Debating Electoral Strategy in the Comintern, 1920: The Bulgarian Situation

Reviewing the debates over electoral strategy at the Second Congress of the Comintern, Donald Parkinson reviews the strategies of the Bulgarian Communist Party and their arguments against electoral abstentionism.

The early Bulgarian Communist party is often forgotten, with little in the way of historiography. This is shocking considering that it was one of the only Comintern parties that could say it had a majority of working-class support and control over the union movement.¹ It was founded from the left-wing of a Social-Democratic movement that was far more radical than the rest of the Second International. The Bulgarian Social-Democratic Workers Party opposed World War I and supported the Bolshevik revolution. Their most Marxist faction would split from the reformists and form their own party, mirroring the Bolsheviks’ split from the Mensheviks. Yet the Bulgarian Party did not take up the ultra-left position of abstention from elections; instead, they brilliantly combined electoral tactics and revolutionary strategy without sacrificing militancy or giving into a “law and order” perspective of constitutional loyalty. A popular argument today is that participation in elections inherently leads a party toward reformist politics. Yet the experience of the Bulgarian Communist Party stands in contradiction to this claim. This reason alone calls for more attention to the early Bulgarian Communist movement. 

Despite being essentially destroyed by a fascist coup in 1923 and only reemerging in the resistance to fascism during World War II, one can gather quite a bit of information on the party’s early years and mass success from the proceedings of the Second Congress of the Comintern, particularly where there is a sharp debate on electoral strategy.²  In this debate, the representative of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Nikolai Shablin, answers to the minority thesis presented by Bordiga against the notion of participation in parliament being mandatory for Comintern parties. This congress established the ‘21 conditions’ for membership in the Comintern, so the debate on the role of elections was intensified. The Bulgarian party played a key role in defending the Comintern majority theses put together by Bukharin, which called for participation in elections to agitate for revolution, a strategy of revolutionary parliamentarism. 

The minority theses put together by Bordiga for electoral abstention, or boycott, made a historicist argument about elections once being useful but now being outdated, based on the historical possibility of an imminent revolution. Bordiga concedes that “participation in elections and in parliamentary activity at a time when the thought of the conquest of power by the proletariat was still far distant and when there was not yet any question of direct preparations for the revolution and of the realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat could offer great possibilities for propaganda, agitation and criticism,” but then goes on to argue that because the proletariat was now in a period of revolution, such tactics are a distraction from the central task of taking power (which cannot be done through parliament).³ From this, it followed that parliament should be abstained from. Essentially, the argument Bordiga presented is that electoral participation was historically useful to build up the forces of the proletariat in a non-revolutionary period but in a revolutionary period the aim was to discredit bourgeois democracy, which could only be seen as hypocritical if Communists didn’t boycott parliament. Bordiga added that:

Under these historical conditions, under which the revolutionary conquest of power by the proletariat has become the main problem of the movement, every political activity of the Party must be dedicated to this goal. It is necessary to break with the bourgeois lie once and for all, with the lie that tries to make people believe that every clash of the hostile parties, every struggle for the conquest of power, must be played out in the framework of the democratic mechanism, in election campaigns and parliamentary debates. It will not be possible to achieve this goal without renouncing completely the traditional method of calling on workers to participate in the elections, where they work side by side with the bourgeois class, without putting an end to the spectacle of the delegates of the proletariat appearing on the same parliamentary ground as its exploiters.⁴

This rejection of electoral tactics based on a broad historical abstraction such as “the era of revolutions” is contrary to the dynamic revolutionary strategy of Lenin, who correctly argued against such notions exemplified by Bordiga’s arguments in his Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Historically, on a grand scale, the era may have been one of revolution, but bourgeois parliaments were not discredited in the eyes of the proletariat, as reformists still maintained leadership of the labor movement. Thus the reformists had to be actively discredited through political struggle, not through empty measures such as boycotts but by directly agitating and fighting for communist politics in the halls of parliament. This also meant connecting parliamentary struggles with struggles outside parliament in factories and working-class communities. The delegitimation of bourgeois parliaments would be accomplished through active political struggle, not simply declaring the nature of the historical epoch. 

Another protest against electoral participation was given by a delegate from England, William Gallacher, who represented the Shop Stewards Movement. Gallacher would go as far to say that the Third International was opportunist for participating in elections and took a position further to the left than Bordiga, who still accepted the 21 Conditions of the Comintern despite his disagreements. While lacking the grand historical pronouncements of Bordiga’s arguments, Gallacher’s argument is essentially the same in its tactical conclusion: that electoral work is a distraction from more important work, that energy put into elections in any form offers few returns for its efforts and risks, and that this energy could instead be put into something that will truly challenge the state or more directly organize the working class. He argues that one who enters parliament can “…make speeches there and thus agitate. The result is, however, that the proletariat becomes accustomed to believing in the democratic institutions.” In the end, the argument is that of “democratic mystification”, that by voting in bourgeois elections and supporting workers’ candidates the worker puts faith in bourgeois institutions and is “softened” by the system, compelling them to refrain from radical action. This argument is similar to Georges Sorel’s critiques of electoral socialism and embrace of vitalist syndicalism, which undoubtedly captured a certain class impulse but was an openly anti-scientific and irrationalist theory that relied on a notion of myth to hold itself together. Either way these anti-electoral arguments found popularity in the Comintern due to the prominence of syndicalists entering the movement, with backgrounds similar to Gallacher’s, aiming to push the Comintern into making immediate war on capitalism.⁵  

Shablin answered Bordiga and Gallacher’s critiques in an excellent polemic that offers insight into the tactics of the early Bulgarian Communists and their effective merging of “the ballot and the bullet”. Shablin immediately attacks Bordiga’s detached historicist theorizing with recognition of concrete political reality: 

“Even if the Theses Comrade Bordiga proposes to us proclaim a Marxist phraseology, it must be said that they have nothing in common with the really Marxist idea according to which the Communist Party must use every opportunity offered us by the bourgeoisie to come into contact with the oppressed masses and to help communist ideas to be victorious among them.” ⁶

Shablin recognizes that the conditions of revolutions are not simply created by epochs of history but by the strength of the proletariat organized as a political force. To accomplish this, Communists must fight for political hegemony in all spheres of civil society and actually win the masses to their politics. The electoral sphere is one of the most publicly visible and dominant spheres in civil society underdeveloped capitalism and therefore cannot be left purely to reactionaries and reformists. For Shablin, Bordiga’s theses represent the remnants of an antiquated, economist, and anti-political tendency in the labor movement that must be overcome. This tendency came from syndicalism—an anarchist school of the workers’ movement that the Comintern aimed to win support from. A challenge for the Comintern was not just overcoming the limits of Social-Democracy but also the anarchism and political indifference of syndicalism which also dominated the pre-war workers’ movement. 

In his rebuke to the promoters of electoral abstention, Shablin highlights the history of Bulgarian Social-Democracy. Both Bulgarian Social-Democracy and the Bolsheviks shared a record of intra-party factional struggle in which revolutionaries and revisionists, unable to reconcile, separated into distinct organizations. The starkest divide was developed between reformists who hoped to appeal to “all productive strata” (meaning a class alliance with the petty-bourgeois), and Orthodox Marxists aiming to build a class independent party. This divide led to the party split in 1903, with the “narrow socialists” vs the “broad socialists” representing the revolutionary wing and the reformist wing of the Bulgarian labor movement. The “narrow socialists” captured most of the local leadership and would go on to become the Communist Party. Unlike other sections of the Second International they opposed World War I. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia granted them the honor of being the pre-October Revolution faction of Social-Democracy closest to Bolshevism.⁷ For example, their opposition to imperialism was matched only by Lenin in the Zimmerwald Left, boycotting the Stockholm Conference in 1917 because it didn’t call for peace without annexations.⁸ This similarity with the Bolsheviks can be seen in their mixture of revolutionary intransigence and uncompromising anti-imperialism with tactical flexibility. Yet the Bulgarian party themselves were unaware of the Bolshevik/Menshevik conflict, taking more influence from the German party.⁹

Having split from the right wing, the left Social-Democrats of Bulgaria were able to mount an opposition to imperialism. Against the notion that the rise of imperialism and revolutionary circumstances make electoral tactics obsolete, Shablin explained how the Bulgarian Revolutionary Social-Democrats used parliament to fight against war, citing their reaction to the Balkan wars of 1912-13 and WWI: 

The Bulgarian Communist Party fought energetically against the Balkan War of 1912-13, and, when this war ended with a defeat and a deep-going economic crisis for the country, the influence of the Party in the masses had grown so far that in the elections for the legislative bodies in 1914 it won 45,000 votes and 11 seats in parliament on the basis of a strictly principled agitation. The parliamentary group protested violently on several occasions against the decision of the Bulgarian government to participate in the European war and voted each time demonstratively against war loans. With the help of pamphlets and illegal leaflets, through zealous agitation and propaganda, the Party carried out a violent struggle against the imperialist war once it had been declared, not only inside the country but also at the front.¹⁰

This strategy, though bringing about a great amount of oppression from the bourgeoisie, was essentially the opposite strategy of the majority of the Second International during WWI. It combined both the ballot and mass action in a revolutionary way, and despite the repression that followed this brave anti-imperialist strategy, when the CP formed and entered elections in 1919 it was resoundingly successful: 

This bitter struggle against the war, the complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie’s policy of conquest and the serious crisis caused by the war gave the Communist Party the opportunity to extend its field of work and its influence among the masses and to become the strongest political party in our country. In the parliamentary elections of 1919 the Communist Party received 120,000 votes and entered parliament with 47 Communist deputies. The social-patriots, the ‘socialists’, could only muster 34 representatives, although the Ministry of the Interior was in the hands of one of the leaders of this party, in the hands of the Bulgarian Noske of sad memory, Pastuchov.¹¹

This was irrefutable proof that electoral struggle could indeed be used to further a revolutionary agenda, especially if a party is strong in its principles and has a real base among the working class. It also showed that by taking a strong anti-war stance, the Communists could gain credibility with the masses rather than conceding to chauvinism as their opponents to the right did. For the Bulgarian CP, electoral work and “mass action” were not counterposed but fed into each other. The party organized mass strikes and demonstrations, inspired by the Russian Revolution to increase the militancy of tactics. Yet this was not the end of electoral success for the Bulgarians. In 1920 their number of deputies rose to 50 even after parliament was dissolved and reformed by the government, while the reformists dropped down to 9 deputies. 

This mere electoral success terrified the bourgeois into more white terror but also showed that through electoral contestations that Communists could weaken the right wing of the labor movement that held back revolution. Communists in 1920 held a majority in parliament, so the bourgeois reacted by ejecting CP deputies. The bourgeoisie had to abandon any formality of democracy to maintain its class dictatorship in face of a parliament subverted by communists that held the backing of the masses. Shablin summarized the general strategy of the party as follows:

The Communist Party is carrying out an unrelenting struggle in parliament against the left as against the right bourgeois parties. It subjects all the government’s draft laws to strict criticism and uses every opportunity to develop its principled standpoint and its slogans. In this way the Communist Party exploits the parliamentary rostrum in order to develop its agitation on the broadest basis among the masses. It shows the toilers the necessity of fighting for workers’ and peasants’ soviets, destroys the authority of and belief in the importance of parliament, and calls on the masses to put the dictatorship of the proletariat in the place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.¹²

Against claims that participation in parliament would retain the stability of bourgeois democracy, the insurgent electoral strategy of the Bulgarian socialists and communists instead showed that through vigilant agitation in the halls of bourgeois power backed by a real mass movement, electoral action would break down the facade of bourgeois democracy by seeing the state resort to more dictatorial methods and creates “states of exception” in response to gains made by the working class through mechanisms of bourgeois democracy. As the Bulgarian CP “threw a wrench” into the normal “democratic” mechanisms for which the ruling class rules through the state, the bourgeois responded with white terror and dismantling of democratic structures themselves. This is what Marx called “the battle for democracy,” where the proletariat shows itself to be the class that represents the true “will of the people” while the bourgeois is revealed as a class of tyranny rather than democracy. The Bulgarian CP fought this battle, but to a degree to where a heavy price in human life was paid due to the repression of the propertied classes against a rising Communist movement. 

Against the argument that elections “divert energy” from direct actions or general base-building in proletarian communities, the Bulgarian CP showed how these processes could be synergistic and build each other up, not simply see electoral activities parasitic toward the on-the-ground organization of workers. This synergy is particularly described by Shablin in his speech regarding industrial actions, which at this time were seen as the true focus of organization by the “left” critics of electoral practice in many cases: 

“The Bulgarian Communist Party fights simultaneously in parliament and among the masses. The parliamentary group participated in the most energetic way in the great strike of the transport workers, which lasted 53 days from December 1919 until February 1920. For this revolutionary activity the Communist deputies were robbed of their legal protection by the government, and several deputies were arrested. Comrades Stefan Dimitrov, the representative from Dubnitza, and Temelke Nenkov, the representative from Pernik, were sentenced, the first to 12, the second to 5 years imprisonment, because they had opposed the state power arms in hand. Both comrades are today languishing in jail. A third Communist deputy, Comrade Kesta Ziporanov, is being prosecuted by the military authorities for high treason. The members of the Central Committee, three members of parliament, were prosecuted because in parliament and in the masses they carried out an energetic struggle against the government, which was supporting Russian counter-revolutionaries. They were provisionally released from custody on a bail of 300,000 Leu, which was guaranteed and paid  in the course of two days by the proletariat of Sofia. All the Communist members’ speeches in the chamber against the bourgeoisie are of such violence that they frequently end in a great scandal, and the government majority and the Communist group come to blows.”¹³ 

These experiences, of course, did not prevent the rise of an anti-electoral faction in the party. 

In 1919 a faction arose demanding the boycott of parliament, perhaps in reaction to the repression of Communists deputies. This was a weak faction in the words of Shablin, and was unanimously rejected when it came to a vote at the party congress. Rather seeing soviets and participating in bourgeois elections as counterposed, the Communist Party of Bulgaria worked to form soviets while running in elections at all levels of government. This was similar to the tactics of the Bolshevik party in the days leading up to October, where the Bolshevik party worked to win a majority within the Soviets around the program while also running in bourgeois elections at all possible levels. This created a synergy between the campaigns of the party to form Soviets and electoral campaigns:

So far, in the councils in which it has possessed a majority, the Communist Party has fought for their autonomy; it calls on the workers and poorer peasants to support by mass action the budgets adopted by the Communist councils, by which the bourgeoisie is to be burdened with a progressive tax, which can be extended as far as the confiscation of their capital, and frees the working class from all taxes. Big sums can then be spent for public works, elementary schools, and other purposes that serve the interests solely of the working class and the poor, and the special interests of the minority of the bourgeoisie and of the capitalists go completely unheeded.¹⁴

This relationship saw the existence of Communists in the mass organizations of the proletariat that were counterposed to the bourgeois state as well as within the bourgeois state not contradictory but rather complementary. Winning majorities in the Soviets and demanding their authority be recognized from within the government saw a way to combine the actions of the proletariat “from below” with an electoral strategy that was “from above”, to use a flawed metaphor that is nonetheless common in the left. For the Bulgarian CP, the question of power was not the ballot box or insurrection, but rather a political struggle that combined the two as necessary. When describing the workers’ soviets of Bulgaria and their relation to the communist deputies, Shablin argues that the working class struggle to defend their gains or ‘communes’ is an educational process that will train the working class to take power. It is clear, given the level of state repression Shablin describes, that he sees the necessity and importance of working-class self-defense. 

In the next session on parliamentary strategy, Shablin continued to defend his position, this time the Swiss delegate Jakob Herzog joined in to represent the “minority” anti-electoral position. Herzog begins his argument by saying that participation in democratic institutions, by giving workers an ability to increase their standard of living, deadens the revolutionary spirit of the workers is the general cause for a pro-electoral communist trend. Russia is seen as capable of revolution not because of the Bolsheviks ability to agitate legally and illegally but because of the primitive nature of its democratic institutions, making the workers more desperate to revolt. This kind of muddled, catastrophist and economist thinking shows the level of theoretical sophistication that arguments against electoral participation had in the Comintern. Herzog then goes on to mock the Communist Party of Bulgaria itself and the idea it is a “model of revolutionary parliamentarism”, saying that he knows someone who saw the Bulgarian party itself and became anti-parliamentarian because of their disappointment.¹⁵ Shablin accuses Herzog of slander, saying that parties activities are well publicized and known to all.¹⁶ Either way, even if Herzog’s story is the truth, it is not an actual indictment of electoral tactics or the CP of Bulgaria, but simply the reflection of an individual. Herzog’s argument doesn’t carry the day regardless, with Bukharin successfully defeating the minority thesis proposed by Bordiga. The verdict of history on anti-electoral communism isn’t necessarily out yet either, but so far its track record in building long-lasting institutions of the working class is very poor. 

Within the Comintern’s Second Congress, the Bulgarian CP defended a line on electoral strategy close to that of the original pre-revolution Bolshevik party, while other parties argued for, essentially, syndicalist influenced notions of a party that would only put its energy into direct opposition to capitalism, the party essentially being a battalion of workers ready to go to war with capitalism. This was certainly how Bordiga saw the Italian CP when under his leadership: an organization formed during a period of international revolution to wage war on the bourgeois state. Yet this vision of the party was not able to win over the masses and can be seen as being at the root of much that was flawed with the Comintern. The notion of impending revolution may have made sense given the level of global catastrophe and class struggle, but a fatalistic understanding of this world revolution as an inevitable event that the party simply had to line up for led to a sort of strategic sterility in many of the Comintern parties, especially earlier on. What was lacking was a long term strategy for revolution, which saw revolution not as something that would outburst at any moment, triggering the mass strikes that would lead to a Soviet Republic, but a process of which the party builds up its forces in a protracted process with tactical flexibility but programmatic clarity. 

The Bulgarian CP, unlike the Bolshevik party, was not able to use their strategy to come to power. The party, despite its strength in combining electoral tactics with a revolutionary program, also had weaknesses. In 1923 a fascist coup took power in Bulgaria, triggering a spontaneous uprising. The Bulgarian CP refused to join in and take leadership, seeing the conflict as merely a squabble between two bourgeois factions. Yet spontaneous resistance without Communist leadership to fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot defeat fascism. The result was that the uprising was defeated while the CP stood still. This was not an uncommon attitude in the Comintern in response to the rise of fascism, unfortunately, most famously repeated in Italy and Germany. Historian Julius Braunthal compares their attitude to that of the KPD during the Kapp putsch, where the reactionary officer caste attempted a coup and the Communist party stayed neutral to avoid ”defending capitalist democracy.”¹⁷ The Comintern Executive, particularly Zinoviev and Radek, was disgusted with this failure to take the lead in resisting the putsch and ordered the Bulgarian party to organize an uprising against the new government. While the leadership of the Party rejected this, the majority voted to follow the Comintern plan and overthrow the government to work towards a Soviet Republic. The result was a fiasco, where only “small isolated groups of Communist party members did take up arms, but only in scattered villages”.¹⁸ Zinoviev and Radek, on the other hand, had hoped the uprising would trigger a revolution in Romania and Yugoslavia, but they were blind to the actual on the ground situation in Bulgaria. Who was to blame? Was it the Comintern Executive for forcing an uprising on the party that it wasn’t prepared for, or the leadership of the Bulgarian CP for not supporting the initial mass uprising against fascism? Either way, such mistakes cannot be repeated, and mechanical uprisings engineered from abroad are unlikely to be a means success, as is refusing to take leadership in mass struggles against fascism. As for Comrade Shablin, he was murdered in 1925 by the Bulgarian police. 

While the experience of the Bulgarian CP can show the use of electoral tactics, it also shows the limitations of a purely electoral approach. This is not to say the Bulgarian CP had such an approach, but rather that their success was due to the aforementioned “synergy” between electoral and mass action as well as their willingness to engage militant self-defense against the violence that the bourgeois will unleash on any attempt to throw them out of power, even if these attempts are made through legal democratic means. The Bulgarian CP faced an immense amount of repression and was only able to survive as an organization by going into illegality after 1923. 

The insurgent electoral strategy of the Bulgarian CP and its predecessor Social-Democrats is far removed from the tepid reformism of much of the left, who promote an electoral strategy that tails the “left wing of the possible” and aims to compromise in every possible way, from the general notion that it is impossible to even work outside the democratic party with excuses being made for every capitulation made by a self-described social-democrats capitulation to the right. Yet on the other hand, due to the prominence of a reformist rather than insurgent electoral strategy, electoral tactics are dismissed altogether which sees the abandonment of a key weapon in the historical class struggle out of fear that such tactics can only lead to reformism. The experiences of the early Bulgarian Communist party during this period shows how electoral tactics can be a powerful tactic in the class struggle and help de-legitimate rather than legitimate the bourgeois system. The choice is not between voting and revolution, as some Maoists and anarchists like to put it. Rather, the choice is between engaging in all spheres of civil society possible where we can fight for our politics or simply leaving them as theatres for the bourgeois and their allies. 

 

1. Braunthal, History of the International, pg. 285
2. Edited by John Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed People’s, Unite!: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, Volume 1, see pages 527-602 for the entire debate on parliamentarism.
3. Ibid, 552.
4. Ibid, pg 554.
5. Ibid, 556 -558.
6. Ibid, 558
7. http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Bulgarian+Communist+Party+BCP
8. Braunthal, History of the International, pg. 84
9. Bell, John D., The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov, pg. 10
10.  Edited by John Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed People’s, Unite!: Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, Volume 1, pg 558-559
11. Ibid, 559.
12. Ibid, 560-561
13. Ibid, 561.
14. Ibid, 563.
15. Ibid, 567.
16. Ibid, 285.
17. Braunthal, 287
18. Braunthal, 289