The Sparts oppose running for any capitalist executive office
(http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/index.html)
> Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!
>Comrade Bride began his re****t by noting the im****tance of our discussion
> on communists running for executive office: “The fundamental point
that’s
> posed here is the line between reform and revolution, between the
> reformiststrategy of taking hold of and administering the bourgeois
> state apparatusversus the revolutionary strategy, which means sma****ng
> the existing stateorgans and replacing them with organs of workers rule.
> Communists do notjoin, sup****t or take responsibility for the
> administration of thebourgeois state. And when you run for, as well as
> hold, executive office,you are legitimizing exactly that—the executive
> authority.”
>The position that communists should under no cir***stances run for
> executive offices of the bourgeois state is an extension of our
> longstanding criticism of the entry of the German Communist Party (KPD),
> with the sup****t of the Comintern, into the regional governments of
> Saxonyand Thuringia in October 1923. The KPD’s sup****t to these
bourgeois
> governments run by “left” Social Democrats—first from outside the
> government and then from within—helped to derail a revolutionary
> situation(see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the
Comintern,”
> SpartacistNo. 56, Spring 2001). Our new line clears up a confusion in
> the communistmovement that has been present since the CI Second Congress
> in 1920. There****ter noted: “We are trying to do what in the main the
> ThirdInternational did do, which is clean up the act of the Second
> International
> on the state; they just didn’t finish the job. Because when they had
that
> discussion at the Second Congress, they were doing battle with the
> Bordigists and ultralefts, who in principle didn’t want to run for
> office.But no distinction there was made between running for parliament
> andrunning for executive office.”
>Our earlier line, affirmed at the 2003 ICL Fourth Conference, was that
> Marxists could run for executive posts so long as we made clear in
> advancethat we would not assume office if elected. Comrade Bride noted
> that thisissue had first been raised internally in 1999, when the party
> was deeplydisoriented, then was raised again after the 2003 conference,
> leading tothe reopening of discussion. He commented, “I think our
> slowness to grapple
> with this has a lot to do with the state of the party and the prevailing
> conception, in fact, that the overriding problems were sectarianism and
> not
> Menshevism.” The subsequent fights and discussions to reorient the ICL
> havegreatly strengthened our ability to address such questions, drawing
> cruciallessons from the history of the workers movement to apply to our
> work.
>The executive office question was a major subject of debate in the
> buildupto our Fifth Conference, with many contributions by comrades at
> pre-conference meetings and in internal bulletins. A number of research
> do***ents were produced, examining a variety of historical situations,
> among them the ministerialism (holding positions in bourgeois
> governments)of the Second International; the electoral work of the
> Bolshevik Party andits attitude toward bourgeois municipal
> administrations during the periodof dual power in 1917; the work of the
> Bulgarian Narrow Socialists in theyears before and after the Russian
> Revolution; and of early Communistparties in France, Mexico and
> elsewhere. Further historical researchremains to be done, with an eye to
> publi****ng more extensive propaganda onthis critical question in the
> future.
>Our change of line remained controversial up to the eve of the
> conference.Some comrades initially argued for running for president in
> “exceptional”cir***stances as a means of gaining a broader hearing
for
> Marxist ideas.Another comrade, pointing to the practice of early
> Communist parties inrunning local administrations, even wrote that if we
> won a majority in amunicipal council, we should take office or risk
> being seen as“abstentionist.” A comrade responded sharply: “Our
position
> is notabstention, as suggested by some, it’s opposition. Please be
very
> clear,we’re not neutral, we’re opposed to the executive of the
> capitalist state.”The comrades who initially argued against changing
our
> line eventually sawthat their argumentation skirted dangerously close to
> reformism, and in the
> end the conference voted unanimously for the new position.
>A recent polemic by the Internationalist Group (IG) provides a crude
> rehashof the worst arguments in favor of running for executive office.
> The IG’sarticle, “France Turns Hard to the Right”
(Internationalist
> supplement, May2007), deals with the recent French presidential
> elections, where theUSec’s flag****p group both ran a candidate and,
> after he was eliminated inthe first round of voting, called to elect the
> candidate of thepro-capitalist Socialist Party. In the name of
“fighting
> the right,” in2002 the Mandelites even called to re-elect France’s
> right-wing bourgeoispresident, Jacques Chirac, against his opponent, the
> fascist Jean-Marie LePen. Citing our new position as summarized in an
> article on the Frenchelections (Le Bolchévik No. 179, March 2007;
> translated in Workers VanguardNo. 890, 13 April 2007), the IG
> ludicrously charges that our policy ofrefusing to run for president or
> other executive office “reveals aparliamentary cretinism similar to
that
> of the Mandelitepseudo-Trotskyists”—because we recognize a
difference
> between parliamentaryand executive positions!
>The IG shows touching faith in the capitalist state and its democratic
> trappings. Marxists have always distinguished between executive offices
> like president or mayor, which by definition entail administering the
> bourgeois state, and legislative positions like parliamentary deputy,
> which
> communists can use as a tribune to help rally the m***** against the
> bourgeois order. Not so the IG, which obliterates that distinction in
> favorof one between “democratic” and “anti-democratic” bourgeois
> institutions.They write: “We are also opposed to the existence of a
> second, supposedlyhigher, legislative chamber as inherently
> anti-democratic. Should wetherefore also refuse to run candidates of the
> Senate?” To baseparticipation in elections on how democratic the
> institutional facades ofthe capitalist state are is truly parliamentary
> cretinism. Does the IGthink the lower chambers of bourgeois
> parliamentary republics are trulydemocratic institutions? If they think
> the French Senate is undemocratic,they should look at the Russian
> tsarist Duma, which the Bolshevikseffectively utilized to propagate
> their revolutionary program. As far asthe IG is concerned, communists
> can run “for whatever post.” Judge?Sheriff? Indeed, if it’s OK to
run
> for commander-in-chief of theimperialist military, why not for local
> sheriff?
>As our conference do***ent states: “The problem with running for
> executiveoffices is that it lends legitimacy to prevailing and reformist
> conceptionsof the state.” When you run for such offices, workers will
> understand thatyou cannot be but aspiring to administer the capitalist
> state. For the IG,running candidates for president or mayor “in no way
> implies that theyintend to occupy these positions within the framework
> of the bourgeoisstate.” After all, “In the unusual case in which a
> revolutionary candidatehad enough influence to be elected, the party
> would already have begunbuilding workers councils and other organs of a
> soviet character. And theparty would insist that, if elected, its
> candidates would base themselveson such organs of workers power and not
> on the institutions of thebourgeois state.” With this line, the IG
> leaves open, and certainly doesnot disavow, the possibility of not only
> running for executive office butof taking such office in a revolutionary
> situation, as in the Saxon andThuringian bourgeois governments in 1923.
> And what if a “revolutionarycandidate” wins a municipal post like
mayor
> in a local party stronghold inthe absence of a nationwide social crisis
> that poses the question ofproletarian power? This was the not-so-unusual
> case with the earlyBulgarian and French Communist parties, among others,
> which controlledhundreds of such local administrations. The IG is mum on
> what its winningcandidate should do in such cir***stances.
>The IG upholds the tradition not of Lenin but of Karl Kautsky. Amid the
> revolutionary upheaval that swept Germany at the end of World War I, the
> Kautskyites claimed to sup****t both the workers councils and the
> bourgeoisprovisional government, the Council of People’s
> Representatives, which theyjoined in November 1918. They thus played a
> key role in co-opting anddefeating the revolutionary upsurge. It is
> precisely in revolutionary timesthat illusions in the capitalist state
> are most dangerous. After Lenin laidout the Marxist perspective of the
> revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeoisstate in The State and
> Revolution (1917), he was furiously attacked bySocial Democrats who
> accused him of going over to anarchism.
>The IG—whose core cadre defected from our Trotskyist organization in
1996
> in pursuit of their op****tunist orientation toward various Stalinists,
> Latin American nationalists and other petty-bourgeois milieus—sees our
> newposition as further evidence of our break with “the continuity of
> genuineTrotskyism.” What they mean here, without saying it, is that in
> 1985 we ranMarjorie Stamberg, now an IG sup****ter, as the Spartacist
> candidate formayor of New York (see, for example, “Vote
Spartacist!”,
> Workers VanguardNo. 390, 1 November 1985). The IG’s line that it could
> accept executiveoffice in certain “unusual” cases, as we have noted
> elsewhere, “is not in‘continuity’ with our earlier position of
‘run but
> do not serve.’ It is,rather, a rightist resolution of the
contradiction
> inherent in that line”(“The IG and Executive Office: Sewer
Centrism,”
> Workers Vanguard No. 895, 6July 2007).
>In a do***ent written during our pre-conference discussion, one comrade
> drew a useful analogy between the past practice of Marxists running for
> executive office and Lenin’s pre-1917 slogan of a “revolutionary
> democraticdictator****p of the proletariat and peasantry” (RDDPP) for
> tsarist Russia.Noting that “some policies can serve revolutionaries
for
> a long time beforethey are ultimately revealed in the development of the
> class struggle to beunfit,” the do***ent continued:
>“Lenin had not been a class traitor when he wielded that defective
slogan
> against the Mensheviks and Liberals. And nor had Trotsky, Cannon, or we
> ourselves, crossed the class line in seeking to oppose Menshevism with a
> latently defective policy.
>“But after the successful 1917 Revolution and the strangled 1927
Chinese
> Revolution, the earlier ‘latent’ defect of Lenin’s RDDPP formula
took on
> anovert, conscious and redirected character. To uphold it then against
> Trotsky’s program of permanent revolution was a betrayal. And the same
> canbe said of clinging to a past practice inherited from our
> predecessors thathad not yet had its built-in defect revealed. We had
> the responsibility,and now we have the benefit, of learning from the
> disastrous consequencesof the German (and Bulgarian) failures of 1923.
> To deny the connectionbetween the Comintern’s unfinished break from
> social-democraticministerialism evident in Bulgaria and Germany 1923,
> and the ECCI’s[Executive Committee of the Communist International’s]
> simultaneouspromotion of campaigns for executive office, is to be
> willfully blind.”
>Or, in the IG’s case, willfully confusionist and centrist.
>Historically speaking, the idea that communists should campaign for
> administrative positions in the state of the ruling class they want to
> overthrow is grotesque. The fact that this is defended in the workers
> movement today is a measure of the success of democratic duplicity,
> directly reflecting the political strength of the capitalist order.
> Historyis littered with examples of self-professed Marxists who have
> gone over todirectly administering the capitalist state against workers
> and theoppressed. An example is the British Labourite Militant Tendency
> (nowSocialist Party), which was the employer of over 30,000 Liverpool
> municipalworkers when it controlled the local council there in the mid
> 1980s. At onepoint, these “socialist” bosses actually threatened to
lay
> off the entirecity workforce, claiming this was a “tactic” to deal
with
> a budget crunchimposed by the central (Tory) government. More recently,
> a leader of theBrazilian USec group accepted a ****tfolio as minister of
> agriculture in thebourgeois Lula government, thus taking direct
> responsibility for evictingmilitant activists of the Landless Peasants
> Movement.
>During our discussion on executive office, one comrade noted a crucial
> distinction between capitalism and previous class societies like
> feudalism.Those societies were marked by clear class and caste
> relation****ps thatdefined one’s place in the social order. Capitalism
> disguises the nature ofits class exploitation behind concepts like
“the
> market,” “supply anddemand” and, especially in the more advanced
> industrial world, thetrappings of “democracy” that supposedly afford
> equal rights andop****tunities to exploiters and exploited alike. Our
> task as communists isto tear off this mask and expose the reality of a
> brutal social system thatis nothing other than the dictator****p of the
> bourgeoisie.
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