ABSTENTIONIST NOSTALGIAS?

Stato Operaio, February 28, 1924

One could not even conceive of a practical attitude of comrades in the Communist Party for electoral abstention. It is not just a question of party discipline: it is enough to reflect that the opinions of various comrades expressed in 1919 and 1920 for abstentionist tactics only made sense as a proposal made to the International, the applicability of which could only be understood on the basis of precise deliberations for the various countries of the International itself. None of us questioned in 1921 that the Communist Party founded on the basis of the decisions of the Second Congress of the Communist International should intervene in the electoral struggle at that time.

Nor is it necessary to reopen the debate on the question of whether the abstentionist theses of that time are still theoretically tenable. What is certain is that those theses supported by a group of comrades insisted on a double order of premises: an international situation preluding an offensive by the proletariat, and the regime of broad democracy in force in an important group of countries: everyone knows that both internationally, and in the Italian political field, those conditions, if perhaps they should not be said to have been overturned, have however been modified in the opposite direction to that from which our known conditions stemmed.

Our abstentionist thesis had no purely contingent value, but comrade Grieco rightly pointed out how today the dangers posed by the abstentionists in 1919, when Nitti averted the gathering of the revolutionary storm thanks to the electoral diversion thrown open in front of the Socialist Party, do not exist. Today the situation is quite different and everyone knows why. We are not threatened by the disaster of a hundred and fifty proletarian, or self-styled such, MPs.

I will not pause to examine all the problems of the present election campaign: it is enough for me to note that the very serious dangers of that time are completely removed from it.

I am only concerned, through the manifestations of some comrades for a contingent thesis of abstention – certainly not for a practical attitude of abstentionism from the party struggle – that these nostalgias, rather than going back to the revolutionary reasons we once put forward for the abstentionist thesis, evidently go back to appreciations, to states of mind, to ideological premises, which savour little of communism; and this would be a drawback no less than formal indiscipline.

Whoever wants to be sincere must acknowledge that the reasoning that leads to the conclusion: we would have done better to abstain, can only be this: we do not go to the elections because they are not held in complete freedom, they will not translate into their results the legitimate expression of the will of the voters, they will not give us the satisfaction of reaching comforting numbers of votes and elected members; and also: if we abstain, we would be spiteful to fascism by devaluing it abroad.

Why do all these reasons lack a classist and communist character? It is not communist to suggest that under democracy and freedom, elections translate the actual will of the masses. Our entire doctrine rises against this colossal bourgeois lie, our entire battle is against the proponents of it, deniers of the revolutionary method of proletarian action. The liberal mechanism of election is made only to give a necessary and constant answer: bourgeois regime, bourgeois regime…

What is to be denounced in the electoralist degeneration is the ‘sporting’ method of achieving high numerical results, which grips all participants and sometimes even us. Today’s abstentionist nostalgia seems to me to derive precisely from the morbidity of electioneering for electioneering’s sake

We, on the other hand, go – the international demands it, and it is not to abstentionists that this task must be more difficult – not as to that exercise in parliamentary cretinism, so reminiscent of the manias for Spalla or Girardengo, the famous sportsmen, but as to a moment and an episode of the incessant class struggle. The degeneration of electionism into class collaborationism is less difficult to avoid today. The instinctive revolutionary dislike for the ballot contest has every reason to be silenced today.

I am not saying, mind you, that we must accept the elections as a challenge to be fought on the terrain of violence: the appropriateness of accepting provocations of this nature is decided by quite different coefficients of political strategy, which today certainly exclude it. But since we cannot speak of transforming the electoral campaign into a class war, we must at least strictly guard against political attitudes that make the masses lose the sense of the necessity of the revolutionary solution to come, as would happen with abstention – and above all with that ultra-cretinous form of it that could unite us with the reformist professional mourners, weeping over the lost freedom, as over the lost opportunity of having, them, in place of fascism, the merit of cutting off the proletariat’s hocks.

And is the argument based on the alleged damage that widespread abstention would do to fascism’s reputation abroad perhaps classist in nature? Never! This would only mean deluding ourselves that the foreign bourgeoisie can help us rid ourselves of fascism, whereas a good communist knows that the foreign bourgeoisie can only rejoice at the works of fascism in Italy and if they do not find it proper to imitate it at home, it is only for their own interests and certainly not because they are scandalised by violations of pure democracy. Do we perhaps want to learn the methods of revolutionary struggle from the Corriere della Sera or Nittian newspapers? Such abstentionism would reek of blockade-ism, the purulent form of electoral syphilis.

Every good communist today has no other duty than to combat with these classist arguments the tendency of many proletarians to abstain, an erroneous derivative of their aversion to fascism. By doing this we will carry out magnificent propaganda and help the formation of a resolutely revolutionary consciousness, which will serve, when the time has come, marked by real situations and not by our desire alone, to boycott, in order to tear it down, the obscene apparatus of the bourgeois parliament.