I know that talking about bourgeois elections is a controversial thing, but I’ve always thought Lenin had pretty good thoughts on this. What do you guys think?
While I think Lenin and the Bolsheviks were right at the time to push for participation in parliament ( through voting for communist party candidates only, a fact many socdems forget ), I think ultimately 100+ years of history has proven that this is a failed strategy.
Firstly, the bolsheviks only really wanted to use the election pulpit to agitate, because it was one of the only ways people could be introduced to Marxist ideas, and grow communist support, in order to ultimately undo and overthrow that bourgeois pulpit. In the modern day, this isn’t necessary; we have the internet and mass communication that doesn’t follow an election cycle, that’s more educating than the soundbyte gotchas of modern day election coverage. IE we have other, more effective means of reaching people and spreading communist ideas.
Secondly, the high cost of election campaigns ensures that only candidates who chain themselves to capitalist financial support can get elected (just one of the many methods making bourgeois democracy a completely rigged system, IE a capitalist dictatorship ) . Halim Alrah has a good vid on some of the others ways here. Any money spent on campaigns for even communist candidates, is essentially thrown down the drain on advertising and whatnot.
Also, while it was a tactic that was used, it was arguably the most unsuccessful one in the bag. What was successful, was building alternative institutions to bourgeois democracy, alternative political organizations like soviets, alternative security forces like red armies, and waging peoples war. This is what brought the most success in every communist-led revolution of the past 100 years.
The reason its such an emphasized tactic in the west (and not building a people’s army for example, which actually worked), is because westerners do feel pretty secure in their daily lives, since the violence that sustains them is exported to the global south, and they really don’t want to do away with parliamentary democracy, they want to preserve it.
All good points. My only thing is, even if the American electoral system is bourgeoisie, which it is, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. Fascists WILL use the electoral system, and if communists and socialists and anarchists don’t, they’ll be giving up power that they could have used.
In my opinion, elections are a small, small part of a larger mission of change. For liberals, electoralism is everything, and there is nothing else. For me, it’s like going to the store. One small part, and while that one part sucks, it’s still a road to power.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
Bernie, while a socdem, has showcased how bourgeois elections can be used to strengthen and diffuse leftist thought. he wasn’t even ML but he’s definitely been a huge factor in a bunch of MLs radicalizations because they kept going beyond Sanders. whether the candidate is actually elected is irrelevant, just use the campaign as a platform.
Really if we want to use the electoral system in place local elections would be the most effecient no? While I agree there’s limited merit to running a presidential campaign community efforts to get communists into city offices sounds like it could be of some use.
The local / national divide is a phantom, cities are also controlled by the elite interests of that city, bourgeois democracy is in full force at the local level, and it can’t be undone by local elections. You can’t vote away their wealth, their power over the city as a whole, its institutions, its police, etc. The most liberal governors are the ones deporting people, locking up immigrants, clamping down on protests, etc.
An earnest communist getting elected would have the whole machinery of bourgeois democracy working against them, ultimately to come to the same conclusion as every non-deluded communist: that the rich won’t allow you to vote away their wealth, and that class struggle and the reorganization of property requires violence and armed struggle.
Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder remains one of the best texts on practical tactics, and everybody should read it several times over. The lessons from Bolsheviks need to be heeded because they ran one of the few successful revolutions, and they documented what worked and what didn’t. It’s a folly to ignore all that wisdom and make the same mistakes today.
Really one of the best books on tactics ever written. Audiobook here.
It makes sense to go where the masses are. In Russia back then, democracy had recently been won from the Tzars and it was fresh and I assume they had a high participation rate.
In the US, most people don’t vote, and the more money one has the more likely they are to vote. So, the masses that are most exploited in the US already see through the electoral process as a farce and don’t participate. They see their lives have not changed from bougoise politician to bougoise politician. This they have the most advanced thinking on the subject, and we should go to these people rather than to the people concerned with electoral politics.
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