Falling into the trap of the struggle for bourgeois democracy against populism

In August 2024, even before the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US president, the ICC proposed to other groups of the Communist Left a common Appeal[1] against the growing attempts by the whole of the bourgeois class to mobilise the population behind the false choice: being downtrodden by liberal democratic or right wing populist governments. The Appeal was designed to strengthen the anti-bourgeois democratic position that only the Communist Left is capable of defending consistently and intransigently in the working class.

Unfortunately this ICC Appeal was rejected by nearly all of its recipients just as a similar ICC appeal for a common internationalist statement against the imperialist war in Ukraine in February 2022 was rejected by most of the Communist Left groups.

Today, a year later, the ICC Appeal on the democratic campaigns has lost none of its relevance for the policy of the Communist Left. On the contrary it is even more relevant.

Six months after Trump's return to power, attacks on the working class have continued to intensify: mass militarised deportations and detentions of immigrant workers, massive cuts in welfare and health benefits, over 150,000 job losses for federal workers. A large-scale campaign was launched by both the ‘liberal’ wing of the bourgeoisie and the self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, etc.) - all those who align themselves with the Democratic Party - to mobilise the population against these measures. Not of course in order to create a working class struggle against these attacks; but to prevent such a struggle from developing. The propaganda of the liberals and the left is presenting the attacks of the populist right not as the fruit of the capitalist system as a whole for which they are also responsible, but of the populist flouting of democratic rules, the result of Trump’s contempt for the ‘rule of law’, a lack of respect for the independence of the bourgeois judiciary and for the sanctity of the US constitution and for all the other innumerable liberal humanitarian facades hiding the dictatorship of capital over labour.

The goal has been to orchestrate massive protest movements that propose not a working class response, on the terrain of its own class interests against all wings of the bourgeoisie, but to contain and divert revolt into an amorphous defence of the tradition of the democratic state against its populist deviations. And this has borne fruit.

The resistance to Trump’s regime in the US has been characterised by the patriotic protests of many federal workers against the mass layoffs engineered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the revolt on the terrain of the ‘democracy’ and bourgeois ‘law’ against the mass deportations of immigrant workers by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), and the humanitarian defence of Palestine nationalism against Trump’s support for the Israeli massacre of innocents in Gaza.

And these democratic protest actions have tended to be mirrored in other countries because the election of Trump has tended to increase the polarisation within the bourgeoises of other countries between populist and liberal democratic factions during 2025.

In South Korea the democratic factions mobilised huge demonstrations against the attempted coup of President Yoon Suk Yeol. In Turkey massive numbers came out into the streets ‘defending Turkish democracy’ in support of the leader of the opposition against the autocratic dictates of President Erdogan. In Serbia there were also mass democratic protests against the corruption of President Vucic.

There have been similar movements of greater or lesser extent but reflecting the same motivation in most other countries.

What must be the policy of the working class, which is the only force objectively interested in and capable of overthrowing the present moribund social system, towards these often mass movements of the population? And therefore, what is the role of the most advanced section of the working class whose task is to formulate the general line of march for the whole class?

Communists clearly must denounce both the democratic and populist attacks of the bourgeoisie and warn the working class of the danger of becoming mobilised behind what are in reality fights between different wings of the ruling class and call on workers to struggle on their own ground of the defence of their own interests against the ruling class as a whole. But which political tendency today fulfils this need?

We asked the same question in our Appeal:

“Who are the political forces which actually defend the real interests of the working class against the increasing attacks coming from the capitalist class? Not the inheritors of the Social Democratic parties who sold their souls to the bourgeoisie in the First World War, and along with the trade unions mobilised the working class for the multi-million slaughter of the trenches. Nor the remaining apologists for the Stalinist ‘Communist’ regime which sacrificed tens of millions of workers for the imperialist interests of the Russian nation in the Second World War. Nor Trotskyism or the official Anarchist current, which, despite a few exceptions, provided critical support for one or other side in that imperialist carnage. Today the descendants of the latter political forces are lining up, in a ‘critical’ way behind liberal and left-wing bourgeois democracy against the populist right to help demobilise the working class.

Only the Communist Left, presently few in number, has remained true to the independent struggle of the working class over the past hundred years. In the workers’ revolutionary wave of 1917-23 the political current led by Amadeo Bordiga, which dominated the Italian Communist Party at the time, rejected the false choice between the fascist and anti-fascist parties which had jointly worked to violently crush the revolutionary upsurge of the working class. In his text “The Democratic Principle” of 1922 Bordiga exposed the nature of the democratic myth in the service of capitalist exploitation and murder.

In the 1930s the Communist Left denounced both the left and right, fascist and anti-fascist factions of the bourgeoisie as the latter prepared the imperialist bloodbath to come. When the Second World War did come it was therefore only this current which was able to hold to an internationalist position, calling for the turning of the imperialist war into civil war by the working class against the whole of the capitalist class in every nation. The Communist Left refused the ghoulish choice between the democratic or fascist mass carnage, between the atrocities of Auschwitz or of Hiroshima.”

Today the Left Communist current is still minoritarian and ‘against the stream’ of all this political debris left over from the counter revolutionary period that lasted some 50 years after the defeat of the October Revolution. But the perspective of a renewed assault on world capitalism by the working class re-emerged after the renewal of the open capitalist economic crisis and the massive reawakening of international working-class struggle at the end of the 1960s. The reconstitution of the communist party on the basis of the positions of the Communist Left was thus posed.

The rejection of these ICC appeals by most groups of the Communist Left suggests that the majority of the groups in this political tradition are in a state of sclerosis and degeneration, unable to recognise that their own micro-parties are part of a broader tradition, nor to recognise the importance, for the working class today and in the future, of the intransigence on this position against democracy that the Italian faction of the Communist Left developed in the 1930s.

Consequently, most of these groups are unable to defend it consistently within the working class today and in the future, and in practice fall opportunistically into the dominant leftist discourse.

These groups have produced some articles and leaflets in their press in response to the current democratic campaigns and movements that reflect this confusion. One in particular stands out as typifying their response and so we will use it to highlight a more general illusion.

 

International Communist Tendency:
Blurring the distinction between proletarian movements and movements in defence of bourgeois democracy.

A 22 July 2025 article “In the Wake of the Capitalist Crisis: Protests and Riots - And the Need for an Independent Class Expression” on the ICT website, takes stock of the widespread development of social struggles we have mentioned above. The article then regrets that the working class has not been able to “assert itself as an independent political force in these demonstrations” and proposes as a solution that the working class resume its struggle at a higher level and form an international communist party to link this struggle to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In addition an internationalist struggle against imperialist war is required. So far, so good.

However, in the article’s account of the large protests against the attacks of the populist right in various countries over the past year there is no awareness that the counterpart to these attacks, and therefore the inspiration for these demonstrations, has been the democratic campaign of the rest of the bourgeoisie in the main capitalist countries - not over the attacks of the populist right themselves, but over their undemocratic form. And the bourgeoisie has been doing this for at least the past decade since populism became a dominant political trend within the bourgeois states.

Moreover, the article seems completely unaware that the bourgeoisie has long used its political divisions as a democratic weapon against its proletarian class adversary in order to pacify it and derail it if possible and drown its revolutionary struggle in blood as the Social Democratic led counter revolution in Germany in 1919 brutally showed. Yet the ICT is supposed, as part of the tradition of the Communist Left, to have drawn the lesson of the threat of democracy to the proletariat. We will look at this historic tradition of the Communist Left’s intransigent rejection of democracy a bit later on.

But, for now, we note the connected fact that the article is unable to identify the class nature of these democratic protests and skates over the vital distinction that revolutionaries must make between democratic protests and genuinely proletarian movements.

“This past year we have experienced some of the largest protests in decades in several countries. These struggles have not had a clear class character and have varied greatly in terms of main issues and triggering factors. But even if the working class has not dominated these protests, large parts of the class (and to some extent workers' organizations and strike activity) have clearly been on the move, and no part of the living conditions of proletarians is left untouched by the accelerating crisis of capitalism. Below we will briefly describe some of these protests, what we see as their limitations, and what we believe is the necessary way forward.”

The article then recounts the struggles in South Korea, Greece, Turkey, the US and elsewhere which in fact show that far from not having a ‘clear class character’ they are clearly, despite the presence of many workers within them, on the terrain of the defence of bourgeois democratic values against the authoritarianism and corruption linked to the growth of political populism, and nothing to do with the defence of the workers’ own interests as a class against the whole bourgeois class. [2]

The article therefore omits a warning to the class about involvement in these protests. On the contrary the article suggests that it is possible to take the protest movements ‘forward’ (to where?) by overcoming their supposed limitations. 

The article confirms this error by concluding: “In summary, these struggles can be said to be directed against corruption and an increasingly authoritarian development, and against a state that is no longer delivering its basic services in the face of deepening capitalist crisis. These are not purely proletarian struggles, but it is clear that there are extensive elements of the working class involved. They are expressions of a general dissatisfaction and frustration that is steaming under the surface, and sometimes must explode.”

The recent democratic struggles in various countries show that they are very far from being even ‘impure’ proletarian struggles. They show on the contrary that the general dissatisfaction and frustration of the population with their oppression are still pre-empted or recuperated by the bourgeoisie and drowned in movements to revive democracy and prevent a class struggle, despite the presence of extensive elements of the working class within them.

To be fair to the ICT, it should be pointed out that the article does draw the lessons of the Arab Spring of 2011 in Egypt, and points out that this mass movement of a decade and half ago, despite involving massive strikes in the textile industry, was drowned in the polluted ocean of the struggle for democracy. But the article fails to apply this lesson to the democratic struggles of 2025.

Given the failure of the ICT article to warn against the danger of confusing proletarian struggle with the struggle for democracy today, or warn against the danger of acting as though it’s possible to convert the latter into the former, it’s more understandable why this group should have refused the proposed ICC Appeal on democracy which anticipated and adopted a clear position against the democratic campaigns and struggles. This ICC Appeal effectively eliminates the possibility that such campaigns can be turned into class movements.

The rejection of the Appeal by the other groups was not because they disagreed with the letter of the Appeal but its spirit: because the Appeal highlights a gulf between the Communist Left and all other political tendencies (from the extreme right to the extreme left) and prevents any opportunist concessions to the latter.

Similarly, the ICT rejected the ICC’s Internationalist Appeal of 2022 not because it disagreed with this Appeals’ main arguments in theory but because in practice the ICT wanted to pretend that it was possible to create an internationalist movement against war beyond the intransigence of the tradition of the Communist Left: a pretence that gave rise to the bluff of the ‘No War but the Class War’ initiative.

 

Democratic movements can’t be turned into proletarian movements

The idea that the present-day bourgeois democratic movements are ambiguous or fluid in their class nature would mean that they can, potentially, be turned into authentically proletarian movements. And the ICT hasn’t hesitated to assume this ill-founded logic even though the two types of movement are completely antagonistic and incompatible with each other.

The article illustrates this illusion perfectly with a subhead slogan: “From Street war to class war”.

Another example is in a leaflet (11.06.2025) of their US affiliate, the Internationalist Workers Group, against the ICE offensive in America. While pointing out that the Democratic Party presidency of Barack Obama had deported more immigrants than Trump, the leaflet says that:

“Workers everywhere must be prepared to defend themselves, their neighbours, and their coworkers against ICE’s raids. From neighborhood action committees and workplace struggles to mass protests, the struggle must be fought by the working class using its immense strength.”[3]

But the leaflet neglects to mention that a class response in the neighbourhoods to the raids of ICE had already been sabotaged long in advance by the Democratic Party as these quotes in support of the struggle from its representatives indicate:

“He [Trump] has declared a war. Democracy is under assault before our eyes.” (Gavin Newsome, Governor of California). “We are in a war for the soul of our country, for our democracy.” (Dolores Huerta, ex-labour official and civil rights activist). “Protest, carried out peacefully, is the bedrock of our democracy.” (Mayor Andrew Ginther, Columbus, Ohio). “We are advocating for the defence of democracy, the pursuit of justice, and the rule of law.” (Jewish Democratic Council of America).

The desperate struggle of immigrant workers against the militarised actions of ICE today (an agency that has existed since the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001) had already been railroaded along the track of defending US democracy against Trumpian illegality, against the latter’s disregard for democratic laws and procedures. The same laws that previously concealed the brutality of the Democrats' deportations of illegal immigrants. In other words, the protests against ICE today are not a class struggle against the attacks of the capitalist state on immigrant workers but a campaign for the democratic lawful restriction and brutalisation of immigrant workers.

Yet the ICT leaflet calls for the working class to take charge of the struggle against ICE, to turn it into a class movement. This would mean though, if it were possible, a rejection of all national divisions and borders and the confrontation not only of the militarised face of the state in ICE but its democratic alternative face as well. In other words, it would mean a completely different movement on a different class terrain. This would only be possible if the working class had already developed its own class struggle for its own interests to this political level. But as the leaflet and the article mentioned admit, this is as yet far from a reality.

However, neither article nor leaflet draw attention to the workers’ wage struggles on an international scale over the past year and since 2022 (including in the US) that have been developing on a class terrain and are clearly distinguishable from the democratic campaigns and movements, and are the only basis for a completely different future political struggle of the proletariat as an autonomous movement. 

 

A repetition of other opportunist mistakes such as in the Black Lives Matter movement

Unfortunately, the leaflet and article are not an isolated mistake but a repetition of other major errors of the groups of the Communist Left like the one the ICT made in imagining that the BLM riots and protests against the police murder of George Floyd, which erupted in 2020 during Trump’s first presidency, was a working class movement:

“In 1965, just like in 2020, the police kill, and the class responds in defiance to the crooked social order they murder for. The struggle continues”.[4]

The ICT added the qualification that the movement “doesn’t go far enough” and shouldn’t support the Democratic Party. But this doesn’t make sense if the movement is already going in the wrong direction to begin with[5]. It makes even less sense when you consider that the experts in pretending that the mobilisations of democratic opposition can be ‘taken further’ - the leftists - already completely occupy this political terrain and don’t need the assistance of misguided Communist Left groups.

Like the article on today’s democratic struggles, the ICT then declared categorically, without concern for the actual situation of the working class, that “The urban rebellion needs to be transformed into world revolution”.

 

The origins and history of this opportunist wishful thinking on democratic struggles

The ICC Appeal against the democratic campaigns refers to the major acquisition of the Italian Left fraction Bilan in the 1930s, for which ‘democratic struggles’ and ‘proletarian struggle’ are antagonistic, any confusion on this issue proving fatal.

Bilan's position can be summarised as follows: The ‘democratic’ experiments since 1918 have shown that defending democracy negates class struggle, stifles proletarian consciousness and leads its vanguard to treachery:

“The proletariat finds the reason for its historic mission by denouncing the lie of the democratic principle in its own nature and in the need to suppress the differences of classes and the classes themselves.” (“Fascism? Democracy? Communism”. Vercesi, Bilan no. 13, December 1934)

The majority of Bilan later defended this anti-democratic principle at the expense of a split with a minority of the fraction which abandoned this principle and went to fight in the war in Spain in 1936 with the illusion that the military conflict of the democratic republican wing against the fascist wing of the bourgeoisie was the precursor to a proletarian revolution rather than, as reality proved, the preparation of the slaughter of the working class in inter-imperialist war. The minority of Bilan thus confirmed in practice Vercesi’s statement that the defence of democracy leads the proletarian vanguard to treachery.

In the 1930s, rejection of anti-fascism, i.e. rejection of the defence of bourgeois democracy, was the litmus test of a communist tendency.[6]

It should be noted that – without having to renounce their intervention alongside the Republicans in Spain – members of this minority of Bilan were later integrated into the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt), which is the ancestor of all the groups of the Communist Left that rejected the ICC's Appeal against the democratic campaigns.

The PCint was founded in Italy in 1943 as an internationalist party of the Italian left, but it was very heterogeneous politically. Many militants who had not broken with the positions of the Front and anti-fascism flocked to this new party. The very foundations on which the party was created contained all kinds of ambiguities, which meant that the party constituted a political regression from the positions of the Fraction before the war, the positions of Bilan. While remaining in the proletarian camp in a general sense, the PCint failed to distance itself from the erroneous positions of the Communist International, for example on the trade union question and the question of participation in electoral campaigns.

Only the Gauche Communiste de France group was able, during this period, to maintain an uncompromising position against bourgeois democracy and to continue the political work of Bilan after the Second World War.[7]

At the end of the Second World War, the PCInt developed an ambiguous attitude towards anti-fascist partisan groups in Italy – fully aligned with the imperialist war alongside the Allies – which it believed, due to the presence of workers among them, could somehow be rallied to the proletarian revolution thanks to the PCInt's participation in their ranks.[8]

When the PCInt split in 1952, this initial confusion surrounding its formation was not subsequently clarified, including by Battaglia Comunista (now the ICT), despite its criticism of Bordigism at the time of the split. It was therefore inevitable that this same conciliatory attitude towards democratic struggles would continue to manifest itself.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc regimes, Battaglia misinterpreted the population's anger against Nicolae Ceausescu's hated regime in Romania as a ‘genuine popular uprising’, when in reality the population was mobilising behind the more democratic opposition to replace him. Regarding the democratic demands of the workers' struggles of the time in Russia itself, Battaglia, while admitting that these demands could be used by a wing of the bourgeoisie, stated: "... For these masses imbued with anti-Stalinism and the ideology of western capitalism, the first possible and necessary demands are those for the overthrow of the 'Communist' regime, for a liberalization of the productive apparatus, and for the conquest of 'democratic freedoms" [9]

Clearly the ambiguity of these groups on the rejection of democracy has a long history. But the class intransigence on this principle must be strengthened by the Communist Left, not only for the class struggle today, but for the revolutionary struggle of the future, and for the formation of its class party, which will depend to a large degree on the rejection of all conciliation to one or other of the political formations of the ruling class whose divisions are used to derail this objective.

 

Como, 8.9.25

 

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[1] “For an Appeal of the Communist Left to the working class against the international campaign to mobilise for bourgeois democracy”, published on the ICC website and sent to all groups of the Communist Left (2024)

[2] For a full account, read the following two articles: “The bourgeoisie is trying to lure the working class into the trap of anti-fascism”; “Workers must not let themselves to be drawn into demonstrations for the defence of democracy”

[3] www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2025-06-11/against-deportation-and-imperialism-no-war-but-the-class-war

[4] www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2020-05-30/on-minneapolis-police-brutality-class-struggle

[5] For a full report, read: “The groups of the communist left faced with the Black Lives Matters protests: a failure to identify the terrain of the working class”

[6] See the pamphlet of the ICC: The Italian Communist Left 1926-1945, in particulier Chapter 4: “1933-39 Bilan - Milestones on the road to defeat: The Weight of the Counter-Revolution”

[7] For information about this group, from which the ICC originated, read: “The Italian Fraction and the French Communist Left”, International Review n° 90.

[8] “The ambiguities of the Internationalist Communist Party over the ‘partisans’ in Italy in 1943”; International Review n° 8.

[9] “Polemic: The wind from the East and the response of revolutionaries” International Review n° 61.