Chile: Elections and How to Differentiate Communism from Revisionism
We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article from the newspaper El Pueblo, of Chile.
During November and December, the country’s political agenda is entirely dominated by the presidential and parliamentary elections: the change of government, the self-proclaimed “celebration of democracy,” the “popular election” of who will run the Chilean State for the next four years.
For the revolutionary sectors of the people, it is easy to argue that the string of promises that will never be fulfilled and the display of supposed “fundamental differences” between the various candidates are clear signs that the elections are a farce, an electoral circus that may be entertaining in its crudeness, but which delivers no benefits for the people.
However, simply raising the slogan of electoral farce is insufficient. It is necessary to go deeper and say that, in reality, elections are a mechanism that seeks to legitimize what is illegitimate: the domination of a tiny handful of big bourgeois and big landlords in the service of imperialism over the vast majority of the population. Moreover, when candidates who call themselves “communists” are running in the current electoral contest, it is especially necessary to point out that the position on elections is an issue that marks a deep ideological and political dividing line between communism and revisionism.
Class struggle is the driving force of history, not elections
Since Marx and the subsequent development of Marxist ideology by the great Lenin and Chairman Mao Tsetung, it has been invariably true that class struggle is the driving force of history, and that history unfolds as the clash between the productive forces and the social relations of production. This is part of the ABCs for any communist.
Thus, it is understood that what shapes the political development of a society is the ebb and flow of the class struggle. That is where we must focus our attention and our action.
Looking at the course of events in the world as a whole, with the Russian Revolution of 1917 we entered the era of world proletarian revolution, where the class struggle is directed not toward the perpetuation of capitalism in its imperialist phase, but toward its downfall and the establishment of socialism, amid revolutions and counterrevolutions. Within this process, the 20th century witnessed the successful revolutions of Russia and China and the rise of anti-imperialist national liberation struggles worldwide, as well as capitalist restorations in those same countries, along with a broad, general, and convergent counterrevolutionary offensive of revisionism and global reaction in every sphere.
As part of its counterrevolutionary offensive, the global reactionary forces propagated the “end of history,” economic liberalization, and capitalist “globalization” as the destiny of humanity, and bourgeois democracy as the panacea, as the highest point of social organization. Parliamentary democracy, electoral mechanisms, and universal suffrage were the political forms that served the development of the major capitalist-imperialist powers and were then propagated as the “ideal” to be implemented throughout the world. This, of course, was in the realm of imperialist propaganda, since in reality the use of bourgeois-democratic forms continued to be accepted as much as any other form of government that was beneficial, including the most bloodthirsty fascist military regimes.
But by 1990, in contrast to the military regimes that had been preferred in previous decades for the semi-colonies, elections began to be seen as a more appropriate mechanism for “giving legitimacy” and “authority recognized by the people” to pro-imperialist governments, given that the class struggle was becoming particularly acute in every place where military regimes were imposed. Parliaments and governments elected at the ballot box, with all kinds of fraud and machinations to ensure that those elected would serve the interests of the reactionary classes and imperialism, proved for the time being to be better at managing the class struggle than military regimes.
Of course, in the face of deep class contradictions, democratic-parliamentary regimes are no guarantee of social peace either. One need only look at current events around the world to see this.
On the one hand, as class contradictions intensify, popular uprisings and rebellions can bring down governments “from below,” whether elected or not, as has recently happened in Peru, Nepal, and Morocco. On the other hand, if a government for some reason threatens the interests of the dominant imperialist power, especially the United States, the latter maintains its habit of overthrowing governments, even when they have been elected, as happened with Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and that they now threaten to do with Venezuela.
It is class struggle that ultimately guides events. And in that sense, faced with the rise of class struggle at the international level, elections and the bourgeois form of government are becoming less and less effective in managing contradictions. Societies are moving toward greater political unrest and the people are tending to rebel, which is why the reactionary classes require increasingly centralist governments, making elections and parliaments less and less useful for imperialism and reaction. This trend is becoming increasingly clear.
False democracy, false communists
World events are showing that we are entering a new era of revolutions, of which the ongoing people’s wars are the vanguard. And for communists and revolutionaries, it is very necessary to deepen our understanding of the political role of elections and thereby distinguish communist and revolutionary positions from revisionist, reformist, and opportunist positions in general.
Fundamentally, the revolutionary sectors of the people cannot fail to strive to clarify among the masses that the issue of the electoral farce is closely linked to understanding that liberal democracy is not true democracy and that the “communists” who participate in its elections are not communists, but revisionists.
And we say that we must delve deeper, because this is not a new problem. Marx pointed out early on: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”
As for the question of dictatorship and democracy, since Lenin, with his great work The State and Revolution, we understand that every State is a dictatorship of classes, where some classes impose their domination over others and establish their own bureaucratic-military apparatus to guarantee this domination: the State.
The issue, then, is that democracy for some is dictatorship for others. Democracy and dictatorship are class-based. The question is which classes dominate and which are oppressed. This determines the character of the State. In colonial and semi-colonial countries, such as Chile, where imperialism imposed a particular type of capitalism called bureaucratic capitalism, the classes that control the State are the big bourgeoisie and the big landlords, who dominate on condition that they remain at the service of imperialist interests, mainly Yankee imperialism, as in the case of our country.
It has been an unchanging dictatorship over the people since the birth of the Republic. This fact, fundamental for communists and revolutionaries, was clearly stated by Luis Emilio Recabarren more than 100 years ago: “Chile’s system of government is called democratic,” he said, “and it is elective by popular suffrage, full of vices and traps. It is a feudal and militaristic government that maintains one of the most powerful armies in South America to defend the vested interests of foreign capital, which are perfectly guaranteed, without any guarantees for the workers…”
Forms of government have changed several times, from parliamentary to military, at more than one point in our history. But in Chile and Latin America, the mistaken idea has spread that only military coups should be called dictatorships; this is not the case, and we revolutionaries must work hard to clarify this issue.
The big bourgeoisie and big landlords exercise their class dictatorship over the proletariat, the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and even sectors of the middle bourgeoisie, using different forms of government. It is a tiny fraction of the population that accumulates large property and capital, controls this old and rotten State, and, on that basis, exercises its domination over the vast majority of the people. Under this domination, there is no possibility of national development for the benefit of the people, whoever may govern under this same old State. The only real transformation can come through a national, anti-imperialist, and anti-feudal democratic revolution, led by the proletariat, in an uninterrupted course toward socialism and communism. A New Democratic revolution that destroys the old bourgeois-big landlord State and raises up a new State of workers, peasants, and the people, which confiscates big capital and large property, expels imperialism, and exercises the domination of the vast majority of the people over the tiny minority that will invariably seek to regain its privileges and restore its old domination.
This path of revolution, obviously, cannot take place within the framework of the legislation and State structure of this old State. And that is why, in this elementary revolutionary understanding of the path of revolution in Chile today, participation in elections has no place for true communists.
The historical expiration of elections
At the beginning of the last century, the revolutionary struggle of the communists considered the possibility of using bourgeois parliaments and elections to spread propaganda for the revolution. It was common practice to participate in elections and use positions of power to amplify agitation and propaganda and serve the political development of the working class and the people.
Recabarren himself, in Chile, was twice elected to Congress and, from there, actively defended the need for revolution. However, in his own experience, he ended up concluding in the 1920s that it was a waste of time, that more could be gained by agitating from a platform in a square than from parliament, and that no transformation could ever be achieved from within, because in those rotten positions there are no people, but “monsters insensitive to the pain of others.”
By the 1930s, Chairman Mao Tsetung in China had already observed that, in the practice of international class struggle, no country had truly advanced the revolution by using elections. Only the followers of revisionism—false communists—who opportunistically interpreted the Communist International’s anti-fascist policy of popular fronts as a policy of electoral fronts, embraced the idea of participating in the elections of the old reactionary States as their path. While maintaining the name of communism, the most brazen revisionists, such as the “Communist” Party of Chile, indefinitely “shelved” the revolutionary program of the proletariat and the people in order to become a bourgeois electoral party. The most underhanded maintained a certain revolutionary rhetoric that they still use today, basing their opportunism on Lenin’s thesis of “all forms of struggle,” without considering the development of Marxism in the decades after Lenin, which demonstrated the historical and political obsolescence of the electoral path.
At the present moment, when the international class struggle is showing that the world is moving into a new era of revolutions, where popular wars led by Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communists are the vanguard of the peoples; where national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia are effectively striking at imperialist interests; where the masses are rising up, shaking and even overthrowing governments, whether elected at the polls or not; where even the most “illustrious democracies” such as France and Germany are restricting liberal freedoms and brutally repressing popular protests; where shameless corruption is evident in each and every government, it is becoming clear that, at the global level, the farce of elections is becoming increasingly obvious and the supposed popular legitimacy of governments elected at the polls is becoming less and less convincing to the people.
It is therefore up to revolutionaries to help clarify why elections are a sham, why popular elections are not synonymous with democracy, but rather a mechanism that seeks to legitimize the class dictatorship of the reactionaries over the people; to explain that for the people the path is revolution and that, on this path, elections have no place; and that, in this sense, the position on reactionary elections is one more element that serves to clearly differentiate communism from revisionism.
