A tactic that upholds the counterproductive character of attempting today an electoral participation similar to that of the social democratic parties during the rising phase of capitalism.
Before anti-parliamentarianism: Social democracy and electoral participation
During rising capitalism the proletariat is, in a large part of Europe, a recognized political subject within bourgeois society. The latter accepts that the workers be "represented" within its institutions of government, aware that there is a margin, within its own domination, for the workers to win advantages and opportunities for their own organization and constitution as a class (legal recognition of strikes, of universal suffrage, etc.). The effort to obtain this recognition is part of the process of the political constitution of the class and of the development of its organization as such (centralism). In that context anti-parliamentarianism would have been a dissolving factor, a suicidal tactic.
The first great service that the German workers rendered to their cause consisted in the mere fact of their existence as a Socialist Party that surpassed all others in strength, in discipline and in speed of growth. But they rendered another as well: they supplied their comrades in all countries with a new weapon, one of the sharpest, by showing them how to use universal suffrage.
Universal suffrage had long existed in France, but it had been discredited by the abusive use the Bonapartist government had made of it. And after the Commune there was no workers' party to make use of it. In Spain too this right had existed since the Republic, but in Spain all the serious opposition parties had always made electoral abstention their rule. The experiences that had been made in Switzerland with universal suffrage also served for anything but to encourage a workers' party.
The revolutionary workers of the Latin countries had grown used to regarding the right to vote as a snare, an instrument of deception in the hands of the government. In Germany it was otherwise.
The "Communist Manifesto" had already proclaimed the struggle for universal suffrage, for democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat, and Lassalle had taken up this point again. And when Bismarck found himself compelled to introduce universal suffrage as the only means of interesting the masses of the people in his plans, our workers immediately took the matter seriously and sent August Bebel to the first Constituent Reichstag.
And from that day on, they have used the right of suffrage in such a way that it has brought them countless benefits and has served as a model for the workers of all countries. To put it in the words of the French Marxist programme, they have transformed universal suffrage from «moyen de duperie qu'il a été jusqu'ici en instrument d'émancipation» —from a means of deception, which it had been until now, into an instrument of emancipation.
And even if universal suffrage had brought no other advantage than that of allowing us to count our forces every three years; that of increasing in equal measure, through the periodically verified and unexpectedly rapid rise in the number of votes, the workers' certainty of victory and the dread of their adversaries, thereby becoming our best means of propaganda; that of informing us accurately of our own strength and that of all the opposing parties, thus supplying us with the best possible instrument for gauging the proportions of our action and guarding us equally against untimely timidity and untimely foolhardiness; even if this were the only advantage we obtained from universal suffrage, it would be enough and more than enough.
But it has given us much more. With electoral agitation, it has provided us with a unique means of getting in touch with the masses of the people where they are still far from us, of forcing all parties to defend their ideas and their actions before the people in the face of our attacks; and, moreover, it opened to our representatives in parliament a platform from which they can speak to their adversaries in the Chamber and to the masses outside it with an authority and a freedom quite different from those one has in the press and at meetings. What use was their anti-socialist law to the government and the bourgeoisie, if the electoral agitation campaigns and the socialist speeches in parliament were constantly breaching it?
But with this successful use of universal suffrage an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, a method of struggle that went on developing rapidly. It was found that the state institutions in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organized offer the working class new opportunities to fight these very same institutions. The workers took part in elections to provincial diets, to municipal councils, to industrial courts; they contested every post with the bourgeoisie wherever a sufficient part of the proletariat had a say in filling it. And so it came about that the bourgeoisie and the government came to fear the legal action of the workers' party far more than its illegal action, electoral successes far more than insurrectionary ones.
Frederick Engels. Introduction to "The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850", 1895.
The "parliamentarism" of the Second International
The parliamentary activity of the workers' parties before the First World War took as its model German social democracy and its slogan "not a penny and not a man for this system", which meant always voting against all government budgets at every level of government.
The result is contradictory and interesting for what it reveals about the period: in general terms, electoral and parliamentary activity helped, within that intransigent framework, to strengthen the organization and constitution of the class; the democratic program of the bourgeoisie was pushed forward, and legal reforms favorable to the possibility of workers' organization were obtained, as well as long-lasting economic conquests such as the reduction of the working day. But opportunist tendencies, conciliatory tendencies, were also carried into the parties; they would end up expressing themselves openly as "revisionism" and undermining the social democratic parties from within, incorporating them into the "national union" with the bourgeoisie and turning them into a fundamental piece in the mobilization of the workers for war.
The impossibility of a class parliamentarism in decadence; anti-parliamentarianism as an alternative tactic
In capitalist decadence, everything that makes the parliamentary activity and representation of the workers possible disappears when the organized class fabric does: the space of "workers' democracy" formed by the innumerable organizations -from the party to the cultural organizations, by way of the cooperatives. Confronted with the revolution and riding a system with no capacity for expansion, the bourgeoisie no longer has room for workers' parties in its institutions; anti-parliamentarianism gradually emerges as a necessary tactic.
During the period running from the First World War to the Spanish Revolution, state capitalism becomes universal, and with it the totalitarian organization of the bourgeoisie around a new type of "interventionist" state merged with big capital and the monopolies. What happens with steel or coal also happens with labor power: the trade union goes from wholesaler to monopolist and is integrated into the economic apparatus of the state. In this process the space of "workers' democracy" formed by the innumerable organizations -from the party to the cultural organizations, by way of the cooperatives- will be destroyed by the two main forms of counter-revolution: fascism and Stalinism.
Freed from the counterweight of "workers' democracy", organized bourgeois "civil society" (parties, associations, etc.) is absorbed by the state machinery: from representing the fractions of capital before the political apparatus, it comes to represent the state before the different sectors of society.
The petty bourgeoisie will have an oscillating relationship: in periods of conflict with the bourgeoisie it will generate its own political and parliamentary expressions... which will end up absorbed or vanished when the conflicts subside.
The political apparatus itself is transformed from head to toe: liberal democracy disappears as such -in the most fragile capitalisms not even the forms are maintained- and the representative system ceases to pivot on a Parliament that works as a metaphor of the market -the "marketplace of ideas" that clash and find equilibria between particular interests- and becomes instead the representation of an "opinion" industrially manufactured by a new monopoly: the mass media.
These media reproduce and amplify the totalitarianism of the state: they occupy the whole space of "opinion" by filling all physical space -from the living room to the car, from the train to, in many places, the elevator- and virtual space -the cell phone, social networks- with news and "debates" whose diversity emphasizes the "non-existence" and "impossibility" of an alternative to capitalist commodification. Underlying this is the fact that, far from being able to "open its hand" to a framework that would allow the constitution as a class, it needs to deny the very existence of the class as a political subject and even, at the height of discursive delirium, to deny its existence even as a sociological class. The whole media and propaganda apparatus, infinitely multiplied, will devote itself to manufacturing ideologies that deny and divide the class: nationalism, racism, pacifism, feminism... always presenting false "realistic" dichotomies between "the bad and the even worse".
"Revolutionary parliamentarism" and counter-revolution
The process of transition towards state capitalism, which begins with imperialism, leaves the parties of the Second International in pieces. Opportunism -which has grown strong in the parliamentary groups of the workers' parties- not only translates at specific moments into revisionism; the reformist right wing, headed by the trade union leaderships, will, at the outbreak of the war, turn the gigantic machine of workers' organization into an apparatus of war recruitment, dissolving it into the nation and leading a central part of the proletariat to the imperialist slaughter.
Aware of the role of parliamentarism in this process, which had placed the center of the socialist parties in the electoral machine, the Third International will propose the tactic of "revolutionary parliamentarism" as a way of updating the original tactic of the times of Engels, Liebknecht senior and Bebel.
The point is to participate in parliaments precisely in order to break the monopoly of opinion, to represent the class opposition between the reactionary deals and "reforms" under way and the workers, whose deputies in the bourgeois countries will vote against or abstain in every vote.
However, "revolutionary parliamentarism", in the absence of an organized class fabric capable of counteracting and resisting the "opinion industry", is an illusion. It will soon become clear that even the conditions that at first made it conceivable as a tactic had already disappeared in most countries during the war. In the rest, the counter-revolution will sweep them away. Anti-parliamentarianism becomes the only possible tactic.
Would a "revolutionary parliamentarism" be possible today?
- The workers' press, the basis of socialist agitation in the 19th century, could compete in the market during rising capitalism because there were mass workers' organizations such as the trade union, but also workers' cultural and educational associations of all kinds in every corner of the industrialized territory. This was a capitalism which, though it hardly encouraged class organization, was not yet totalitarian either. Moreover, there was still a certain free market. Only in some countries had the bourgeoisie created by-products to confront the workers' press: the first British "tabloids". In the world of hyper-concentrated capital articulated around the state, newspapers have become gigantic multimedia conglomerates beyond the reach of any party or group of workers. To try to compete with them in the battle for everyday "opinion" is as utopian as to claim that every militant group should have its own Google or Amazon. And, needless to say, there is no organized, mass class fabric in neighborhoods and workplaces.
- Once you are in the game you accept what the game claims to measure... even if you know it measures something else. "Opinion" remains alien terrain, one more product of the monopolies. Mobilizing only to reap the frustration of a defeat is precisely what the left of capital loves to do, always intent on destroying the self-confidence of the class.
- Even if an electoral "victory" were achieved, a parliamentary group of workers' "representatives" could not obtain tangible results for the workers as a whole. There are no sustainable improvements possible for labor under a capital in permanent crisis. Only revolutionary parliamentarism would be possible: the refusal of any compromise and the denunciation of all false "reforms". But could it hold out against the media industry without mass organizations sustaining it?
- The very existence of workers' "representatives" who have not emerged from the struggles, who are not revocable by the organized proletariat itself, but are elected through the state, would be counterproductive. The constitution of the class as a political subject, the development of class consciousness, can no longer rely on an alien state. The emancipation of the workers, that is, their affirmation independently of the bourgeoisie, is incompatible with representation in state capitalism. Anti-parliamentarianism is, for the time being, the possible tactic.