Parker and Peter join August Nimtz, the author of Lenin’s Electoral Strategy (now reprinted as The Ballot, The Streets– or Both) to discuss how Lenin and the Bolsheviks approached electoral politics and what we can learn from them to apply to today’s situation. They talk about the origins of Nimtz’s research project as an attempt to refute the point that electoralism must mean programmatic compromises, the influence on Lenin of Marx and Engels’ 1850 address to the Communist League, and how Lenin’s relation to the ballot depended on the temperature of the street and meant alternating boycotts with participation on an independent ballot line. They pivot towards analyzing the behavior and discipline of the Bolshevik faction including the consistent attempts to build an alliance with the peasantry, and the contrast between the Bolsheviks and the pre-WW1 German Social-Democratic Party, and the role of democratic centralism in disciplining parliamentary factions. They end with a reflection of what the ballot means today.
In a previous article, Comrade Sophia Burns argued for the “unity of the dispossessed,” in opposition to the “unity of Marxists” proposed by Comrades Rosa Janis and Parker McQueeney. She correctly exposes the largely petit-bourgeois makeup of the contemporary left, critiques its culture of protest (which, as she notes, often does little to build up an organised revolutionary force, but rather “attract[s] dissident anger and channel[s] it harmlessly into the ground”), and identifies that Marxists must “gain experience with class struggle, gradually cultivate a base among the dispossessed, and eventually begin to develop the necessary forces to establish revolutionary sovereignty.” However, she goes too far in her identification of what constitutes collaboration with the bourgeois state.
Burns is correct that the goal of any Marxist minimum programme must be “not [to] join[] the official political realm but [to] creat[e] an entirely new one, an insurrectionary proletarian state”. But even as she advocates for the overthrow of the state and the establishment of “‘dual power’ the way Lenin meant it”, she rejects key lessons of the Bolshevik experience, both before the establishment of “dual power” and after. When she insists on “not lobbying [the government], participating in its elections… or… protesting it”, Burns leaves to us only a single tactic: the formation of “struggle committees” for the fulfillment of the workers’ demands in their struggles against the bosses and the landlords. Presumably these “struggle committees” are to form the nucleus of the future workers’ state.
This tactical orientation leaves something to be desired, even by Burns’ own admission. “Something more is needed,” she says. “I don’t know what it is. It’ll take a lot of experimentation and, likely, plenty of failures to figure it out.” This is a respectable position to hold, and she is on the right track. She correctly identifies the need for “mass organizations with communist leadership actively destabilizing the liberal order” and “developing the organizational capacity to govern.” As I have argued in the past, it is necessary to form a workers’ party with a revolutionary programme, which will train the proletariat in self-governance through the formation of counter-hegemonic, democratic proletarian civic institutions. These institutions, administered and staffed by the proletariat, must substitute the functions of the bourgeois state following the seizure of power. Burns is not hostile to party-building—indeed, she admits that it “will likely be necessary”—but her conception of this is not comprehensive.
In How Do You Do Politics? Burns shows the beginnings of the path forward. Although I have some misgivings about her overall thesis, her tactical orientation of directly engaging with workers in the class struggle is correct. But what comes after? Where do we go once we’ve begun to build up this organic base among the workers?
In accordance with Burns’ own advocacy of “‘dual power’ the way Lenin meant it”, we will explore the ways in which the Bolsheviks built up their mass base among the proletariat. Contrary to Burns’ insistence that the revolutionary movement must boycott all engagement with the bourgeois state, I will argue that such engagement was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in October 1917. The Bolsheviks did not only engage in elections to the soviets—the “insurrectionary proletarian state”, as Burns puts it—but they also made demands of the Provisional Government, called for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and participated in bourgeois elections to the Constituent Assembly and the municipal Dumas. Even before the February Revolution, they participated in elections to the tsarist Duma, which was hardly representative and had no real legislative power. We will also examine the notion of “dual power” in the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary strategy in 1917, in order to provide context for these discussions.
It is true that many attempts by modern-day Marxists to engage in elections are frankly opportunistic, and fail to advance the revolutionary cause. However, as this foray into Russian revolutionary history will reveal, boycotting elections (and other forms of engagement with the state) on principle would be a grave mistake. Although Cosmonaut has published examinations of communist electoral tactics in the past, this remains a very muddled issue for the left, and Burns’ needed intervention provides an opportunity to clarify how communists should orient ourselves vis-à-vis the state. For the moment, the Marxist left in most of the Global North remains too weak to engage in successful electoral tactics on any significant scale, but if we are to engage in party-building, we must be clear about what we plan to do with the party once it has been formed. It is impossible to formulate short-term tactics without a long-term strategy; hopefully, this examination of the Bolshevik strategy can help to inform Marxist revolutionary strategy today.
Last session of the third Duma, October 15, 1911.
Before the Revolution: The Duma
The trial has unfolded a picture of revolutionary Social-Democracy taking advantage of parliamentarism, the like of which has not been witnessed in international Socialism. This example will, more than all speeches, appeal to the minds and hearts of the proletarian masses; it will, more than any arguments, repudiate the legalist-opportunists and anarchist phrase-mongers…. There was a Workers’ Party in Russia whose deputies neither shone with fine rhetoric, nor had “access” to the bourgeois intellectual drawing rooms, nor possessed the business-like efficiency of a ‘European’ lawyer and parliamentarian, but excelled in maintaining connections with the working masses, in ardent work among those masses, in carrying out the small, unpretentious, difficult, thankless and unusually dangerous functions of illegal propagandists and organisers…. The ‘Pravdist’ papers and the ‘Muranov type’ of work have brought about the unity of four-fifths of the class-conscious workers of Russia…. It is with this section that we must work. It is its unity that must be defended against social-chauvinism. It is along this road that the labour movement of Russia can develop towards social revolution.
The State Duma was hardly a democratic body. It had no true legislative power and absolutely no power over the executive. The Russian workers had little faith in it. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks chose to participate in the elections, even though they knew they would be totally unable to effect any kind of legislative change towards socialism in doing so. Today, in an age of polarisation between electoral opportunism and abstentionism, this may seem strange. If the Bolsheviks had no illusions in the State Duma, and they were committed to effecting revolutionary change, why would they waste their time with sham elections?
Before answering this question, we should note that the Bolsheviks were not opposed a priori to a boycott of the Duma. In fact, Lenin proposed just this in 1905, when, in response to the great revolutionary upheaval that had taken hold of Russia, the Tsar’s government proposed the convocation of a Duma which would take on a merely advisory role. Nevertheless, Lenin was opposed to “mere passive abstention from voting,” insisting that a boycott of the elections must be an “active boycott”, which “should imply increasing agitation tenfold, organising meetings everywhere, taking advantage of election meetings, even if we have to force our way into them, holding demonstrations, political strikes, and so on and so forth.”2 It is clear from this formulation that the active boycott tactic can only be applied under the conditions of a mass revolutionary upsurge, and requires the existence of a mass workers’ party.
Lenin would elaborate on this theme two years later, reflecting on the experience of the 1905 revolution. This time, however, he argued against a boycott of the Duma—not on the basis that the Duma had become any more democratic than before, but on the basis that the situation was no longer conducive to an insurrection:
The Social-Democrat who takes a Marxist stand draws his conclusions about the boycott not from the degree of reactionariness of one or another institution, but from the existence of those special conditions of struggle that, as the experience of the Russian revolution has now shown, make it possible to apply the specific method known as boycott.3
Further,
All boycott is a struggle, not within the framework of a given institution, but against its emergence, or, to put it more broadly, against it becoming operative. Therefore, those who… opposed the boycott on the general grounds that it was necessary for a Marxist to make use of representative institutions, thereby only revealed absurd doctrinairism… Unquestionably, a Marxist should make use of representative institutions. Does that imply that a Marxist cannot, under certain conditions, stand for a struggle not within the framework of a given institution but against that institution being brought into existence? No, it does not, because this general argument applies only to those cases where there is no room for a struggle to prevent such an institution from coming into being. The boycott is a controversial question precisely because it is a question of whether there is room for a struggle to prevent the emergence of such institutions….
… [T]he boycott is a means of struggle aimed directly at overthrowing the old regime, or, at the worst, i.e., when the assault is not strong enough for overthrow, at weakening it to such an extent that it would be unable to set up that institution, unable to make it operate. Consequently, to be successful the boycott requires a direct struggle against the old regime, an uprising against it and mass disobedience to it in a large number of cases (such mass disobedience is one of the conditions for preparing an uprising). Boycott is a refusal to recognise the old regime, a refusal, of course, not in words, but in deeds, i.e., it is something that finds expression not only in cries or the slogans of organisations, but in a definite movement of the mass of the people, who systematically defy the laws of the old regime, systematically set up new institutions, which, though unlawful, actually exist, and so on and so forth. The connection between boycott and the broad revolutionary upswing is thus obvious: boycott is the most decisive means of struggle, which rejects not the form of organisation of the given institution, but its very existence. Boycott is a declaration of open war against the old regime, a direct attack upon it. Unless there is a broad revolutionary upswing, unless there is mass unrest which overflows, as it were, the bounds of the old legality, there can be no question of the boycott succeeding.4
In Lenin’s formulation, it is thus necessary to use the state institutions to the benefit of the revolutionary movement when opposing the state outright is impossible; to boycott these institutions, without having the ability to truly contest their legitimacy, is to spurn a potentially useful avenue of propaganda and revolutionary work. While it could be argued that this formulation is incorrect or no longer applicable, we must understand this context if we are to understand the Bolsheviks’ use of election campaigns and the Duma rostrum.
With this in mind, we can return to the question of how participation in the Duma could benefit the revolutionary movement. The writings of Alexei Badayev, a factory worker and a Bolshevik deputy to the Duma from 1912 to 1914, offer a great deal of insight into this matter:
The Fourth Duma was to follow in the footsteps of the Third. The electoral law remained the same, and therefore the majority in the new Duma was bound to be as Black Hundred as before. There was no doubt that the activities of the Fourth Duma would also be directed against the workers and that its legislation would be of no use either to the workers or the peasantry.
In spite of these considerations the Social-Democratic Party decided to take an active part in the elections as it had done in those for the Second and Third Dumas. The experience of the preceding years had shown the great importance of an election campaign from the standpoint of agitation, and the important role played by Social-Democratic fractions in the Duma. Our fractions, while refusing to take part in the so-called ‘positive’ work of legislation, used the Duma rostrum for revolutionary agitation. The work of the Social-Democratic fractions outside the Duma was still more important; they were becoming the organising centres of Party work in Russia. Therefore our Party decided that active participation in the campaign was necessary.5
Indeed, the election campaign was a great opportunity for the elaboration of the party’s tactics and the development of the workers’ class-consciousness. Although the tsarist police did their utmost to prevent public meetings during the campaigns, debates in Pravda and Luch (the Mensheviks’ newspaper) were widely read by workers and served to clarify the programme of revolutionary social democracy. This helped set the Bolsheviks’ revolutionary platform (centred around the slogans of a democratic republic, an eight-hour workday, and the confiscation of the landlords’ estates, to which the rest of the minimum programme for workers’ power was to be linked) apart from the opportunistic and legalistic slogans of the Mensheviks (which failed to challenge the tsarist, feudal order in a revolutionary manner).6 The election campaign spurred the Bolsheviks to forge true programmatic unity and then helped them to win the proletariat to this programme. Throughout the campaign, the Bolsheviks and their supporters among the working class were subjected to considerable police repression, and while this disrupted a great deal of potentially valuable propaganda work, it also strengthened the solidarity of the workers.
The most egregious example of such repression is perhaps the invalidation of the election results from 29 factories and mills throughout St. Petersburg, disqualifying their delegates from participating in the electoral college that would choose electors who would go on, along with the electors of the other classes of St. Petersburg, to select a deputy from among themselves.7
The disqualification of the delegates triggered a militant reaction by the workers of St. Petersburg: more than 70,000 workers would go out on strike, including many of those whose delegates had not been disqualified. No economic demands were presented; the core of the strike was centered around the right to vote. The workers made a great show of unity and discipline and were able to win their demands: not only were new elections to be held, but many factories and mills which had previously been unable to participate in the elections were to be included.8 It was a great victory for the working class, which exemplifies the value of engaging in political struggles against the state, both through elections and in the streets. The electoral and street actions reinforced each other and pushed the class struggle beyond simple economistic demands to a question of state power. The crucial factor is the presentation of concrete demands on a class basis, demands that expose the fundamental opposition between the exploiters and the exploited, the rulers and the ruled. This type of engagement with the state is hardly comparable to the opportunistic election campaigns and liberal activist culture to which so much of the modern left is wedded.
The election campaign was conducted upon a revolutionary, class basis, which united workers around the struggle for their political rights and the Bolshevik programme. The campaign forced the distinctions between the revolutionary Bolsheviks and the “legalist-opportunist” Mensheviks out into the open, for all the workers to see. It mobilised the forces of labour against the ruling class in a tangible way that clearly raised the workers’ class consciousness. Following the second round of elections, the workers voted to bind their delegates to a set of instructions drafted by the Bolsheviks, which laid out the role of the deputies as specifically revolutionary:
The Duma tribune is, under the present conditions, one of the best means for enlightening and organising the broad masses of the proletariat.
It is for this very purpose that we are sending our deputy into the Duma, and we charge him and the whole Social-Democratic fraction of the Fourth Duma to make widely known our demands from the Duma tribune, and not to play at legislation in the State Duma….
We want to hear the voices of the members of the Social-Democratic fraction ring out loudly from the Duma tribune proclaiming the final goal of the proletariat…. We call upon the Social-Democratic- fraction of the Fourth Duma, in its work on the basis of the above slogans, to act in unity and with its ranks closed.
Let it gather its strength from constant contact with the broad masses.
Let it march shoulder to shoulder with the political organisation of the working class of Russia.9
The Bolshevik deputies elected to the Duma held to this promise. “During my daily visits to the Pravda offices,” Badayev recalls, “I met the representatives of labour organisations and became acquainted with the moods of the workers. Workers came there from all the city districts and related what had taken place at factories and works, and how the legal and illegal organisations were functioning. Conversations and meetings with the representatives of the revolutionary workers supplied me with a vast amount of material for my future activity in the Duma.”10
Once within the halls of Tauride Palace, where the Duma sat, the Social-Democratic fraction declared its irreconcilable opposition to the legislative work of the body from day one. They refused to participate in electing the chairman of the Duma, as “the chairman of such a Duma would systematically attack members of the Social-Democratic fraction, whenever the latter spoke from the Duma rostrum in defence of the interests of the masses…. You are welcome to choose a chairman acceptable to the majority; we shall use the rostrum in the interests of the people.”11 In Badayev’s words:
… [W]e demonstrated, on the first day of the Fourth Duma, that there could be no question of ‘parliamentary’ work for us, that the working class only used the Duma for the greater consolidation and strengthening of the revolutionary struggle in the country. A similar attitude determined the nature of our relations with the Duma majority. No joint work, but a sustained struggle against the Rights, the Octobrists and the Cadets, and their exposure in the eyes of the workers; this was the task of the workers’ deputies in the Duma of the landlords and nobles.12
Another example of the mutual reinforcement of mass action and activities in the Duma came only a short while later. The metalworkers’ union—one of the most advanced workers’ organisations in Russia, with which the party had conducted a great deal of work—was subjected, like all Russian trade unions, to periodic suppressions, forcing it to refound itself under a new name each time. In late 1912, once again, the police shut down the union and worked to prevent its refoundation. In the process, both the police and the municipal government violated the 1906 law that accorded some meager protections to the unions.
The Social-Democratic fraction took advantage of these illegal proceedings to register an interpellation. This process was always convoluted, and the government did all it could to limit speeches and debate. Nevertheless, the Social-Democratic fraction took advantage of whatever parts of the bureaucratic procedure they could. In particular, they were allowed to make speeches to argue for the urgency of a matter, which would have to be accepted in order for the interpellation to be made. Although the urgency of those matters raised by the Social-Democrats was consistently denied, the fraction frequently used these speeches to denounce the government and call for revolution. In this particular instance, on December 14, the interpellation was accompanied by a one-day strike of the St. Petersburg workers, who held public meetings to pass resolutions of protest against the suppression of the trade unions, and in support of the Social-Democratic fraction’s interpellation.
What the Social-Democrats had planned as a one-day strike continued the next day, and expanded to include even more workers than the day before. Some of the “unreliable” workers were fired, and this only triggered a third day of strikes, demanding their reinstatement. The Social-Democratic fraction remained at the centre of workers’ struggles during these days. They remained in constant contact with the strikers, helped to coordinate funds and develop slogans, and served as negotiators with the authorities. The workers of the whole city supported, in words and in deeds, the plight of the dismissed workers, and the strike ultimately lasted over two weeks.13
By 1914, the Bolsheviks were a truly mass workers’ party, despite their conditions of illegality. But with the outbreak of the war, this work all came to an end. Patriotic sentiments were running high: pro-war demonstrators marched through the streets, praising the Tsar and beating passers-by who failed to meet the correct standards of nationalist fervour; workers’ organisations were suppressed, and patriotic onlookers aided the police in clashes with strikers and anti-war demonstrators.14
The Bolsheviks declared “War against War”15, and walked out of the Duma rather than participate in the vote for war credits. The Bolshevik deputies were soon arrested, in violation of their parliamentary immunity. The workers protested but were too weak to secure the freedom of the deputies. The party was crippled by the destruction of this centre of revolutionary work, along with the destruction of so many other organising centres. The proletariat won only a single victory in this regard: the government, fearing a backlash in the case that they were to execute the deputies, turned the case over from the military to the civilian courts.16
Even this was an opportunity for propaganda among the workers, and the party and the deputies seized upon it. The trial was highly publicised by the Bolshevik press, and the deputies defended their revolutionary work with zeal. They insisted that the Russian workers would remember this repression of their chosen representatives, and foretold that they would “not remain long in exile but [would] soon return in triumph.”17
And so, in 1917, they did.
From the First Revolution to the Second: Dual Power
The deputies, alongside the rest of the Bolshevik party, returned from exile following the overthrow of the Tsar in February. The bourgeoisie had formed a Provisional Government; the workers and soldiers had formed the soviets. The former represented the bourgeois republic; the latter, the workers’ and peasants’ republic. Lenin described this situation using the term “dual power.” Let us examine what he meant by this, and what political conclusions he drew from this analysis.
According to the old way of thinking, the rule of the bourgeoisie could and should be followed by the rule of the proletariat and the peasantry, by their dictatorship.
In real life, however, things have already turned out differently; there has been an extremely original, novel and unprecedented interlacing of the one with the other. We have side by side, existing together, simultaneously, both the rule of the bourgeoisie (the government of Lvov and Guchkov) and a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, which is voluntarily ceding power to the bourgeoisie, voluntarily making itself an appendage of the bourgeoisie.
For it must not be forgotten that actually, in Petrograd, the power is in the hands of the workers and soldiers; the new government is not using and cannot use violence against them, because there is no police, no army standing apart from the people, no officialdom standing all-powerful above the people.
… [F]reely elected soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies are freely joining the second, parallel government, and are freely supplementing, developing and completing it. And, just as freely, they are surrendering power to the bourgeoisie…18
It is important to note that “power” (vlast) refers specifically to the sovereign state authority. This is a key point: the existence of more than one vlast is necessarily a contradiction in terms because by definition there can only be one sovereign authority in a single state. “Dual power”, then, is a situation in which the narod (the workers and peasants, analogous to Burns’ use of “the dispossessed”) and the bourgeoisie each has an embryonic vlast, the former (the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies) being unwilling to establish a “firm vlast”, and the latter (the Provisional Government) being unable to establish one. In effect, then, there is no true vlast under these conditions. The necessary outcome of this situation is, therefore, the end of dual power, and the establishment of a firm vlast around a single class pole: either that of the bourgeoisie (in the form of the Provisional Government) or that of the narod (in the form of the soviets).19 Lenin summarised this situation thus:
The bourgeoisie stands for the undivided power (vlast) of the bourgeoisie.
The class-conscious workers stand for the undivided power (vlast) of the Soviets of Workers’, Agricultural Labourers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Deputies—for undivided power (vlast) made possible not by adventurist acts, but by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie20
We must ably, carefully, clear people’s minds and lead the proletariat and poor peasantry forward, away from ‘dual power’ towards the full power of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.21
Soviet power came into existence in February; October was merely the point at which it ceased to tolerate the Provisional Government, ending the period of “dual power.” To speak, then, of dual power as an aim of the revolutionary movement is to fundamentally misunderstand the lessons of October. In the Bolsheviks’ view, dual power was never an aim but an unexpected obstacle—an aberrant result of the peculiar conditions of the Russian Revolution—which was to be overcome.
Even so, the Bolsheviks were not opposed to the convention of the Constituent Assembly; in fact, they often criticised the Provisional Government for delaying the elections to it. One of the first demands of the Bolsheviks following the February Revolution was “to convene a Constituent Assembly as speedily as possible” (alongside the establishment of the soviet vlast).22 Lenin noted upon his return to Russia,
I attacked the Provisional Government for not having appointed an early date, or any date at all, for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and for confining itself to promises. I argued that without the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies the convocation of the Constituent Assembly is not guaranteed and its success is impossible.23
Even beyond this, the Bolsheviks participated in the municipal Duma elections in the summer of 1917, much in the same way they used the prewar Duma elections. In particular, they took advantage of the campaign to make a series of demands of the Provisional Government—demands which they knew the government could not meet. “Unless these demands are met,” Pravda proclaimed, “unless a fight is waged for these demands, not a single serious municipal reform and no democratization of municipal affairs is conceivable.”24 These demands were explicitly connected to the transfer of power to the narod. Although the municipal Dumas were not class organs—they did not represent the “insurrectionary state”—the election campaigns were used by the Bolsheviks to agitate for the takeover of the full vlast by the insurrectionary state, as well as to measure the balance of class forces.25 They heartily urged the workers and soldiers to vote, in such forceful terms as: “You, and you alone, comrades, will be to blame if you do not make full use of this right [to vote]…. [B]e capable now of battling for your interests by voting for our Party!”26
Making demands of the Provisional Government was a key tactic of the Bolshevik party during the revolutionary period. Although in April there was a debate between Lenin and the other Bolsheviks over the issue of “kontrol”, that is, supervision of the Provisional Government by the Soviet, Lars Lih chalks this up to essentially a misunderstanding between Lenin and the Petrograd Bolsheviks, which was resolved by the end of April in a manner that satisfied both camps. The crux of the debate was over the role of kontrol in the revolution: while the moderate socialists proposed kontrol as a means of maintaining the vlast of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks proposed it as a means of exposing the Provisional Government as incapable of carrying out the revolution “to the end.”27
This tactic of making demands, in order to expose the Provisional Government’s counterrevolutionary nature, was used to great effect throughout 1917. The Bolsheviks maintained in their propaganda that the Provisional Government, to the extent that it carried out revolutionary measures against tsarism, only did so under pressure from the workers and soldiers, and its ultimate counterrevolutionary nature would inevitably lead to a confrontation between revolutionary democracy (i.e. the narod) and the bourgeoisie. Hence, demands for a democratic republic, an end to the war, redistribution of the land, the publication and annulment of the secret treaties, etc. were not made under the pretense that the Provisional Government would or could carry these out. Stalin wrote in August:
The Party declares that unless these demands are realized it will be impossible to save the revolution, which for half a year now has been stifling in the clutches of war and general disruption.
The Party declares that the only possible way of securing these demands is to break with the capitalists, completely liquidate the bourgeois counter-revolution, and transfer power in the country to the revolutionary workers, peasants, and soldiers.
That is the only means of saving the country and the revolution from collapse.28
This method must be clearly delineated from that of making demands in a way that obscures the necessity of taking power. Revolution is not a secondary concern in this type of propaganda, but placed front and centre. Demands are formulated specifically in connection with overthrowing the bourgeoisie: “All propaganda, agitation and the organisation of the millions must immediately be directed towards [transferring power to the soviets].”29
This way of making demands of the bourgeois state is far from the usual, liberal-democratic practice of lobbying. These demands, backed up by organising the proletariat through the Bolshevik type of electoral work and street actions, can be a valuable weapon in the arsenal of the revolution. It is true that none of these methods individually can accomplish revolution, but that goes just as much for organising workers in “struggle committees” as it does for electoral participation, making demands of the government, or participating in street protests. Ultimately, the Bolsheviks used all four of these tools to win the confidence of the dispossessed and take power in October.
Bolshevik Central Committee on the eve of the revolution.
Conclusion
Burns is correct to call for Marxists to focus on organising the proletariat, and she is equally correct to identify erroneous, opportunistic and petit-bourgeois activist tendencies in the contemporary left. However, her solution falls short: her tactical inflexibility leads her to reject participation in elections or making demands of the bourgeois state out of hand—tactics which, as we have shown above, were crucial to the Bolshevik victory in October.
Comrades Janis and McQueeney are correct to call for programmatic unity of revolutionary Marxists, and they are correct to identify DSA as one possible avenue through which to fight for this unity. The task of Marxists in DSA is not only to organise the working class, but also to fight for a revolutionary programme, and to elaborate on the tactics that may assist organising efforts. While there is an influential opportunistic tendency in DSA that insists on tailing the Democratic Party (either temporarily or indefinitely), this is not the only possible electoral tactic. This opportunism must be fought against, in favour of a class-independent electoral tactic; one that, like the Bolsheviks’, serves to heighten the consciousness of the proletariat, to rally their numbers to the revolutionary programme, and above all to support DSA’s organising work. The specifics of this tactic must be left up to the revolutionary Marxists in DSA, who will need to deliberate among themselves, examine the objective conditions, and engage in debate with both opportunists and abstentionists in order to formulate a revolutionary orientation to bourgeois elections suitable to 21st-century American conditions. That said, the core of this tactic must consist of:
An immediate break with the Democratic Party and all other bourgeois parties,
Using electoral and parliamentary work above all to support the task of organising the proletariat, rather than for its own sake, and
Irreconcilable opposition to the American state, its military and police, and taking advantage of every opportunity to obstruct its functioning.
It is possible that the best electoral tactic for the present moment is to temporarily refrain from electoral work in favour of organising the working class. It is also possible that the best electoral tactic will involve participation in elections at various levels of government in different degrees. A discussion of these details is well beyond the scope of this essay, but it is urgent that such discussions take place, that revolutionary Marxists in DSA begin to forge programmatic unity, and that the struggle is taken up against opportunist collaboration with the bourgeois state.
Comrade Burns asks us: “For the unity of Marxists, or the unity of the dispossessed?” This question, although thought-provoking in a necessary way, sets up a false dichotomy. For the Bolsheviks, there was never a question of one or the other. They saw the programmatic unity of revolutionary Marxists as bringing about the unity of the dispossessed around the programme of revolution; and this unity of the dispossessed, in turn, empowered the party of revolution, transforming it from a circle of intellectuals into a potent weapon of the class struggle. The revolution was made possible, not by one or the other, but by both: the unity of Marxists with the dispossessed, the unity of the revolutionary programme with the workers’ movement. This is the lesson of the October Revolution; this is the lesson that we must remember, as the left vacillates between opportunism and impotency if we are to recreate a revolutionary movement, if we are to win power, if we are to achieve communism.
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.
Painting by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev
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
Amadeo Bordiga
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.16Either 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.”17The 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.
