Signalfire is pleased to present the following contribution by a comrade from NYC:

The question of elections is put squarely on the table of all

communists within the United States, as a correct orientation and

understanding of the electoral process will enable all comrades to

fight both right opportunist and left opportunist tendencies which

remarkably strive for the same thing in effect, the maintenance of our

forces as weak and unprepared which no matter how clever they are

thought, will eventually strive to be under the wing of the liberal

bourgeoisie. The class nature of this opportunism is not fundamentally

rooted in the advanced section of the proletariat but among the

“advanced” (rearguards) of the more bourgeoisified sections of labor

and/or the lower-petty bourgeoisie. It is at this point easy to make

this claim; however we hope to demonstrate it in the course of this

position paper. Moreover a real revolutionary strategic line must be shown against the various opportunists in regards to elections both in general and with the presidential elections occurring at this moment in time.

On the Bourgeois Democratic State

The bourgeois democratic state’s legitimation rests in its ability to

rule without direct coercive force against the masses of people;

however the truth is that this force is indeed exercised by US

imperialism as the head of Empire against the worlds oppressed

majority and internally against the lowest and deepest section of the

proletariat and oppressed nationalities. Barack Obama is the head of

US Imperialism, he is commander and chief, and this can’t be covered

up by any merely pragmatic allure.

These again are facts: The bourgeois democratic state is a democracy of

the bourgeoisie, and a dictatorship of it. In context of US

Imperialism, this state operates not simply internally but

externally against the world’s majority.

With this considered it also quite true that rather than simple

illusion, rather than a simple instramentalization of the state by the

bourgeoisie, much of the masses are brought forward into the electoral

process. That is to say: The process of “democracy” has a real basis and is

actualized in the procedure of the state. This legitimation on the

basis of the mandate from the masses constitutes the real politics of

capitalism.

These facts are however not in contradiction, but are the real

nature and function of the state in the modern bourgeois context. The

state is an instrument of the whole of the class, executive of the

social formation, abstracted from economic intercourse to

provide the condition for this very intercourse. The modern bourgeois

state is a historical development that is rooted in the development of

class societies, social formations which have become more complex and

integrated more of the productive forces into coherent units of

production. Finally it is the bourgeoisie which has brought the most

remote of regions into its world system. It has done this through the

most primitive means one can be certain, but simultaneously must

assure the basis of commodity exchange and production, that is the

whole of the class must have a guarantee of the safety of

each individual’s economic activity.

Hence it is common for the bourgeoisie to trumpet the rule of law and

democracy as the cornerstone for each of its respective social

formations (which of course are themselves founded upon competing

national blocs of capital). Whatever can be said up about the falsity

of these claims, the real examples of cronyism amongst them or the

disenfranchisement in the particular of its citizens from

participation within its democracy, this does not at all at once throw

the entirety of the reality that such a foundational basis, such

ideological claims are important for their legitimation among the

whole of the people and to an extent among themselves.

The democratic bourgeois state’s long march to its modern

incarnation(s) is an affair which begins prior to the state itself in

the struggle of the bourgeois class in the protection against the

feudal state of their own private property, such a struggle which can

be chronicled for hundreds of years before the bourgeois revolutions

themselves, revolutions made possible by the advancement of productive

forces bringing forward the basis of commodity production led by the

bourgeois class. The basis of the first bourgeois states is found in

representative democracy which some revolutions opened to a

broad base and others retained to a propertied elite.

It is only through the development of bourgeois society into an

imperialist world system, that the class struggle at the cores of

capital was able to win political rights for the proletarian and

oppressed excluded masses. It was struggle that while paid

in blood became possible with the deepening of capital at a world scale.

Democracy’s legitimation now depended ultimately in a much larger

body, but one which is still explicitly of the national interest, one

which ultimately brings labor and whatever auxiliary forces for

revolution under the wing of the bourgeoisie in the nation state

confines of bourgeois right.

On the US type of State and its Historical Development in Particular

The United States of America is the independent form and continuation

of the network of settler-colonial projects of Europe. It’s bourgeois

democratic form of state governance, perhaps the first true bourgeois

form, was also in its very character conditioned upon its concrete

basis of existence which combined settler expansionism and slave

economy. That is despite what is commonly thought by the ideologists

of liberalism and American exceptionalism in this country (which

includes the revisionist Communist Party and some other stale dying

continuations of the Neo-Browderites), the classic US form

of governance which is very much a model of the most moderate

bourgeoisie of its era contained in itself already all the barbaric

stems of primitive accumulation (the genocide of indigenous people

and the emptying of the land for settlers, the slave economy and it’s

role in the Atlantic system, the militarist conquest of Mexican land)

and led right to the imperialist empire in its current form. In

fact, it must be argued, that throughout much of the history of the

the United States of America it was the industrial bourgeois class and

it’s work to weaken the “people’s democracy” (in its party

form as Federalists, Whigs, and eventually Republicans) that was the

most progressive and in the basic interests of the real exploited and

oppressed people in the country. That most of the country was a

country of petty-bourgeois reactionary small farmers and settlers,

that consistently labor was weakened and continually overturned by the

westward expansion, and ultimately the whole of the country was

dependent upon slave economy is a basic fact until the Civil War

itself where the industrial bourgeoisie was able to muster the

strength to extinguish and smash the heart of the Jeffersonian

Democrats in the rebelling southern states and ultimately alter the

relationship of power between states and the federal government.

However the fundamental basis of power in the petty-bourgeoisie, the

need for legitimation among this class of mostly white euro-American

settlers, had never fundamentally changed. The most radical and

revolutionary attempts of the bourgeoisie themselves in conjunction

with social forces of labor and the masses of black people to uplift

this basic reactionary grouping towards the sentiment of popular democracy

has ultimately failed in many instances (Reconstruction, Civil Rights,

etc) with the bourgeoisie ultimately betraying the black masses in

their most essential struggles for real integration and the promotion

of a few individuals of its national bourgeoisie into compradors and

executors in general of the imperialist program of the white

supremacist state (with of course nominal objection).

We are now entering a moment in this election cycle where the sediment

of the reactionary regime of US imperialist power, harbored in the

white petty bourgeoisie, ultimately finds itself in great jeopardy

politically (and with all reason will suffer another debilitating

defeat in these elections). These bring up for our forces much

consideration in terms of tactics and strategies around this basic

question, as more and more of the electorate has transformed

demographically in its representation. As more and more the white

petty-bourgeoisie within the US struggle against their impending

suffocation in the world capitalist system and desperately try to

retain their edge in such a system. Moreover it’s ideological frame of

reference to politics and it’s understanding becomes more and more

jeopardized as sections of white labor, especially the labor

aristocratic sections, and it’s dangerous lumpen element rebel for the

heart of America that corresponds to their notion of what is the

promise of America (power of white men); however one would like to

parse of course the material basis of such ideological coordinates and

whether it constitutes a false consciousness or the return of the

repressed of a section of the masses finding itself more and more

precarious and fighting its essential proletarianization, the

material effect is quite clear historically and that is the creation

of new avenues of Fascism.

There is of course a consistent role for such proto-fascist forces in

the body politic of the United States, and what is more, as a real

force they are armed, organized, and have a much deeper relationship

with the very thuggish nature of the state. Not merely are such clowns

parading themselves and making themselves felt within the Republican

Party (which combines such essential reactionary forces with capital),

but they are also in many places the armed thugs of the state, or they

build paramilitary forces and attempt to rival the state (of course

never as effectively) in force.

It is also clear that those remnants of law and organization of the

state structure under those principles that were enshrined by our

slave-owning genocidal forefathers gives enough room for maneuver of

those reactionary forces as to play a corrosive role against the whole

of the state body. And we must understand this in its particularity,

for as where the basic function of bourgeois democracy is to always

allow a certain freedom of politics of those in the organized

opposition, the checks and balances of the US state is such that

it will always unevenly decenter power to the advantage of the

reactionary classes (especially the white petty-bourgeois). I.e. the

historical struggle in the US between states rights against federal

government has had a consistent streak of being a struggle between

white supremacist petty-bourgeois reaction and that section of capital

which attempts to win its legitimation with the oppressed masses of

people.

In this election between Obama and Romney, this is very much all at

play in a heightened way as it was four years prior. Yet there are

important differences between these elections and such distinctions make the demarcations stand much more drastically between the road of historical liquidationism and building a revolutionary proletarian party.

On Revisionism and it’s “Strategy”

It is almost consistent that we hear from the forces like Bill

Fletcher, Carl Davidson, and Bob Wing that we need a strategic

orientation of our forces to the elections. So consistent they are

that is has become almost embarrassing in the manner they ape what has

been almost the same driven mantra of the dying organizations of

yesteryear (CPUSA, CCDS) that it’s “striking” how they begin to merge

as one social force. The former grizzled veterans of the New Communist

Movement, perhaps have learned so much from those years past that we

are not fundamentally equipped to understand such nuance or to have

their same patience in work (as Fletcher has decisively stated in a

recent document in his “Marxist” politics for 21st century) but it

seems to us immature and young Leninists that what they are

celebrating in their history is liquidation and defeat, and their

desire is in e very last analysis to lead revolutionary forces down

such a road one more time.

Fletcher, Davidson, and Wing all argue strategy and being strategic,

but when they argue politics, our Marxists demonstrate they are no

longer quite Marxists at all but have regrouped themselves as

revisionists for the 21st century. Their strategy in the end becomes

nothing more than a series of tactical maneuvers for little power of

stooges under the bourgeoisie. It’s the same power of course that all

opportunists have already had in their grasp to facilitate and help

the bourgeoisie in exercising the dictatorship of said bourgeoisie. It

is in fact nothing more than those same politics, consistent as a

trend of those forces in our ranks who achieving some position as

labor captains or bureaucrats (and today NGO staff) to begin to strive

under the bourgeoisie and mistake their own utilization as instruments

of the bourgeoisie as becoming agents not of our class, not tribunes

of the people, but of bourgeois power within the movement.

This may sound all too abrasive, but we can no long hide what has

become painfully obvious and that is the real slide of revisionism and

it’s real tendency to harness and pull movements for the effective

utility of the bourgeoisie.

However we must construct an argument which indicts the veterans of

the NCM and their strategy for what it is. But where to begin?

It must begin with the very history that led to their positions, a

history rooted in their own organizations, within the New Communist

Movement, which held so much promise but ended into whole sale

liquidation of three democratic centralist formations into the

Democratic Party itself – League of Revolutionary Struggle, Line of

March, and the Communist Workers’ Party. The only organizational

remnants of the NCM can be found in the two existing FRSO(s) and

the RCP, USA. How did it happen that the young revolutionary movement

of the NCM was exhausted? The NCM at first began in the

height of contradiction on a world scale between the revolutionary

social forces and imperialism, it rejected those politics of the

Communist Party which appeared to many as simply for what they were –

reformist, endlessly tailing the liberal bourgeoisie, and unreservedly

apologist for Soviet social-imperialism. The set out the task of

developing a new communist party based on the scientific

principles of Marxism-Leninism, anti-revisionism, and influenced

mostly by Mao Tse Tung Thought. While there is much particularity

to the dissolution of each sect, the pull of social democratic

politics and revisionism created crisis at the core of many

organizations from their inception. Particularly there emerged a

tendency towards pragmatism in the mass work and practice of many orgs so that

when a social forces of the national bourgeoisie appeared around the

campaign of Jesse Jackson, those orgs which decided to unite with this

campaign ultimately felt the pull of the Democratic Party

into its machine. There are from the remnants of LRS, LoM, CWP, and

many other similar orgs individuals in the democratic party

establishment who are the worse politicians and poverty pimps.

It is however understandable why such forces worked closely with the

Jackson Rainbow Coalition and it’s campaign work in the Democratic

primaries, it’s understandable how liquidationism emerged in those

political organizations and because of the immaturity and dysfunction

of the internal life of those organizations that they indeed imploded. It is

however not understandable why Fletcher, Davidson, and Bob Wing ask us

to repeat this experience.

It is only understandable if one understands the politics of Fletcher,

Davidson, and Wing. While all three have emerged from the NCM and have

certainly their own particular differences (for instance on the

national question), these figures while not embracing the whole of

liquidationism as it appeared in their midst in their younger years

embrace it a half-hearted way and adopt such dire pragmatist visions

as to have no correspondence any longer with communism.

But still where is the kernel of this revisionism? What has turned

these men into social-democrats at best and overall consistent

rearguard elements of the Democratic Party machine? Things must be

viewed here analytically in regards to their lines. Like all

revisionists, these folks have rejected the possibility of smashing

the state and replacing it with a new one. Davidson has gone so far as

to reject even the possibility of communism and only fights for

“market socialism.” Following of course this rejection, they see

ultimately their work as one which must transform the system through a

war of position within the state structure. This follows of

course much of the other refoundationist and eurocommunist tendencies

of the left worldwide. The instrumentality of the state as a bourgeois

dictatorship is lost on our right opportunists, revisionists, and

modern social democrats who after the fashion of the politics of

“crisis of socialism” have dropped this position for the Eurocommunist

or “Gramscian” solutions which imagine the state as a robust territory

in which a popular insurgency through democratic struggle can

ultimately win socialism.

That all this runs contrary to the facts in the first decade or so of

our 21st century socialism – that the South African Communist Party

endorses the murder of miners, that the Refoundationist Communist

Party of Italy has virtually disappeared, that SYRIZA can not mobilize

itself against the European Union programmatically, that the Communist

Party of India (Marxist) facilitates the liquidation of peasants and

their land holdings for Neo-liberal special economic zones, or that

the impressive national bourgeois states in Latin America simply

realign themselves for another bloc of capital with capitalist social

relations dominating entirely it’s hemisphere (however progressive

this realignment is) – they should perhaps find striking but say

relatively little about.

So our revisionists strategy is in its simple generality this – work

through the state system to employ the left to transform the state for

ourselves. Even while they acknowledge that this is one of the most

undemocratic Democracies (Davidson and Fletcher refer to it as a

duopoly), and while the Left is incredibly weak they tell us, and

while their own parties fell into the abyss of the liberal bourgeoisie

and the Democratic Party we are told by these gentlemen who have seen

so many battles what the realities are.

Could it be comrades that something more is at stake here for them

with all their bluster of “main danger of the right” and visionary

accounts of inside-outside strategies? Could it be that in the

liquidation of their respective orgs and the existing social basis for

these men whose voice is so heralded throughout the movement (a

movement so insignificant and weak for them), that their program has

already been a failure for some time and the actual presidency of

Barack Obama is very much the proof of this failure in their

leadership? Maybe this election isn’t about Barack Obama for them, but

shouldn’t it be? Considering how long they have talked about

“Neo-Rainbows,” have talked about inside-outside strategies, how the

Van Jones and Jean Quans are in a quandary about what to do with militant

anti-capitalist youth in the street? Isn’t this precisely a crisis in

their strategy, in their movement?

Elections: Traps for fools…not Communists

A communist position on elections in general must be rooted in the

historical position of our class, not simply nationally but

internationally. That is to say a communist position must be a

consistent communist position, one which correctly puts itself in

relation to the struggle of our entire class for revolution and not

simply immediate pragmatic aims in the local, regional, or national

sphere. A communist position on elections in the United States

therefore can not simply be swooned over by arguments and fear of

“main dangers” and ideas of “lesser evils.” It can not surrender its

historical duty in a politics of fear which in every instance has us

beholden to capital, and it is the truth that those forces arguing

about main dangers, inside-outside strategies, are tightly under the

wing of capital itself through foundation grants, through necessary

complicity with labor bureaucracy, with rapprochement ultimately

with the liberal bourgeoisie.

Let us quickly turn to the experience (and perhaps to the groans of

revisionists that we do so dogmatically) of the Bolsheviks in the Duma

of Tsarist Russia. Because here is still, for all intents and purposes

is an experience of communists who would move to make revolution

utilizing the platform that was provided to them through elections and

participation in the parliament of a semi-feudal police dictatorship

under the Tsar.

Here Bolsheviks combined their force for most of the time with

Mensheviks in a social-democratic fraction to work in the Duma

(Russian Parliament), and while there was great distinction and

ultimately a rupture in that fraction between Bolsheviks and

Mensheviks on programmatic lines (the Mensheviks insisted on their

position to support the liberal bourgeoisie, whereas the Bolsheviks at

every moment used their position to scorn and expose the Tsarist

state, the necessity for proletarian revolution, and fought only for

the interests of workers and the whole people for these aims), the

Bolsheviks at each point insisted on putting themselves forward in

such a process against Otzovist left opportunism and the

semi-Menshevik right opportunism inside the Bolshevik’s camp itself.

Lenin in particular fought against both tendencies, and was especially

stringent against the Otzovist trend.

While of course we live in different conditions and times, and work

itself in the Tsarist Duma was only done with full attention given to

the details and development of clandestine organization, the

experience of the Bolsheviks should serve us well to understand the

attitude and work of revolutionaries in this matter. It provides us

lessons in this matter against both left and right opportunism.

With of course right opportunism, as we have already devoted attention

to, we can see the work if taken forward must ultimately be under the

discipline of a party of the new type. That is it must be under the

discipline of a revolutionary party, those who participate in such

work must resolve to carry their work forward not as a pragmatic

workhorse of the bourgeoisie but as a tribune of the people, their

work must fully be in correspondence with the revolutionary program of

the vanguard party. That at each moment the people involved in such

work must expose the character of the bourgeois state and even the

very futility of the democratic process of the bourgeois dictatorship

as a whole.

Against Left opportunism, which we have spoken little of, we must

resolve to fight against such lines of voluntarism, principled

ignorance, and often stereotyped hackery of left-wing phrases that

ultimately manifest themselves in a quite philistine abstentionism.

This is generally the lines of the radical petty bourgeois, the

expression of an unhappy consciousness in its milieu predisposed to

inoculate itself from its very evident isolation with a deeper

contempt for the real politics of the multitude, this was what in

essence was the Otzovist line (which of course was a general trend of

Bolshevik intellectuals who insisted on infantile left positions in

many spheres). While it is of course generally understandable to feel

an instinctual distaste for the sham that are these elections, however

to resolve our position to this simply is as much part of the trap

than illusory participation.

To vote or not to vote, it is all the same, if there is no party for revolution.

It is through the formation only of a communist party that any real

talk in our situation can begin about electoral work and strategies,

about campaigns of boycotts, or inside-outside tricks. This must be

again our fundamental thesis. Only with the development of a party for

revolution, a party of the new type, can we begin to deal in any

substantive way with the electoral traps that haunt our right

opportunists and left opportunists.

This all considered, we must look at and with some praise the work of

the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which with left and right

hackery in discussion about the elections has forged an interesting

grassroots campaign around their presidential candidate. The

experience of this campaign should not be lost among the general

communist milieu, and while deficient in many respects (PSL generally

putting out semi-socialist politics as opposed to a more explicit

revolutionary one, PSL dehabilitating their own campaign with their

West Coast working around the Peace and Freedom Party candidacy of

Roseanne Barr uniting with a left populism) there is a good reason why

the Brezhnevites in Freedom Road Social Organization (Fight Back!)

have saved their own special spit for PSL as they have been challenged

for their “vote against Romney” line.

Finally our last contempt is held for this inside-outside strategy.

Such a line has become irreconcilably revisionist at this point,

hardly worth scrapping anything salvageable in its practice. It is

better for Communists to have inside-outside tactics, as sometimes

days can be months, and clandestine activity appreciates the swift and

stealth among our enemy as opposed to the long visible and

bureaucratic entrenchment of forces.

On Electoral Suppression, the National Question, and the Sunbelt

Within the united states the bourgeois electoral system is

fundamentally different than those of the parliamentary order, the US

system grounds the body politic under a stronger regime of the

leadership of capital and provides for greater stability for capital

in carrying forward the economic intercourse of a free market society.

Moreover this regime unites with white reactionary petty bourgeois

class forces in, historically and into today, in disenfranchising

citizens (particularly African-American and Latino voters). This

occurs in many swing states and particularly through the sunbelt and

rust-belt through gerrymandering or voter suppression. It is of course

long part of the history of white supremacist rule and the

continuation of national oppression and it can’t fundamentally be

ignored.

Communists must fight for the political rights of the oppressed and

expose the character of the state at work, why it must continually

imprison those people in oppressed nationality communities and

internal colonies. However such terrain is of course at issue because

fundamentally the work of the Left here in many respects can be

ultimately rerouted under the liberal bourgeoisie. Ultimately many

left opportunists ignore these political questions precisely because

the very matter draws them from their philistine posturing into the

concrete of one of the many manifestations of national oppression as

it is conducted in the United States.

Where voter suppression does exist, Communists must fight it. It

should even tactically unite with those forces fighting against such

repressive measures by those sections of capital working to bring this

forward, it’s political representatives in the Republican Party, and

the reactionary mass of the white petty bourgeoisie who are ultimately

their auxiliary at work. We must strive to do so however independently

from that work which seeks to simply draw voters quite straight away

into the hands of the liberal bourgeoisie and the Democratic Party and

again at each moment exposé the whole of the state, it’s history, and

the ultimate traitorous nature of the Democrats including Barack

Obama.

These principles of work must inform the general work of communists

throughout the Sunbelt, and generally we must draw that strategy

together which ultimately must figure tactical relations to those in

the Democratic Party (especially the national bourgeoisie) that can

enable us to build proletarian organization with real power to

eventually oppose all sections of the bourgeoisie. Again here

inside-outside as tactics not as strategy, though we must have a

strategic evaluation of winning over sections of the African-American

and national bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie.

It is however apparent that such a strategy can’t be a tailing of the

national bourgeoisie, even in its most radical of sections. Communists

must insist on being the vanguard of the whole of the proletariat and

programmatically deal in concrete detail with those possible

oscillating class forces that can be won to revolution, that can be

won over if we acknowledge the reality of democratic struggle of these

forces for integration or self-determination. Where those forces exist

and struggle in the terrain of the state for municipal power, to

develop the productive forces of their communities, we lend the

tentative support that’s always conditioned by our Communist program

that sees how one must divide into two, how things turn into their

opposites, and how the masses of people ultimately need liberation.