EITHER ELECTIONS OR REVOLUTION

Il Soviet, June 29, 1919

While on the one hand many comrades are unhappily beginning to polarize their attention toward the coming ballot fights, on the other hand the current opposed to participation in the elections is spreading in the ranks of the Party, and insistence is being made on all sides on the necessity of the National Congress. 

The Directorate, however, does not pronounce itself, and as the elections approach, the convening of the Congress is increasingly being delayed.

We wish to note that, in a letter to the workers of Europe which appeared in the Trieste “Riscossa”, Comrade Lenin writes, among other interesting things: ”…There are today men such as Maclean, Debs, Serrati, Lazzari, etc., who understand that we must put an end to bourgeois parliamentarism… [Trieste censorship].“ After this consideration, which is logically inferred from our party’s adherence to the Third International, Lenin writes: 

“The bourgeois parliament, even in the most democratic republic, is nothing but a machine of oppression against millions of workers forced to vote for laws that others make to their detriment. Socialism has admitted parliamentary struggles solely for the purpose of using the forum of parliament for propaganda purposes so long as the struggle must necessarily take place within the bourgeois order.“

Here, too, censorship interrupts the writing. But, we add, the struggle of the proletariat is international, and the tactics of it, as clearly stated by the Moscow program accepted by our Directorate, are internationally uniform. There are already three communist republics, we are therefore in the full historical course of the revolution, outside the period when the struggle took place within the bourgeois order. 

To still call the proletariat to the polls is to declare without question that there is no hope of realizing revolutionary aspirations; and that the struggle will necessarily have to take place within the bourgeois order.

The program of the proletarian dictatorship, and the adherence to the Third International, the Directorate has thus taken them back with its deliberation to participate in the elections. How can one fail to see this baleful contradiction? How can one fail to understand that to say to the proletariat today “to the polls!” is to invite it to disarm from all revolutionary efforts to conquer power?

We cry out loudly: The Congress! The Congress!

This is not the way forward. And as the bourgeoisie is about to strangle the Soviet republics, the illusions of those easy-going comrades of ours, who, though convinced revolutionaries, believing programmatic and theoretical discussions to be sterile (horror!) get away with saying: you won’t get to the elections anyway! 

Practical friends: the elections will be, and while the sacrifice and honor of saving the revolution will remain all to the Russian and Hungarian proletarians who shed their blood without regret, trusting in us, we will lead to the Montecitorio symposium a hundred or so honorable heroes of the bloodless electoral struggle, in the cheerful oblivion of all dignity and faith that the ballot orgies give.

Will this be averted?