AGAINST ABSTENTIONISM

Avanti!, July 13, 1913

In the coming electoral battle our party, which faces it alone against all in the name of its whole programme, must not forget to guard and defend itself against a danger no less serious than any other, the abstentionist danger. However much the anarchist movement and the syndicalist movement may not be in a very flourishing condition among us today, nevertheless socialists, and revolutionary socialists above all, must not remain indifferent to the sabotage attempted by the anti-electionists against the Party, and to their denigrating campaign against the sincerely revolutionary direction taken by socialism in Italy after recent events. The whole campaign carried out by the revolutionaries against the reformist degeneration of the Party and its parliamentary action, had to remain and has remained perfectly immune from tenderness toward a rapprochement with anarchist or syndicalist abstentionism. And it is precisely the revolutionaries who must refute the convenient abstentionist arguments based on the errors and weaknesses of a fraction of the party that had seriously deviated and is now almost entirely eliminated from it. 

Revolutionaries have reaffirmed the political value of the revolutionary class struggle, according to Marxist conceptions, in the face of all the equivocal forms of apoliticism and neutralism that had robbed the Party of its subversive physiognomy. Thus they must more than ever uphold the revolutionary necessity of the class political party, the need to politically “color” all working class action in order to direct it to its communist aims. This concept is opposed to the opportunist neutralism of workers’ bodies, advocated by reformism in its crude and vulgar conception that forgets in the most complete way any organic and integral tendency to a goal that is not immediate and limited. Syndicalism and reformism have now met in the concept of trade union apoliticism, which is as much as to say that they have shown us that the proletariat can never accomplish revolution by the strength of its economic organizations alone. Social revolution is a political fact and is prepared on the political ground. In the concept of the general political action of the party, the electoral struggle enters as one of the many sides of socialist activity. It should not exclude all other forms of it. But it is, in our opinion, necessary for the party to demand from all its militants the firm positive affirmation of their opinion and decision. 

One can make very elegant arguments about the influence of the parliamentary environment and the daily “corruption” of elected socialists. We do not dispute such influence. Only we believe that if all voters, according to our uncompromising view, were true “socialists,” the mistake made by the representative should have no effect on them. But if the voters are gleaned from the other parties, lured with promises of a whole range of reformist favoritism and immediate benefits, then it is no wonder that the elected person becomes a renegade.

This which is precisely the charge we make against reformism, is intended to be used by abstentionists as an argument against participating in elections.

Now we make no secret of the grave difficulty of giving the class politics of the proletariat, carried out by the Socialist Party, a character so profoundly different from bourgeois politicking. But true revolutionaries must strive to work toward this end and not desert the struggle. Abstentionism is not a remedy; on the contrary, it is the renunciation of the only method that can give the proletariat a consciousness capable of defending it from the opportunist politicking of non-socialist parties. Electoral neutralism becomes neutralism of conscience and opinion in the face of the great social problems, which although they are built, as we Marxists maintain, on the economic framework, always have a political character.

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It is not our claim to unfold in a few lines such a complex problem. We only want to sound an alarm against the propagandists of anti-electionism who will come to sabotage our propaganda work at election rallies. We intend to try the political consciousness of the people of Italy in a great anti-bourgeois battle. Ours is the only party that will go down in struggle against the clerical-monarchical-democratic dictatorship. We wait for the election period not because we are fetishists of parliament, but to shake proletarian consciences asleep by all the neutralisms of every school. We feel we are doing profoundly subversive work and aim to slap down all forms of class collaboration.

The syndicalists, who make a blockade concoction to reward with a badge De Ambris, the anarchists, who also drown in the democratic honey of culture, schooling and popular education in good agreement with the bourgeois “intellectuals,” will try to come, posing as monopolists of the revolution, to blame us for compromises because we resort to the weapon of the vote.

We must be prepared to respond so that we will not be robbed of the vote of a few real revolutionaries, which we value more than a hundred equivocal non-socialist votes. These champions of abstentionism are anxiously waiting for Giolitti to open the election campaign to come and launch their reckless tirades, peppered with platitudes, mainly against us, who they say are their “cousins.” But the Socialist Party has no more kinship, neither on the right nor on the left! These anti-parliamentary gentlemen ultimately attach more importance than we do to the action of parliament. We ultimately care more about the streets and the voting hall than about the chamber of Montecitorio. They, on the other hand, are the fervent canvassers of candidate Nobody. And this Mr. Nobody is but the exponent of the most amorphous “bloc”: anarchists, syndicalists, Mazzinians and … intransigent Catholics.

He is the candidate of the immense party of indifference. All people we don’t want to deal with. And we are waiting for the not farcical revolutionaries at the ballot box test. As we will wait for them tomorrow at the barricade test!