Bourgeois Elections and the Dictatorship of Capital

(Quote of the Week)

As the presidential primary circus kicks off, America’s rulers tout this country’s political system as a model of democracy. The First Congress of the Communist International in 1919 contrasted the fraud of bourgeois democracy, a fig leaf for the class dictatorship of capital, to the system of proletarian rule in the form of soviets (councils) in the early workers state established through the 1917 October Revolution in Russia.

So-called democracy, that is, bourgeois democracy, is nothing but a veiled dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The highly touted general “will of the people” is no more real than national unity. In reality, classes confront each other with antagonistic, irreconcilable wills. But since the bourgeoisie is a small minority, it needs this fiction, this illusion of a national “will of the people,” these high-sounding words, to consolidate its rule over the working class and impose its own class will on the proletariat. By contrast the proletariat, the overwhelming majority of the population, openly wields the class power of its mass organizations, its councils, in order to abolish the privileges of the bourgeoisie and to safeguard the transition to a classless, communist society.

Bourgeois democracy puts the primary emphasis on purely formal declarations of rights and freedoms, which are beyond the reach of working people, the proletarians and semiproletarians, who lack the material resources to exercise them. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie uses its material resources, through its press and organizations, to deceive and betray the people. In contrast, the council system, the new type of state power, assigns the highest priority to enabling the proletariat to exercise its rights and freedom. The power of the councils gives the best palaces, buildings, printing plants, paper stocks, and so forth to the people for their newspapers, meetings, and organizations. Only thus does real proletarian democracy even become possible.

—“Platform of the Communist International” (March 1919), reprinted in Founding the Communist International (1987)