II. The Ideology of “Sovietism”

The political ideology of that part of the contemporary social-revolutionary movement that has taken on the colouring of Bolshevism recognizes only soviets as the form of political organization by which the social emancipation of the proletariat can take place.

The soviet state structure, leading to the gradual abolition of the state as an apparatus of social coercion, from this point of view appears to be the historically conditioned product of a lengthy social development, a social form growing out of the class contradictions of capitalism when these have become acute at the highest imperialistic stage of its development. As the most suitable form for the class dictatorship of the proletariat, the soviet structure is seen as the most perfect form of genuine democracy, one that corresponds to the stage of development of society when the old bourgeois democracy has completely exhausted itself.

However, every perfection has a dangerous characteristic. That part of humanity untroubled by critical reasoning, completely disregarding the nuances of “grey [drab] theory,” becomes impatient to adopt perfection, without taking note that the perfection in question is supposed to be based on particular historical prerequisites. The metaphysical thinking of the common masses has absolutely no regard for the dialectical negation of the absolute. It does not know the category of relativity. Once the true, authentic, and perfect form of social life has at last been discovered, it insists on making this perfect form a reality.

And we see how this “perfection”—the soviet form of democracy—turns out, contrary to theory, to be suitable for all peoples and societies, no matter their stage of social development. All that is necessary is that the people concerned should desire to modify the structure of the state system under which they are suffering. The soviet form of organization becomes the political slogan for the proletariat of the most developed industrial countries—the United States, England, Germany—as well as for overwhelmingly agricultural Hungary, peasant Bulgaria, and for Russia, where agriculture is just emerging from the stage of subsistence.

But the universal efficacy of the soviet form of organization does not end there. Communist publicists write seriously of soviet overturns emerging in Asiatic Turkey, among the Egyptian fellahin, and in the pampas and grasslands of South America. In Korea, the founding of a soviet republic is apparently only a matter of time, while in India, China, and Persia the soviet idea is apparently advancing with the speed of an express train. As for the Bashkirs, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen of Turkestan and the mountain dwellers of Dagestan, it is well-known that the soviet system has already been grafted onto the primordial, undeveloped conditions of their social lives.

Contrary to Marxist theory, which originally provided its justification, the soviet form of organization turns out to be a universal state form that can solve any problems and contradictions of social development, not only those of highly developed capitalism, characterized by extreme intra-national antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In theory, peoples entering into soviet statehood are expected to have in fact, or at least in their thinking, passed through the stage of bourgeois democracy. They are expected to have freed themselves from a number of illusions: parliamentarism, the need for the “four-tails” [universal, direct, equal, and secret] of suffrage, the need for freedom of the press, etc.¹ Only then can they know the supreme perfection of soviet statehood. In practice, however, peoples skip through all the stages, possessed by the metaphysical negation of any relatively progressive categories. Kyrgyz nomads, Brazilian shepherds, and Egyptian fellahin resolve: “[But let your communication be] Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of social betrayal.”² If soviets are the perfect form of the state, if they are the key to the destruction of social inequality and poverty, then who would willingly put on the yoke of less perfect forms so that, through painful practice, they could learn their contradictions? Having tasted the sweet, who would wish to taste the bitter?³

In February 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, Trotsky and [Lev] Kamenev, with great tenacity, defended the principle of self-determination of peoples.⁴ They demanded from victorious Germany that this principle be applied—through universal and equal suffrage—in Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. The relative historic value of democracy was still recognized at that time. A year later, however, at the congress of the Russian Communist Party, the intrepid [Nikolai] Bukharin was already demanding that the principle of “self-determination of peoples” be replaced with the principle of “self-determination of the working classes.”⁵ Vladimir Lenin succeeded in maintaining the principle of self-determination—for underdeveloped peoples—just as some philosophers who, not wanting to quarrel with the church, would limit the scope of their materialist teachings to animals deprived of the benefits of divine grace. The Communist congress refused to follow Bukharin, not because of doctrinal hesitations, but because of considerations of a diplomatic nature, considerations that were expressed by Lenin: it was thought unwise to alienate from the Communist International the Hindus, Persians, and other peoples who, as yet deprived of grace, were in a situation of nationwide struggle against the foreign oppressor. In essence, of course, the Communists were in full agreement with Bukharin. Having tasted the sweet, who would offer their neighbour the bitter?

When the Turkish consul in Odessa put out an unsubstantiated story about the triumph of a soviet revolution in the Ottoman Empire, not one Russian newspaper refused to take seriously this obvious canard. Not a single publication expressed the slightest skepticism concerning the ability of the brave Turks to jump over the stages of self-determination, the “four-tails” [universal, direct, equal, and secret] of suffrage, bourgeois parliamentarism, etc. The hoax was completely successful.

Because mysticism provides a breeding ground for hoaxes. The very concept of a political form that, by virtue of its particular character, can surmount all economic, social, and national contradictions, in the midst of which advances the revolution, generated by the world war—this is nothing less than mystical.

The congress of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany at Leipzig, where its members puzzled over how to reconcile “All power to the soviets!” with the foundations of a democratic system and with the traditional ideas of social democracy concerning the political forms of the socialist revolution, showed once again how profoundly today’s popular idea—that of “All power to the soviets!”—is imbued with social mysticism.

The mystery escapes the understanding of the revolution’s true believers with the same persistence that the mystery of the immaculate conception escapes the understanding of the Christian faithful.

Sometimes it escapes the understanding of its own creator. We got the news that the soviet idea had triumphed in Hungary. It seemed, at first, that everything had been done “according to the ritual.” But one essential detail was missing. It was reported that the Hungarian “soviet” did not come into being as a result of a civil war within the Hungarian proletariat (we shall see later how important this detail is). It was, on the contrary, the product of the unity of the Hungarian proletariat. In a telegram, the complete text of which appeared in the foreign press, an astonished Lenin asked [Hungarian Communist leader] Béla Kun: “What proof do you have that your revolution is truly communist, and not merely socialist, that is to say (!) a revolution of social-traitors?”⁶

Béla Kun’s reply, published in the Russian press, was evasive and betrayed some embarrassment. He reported that power rested in the hands of a group of five persons—two Communists, two Social Democrats, and “the fifth in the same category as your Lunacharsky.” The mystery had grown deeper.

As a result of the extreme class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the proletariat overthrows the highest forms of democratic statehood. The proletariat creates thereby a political form that is the specific expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the starting point of the “soviet idea.” But the final point in the development of the “soviet idea” is that it is a political form universally applicable to all sorts of social upheavals, a political form that embraces all the diverse content of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century.

In this dialectical contradiction, the mystery of “sovietism” is revealed, a mystery before which dogmatic political thinking on both the Left and the Right is powerless.

The mechanism by which people’s revolutions unfolded in the preceding historical period had the following characteristics. The active factors in the social upheavals were minorities of those social classes in whose interest the various phases of the revolution were carried out. These minorities made use of the vague discontent and sporadic explosions of anger arising among the dispersed masses of their respective classes, carrying the masses along the path of overturning the old social relations. At the same time, these active minorities made efforts to overcome the inertia [of the majority] through the concentrated energy [of the active minority] and, sometimes successfully, to crush the passive resistance of these same masses when the latter refused to move forward toward the broadening and deepening of the revolution. A dictatorship of an active revolutionary minority, a dictatorship that sometimes took on a terrorist character, was the natural result of the situation bequeathed by the old social order to the broad masses of the people, now called on by the revolution to actively make their own history.

Where the active revolutionary minority was not able to organize such a dictatorship or maintain it for some time, as was the case in Germany, Austria, and France in 1848, we observed the incompleteness of the revolutionary process, the incompleteness of the revolutions.

As Engels put it, the revolutions of the previous historical period were the work of conscious minorities exploiting the spontaneous outrage of majorities lacking consciousness.

Of course, the word “conscious” should be understood here in a relative sense. It was a question of pursuing certain political and social goals, however contradictory and utopian they may have been. The ideology guiding the Jacobins in 1793–94 was completely imbued with utopianism. It cannot be considered to have been the product of an awareness of the objective process of historical development. But in relation to the mass of peasants, small producers, and workers in whose name they demolished the Old Regime, the Jacobins represented a conscious vanguard whose destructive work was subordinate to definite positive objectives.

In the 1890s, Engels arrived at the conclusion that the epoch of revolutions effected by masses lacking consciousness under the leadership of conscious minorities had closed forever. From now on, he believed, revolution would be prepared by decades of political, organizational, and cultural work by socialist parties and would be carried out actively and consciously by the interested masses themselves.

Without question, this idea of Engels’s was assimilated by the great majority of modern socialists—assimilated to such an extent that the slogan “All power to the soviets!” was originally launched as an answer to the question: During the revolutionary period, how does one ensure the most active, conscious, and self-active [samodeiatel’ni] participation of the masses themselves in all the processes of social creativity?

Read Lenin’s articles and speeches of 1917 and you will discover this basic motif: “All power to the soviets!” means . . .

• the direct, self-active [samodeiatel’ni] participation of the masses in the whole process of managing production and public affairs;
• the obliteration of all forms of mediation between those who govern and those who are governed, the obliteration of all social hierarchy;
• the maximum possible erasure of the boundaries between legislative and executive powers, between the apparatus of production and the apparatus of administration, between the national state machinery and the machinery of local self-government;
• the maximum freedom of action for the masses with a minimum of autonomy for their elected representatives;
• the complete abolition of all bureaucracy.

Parliamentarism was repudiated not only as the arena where two enemy classes collaborate politically and engage in “peaceful” combat, but also as a mechanism of public administration. And this repudiation was motivated, above all, by the contradiction that arises between this mechanism and the unlimited revolutionary self-activity [samodeiatel’nost] of the masses and their direct participation in government and production.

In August 1917, Lenin wrote:

The workers, having conquered political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, tear it down to its foundations, leaving no stone unturned, and replace it with a new one, consisting of the same workers and salaried employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats immediate measures will be taken that were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a worker’s wage; (3) immediate transition to ensuring that everyone performs the functions of control and supervision, so that everyone becomes a bureaucrat for a time and that, therefore, no one may become [an actual] bureaucrat.

“Since the majority of the people suppress their oppressors,” he writes, “a ‘special force’ for suppression is no longer necessary. . . . Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged bureaucracy, commanders of the standing army), the majority can directly fulfil all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.”⁷

Elsewhere, he wrote of the “substitution of a [universal] people’s militia for the police” as well as proposing that “judges and other officials, both civil and military . . . be elected by the people with the right to recall any of them at any time by decision of a majority of their electors.”⁸ He wrote of “workers’ control” in its original sense, and of the direct participation of the people in the courts, not only in the form of a jury trial but also in the form of abolishing specialized prosecutors and defence counsels and by deciding questions of guilt through [the vote of] all present. That is how the overcoming of old bourgeois democracy through the soviet system was interpreted in theory—and sometimes in practice.

The first constitution, which was adopted at the Third Congress of Soviets on the initiative of V. Trutovskii, implemented the conception of “All power to the soviets!” when it gave comprehensive authority to the volost’ soviet within the volost’ [subdistrict or county], to the uezd soviet within the uezd [district], and to the guberniia soviet within the guberniia [province], while the coordinating functions of each of the higher soviet organs were limited exclusively to settling differences among the bodies/organs subordinated to it.⁹

Anticipating the objection that such extreme federalism might undermine national unity, Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution, the same pamphlet cited earlier:

Only those who are imbued a with petit-bourgeois superstitious faith in the state can assume that the destruction of the bourgeois state machine means the destruction of centralism! Now if the proletariat and the poor peasants take state power into their own hands, organize themselves quite freely in communes, and unite all the communes in striking at capital, in crushing the resistance of the capitalists, in transferring the privately owned railways, factories, land, and everything else to the entire nation, to the whole of society, won’t that be centralism?¹⁰

Reality has cruelly shattered all these illusions. The “soviet state” has not established the practice of either election or recall of public officials and commanding staff. It has not abolished the professional police. It has not dissolved the courts into the direct law-making of the masses. It has not done away with social hierarchy in production. It has not destroyed the coercive power of the [national] state over the individual communes. On the contrary, in its development the soviet state displays the opposite tendency. In its behaviour, it displays a tendency toward intensified centralism of the state, a tendency toward the utmost possible strengthening of the principles of hierarchy and coercion. It displays a tendency toward the development of an entire specialized apparatus of repression. It displays a tendency toward greater independence of elective bodies from the control of the electoral masses. It displays a tendency toward total freedom of the executive organs from the representative institutions that appoint them. The “power of the soviets” has been realized in life as “Soviet Power,” a power that originated in the soviets but has steadily become independent from the soviets.

We must assume that the Russian ideologists of the system have not abandoned their idea that a stateless social order should be the goal of the revolution. But as they see matters now, the road to this stateless social order no longer lies in the progressive “withering away” of the functions and institutions forged in the process of the development of the bourgeois state, as they said they had imagined in 1917. Now it appears that the road to this stateless social order lies in the expansion of these functions and in the revival, in an altered form, of many of the state institutions typical of the bourgeois era. They continue to reject democratic parliamentarism; however, they no longer reject along with it those instruments of state power to which parliamentarism is a partial counterbalance within bourgeois society: a counterbalance to the bureaucracy, the police, the standing army with a command staff independent of the soldiers, courts that are beyond the control of the community, and so on.

The transitional revolutionary state, according to theory, in contrast to the bourgeois state, should be an organ for the “coercion of the minority by the majority”—an organ of majority rule [vlast]. In reality, it turned out to be the same organ of minority rule [vlast] (of a different minority, of course).

Realization of this fact leads to an open or covert replacement of the power of the soviets [councils] with the power of a particular party. Little by little, the party becomes the principal state institution, the core of the entire system of the “republic of soviets [councils].”

The evolution accomplished by the idea of the “soviet state” in Russia sheds light on the psychological roots of the emergence of this idea in other countries, where the revolutionary process of today is as yet in its initial phase.

The “soviet system” turns out to be a means of putting in place and maintaining in power a revolutionary minority that seeks to defend those interests of the majority that the latter either has not recognized as its own or has not recognized as its own sufficiently so as to defend them with maximum energy and determination.

That this is so, is demonstrated by the fact that in many countries—as also happened in Russia—the idea of “Soviet Power” is used against the existing, real soviets [councils] that were created during the first manifestations of the revolution. It is thus directed, first and foremost, against the majority of the working class and against the political tendencies that dominated within the proletariat at the beginning of the revolution. Thus, the idea of “Soviet Power”—in terms of its actual political content—becomes an alias for the dictatorship of an extreme minority of the proletariat.

This is so true that when the failure of 3 July 1917 [the so-called July Days] demonstrated the stubborn resistance of the soviets to the onslaught of Bolshevism, Lenin disclosed the [truth about the] alias in his pamphlet On Slogans and proclaimed that the slogan “All power to the soviets!” was henceforth out of date and had to be replaced with the slogan “All power to the Bolshevik Party.”¹¹

But this “materialization” of the symbol, this disclosure of its true content, proved to be only a moment in revolutionary development, one that continued to take place under the sign of the “mystical” idea of the perfect political form, “at last discovered,” a political form possessing the capacity to reveal the social essence of the proletarian revolution.¹²

Power held by the minority of a given class (or an alliance [of classes]) organized into a party in the name of the real interests of the class (or classes), is in no way something new, arising from antagonisms of the most recent phase of capitalism, fundamentally distinguishing the new revolutions from the old ones. On the contrary, the dictatorship by such a minority is something common to both, that makes today’s revolution similar to those of the preceding historical period. If rule by a minority is the basic principle of the governmental mechanism in question, it is of little importance that—due to historical circumstances—this principle has assumed the form of soviets.

Indeed. The events of 1792–94 in France offer an example of a revolution that was realized by means of a minority dictatorship in the form of the dictatorship of the Jacobin party. The Jacobin party embraced the most active, the most “left-leaning,” elements of the petite bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the declassed intelligentsia, and the lumpen proletariat. It exercised its dictatorship through a network of various institutions: communes, sections, clubs, and revolutionary committees. In this network, informal organizations established by workers in industry, of a type similar to our workers’ soviets, were completely absent. Otherwise, however, among the network of institutions that implement the dictatorship of the minority, we see institutions that are similar to those of the Jacobin dictatorship. The party cells of today differ in no way from the Jacobin Clubs. The revolutionary committees of 1794 and 1919 are entirely alike. Today’s komitety bednoty [committees of the poor peasants] are analogous to the committees and clubs on which the Jacobin dictatorship based itself in the villages, building them mainly among the poor elements.¹³ Workers’ soviets, factory committees, and trade-union centres leave their mark on the revolutions of our time, giving them their specific character. This, of course, reflects the influence that the proletariat in heavy industry now has on the content and course of the revolution. Nevertheless, such specifically class-based organizations, such purely proletarian formations, having grown from a modern industrial milieu, serve as the mechanical instruments for the dictatorship of a certain party minority, much as did the auxiliaries of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1792–94, though with completely different roots.

In the specific conditions of contemporary Russia, this party dictatorship primarily reflects the interests and sentiments of the proletarian sections of the population. This will be even more the case when soviet soviet power is consolidated in the more advanced industrial countries. But the decisive factor is not the nature of the soviets or their connections to industrial units. After 3 July 1917, we saw that Lenin envisaged the direct dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party, thereby bypassing the soviets. We see now that in some places such a dictatorship is fully realized through the channel of revolutionary committees and party cells. All of this does not prevent it from retaining the strongest connection with the proletariat, in class terms reflecting above all the interests and aspirations of the urban working class.

On the other hand, as an organizational form, the soviets can be filled with a different class content, since soviets of soldiers and peasants appear on the stage alongside the workers’ soviets. Accordingly, in countries that are economically less developed than Russia, the Soviet Power may represent something other than the proletariat. It may represent the party dictatorship of a section of the peasantry, or other non-proletarian section of the population. This is the solution to the mystery of the “soviet system.” A form derived from the specific features of a working-class movement corresponding to the highest development of capitalism proves equally suitable for countries without either large-scale capitalist production or a powerful domestic bourgeoisie, or a proletariat that has gone through the school of the class struggle—it is suitable for Egypt, for Yugoslavia, for Brazil, even for Korea.

In other words, in the developed countries, the proletariat has recourse to a soviet form of dictatorship from the moment its movement toward a social revolution encounters the impossibility of exercising its power except in the form of the dictatorship of a minority, a minority within the proletariat itself.

The theory of the “form at last discovered,” the theory of the political form that, while belonging to the specific conditions of the imperialist phase of capitalism, is the only form that can realize the social emancipation of the proletariat, constitutes the historically necessary illusion through which the revolutionary segment of the proletariat renounces its belief in its ability to lead the majority of the population of the country and resurrects the forms of the Jacobin dictatorship of a minority, created by the bourgeois revolution of the eighteenth century—a revolutionary method that had been rejected by the working class to the extent that it had freed itself from the spiritual heritage of petit-bourgeois revolutionism. As soon as the soviet system has played its role as an alias under the cover of which the Jacobin and Blanquist idea of a minority dictatorship is reborn in the ranks of the proletariat, then the soviet system acquires a universal character, universally applicable to any kind of revolutionary upheaval.¹⁴ All specific content associated with a definite phase of capitalist development is necessarily eliminated. The soviet system now becomes a universal form of revolution, supposedly suitable to any revolution regardless of political divisions, inactivity, and lack of internal cohesion among the masses, provided only that the bases of the old regime have been radically undermined through the course of historical development.

So, the secret of the triumph of the [idea of the] “soviet system” in the consciousness of the agitated proletarian masses of Europe lies in the loss of faith—by these revolutionary masses—in their ability to directly lead the majority of the people on the road to socialism. Since this popular majority, currently opposing socialism either actively or passively—or as yet continuing to follow parties that reject socialism—includes significant strata of the proletariat, the principle of the “soviet system” implies not only the rejection of democracy in the framework of the nation but also its elimination within the working class itself.

In theory, soviet rule does not abolish democracy, but only limits its scope to the working class and the “poorest peasantry.” After all, the essence of democracy is not expressed—either exclusively or in principle—by absolute universal suffrage. The “universal” suffrage that we managed to win in the most advanced bourgeois countries before the Russian Revolution excluded women, the military, and sometimes young people up to the age of twenty-five. These exceptions did not render undemocratic these countries’ systems, as long as among those called on to exercise the people’s sovereignty, there existed a degree of democracy consistent with the preservation of the capitalist foundations of the social system.

For this reason, excluding from the circle of voters all bourgeois, rentiers, those who use hired labour, and even members of the liberal professions—something Plekhanov famously accepted for the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat—does not in itself make the soviet system something absolutely opposed to democracy.¹⁵ On the contrary, such exceptions are entirely compatible with the development of other, no less significant principles of democracy. In spite of the limitation of electoral rights, this system is still a “more perfect democracy” than all the democratic regimes we have known to date, which have been based on the social domination of the [subordinate classes by the] bourgeoisie.

The exclusion of the bourgeois minority from participation in state power may be (as we think) both useless from the point of view of consolidating the power of the majority and directly harmful, since it leads to an impoverishment of the process through which the social content of the popular will is expressed in the electoral struggle.¹⁶ But that alone does not eradicate the democratic character of the soviet system.

That democratic character is eradicated when the basic features of democracy are suppressed in the relations between citizens who stand inside the privileged circle, designated as the bearers of state power.

[Consider the following:]

• Absolute subordination of the executive apparatus to popular representation (even though, in the case of the soviets, popular representation does not include all citizens).
• The right to elect and recall the administration, judges, the police. Democracy within the army.
• The control and open, public character of all administrative acts.
• Freedom to form voluntary groupings of citizens (though this may mean freedom only for the “privileged,” in the above-mentioned sense of the term).
• Inviolability of citizens’ individual and collective rights and protection from any abuses on the part of any individuals in power or official institutions.
• Freedom of citizens to discuss all matters of state. The right of citizens to freely exert pressure on the governmental mechanism, etc., etc.

These are the integral features of a democratic regime, no matter how limited the circle of citizens to whom they apply. (After all, we have historical examples of democratic republics of slaveholders—Athens, for example.)

The theoreticians of the soviet system have never rejected these features of democracy as applicable to the internal system of the soviets. On the contrary, they argued that, given the restricted electoral base of the soviets, these principles would develop as they never could on the broader electoral base of capitalist democracies. Let us recall Lenin’s promise about the participation of all working people in government, of all soldiers in the election of officers, and the abolition of all police and of all bureaucracy. The rejection of all democratism within the soviet system presupposes a recognition by those sections of the proletariat advocating such a rejection that either the working class forms a minority in a population that is hostile to it, or that it is deeply divided into factions fighting among themselves for power—or both.

In all these cases, the true essence of the popularity of the soviet system is found in the desire to ensure that the will of a certain revolutionary minority prevails, by suppressing the will of all other groups of the population, including proletarian groups.

Describing the fascination with the idea of the soviets that swept through the Swiss proletariat, Charles Naine, the well-known Swiss socialist, writes:

At the beginning of 1918, there was genuine excitement. In Switzerland, without delay, soviets of worker, soldier and peasant deputies had to be formed, and a red guard established. It was up to the conscious minority to impose its will on the majority, by brute force if necessary. The great mass of workers was in such economic bondage, it was impossible for them to liberate themselves through their own efforts. Moreover, educated and trained by their masters, they were incapable of understanding their real interests. It was up to the conscious minority to free the masses from this tutelage. Only then would the masses be able to understand. Scientific socialism being the truth itself, the minority possessing the knowledge of this truth had a duty to impose it on the masses. Parliament is nothing more than an obstacle, an instrument of reaction. The bourgeois press, which poisons the minds of the people, must be suppressed, or at least muzzled. Freedom and democracy can only be revived later, after the socialist dictators have transformed the regime. Then the citizens will be able to form a true democracy, because they will be freed from the economic regime that oppresses them and keeps them from manifesting their true will.¹⁷

One has to be a hypocrite or completely oblivious not to see that Charles Naine has presented here, freed from verbal adornments, the true ideology of Bolshevism. It has been assimilated in this form by the masses in our country [Russia], Germany, Hungary—wherever the Bolshevik movement has made its appearance.

Verbal adornments do not always help to obscure this essence of the matter. Take, for example, the article by P. Orlovskii¹⁸ in Pravda, no. 101, 13 May 1919, entitled “The Communist International and the World Soviet Republic.” The author, in his own words, deals with “the very essence of the matter”—that is, with the soviet system. “The soviet system,” he writes, “in itself means only the participation of the masses in public administration, but it does not assure them either dominance or even preponderant influence.”¹⁹

In this tirade, if we substitute the words “parliamentary democracy” for the words “soviet system,” we get the same elementary truth as the one expressed by Orlovskii. After all, while democratic parliamentarism, implemented consistently, ensures the participation of the masses in public administration, it does not in itself guarantee their political dominance.

What conclusion does Orlovskii draw from this?

“Only,” he says, “when actual state power in the soviet system passes into the hands of the Communists, that is to say the party of the working class, will workers and the exploited not merely obtain access to state power, but also have an opportunity to rebuild the state on new principles that meet their needs,” and so on.

In other words, the soviet system is good only insofar as it is in the hands of the Communists. For:

As soon as the bourgeoisie succeeds in getting its hands on the soviets (as was the case in Russia under Kerensky and now—in 1919—in Germany), it will use them to fight against the revolutionary workers and peasants, just as the tsars used the soldiers, who came from the people, to oppress the people. Therefore, soviets can fulfil a revolutionary role—that is, to free the working masses—only when the Communists play the leading role. And for the same reason, the growth of soviet institutions in other countries is a revolutionary phenomenon in the proletarian sense—not merely in the petit-bourgeois sense—only when this growth goes hand in hand with the triumph of communism.²⁰

It is impossible to express it more clearly. The “soviet system” is the scaffolding by which “state power passes into the hands of the Communists.” The scaffolding is removed as soon as it has fulfilled its historic mission. While never spoken out loud, this is, in fact, what is done in real life.

At the same time, the premise is always: “The Communist Party, that is to say, the party of the working class.” Not one of their parties, nor even the most advanced party best representing the general class interests of the proletariat, but the only truly working-class party.

Orlovskii’s idea is well-illustrated in the resolutions adopted by the Communist conference at Kashin, published in Pravda, no. 3, 1919:

The middle peasants may be admitted (!) to power, even when they do not belong to the party, if they accept the soviet platform—with the reservation that the leading and dominant role in the soviets must remain with the party of the proletariat. It is to be seen as totally unacceptable and dangerous to leave the soviets entirely in the hands of the non-party middle peasantry. That would expose all the achievements of the proletarian revolution to the danger of complete destruction at a moment when the decisive and final struggle with international reaction is taking place.²¹

To be sure, the Communists at Kashin reveal the secret meaning of “dictatorship” only insofar as it is applied to the peasantry. But, as everyone knows, the question of the dictatorship of the “middle worker” (there is such a term) is solved in the same manner. This is precisely the essence of “worker and peasant” power and not merely workers’ power.

No doubt, what originally made “sovietism” so attractive to socialists was their utmost confidence in the collective intelligence of the working class, their confidence in the workers’ ability to attain, by means of their dictatorship over the bourgeoisie, a condition of complete self-governance, without the shadow of tutelage by a minority. The first enthusiasm for the soviet system was an enthusiasm for escaping the framework of a hierarchically organized state.

In the eloquent report presented by Ernest Däumig (Left Independent)²² at the first Pan-German Congress of Councils (16–21 December 1918), we read:

The current German revolution has damnably little confidence in its own strength. Naturally, the spirit of military subservience and passive obedience still weighs heavily on it, a legacy of centuries. This spirit cannot be killed by electoral struggle or by election leaflets distributed among the masses every two or three years. It can only be killed by a sincere and powerful effort to maintain the German people in a condition of permanent political activity. And this can only be accomplished in the soviet [council] system. We must finish, once and for all, with all the old administrative machinery of the empire, of the individual [German] states and municipalities. Self-governance, instead of governance from above, should more and more become the aim of the German people.

And at the same congress, the Spartacist Heckert declared:

The Constituent Assembly will be a reactionary institution even if it has a socialist majority, precisely because the German people are a completely apolitical people who want to be led and who have not shown any evidence of a desire to take their destinies into their own hands. Here in Germany, we wait to have liberty brought to us by leaders, not from the bottom up.

“The soviet system,” he says elsewhere, “is the one that transfers direct responsibility for building society to the broad masses of the proletariat, while the Constituent Assembly is an organization that transfers this responsibility to the hands of the leaders.”

But here’s the interesting thing. In the same report in which Däumig glorifies the soviets [councils] as guarantors of the self-governance of the working class, he gives a very gloomy description of the actual German soviets [councils], personified by their congress of 1918:

Gentlemen, no revolutionary parliament in history has shown such a timid, narrow, pedestrian spirit as the parliament of the revolution assembled here.

Where are the great, uplifting, spiritual ideals that dominated the French National Convention? Where is the youthful enthusiasm of March 1848? Not a trace of either can be seen today.

And it is precisely when Däumig discovers the “timid, narrow, pedestrian” spirit that dominates the German soviets [councils], that he seeks the key to all the problems raised by the social revolution in the slogan “All power to the soviets!”²³ All power to the timid, narrow, and pedestrian as a means of skipping the pedestrian character of universal suffrage! A strange paradox! But this paradox makes perfect sense, if in the “subconscious” sphere the process is already taking place that, when it passes into the sphere of consciousness, will find its expression in P. Orlovskii’s formula: “With the aid of the soviet system, state power passes into the hands of the Communists.” In other words, through the intermediary of the soviets, the revolutionary minority subjugates the “pedestrian” majority.

Note that Däumig is in fact right. In the first all-German Congress of Soviets [the First German Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils], Scheidemann’s partisans and the soldiers held an overwhelming majority. The congress, you might say, smelled of timidity and pedestrianism. Four and a half years of “class collaboration” and “the brotherhood of the trenches” had not failed to leave their mark both on the worker in overalls and the worker in a grey military overcoat.

Similarly, our Bolsheviks were right when, in June 1917, they shrugged their shoulders in indignation at the hopelessly timid spirit that dominated the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, despite the fact that it—unlike its German counterpart—was headed by a politician like I. G. Tsereteli, an individual who had an outstanding ability to raise the masses above their everyday timidity.²⁴ We, the [Menshevik] Internationalists, who had the pleasure of being in the minority at this congress, also despaired at the timidity and lack of understanding shown again and again by the immense “swamp” of the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary majority in the face of great world events and the most complex socio-political problems. And, we could not understand why the Bolsheviks sitting to the left of us—who were even more indignant at the spirit [dominating the congress]—nonetheless called for “All power to the soviets!” We could not understand them when, during this congress, they organized a demonstration with the object of forcing such an assembly to take all power into its own hands.

As was mentioned above, fear of the triumph by “the timid majority” prompted even Lenin, after 3 July 1917, to propose removing from the agenda the slogan “All power to the soviets!,” recognizing this old slogan as being outdated, and replacing it with “All power to the Bolsheviks!”²⁵ We might perhaps find a German parallel to this in the Spartacist decision to boycott the election to the second (April) all-German Congress of Councils [Soviets].

The subsequent course of the Russian Revolution cured Lenin of his temporary lack of faith. The soviets fulfilled their intended role. A wave of spontaneous bourgeois-revolutionary enthusiasm swept through the broad masses of workers and peasants, dissolving their “timid, narrow, and pedestrian” spirit (along with something else). On the crest of this wave, the Communists seized the machinery of power. Then the role of the rebellious self-active [samodeiatel’ni] element was played out. The servant had done its work. [The servant could now go and leave the stage.]²⁶ The state which had been constructed with the aid of the “power of the soviets” became the “Soviet Power.” The Communist minority organized into this state insulated itself, once and for all, against any new recurrence of the “narrow” and “pedestrian” sentiments in the masses. The idea that had glimmered in the sphere of the subconscious could finally be brought to fruition in the theory of P. Orlovskii, sanctioned by the practice of the Kashin Communists.

Dictatorship as a means of protecting the people from their innate reactionary “pedestrianism”—such was the historical origin of revolutionary communism at the time when the proletariat began to see through the lies and hypocrisy of the liberty proclaimed by capitalism.

Buonarotti, the theoretician of Babeuf’s communist conspiracy of 1796, concluded that as soon as power was taken over by the communists, they would need to isolate France by an impassable barrier in order to shield the masses from pernicious influences coming from other countries. He demanded that no publication should appear in France without the authorization of the communist government.²⁷ According to Wilhelm Weitling, writing in the 1840s:

All Socialists, with the exception of the followers of Fourier . . . are agreed that the form of government which is called the rule of the people is totally unsuitable, and even dangerous, for the young principle of social organization about to be realized.²⁸

Étienne Cabet wrote that in each city in a socialist society, there could be only a single newspaper, which would of course be issued by the government.²⁹ The people were to be protected from the temptation of seeking the truth in the clash of opposing opinions.

At the political trial arising from the 1839 insurrection led by Blanqui and Barbes, a communist catechism was found in the possession of the accused. This catechism dealt, among other things, with the problem of dictatorship:

Unquestionably, after a revolution carried out in the spirit of our ideas, it will be necessary to create a dictatorial power whose mission is to lead the revolutionary movement. This dictatorial power will necessarily draw its strength from the assent of the armed population, which, acting for the common good and for humanitarian progress, will obviously represent the enlightened will of the great majority of the nation. . . .

In order to be strong, to be able to act quickly, dictatorial power will have to be concentrated in as few men as possible. . . .

To undermine the old society, to destroy it to its very foundations, to overthrow the internal and external enemies of the Republic, to prepare the new foundations of social organization, and, finally, to lead the people from the revolutionary government to a regular republican government—such are the responsibilities of the dictatorial power and the limits of its duration.³⁰

The question is: How great is the theoretical distance separating those that stand for “Soviet Power,” in the manner of P. Orlovskii and the Kashin Communists, from the Parisian communists of 1839?

The working class is the product of capitalist society. As such, its mindset is subjected to the influence of this society. Its consciousness is developed under the pressure of its bourgeois masters. School and church, the barracks and the factory, the press and social life—in short, all the factors shaping the consciousness of the proletarian masses—are powerful conductors of the influence of bourgeois ideas and attitudes. That is fairly obvious. As Charles Naine pointed out in the lines cited above, for revolutionary socialists, at least in Switzerland, precisely the observation of these facts served as the starting point for their belief in the necessity of a dictatorship by a minority of conscious proletarians over all the people, and even over the majority of the proletariat itself.

Emile Pouget, the prominent syndicalist leader, wrote:

Were the democratic mechanism to be applied in workers’ organizations, the indifference of the unconscious and non-unionized majority would paralyze any action. But the minority is not inclined to abdicate its claims and aspirations before the inertia of a mass not yet energized and enlivened by the spirit of revolt.

Therefore, for the conscious minority, there is an obligation to act without taking into account the sluggish mass. . . .

The amorphous mass, numerous and compact though it may be, has little cause to complain about this. It is the first to benefit from the action of the minority. . . .

Who would blame the minority for its selfless initiative? Certainly not those lacking consciousness, whom the militants consider to be little more than human zeros, which only acquire numerical value when another number is placed to their left.

This is the enormous difference in method distinguishing syndicalism from democratism. The latter, through the mechanism of universal suffrage, gives leadership to the unconscious, the laggards . . . and stifles the minorities who carry within them the future. The syndicalist method gives diametrically opposite results: the impetus for the movement comes from the conscious, the rebels. All those of good will are called on to act, to participate in the movement.³¹

The thesis about the inevitable mental/spiritual subjugation of the proletarian masses by the capitalist class also forms one of the premises of P. Orlovskii’s conclusions, given in the preceding chapter.

This thesis is undoubtedly materialist in nature. It is based on the recognition of the dependence of people’s thinking on their material environment.

Such a recognition was characteristic of many socialists and communists, utopian and revolutionary, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We can discover its traces in Robert Owen, Cabet, Weitling, and Blanqui.³² They all recognized that the mental servitude of the masses was generated by the material conditions of their situation in the present society. And all of them drew the conclusion that only a fundamental change in the material conditions in which the masses lived, only a fundamental transformation of society, would render the masses capable of directing their own destiny.

But who will change these conditions?

The wise educators of humanity who come out of the privileged classes, that is to say, individuals freed from the material conditions that overwhelm the thinking of the masses—that was the answer of the social utopians.

A revolutionary minority composed of individuals who, for more or less accidental reasons, have shielded their mind and wills from this pressure, persons who in our society represent an exception that proves the rule—this, as we have seen, was the answer of revolutionary communists like Weitling and Blanqui, and the conception of their epigones of the anarcho-syndicalist type, like Pouget and Gustave Hervé of blessed memory.³³

For some, it was a benevolent dictatorship; for others, a violent one that was to be the deus ex machina, the external factor that was going to bridge the gap between the social situation that produced the spiritual bondage of the masses and the social situation that would make possible their full development as human beings.

“The character of human beings,” wrote Robert Owen, “is formed by environment and education. . . . From this follows the task: to transform these two factors shaping character in such a manner that human beings become virtuous.”³⁴

According to Owen, the task of performing this transformation fell to the legislators, to the philanthropists, to the pedagogues.

It is easy to see that both pacifist and revolutionary utopians were only half materialist. They understood in a purely metaphysical way the thesis about human psychology’s dependence on the material environment. That is, [they understood it] statically, being unaware of the dynamics of the social process. Their materialism was not dialectical. The relationship between a given state of social consciousness and the conditioned state of social being, which determines the former, were understood by them [the utopians] as something frozen, once and for all given. They, therefore, stopped being materialists and became pure idealists as soon as they tried to solve the practical problem of how to change the social environment in order to make possible a change in the condition of the masses.

Marx long ago observed in his “Theses on Feuerbach”:

The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of other circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is the people who change the circumstances and that the educators must themselves be educated. Hence, this doctrine must of necessity divide society into two parts, one of which is elevated above the other (in Robert Owen, for example).³⁵

Applied to the class struggle of the proletariat, this means the following. Driven by the very “circumstances” of capitalist society that form its character as a subjugated class, the proletariat enters into a struggle against the society that subjugates it. The process of this struggle modifies the social “circumstances.” It modifies the environment in which the working class lives. In this way, the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which it is subjected, it becomes a class that actively overthrows all subjugation, including that of the mind.

This process is far from straightforward. It does not take place evenly in all strata of the proletariat, nor all aspects of proletarian consciousness. It will not, of course, be complete when a combination of historical circumstances makes possible or even inevitable the working class tearing the apparatus of political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie. The workers are condemned to enter the realm of socialism burdened by a significant share of those “vices of the oppressed,” the yoke that Ferdinand Lassalle had so eloquently urged them to throw off.³⁶

In the process of the struggle against capitalism, the proletariat modifies the material environment surrounding it, thereby modifying its own character and emancipating itself intellectually/spiritually. Likewise, in the process of using its conquered power to systematically construct the entire social order, the proletariat eventually frees itself completely from the intellectual influence of the old society, because it achieves a radical transformation in the material environment by which its character is determined.

But only “eventually!” Only as the result of a long, painful and contradictory process in which, as in all preceding historical processes, social creativity develops only under the hammer of iron necessity, under the imperious pressure of elementary needs.

The conscious will of the advanced members of the class can appreciably shorten and facilitate this process. It can never bypass it.

Some people assume that if a compact revolutionary minority, having the willpower to establish socialism, seizes the machinery of state administration and concentrates in its own hands all the means of production and distribution as well as all organizational apparatuses of the masses and all sources of education,³⁷ it may—guided by the ideals of communism—create conditions in which the popular mind will, little by little, be purged of its old intellectual heritage and be filled with a new content. Then, and only then, will the people be able to stand on their own and walk the path of socialism.

If this utopia could be fully implemented, it would lead to the diametrically opposite result, if only because, in Marx’s words, the “educators must be educated,” and because, therefore, such a dictatorship, and the relations established between the dictatorial minority and the mass, educate the dictators in all possible ways, but not as people capable of directing the course of social development along the path of building a new society. It goes without saying that such an education can only corrupt and spiritually debase the masses.

The only possible builder of the new society, and consequently the only possible successor to the former dominant classes in the administration of the state, is the proletarian class considered as a whole—and we are using the word in its broadest sense, including knowledge workers, the workers of intellectual labour, whose co-operation in the direction of the state and the administration of the economy is so obviously necessary. The proletarians will also find it indispensable to win the active support or at least the friendly neutrality of very broad layers within the non-proletarian producers of the city and countryside. This follows from the very nature of the social revolution, the realization of which is the proletariat’s historic mission. This change must manifest itself in every part of the life of society. Only if it generates the maximum moral and spiritual energy will the proletariat be able to take in its hands the vast heritage of capitalism without squandering it and put into motion capitalism’s gigantic forces of production so that the result is real social equality based on an increase in the general well-being. This is only possible with the maximum development of the organized self-activity [samodeiatel’nost] of all the component parts of the working class—that is, under conditions that absolutely preclude the dictatorship of a minority standing “above society,” along with the indispensable companions of such a dictatorship: terror and bureaucracy.

In the process of freely constructing a new society, the proletariat will re-educate itself and eliminate from its character those traits that come directly into conflict with the great tasks it faces. This applies both to the working class as a whole and to each of its individual strata. Naturally, the duration of this process will vary for each of these strata. Socialist policy, standing on the firm ground of historical reality must reckon with this fact—the inevitably slow, sometimes very slow, pace of the developmental process by which the psychological adaptation of the whole class to its new situation will be accomplished. Any attempt to artificially force the pace of this process is certain to yield the opposite result. For the goal to be achieved, a whole series of historically imposed compromises will be found absolutely indispensable, in order to adapt to the intellectual/spiritual level attained by the different strata within the working class at the moment of capitalism’s collapse.

But the ultimate goal justifies only those compromises that do not contradict it, that do not bar the road to its realization. Consequently, it is inadvisable to make too far-reaching a compromise with either the destructive elements that attract some sections of the working class or with the conservative inertia of other sections of the working class.

A compromise made with a hostile class is nearly always fatal to the revolution. A compromise that guarantees the unity of the class in its struggle against the enemy and makes possible the self-active [samodeiatel’ni] participation of the broadest masses of this class in the work of the revolutionary government can only move the revolution forward.

To be sure, this will be at the cost of a longer, more winding path of development for the revolution, compared to the straight line that could be drawn under the conditions of a minority dictatorship. But here, as in mechanics, “what is lost in distance is made up in speed,” the speed in more rapidly overcoming the inner psychological obstacles that arise in the way of the revolutionary class and hamper it in its attempt to achieve its aims. By contrast, the straight line, preferred by the doctrinaires of the violent revolution because it is shorter, leads in practice to the maximum of psychological resistance, and because of this, to the minimum productivity from creative social revolutionary work.