Editorial
The Worker calls on all class-conscious workers and proletarian revolutionaries to join in the campaign to boycott the 2024 elections!
1. Elections are Crucial to Imperialism
As the 2024 presidential elections approach, they promise to be the most farcical to date. Bourgeois democracy has its paint peeling away, revealing the rot below the surface. The bourgeois elections are not useful to the masses of people, but they are crucial to US imperialism because it wants to hide behind the veneer of a real democracy—something the propertied classes could never extend to the majority of oppressed and exploited people. US imperialism reinvigorates itself through the circus of elections, especially the presidential elections every four years.
The 2024 elections will take place amid the deepening economic crisis of imperialism, which has led to a political crisis of legitimacy. Illegitimate candidates attempt to legitimize themselves by pointing fingers at their opponents, each one accusing the other of criminality, threatening to charge or even arrest their political rivals if elected. Elections also play upon social crises in the US to drum up votes, wielding identity politics to divide the masses behind the two hostile parties of the ruling class, both of which serve the interests of the ruling class.
The exclusion of the masses from the election is the natural consequence of the bourgeois democratic state—a state ruled by the minority against the majority, in which the interests of the masses are ignored except when they can be used as a tool to win votes before being betrayed. However, while the masses are in essence excluded from the coming elections in that their options never serve their interests, reaction hopes for their formal participation so that the system which harms them can have consent to rule. Mass exclusion is not a question of being granted a vote, although there are those among the imperialist ruling class who do seek to bar large sections of the people from the voting process when it is in the interests of their clique.
The root causes of mass suffering and misery for working people cannot be addressed by the imperialist election due to the class character of the state. The elections serve only to add a superficial dressing of legitimacy, not even useful reforms. To address the real issues, the state as we know it would have to cease to exist—an event the elections exist to prevent.
The general crisis of imperialism has increased the collusion and contention of the ruling class within government, with collusion still being the main form by which the factions relate to one another. The appearance of contention, on the other hand, is used to pardon the betrayal of the masses as an act of necessary cooperation between the ruling class parties. Examples of such collusion are abundant: decreased funding for the public schools where workers are forced to send their children, massive funding increases for so-called border security, billions of dollars to the genocidal and illegitimate occupation forces known as the state of Israel, tax money to the puppet-government of Ukraine shoring up the ability to control the country in the event that they can expel the Russian invader—the list goes on. And at every turn the ruling parties compromise to make things worse for the interests of the people.
The ruling class must sanctify their representatives of exploitation and oppression, and the masses are asked to make the endorsement. Every mass movement is hitched to the back of this lumbering state in the elections. When understood this way, elections can be seen as part of the low intensity warfare waged on the working class via the ruling-class dictatorship. There exists the militarized police, the largest prison system in the world—overcrowded with the poor—there exists the scab and the snitch, but none of these surpass the soft tactics of coercion and control implemented through the general elections. This social manipulation is absolutely critical to the ultra-minority holding dominance over the broad masses. The very few and very rich control everything, and tout our votes for which of their representatives are to abuse us for the next four years as consent for this system of exploitation and oppression. However, the mask is slipping. We see the evidence as each election is increasingly theatrical, more bridled with individual gossip, scandal, and controversy, more foreboding, in an attempt to prevent the inevitable trend of non-voting from increasing. In short, the elections are a counter-revolutionary apparatus of the dictatorship of the imperialist ruling class.
Bourgeois democracy began as something else. When the democratic ideas of the bourgeois were still revolutionary, these ideas were in the process of replacing the old feudal idea that the king ruled by mandate of God. The old feudal order could not stand and would be replaced by capitalism. Like in other revolutions before it, the minority—the bourgeoisie, in this case—was able to mobilize the majority—the peasants and the workers—to overthrow the feudal order, and its democracy pledged to serve everyone. But in that very moment when the capitalist became triumphant over the old kings, the contradictions among their left and right came to the fore. In order for capitalism to succeed, it had to improve upon the old order’s oppression of the world, making it more vile and vicious. The new order rode to power on the backs of the colonies and the workers who fought in its service, and so it was born drenched in blood and oozing filth from every pore. It would develop from free competition among the propertied classes into monopoly capitalism, and from there to imperialism, dominated entirely by money. It is by this process that liberal-bourgeois democracy—the form of government preferred by the US ruling class—decomposes and becomes increasingly backward.
Since World War II, the second imperialist world war, the US has secured its role as the world’s sole hegemonic imperialist superpower, and there has been no stability in the world and everything from government, to democratic rights, to culture and society have undergone decomposition. This is manifested in the governments as reactionization: power is concentrated around the executive branch and presidential absolution increases. In society this process manifests as a return to the ideas of the dark ages, whether it comes in the form of the mega-church as the ideological factory among the masses drawn into jingoism and Trumpism, or with the postmodern ideas which dominate the universities, splitting apart all manner of struggles and promoting extreme individualism and an anti-scientific worldview bordering on the hysteric. The elections cannot but take place mired in these conditions, and thus every candidate is increasingly reactionary and increasingly desperate.
In this context of reactionization, the left suffers major dispersion. The ideological, political and organizational differences are severe. Revisionism—the eradication of Marxism’s revolutionary content in the name of new conditions—has played its role in the entire process of reactionization. Revisionism has done its part to usher in postmodernism in the 1970s and to collaborate with it today. It has done its part to water down socialism into a pathetic domesticated animal in the houses of the imperialists, and to settle for the process of reform and betrayal which placates the masses and drives them into electoral dead ends.
Revisionism is hopeless. The most “successful” revisionists can only openly trail behind the Democratic Party, and the least successful still put all their faith into the elections only to be revealed by the numbers as hopelessly insignificant. Revisionism exists to serve counter-revolution, even in conditions predating revolutionary viability. Revisionism cannot imagine politics beyond bourgeois politics. They cannot imagine why anyone would abstain from, oppose, or boycott the elections. They cannot imagine maturity without senility.
The dispersal of forces, the disorganization and lack of cohesion as well as the attacks on revolutionary ideas from the revisionists, all of which amount to attacks on Maoism most evident in the liquidationists, brings the election boycott campaign of 2024 into the service of uniting under Maoism.
2. The Current Political Crisis
A crisis of legitimacy faces the bourgeoisie every four years, and this feature is enhanced in the context of the general crisis of imperialism and the political crisis it generates inside of the imperialist countries, mainly the US. Elections are the means of navigating through the crisis of legitimacy; the current administration can be blamed for all the faults inherent in capitalism and can be presumably voted out for a new one, and the cyclical crisis can continue. In this sense, the elections are a necessary mechanism of renewal of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. This pageantry is organized to trick and deceive. In reality it does not matter who is elected; the fundamental problems, the social-injustice, the poverty of the people and so on, will persist and deepen over time.
Consider three universal principles of Marxism: first, it was the great Lenin who taught that the bourgeois elections must be considered on the basis of propaganda. In certain conditions the forces of the proletariat, ideally the Communist Party, must approach the elections as either partisan participants or a partisan opposition to the elections themselves and thus organize a boycott. Currently, both the composition of forces and the political crisis stemming from decomposition reveal the correct tactic to be the election boycott which as always is used to propagandize the utter bankruptcy of the capitalist system. Secondly, Marxism holds that all analysis must proceed from reality, the reality of the concrete conditions expressed in the main contradictions and how they manifest. Thirdly, it was Marx and Engels who expressed that the Communist Party is the party of the proletariat, independent from and opposed to the parties of all other classes.
For their part, the parties of the ruling class, both Democrat and Republican, and especially their leading candidates, have played a significant role in the current political crisis, making a crisis of their own. Biden as the head boss of US imperialism has done his utmost to surpass the record of his predecessor; his administration is marred in failure and broken promises. The very basis in which Biden was elected, the fact that he was not Trump, has been undermined by his rule. The most repugnant acts of Trump and his administration have been carried out loyally and effectively by Biden. The increase of deportations, the increase of border militarization, the rising cost of housing and necessary commodities and a decrease in real wages have continued just as they did under Trump.
Biden panders to progressives and democratic people among the masses but has utterly discredited himself with his handling of the genocide in Gaza; he has not only refused the mass calls for a cease fire to be imposed on Israel, but dramatically increased the flow of weapons and money into the Zionist project, and in serving this imperialist objective he has lost credibility with sizable parts of his base. Biden is the most suitable representative of the imperialist ruling class; he is a stalwart imperialist of the political elite in the US and for these reasons he has exposed himself as a blood sucker to the people.
Trump’s rhetoric and methods of meeting the same objectives have cast him as a dubious figure even among the imperialist ruling class. His populism has brought him into contradiction with the tried and true decorum expected of government officials. His ego and political methods make him unstable, his political actions have made a legal mess for himself, and the stakes are very high for him personally—not only is his campaign on the line but so is his legal standing.
A repeat of a Biden vs. Trump election, the most likely scenario as of now, promises to be mired in the self-made crisis of each candidate, both of whom have—pardon the phrase—shat where they sleep. The political crisis itself, the utter depravity and scandal of the candidates, finds a certain usefulness in marketing the elections to those who would otherwise not vote. This was evident in the last act of the circus too.
On the side, that of the worker, there is no one for whom to vote. There is a marked lack of political parties and organizations representing working people; there are instead only parasites who traffic in the concerns of the worker. Not only does the proletariat lack its political party in the US, there are not even any solid reformist parties who are able to alleviate the worker’s burden a little bit to popularize themselves. The material interests of the working classes are absent in the elections and in their place is all manner of superficial and immature controversy.
With a lack of effective reformist parties, let alone a revolutionary party, we are left with the so-called option between the right-wing Democrats and the slightly more right-wing Republicans. They share a common mockery of history: Democrats insinuate that the Republicans represent a slide to fascist dictatorship, and Republicans openly proclaim that the Democrats represent an existential threat to the US in the form of “socialism,” “Marxism,” and “fascism.” Rational history is diluted into buzz words to instill fear and convince the relative few that voting for a right-wing party is a sensible thing to do, a necessary security precaution to assure their dwindling privilege. For the broad masses, and regardless of their consciousness, the option between the two is not really an option at all. Their similarities outweigh their differences, and their differences are used for bargaining in their vulgar politicking: one concedes here and the other there, until the interests of finance capital generally are met by both.
We see collusion well in the interests of funding the genocide of the Palestinian people by the Zionist entity Israel. In spite of mass protest, neither party feels that the situation has gone too far because the US imperialist ruling class has certain political and military designs on the Middle East as part of their objective of economic domination in the world. A vote for them is a vote for genocide. Both parties agree to strong borders; Trump’s wall, which was such a scandal, is only a crude physical manifestation of Biden’s drones and federal troops. In all his bombast, Trump was actually unable to deport as many people as the Democratic administrations that came before and after him. A vote for them is a vote for concentration camps along the border, for family separation, and the abuse of foreign-born workers.
Both parties pander to the aristocrats of labor, undermining and excluding rank and file workers from the collective bargaining process, and both parties seek to slap a “Made in America” label on the exploitation of the American worker—both seek to promise middle class prosperity which simply cannot increase so broadly under the monopoly capitalist imperialist mode of production. A vote for them is a vote for the accumulation of misery among an increasing number of workers.
Both parties represent the trend of growing poverty so much that it is reflected in the fact that there is 800,000 homeless people in the United States, the richest country in the world, and that the people becoming homeless faster and more than any other are families with children under the age of 6. A vote for them is a vote for the continuation and denial of the misery of the masses.
In terms of their contention, the parties of the ruling class are happy most to quarrel over cultural matters which leave their economic agreements and war arrangements intact. They quarrel over public restrooms and the quarrel over who can play on sports teams in the schools they both defund. They quarrel over pronouns and who can get pregnant, while millions of women are denied medical access to necessary procedures.
Last election season, these same two quarreled over who was the most in favor of the police, in the midst of nation-wide mass anti-police uprisings. The root of these disagreements come down to whether imperialism needs a face-lift, cultural changes to better suit how it produces and to gain some more costumes to make it look “progressive,” or whether US imperialism should be the beacon of “traditional American values.” And this is the main field in which the bases of both parties are rallied to help imperialism prevent “the existential threats” to their privileges. Genuine struggles are exploited, turned into the most superficial formalities so that these phony disagreements can be made and snake oil can be sold to the people. These differences, superficial as they are, each push and pull the masses into hostile camps behind the two bourgeois parties, and this division does not reflect class difference but conceals it, further serving the counter-revolutionary role of the elections.
The diffusion of people’s concerns into cultural dead ends—and we say cultural dead ends because changing the capitalist superstructure will not emancipate the working class or stop them from being exploited—are methods of social control and domination used to preserve and not change the economic base. This plays a role in the counter-revolutionary apparatus of the elections which are used to replace mass protest with promises from the elite that the lot of the poor can be improved by means other than armed struggle. The bourgeois elections are a tool for dominating, silencing, and diverting the poor, subordinating them to superficial bourgeois causes, or liquidating them into miserable and disconnected political actions, sending the most militant struggles of the masses into the graveyard warded by the bourgeois political parties. Both ruling class parties agree to the division of the working class along every imaginable line and to defending these divisions against any attempt at working class unity. The ruling class seeks to extract the maximum benefit from the contradictions among the people, strengthening their reactionary state.
There are numerous reasons why people vote; our objective is not to blame those who have been conned and swindled into supporting the ruling class with votes. Nevertheless, there is a material aspect to voting which revolutionaries cannot ignore. Voting for the parties of the imperialist ruling class is an endorsement for imperialism, and thus an endorsement of what the imperialists will do abroad. Such an endorsement is a rejection of proletarian internationalism which no would-be revolutionary should be willing to make.
The masses who are drawn into voting are in need of counter-arguments; they vote because it is presented as a means readily available to them and because they clamor for a change, a bit of relief to the pain they are in. Revolutionaries in formation have to respond to this not by tailing sections of the people into the sewer of the elections, but by showing them a way out.
The worst of all is revisionism, which tries to draw the masses already jaded by experience back into the farce of elections with renewed false promises. In this respect, the boycott of the US elections is an act of practical internationalism; drive the voting rates as low as we can and thus show the world that we do not support the state that is the manager their oppression.
The illusions and self-denial of some active elements must be challenged here. There are those who support Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns against Israel, yet when it comes time to vote, they issue votes for the Democratic Party. If we are to oppose the purchase and sale of commodities associated with Israel, then the same opposition should extend to their political protectors.
Labor aristocrats and the crisis
The role of labor aristocrats is prominent in the general crisis and manifests itself in the political crisis too. The number of labor aristocrats is declining with the privileges they are awarded from their role as capitalists agents among the workers’ struggles, yet they promise the downtrodden, non-aristocratic workers that through supporting them they too can become flabby and privileged. This is a dangerous myth which corrals the workers’ struggles into the pig pens of the bourgeois electoral farce.
The labor aristocrats, including the big union bureaucracy, are fattened with scraps of flesh from the bosses’ table. That flesh on which they gorge themselves is torn from the living heart of the oppressed nations. The proletariat must be steeled to refuse blood money as bribery against their class interests, even if there were enough of it to go around. The same approach must be made to voting: it is the labor aristocrats who play bourgeois politics as the leashed dogs of the propertied exploiters. They play a dual role: undermining concessions to the worker and preventing the conquest of better conditions, and also shoring up votes for the ruling class with their endorsements. The aristocrats’ status is the wage of sin against their own people.
All honest workers, at least those few whose shops are unionized, know that the fight is on two fronts: against the boss and also against his agency, the top brass of the union. This fight extends to elections as well. The bureaucrats are undermined and combated by spreading the boycott to the shop floor and drawing a clear line, refusing to allow our fellow workers to be pimped out by the union boss.
The general crisis has given a little more weight to the flabby hand of the labor aristocrats, and they salivate for maximum reward in the selling of votes; this means class conscious workers and proletarian revolutionaries must redouble their boycott message in the workplace. The election boycott serves the fight for organizations in the workplace which can actually represent the workers and which carry the fight beyond the bounds of trade unionism.
The bourgeois parties and the bourgeois labor unions differ in terms of method and rhetoric, but are alike in their ultimate goals; it is the reactionary goal which is common to them that the election boycott alone can condemn and this is a matter of principle.
The elections themselves reflect the serious need to condemn them; they have become more militarized, more contentious, more dramatic, more scandalous, and, most of all, more cynical. The boycott on the other hand represents the real optimism for a better world than the cage in which we are forced to live.
In response to the crisis of legitimacy, the ruling class has increased the pressure upon the people to vote. It has used the most hysterical fear mongering, encouraged the masses to blame themselves and each other for not voting—as if this is the reason the US is so backward and awful! From fear, to guilt, to mobs in the street, the ruling class is deploying forces to pressure voting, and this pressure too must be defied.
The political crisis has never been more pronounced, resulting in all imaginable scandals being used to draw the masses into the electoral farce. This results in the elections being less trustworthy and more fraudulent than ever before. The opportunism of the bourgeois parties is highlighted by the fact that even they do not trust the election process—unless the results are favorable to their party. These are all signs of the severe decomposition of bourgeois democracy.
The 2012 electoral farce
The current political crisis further comes to light if we look back on the last ten years of presidential elections. In spite of spending $6 billion on the 2012 presidential elections, voter participation diminished compared to 2008. Of eligible voters in the US, a demographic which drastically increased in 2012, almost half did not vote. The political strategy was costly and clear: the vast majority of the campaign ads of both candidates were of a negative character, an attack on the other candidate rather than highlighting positive attributes of the one running the ad. The political approach of rival bourgeois candidates, unwilling to actually take positions favorable to most people, is to simply insist their rival is worse, and thus to make their own principal attribute the fact that they are not their opponent. This results in very close elections divided only along party lines—in this case the incumbent Obama getting only 51% of the vote, a margin nevertheless considered outstanding by the bourgeoisie. Party-based voting has nullified the vote in most states, reducing the impact of voters to only those in swing states, which is where the most money is spent on the negative ad campaigns.
The utter foolishness of the 2016 elections
After 8 years of Obama-Biden, the 2016 general election was characterized by a sentiment among voters to break with the establishment. They sought to elect someone who did not appear the run of the mill politician, and hence the popularity of the Sanders and Trump campaigns, and the Democrats’ ill-fated decision to endorse Clinton over Sanders. This fiasco, resulting in Trump’s presidency, was taking place as the general crisis of imperialism was starting to show signs of its overproduction cycle. In this election, the bourgeoisie spent half a billion dollars more than 4 years before to put on the pageant, raising the total to $6.5 billion. This massive number was used, for instance, not to fix a decomposing public school system but to create the most vulgar and tasteless reality TV of an electoral farce.
Campaign donations resemble bad horse betting. Clinton’s campaign spent twice as much as Trump’s but would ultimately lose, and all that money went into creating a two-year long spectacle. The US—unlike many countries—places no limit on campaign funds, which further illustrates the utter decrepitude of the rich man’s elections. As far as the results are concerned, the voters turnout was the same trend, about only half of eligible voters actually voted, and the scandalous fight divided the relatively few voters along party lines, resulting in Clinton getting a narrow lead in the popular vote and Trump getting a narrow victory in the electoral college.
Spending half a billion dollars more on the election did not increase the number of actual voters, which stayed about the same as in 2012, despite even more people being of voting age. The particular farcical character of this election could not be more dramatic: on the one hand one had the identity politics of the ruling class promoting “the first woman president” who is a war criminal, drenched head to toe in blood, the female Kissinger. On the other hand, one had the epitome of US decadence, a television personality and big bourgeois real estate tycoon, a slum lord and controversy-seeking showboat, a villain from an old cartoon only missing the monocle, cigar, and top hat.
2020, the farce outdoes itself and things get dangerous
Both candidates framed the 2020 election farce as the most important in US history; the cost of more than $14.5 billion proved it be the most expensive farce in US history. A 2010 US supreme court ruling allowed corporations, NGOs, and unions to spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose a presidential candidate. The most powerful among these were the corporations and private billionaires. The high cost of the elections only further demonstrates that they are the mechanism of the ultra-right to lend false legitimacy to their rule, highlighting that bourgeois democracy is utterly bankrupt. The money again went to the most spurious and scandalous ads. Biden, who received the most money from private military corporations and arms manufacturers, used this decisively in the swing states. The funding for Biden’s presidency was made up mainly of finance capital and real estate, followed closely by private donations from mainly billionaires. Either of these figures taken separately dwarfed the less than $30 million he received from the labor unions. Nevertheless, $30 million of workers’ dues is a significant amount of money which would make one hell of a strike fund if used by real representatives of organized labor.
Due essentially to the bankrupt character of bourgeois democracy, the sore losers of the election tend to cry foul, claiming that the election was stolen and adding to the scandal. This takes place almost any time the numbers are very close, and the numbers are so often close because the sham is paper thin and based on votes cast due to party preference and the amount of negativity one candidate can cast on the other, rather than a logical support for coherent policy differences—the two teams of the grudge match always have common class interests.
Thus, Trump’s contest of the election results fits a national trend. The election between Hoover and Roosevelt, between Bush and Gore, between Trump and Clinton are a few examples of one party denying the legitimacy of the vote when its candidate lost. However, in true Trump style, the challenge to the validity of the results were to be the most scandalous to date. The reactionary protests-turned-riot in Washington DC were nothing more than this; however, the ruling class generally could not accept the level of scandal and dubbed the whole mess an “insurrection”.
The so-called January 6th insurrection has two main uses for the majority of the ruling class. On the one hand, it offered justification to ramp up the process of reactionization, bringing back into use sedition laws, use of conspiracy and RICO charges beyond the previous norm, and increasing restrictions on protests, especially ones which cross the legal and moral taboos of the bourgeoisie. The event was framed as a threat to democracy in an attempt to make the US demo-liberal system of government seem legitimate and worth preserving in the first place. The second use for January 6th is that it offers yet more scandal to pressure voters. The claim of being the most important election in US history, promoted by both parties, is developed and continued through the conjured memory of January 6th.
Elections are now given an existential magnitude, treated not as a question of who governs, but as if the fate of the entire country and of human beings is determined by voting in the sham elections. It all appears hysterical and mad: the amount of money dumped into the elections, the inflation of the threat imposed, and the general desperation of the bourgeoisie in the midst of deepening crisis promise that the 2024 elections will surpass even the 2020 election in terms of theatrics.
If the trajectory is not altered by the legal mess Trump has found himself in, then a second round of the grudge match between Biden and Trump will deliver exactly the kind of entertainment the imperialists need to drum up reluctant votes. The scandal proved useful, more voters turned out in 2020 than ever before, many non-voters and new-voters voted due to the concerted efforts of the bourgeois media, the politicians themselves, and the revisionists to create maximum fear and confusion.
After this act in the farce concluded, those who voted based on fear and the majority of Biden voters suffered buyer’s remorse. Biden did exactly what he was meant to do, exactly what those billions funneled into his campaign assured he would—he stuck to the tried and true politics of imperialism and made a mess around the world, and the economy deteriorated and reaction in general increased. In terms of pure bloodshed, both Obama and Biden managed to outpace Trump due only to the latter’s instability and flippancy—not to any moral attribute. Nonetheless, the voters have been scorned and many of them will come to the conclusion that it is better not to sully themselves by lending support to the class forces which make life a misery around the world. It is unlikely that 2024 will see the same voter turn out as 2020, but the ruling class and their lackeys will do everything they can to make it happen, including dumping unimaginable amounts of money into an election based on negativity, demagoguery, and personality more than politics.
What all of the past election cycles have in common is that the poorest in the US are the least likely to vote. These comprise the broad masses; they are men and women who for the most part intrinsically understand that the candidates do not and cannot represent their interests.
The revisionists have imprisoned themselves in a losing loop with their worship of elections. They exhaust themselves fiddling around with bourgeois elections, wasting their limited resources and getting absolutely nowhere. They seem permanently fused to the ass-end of the ass of the Democratic Party. Their social base is most often comprised of the petty bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy so there is nowhere else they could end up. In 2024, their collaboration with the imperialist ruling class via their contortionist support for the Democrats will be even more vulgar that it was in 2020, as the Biden administration’s increased support for the genocide of the Palestinian people will still be on everyone’s mind.
The hypocrisy of revisionism must be demonstrated by the election boycott. The bending over of revisionism is exemplified by the fact that even the social-democrats cannot run on their own; they cannot get enough votes. Their loss in the elections is exactly what they deserve for still defending them as legitimate. The principled and correct tactic of the election boycott must be used to draw away their support, to have the most honest members of revisionist organizations found among their rank and file leave these organizations in favor of anti-revisionist proletarian organizing.
3. How the Election Boycott Serves the People, Strengthens the Trend of Revolution, and Helps the Process of Party Reconstitution
Unity is accomplished not through superficial good will but through struggle. There must be demarcation; the tactic of election boycotts demarcates the left from the right. Right opportunism either worships bourgeois elections or fears offending those who do; it is in the interest of the right opportunists to paper over the contradictions because it is they who hold a temporary advantage over the left, while the left must fight hard battles just to emerge and exist. Silence toward the elections or condoning them are the easiest policies to follow but these are the policies of centrism and revisionism, while revolutionaries must go against the tide.
The left is dispersed and divided in the current situation facing the revolutionaries in the US. This is part of the political crisis of imperialism, its desperate acts of repression and so on. Campaigns must be carried out in spite of and against these conditions of dispersal. Through shattering the revolutionary movement, the ruling class and its state stand to benefit by ending the election boycott which has been a thorn in their side.
The election boycott serves the struggle for unity of the revolutionaries with the realization of parallel actions or joint actions by the dispersed revolutionary nuclei. The dispersed revolutionaries come together in the election boycott and persistently undermine imperialism’s plans to secure public opinion. The election boycott serves as a reminder to the people of the many crimes of the imperialist ruling class carried out by either ruling party.
How is the boycott carried out? With patient and dedicated work among the masses through propaganda combating tendencies toward trade union consciousness and the tailing of the bourgeoisie, to ween the people away from utter dependency on the imperialist state, unlocking more and more their creative potential and rebellious tendencies. It is right to rebel against reactionaries, and it is right to rebel against their elections too!
The election boycott campaign serves the development of the campaign to unite under Maoism, responding directly to the omnipresent plan of imperialism and reaction to divide the revolutionary forces. While the struggle to unite under Maoism is a struggle of vital importance which transcends the tactic of the election boycott, the latter falls into the strict service of the former.
The boycott must manifest as a campaign of action. Through hard struggle it has been proven that the election boycott can force its way into popular discussion and assail even the pages of the bourgeois media, which typically mythologize the sanctity of bourgeois elections and cast everyone not voting as ignorant or lazy. Support for the election boycott can be carved out in the people’s mass movements by bringing the campaign to the heart of their struggles; this is performing a service which turns the active elements of society away from the cemetery of struggle which is the electoral circus. The elections, like all other “solutions” presented by the ruling class, must be exposed as false solutions which prolong the fake legitimacy and arrogance of playing by the rules set up by the establishment in their interests, thus the boycott campaign permits those who struggle to go further and reach higher.
The elections, funded by and conducted by the class enemy, are converted into an education tool and a cause to act by the revolutionaries when they conduct patient and persistent political work among those who do not vote based on opposition to the wretchedness of bourgeois democracy as well as those who do not care about elections and see no prospects in the act of voting. This draws the masses into actively interrogating imperialism, its methods of social control, its institutions, and its rituals.
It is impossible to prevent the bourgeois electoral circus from taking place in the given conditions; this is not the purpose of the election boycott tactic. Its purpose is obstruction where possible, criticism, and mainly raising consciousness around the necessity and inevitability of revolution. The election boycott tactic is a propaganda tool of revolutionaries who exist in the fissure between the bourgeois state and the exploited and oppressed masses. In the US this means class conscious workers and the proletariat in the general sense of those who sell their labor power in order to survive, as well as progressive students and intellectuals. These are forces which must be won to the fight against the domestication of socialism. Indeed, the question of socialism is of vital importance. Socialist revolution is the type of revolution which must be carried out in the imperialist countries—socialism cannot remain popularly associated with toothless reformism and simple welfare.
4. Maoists in the US have carried out successive boycotts since 2016 and we briefly highlight some of the campaigns below
In 2016, pamphlets and articles were produced which took on the false claims of local and national candidates in the bourgeois elections. Street theater and educational demonstrations took place. Working people were polled about voting, why they are for or against voting. The claim of apathy among non-voters was proven false by the testimony of workers who did not vote and this too was propagandized. Polling places were protested, and those who vote were encouraged to get active outside of the ballot box in the growing people’s protests.
The election boycott of 2016 was not the first. Socialists and communists of the 20th century also carried out boycotts; the importance of 2016 is that it primed the small revolutionary nuclei for more coherent action through confronting class enemies, offering them a school and developing discipline for what was ahead, i.e. for Trump’s victory in the election and the mass movement which it would provoke, the fight against the reactionaries on the far right and the few, but no less concerning, organized fascists among them who sought to establish a stable presence in liberal cities. The campaign was small and localized, and this was its main mistake. It was not able to generate enough interest and was likely started too late. Its success lies in the fact that it was a break with the politics and methods acceptable to the ruling class. It served as a starting point, a small thing that could spread. Perhaps its most admirable quality was that it helped move the activity of revolutionaries away from giving away items free of charge and started challenging the reasons why people need such charity in the first place.
By the midterm elections of 2018, the campaign had taken on a more national character and had become more cohesive. Posters and banners were deployed and protests took place nationwide. Significant dates were observed in response to the increased pressure for voting in the midterm elections. Educational events and lectures were given on the topic of the boycott, and the policies of the revisionists and other electoral cretins were exposed within the general confrontation with the politics of the ruling class. Wall paintings, murals, and direct action also found a place in the 2018 election boycott. Importantly, the slogan “Elections no, Revolution yes” was raised by the dispersed revolutionary nuclei around the country and joint action was realized. This was a step forward in the long and twisting process of reconstitution of the Communist Party, even though it was not realized as such in the propaganda of this movement.
The campaign expressed several objectives: to condemn the electoral farce, to bring elements of the masses away from the swamp of bourgeois politics as the only expression of politics, to politicize the commonly held rejection of voting thus turning voter abstinence into a political boycott, to demarcate between revolutionaries and revisionists by exposing the revisionists collaboration with the ruling class on the elections, and to begin forcing the boycott into public discussions with propaganda actions which would grab headlines. There were successes and failures with each of these objectives.
Judging from what was published, the most prominent of the failures—which when taken as a whole were secondary—was the question of educating the masses which took a back seat to the demarcation between revolutionaries and revisionists and propaganda actions which could grab headlines. We can attribute this to the amateurishness of the campaign, and principally to the lack of patience, and we can make this analysis without denying the creative militancy which guided the propaganda actions or the correctness of those two objectives.
The dramatic flair which brought the 2018 midterm boycott to a close erupted again with the initiation of the boycott of the general elections for 2020. In January of that year, a small group of militants in Austin, Texas confronted democratic congressional candidate Heidi Sloan and carried out a classic act of political protest dating back to the middle ages: the egging of the politician. In a predictable manner, Sloan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America—the so-called left wing of the imperialist Democratic Party—cried to the media and portrayed the boycott as an “attack on democracy.” The electoral cretin cannot fathom that there is democracy outside the pig pen of bourgeois democracy, and that political protest is itself an act of democracy. The small combative action made national headlines, and portraying herself as the victim of scary communists undermined her image as a fighter in the eyes of voters. She lost the election for other reasons, but this is still significant.
On Super Tuesday, dozens of Sloan’s election signs were returned to her residence, redecorated with hammers and sickles and election boycott slogans. Graffiti was carried out in various cities against the electoral offices of Micheal Bloomberg, a filthy rich former New York City Mayor. In several cities Bloomberg offices were pelted with rocks or covered in paint. Educational events took place across the country as part of the campaign. Posters, banners, wall slogans, and murals appeared. The campaign to boycott the 2020 election was the biggest in the 21st century; hundreds of actions took place. In several cities one could not pass election signs without seeing them slashed to bits and covered in red spray-paint and boycott slogans. Importantly, the election boycott of 2020 provided analysis on the maneuvers of each politician and the political situation in the US. Further, the boycott fought for its aims and objectives within the mass uprisings which would take place that year, drawing more support than it had in the previous years, beginning to partially overcome some of the mistakes of the previous boycott. By far the largest and most successful boycott campaign carried out by the Maoists to date, it nevertheless suffered from some ill-conceived actions which represented a kind of putschist deviation.
Following the boycott campaign of the 2020 elections, an understanding of the Biden administration was developed. It was expected that a Democratic presidency would result in a quelling of the mass protest movements endemic under the outgoing Republican administration. This proved true and likewise the predicted return of mass protests becomes evident leading up to the 2024 presidential elections.
As mentioned earlier, the elections prove to be more sensationalized than ever before.
Revolutionaries would be wise to avoid playing into this sensationalizing and wise to avoid seeking scandal with the boycott; they should instead approach the campaign with disciplined and orderly work, and with maturity in the face of the petty vitriol of the ruling class.
In an article re-posted by The Worker, a proletarian revolutionary at UPS suggests, “In my opinion, a boycott of the 2024 general election would be an excellent place to start uniting all the disparate labor and tenant organizing groups.” The comrade is right on point and we support this suggestion wholeheartedly.
Election boycott campaigns in the US are part of and in service to the campaigns carried out by revolutionaries and communists internationally. Boycott actions have already begun taking place around the world, most notably in India where the vanguard party, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), is banned. In the areas under the Party’s influence, the elections cannot take place like normal; they are militantly confronted, the masses are mobilized, and propaganda and guerrilla actions take place in direct opposition to the farce of “the world’s largest Democracy.”
In Brazil, where it is illegal not to vote, the comrades score a great moral and political victory each election by increasing the number of non-voters and spoiled votes, and, in some cases, the masses inspired by the boycott physically confront polling places and have damaged or destroyed voting machines. Sharp analysis is produced in all instances of the boycott which serve to enrich the understanding of the bourgeois state and the decomposition of bourgeois democracy, and bourgeois democracy’s utter falsehood in the struggle for new democratic revolution. The boycott campaigns internationally take place in the imperialist countries as well—most notably in Europe where for many years militant actions and propaganda have blossomed.
The greatest election boycotts have taken place in the People’s War in Peru, led by the Communist Party of Peru, and which has produced the most sound analysis to date. The People’s War which is ongoing and stands undefeated to this day was initiated on May 17th, 1980 (ILA80 as it is known) with the boycott of the elections at a time that the ruling class of Peru and US imperialism most needed to legitimize themselves with false democracy—the military dictatorship was coming to an end, and the masses were forced to give their “consent” to the homeland-selling government of imperialism, semi-feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism. Combatants of the People’s War burned ballots in Ayacucho and issued the first shots of the war, a war in which the unarmed masses are gradually armed and power is conquered. The election boycotts are of significant importance to the People’s War in Peru, and they no less important to enriching our understanding of Maoism around the world, notably with study of the documents Elections No People’s War Yes and On the Rectification Campaign Based on the Study of the Document Elections No, People’s War Yes; these provide some of the best material on Maoism and election boycotts and stand to be studied over and over again.
5. Unite Under Maoism, Boycott the 2024 Elections!
The election boycott of 2024 offers the dispersed revolutionary nuclei the best opportunity to carry out parallel actions which can develop into joint action. The boycott campaign represents a rejection of the revisionist tactics which lend legitimacy to the elections from a domesticated “socialist” position; it breaks the silence on the decision not to vote for imperialists; it promotes armed struggle as the ultimate means of changing the existing society, i.e. armed struggle as the highest form of class struggle; it connects to the living struggles of the people, bringing perspective and activity; it demonstrates international solidarity with the nations oppressed by imperialism through the rejection of the imperialist state; and it insists that Maoism must be the command and guide of the world proletarian revolution and the US revolution as part of and in service to it.
Revolutionaries must uphold Maoism in order to struggle for unity under it. In the current conditions in the US, upholding Maoism means struggling for the necessary unity required to take a step further in the process of the reconstitution of the Communist Party, the principal task of all revolutionaries in this country. The reconstituted Communist Party of the USA is the prerequisite for leading and accomplishing the socialist revolution, the stage which must prefigure the communist society, which is the unalterable goal.
In the immediate perspective, the question of uniting under Maoism expresses itself in the nuclei upholding Maoism, enabling parallel actions to speak; this strikes a blow against the designs of imperialism and the forces of counter-revolutionary liquidationism which otherwise grow unchecked. Unification of the revolutionaries is necessary to the unification of the proletariat in its own interests. This prospect alone justifies all efforts toward the struggle for unity and all sincere action in the same campaigns.
Two-line struggle is the motor force of development; Chairman Mao’s great formula of unity-struggle-unity defines the current period of dispersal. That is to say: the desire for unity is cultivated by sharing in struggle against the class enemies, and in this case in struggle against the elections which serve to renew the government of the class enemy. From this forms parallel actions which deepen the struggle for unity on the ideological basis of Maoism, developing into political struggle over tactics and strategy. This struggle accomplishes new and greater unity among the revolutionaries who will repeat the process in the stage of reconstitution and all stages which follow.
The dispersed revolutionary nuclei independently find their bearings in the election boycott, through parallel actions, through Maoist slogans, and through mutual support for the International Communist Movement and world proletarian revolution. This meets important objectives: maintaining ones post in the struggle, maintaining and deepening the connection between the revolutionaries and the masses, and also the establishment of better contact between the revolutionaries where this is lacking—contact which will allow for direct and principled two-line struggle.
There is a basis for parallel actions where agreements on the following points exist: Maoism as the third and higher stage of the ideology of the proletariat; the omnipotence of armed struggle; that the masses make history; the need for the Communist Party which can lead the proletariat in the conquest and defense of political power; the futility of participating in bourgeois elections and their counter-revolutionary role to stifle the masses; internationalism and anti-imperialism; and the need to overcome the dispersal of forces.
All revolutions and all revolutionary work are subject to the dialectical laws of motion. There is advance and retreat, and retreat itself contains an advance. One must draw back one’s arm to deliver one’s fist with the desired impact. Understanding that there have been setbacks is only a cause to move forward without fear or reservation, this is what Lenin made of the 1905 revolution and what Chairman Mao made of the Long March. In both cases, the forces of revolution suffered a blow but accomplished something great—they had to reorganize to strike a blow. This is applicable to Maoism in the US; we have seen that the largest Maoist movement of the 21st century was generated, and it too has suffered a blow. The election boycott offers revolutionaries the means to turn a bad thing into a good thing. Patient work must proceed in an orderly fashion through rectification and the deepening of the two-line struggle to unite under Maoism.
The bourgeois elections, with its farce and pageantry, demands political opposition. The path of electoral cretinism and the path of revolutionary violence to accomplish socialism must be defined and delineated: how the former lends sustenance to the decomposing bourgeois democracy and the latter is the universal law of revolution without any exceptions. These two things form an antagonistic contradiction.
The thing is not to be discouraged by the low situation facing those in the US politically, to not give in to the pressure of the ruling class to condone their rule and their system through voting. Optimism here means going against the tide, and this is how new politics develop among people—with people going against the tide, people fighting hard for new forms. What are the new forms? They are organizations among the proletariat and the masses generally which are not stupefied by legalism and right opportunism, organizations which fight the ruling class and certainly do not tail them in the elections. To make history, the masses require new forms, and most of all new politics. With these they will be armed and it is with gun in hand that the old order will be abolished. Hence, the election boycott expresses itself in the great struggle for communism.
All revolutions pass through stages; it is critical that the revolutionaries and the revolutionaries in the making begin now to comprehend the stages, defining and understanding the course the stages take and the role played by the election boycott in the current stage.
Towards that end, we delineate the five stages of the revolution in the USA below.
1) On Reconstitution: We say reconstitution and not building, organizing, constituting, or constructing. Why? because there was the Communist Party and we do not want another party other than that. Only the Party can build its cells, branches, districts, etc. Only the Party can organize itself; no one else can organize the Party. It was already constituted in 1919, hence it cannot be constituted now, and construction is something that is done when the Party exists after reconstitution. An important point regarding these distinctions: the material to organize into a Party, the substantial forces even for a Red Fraction, do not exist anywhere in this country. Militants and leaders must be forged in class struggle, and they must serve as the forces of reconstitution and must reach higher levels.
The proletariat generates its party and that is the Communist Party. When the Communist Party is destroyed by revisionism, then it must be reconstituted against revisionism, imperialism, and reaction. When the Party has been destroyed by revisionism, the proletariat is left without its party, and thus the proletariat cannot be united into a revolutionary force, and as a class it will not supersede trade union consciousness which is bourgeois ideology. The Party is the political military force required to bring the ideology of the international proletariat to the proletarian struggles for daily demands and combine these struggles with the struggle to conquer and defend power. There can be no revolution without the Communist Party. The long period in which the proletariat exists in the US without a party is the period of reconstitution; we cannot put a time on its conclusion, but reconstitution has characterized the stage since at least 1945. The principal task all through the stage of reconstitution, the task which guides all the other tasks, is the reconstitution of the Communist Party. We understand this as expressed now in two tasks: unite under Maoism and go to the deepest and most profound masses, the hardcore of the proletariat mainly.
2) On People’s War: A lot of nonsense gets said about people’s war. People’s war is the universally applicable military strategy of the international proletariat applied creatively in the conditions of each country. Each application of military strategy results in a military doctrine of the army or people applying it, and this is true in all wars. The proletariat is an international class; its battles are fought internationally. Hence, the dogmatic notion that people’s war must be reduced only to the formulas of the Chinese military doctrine are rejected. People’s war is universal in the sense that it proclaims the omnipotence of revolutionary violence; it centers war as the means for conquering power and it passes through three stages: from weak revolutionary forces to strong ones in the process of destruction, preservation, and elevation—a dialectical process. People’s war is therefore an application of the law of contradiction to the most developed military theory accomplishing a qualitative leap—a synthesis—and resulting in the theory we have today as expressed correctly by Chairman Gonzalo. Only a bad scientist fails to see a new discovery.
Only the Party can initiate and lead people’s war, and people’s war is not only the law of contradiction applied to war, passing through three stages, but also the great mobilization and arming of the masses into a red army and into militias. It is the only method of war which mobilizes the broad masses on a voluntary basis through sharpening their class consciousness. It is a necessary experience for the masses to hold and defend power. In people’s war, the ruled turned to rulers, the outlawed party to the leading party, and the powerful army of the enemy into a defeated army. This is synthesis; there is no other way of accomplishing power other than eating the enemy bite by bite. For the type of revolution in the US—the socialist revolution—this means the fundamental battles will be fought in the cities where most of the people are, but this does not exclude rural bases as a component. There is no need to speculate beyond this; the best study of war is fighting in one.
It is only the reconstituted Communist Party which can lead the people’s war; it must choose when to initiate it, finding the right moment and, while not haphazardly, it must do so as soon as possible. The revolutionary situation which exists in the world today is in uneven development, and only a Communist Party with rock solid leadership and rock solid connections to the masses in struggle, forged in many battles, is capable of making this decision. Marx is correct to say that one must not toy with insurrection. At the same time, delaying initiative or giving it to the enemy is suicidal; the stale accumulation of forces has proven to lead to legalism. The second stage, that of people’s war, is marked by extreme violence, both revolutionary and reactionary, but it is the synthesis that matters, not the violence. Violence exists at all stages, so we do not get carried away by it.
3) On Socialism: We say people’s war is the means to conquer and defend political power for the proletariat, for the dictatorship of the proletariat based on the armed forces led by the Communist Party, so of course the stage of people’s war passes to the stage of socialism without ending the people’s war; it goes on as long as enemies exist. As long as enemies exist, war must be waged and when all the masses are armed and no exploiters exist, then we will have communism, but to get there we need socialism.
Socialism is a radically different mode of production, constituting its own distinct epoch; it is the lower stage of communism. This is the first thing: socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised over the bourgeoisie. It is the ownership of the means of production by the proletariat, and the reason for producing under such ownership is the betterment of the society and the strengthening of socialism, which fights against profit motives. Socialism has its own political economy distinct from capitalism and it is Chairman Mao who defined it. When socialism is new, like any new mode of production, it is vulnerable; the question of who will win out has not been settled, and, just as Lenin expressed, the attacks by the bourgeoisie are increased ten fold. This means that in such conditions, the superstructure can determine the base, whereas in every other instance it is the other way around. This was a profound insight of Chairman Mao. In socialism, the class struggle not only continues but also becomes more acute, and there is no such thing as socialism without the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Socialism represents the third revolutionary stage, and within it there are more stages, for instance the constructive state and the organizational stage, not only can revolutionaries not assume the ready-made state apparatus, but the entire parasitic economy will be no more and production must be reorganized against parasitism and dependence on imports, and the crumbling infrastructure, damaged by war as well, will need rebuilding. People’s war defends socialism. The socialist country becomes a base area for world proletarian revolution. It is certain that the revolution will proceed first from the storm centers where the highest concentration of masses exist and where the principal contradiction is pronounced. It is chauvinism that leads deviants to think otherwise. Before coming into existence, socialism in the US will have many friends abroad, and the oppressed people of the world would support such a massive blow against their main enemy, the US imperialist ruling class.
4) On Cultural Revolution: This is Chairman Mao’s most transcendental contribution. It is not applicable at all without the precondition of socialism. Is that clear? Cultural Revolution is the continuation of the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its function is to mobilize the masses in grasping the ideology and promoting production, to combat old ideas in the superstructure and bring the superstructure into the service of the new economic base, preventing the restoration of capitalism through strengthening proletarian dictatorship and ridding the party of those in power taking the capitalist road. Cultural revolution is universal without exceptions, but it is not applicable at any time, without the correct conditions. It cannot be defined as “bombarding the headquarters” or putting up “dazibaos;” this kind of reenactment does not continue the socialist revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but on the contrary it mimics postmodern ideas that capitalism can be overthrown with cultural activism, and in the worst cases it carries out attacks instead of two-line struggle and does so under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is important that Cultural Revolution is defended from the materialist viewpoint and not an idealist viewpoint.
There are many cultural revolutions which come in reiterative waves all throughout the dictatorship of the proletariat. The principal thing is that they combat capitalist restoration and proceed to the luminous communist society.
5) On Communism: It is our unalterable goal, the luminous communist society is one which everyone on earth enters or no one at all enters. It is the realization and the leap of socialism’s triumph on the world scale. It is the society in which classes have been abolished, where there is no rich and no poor, no exploiters or exploited, where the contradiction between man and man has been abolished, and man has won in the contradiction between man and nature. Contradictions exist, but not class contradictions.
Communism is the doctrine of the emancipation of the international proletariat; it is in the fight that exists all around us, the fight for the communist society. Communism being the unalterable goal means literally anything is justified to bring us closer to it—communism is the basis then for all ethics, morals, and principles. Everything should be done to get closer to this goal, and anything that slows us down or takes us off course should be criticized. All who enter communism will have crossed a sea of blood. It is a bright shore, but the path is arduous and the struggle will be hard. A Communist is one who carries their lives on their fingertips, fears nothing and fights for this goal above all else.
UNITE UNDER MAOISM, BOYCOTT THE 2024 ELECTIONS!
THE ELECTIONS ARE A FARCE, DON’T VOTE, ORGANIZE CLASS STRUGGLE!
ELECTIONS, NO! REVOLUTION, YES!
Voting for the oppressor is futile. Prepare for revolution by struggling to reconstitute the Communist Party under the command and guide of Maoism. Combat and resist liquidation and opportunism by rectifying our style of work in the deepening of the two-line struggle. Carry out parallel and joint actions by organizing the 2024 boycott campaign among the class in the struggle against exploitation and oppression.
