After the last elections in which 56 million people able to vote have simply shrugged and did not vote or voted null/white ( despite all the blackmail and threats of the Superior Electoral Tribunal, other institutions of the rotten State besides the crusade of the press monopolies), the electoral farce is reissued. The municipal election, just like a circus, mounts the canvas and prepares the spectacle of lies and deceit. On a chaotic and burning terrain, the electoral farce still counts on the propaganda of the false opportunist electoral left-wing, and beautification of this reactionary democracy.
Some, insolent as PCdoB, simply deceive the class character of the State and shamelessly spread their revisionism, sowing to people that, after all, power is even handed over to the winner, depending on the outcome of the polls, showing its opportunistic, cynical essence.
Some others, more cautious with their opportunism, justify the need of the election for ‘revolutionary propaganda’. It would be comical, if it were not tragic, that the sectors that claim to use them as advertising to denounce to the masses the very farcical character of bourgeois democracy”, must try to convince the masses to vote today with the intention of, one day, “convincing them” of what they are already convinced of. This tautology they want to present as dialectic. They are ‘shock troops” of legalism and respect for the sacrosanct “democratic” institutional order.
A plastered Lenin for opportunists
“Our” opportunists and revisionists have converted the important work of the head of the proletariat, the great Lenin, Leftism, the infantile disease of communism, into an instrument of juggling to wallow in parliamentary cretinism and the rotten ‘cold accumulation’ strategy.
In their electoral efforts, the try to turn Lenin into a conservative shield, ignoring the context in which he wrote the work: in 1920, before the emegence of fascism as a relevant phenomenon, when suffrage was exclusively male, and the bourgeois parliament still seemed to the masses to be the only way out to authocracies in crisis, including in Europe; a context in which, after the unmasking and bankruptcy of the II International and revisionism, and the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, simplistic temptations were generated about the seizure of power in which “leftism” assumed special relevance. A context in which imperialism, as a decaying monopoly capital, was not more than 20 years old, the degree of reactionary bourgeois State and destruction of ties between it and the masses of people were infinitely inferior of today’s. A context within which the only possible strategy was that of an armed insurrection, preceded by a long accumulation of forces, the only one possible due to the still low wear of bourgeois types of ‘democratic’ domination, within which the electoral tactics could, in certain periods and situations, be consistent and useful, – however temporarily, depending on the development of the conditions.
It is in that context, specifically in that one, that Lenin criticizes as “leftist” the boycott tactics that, in general, started from correct premises but wrong ones, in the specific cases, because they went far beyond the consciousness of the great people’s masses not yet experienced in the parliamentary counterrevolution domination. And, therefore, unable to support the revolutionary actions of the advanced masses. Lenin points out that, under these conditions, tactics on the immediate assault on power would only remove the proletarian vanguard from the bulk of the masses and fail. He has also pointed out that “leftism” is a subjectivist and unilateral reaction to the fight against rightism and should therefore be fought but without forgetting that the latter is the main danger.
However, let us see what more Lenin says about the character participation of the parliament in that historical context, in the thesis of the 1920’s International Communist: “ Parliament cannot be for the communists, and in no case, the theatre for struggling for reforms and the improvement of living conditions of the working class as it used to be. The centre of gravity of political life has shifted from Parliament and definitely”. “Consequently, the question of using the institutions of the bourgeois State can only be asked as an objective of its destruction”.
Let us remember that Lenin had stressed that under certain conditions “ if it is possible and even mandatory” to abandon the participation in elections and in parliament. Behold, our voters give a class of dogmatism to justify their defense of de facto reformism.
The present context of the electoral farse
The electoral participation is, for revisionism, a matter of principle, in practice. Lenin is emphatic: boycotting or participating in the electoral farce is a tactical problem and must be taken according to concrete conditions. What are the concrete conditions?
Today’s world is marching in a revolutionary situation of unequal development. Within it, in Brasil – as a country dominated and oppressed by imperialism, mainly Yankee – this revolutionary situation alternates between stationary and in development ( the case of today) but already very accentuated. The same base is the general crisis of decomposition of the bureaucratic capitalism, aggravated by each cyclical crisis of overproduction, without full recovery, even within the framework of capitalism, as it is deformed, bureaucratic in the midst of a general crisis of imperialism, Every unprecedented day accompanied by sharp rationing of the State. That is, gradual and permanent restriction of democratic, labour and individual rights, militarization of the whole society and political Power, in an evident or masked way.
Situation of unparalleled wear and tear of the bourgeois democracy regime in the world, and especially in the country, after at least 120 years of experience of the masses under “democratic” domination. Above all, mostly after the last cycle started in 1988, with the impulse of a democratic republic tied, in fact, to the landowning and oligarchic essence never surpassed.
A situation in which the elections are the main form of counterinsurgent politics of imperialism worldwide, a policy driven since the 1980s, as the beginning of the general counter-revolutionary offensive which combines with their massive demoralization. However, in the midst of such a serious general crisis, elections are more than ever the key to maintaining the old order. A situation amidst the strategics of the World Proletarian Revolution expressed in all these objective conditions in a New Great Wave of stormy mass struggles that need to be boosted more and under proletarian leadership.
In addition to their their daily protests, still atomized, but increasingly bloody, the masses not only reject the electoral farce and the political system when they do not vote: they give us everyday manifestations as the complete lack of credibility, even when they vote by selling their vote, for instance. Of course, there is no revolutionary conscience in this but because it is a challenge there is inside it a “bud of conscience” – as Lenin affirmed refering to the factory workers who destroyed their machines at the beginning of capitalism – of what this old democracy really is. Another symptom is the growing of fascism among the masses as a disregard for the old political order
Based in Lenin, it is feasible to affirm that “those above” in Brasil can no longer rule as before, a fact that obliges them to launch a preventive counter-revolutionary military coup d’état: and those “below” no longer accept, as the successive electoral boycotts showed in the 2013/2014 Uprisings and in the hundreds of protests and revolts across the country, albeit spontaneously, lacking class-based organization and a solid leadership for the broad masses. Such is the subjective factor that depends on the conscious action of the proletarian revolutionaries whose form of accummulation of forces for the Revolution, by the current consciousness level of the masses, can only be obtained in the most indomitable turmoil of the class struggle, whose boycott to the electoral farce is an importatnt driver. Unlike the real show of lies of the electoral campaigns, the mass revolutionary actions, directed by the authentic proletarian vanguard, converging with all the class instinct and the level of consciousness of the broad oppressed masses, will conform – and they do – an irresistible propaganda of the Revolution that will drag thousands and then millions of people around them.
