Revolution or War n°5

(February 2016)

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Reflections on the National Elections under Way...

In 2015, different elections have provoked the arising of new bourgeois political parties, sometimes just created as in Spain, in the first line of the national political game – indeed even in such a position that they can participate in the government. Do these electoral novelties have an international dimension and a particular political significance for the proletariat ? This is the question which the two following articles, try to respond to. The elections to come in 2016, in particular the outcome of the American presidential election, will aid in understanding the policies that the bourgeoisie attempts to set up for the present period.

October 2015 Canadian Elections :The Longest Electoral Circus in Canadian History

The electoral circus has brought a change inside the Canadian bourgeoisie. After almost ten years in power, Stephen Harper’s Conservative party has been replaced by Justin Trudeau’s [1] Liberal party on the 19th of October. Almost all of the big newspapers have supported Trudeau’s election. The Conservative party wanted to maintain a « zero deficit » budget no matter the cost. The NDP (New Democratic party) had the same agenda. The Liberal party and the Green party (which preaches an impossible ecological capitalism) put forward budget deficits.

Deficits of 10 billion Canadian dollars (7 billion euros) each year lasting 3 years to invest in infrastructure and lower taxes for what they call the middle class, that was the electoral promise of the Liberal party. The debt of the Canadian state, exemplified as good budgetary rigor because the debt has diminished during the past decade, is again on the rise since the 2008 crisis. Rising deficits announced by Trudeau (unlike Harper’s Conservative zero deficit) expresses that the Canadian bourgeoisie, like all the other international bourgeoisies, is caught in a dilemma between the need to ’sort out finances’ to stay away from the risk of a new 2008 on the one hand and the need to maintain a minimum economic activity by deficits and debt on the other hand. This contradiction expresses the impasse of capitalism in economic terms since the path toward massive destruction of productive forces to solve the crisis of overproduction, that is to say the path to a generalized holocaust, is not open. The Canadian bourgeoisie is not yet in direct preparations for a world war because the proletariat is not crushed physically, ideologically and politically. However like other bourgeoisies, the Canadian bourgeoisie has ’two irons in the fire’ so to say, to engage more and more in imperialist wars on the one hand; and also to lead the class war against the working class as the Canadian proletariat is struggling against austerity measures even if they are well contained by the unions. This election will allow a greater rapprochement with US imperialism and serve the Canadian bourgeoisie in its competing territorial claims with Russia about the rich seabed of the Arctic.

Now, the government announced that the deficit will be of 15 billion (10.5 billion euros) for the first year instead of the 10 billion expected because of the lower prices for oil and metals. Already the promise to cut taxes for the middle class will cost 1.2 billion more than expected. The Canadian central bank announced on October 21 that the increase in gross domestic product of Canada would be 1.1% this year, before reducing its forecasts for 2016 and 2017 from 2.0% and 2.5%, respectively. In short the growth of the Canadian economy will be very weak for the coming years and as during the 2008 crisis with the Conservatives, the Liberals want to revive the Canadian economy ... another attempt of the bourgeoisie that will fail.

During the election campaign, the Liberals promised a cessation of bombing in Syria before March 2015 which marks the final date for the commitment of the Harper Conservatives. However they want to increase the number of soldiers in Iraq for the training of Kurdish soldiers or to send special forces who will intervene on the ground. The Canadian imperialism still wants to maintain its place among the imperialist powers, particularly among the G7. It will remain in the coalition of American imperialism and even get more involved, but in another form than bombing. Regarding the reception of refugees, the Liberals have backtracked on the expected number of 25,000 in 2015. It will be less than 6000. The arrival of refugees is an opportunity for media and politicians during an extensive propaganda on bourgeois democracy and the ’benefits’ of Canadian capitalism. They consciously avoid to say that Canada’s participation in the Middle East wars is one of the causes of their migration.

The electoral circus was one of the longest in the history of Canada. We saw the unions do everything to beat Harper and encourage the workers to do a strategic vote saying that it would improve their situation. For example, the Fédération des travailleurs du Québec (FTQ) has not skimped on how to mobilize hundreds of volunteers. Louise Chabot, president of the Centrale des syndicats du Québec has launched an appeal to block the Conservative Party by going to vote massively on October 19. « Hassan Yussuff, president of the Canadian Labour Congress, said he is convinced this strategy will work – if members vote. “The reality is we represent 3.3 million workers and if you add one family member to that equation, you’re looking at potentially 6 million votes,” he said. “If they go out and vote and bring their family along … there is no question we’re going to change the outcome. » [2]

In addition to trade unions, the reformist and independentist left Quebec Solidaire called to beat Harper without any mention of the existence of the proletariat and the class struggle. The call to fight Harper was, in fact, support to other fractions of the Canadian bourgeoisie. This unprecedentedly long electoral period allowed the revival of individualist and bourgeois democratic ideologies namely the principle ’one person, one vote’ for the elections and the choice of governments. Nationalism has been put forward by all parties: Conservative, Liberal, New Democratic and Green have revived Canadian nationalism while the Bloc Quebecois (a party advocating the secession of Quebec) was counting on Quebecois nationalism.

« In decadent capitalism, parliament and elections are nothing but a masquerade. Any call to participate in the parliamentary circus can only reinforce the lie that presents these elections as a real choice for the exploited. ’Democracy’, a particularly hypocritical form of the domination of the bourgeoisie, does not differ at root from other forms of capitalist dictatorship, such as stalinism and fascism.» (Basic position of the IGCL)

The Canadian proletariat, as with proletarians around the world, have everything to lose by participating in the electoral circus. The working class must organize and rather start working to build an international and internationalist party to fight not only misery, unemployment, war and terrorism but the system that produces these and to fight for a society with neither classes, money nor borders, that is to say a communist society that has nothing in common with Stalinism.


2015 Elections: Adaptation of the State Political Apparatus to the New Stakes?

The last national or local elections which took place throughout 2015 in various countries, European in particular, have seen upheavals in the electoral results of the bourgeois parties and the emergence of new parties, often “extreme-left” or “extreme-right” presenting themselves as “outside the system”. The end of “the two-party system”, that is the alternating in power of a traditional right wing party and a left party (social-democrat), is announced in Spain, Portugal, France, after having arrived in Greece and elsewhere (Italy for a long time).

Certainly, it is contrary to the proletariat’s interests to participate in the electoral game in our historical period and the revolutionaries denounce the mystification and the trap it represents. Nevertheless it remains that the electoral periods are moments of massive ideological and political hype on the populations and particularly on the workers. Today their role is not to convince the latter to march towards world war but to conceal the reality of growing exploitation and misery and to make them forget the necessity for the class fight against these. As such, they have an impact upon the working class.

But also, depending on the moments and the international and national situations, it happens that beyond the simple alternation between governments aiming to lend credibility to the democratic electoral game, the choice of government teams may represent inflections, even changes, of policies. It can be at the economic level and in direct relation to the working class as well as at the imperialist level. For instance, in the 1990s and 2000s, we can consider that, globally, that is in the main capitalist countries with a strong democratic tradition, the political alternating between right and left governments based on the two-party system did not present fundamentally different political bourgeois options; but it is beyond all doubt today that the coming to power of Thatcher in Great Britain and Reagan in the United States at the dawn of the 1980s represented a considerable inflection of the policies led by the main Western ruling classes. They set up so-called “neo-liberal” policies at the economic level, brutal attacks against the working class conditions and particularly aggressive ones at the imperialist level against the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. The negative consequences for the international working class quickly followed .

In 2015, has the constitution of coalition governments between “classical government” left parties (Socialist Party) and “radical” left in Portugal (Bloco de Esquerda and the CP) and in Greece (Syriza), the 20% of votes for Podemos (equal to the 21% of the PSOE – the Socialist Party) in Spain where the negotiations for forming the government continue at the time we are writing, an international political significance? As well as the electoral victory of “extreme” right parties such as the National Front in France? And if such is the case, is this simply to end with the two-party alternating game which is greatly discredited? Are they short-lived phenomena? Or rather do they announce new stakes for the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

Probably, it is too soon to provide a precise response. It nevertheless remains that beyond the particular national situations, these political changes feed the debate which develops increasingly through the European bourgeoisies within the European Union: should the economic policy be the drastic reduction of deficits or rather should they join the policy led by the United States since 2008 of the creation of money which lets the deficits keep increasing? Today no one has doubt that neither option can respond to the economic dead-end of capitalism whose crisis inexorably continues to deepen. Until now, the German ruling class had imposed the first option which had enabled it to establish its leadership in Europe. But the question is posed again since the 2015 Paris attacks. After the November 13th slaughters, the EU, thus Germany, have accepted in the name of war against terrorism that France does not reduce its deficits as agreed beforehand. Even better, the German Minister of Finances, Schaüble, yet fervent slayer of the European deficits, has called on Europe to develop the “means” for a common European army.

Let us make no mistake: in no case an easing (even so-called “Keynesian”) of the European economic policy constitute an improvement of the working class situation, nor even a stop in its deterioration. On the other hand, it could well mean an increase of expenditures and other “major works” for military defence and the fact that the EU, answering to the Quantitative Easing policies of the American Central Bank, would have decided to march more resolutly towards the imperialist war. Besides the increased weight of these growing military expenditures upon the European proletariat which still worsens the exploitation it suffers, this orientation of the European bourgeois policy would have the consequence of deepening the international ideological and political offensive against the working class; this very one which has started from the January and November 2015 attacks, with the calls for war against terrorism, to increased military interventions in Middle East, to national unity, to the state of emergency which forbids any demonstration and worsens the measures of anti-worker repression.

This is why the revolutionaries and the proletariat as a whole, while rejecting the bourgeois electoral game and any participation in it, cannot remain “indifferent” to the results and the changes of government and of political staff which can indicate inflections or changes of the policies that each national bourgeoisie leads. It is a matter of their ability to recognize the terrain, the lines of confrontation, and the stakes of the different battles that the bourgeoisie attempts to impose upon the working class in the crucial period to come.

RL, January 2016.



[1Son of former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau recognized for having set the law of war measures in the province of Quebec in October 1970 to allegedly stop an apprehended insurrection. This law allowed the arrest of nearly 500 people. Despite the promise made at the last election campaign, the Liberal government of PET decreed, in 1975, control of prices and wages.