The Fraud of Bourgeois Parliamentarism

quote of the issue

We print below an excerpt from an 1888 article by Paul Lafargue, a founding leader of the French Parti Ouvrier, which explains how the capitalist ruling class uses parliamentary elections as a prop for its class dictatorship over the workers. Lafargue, who was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, had earlier served on the General Council of the First International and was a delegate of the 1871 Paris Commune. The article was published by the founding group of Russian Marxists, then in exile in Switzerland, in their journal Sozialdemokrat. The way out of the parliamentary cesspool was later shown by the Bolshevik Party of V.I. Lenin when it led the Russian workers to the seizure of state power in 1917.

Leon Trotsky quoted extensively from Lafargue’s article in his 1920 Terrorism and Communism, a polemic against the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky who denounced the Soviet workers state and promoted bourgeois parliamentarism. A complete English version was published in the August 1958 issue of Labour Monthly, edited by R. Palme Dutt, a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Parliamentarianism is a system of government where the people have the illusion that they are managing the affairs of the country themselves when, in reality, effective power is concentrated under the system in the hands of the bourgeoisie—and not even of all the bourgeoisie, but of only some strata of that class. In the first period of its rule the bourgeoisie does not understand, or more correctly does not feel, the necessity of creating for the people the illusion of self- government. For this reason all the parliamentary countries of Europe began with a limited franchise. Everywhere the right to give direction to the policy of the country by means of electing deputies belonged at first only to more or less substantial property-owners, and only gradually thereafter spread to less well-off citizens until, in some countries, it changed from the privilege of a few to the universal right of all and sundry.

In bourgeois society, the more considerable the mass of social wealth becomes, the smaller and smaller is the number of individuals by whom it is appropriated. The same takes place with political authority. As the mass of citizens possessing political rights grows, and the number of elected rulers increases, real authority is concentrated in, and becomes the monopoly of, an ever-smaller and smaller group of individuals. In the capitalist countries which have reached a high degree of development, like England, France and the United States, State power is in the hands of the financiers, although the electoral rights are extremely broad, while in two of the countries mentioned there is even universal suffrage.

The electors amuse themselves by drawing up programmes, their candidates swear to labour unfalteringly at putting these programmes into effect, but the elected candidate no longer belongs to himself and still less does he belong to the electors. Devoured by the thirst for money, he becomes the servant of the financiers, who pay him in cash or, in those cases when the deputy is as incorruptible as Cato, they reward him with directorates in financial companies. Corruption of politicians is the characteristic feature of parliamentarianism; politics becomes a trade—a profitable one, too. The scandals which break out from time to time, both in republican France and America and in monarchical Britain, may surprise the naive: but in reality they are only the external symptoms of the profound organic disease which undermines a parliamentary régime. Moreover, buying and selling represent after all the main social function of every bourgeois; why then should not the deputy, who has neither sugar nor leather to sell, not trade in his vote?

In despotic countries the head of the state governs with brutal senselessness. He says: “I desire”—and that argument is quite sufficient. He has no need to reckon with either the requirements or the wishes of the governed. But members of parliament, who call themselves the servants of the sovereign people and fulfillers of its instructions, have to resort to tricks in order, while ruling the people, not to destroy its illusions. Parliamentary tricks are extremely numerous—the right to vote and to petition, which afford an innocent amusement to the electors; parliamentary commissions and enquiries, which serve as the most rapid and reliable means of evading important and difficult questions; endless and verbose discussions about trifles, which help to kill time and befog the minds of the electors, etc., etc.

The most complex and the most successful parliamentary trick is to divide the deputies into two rival parties, which replace each other in power, in order in turn to rob the people and act in the interests of property-owners. In all its perfection this system of parliamentary equilibristics has been able to function only in Britain. Here the parliamentary world is divided into Tories and Liberals, their arguments command the attention of the public and arouse its passions, but the exploitation of the producers for the benefit of the landowners and capitalists goes on with equal success, whichever party holds the reins of government.

—Paul Lafargue, “Parliamentarianism and Boulangism” (1888), Labour Monthly, August 1958