[We publish here a translation of a writing about the recent elections in Mexico from our comrades in the Communist League of Mexico which calls for workers to boycott the electoral farce and organise themselves to smash the state and fight for real political power.]
“Democracy is the form of government in which we change tyrants every four years.” – Vladimir Lenin.
Following the scheme of bourgeois democracy in Mexico, every six years, citizens of this country simulate the exercise of their “power” by voting. This is one of the mechanisms the state uses in order to sustain itself, as the state depends on the illusion that the voting process generates in order to maintain its continuity. But it is clear that the voting process is NOT the way to change the state and its institutions! In reality, voting reinforces the status quo, demobilising proletarians, who will wait in futility for the “change” promised by the reforms put forward during the campaign. In the case of Mexico, we shall consider that the left, led by MORENA, suffers from “leopard” syndrome, which was described by Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa as follows: “changing everything in order to not change anything”.
MORENA is a leftist party of capitalism, the heirs of the “socialistic” and reformist ideology of the PRI (and their state-owned companies), who have undermined and underestimated the Mexican proletariat, as seen in attacks against workers, strikers, mothers and fathers of the victims of the disappeared, that only reproduce the act of reformism that claims to “defend” the proletariat from itself. Such is the case of the reduction of the working time from 48 hours to 40 hours a week that was postponed by a representative of the Morenista bench, Ignacio Mier Velazco, under the excuse of “lack of time”, and indeed, for bourgeois officials, whatever their party colours, time will always be scarce to attend to the demands of the working class.
It therefore becomes clear for us, the Communist League of Mexico, that what is needed is to follow the class programme, and, by these means, to position ourselves on a class terrain against the hoax of the next 2nd of June. Against this, our detractors might cry out that “this is ridiculous” and ask, “how would we convince the proletariat?”, but as Bordiga explained:
“In still more characteristic fashion, communism is the demolition of the conceptions of liberalism and bourgeois democracy by the Marxist critique. The juridical assertion of freedom of thought and political equality of citizens, and the idea that institutions founded on the rights of the majority and on the mechanism of universal electoral representation are a sufficient base for a gradual and indefinite progress of human society, are ideologies which correspond to the regime of private economy and free competition, and to the interests of the capitalist class.”
– Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Faction of the Italian Socialist Party (1920)
It’s clear that our task as communists is not to achieve power through the mechanism of the state, but to guide the process of the proletarian insurgency against the bourgeoisie and its state, which includes their electoral circus, for, as Marx and Engels wrote in the mid-19th century:
“It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. (…) the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier.”
– Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (1850)
The apparatus of the bourgeois democratic state depends upon coercive power in order to preserve the exploitation based on the private ownership of the means of production, this is to say, for the protection of the interest of a minority; the democratic speechifying of bourgeois politicians can thus be nothing else than a mystification of reality, an item revealed to the citizenship as a reward of civic virtue, while the base remains under exploitative conditions.
MORENA and, for general purposes, all leftist pantomimes maintain this mystification over the working class even more effectively than the liberal right, because they are capable of ending social programs and trusts without causing the faintest of irritations in their electoral base. Such was the case with the disappearance of childcare centres: a measure that clearly undermines the state subsidisation of child-rearing and a clear example of control over the working class wielded by a populist party. It is also worth mentioning the pyrrhic increase to the minimum wage that the government is trumpeting as a historic change, when that increase does not even keep pace with inflation, and hence does nothing to mitigate the poverty of the majority of the country’s population, though it has only served to distract the attention of workers to more forceful measures, maintaining the bread and circus of the “welfare” state.
The other two political “options”, the PRI-PAN-PRD coalition and the Movimiento Ciudadano (Citizen’s Movement) party offer no more than the same bourgeois-liberal discourse that continues the rule of capital. The concessions they promise are still borne out of the logic of capital itself and it is even clearer from their record as political organisations. To reject electoralism is to reject the farce of bourgeois democracy that these characters protect so much.
Our position, as the Communist League of Mexico and following the historic programme of the proletariat, is to promote abstentionism among the masses; that is, to refuse participation in the empowerment of bourgeois institutions, which do not and will never represent us! Thus, we cannot and will not encourage voting as an organisation, at any level, be it local, state or federal. This includes the supposed “communists” of the Communist Party of Mexico who have not only called to vote, but to support their candidacies, thus manifesting their support for bourgeois institutions in yet another demonstration of their passivity, as well as the other leftist organisations that, despite positioning themselves against MORENA and its opposition, assume an openly reformist, democratic role in favour of managing the State in the name of sovereignty, national liberation or the “fight against neoliberalism”, rejecting a true revolutionary program, and positioning themselves either with the big or the petty bourgeoisie.
We shall conclude here with a relevant reflection of Frederick Engels from his ‘Origin of Private Property, the Family and the State’:
“Universal suffrage is thus the index of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will go further in the present state, but this is enough. The day when the thermometer of universal suffrage marks the boiling point for the workers, they will know, as well as the capitalists, what they must do”.
Proletarians of the world, unite!
Communist League of Mexico
18 June 2024
League of Internationalist Communists 