NORMS FOR POLITICAL ELECTIONS

Il Comunista, April 14, 1921

There is no electionist or anti-electionist question for us today. It may come up for discussion again at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International. But today the Italian section of the 3rd International obeys, disciplined and united, the rules laid down in Moscow last year. The Executive Committee of the Party, meeting to deliberate on the forthcoming electoral struggle, did not delay even a minute in examining whether the Party could, given its special organisational conditions just at the beginning, refrain from participating in the May rallies.

And it immediately went on to set the rules for participation, voting on the following agenda:

‘The Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Italy, discussing the general political elections, in the urgency of issuing provisions even before the convening of the C.C., which will address a manifesto-programme to the proletariat, declares that, by virtue of the discipline to the deliberations of the International, the Communist Party will participate in the elections with the precise aims and criteria contained in the theses approved by the Second World Congress in Moscow and resolves:

‘that the Communist Party will take part in the struggle, in principle, in all constituencies, with absolute intransigence, with blocked lists, adopting as a symbol for the ballot papers the emblem of the Republic of Soviets, i.e. the hammer and sickle in the crown of ears of wheat;

‘that in each constituency a convention of representatives of the interested provincial federations – no more than two delegates for each one – is immediately convened to proceed with the organisation of the struggle, designating a shortlist of candidates, which must include a number of names more than half the number of deputies to be elected in the constituency, and informing the Executive Committee by the 14th so that the latter can compile the final list;

‘all full members of the Party who have been members since its constitution may be candidates;

‘in all the constituencies the collection of the three hundred signatures with notary authentication necessary for the subsequent presentation of the lists will begin immediately’.

It is pointless to repeat what we have already written in anticipation of the forthcoming convocation of the electoral meetings. These come at a very critical time for our party. Difficulties of all kinds will have to be overcome, given also that the federal constituent congress has not been held in all the provinces and that the federations’ coffers are empty. Nor will the E.C. be able to contribute even a small part of the election expenses. Since we are unscrupulous in this matter, we won’t get worked up over  electoral preparations. We will keep our health intact for the biggest and most decisive battles. But this does not mean that we should disregard the fight, which would mean not participating in it, having a colossal defeat without even the honour of having fought, sabotaging party discipline under the guise of respecting it.

Of course our elections will be done with economy. We have always repeated that they do not even remotely give the true majority of the country’s thinking, since the democratic regime, which holds the power of the state and the bank and the press in its hands, precludes the workers from the path of free expression of their political thought. Tens of thousands of revolutionary workers are in jail and ‘will not come out until after the elections have taken place’, hundreds of thousands of names of workers presumed to be subversive voters have been removed from the electoral lists by the bourgeois communes; and where the communes were socialist, due to their cowardice and the action of the royal and white guards, the royal or prefectural commissioners took over to prepare the electoral lists. Thousands of workers, on voting day, could not cast their ballot in the ballot box, because they were in service on the railways, on the tramways, in the ports, on the oceans, in the army, in the navy.

Those taking part in the elections are the same people we see every day on punitive expeditions, the white guard, i.e. the plaincloth royal guard, and the idlers of all industries, of the vilest commerce, of the bloodthirsty agrarians, of the most petulant and unclean press.

But the workers and communists must not miss any opposing rally. They must speak their word, which is that of the entire Party, to the scoundrels of the bourgeoisie, and to the cowardly Italian socialists who have admitted the principle of ‘passive resistance’. We will make propaganda, as far as we are allowed by democratic fiction.

Our thoughts and activities go beyond the petty electoral competition.

We pause to speak our mind at this juncture because we do not want to miss an opportunity to propagandise communist principles.

Nor should we be too surprised if, by granting ‘universal suffrage’, democracy prevents workers from exercising their right to vote. The democratic state exercises its dictatorship. This is Marxistically logical.

And it justifies the proletarian dictatorship, which – moreover – by excluding the bourgeoisie and all those who do not perform productive work for the community (whether material or spiritual) from the soviet elections, does not, through a tendentiously classist formula, lie about its profound class conception.

The Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Italy