For an Appeal of the Communist Left to the working class against the international campaign to mobilise for bourgeois democracy

Covering Letter

International Communist Current to:

• Internationalist Communist Tendency
• PCI (Programma Comunista)
• PCI (Il Comunista)
• PCI (Il Partito Comunista)
• Istituto Onorato Damen
• Internationalist Voice
  + Internationalist Communist Perspective, Korea

 

30th August 2024

Dear comrades,

We attach a proposed appeal of the Communist Left against the huge international campaign today in defence of democracy against populism and the extreme right. All the Communist Left groups today, despite their mutual differences, come from a political tradition that has uniquely rejected the false governmental choices that the bourgeoisie uses to hide its permanent dictatorship and to derail the working class from its own terrain of struggle. It is therefore vital that these groups make a joint statement today as the strongest possible reference point for the real political interests and struggle of the proletariat and a clear alternative to the hypocritical lies of the enemy class.

Please respond rapidly to this letter and proposal. Note that the formulations of the proposed appeal can be discussed and changed within the framework of its main premise. 

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Communist greetings

The ICC

Proposed Appeal

 

Appeal of the Communist Left to the working class against the international campaign to mobilise for bourgeois democracy

For the implacable struggle of the working class against the despotism of the capitalist class
Against the poisonous choices in the fraud of bourgeois democracy

Over the last few months the world’s mass media - which is owned, controlled and dictated to by the capitalist class - has been preoccupied by the election carnival taking place in France, then Britain, throughout the rest of the world such as in Venezuela, Iran and India, and now more and more in the United States.

The overriding theme of the propaganda about the election carnivals has been the defence of the democratic governmental facade of capitalist rule. A facade designed to hide the reality of imperialist war, the pauperisation of the working class, the destruction of the environment, the persecution of refugees. It is the democratic fig leaf that obscures the dictatorship of capital whichever of its different parties - right, left, or center - come to political power in the bourgeois state.

The working class is being asked to make the false choice between one or other capitalist government, this or that party or leader, and, more and more today, to opt between those who pretend to abide by the established democratic protocols of the bourgeois state and those who, like the populist right, treat these procedures with an open, rather than the concealed, contempt of the liberal democratic parties.

However, instead of one day every few years choosing who is to ‘represent’ and repress them, the working class must decide on the defence of its own class interests over wages and conditions and look to achieving its own political power – objectives that the hue and cry over democracy is designed to derail and make appear impossible.

Whatever the election results, in these and other countries, the same capitalist dictatorship of militarism and poverty will remain and worsen. In Britain, to take one example, where the centre left Labour Party has just replaced a populist influenced Tory government, the new prime minister lost no time in reinforcing the British bourgeoisie’s involvement in the war between Russia and Ukraine and maintaining and sharpening the existing cuts in the social wage of the working class in order to help pay for such imperialist ventures.

Who are the political forces which actually defend the real interests of the working class against the increasing attacks coming from the capitalist class? Not the inheritors of the Social Democratic parties who sold their souls to the bourgeoisie in the First World War, and along with the trade unions mobilised the working class for the multi-million slaughter of the trenches. Nor the remaining apologists for the Stalinist ‘Communist’ regime which sacrificed tens of millions of workers for the imperialist interests of the Russian nation in the Second World War. Nor Trotskyism or the official Anarchist current, which, despite a few exceptions, provided critical support for one or other side in that imperialist carnage. Today the descendants of the latter political forces are lining up, in a ‘critical’ way behind liberal and left-wing bourgeois democracy against the populist right to help demobilise the working class.

Only the Communist Left, presently few in number, has remained true to the independent struggle of the working class over the past hundred years. In the workers’ revolutionary wave of 1917-23 the political current led by Amadeo Bordiga, which dominated the Italian Communist Party at the time, rejected the false choice between the fascist and anti-fascist parties which had jointly worked to violently crush the revolutionary upsurge of the working class. In his text “The Democratic Principle” of 1922 Bordiga exposed the nature of the democratic myth in the service of capitalist exploitation and murder.

In the 1930s the Communist Left denounced both the left and right, fascist and anti-fascist factions of the bourgeoisie as the latter prepared the imperialist bloodbath to come. When the Second World War did come it was therefore only this current which was able to hold to an internationalist position, calling for the turning of the imperialist war into civil war by the working class against the whole of the capitalist class in every nation. The Communist Left refused the ghoulish choice between the democratic or fascist mass carnage, between the atrocities of Auschwitz or of Hiroshima.

That’s why, today, in the face of the renewed campaigns of these false choices of capitalist regimes to make the working class line up with either liberal democracy or right wing populism, between fascism and anti-fascism, the different expressions of the Communist Left, whatever their other political differences, have decided to make a common appeal to the working class:

• DOWN WITH THE FRAUD OF BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY THAT HIDES THE DICTATORSHIP OF CAPITAL AND ITS IMPERIALIST MILITARISM!
• AGAINST THE AUSTERITY OF CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONAL INTEREST, FOR THE STRUGGLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKING CLASS TO DEFEND ITS INTERESTS
• FOR THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORKING CLASS TO DIVEST THE BOURGEOISIE OF POLITICAL POWER, EXPROPRIATE THE CAPITALIST CLASS AND END THE FRATICIDAL CONFLICTS IMPOSED ON THE PROLETARIAT BY COMPETING NATION STATES