Servir al Pueblo calls for electoral boycot in the Spanish State

Image from the newspaper Servir al Pueblo

With the arrival of the elections in the Spanish State, the revolutionary newspaper Servir al Pueblo (Serve the People) calls for electoral boycott to denounce the “electoral farce”. This 28 May, local elections will be carried out in 8.112 cities, simultaneously with the elections of most of the autonomous regions, like the Community of Madrid. Later, before 10 December but still without an expected date, they have to hold the general elections for the presidency of the government. During these last three years, the Spanish working class has experienced a decrease of their purchasing power. The price of basic products like food, electricity and rent have increased while the minimum wage has barely varied.

The newspaper remarks that the Spanish people already have shown their rejection to the general elections, with a high rate of abstention in the past elections: “In the last general elections, 33,77% of people able to vote did not do it, almost 12 and a half million people did not think that voting would solve their problems. It is necessary to reject the participation in a new electoral fraud and work actively by boycotting it.” comments the newspaper.

It also adds:

“Elections after elections, the policy that is only concerned about the number of votes is unable to cover the needs of the working class. The masses suffer from unemployment, temporary work, labor exploitation, racism, the double exploitation of proletarian women, the rise of electricity prices, the global climbing of prices though inflation, and all the consequences of capitalist oppression: none of all these issues are dealt with. All these problems are structural, their root is deep and none can be solved by voting.

They can not be solved, firstly, because we live in the period of the imperialism, the current and higher stage of the capitalism in which the world is divided between imperialist countries and oppressed nations. All the countries of the world have economical relations between themselves creating relations of oppression and dependency to increase their wealth, relations that have not been chosen in any electoral process but by unilateral decision of a bunch of capitalists. None of these relations are questioned. The masses did not make any decision in this regard and neither will make it, it is not in the agenda of the bourgeois democracy that the masses can decide the really important questions that affect to the life of millions, neither in the Spanish State itself nor at international level. There is not any institutional or legal way to do it, and it will never be one. The decisions that are taken by the State and the government are limited to its management, to the management of the interests of a bunch of capitalists. With this we arrive to the second reason: The State and the government are not the same thing. Engels, teacher of the international proletariat, masterly synthesized: ‘ The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. (…) the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy’. Pretending that the State is another thing, that is impartial to the class struggle or that, of some form, manages the surplus value and the wealth of the country, is to be a turncoat that only sells illusions to the working class and is our enemy”.

During this term, the government has been headed by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), but has governed in coalition with United We Can (UP), an alliance of multiple “left” parties, including the so-called Communist Party of Spain (PCE). The newspaper reports that the situation has not been favorable to the interests of the Spanish working class although the “left” parties were governing:

“The government of coalition has characterized by a absolutely hypocritical double standard to measure that is close to being bipolar. There is a big difference between the words and the real facts, saying that they stopped the evictions while they sent riot police to throw working families out of their houses, saying that they forbade evictions during the pandemic and more people than ever were fired from their jobs in the last years, or marking a supposed ceiling to the electricity that only lead to more profit to the electricity companies. All this shelving the betrayal of the saharan people, sold to Morocco, committing to double military budget in the imperialist alliance of NATO, extremely repressing the metallurgical workers of Cádiz, keeping political prisoners like Pablo Hasel and others imprisoned, washing their hands with the massacre of the Fence of Melilla where tens of people were murdered last summer, keep the Restraint Law or the new law for foreign people. How much progressiveness in so little time! The government presume to have governed for the hard-working people by rising the minimum wage and the different subsidies, when precisely these subsidies are the failure of capitalism and a problem for the State to maintain the quantity of labor force without any way to subsist. The prices are getting higher because of inflation, more than the minimum wage, the purchasing power of the proletariat is lower than three years ago.”

In addition, the newspaper highlights statements made by government leaders, such as the prohibition of dismissals after the labor reform or the ban on evictions in 2020, and contrasts them with the objective data: since the entry into force of the labor reform there have been 623% more dismissals than before, and in 2020 alone there were 38,266 evictions.

The newspaper concludes with the importance of an active electoral boycott, with organized and political actions: “Now if some people say that we have to use the elections like a stage for agitation and propaganda among the masses, then tell them: ‘You are right! And the way to do it is electoral boycott!’ This is the only way that the communists can be against the bourgeoisie elections, to promote the proletariat’s aim to take power. The main aim is not to increase the number of invalid votes, that can not be the end of the boycott, because this by itself does not break with parliamentary cretinism, neither does choosing any «satire» or «joke party» or calling for this. This only expresses that you do not agree with the «options» you have . The aim of the proletarian revolutionaries has to be to confirm the feeling of the masses that the bourgeoisie elections are a farce and increase their consciousness in this aspect, destroying the residual illusions in the bourgeois State and afterwards we have to do something with the politicization, mobilization and organization of the masses to create something new. Like this, in this appearance, the electoral boycott combines the two sides of the war – destruction and construction, the latter being the main – and educates the masses on the subject of the revolutionary violence”.

It ends with the following slogans:

Elections, no! Revolution, yes!

Electoral boycott!