Ask Lemmygrad

Bourgeois politics/elections is quite simply another battlefront on which we must fight. To say that you will not participate in it is to say that it is a battlefront you are willing to concede.

HOWEVER! Participation does not mean participating within a Bourgeois party!

It means creating your own political party, in which you do not at all expect to get elected and in which you treat the bourgeois parties as your enemies! Any reform that you push for or work to have enacted (perhaps even with the assistance of bourgeois parties) should be for the sole purpose of raising class consciousness and hastening the revolution!

This is elaborated upon by Lenin in "What is to be Done?" and "Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder".

you can vote and recommend a party but you have to be realistic about your vote and what will really happen.

you cant really vote for anything, you have to organize for it. i will use LGBT rights as an example. there are not ”anti-LGBT rights” or ”pro-LGBT rights” politicians as much as there are politicians who use these issues to get themselves in office. we didnt get our rights from voting as much as we did from riots, protesting and organizing.

as for improving the conditions of people? where does that come from? since when do politicians improve our living conditions? zohran mamdani? this is why people were wary of zohrans real impact. he didnt bring anybody to revolutionary ideas, he just made people trust the bourgeoisie elections even more now.

Mensheviks and liberal Cadets, argued that running their own candidates would split the democratic party and aid the reactionary proto-fascist Black Hundreds.

Lenin followed Marx and Engels’ advice that the workers’ movement should not be persuaded by the claim of the bourgeois Democrats that in running their own candidates “they are splitting the democratic party and giving the reactionaries the possibility of victory.”

"Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. 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."

— Karl Marx, The Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, 1850

His instructions to the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) deputies who were elected to the Duma in which the liberal Cadet party was hegemonic were all-so revealing:

“Our task is not to support the Cadet Duma, but to use the conflicts within this Duma, or connected with it, for choosing the right moment to attack the enemy, the right moment for an insurrection against the autocracy. . . As a means of testing public opinion and defining as correctly and precisely as possible the moment when “boiling point” is reached . . . but only as a symptom, not as the real field of struggle. . . . Our task is to use the respite that will be provided by an opposition Duma (and as the proletariat needs time to rally its forces properly, this respite will be very much to our advantage), to organise the workers, to expose constitutional illusions, and to prepare for a military offensive. Our task is to be at our post when the Duma farce develops into a new great political crisis; and our aim then will be, not support for the Cadets (at best they will be only a weak mouthpiece of the revolutionary people), but the overthrow of the autocratic government and the transfer of power to the revolutionary people.”

– (Lenin Collected Works, 10: 237-38)

To not run their own campaign, he replied, would deny the RSDLP the opportunity to know its true strength within the proletariat, in other words, its reason for existence. Also, according to his calculations, the Cadets were exaggerating the probability of Black Hundred victory. (Just like how democrats in USA argue that the republicans will win progressive seats if socialists split the democrat vote)

Though Lenin couldn’t persuade his Menshevik comrades with his arguments, he felt vindicated when the election results revealed that indeed a Black Hundred victory was unlikely. In retrospect, his debate with the Mensheviks may have been the beginning of the end of the Bolshevik-Menshevik coalition.

That the Bolsheviks proved eventually to be more influential than the Mensheviks with Russia’s proletariat was not coincidental. Lenin’s 1906-1907 writings constitute the Marxist movement’s first, and maybe only, detailed response to the lesser evil/splitting-the-vote conundrum.

The St. Petersburg Elections and the Hypocrisy of the Thirty-One Mensheviks

When they reappeared in the February Revolution of 1917, the soviets began to increasingly function as an alternative to the parliamentary-like Duma bodies. Because they were more democratic than the latter and thus more representative of public opinion, Lenin immediately recognized that the soviets could be more effective than the Dumas in realizing his vision for working-class ascent via “a military offensive.” Five months after the Bolshevik victory, he explained their success as following,

"As matters stood in October, we had made a precise calculation of the mass forces. We not only thought, we knew with certainty, from the experience of the mass elections to the Soviets that the overwhelming majority of the workers and soldiers had already come over to our side in September and in early October. We knew . . . that the [provisional government] had also lost the support of the peasantry — and that meant that our cause had already won."

– collected works of Lenin, 27: 25

In What is to be Done Lenin says that Communists should participate in Bourgeois electoralism as a route for making themselves and their views known to the general public. It's notable that he did not say to do this in order to gain power. Although concessions can be gained through electoral politics this is not the goal of revolutionary marxism and the energy of our party should not be used for this purpose. In order to improve the material conditions of the working class in a way that is favorable to our movement we must make a political vanguard that directly addresses the needs of working people through the creation of parallel institutions (think mutual aid, education like the black panthers did, etc.).

In short, bourgeois electoralism is a popularity contest that lets us be seen but nothing more.

Our marxist party participates in every election we can to get our faces known by the public and to influence political discourse. It also simply brings in money for the party.

At the same time behind closed doors we acknowledge that it will not be the way to bring change and we try to build the lass consciousness by going to the factories and other workplaces to get the workers on our side. Real change comes from building a workers movement and you do that by staying involved with the workers. We have local action groups to do that who can tackle local problems and get local people to join us.

Basically the politic side is just some PR machine because realistically we will never get in serious positions of powers that way. We are constantly hindered in these ways.

A communist party most likely won’t get to government through elections, so it won’t be able to directly implement its program. However, they should always advocate for the working class and point out the contradictions of social democratic policy. That only in a socialist society can these policies be protected from the bourgeoisie.