In the bourgeoise social formation, the bourgeoisie owns the production means and so virtually it detains all the power (economic, political e military). For this reason, we say that the current political system, the so-called bourgeise democracy, at its roots is a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Elections are simply the puppet theatre of politics to legitimate the power in the hands of the bourgeoisie. They deck the system with a people mandate and, at the same time, they let it appear as “democratic”. Elections are the moment in which the bourgeoise parliamentary democracy concedes, to those exploited, the freedom to elect their own owners - to be chosen among those who have demonstrated to know how to defend the interests of the bourgeoise class at best. To participate in elections means to back this democratic mystification and to help the bourgeoisie in its dictatorship: exactly the one they call “democracy”.

Against the fraud of the bourgeoise parliament, the abstentionism on class positions has to be relaunched; not certainly to legitimate apathy and apolitical individualism, but to engage in restarting class struggle, in workplaces and in streets, and in rebuilding the revolutionary party. Parliamentary roads will never led to abolishing the exploitation of wage work, neither to acquiring any long lasting “right” (as they are incorrectly called today). Only the mounting class struggle can oblige the capital to momentarily concede some space. Only the proletarian revolution can create the conditions to realize a society without exploitation.

• leftcom.org Discorso di Bordiga sul parlamentarismo
• leftcom.org Tesi della frazione comunista astensionista sul parlamentarismo
• leftcom.org Abbasso la repubblica borghese, abbasso la sua costituzione* leftcom.org Stato borghese, democrazia borghese, semi-stato proletario