Elections and the Marxist Tradition
"THERE IS a still-widespread fallacy that Marxism cares only about economics.
It is certainly true that Marxists believe the economic relations of society constitute its foundation, and you can't understand the dynamics of a particular society unless you understand its underlying relations of production--and, in particular, its class relations. "What distinguishes the various economic formations of society," wrote Marx in Capital, "is the form in which...surplus labor is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker."
But just as a house is more than its foundation and supports, so capitalism is more than its economic structure. As Marx famously wrote in his Preface to A Critique of Political Economy, a "legal and political superstructure" arises on this foundation, "to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness."
One key component of this superstructure is the state, which has, at its core, agencies of coercion and vast official bureaucracies, but also legislative and executive bodies that change hands between competing political parties, at least in systems where elections are held. Engels described the modern state, even in its most democratic form, as "the organization which the ruling classes--landowners and capitalists--have provided for themselves in order to protect their social privileges."
The working class must therefore involve itself in politics. It must create its own independent political party to achieve emancipation.
An 1871 resolution penned by Karl Marx for the London conference of the International Workingmen's Association summed up this position. The working class must constitute itself as a party "distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes," as the only means to "ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end--the abolition of classes."
Elsewhere, Engels wrote, "The workers' party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy."
To be sure, Marxists have always focused on the economic struggles of workers as building blocks of collective action and an indispensable means for training the working class in how to exercise its own power and for developing its consciousness as a class.
By its ruthless exploitation of labor, capitalism compels workers to combine into unions and push back against the constant efforts by employers to push down wages and degrade working conditions. But strikes, in and of themselves, do not constitute a means by which workers can reorder social relations and abolish exploitation and oppression.
Marx and Engels were quite critical of trade unionism when it deliberately limited itself to the fight over wages. As Engels wrote about workers in Britain:
For a number of years the English workers' movement has been going round and round bootlessly in a confined circle of STRIKES for wages and the reduction of working hours--not, mark you, as an expedient and a means of propaganda and organization, but as the ultimate aim. Both on principle and statutorily the TRADES UNIONS actually exclude any political action and hence participation in any general activity on the part of the working class as a class.
SO MARXISM by no means ignores or downplays politics. Working-class political power is a precondition for dismantling capitalist economic relations.
As an economic system, capitalism developed within feudal society. The modern class of capitalists first developed its economic power before it sought political power. But it must be the reverse with the working class, as the U.S. Marxist Hal Draper wrote:
The working class (unlike the bourgeoisie) cannot inseminate its own system of economic power within the old one, thereby establishing a plateau of power from which to gain the political heights. The order necessarily is the reverse. The proletariat--through the organization of its political movement, like every other aspiring class--must first conquer political power and then begin the process of socioeconomic transformation. For the bourgeoisie, political power was finally plucked as the ripe or overripe fruit of its socioeconomic power, its power as a possessing class. For the proletariat, political power is needed as the engine with which to bring a new social order into existence.
Note, however, that Draper is talking about more than just running candidates or winning office--he's talking about conquering state power. The "triumph of the social revolution" referred to in the resolution for the International Workingmen's Association cited above isn't going to be achieved by getting the right people elected, as important as elections are in developing the independent political organization of the working class.
The purpose of political participation in the bourgeois system of elections, for Marx and Engels, was that it allowed workers' parties "to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint."
Indeed, refusing to run candidates on the grounds that it might let conservatives win elections--because more moderate candidates would lose votes to the left--was itself an indication of the political immaturity of the class and its willingness to become the "tagtail" that Engels describes above.
As Marx wrote: "The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is indefinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body."
MOST PEOPLE'S view of politics is shaped by the stifling limits of the two-party system. Politics is seen as something politicians do, which has little to do with "us."
The two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, appear, to quote Frederick Engels, as "two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends--and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it."
It should be no surprise, then, that most people detest politics--or that an estimated 93 million eligible voters didn't cast a ballot in the 2012 presidential election. There is a widespread recognition that the game is rigged--something colorfully expressed by Republican Sen. Boies Penrose in 1896, addressing big business: "I believe in the division of labor. You send us to Congress; we pass laws under which you make money...and out of your profits, you further contribute to our campaign funds to send us back again to pass more laws to enable you to make more money."
And yet, to the extent that ordinary people are awakened to a desire for social change, they will, at various points, turn toward electoral politics--witness the enthusiasm in Election 2016 for Bernie Sanders because his speeches address the concerns of ordinary people in a way rarely seen in U.S. politics. . ."
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