Electoral Politics Show Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie

The U.S. midterm election results are still coming in and the predicted “red wave” of Republican victories does not appear to have materialized quite as expected. Like every U.S. election, this one was hyped as the most important election of voters’ lifetimes. What stands out to this observer from north of the border is how little has changed electorally despite the ongoing crisis of U.S. capitalism.

At the time of writing, there was a practically even split in the Senate of 48-46 between Republicans and Democrats, respectively, with the GOP losing a seat and Dems gaining one. The House of Representatives saw maybe half a dozen seats change between each parties. Decades of gerrymandering is partly why the U.S. Congress sees so little turnover. But the dull midterm results reflect a pattern in bourgeois democracies around the world, one in which growing popular anger finds no reflection in electoral politics.

Consider that the last few years have seen a global pandemic that has killed more than 6.5 million around the world so far; skyrocketing inflation and living costs; growing hunger, the war in Ukraine, and of course an ongoing climate crisis marked by catastrophic floods, wildfires, and droughts. Polls show record low confidence in institutions. Widespread anger has resulted in the rise of populist forces on both the left and right.

And yet what have been the results of elections during the pandemic era? By and large, at a time of growing anger against the status quo, elections have tended to reaffirm the status quo. The 2021 Canadian federal election resulted in a second Liberal minority government with a Parliament that looked pretty much like the last one. The 2022 Ontario general election saw Doug Ford win a second majority government and the NDP lose seats while continuing as the Official Opposition—all this after Ford’s regime had overseen nearly 14,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Ontario. In Toronto, this year’s municipal election saw John Tory win another term as mayor without even a significant challenger, in a city where the housing crisis results in one homeless person dying every two days. Internationally we see similar results, as in the 2022 French presidential election which had a nearly identical result as the previous one, as Emmanuel Macron won re-election over far-right challenger Marine Le Pen despite growing social upheaval—though Macron lost his majority in the subsequent legislative elections.

Why does growing popular unrest and hatred of the status quo find little reflection in the electoral arena? In large part it’s because the system is designed this way. Money rules in capitalist politics, where those with money make the rules. We have institutional barriers that are designed to thwart the possibility of radical change, such as an unelected Senate, unelected Supreme Court, and unelected monarch with significant reserve powers in Canada. In the United States, you have the unelected Supreme Court, undemocratic electoral college that ensures people do not directly vote for the president, the undemocratic Senate that provides equal representation to sparsely populated rural, largely white states like Wyoming as it does to massive states with diverse populations like California and New York.

In liberal “democracy” we have capitalist parties that are heavily funded by the rich, big banks, and corporations. We have major media owned by those same interests who ensure voices that seriously threaten the status quo are almost never heard. In the event that they are, we have the repressive forces of the state who will imprison and/or kill dissidents.

Elections are still useful barometers of the general mood in society, and in periods of crisis, the ruling class can lose control of its parties or find itself increasingly facing popular anger. Right-wing populists like Donald Trump are less threatening to the bourgeoisie since they defend capitalism. But the possibility of even a reformist left-wing government coming to power is something that the ruling class can increasingly no longer tolerate. They have two responses to this threat: attack and co-optation.

The unprecedented smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. was an example of the former, with the British gutter press throwing enough mud that some of it was made to stick and prevent Corbyn from coming to power. But more often than not, the bourgeoisie rely on the reformist leaders of workers’ parties and organizations to do their dirty work. These are the figures Lenin called “the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”. Without a perspective of breaking from capitalism, reformists strive to be better managers of capitalism. Elected to represent the interests of the working class, they instead attack workers and rule on behalf of the capitalists. Hence the expression that “betrayal is inherent in reformism.”

History is littered with examples of such governments, from Ramsay MacDonald’s national government in Britain to Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government to Syriza’s betrayal in Greece. The imposition of austerity and cuts by reformist governments leads to disillusion and demoralization that only pave the way for the subsequent victory of the reactionary right. More recently, we can look at the 2019 defeat of Rachel Notley’s Alberta NDP government to the United Conservative Party, after Notley sought to outdo the Conservatives as the better representative of the province’s oil barons. The B.C. NDP government is similarly digging its own grave and preparing the future victory of the B.C. Liberals after breaking all its promises, ruling on behalf of oil and gas lobbyists, and disqualifying left candidate Anjali Appadurai on flimsy evidence to prevent a challenge to establishment candidate David Eby as Premier John Horgan’s successor.

When electoral politics so often lead to defeat or betrayal, it can be easy to grow discouraged. But socialism does not and has never come through the ballot box. Electoral politics is not useless, but is at any moment only a snapshot of mass consciousness at any given time. One of the lessons Karl Marx drew from the experience of the 1871 Paris Commune is that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Every institution of the state, from parliaments to the military, courts, police, and judiciary, are designed to serve the interests of the ruling class, not the oppressed class. As summarized by Lenin, “Marx's idea is that the working class must break up, smash the ‘ready-made state machinery’, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.” Workers can only guarantee their own interests by taking control of the state, which is not a neutral instrument but an instrument of class rule. A workers’ state will not look like the bourgeois state, as shown by the example of the Paris Commune, which replaced the standing army with the armed people and in which all officials were elected, earned an average worker’s wage, and were subject to recall at any time.

What recent elections show once again is that beneath the fig leaf of democracy, we live under a class dictatorship: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. If you talk to someone who doesn’t vote, they will often explain the reasons for their apathy as, “Why bother? Nothing ever changes.” There is a real kernel of truth in this observation. The system is designed to ensure that, in the words of Joe Biden, “nothing will fundamentally change.” You can vote for whoever you want, but in the end the bankers and wealthy capitalists make all the important decisions. The structures of government and legalized bribery of public officials aim to guarantee that.

But the more elections that people live through without any of their problems being solved, the worse their lives get despite all the empty promises of politicians, the more radicalized they become. Sooner or later that anger explodes to the surface and the masses take matters into their own hands. There’s a word for that: revolution. Leon Trotsky described the process of growing popular radicalization in his classic History of the Russian Revolution:

The masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old régime. Only the guiding layers of a class have a political program, and even this still requires the test of events, and the approval of the masses. The fundamental political process of the revolution thus consists in the gradual comprehension by a class of the problems arising from the social crisis – the active orientation of the masses by a method of successive approximations.

When the masses find themselves unable to create change in the electoral arena, energy often shifts to the workplaces and the streets. Thus we see the growing strike wave in the United States. In Ontario, we just saw a momentous episode in the history of the Canadian labour movement as the threat of a general strike forced the first-ever repeal of “back-to-work” legislation. These labour struggles are far more inspiring at the moment than anything in electoral politics. But sooner or later that radical energy will need to find political expression and the old question will arise again: What is to be done? If you’re asking that I encourage you to get involved.