Lenin and Abstentionism

Comrade Graziadei, showing a few days ago to French socialists the situation of the Italian Socialist Party and making allusion to the function of the Third International, recalled Lenin is so favorable to a reasonable autonomy of practical action in different countries that he congratulated the decision made by the Congress of Bologna to participate in the general elections of the bourgeois parliament¹, a resolution, however, fought against by a committed minority to better interpret the thought of the great politician of socialist Russia.

This minority having defended and amply discussed the thesis of non-participation in legislative elections in this journal even before showing it to the Congress of Bologna, some light must be shed on this inaccurate assertion by Comrade Graziadei.

The abstentionist communist tendency has never, no matter what they say, pretended to be the most faithful interpreter of Lenin’s thought. It has always maintained that Russian Bolshevism has nothing new from a theoretical point of view, like Lenin himself has recognized; Bolshevism is in fact nothing other than the return of Marxism at its most rigid and severe: in all his declarations and his polemics, it is to the rest of it that Lenin constantly appeals.

The frequent coincidence between our directives and those of Lenin demonstrate that the two currents stem from the same trunk and develop in the same direction.

If we have supported and continue to support the P.S.I.’s non-participation in parliament and other organs of the bourgeois State, it is because we judge that the current historical period is revolutionary, that in such a period, the specific function of the party is to demolish the bourgeois State, and it must fulfill that task.

Our view coincides exactly with one of the conclusions from Lenin’s report to the Congress of Third International in Moscow.

We put a much greater value on non-participation than did Lenin, for we consider that non-participation is all the more necessary and imperative now that the western countries have been plunged much longer in the delights of the precious democratic civilization of Turati and his ilk, and its roots are particularly difficult to tear out.

We believe that the evident contradiction between the conclusions of the report and the two letters by the very same Lenin results from the small significance that he attributed to democratic institutions, which in Russia only had a brief and precarious life and, not being familiar with the masses, had not been able to exercise as great an influence on them as it did with us, where it was further reinforced by left parties and in particular by the P.S.I. who for years have worked assiduously to value these institutions.

As for autonomy of tactics in diverse nations, we are resolutely against it. For some time, on the contrary, we insist that the representatives of the parties of the Third International reconvene in congress, precisely to reach an agreement on tactics and unity.

The absence of a rigorous uniformity in tactics was one of the causes of the great feebleness of the pre-war International and it has had the most painful and miserable consequences.

To repeat the same error in the Third International would mean exposure to new surprises and cruel disillusionments.

Uniformity of tactics has for us a capital importance. Among questions of tactics, the one of participation or not in bourgeois elections has primary importance, for it marks the clear separation from the partisans of social-democracy and the partisans for the dictatorship of the proletariat: it is on these two profoundly antithetical conceptions that socialists must polarize; any transaction between them is equivocal and engenders confusion. Subsequent connivance of these two groups in the same party is a cause of weakness for both, but it is certainly noxious for the communist tendency that, appearing most recently, must isolate itself and have its own physiognomy, if it wants to make its own place.

All of the comrades of our tendency are thoroughly studying this delicate moment of its life and its development, and they weigh the dangers and, if there are any, advantages of participation in elections to be able to judge the issue seriously.

Over feelings and habits, there are the great duties of the hour, that allow no weaknesses, no shilly-shallying, no accommodations, but require firm, frank, rectilinear resolutions, exclusively inspired by the supreme interests of the proletarian cause.