REVOLUTIONARY PREPARATION OR ELECTORAL PREPARATION

Avanti!, August 21, 1919

We believe that we have entered the historical revolutionary period in which the proletariat achieves the overthrow of bourgeois power, for this result is already achieved in many countries of Europe, and in which in the other countries the communists must converge all their efforts to the realization of the same goal.

The communist parties must therefore devote themselves to revolutionary preparation, training the proletariat in not only the conquest, but also in the practice, of political dictatorship, and taking care to enucleate from the bosom of the working class the bodies fit to assume and manage the direction of society. 

This preparation must be accomplished in the programmatic field by forming in the masses an awareness of the complex historical development through which the era of capitalism will yield to that of communism; and in the tactical field by the formation of provisional soviets ready to take over local and central powers, and the setting up of all the means of struggle indispensable to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

During the period dedicated to this preparation, all the efforts of the Communist Party are devoted to creating the environment of the proletarian dictatorship, advocating by propaganda not only of words but especially of deeds the cardinal principle of dictatorship, that is, the rule of society by the proletarian class with the deprivation of all intervention and political rights for the bourgeois minority.

If at the same time one were to adopt the electoral action tending to send the representatives of the proletariat and the party into the elective organs of the bourgeois system, based on representative democracy, which is the historical and political antithesis of the proletarian dictatorship, one would destroy all the effectiveness of revolutionary preparation. 

Even if in election rallies and from the parliamentary gallery the maximalist problem were agitated, the speeches of candidates and deputies would arise on a factual contradiction: claiming that the proletariat should politically direct society without the bourgeoisie, and admitting with the fact that proletarian and bourgeois representatives would continue to meet with equal rights in the bosom of the legislative powers of the state. 

In practice all moral, intellectual, material and financial energies would be dissipated in the maelstrom of electoral contention, and the men, the propagandists, the organizers, the press, all resources of the party would be diverted from revolutionary preparation, for which they are already, unfortunately, insufficient. 

Having established the theoretical and practical incompatibility between the two preparations, it seems to us that there can be no hesitation in the choice, and that electoral intervention can logically be admitted for those alone who have not even the slightest hope in the possibility of revolution.

The incompatibility of the two forms of activity is not a momentary incompatibility, such that the alternating of both forms of action is admissible. One and the other presuppose long periods of set-up, and absorb the entire activity of the movement for a considerable lapse of time. 

The concern of those comrades who consider the hypothesis of the implemented electoral abstention without the revolutionary outcome having been achieved has no reason to be. Even if remaining without parliamentary representatives instead of being an advantage – as we firmly and supported by vast experience believe – were a danger, such a danger would not be even remotely comparable to that of compromising and even only delaying the proletariat’s preparation for the revolutionary conquest of its dictatorship.

Therefore, unless it can be proved that electoral action, not only with its historical setting in theory, but also with its known practical degenerations, doesn’t succeed in being fatal to revolutionary training, we must without regret throw the election method into the rattletraps and without looking back concentrate all our forces on the realization of the supreme maximal objectives of socialism.