We must fight for the political independence of the exploited masses

Masses, 30^th year, n. 569 – August 5^th to 19^th, 2018.

Policy of the proletariat

We must fight for the political independence of the exploited masses

The electoral framework is practically defined. The party arrangement is the first step in launching a major offensive on the oppressed majority. Now the various candidates, their respective parties and alliances, set out to drag the masses.

The population, formed by workers in the majority and ruined petty bourgeoisie, has no influence on party arrangements, the definition of candidacies and coalitions. The bourgeois parties answer only to economic power. It is at its summit that the dispute between the various factions of bourgeois politics is done and it is in it that everything is decided. Hovering above the masses indifferent to their most elemental needs. They get prepared to change the government, keeping the capitalists in power and the majority in the condition of being exploited. It is the big parties that decide the direction of the elections, the change of president and the governability.

The masses are placed only in the condition of spectators. And they cannot influence, even if parties like PT say they want a “popular government” with “popular participation” and “popular causes”. The working class, which is the revolutionary class, will never have any ascendancy over whichever elected government. The PT’s example also serves to substantiate this absolute statement. Reformers, of course, will always do everything to relativize it. But its own bourgeois or petty-bourgeois policy will always show its absolute opposite.

There is not in the republican history of Brazil and of any other part of the world where the elected government is under the class influence of the proletariat. We are not unaware of the tragic experiences of popular front governments, which expressed the caricature of popular participation. The recent national-reformist governments, which have been falling, one after another, either by coups d’état or by the electoral process, reaffirm the law of the politics of capitalist society, that it is not possible for an elected government to be determined by the needs and politics of the proletariat, which is the only social force among all the oppressed, capable of defining the class character of government.

Elections are no more than an instrument of bourgeois democracy, which constitutes one of the political regimes of class domination. All who exhort the masses to support them in the name of democracy in general, abstract, serve the capitalists. It is necessary in every situation to show to the exploited the content and class form of democracy.

The October elections have the peculiarity of occurring after the coup that took down the elected government of Dilma Rousseff. After the transition from Temer’s civilian dictatorship, a new government is being set up. The banner that democracy is back and that the country will have a government legitimized by the popular vote is based on a great fraud. The coup took place in the bowels of bourgeois democracy itself, which has the peculiarity of being oligarchic. The National Congress, supported by the judicial, police and military apparatus, as well as in the Constitution, used the impeachment to void the 54 million votes that gave Dilma Rousseff the victory.

The elections that will take place in October do not reestablish democracy, nor the “legitimacy” of the new bourgeois government. They are conditioned by the coup d’etat and the forces that gave life to the civil dictatorship of Temer. Lula arrestment and the annulment of his political rights set fire to the Inter bourgeois dispute and will mark the result of the elections. Its antidemocratic character is more than clear.

It is no coincidence that the population is skeptical, distrustful and apathetic towards advertised candidates. It will take a major campaign of regimentation to take her to the polls. The demagogic participation of the left in this picture is shameful. It is up to the revolutionary vanguard to fight for the independence of the proletariat, denouncing and explaining the function of the elections to preserve the dominion of the bourgeoisie. The banner of the construction of the revolutionary party, Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist, will guide our campaign by the null-vote.