On Saturday 8 March, the CWO held an invite-only online meeting on the topic of elections. We publish here the presentation – although the situation has moved on since then, the central message remains just as relevant. As protests in "defence of democracy" spring up in various countries (USA, Germany, Israel, Turkey, South Korea, etc.), it is important that workers don't get swept up in ruling class infighting over definitions of capitalist democracy but instead fight for their own vision of workers' democracy, premised on a break with capitalism and the rule of workers' councils not bourgeois parliaments.

The Presentation

Let’s start with a recap. Five decades into an ongoing structural crisis of profitability, during which wages as a share of GDP have dropped continually, representatives of the ruling class are running out of ways to put a positive spin on the situation we find ourselves in. Last year was a bumper year for elections. In the wake of the COVID pandemic, the cost of living crisis and intensifying imperialist tensions, it’s no surprise we saw defeats for incumbent governments worldwide, from Iceland to Bangladesh, including in France, India, Japan, and South Africa. For now, we will focus on Britain and America. The British and American working classes were both treated to a selection of uninspiring centrists and far-right populists. The result of this worldwide pattern was that in Britain, Starmer’s new New Labour won control of the government over the incumbent Tories; in the US, it was Trump’s Trumpist Republicans over the incumbent Democrats.

Starmer finally has something to stand out with. He has won the record biggest majority for the record lowest vote share (33.7%, 20.2% accounting for turnout) since 1924. Neither Labour or the Liberal Democrats won a substantial change in voteshare; their gains were mostly due to Tory votesplitting with Reform. After the disaster of Truss, Labour has successfully sold itself as taking the Tories’ place as the ‘party of strong and stable government’ to continue an austerity agenda – and simultaneously, the reactionary right of the bourgeoisie has strengthened, leading to the huge Reform vote and racist riots in July and August. Decades of blaming “the other” for falling living standards are being their rotten fruit.

Another embarrassment to the Tories were the spikes in class struggle in 2022 and ‘23. Their strategy was to confront workers head on, passing the Minimum Service Levels Act in June 2023 to all but ban the strikes by public sector workers. With the usual complicity of the unions, who kept strikes ineffectual and isolated above and beyond Westminster's orders, few struggles could claim to have achieved victory, despite months of disruption. Starmer’s change of tack, conceding wage raises to some in the public sector and amending the Trade Union Act, aims to reduce the threat of more revived class struggle, and shore up support from the union bureaucracy – but he has already had to fold to British capitalism’s reliance on zero hours contracts.

In other areas the Starmer government continues the same strategies of previous governments, with small tweaks. Labour’s apologists are happy to condemn the Tories and Reform as anti-immigrant. Meanwhile, Labour’s Immigration Minister Angela Eagle brags about carrying out the three largest mass deportations by plane in history, and raids on almost 300 workplaces suspected of employing immigrants, all in pursuit of deportation and boat-stopping goals. Politicians and the press gleefully reduce human beings to numbers, often weighing up Starmer and Sunak by how many thousands of desperate asylum seekers succeed in crossing the Channel. The millions of children pushed deeper into poverty by the two-child benefit cap are sacrificed for the £2-4 billion of state budget British capital cannot spare with its desperation for ever-smaller profits, while Liz Kendall embarks on yet another “crackdown on worklessness”, promising to cut benefits for young people who aren’t in work (not that this will conjure up any more jobs that don’t exist, or make disabled and ill workers any more able to work).

This is what we must prepare to confront under this new management: for the most part, more of the same, with marginal reforms to ‘restore order’. This is to create the impression of an administration more suited to carry out the same class offensive of the bosses. It might even involve paying some lip service to the working class (though this is looking increasingly farfetched). Both of these purposes involve neutralising any class response. If this fails, they may fall back on the failsafe excuse of “better than the Tories”.

Meanwhile in the US, Democratic internal polling showed strong conditions for a Trump comeback. The Democrats wisely reacted by running a historically abysmal campaign, nicking the nomination from Biden’s body at the last minute to have Kamala Harris campaign with neocon matriarch Liz Cheney. Trump won all swing states, as well as a majority of the popular vote for the first time. In part this is, surprisingly, due to high turnout – for Republicans, and low turnout for Democrats. Even New York and New Jersey were won by unusually close margins (12 and 6 points respectively), and were even polling for the Republicans! before Biden was replaced. Maybe this defeat was the best the Democrats could hope for.

For many working class voters, this election was a protest against the post-pandemic ‘return to normal’. Polls consistently showed the American economy was the number one issue of the election, and almost 70% polled by Stephen Semler thought it was worse. Pundits were puzzled by this, considering a recovered economy after the post-COVID recession, with inflation at under 3% by July. What they forget is that workers have memories. Biden originally planned to follow the temporary post-COVID social welfare measures in the 2021 American Rescue Plan with permanent ones, promising to ‘Build Back Better’, not just return to the pre-pandemic. But after this plan was blocked by a handful of Senators, almost all of it was abandoned in the legislative package negotiated with them, replaced with their beloved deficit reduction. The result was that these measures expired right as the working class were hit with a wall of inflation in the middle of Biden’s term. Trump pounced on this working-class unrest. He again won not just by rallying his petty bourgeois footsoldiers with populist reactionary rhetoric, but by convincing workers – this time especially 18-28-year-olds and Latino men – he was the solution to their problems. Particularly, he made use of lying that the President has the power to control prices, a magical solution that conveniently avoids having to promise workers any actual pay rises. Amongst his incomprehensible rambling, Trump promises to raise tariffs and withdraw from Ukraine to prepare for conflict with China, ignore the climate crisis which is inconvenient for capital, renew his divide-and-conquer anti-immigrant campaign, and lull workers to sleep with promises of industrial recovery, nationalist resurgence, and discriminatory moral panics and conspiracy theories.

Not even the false hope of the left was offered to workers in the UK and US last year – only the far-right con job or the detested neoliberal status quo. Workers certainly haven't missed this. Many in the UK simply didn't vote at all: 4 in 10, another record low, since 2001. In the US this is nothing new. Turnout has only been buoyed by effective charlatans like Obama and Trump: outside of their election years, and the exceptional nationalist fervour after 2001, turnout has remained in the 50s since 1972.

What is bourgeois democracy? Let’s not be fooled into thinking the capitalist state is the neutral, classless, omnibenevolent body it claims to be, in a society split between two classes whose interests are irreconcilable. Like all states, the capitalist state is a machine of class rule, whose function is to maintain the capitalist system – the enslavement of the working class to the capitalist class in chains of wage labour. Elections determine who will manage the state on behalf of the bosses. This is why their candidates can only offer us shit. The needs of capitalism win no matter who we vote for. When the 2008 recession hit, the system demanded austerity, and all three parties provided!

In fact, the capitalists have turned to bourgeois democracy time and time again as the ideal political shell for their dictatorship. Firstly, it provides a civilised way for the moneybags to resolve their own internal squabble; we can see this in how Labour and the Tories are currently both competing for the job of austerity manager. But more importantly, universal suffrage creates the powerful illusion that “the majority” or “the people” are in control; that the capitalist state really is a neutral body; that we have a real say over society, not just picking between masters.

The attitude to parliament Marxists have taken is not based in some eternal anti-political purer-than-thou principle, but the historical development of parliament as part of the capitalist state. To understand bourgeois democracy today, we should examine how it evolved and the consequences at each stage for the workers’ movement.

In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, parliaments were a key weapon wielded by the capitalist class against their own predecessors, the feudal aristocracy. In this period, workers were explicitly excluded from the political process – they could not vote or put up their own candidates. As such, some of the earliest demands raised by the nascent working class movement included political representation (in Britain, most famously with Chartism). The ruling class was forced to make concessions, and grant workers some limited political rights. In this context, revolutionaries like Marx encouraged workers to take advantage of the platform newly made available to them. While he may have speculated that a peaceful transition through parliament might still be possible in a few countries without an enormous bureaucratic and military apparatus (like Britain, America, and the Netherlands) he nevertheless recognised that in most countries the seizure of political power by the working class will have to involve a revolution, as the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune had demonstrated: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”; now, the working class would need to violently smash the capitalist state before building its own new organs.

As capitalist states grew in size and sophistication, this became even more true: real political power moved more and more out of parliaments, and into growing bureaucratic complexes and standing militaries. Within this state complex, bourgeois parliaments atrophied into talking shops and committees for optimising capitalist rule. Class struggle would necessarily be conducted outside of them.

For the revolutionary wing of the Second International, participation in parliaments and elections was tactical and agitational, where running would help revolutionaries spread propaganda – to speak to workers at the platforms provided by hustings, to use the parliamentary pulpit to speak and demonstrate, or to exploit parliamentary immunity to protect revolutionaries from prosecution. The question of how exactly to apply this immediately raised itself within the Third International after the outbreak of the revolutionary wave in 1917. Influenced by the events in Russia, a movement of workers’ councils, aka soviets, was spreading across Europe.

In the course of their struggle, workers had found an alternative to the capitalist state. The theses written by Bukharin and adopted by the Third International at its Second Congress, recognised that “parliamentarism as a state system has become a ‘democratic’ form of the rule of the bourgeoisie” and that the “state machine of the bourgeoisie … must be destroyed by the revolutionary proletariat and replaced by local soviets of workers’ deputies.” At the same time, they still considered the parliamentary pulpit a useful propaganda tool even in a revolutionary situation. Military imagery of revolutionary MPs ‘entering the enemy’s camp’ to ‘lay mines’ and ‘assist the masses behind the walls of the parliament in the work of blowing it up’ was used to portray this. The position represented by Bordiga’s defeated theses, while agreeing with Bukharin’s that it was a tactical question, argued that when revolution was imminent and the immediate task of the working class was to destroy political organs of bourgeois rule and replace them with their own, revolutionaries taking seats in parliament was contradictory – it would only confuse workers, take energy away from more important work, and lend legitimacy to these bodies in a critical moment. Others, like anarchists, syndicalists, and the predecessors of what we would now call Dutch-German councillists outright rejected participation in bourgeois parliaments in principle. All factions agreed that there is nothing to be gained from workers abandoning their own politics and falling for the rival capitalist parties’ promises for more crumbs from the bosses’ table. We can take those crumbs ourselves - and so much more.

The last time our comrades in our Italian affiliate, the Internationalist Communist Party, found it useful to participate in an election was in 1948, only in order to gain access to hustings and under the slogan “don’t vote”. The election itself was reduced to an episode in the opening imperialist conflict, as the lines of the Cold War were carved out in Europe, and workers were individually asked to pick between two imperialist blocs, the USSR and US, represented in the (Stalinist) Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats respectively. And this brings us to the final stage in the evolution of bourgeois parliamentarism to today: the development of a fully mature capitalist media, which totally dominates elections, drawing workers into the ranks of these rival sections of capital with the help of powerful media-electoral machines. Whatever small amount of agitation the working class can achieve from running their own communist candidates in elections is drowned out, while reinforcing workers’ illusions in capitalist democracy.

Of course, the bourgeoisie also has its own alternative to elections. If elections prove ineffective as a tool for social control, and these new democratic governments go the same way as their predecessors by failing to contain the capitalist crisis and resulting working class unrest, the bourgeoisie may turn to more authoritarian methods of government, which the resurgent right would be happy to deliver. Elections may particularly become less important in the eyes of the bosses as conditions increasingly ramp up to generalised war.

So how should we respond to Trump? Definitely not by falling into the arms of the ‘lesser-evil’ democratic bourgeoisie, like Harris and Starmer, against the far-right, as many antifascists urge us to do. Bourgeois democracy is not really the antithesis of fascism, but stands alongside it as one of options the bosses can choose for how to run their dictatorship. Fascist oppression is not a special aberration from capitalist rule, but just another weapon the capitalist class has to use against the working class, which they can do just as much through ‘democratic’ oppression. It was not the far-right that brutally crushed the German Revolution in 1919, but the social-democratic SPD government, with its liberal accomplices. How should we respond to Starmer? Not by supporting the capitalist left who claim to oppose both, from the established social democratic parties to the Trotskyist and Stalinist rackets, who muddy the word socialism in state capitalism, nationalisation, and welfare policies for ‘fairer exploitation’. To support any of these bourgeois factions would be to promote subordination to capital instead of independent working class politics.

So what should we do? Abstention from elections is obviously not enough. We have to respond with class struggle.

In their elections, the bosses can only offer us wage-work and war. Bourgeois democracy is nothing more than a performance to trick the working class into fighting in the bosses’ ranks. Workers’ democracy is the alternative. Strike committees; mass assemblies; workers’ councils and congresses of them; these are the forms the working class has discovered through history to exercise their class power, from the factories of 1917 Russia to the sugar plants of 2010s Iran. Basically, these are bodies set up by workers themselves in the heat of struggle, made up of delegates from their own ranks whom they can recall at any time, to collectively and directly coordinate their activity. As the level of struggle increases, more and more workers can be brought into unified action.

The next step, as the bulk of workers increasingly look in the same direction, the ruling class is weak, and the class struggle reaches a revolutionary climax, is to use these organs to take control of society. The Russian revolution gives us the best example of this. Workers’ councils, aka soviets, had first been discovered in the 1905 Revolution, to coordinate the spontaneous mass class struggle across Russia. Workers elected delegates to them from their factories or sometimes territorial areas. Unlike members of parliament, who, once elected, are free to vote however they like to represent ‘the will of the nation’ (i.e. national capital), these delegates were bound by mandates and subject to recall by their constituents. For that purpose, alternates were elected alongside each delegate (which also served as replacements in case they were arrested). When soviets were elected again in 1917, the Russian working class were able to use them to topple the Russian ruling class. After uniting all the soviets across Russia in a permanent All-Russian Congress of Soviets, they were able to create lasting working class control over a whole country for the first time – a soviet republic.

This also demonstrates how revolutionary class struggle is a conscious activity of the mass of the class. Proletarian revolution is not carried out by a handful of professional revolutionaries – even if they're elected workers’ deputies. The soviets under Mensheviks and Right SRs control refused to seize power, as the first few months of the revolution repeatedly proved. So toppling the Tsar and the bourgeoisie’s attempt to restore order through the Provisional Government involved not just electing soviets, but the Russian working class – and therefore their delegates in the soviets – turning towards the option of revolution, represented by the Bolsheviks, Left SRs, and anarchists gaining more and more seats in the soviets. The workers’ councils were only an executive organ of an international revolutionary wave of the whole class, a movement that extended well outside of the bodies themselves. Just as the growing working class offensive led to revolutionary control of the soviets, when this class movement began to retreat by 1921, working class political activity declined and the councils lost their energy. Ultimately, their shells were absorbed into the developing capitalist state, as were the degenerating Third International and the Russian Communist Party itself.

Seizing political power is a precondition for constructing a new, classless, communist society. In other words, a soviet republic – unlike every state before it – would not exist to perpetuate its own existence as an organ of class rule, but to make that redundant by abolishing class divisions. The capitalist state exists to reproduce capitalist relations of production. A soviet republic would be able to finally break those exploitative relations once and for all, replacing them not with a new class order but common, free production for the needs of everyone – a society summed up by the maxim ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’. Capitalist democracy is a sham at best and engineered to draw workers into their own oppression at worst. Workers’ democracy is the historically discovered method which the working class can use to organise themselves and collectively exercise a class dictatorship that can revolutionise human existence – and save it from total destruction.