Message of Endorsement to the Committee for Electoral Boycott
#Workers and oppressed people of the world, unite!
#MESSAGE OF ENDORSEMENT TO THE COMMITTEE FOR ELECTORAL BOYCOTT
#Central Committee of the Communist Party in Switzerland
#18th of October, 2023
#To the Committee for Electoral Boycott (https://wahlboykott.jetzt)
Dear Comrades:
The Communist Party in Switzerland endorses your campaign to boycott the 2023 Federal Elections in this country. It fills us with joy to see such different revolutionaries and progressives come together and unite for the purpose of openly rejecting the capitalist class dictatorship that is the Swiss State, actively boycotting the pseudo-parliamentary elections, and calling for a struggle for councils of working people's deputies, that is, the class dictatorship of the proletariat and the working people — the only way out of this miserable capitalist hell in which we live.
Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, clearly stated:
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to (mis)represent the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in communes [...].1
In this way, Marx clearly established the difference between the bourgeois, capitalist democracy of today and the proletarian, socialist democracy of tomorrow — council democracy.
In our recent in-depth analysis of the electoral process in Switzerland, From Pseudo-Parliamentarism to Council Democracy (which we have appended to this message), our Party wrote:
[...] an important and immediate task of this electoral boycott campaign is to build up an embryonic socialist united front in the form of alliances to boycott the parliamentary elections in this country, and we Communists should support and/or participate in all efforts that lead toward this objective, even if this support is critical and conditional. However, we should always keep in mind that, as Communists, our task is not to put up this or that amount of posters or to make a big splash, but to conduct patient and principled mass work.2
We once again emphasize, as we stated in the document quoted above, that any electoral boycott campaign will result in nothing, absolutely nothing, without mass participation. We must go among the deepest and broadest masses of the working people, those who do not and especially cannot vote, and mainly to the workers, and bring the boycott campaign to them; every revolutionary must live, work, and learn to fight together with the masses. Otherwise, this kind of campaign will inevitably run into the sand.
According to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, correct ideas are not developed in a vacuum, nor do they emerge spontaneously in people's brains, nor are they produced by a small group of people talking things over; correct ideas come from the masses of working people, and the role of the leaders is to seek out the masses, listen to them, note these ideas, sum them up, analyse their class content, produce a correct line on the basis of the correct parts of these ideas, and return to the masses with this line, so as to mobilize, educate, organize, and (prospectively) arm them. At the same time, the leaders must take care constantly to rectify their own mistaken ideas and to improve their line in the course of this process, which repeats itself endlessly in a spiral pattern, with the line becoming more correct and appropriate over time. There is no other way to establish scientific truth in the sphere of the social sciences.
This method, which is known as «from the masses, to the masses»,3 is also the best method by which an electoral boycott campaign can be carried out. The Committee for Electoral Boycott should go among the masses of working people, find out what their problems are, find out what the perceived sources of these problems are, and find out what their perceived solutions are; then, it should sum up these ideas (which come from the masses themselves) in a kind of anti-electoral platform, a platform for the electoral boycott campaign, in opposition to the political establishment, in a way that leads the masses from their own ideas as the starting point, through the electoral boycott, toward the idea of fighting for council democracy.
Through our experience working alongside this boycott campaign and engaging in our own boycott activities, we noticed that a lot, if not most working people agree or at least don't disagree with your message, but the point is not to be satisfied with that, but to connect with that interest.
We understand that it is not feasible to carry out this work before this month's elections, and that the Committee must therefore restrict itself to simple propaganda work. However, in the years and elections to come, it will hopefully be possible to organize this kind of deeper and broader boycott campaign. This should be possible as long as the Swiss capitalists are still able to keep their pseudo-parliamentary machine running. However, we expect this to not last longer than a few decades; after all, their fuel is running out, and machines tend to rust in floodwater.
That is why we wholeheartedly support your initiative, which is a great step in the direction of making the pseudo-parliamentary system obsolete, not merely historically, but also politically.