Against Left and Right: Bourgeois Democracy and Our Tasks

The November presidential elections have spawned a multitude of reactions from both the so-called Marxist ‘Left’ and the strains of post-Anarchism and autonomism emerging from the self-liquidation of the Occupy movement. Positions range from an inside-outside strategy which calls to “vote against Romney” while simultaneously building a left pole both inside and outside Democratic Party, voting for a third party candidate, or organizing for an outright boycott. However, as Mao says, “one divides into two.”

The USAmerican “left” provides us with the false choice of outright liquidation into the Democratic Party or the similar erroneous choice of following spontaneous moral outrage in organizing a virtual boycott of the entire institution of bourgeois democracy, where participation amounts to saving face by sharing a link on Facebook.

I will briefly describe these two, seemingly opposing lines, and offer a third position on our tasks within developed bourgeois democracy from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Beating A Dead Horse

Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson, two long-time Marxists and labor activists central to developing an American-style ‘21st Century Socialism’, tote a decades old line on the strategic centrality of elections for the Left within bourgeois democracy.

Except in this election, they also make some sense. Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson both believe a vote for Obama is necessary because the Romney campaign represents white revanchism. Outright white supremacy, not even couched in post-racial discourse, is thoroughly on display as Donald Trump launched a campaign to “uncover” Obama’s foreign birth and the Republican Party attempted to marginalize nationally oppressed at the voting booth through id checks.

While voting for Obama can be understood as a symbolic gesture against white supremacy –as Bill Fletcher notes, his critical support for Obama is not at all about his record, Fletcher and Davidson’s ‘inside-outside’ strategy is historically flawed. Fletcher and Davidson, as a corollary, promote the intersection of an insurgent civil society and bourgeois democracy through the creation of mass-based left-wing electoral formations to run progressive Democrats for office, in the hope of eventually challenging the Party duopoly.

This strategy has never worked and has only led to the liquidation of Marxist-Leninist forces in the United $nakes, who, openly (and often rightfully) fearful of ultra-leftism, resorted to disillusion instead, citing isolation from the working masses and the need to “meet people where they’re at.”

We’re Pissed Off!

A seemingly opposed line calls for a complete boycott of bourgeois democratic institutions. Their idea of a boycott is a Facebook campaign in which you register your moral outrage. Taking the Occupy Movement, the convergence of primarily petit-bourgeois students and professionals fearful of re-proletarianization as a starting point, these forces make the assumption that the Occupy Movement itself is politics at a distance from the state.

And from this summation, developed through the work of Alain Badiou, only see the proliferation of communes and Occupy-related forms as the practical work of building a movement to overthrow the the state and it’s institutions.

But, in effect, they only substitute voluntarism for liquidationism (itself a form of liquidation) and instead of addressing bourgeois democracy, ignore it for the “Event”, subjectivization, communization, or whatever term one wishes to use for the radicalization of the individual qua collective. However, they neglect, too, that Alain Badiou states it is sometimes necessary to reinforce the state while enacting a political distance from it.

The Third Position

The “boycott the system” populist line is not only totally vapid, but, equates bourgeois democracy entirely with Capital, as if politics do not shape economics co-terminously but that the entire system is determined by “material circumstances” and the conspiracies of the imperialist bourgeoisie alone.

Yet, what is Democracy? Democracy comes from the term ‘Demos’ (or the rabble), and as Plato begrudgingly admits, the only qualification of democracy is that there are no qualifications. However, engaging bourgeois democracy requires a substantial assortment of qualifications. You can’t be a prisoner. You can’t be on parole. You may need proper identification and so on. What the “boycott” line avoids is national oppression.

While I agree that our focus should never be on handing Obama victory in 2012, there should be massive mobilization in regards to defending and enhancing the democratic rights of the excluded and nationally oppressed. Communists should intervene in reforms which decriminalize nationally oppressed youth, even if this activism only culminates in a massive turn-out at the voting booth.

For example, our “pure” Communist friends would have abstained from voting on the question of decriminalizing marijuana, even though this directly contributes to the struggle against settler white supremacy. I’ll call it: Racism. While the right opportunist line calls for liquidation, the left opportunist line envisions a petit-bourgeois utopian movement which “counts each person as one” and claims “everyone who is here is from here” without the understanding that it isn’t simply ‘the system’ which counts people for not, but, the very popular classes themselves who also enforce national oppression. If Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson epitomize revisionism, the opposed side represents the worst strains of national chauvinism covered-up in book worship.

We’re Not There Yet

There is not yet a comprehensive, non-reformist strategy which takes into account the contradictory character of bourgeois democracy, that, while supposedly requiring no qualifications, enacts qualifications for it’s very existence. Yet, the future of the Communist movement in the United $nakes requires walking that tight rope between reform and revolution. The failure of articulating a centrist position on this question which simultaneously strives for a people’s war (or insurrection – sue me) to enact the dictatorship of the proletariat while forcing bourgeois democracy to be bourgeois is disconcerting and reveals our continued state of overall disarray.

Away with false choices: Let’s make the hard choice of building a strategy, which can really unite the proletariat with the vanguard and rally the masses around the proletariat.

Source: Signalfire

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2 Comments to “Against Left and Right: Bourgeois Democracy and Our Tasks”

  1. friend of a friend 14 November 2012 at 8:00 pm #

    Who are these ostensible “pure” communists the author criticizes?

    Fletcher and Davidson get names. Who are these people who are “organizing” abstention and bathing in national chauvinism and book worship? Please cite them.

    Having participated actively with Occupy in several cities, including OWS — the author’s contention that it was “convergence of primarily petit-bourgeois students and professionals fearful of re-proletarianization” to be kind of wrong. Wrong in terms of demographics. Though reproletarianization is part of the dynamic. Undoubtedly. Which may mean that your theory needs to be updated with the actual balance of class forces TODAY and not in the books and decades-old polemics that have informed your parameters.

    What is most amusing is the disdain for the movement that actually put the fight against the ruling class on the global map. The author didn’t do it, that’s for sure. If they were at Occupy, they’d know perfectly well that their demagogic demographics serve an ideological purpose in bolstering their own position.

    So please: don’t dignify revisionists and then not even give the right of honest presentation to your own comrades on the revolutionary left.

  2. JMP 26 November 2012 at 8:52 am #

    While I generally disagree with *friend of a friend*’s complaint about the article’s analysis of Occupy (I do think it was limited by petty-bourgeois parameters, but hey I only experienced it in Canada where it was a US imported farce), I’m in agreement with their critique about the section on the boycott and “pure” communists. Indeed, I think it’s downright insulting to people who have theorized a boycott line.

    First of all, the claim that the boycott position confuses the state and capital is rather vague; the state form is always an expression of the economic base and is required in order to enforce capitalism––does the author have some notion of capitalism that can function without a state, without a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and that classes just exist economically all by themselves without everything the state produces?

    Secondly, the argument regarding national oppression is just ludicrous since a proper boycott also be about boycotting the settler state and recognizing national self-determination. Or does the author think that the key for pursuing national self-determination for colonized nations is to participate in the elections of a settler government? The reduction of this argument to the drug question is something of a red herring and purely rhetorical used to end any discussion on this issue by claiming its position is anti-racist and people who are interested in boycotting a racist state are somehow racist.

    None of this is to say that criticisms of a boycott line cannot and should not be made, just that the arguments are not made in this article because the analysis of the boycott line is: a) confused and vague; b) at best rhetorical. And the fact that it tries to claim it is the so-called “pure” communists pushing the boycott line is strange considering that “pure” communists have dogmatically clung to Lenin’s “Left-wing Capitalism an Infantile Disorder” and have, in fact, generally taken the position of this article.