The Daily Worker

Yes. It Is a Big Vote

The biggest vote that was ever cast for a reactionary political order was cast in this election. The vote for Hoover, more than 17,000,000, plus the vote for Smith, more than 12,000,000, was an outright vote for the capitalist system, while the small vote that was cast this year for the socialist party was also a vote for the capitalist system in spite of the fact that thousands of workers followed this petty-capitalist party with the illusions created by the name "socialist" and by traditions long ago meaningless.

The unprecedented vote for Hoover, the scion of Teapot Dome, open advocate of the biggest finance-capital and of world imperialism, was the largest vote ever cast for any reactionary candidate in any country in the history of nations. While Smith, his rival, really represented reaction no less extreme, nevertheless, the vote for Hoover was on the whole somewhat more consciously cast in favor of the blood-and-iron, graft and monopoly which is today incorporated in the government at Washington.

Is this, then, "democracy"?

This is the dictatorship of the capitalist class.

But, large as the vote for capitalist reaction is in this election, there is on record a larger vote against capitalism. For the largest vote that was ever cast in any country in the world is the vote that is cast regularly by practically every adult person in a population of 160,000,000 in the elections in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This vote, however, is cast in favor of the socialization of society and the development toward a free Communist order, in support of the dictatorship of the working class.

It is democracy of the masses, as distinguished from the "democracy" of the dictatorship of the financial-capitalist oligarchy which rules through the Coolidges, the Hoovers and the Smiths.

What is the most important sign on the horizon of this country in this election? It is the small but growing support of the Workers (Communist) Party. This tends to build the revolutionary party which, by revolutionary leadership of the masses outside of the capitalist parliamentary forms, will bring the greatest democracy-the democracy of the working masses.