Revolutionaries and Elections
The
decision in the final round of the recent presidential election of the Egyptian
Revolutionary Socialists to vote for Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate,
against Shafiq, the candidate of SCAF and the counter revolution – a decision I
think absolutely correct – has led to a storm of debate, and condemnation, on
the international left as well as much controversy in Egypt itself.
My
principle aim in this article is not to defend this decision but to review the
more general question of the attitude of revolutionary Marxism to elections
under capitalism. First however I have to say that while much of the debate in
Egypt is fueled by, entirely understandable, youthful ultra-leftism it is my
strong impression that a good deal of the international criticism (not all of
course) is based on a combination of ignorance and veiled Islamophobic
prejudice.
For example
in one debate with a veteran leftist in Ireland I was informed that the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt were like the Russian Black
Hundreds (proto-fascist bands used to carry out pogroms in Tsarist Russia).
This is manifestly not the case and could only be asserted by someone who had
no knowledge or experience of the MB – and, by the way, if it were the case it
is inconceivable that the either the
Egyptian RS or the SWP or the International Socialist Tendency could recommend
a vote for them. [You can accuse the SWP of a lot of things but an inclination
to vote for fascists is not one of them!].
In another
argument with a long standing leftist I was told the MB represented ‘reaction
incarnate’ and were in no sense ‘reformist’. I asked the comrade concerned if
he had ever read anything published by the MBs, heard a speech by any of their
leaders, met any of them, or knew what programme they were standing on in the
election. The answer to all these questions was ‘no’.[At least he was honest].
In other words in both these cases, the comrades were simply responding to the
name ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and the associations, or prejudices, that this conjured
up in their minds without any awareness of the facts or the real situation on
the ground.
But leaving
that aside I want to turn to my main theme: how Marxists relate to bourgeois
elections.
Why Participate?
Revolutionary
Marxists do not believe that it is possible to transform capitalism into
socialism through the mechanism of parliamentary reform or parliamentary
elections. We do not even subscribe to the ambiguous formula that what is
needed is a combination of a left parliamentary majority supplemented by, or
backed by, extra-parliamentary working class mobilization. Rather following
Marx’s conclusion from the Paris Commune that the working class ‘cannot simply
take over the existing state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’, and
Lenin’s reinforcement of that position in The
State and Revolution, we hold that the working class needs to destroy the
existing state apparatus, including parliament, in a mass revolution from below
and replace it with a workers’ state based on workers’ councils elected from
workplaces and working class communities. As Lenin put it in Left Wing Communism ‘only workers’
Soviets, and not parliament, can be the instrument whereby the aims of the
proletariat will be achieved’
We also
understand that parliament (or the presidential palace) is not the main locus
of power in capitalist society: real power is concentrated in the boardrooms of
the giant corporations, banks, and financial institutions and in the state (the
chiefs of the armed forces, judiciary, police etc). Consequently the
parliamentary arena is not the central focus of the class struggle or of our
activity as socialists. To quote Lenin again ‘the action of the masses – a big
strike for example – is more important than parliamentary activity at all times, and not only during a
revolution or revolutionary situation’.
So why
should revolutionaries participate in bourgeois elections?
First, because the fact that elections are not
decisive in determining the fate of society does not mean they make no
difference at all. To argue that elections and their outcomes make NO
difference is both an obvious exaggeration and a form of mechanical economic
determinism, clearly repudiated by Engels (along with all the other leading
Marxists):
According to
the materialist conception of history, the
ultimately determining
element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than
this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into
saying that the economic element is the
only determining one, he
transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The
economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure
— political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions
established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical
forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the
participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and
their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their
influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases
preponderate in determining their
form
The victory of Francois Hollande over Sarkozy in France does not transform French
society or change its basic trajectory but it makes a difference; the victory
of Syriza in Greece would also not have
transformed Greece but it would clearly have
made a significant difference to the circumstances in which the Greek working
class has to fight. Socialists cannot be indifferent to these real differences,
anymore than we are indifferent to small reforms (limiting the working day,
wage increases, the retirement age and so on) which don’t change the system but
do affect workers’ living standards.
The second reason for participating in elections is
that it is part of the battle for working class consciousness. We
revolutionaries may not have faith or illusions in parliament, but millions of
working people do; we may understand that real power is not held by parliament
or MPs, but millions of working people do not understand this yet. Consequently
for these millions elections are time of heightened political awareness when
their minds are focused on political debate, in a way they are not much of the
time. Revolutionaries, therefore, should not allow this time to go by without
intervening in it to make socialist propaganda; above all we cannot afford to
abandon this terrain of political activity to the reformists, liberals, conservatives
and fascists (especially as the last mentioned have always combined
parliamentary and extra - parliamentary struggle, often very effectively).
Third, actually getting revolutionaries elected as
deputies or councilors, enables them to act as ‘tribunes of the people’, as
‘megaphones’ for socialist ideas, and as rallying points for campaigns by
working people and the oppressed.
Lastly, and this point is often forgotten because
we haven’t yet reached this stage of the struggle but is stressed by Lenin, it
is very helpful to the struggle against parliament to get ‘pro-Soviet
politicians into parliament’ who work at ‘disintegrating parliamentarism from within’, and ‘for the success of
the Soviets in their forthcoming task of dispersing parliament’.
When to
boycott
If in general it is right to participate, in some
form, in elections – and this has been the view of Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Trotsky, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Lukacs, Gramsci, Cliff, Mandel, Harman and
virtually the entire serious Marxist tradition – there are nonetheless certain
circumstances in which it is correct to mount a boycott. When? Such a question
is by its nature tactical and must always be based on a concrete analysis of
the concrete situation – it is impossible to formulate any absolute rule.
However, on the basis of the history of the Marxist movement, it is possible to
say that the boycott position should be the exception, not the rule, and that
the principal exceptional circumstance justifying an ‘active’ boycott is when
it is an integral part of preparations for a more or less immediate
insurrection. The boycott of elections, therefore, is seen as an action leading
directly to the overthrow and dispersal of the parliament concerned.
Probably the most instructive historical episode for
this question is the development of Lenin’s attitude to the Tsarist Duma in the
period 1905-6. This is described in detail in Tony Cliff, Lenin, Vol 1, Building the
Party, (London 1986) pp.248-52. The main
points are as follows. The Tsarist Duma was a highly undemocratic parliamentary
body with a franchise openly and heavily weighted in favour of the landlords
and against workers and peasants. In August-September 1905 Lenin advocated and
the Bolsheviks decided on a boycott as part of preparing an armed uprising. After the
defeat of the insurrection in December 1905, the Bolsheviks continued to
support a boycott in the expectation of a renewed uprising. When it became
clear this was not going to be possible Lenin, in August 1906, changed his
position and supported participation, even going as far as to vote with the
Mensheviks, against the Bolsheviks, on this question at a Party Conference in
July 1907. Lenin concluded:
Active boycott …is correct
tactics …only under conditions of a sweeping, universal and rapid upswing of
the revolution, developing into an armed uprising…in the absence of these
conditions correct tactics call for participation in the elections.
A similar
episode occurred in August- September 1917 in the relation to a
Council of the Republic, or Pre-Parliament, which was to represent the nation
until the Constituent Assembly. Trotsky comments:
What attitude to adopt toward the Council of the
Republic immediately became for the Bolsheviks an acute tactical problem.
Should they enter it or not? The boycott of parliamentary institutions on the
part of anarchists and semi-anarchists is dictated by a desire not to submit
their weakness to a test on the part of the masses, thus preserving their right
to an inactive
hauteur which makes no difference to anybody. A
revolutionary party can turn its back to a parliament only if it has set itself
the immediate task of overthrowing the existing régime.
But, of course, this was an immediately pre- insurrectionary situation and
the debate within the Bolsheviks reflected this, with the majority of the
Bolshevik leadership against boycott, and Trotsky, supported by Lenin (who was
in hiding), in favour of it – at this moment Lenin had not yet won the
Bolshevik CC to the idea of actually launching the insurrection.
These examples demonstrate the tactical complexities of the boycott question
but they also reinforce the point that generally speaking revolutionaries are
in favour of participating in elections.
How to Participate
Revolutionary participation in elections can take a number of forms, and
once again, which form or forms are adopted is a tactical question which must
be decided in each
case on the basis of concrete analysis, and is considerably affected by the
nature of the electoral system in place.
Ideally a revolutionary socialist party would participate in elections by
standing candidates in its own name. This is the simplest, clearest and best
option. Unfortunately, for many decades now, the weakness of revolutionary
socialist forces have made this impossible or very difficult. It is not
helpful, as the British SWP found out in the late 1970s, to stand candidates
who receive completely derisory votes. Nor is it useful to have several far
left candidates standing against one another and splitting each others votes to
the confusion of the electorate and the detriment of the left as a whole.
For this reason is often necessary for revolutionaries to stand as part of
coalitions of the left as, for example, Richard Boyd Barrett (of the Irish SWP)
did in Ireland in 2011 as part of People Before Profit and the United Left
Alliance, or the Greek SEK did as part of Antarsya, or the British SWP did at
various times with the Socialist Alliance, Respect and TUSC
(Trade Union and Socialist Coalition). Such coalitions and alliances are often necessary
but invariably present their own complex strategic and tactical problems which
cannot be gone into here.
Nevetheless it is possible to outline some general guidelines for these
campaigns: 1) We should mount serious campaigns with the aim, if possible, of
winning; 2) to this end we should stand on programmes of concrete demands which
make sense to large masses of working people not a purely abstract maximum
programme; 3) but we should resolutely reject opportunist concessions to the
pressures of electoralism, eg populist law and order campaigns, or any
compromise with zenophobia, racism, sexism etc, 4) we should make clear that
the election campaign is just one (subordinate) part of the struggle to
mobilize the masses.
However there is also the question of how to vote when or where we are
unable to stand ourselves and, even when we can stand, how to use second
preference votes or to vote in second rounds if we are eliminated. Obviously
this gives rise to a multitude of questions, sometimes tricky, sometimes
crucial and sometimes much less important. For example in the general election
in Ireland in
2011 I had a number of discussions with comrades as to how, after voting first
for United Left Alliance candidates, we should use our second and third
preferences: should we vote second Sinn Fein and third Labour or second Labour
and third Sinn Fein. Here, even less than on the question of standing
candidates, can there be a one-size fits all solution but once again it is
still possible to make some general observations.
Deciding who to vote for
First it is necessary to understand that revolutionary socialists decide how
to vote on a different basis from liberals or others who actually believe that
parliamentary representatives or presidents really do run society. For a start
the ‘personal’ characteristics of a candidate are of very little importance and
certainly not the starting point for making the decision. If, for example, the
main candidate of the left in an election is George Galloway in Britain, Ralph
Nader in the US or Hamdeen Sabbahi
in
Egypt, it is not a good argument to say ‘I won’t vote for this guy because I
don’t trust him, or even because I can’t stand him because he did this or that
bad thing three years ago’.
Secondly a vote in an election constitutes a preference for a particular
outcome in circumstances usually not of our choosing, not an overall political
endorsement. The concept of critical support – variously expressed as ‘voting
without illusions’ ‘voting and preparing to fight’ or even ‘support like a rope
supports a hanging man’(Lenin) is crucial here. It is an unfortunate habit of
polemic on the left to attack a decision by another left organization to vote
for party X or candidate Y
in terms of
denouncing their ‘support’ for party X or candidate Y as if this meant full
blooded political support, even when it is made perfectly clear that this is
not the case. (It is, of course, incumbent on the revolutionary socialists to
make their criticisms clear). Thus in 1997 I (and the British SWP) voted for
Tony Blair’s Labour Party. This was because in that election I/we judged it very
important for the British working class to remove the Tory Government who had
been in office for 18 years, and this was the only means of achieving this
objective. It did not mean that I/we had the slightest illusions in what Blair
or the Labour Party would do and to interpret this vote as the SWP or John
Molyneux ‘supporting Tony Blair’ is simply a travesty.
Lenin wrote as follows about an earlier generation of Labour leaders:
It is true that the Hendersons, the Clyneses, the
MacDonalds and the Snowdens are hopelessly reactionary [Labour Party leaders in
1920- JM]. It is equally true that they want to assume power (though they would
prefer a coalition with the bourgeoisie), that they want to "rule"
along the old bourgeois lines, and that when they are in power they will
certainly behave like the Scheidemanns and Noskes [German Social Democrats –
the murders of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and betrayers of the German Revolution-
JM]. All that is true. But it does not at all follow that to support them means
treachery to the revolution; what does follow is that, in the interests of the
revolution, working-class revolutionaries should give these gentlemen a certain
amount of parliamentary support.
Anyone who interprets this to mean that Lenin was, in general, a supporter
of Ramsay MacDonald or Scheidemann and Noske is foolishly or deliberately
missing the point.
The key thing is to determine the
political
meaning of the vote in any particular political situation, based on
examining the situation
as a whole.
It demands that account be taken of
all
the forces, groups, parties, classes and masses operating in a given country,
and also that policy should not be determined only by the desires and views, by
the degree of class-consciousness and the militancy of one group or party
alone.
In my opinion three elements are particularly important in making this
assessment: 1) the class nature of the parties/candidates involved; 2) the
class and political nature of the support, among the masses, for said
parties/candidates; 3) the political consequences of a particular vote and/or
of a particular outcome to the election concerned. The matter would be relatively
simple if the answers to all these questions always pointed in the same
direction, unfortunately life is not that easy.
Thus, as Lenin explained, labour and social democratic parties are,
typically, neither simply capitalist parties nor simply workers’ parties but
rather ‘capitalist workers parties’ or ‘bourgeois labour parties’
.
They combine a thoroughly pro-capitalist leadership with (typically) an organic
link with the trade unions (especially with the trade union bureaucracies) and
mass electoral support in the working class. On this basis Lenin, as we have
seen, argued in favour of a vote for the British Labour Party against the main
parties of the British bourgeoisie ie the Tories and the Liberals. But there
are nuances and variations: there are left reformist parties whose leadership
is not simply ‘pro-capitalist’ in the sense that Blair, Brown, Miliband,
Hollande, Papandreou and so on are, even though they are very likely to
capitulate to capitalism
eg Syriza in
Greece, or Front de Gauche in France; Syriza however though much more radical
does not have a comparable trade union base to British Labour. Often the case
for voting for the Labour type party against the outright bourgeois party is
overridden by the need to develop a left or revolutionary socialist alternative
to the reformists. Sometimes, as in Ireland,
the electoral system allows one to do both (by using second preferences etc);
other times, as in Britain
(with first-past-the post), it does not and a choice has to be made.
Another complication is the fact that in ‘third world’ or ‘developing’
countries and former colonies the political space filled in Europe by social
democratic parties is often taken by nationalist or Islamist parties that
combine support for capitalism in practice, with anti-imperialist rhetoric (and
sometimes struggle) and mass support among the working class, the poor and the
peasantry – examples range from the ANC in South Africa to Hezbollah in Lebanon
and, at different times, the PLO and Hamas. In Ireland
we have the unusual role played by Sinn Fein.
Sometimes factor three – the political consequences of a result- can seem to
pull in a different direction from factors one and two. For example when the
second round of the French Presidential election in 2002 was reduced to a run-off
between the right wing Chirac and the Fascist Le Pen. Obviously no socialist
would normally contemplate voting for Chirac. Equally obviously a Le Pen
victory would be a disaster. Opinion among revolutionary Marxists was divided.
The British SWP argued against a vote for Chirac , calling for extra
parliamentary mobilization against the fascists. The French LCR (Ligue
Communiste Revolutionaire) voted for Chirac. At the time I accepted the SWP
line but now think I was probably mistaken. As it happened Chirac won by a
landslide with 82% of the vote on a 79% turnout, so clearly the vast majority
of French workers, including its more class conscious layers voted Chirac.
Left Wing Communism
In my opinion the best general guide in the Marxist tradition to the whole
issue of revolutionaries and elections is Lenin’s
Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, (1920) from which I
have already quoted on a number of occasions. Written to combat the ‘Left’
Communist tendency which was then a considerable force in a number of the newly
formed parties of the Communist International (German, Dutch, Italian etc) it
is a superb manual of strategy and tactics, and should be studied by everyone who
aspires to make serious judgments on these issues. Just as one can’t be a
serious Marxist economist without having studied
Capital, so one can’t be revolutionary socialist political leader
without having read
Left Wing Communism.
Its main arguments are: a) that a refusal in advance of all ‘compromises’ is
not a serious Marxist position; b) that it is absolutely necessary to work in
trade unions, including ‘reactionary’ trade unions
;
c) that it is obligatory to contest elections and participate in bourgeois
parliaments; d) that it is necessary to vote for the social democratic parties
against the openly capitalist parties in order to side with the mass of workers
against the right, to expose the reformists before the masses by putting them
into office, so as to win over the rank-and-file workers from the treacherous
reformist leaders; e) that the art of revolutionary leadership involves
learning how to win the majority of the working class not just its
revolutionary vanguard (‘Victory cannot be won with the vanguard alone’
) and
that this means being one step ahead of the masses not out of touch and round
the corner.
But just as
Capital is a prerequisite
for a Marxist economic analysis but not a substitute for studying the economy
today, so arriving at correct decisions in relation to elections cannot simply
be read-off from Lenin (or Trotsky etc) but involves an assessment of the
concrete balance of class and political forces.
Back to Egypt
It is precisely because, sat in Ireland,
I am not in a good position to make such a concrete assessment that I did not
want to make Egypt
the main focus of this article. However some of the arguments developed here
have clear implications for the situation in Egypt.
First they suggest that a number of reasons given for an abstentionist or
boycottist position, either in the parliamentary or presidential elections do
not stand up. Not only is it false (because untrue) to argue that it is
impossible to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood
against Shafiq because the Brotherhood represent extreme reaction,
it is also mistaken to argue that we shouldn’t vote for them
against Shafiq because they have sold
out the revolution or will sell out the revolution (though they have and will),
or because they are religious or have backward attitudes to women etc. History
shows that serious revolutionaries have had to vote,
against outright reaction and counter revolution, for such sell
outs and backward elements on many occasions. (Does anyone imagine that Irish
Republicans who had to be supported against British imperialism were fighters
for women’s rights and workers’ power? Not to speak of innumerable social
democrats who backed imperialist wars from 1914 onwards and imposed racist
immigration controls amongst many other crimes.)
It was also a mistake to argue that the left should not participate in the
elections unless the Political Isolation Law was upheld
:
it was wrong as an absolute or ‘moral’ principle since all bourgeois elections,
all elections held under capitalism, are flawed and biased and it was
meaningless as a ‘threat’ or bargaining counter since why should SCAF care if
the left boycotted the elections.
It is also interesting that there are strong parallels (not exact, of
course) between the revolutionaries advocating abstention in Germany in
1919/1920, who Lenin wrote
Left Wing
Communism against, and the revolutionaries advocating non-participation in
elections in Egypt today. In both cases they tend to be (mainly if not
exclusively) young recently revolutionized workers and street fighters. These
are entirely admirable people without whom revolution is impossible, but they
lack experience and training in revolutionary strategy and tactics and,
crucially, they cannot make the revolution – the socialist revolution- or even
bring down SCAF, by their own courage and will power alone.
Carrying the revolution through to victory involves the heroic revolutionary
vanguard winning over the masses – the workers in the workplaces, the urban and
rural poor, a substantial section of the peasants – not just in their hundreds
of thousands but in their tens of millions. Doing that requires not only street
fighting but also political strategy and part of that strategy has to be an
electoral strategy, so as to relate to the
millions
of working people who voted for Hamdeen Sabbahi and Mohammed Morsi. Formulation
of such a strategy will therefore be an important task facing the Egyptian left
in the period ahead.*
*This raises the issue, as it has done in many other countries (Greece,
France, UK,
Ireland etc) of electoral coalitions or united fronts between revolutionaries
and left reformists of various kinds. In many cases this is clearly necessary
in order to make an effective electoral intervention but, as experience has
shown (not least in Britain)
it can also generate a host of problems. For reasons of time a general
discussion of these problems cannot be undertaken here and my knowledge of ‘the
left’ and radical forces in Egypt
is inadequate to say anything concrete about the situation there. It does seem
likely, however, that revolutionaries in Egypt
will need to address this question at some stage.
John Molyneux
July 23, 2012
