Masses, 32th year, n. 621 – Electoral circus set up

Electoral circus set up

The struggle for the political and organizational independence of the exploited

Masses, 32^th year, n. 621 – October 11, 2020.

The elections are an important component of bourgeois democracy. This class mark is decisive. The elected and governability have the function of managing the capitalist state. It governs for the bourgeoisie, although it is the people who elect. And the people are composed of the exploited and oppressed majority. Its composition includes the working class, the urban middle class and the rural petty-bourgeoisie. Therefore, the majority of the people are constituted of poor and miserable.
An important portion, more than half, faces unemployment and underemployment. Millions depend on welfarism to keep from starving. The most comprehensive is the “Bolsa-Família” (a government welfare program). Working conditions have worsened. In addition to unemployment and underemployment, there is a predominant tendency to worsen poverty and misery.
Since 1989, except for the coups d’état, which, through the impeachment, in December 1992, forced Collor de Mello to resign, and in 2016, overthrew the government of Dilma Rousseff, the presidents have been elected. Governors and mayors are also elected. With the exception of some removals, motivated by corruption scandals, most end their term. The state of Rio de Janeiro is exemplary in that matter. At that very moment, the governor was dismissed, and the mayor runs for the sub judice.
New elections renew hope among the population that everything will be fixed. The president, governors and mayors come and go periodically, and the lives of the most exploited, however, go from bad to worse.

It is noted, on the other hand, that the explorers concentrate more wealth, and a layer of the upper middle class becomes more luxurious. The capitalist minority, and the narrow range of wealthy middle class, sit on the vast majority of the poor and miserable. They are parasites of the work of the crowd that, daily, produces in factories, workshops, in the fields, and that allows commerce and services to function. And they are executioners of the crowd of unemployed and underemployed, that go through all kinds of needs.
It is to maintain this parasitic minority that new rulers are elected. Parties and names are changed, aspects of the economic policy are changed, political guidelines are changed, but the class relationship between the exploiting minority and the exploited majority is not changed, and between concentrated wealth and widespread poverty. That is why, inevitably, elections are decided by the economic power of the minority, and not by the voting power of the majority.
The electoral moment arrives, the circus of candidacies and promises is set up. There is no better way to hunt vote than lying. But, it is not enough to be an acrobat of lies. It is necessary to have the means to make lying a truth, in the eyes of the exploited majority. There is no lack of economic, political and ideological means for the bourgeoisie to dictate the course of the elections. Not only does money decide, despite being the main actor. The apparatus of the media, churches, NGOs, community agents, drug traffickers, etc. have enormous electoral power over the masses. They are political and ideological instruments of economic power.
Facing elections, they begin to promote parties and candidacies, according to the general interests of the bourgeoisie, as well as their own. It is natural that this be so, for the organic parties of the bourgeoisie. But it is not so, for the leftist parties, who become assistants in the movement of the apparatuses, which feed the democratic illusions of the poor and miserable.
Without a powerful revolutionary party, it is not possible to tactically use elections, with their own candidacies, to oppose the electoral circus, to fight the parties of the bourgeoisie, to expose the masses to their own power strategy, to awaken them to collective action and to develop class consciousness of the proletariat.
These municipal elections have the particularity of taking place under the deadly pandemic, and the advance of the economic crisis. The bourgeois policy of social isolation only served to justify actions such as those foreseen in MP 936, which made it possible to reduce wages, suspend contracts and boost capitalist flexibilization of work, as well as the wave of mass layoffs. The capitulation of union leaders, reformist and centrist parties resulted from being subjected to the government and bourgeois offensive against the masses. Thus, municipal elections are marked politically by the disorganization of the working class and others exploited. What has been facilitating the regrouping of the poor and the miserable by the organic parties of the bourgeoisie, including by the parties of the Bolsonarist ultra-right.

The task of the class-conscious vanguard in the midst of elections is to fight for the class independence of the exploited. The defense of the null vote, presentation of a program of demands, and the call for the constitution of a united front to set up a mass movement, allow intervention in the elections with the proper strategy of power, which is the workers’ and peasants’ government, governmental expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat.