THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ELECTORAL MAXIMALISM

Avanti!, September 14, 1919

The comrades of the electoral maximalist fraction claim that for them the electoral question is by no means secondary, nor is it such as to divide the Communists! It does not seem to be so judging from the fact that it was enough to post the abstention proposal for the supporters of electoral participation to flock to it, who for that matter only pass on a few very questionable arguments to each other.

And the maximalist fraction is more concerned with polemicizing with us on this “secondary” topic than with countering the objections that come to it — that come to us — from the reformists. We reserve the right to reply in appropriate quarters to the arguments of Turati, Ciccotti, Zibordi, etc., and limit ourselves for now to beating into the breach the incongruity of maximalist electoralism on common premises. All of us maximalists believe that it is possible-and therefore necessary-to move in the present period to organize the conquest of power by the Italian proletariat, and we see in the Russian Communist Revolution only the first act of the World Revolution. We are thus on the terrain of the Third International and accept its programmatic and tactical task: to spread among the masses an awareness of the process of revolutionary realization, and to prepare the means of action for the violent seizure of power and the subsequent explication of social management by the proletariat.

Is this preparation a thing of slight account? Far from it. What was done for the second part (for material preparation)? Nothing. The comrades do not even bother to discuss the appropriateness of Lenin’s tactical conclusion about the formation of Soviets and the winning of communist majorities in them. What was done about the first part (preparation, say, spiritual)? Little, and with little programmatic clarity. The leadership had made the formula of “proletarian dictatorship” its own, adopting afterwards the imprecise one of “expropriatory strike,” creating in the party and the masses more of an indistinct expectation of who knows what than an organic consciousness of the task to be accomplished. The fault lies not with the Directorate, but with the Party, which had not yet carried out the necessary programmatic review to orient and “select itself”-without which organic tactical preparation is impossible, and it is likely in case of unforeseen events to be surprised and overtaken by them. More: many comrades believe that being convinced of the necessity of a violent collision between classes authorizes them to dispense with an organic programmatic orientation, “before,” “during,” and “after” the insurrection. They are actually anarchoids and deserve the criticism of attributing thaumaturgical virtues to the violent act. Because they limit it in time and make proletarian expectation and triumph culminate in it, they do not see why the preparation of the party and the proletariat for revolution are marred by intervention in the electoral and parliamentary campaign. The Congress should lay the groundwork for the further explication of this revolutionary preparation. Will it do so? Academy: very many among us reply. But meanwhile Lenin from Moscow waits in vain for our “document.” One can see that he too is a scribbler.

Having summarily defined this double preparation: spiritual and material, we declare that the party’s electoral and parliamentary action belittles and undermines it. Just as revolution cannot be understood in the days of insurrection, so cannot electoral participation be understood on voting day. That is why the objection that says: we will give up the ballot only at the time of armed struggle is silly. The election is a political act of the Party that is reflected over four or five successive years, and a few months of total and feverish activity prior to that.

Instead, such a method must be renounced as soon as one is able to replace it with the organic preparation for the conquest of the proletarian dictatorship. The undersigned who … is in less of a hurry than many others, thinks that the moment may be closer than the duration of the next bourgeois legislative assembly. 

Those who say that the Russian Revolution is not destined to be followed by revolution in other countries and in Italy are logical to go quietly to the polls. But those who want – in the Third International – to do work of factual solidarity with the proletariat in Russia and other countries by “subordinating the national demands of the movement to the general ones,” must be for the mobilization of communist forces in order to be able to open hostilities at the appropriate time. That voting is incompatible in the period of hostilities is itself a self-evident thing: what we are advocating is quite different: election action is incompatible with the mobilization of the proletariat for the attainment of its doctrine. Now: either we do this mobilization or we renounce it, and then it must be made clear to comrades in other countries who await our entry into action.

Going back to the preparation: the spiritual one consists of active and intensive propaganda of the communist program, criticizing on the basis of fundamental Marxist arguments the bourgeois system of government, parliamentary democracy, and explaining the bold innovative concepts of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the socialist system of organization of the proletariat into the ruling class – arguing that the crisis of development of society is such that the time has come to break the former system by violent action of the masses to replace it with the latter. To do this in rallies convened precisely to elect representatives to bourgeois representative bodies? This is a baleful contradiction. If it were only a matter of criticism of these institutions, it might go; although the past teaches that on such a path one has always slipped. But when it is a matter of criticizing not only, but demolishing, bringing together Marxistically theory and action, overcoming that antithesis between program and realization that reformism has blown in the minds of so many revolutionaries, then the absurdity becomes evident. We criticize the bourgeois political system and say to you: prepare to suppress it; however, we ask you to send us to participate in it, in its structure, in its functions. It is enormous! This is how you create confusion, not programmatic awareness and clarity in the masses. One intervenes in the cog of the democratic system, one implicitly makes an act of recognition of its functional laws; one has to complain if the voting, the polling, the conduct of parliamentary debates are not carried out according to the laws and rules established by the current constitution, and one strengthens the whole system in its functionality.

The maximalist program talks about helping “from within” the demolition. A theorem of mechanics teaches that a system cannot move in space by the action of forces within the system. But physics has nothing to do with it. It does, however, have to do with logic and experience, which amply prove how socialist parliamentarians have always worked to defend parliamentary prerogatives and norms and the whole system. 

Proposing that proletarians vote already destroys all the most eloquent expositions of the communist program. To vote means, in the present regime, to delegate one’s share of claimed sovereignty for a time, to exhaust the individual’s intervention in politics for all that time. But voters are told that this must not be. Then one must conclude: do not vote. Propaganda of the communist program and method is not a simple matter; its basic concepts are not easily acquired in the collective consciousness. The antithesis between them and the principles of bourgeois democracy must be put into the most lucid evidence. Now the party must put itself in a factual condition that shows how this preaching is merely the projecting in advance of events that are about to take place. Only abstention from elections can meet this delicate need. Otherwise the naive objection that maximalism is but a phraseology to enthuse the masses and get their votes, if not true, will however be the translation of a more complete but analogous truth. 

Is abstention a negative act? Not if it amounts to tangibly proclaiming the shift of party forces to the terrain of realizing the conquest of political power. Abstention seems negative only to those who mistakenly see the positive phase of revolutionary action only in the insurrectionary moment, not to those who realize that this must be preceded by a whole period of political activity on the part of the party, such as to require all its forces. Just as voting is in deplorable contradiction to the spiritual preparation of the proletarian dictatorship (there will be voting in this, too, it is true; but without the bourgeoisie: it is essential, therefore, to deny not the vote, but the system of voting on an equal footing between proletarians and bourgeoisie; and therefore abstention is necessary); so is the existence of parliamentary representation of the party.

The deputies will say what they want; but they will say it with exactly in the same condition of a bourgeois deputy, and the effect of their propaganda will be to confuse rather than clarify the concepts of the communist program.

So far, socialist propaganda has been made (converging in this the forms of programmatic imperfection of reformism and anarchist utopianism) mainly by contrasting the rational structure of communist economics with the irrational and fraught with evil consequences structure of capitalist economics. The two systems were contrasted abstractly, and therefore such preaching could be carried out on any platform. Today, as we live through the period of transformation, we need to bring our propaganda (by enriching it with the wonderful “divinations” of Marxist doctrine) into the realm of the concrete historical process that leads from the regime of bourgeois economy to communism, illustrating this transition. This realist propaganda, a prelude to imminent action, can only be done with arms at the ready, facing the enemy. If the essential key to the revolutionary passage is the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic system, the programmatic preparation of the masses must be done outside and not inside the organs of the system – the elimination of which is the first historical condition of the emancipation of the proletariat.