Opinion |Emil McLeod
The State and the Role of Elections
Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament! – Lenin, The State and Revolution
As the 2024 presidential election approaches even more farcical heights than before due to the deepening crisis of imperialism, the monopoly media and the opportunists attempt to whip the masses into an electoral frenzy with a chorus of clichés that this is the “most important election of our lifetimes”, or that “this is the election to save democracy”. These phrases represent a tried-and-true tactic of the bourgeoisie, and have been used in each election in recent memory in order to attempt to mobilize the population to vote for one or the other candidates of the bourgeoisie. As the bourgeois-democratic republic is the form of State best suited to the interests of the bourgeoisie, the use of elections generally cannot be dispensed with, as this is the political method by which the bourgeoisie attempts to tie the masses to the bourgeois state dictatorship. Yet, despite these facts, every three and a half years we’re “treated” to the same commentary from the monopoly media and the electoral opportunists regarding the necessity of the masses participating in the electoral farce; with the former playing their role as propagandists of the bourgeoisie, while the latter also play their role, that of a prop of the bourgeoisie among the masses. In order to combat both of these, which are two sides of the same coin, it is necessary to examine what the State is, the historical tactics of communists in relation to bourgeois elections and how the opportunists distort these for their own ends, and the tactic of the election boycott, its universality, and its necessity at this stage.
What is the State? The State is a machine for the suppression of one class by another, specifically, the bourgeois state is a machine for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois-democratic state emerged from feudal forms and grew with the rise of the bourgeoisie as they captured power through revolution in countries like England, the United States, and France, and has spread further since the revolutions in these countries to be the dominant state form under the bourgeoisie today. Historically, this is the state form best suited to the anarchic and competitive nature of the capitalist economy, as factions of the bourgeoisie compete in a multi-party system through elections in order to govern on behalf of the whole bourgeoisie, this being the expression in politics of what is true in bourgeois economics, i.e. competition in economics is expressed as competition in politics.
With the development of capitalism from its stage of free competition to it monopoly stage, that is imperialism, competition in economics and politics are transformed into their opposites. In the economy there is qualitative development towards greater degrees of concentration of capital and means of production into vast monopolies, alongside the merging of banking capital with industrial capital. In politics, this is expressed through the narrowing and erasure of the previous distinctions between all bourgeois parties, which represent the different factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie. With a basis of monopolies in economics there can be nothing but monopoly in politics, and the different factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie, represented by their various parties, are now “rotting away alive”, as Lenin said. The bourgeois state also begins the process of reactionization at this stage, expressed through a higher concentration of powers in the executive branch, and militarization of its whole apparatus in order to prevent the outbreak of revolution and to repress the masses.
The elections in the U.S. are a method of determining who from the two factions of the bourgeoisie will govern, and as such the differences between the two representatives of these factions does not lie in differing principles or programs, but rather primarily in differences of person and who has the more well-oiled electoral machine propelling their campaign. This is the character of elections under imperialism, as a candidate’s qualities for governance are more and more divergent from their qualities for nomination, noted even by the criminal and arch-reactionary Henry Kissinger in his memoirs The White House Years. More specifically, the nomination process attaches a premium to the candidate with the most effectively organized campaign, and who can make their political expression best fit the needs of the moment, therefore being the most adept at mastering ambiguity of policy and building consensus.
The use of elections in the bourgeois dictatorship accomplishes the following five main tasks which are inter-related and also involve the support and participation of the electoral opportunist:
- The replacement of certain authorities, and the distribution of political perks and privileges corresponding to economic ones, among the co-opted upper strata of workers and the petty-bourgeoisie.
- To tie the masses to the bourgeois state through their participation in the elections. As the masses seek to express themselves more and more through politics, and do so by numerous and varied means, the bourgeoisie seeks dominance and leadership over the masses.
- To manipulate the masses by means of flattery, lies, shady dealings, sleight of hand with popular phraseology, and promises, both left and right, for different kinds of reforms and benefits to the masses in order to sow illusions about change within the present system, and to denounce and attack revolution.
- Collaboration with the opportunists, themselves a section of the upper strata of the proletariat and a section of the petty-bourgeoisie that have been bought off by imperialist super-profits, in order to manipulate the masses by sowing illusions about the elections and parliaments in general, alongside embellishing imperialism and concealing its deepest contradictions.
- Sowing fear by different means, corresponding to the different thinking of different factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie, in order to further harness them to the bourgeois state dictatorship, expressed through the promotion of “defense of democracy”, “fighting fascism”, “anti-illegal immigration”, “anti-immigrants”, “defending identity and culture”, “against fundamentalism” etc.
Having examined the nature of the State, along with the character of elections under the bourgeois state dictatorship, the role that the opportunists play must be further examined, as they play a very important role for the bourgeoisie in the elections within the bourgeois dictatorship. In doing so, it will be illustrative to examine the work of the Bolsheviks in the Fourth Duma, as the historical facts regarding the Bolshevik’s participation in this body have been distorted by the opportunists in order for them to promote their electoral cretinism, always in service to the bourgeoisie, among the masses. The historical work by the Old Bolshevik, and Bolshevik deputy in the Fourth Duma, Alexei Badayev, forms the basis for the following brief examination.
The Activity of the Bolshevik Fraction in the Fourth Duma
“Only scoundrels or simpletons can think that the proletariat must first win a majority in elections carried out under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, under the yoke of wage-slavery, and must then win power. This is the height of stupidity or hypocrisy; it is substituting elections, under the old system and with the old power, for class struggle and revolution.” – Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
The Duma was a legislative body created during the years of the Tsarist autocracy. The First Duma was created in the wake of the 1905 Revolution in Russia; however, it was short-lived as Tsar Nicholas II dissolved the First Duma shortly after its formation, utilizing the passage of the Fundamental Laws, which gave him broad powers to rule by decree, including sweeping “emergency powers” and the ability to hold new elections at any time. The Second Duma, in session briefly from February 1907 to June 1907, was similarly dissolved, but not before the arch-reactionary, Stolypin, with the political weight of the Tsar behind him, altered the electoral laws significantly in favor of the landowners and bourgeoisie. Subsequently, the Third Duma, in session from November 1907-June 1912 and known popularly as the “Duma of the Lords and Lackeys” due to the dominance of the reactionary large landowners within it, was able to complete its five-year term, but proved that the Duma would remain under the control of the aristocracy, with the backing of the Tsar. The Fourth Duma was in existence from November 1912 to October 1917, and comprised six sessions during that period. In the election campaign leading up to the first session of the Fourth Duma the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) issued the following program at their Prague Conference defining their approach to the elections:
“…the Party must wage a merciless war against the Tsarist autocracy and the parties of the landlords and capitalists that support it, persistently exposing at the same time the counter-revolutionary views and false democracy of the bourgeois liberals (with the Cadet party at their head). Special attention should be paid in the election campaign to maintaining the independence of the party of the proletariat from all non-proletarian parties, to revealing the petty-bourgeois nature of the pseudo-socialism of the democratic groups (mainly the Trudoviks, the Narodniks, and the Socialist Revolutionaries), and to exposing the harm done to the cause of democracy by their vacillations on questions of mass revolutionary struggle.”1
The Bolshevik fraction, under the leadership of Comrade Lenin, established the tactical approach to the elections as being a means for agitation and propaganda. The election of Bolshevik deputies was never to transform this campaign into a struggle for a few paltry seats in the Duma, as our modern opportunists reduce it to in order to justify their own electoral opportunism, but to expose the most intimate secrets of the class enemy and their double-dealings from the seats of their very own legislative body. Connected to this was the fact that most of the Bolshevik deputies’ work took place outside of the Duma. Primarily among the workers in St. Petersburg, propagandizing and agitating among them, particularly among the unions, writing articles for Pravda that denounced and exposed the bourgeoisie and autocracy along with their opportunist collaborators with information that only the Bolshevik deputies were privy to accessing in the Duma. Lenin was always careful to emphasize the caveat that participation in the bourgeois elections was always contingent on specific historical conditions and circumstances; that it was a tactical approach that the revolutionary proletarian Party could use selectively and to a certain extent, but never a strategic principle. Elevating electoral opportunism to a matter of principle, which our electoral opportunists do, violates the basic theses of Marxism regarding the State and the revolution, making a fetish of elections and the bourgeois state, thus falling into revisionism.
The political platform of the Bolsheviks that was advocated during the campaign was embodied in three slogans, known as the “three whales” which were: 1) a democratic republic 2) an eight-hour day 3) the confiscation of the landlords’ estates. These slogans would then be linked, through the Party’s propaganda, to the minimum program which included universal suffrage, freedom of association, the popular election of judges and officials, and the substitution of the armed people for a standing army. The Mensheviks, on the other hand, put the secondary demands of the minimum program at the forefront, alongside altering two of the “whales”. Instead of a “democratic republic” they demanded the “sovereignty of the people’s representatives” and instead of the “confiscation of the landlords’ estates” they put forward the vague slogan of a “revision of the agrarian legislation”.
The delegates of the RSDLP that were elected to the Fourth Duma were legally registered as a single Party fraction, but actually this grouping was composed of two separate fractions, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which did not meet or act in concert with each other even before the formal split in the Party in 1913. Deputies from both fractions were elected, with the Bolshevik fraction managing to get six deputies elected, and the Mensheviks managing to get seven deputies elected. All of the six Bolshevik deputies elected were workers, with four being metal workers and two being textile workers. The Menshevik deputies contained three intellectuals, with the other four being workers from the border provinces. After the split in the Party in 1913, “The Six”, as the Bolshevik fraction was known, assumed the title of Social-Democratic Workers Fraction, stressing the word “Workers” in order to separate themselves from “The Seven”, as the Mensheviks were known, who took on the name Social-Democratic Fraction, reflecting their lack of influence among the revolutionary workers. The presidium of the Duma tried at every turn to frustrate the work of the Social-Democratic Workers Fraction, going so far as to declare after the Party split that there could not be two Social-Democratic fractions, and that the Bolsheviks would have to register as “independents”, a move that would have significantly curtailed their political rights in the Duma.
The Social-Democratic Workers Fraction, following the program of the Party and its established discipline for deputies, acted resolutely and in concert, and were under no illusions regarding their efforts, nor regarding the balance of forces within the Duma itself. With only six Bolsheviks holding seats there was no chance that any legislation introduced could possibly pass. Contrary to modern electoral opportunist claims stating that the work of the Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was primarily focused on the introduction of reform legislation and the maintenance of seats, Badayev notes that:
“The eight-hours bill, which was of special importance in our Duma work, was drafted with the aid of the ‘worker’s commission’. Was this so-called ‘positive legislative work’ to which our Party was definitely opposed? Most decidedly not. In the first place, the eight-hour day was not one of those partial demands which the Liquidators considered could be realized through the Duma; it was one of the three fundamental slogans under which the Party mobilized the workers for the struggle. The introduction of the bill into the Duma provided an opportunity for the proclamation of one of our fighting revolutionary slogans from the Duma tribune itself. The bill had nothing to do with ‘positive work’, since there was not the slightest chance that it would be accepted by the Black Hundred majority. On the other hand, the very failure of the bill could be made the occasion of further revolutionary agitation.”2
The modern electoral opportunists, which in the United States are parties and groups such as the PSL, DSA, CPUSA, WWP, the assorted Trotskyite sects, and other revisionist parties and groups, frequently cite the example of the Bolsheviks in this Duma as their justification for running their candidates in elections for the state and federal legislatures, alongside various other seats in bourgeois government. However, they, unlike the Bolshevik fraction, see these campaigns as focused on passing reform legislation, particularly elevating the basic minimum demands of their organizational programs to be principal. They also mirror the electoral campaigns and outlook of the bourgeois parties, which are not focused on condemning the parliamentary bodies and the elections and utilizing them for agitational and propaganda purposes to mobilize the masses with fighting slogans for revolution, but on defending them as bastions of “democracy” and re-electing their candidates repeatedly to “maintain seats”. Our modern electoral opportunists are inheritors of the legacy of the Mensheviks, and have nothing in common with Bolshevik tactics in regards to elections, and certainly much less any relation to the work of the Social-Democratic Workers Fraction.
Furthermore, in their continued attempt to sow confusion and promote their own opportunism, our modern electoral opportunists compare apples and oranges. They compare the Duma as a bourgeois legislative form which was controlled by the Tsarist autocracy, large landowners, and the politically subservient and weak bourgeoisie, to the parliaments of the modern imperialist state, which are fully under the domination and control of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and serve as the preferred method of governance for the bourgeois class dictatorship! At the time of the Fourth Duma, and during the prior two Dumas, the proletariat had already discovered and developed the embryos of the New State during the 1905 Revolution, i.e. the soviets. Lenin and the Bolsheviks continually pointed out that due to the political weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, specifically their subservience to the aristocracy, that they were unable to lead and complete the bourgeois revolution, and that the tasks of this bourgeois-democratic revolution would have to be led and completed by the proletariat allied with the peasantry, uninterruptedly passing then to the socialist revolution once the tasks of that stage were complete.
It is important to remember this fact because already then it was pointed out that the bourgeois state form, with its parliament, was historically outmoded due to the necessity of the proletariat being the leading force of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and with it the soviets representing a superior embryo of the New State over the already politically surpassed Duma.
Because of this, the participation of the Bolsheviks in the Duma could be nothing more than to denounce its insufficiency, expose the treacherous nature of the liberal and left opportunists, utilize it as a platform to spread the Party’s slogans to mobilize the masses for revolutionary action, and to reveal to the masses the innermost secrets and economic and political dealings of the reaction.
Furthermore, it also must be borne in mind that during the period of the Dumas the Russian bourgeoisie did not yet have the weight of tradition behind them, as they were too tied to the aristocracy to act and rule on their own, and were therefore much more politically weaker. This is certainly not the case of the modern imperialist bourgeoisie, especially in countries like the United States, where they do have the weight of tradition behind them, culturally, politically, and economically, alongside the historical experience of exercising their class dictatorship for almost 250 years. The soviets had already shown themselves to be a superior legislative body than the Duma, and so the participation of the Bolsheviks in the Duma could be nothing more than to denounce and expose it. In declaring electoralism as a matter of principle applicable to all countries in the era of imperialism, the electoral opportunists have rejected Lenin’s comments on the specificity of this as a matter of tactics, always contingent on concrete historical conditions.
The Electoral Boycott as a Universal Tactic of Revolutionaries
“In the past decades, many Communist Parties have participated in elections and parliaments, but none has set up a dictatorship of the proletariat by such means. Even if a Communist Party should win a majority in parliament or participate in the government, this would not mean any change in the character of bourgeois political power, still less the smashing of the old state machine. The reactionary ruling classes can proclaim the election null and void, dissolve the parliament or directly use violence to kick out the Communist Party. If a proletarian party does no mass work, rejects armed struggle and makes a fetish of parliamentary elections, it will only lull the masses and corrupt itself. The bourgeoisie buys over a Communist Party through parliamentary elections and turns it into a revisionist party, a party of the bourgeoisie—are such cases rare in history?
“The proletariat must use the gun to seize political power and must use the gun to defend it. The people’s army under the leadership of a Marxist-Leninist party is the bulwark of the dictatorship of the proletariat and among the various factors for preventing the restoration of capitalism it is the main one. Having a people’s army armed with the Marxist-Leninist ideology, the proletariat can deal with any complicated situation in the domestic or international class struggle and safeguard the proletarian state.” – Communist Party of China, Long Live the Victory of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Having examined the nature of the State and the character of the elections under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and the historical experience of the Bolsheviks in the Fourth Duma, our examination must turn to the attitude of revolutionaries to the elections in our current era. We live in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolution. More specifically, when examining the world proletarian revolution in the process of its development and in totality, we are in the stage of the strategic offensive of the world revolution. This stage is one where imperialism is in its death throes, while the masses exert their influence politically with more and more weight than before. At this point the scales of history inveigh against the bourgeoisie, reflecting the fact that they are historically doomed and on the precipice of their demise as the world proletarian revolution ceaselessly develops. Imperialism, in contrast, cannot develop further, and is constantly lurching from crisis to crisis, always generating more wars and misery for the masses. It is in this context that elections must be considered, as these are a means of wedding the masses tighter to the increasingly militarized and decomposing imperialist state, as has already been shown. In this era revisionism is the main danger to the revolution, because it actively fights revolution from within the labor movement itself, with one of the main tactics of revisionism being electoral opportunism. This is a process occurring in every country without exception. The great Indian revolutionary, Charu Majumdar, saw this development and stated that:
“In the present era when imperialism is heading towards total collapse, revolutionary struggle in every country has taken the form of armed struggle; …world revolution has entered a new higher phase; and socialism is marching irrepressibly forward to victory—in such an era, to take the parliamentary road means stopping this onward march of world revolution. Today the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists cannot opt for the parliamentary road. This is true not only for the colonial and semi-colonial countries, but for the capitalist countries as well.”3
Behind the electoral opportunist’s promotion of participation in bourgeois elections and parliaments are their illusions regarding democracy and the State. Regarding the State, the electoral opportunists see it as a neutral arbiter that can be captured, i.e. the State is not a machine for the suppression of one class by another, which is the Marxist thesis, but a neutral apparatus independent of classes that can be captured by a simple parliamentary majority or by filling other important posts in the bourgeois state. Secondly, the electoral opportunists harbor illusions about bourgeois democracy, stripping it of its class nature, just as they do the State, they promote the idea of democracy in the abstract. When examining democracy, as a form of state, they do not ask “democracy for whom?”, but instead declare democracy to be the form that best represents the “general will”. Of course, it is ludicrous to speak of any “general will” when society is divided into antagonistic classes. This was the line of reasoning utilized by the old intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, like Rousseau, when it was a revolutionary class, and since the emergence of the proletariat as a class, and its ideology (today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism), this has always been criticized by the great teachers of the international proletariat. In class society one can only speak of democracy for a certain class, the State as a dictatorship of a certain class etc. Only when there are no classes, and therefore no State, can we speak of any type of “general interest” or “general will” of society. The elevation of bourgeois democracy to a universal ideal, and the promotion of the neutral, non-class, nature of the State aims to sap the energy of the proletarian movement and divert its course from the revolutionary overthrow of the existing society into its integration to the bourgeois state itself, and in this way the electoral opportunists serve as a prop of the bourgeoisie.
It must also be noted that the bourgeoisie has “perfected” the electoral machine to a high degree, which developed rapidly after World War II, and has even been noted by bourgeois political scientists and sociologists, designating the current state of bourgeois democracy with terms such as “low intensity democracy”. The main feature of this development is the mobilization and demobilization of the masses around the elections, which of course takes on a cyclical character and reflects the bloated, absurd, and farcical nature of the elections in general. The main goal is to quickly and efficiently mobilize the masses to elect the already selected candidates of the bourgeoisie, not to affect policy, but as a means of legitimizing their rule through their so-called “mandate of the electorate” or “consent of the governed”. After the elections the immediate task is to then demobilize the masses as quickly as possible to prevent their participation or influence in officially sanctioned politics. Now the managing of the affairs of the State can continue fulfilling the needs of the bourgeoisie and imperialism, but with the “blessing” of the masses secured. In the United States this cycle is repeated in a most pronounced way every three to three and a half years in the lead up to the presidential elections, but it is a feature of elections under bourgeois democracy at every level of the State. When examining electoral participation in our country, specifically the past three major elections in 2020, 2022, and 2018 we can see the following in regards to the low level of the masses’ participation in the elections:
The electoral opportunists, echoing the bourgeoisie, further argue that organizing the masses’ non-participation in the elections as an electoral boycott is a form of “voter suppression”, which is nothing more than phrase-mongering based on terminological ignorance and historical dishonesty. The term “suppression” means to prevent the development of something, which certainly the revolutionaries are not doing this as imperialism and the bourgeois state have already done this to the most significant degree, as outlined previously. What is done is for the Communist Party to organize, lead, and develop what already exists, and to develop it further through People’s War, and the construction of the New State and the incorporation of the masses into it. In this way the election boycott develops hand in hand with the development of People’s War, and the development of the New State, as more and more masses are pulled away from the Old State and begin exercising power through these new forms. In this way “voters” are not suppressed, but what is suppressed is the Old State and the class enemy. Secondly, equating boycotting the reactionary elections with “voter suppression” accomplishes through a false equivalency historical examples of real voter suppression, like the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorizing of Black people to prevent them exercising basic democratic rights, with the organization of the masses to seize and defend State power through People’s War. Only a dishonest fool and reactionary could suggest such a comparison. The bourgeoisie, and their prop, the electoral opportunists, who peddle this traffic not only in lies, but also with the blood of the people because they try to equate the revolution to the reaction in order to prevent the outbreak of the revolution.
The election boycott fulfills what Lenin said, also reflecting the tactics of the Bolsheviks in the Fourth Duma, namely, that the elections should be used as a means of agitation and propaganda in service of the development of the revolution, not to make a fetish of them or to seek a few measly seats in the Old State. More specifically, that participation in elections is dependent on specific historical conditions and circumstances, and particularly here we must remember the vast differences; political, economic, and cultural that separate the current day United States from pre-revolutionary Russia. It must be stated again, that the developments in imperialism since Lenin’s time, with the militarization of the bourgeois state, its increasing reactionization, the further decomposition of imperialism, and the “perfection” of the bourgeois electoral machine, have proved that participation in these elections is not applicable for communists, only agitating and propagating against participating in them, as a part of organizing the rebellion of the masses, always in service to incorporating the masses more and more into the revolution. The question of the necessity and universality of the electoral boycott is a question of which road to take; the victorious road of revolutionary violence through People’s War to seize and defend power, accomplishing the socialist revolution and continuing on the road to communism, or the failed road of parliamentary cretinism preached by the bourgeoisie and electoral opportunists where the masses and their revolutionary development are suppressed more and more in an effort to tie them to the Old State and to keep them under the thumb of the bourgeoisie.
It is for these reasons that the electoral boycott assumes universal significance. The problem becomes how to transform the abstention of significant sections of the masses into an electoral boycott. Abstention, something that a significant part of the masses are already engaging in, expresses how the subjective situation (the consciousness and organization of the masses) develops alongside the objective situation, creating a revolutionary situation in uneven development. What is lacking is a Communist Party capable of organizing and leading them in an all-around way, to raise their level of action from spontaneity to that of conscious action, to accomplish the socialist revolution by means of revolutionary violence to seize and defend power, i.e. People’s War. In the U.S. the electoral boycott serves the principal task currently facing the dispersed revolutionary nuclei, namely, to reconstitute the Communist Party USA, expressed in the slogan “Unite Under Maoism”. This task cannot be accomplished through the integration of the masses into the imperialist state with the assistance of the communists, as the electoral opportunists imagine as the nature of the imperialist state and the elections are fundamentally antagonistic to the masses and building the necessary instruments to wage revolution. Only by the revolutionary nuclei agitating and propagating against the elections among the masses, maintaining their post in the struggle, forming deep links between the nuclei and the masses, and conducting parallel and joint actions with other revolutionary nuclei can dispersion be combatted, further aiding in the effort for reconstitution and combatting liquidationism.
- Alexei Badayev, “The Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma,” Marxists.org, August 12, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/archive/badayev/1929/duma/index.html. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Charu Majumdar, “‘Boycott Elections’ International Significance of the Slogan,” Marxists.org, August 12, 2024, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mazumdar/1968/12/x01.html. ↩︎
image: The Russian Duma in 1912, the “Duma of the Lords and Lackeys”
