In the LRP article from 2020 that Charles refers to, we challenged proponents of the so-called principle of never voting for bourgeois parties to find wherever such a principle was declared by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky. Louis Proyect brought up Marx’s 1850 Address to the Communist League – but that was at a time when M&E thought socialist revolution was on the agenda. Subsequently they acted differently. Other than that we have yet to get an answer, so the challenge stands. I know such a principle was expressed, with regard to the US Democratic Party, by Shachtman in the 1930s and by Cannon in the 1940s. There is reason to believe they got it from Debs, and Debs was certainly right about the Democratic Party of his day. The democratic gap between MAGA and the Democrats today is qualitatively different. All the classic Marxists, of course, stood for the building of independent, socialist working-class parties. But they did not rule out tactical support for bourgeois parties who defended, for their own reasons, democratic rights that the working class needed for its self-organization. Indeed, they used such tactics at times when their class had no viable alternative of its own. Charles suggests that Marx and Engels only did so against “feudal remnants.” In Germany, however, they supported bourgeois candidates who opposed Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law – an eminently capitalist regulation. Charles also said that Lenin abandoned such tactical voting after the 1917 revolution. But he advocated it in his Left-Wing Communism pamphlet written in 1920. As we wrote, we held to the no-bourgeois-vote “principle” ourselves until Trump’s election drove us to actually check. We found that the principle was a myth. And again we invite others to check. Marx and Engels’s letters have become more available in English, so deeper checking is possible. What we have found only confirms their tactical approach. In response to sartesian, we hold no “belief that the Democrats can be organized as an effective counterweight to the expansion of the extreme right.” No, the Democrats are a pro-capitalist and imperialist party that habitually capitulates to the far right – most notably at the moment on immigration policy. We do believe that working-class and oppressed people can better organize themselves under a regime that does not promise to violently suppress their demonstrations and campaigns and that, for its own reasons, for example, defends the voting rights of Black people and the existence of trade unions. You call Trump a fascist. That’s not exact, but he certainly encourages fascists. Either way, it is better not to have a government that’s on their side. Walter
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