[GM 104-106] Communism, the historical negation of democracy

The democratic regime is just one of the faces behind which capitalism hides its class dictatorship. It relies on the mystification that the people, called on to cast their vote, will supposedly have the capacity to determine the political action of governments. But all the people can do in free elections is, at the very most, choose a gang of professional politicians, who for a certain number of years will manage the interests of the ruling class and the social policy of whatever bourgeois-democratic government is elected, and thereby perpetuate the exploitation of the proletariat and prolong its misery.

Just to make a list of all the texts, theses and writings on this theme that have appeared within the framework of left communism, from Marx’s time until now, would be a major undertaking in itself.

Every class has its own ideology. Democracy is the typical ideology of the bourgeoisie because it is the one which best corresponds to its specific class interests.

The revolutionary bourgeoisie would portray the future post-feudal State as a popular rather than a class State, founded on the suppression of all inequality before the Law, and claim that this vision corresponded to liberty and equality for every member of society.

The programme of the first workers’ organisations, which were generally secret after the model of the Carbonari, was to push the principles enunciated by the bourgeois revolution, of Equality, Justice and Brotherhood, to the extreme. But soon a marked rift would arise between these theories and the new theory which would guide the anti-capitalist proletarian movement. The Communist League, by adopting the principle that there could be no revolutionary social movement without an autonomous revolutionary theory, represented the first example of a classist party, and it was in fact for the Communist League that Marx and Engels drew up the Communist Manifesto.

Communism immediately declares that its future State will be a class State, that is, it will be the instrument of one class alone: the proletariat. As Lenin put it, once the working class has taken power “it won’t share it with anyone”. The fact that democracy was rejected by the proletarian movement from the very beginning is not left in the minimum doubt.

Opportunism, when it accuses the ruling class of betraying its own principles, has constantly called on the proletariat to devote itself not to the overthrowing of the capitalist regime but to the reinstatement of neglected democratic rules, whose values, considered eternal, are held to be indispensable if social equality is to be obtained in the future. Communist revolutionaries instead perceive democracy, especially in its ideal, “theoretical” manifestation rather than in its practical “realisation”, as the enemy to be overthrown; as the false myth from which the proletariat needs to be freed.

If it is true that revolutionary Marxists accepted the participation of the Communist Party in bourgeois elections, even when capitalist power was not in danger (think of the revolutionary parliamentarism advocated by Lenin), they participated only in order to use the space conceded by democracy for class agitation and their aim was to destroy democratic institutions.

Following the victory of the Stalinian counter-revolution the exact opposite of what Lenin wanted would happen: having once adhered to the rules of the democratic game, of which the electoral “battle” is the maximum expression, all revolutionary communist positions, and even classist ones, were progressively abandoned so that a political platform could be adopted that shared planks with bourgeois parties.

Even regarding internal matters, the party has never maintained that pronouncements of the majority are necessarily the best. As far back as 1922 the Italian Left was proposing that the formula of democratic centralism should be replaced with organic centralism. Today, in our party, a party based on a unity of theory, principles, final aims and tactics, in which we exclude the practice of mergers with, or infiltrations of, other political organisations, and where we only allow people to join as individuals, there is not only no longer a role for the democratic principle – i.e. the struggle of currents and fractions with a view to establishing the orientation of the party by selecting from a list of illustrious comrades – but no role either for the banal and rudimentary democratic mechanism.

Anyone who hasn’t yet come to realise this, who has a problem accepting or sticking by it, or who is uncomfortable with it knows what their most consistent course of action would be: to leave the party.