Dictatorship vs. Democracy Part 6

In Petrograd we conquered power in November, 1917, almost without bloodshed, and even without arrests. The ministers of Kerensky's Government were set free very soon after the revolution. More, the Cossack General, Krasnov, who had advanced on Petrograd together with Kerensky after the power had pa.s.sed to the Soviet, and who had been made prisoner by us at Gatchina, was set free on his word of honor the next day. This was "generosity" quite in the spirit of the first measures of the Commune. But it was a mistake. Afterwards, General Krasnov, after fighting against us for about a year in the South, and destroying many thousands of Communists, again advanced on Petrograd, this time in the ranks of Yudenich's army. The proletarian revolution a.s.sumed a more severe character only after the rising of the junkers in Petrograd, and particularly after the rising of the Czecho-Slovaks on the Volga organized by the Cadets, the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks, after their ma.s.s executions of Communists, the attempt on Lenin's life, the murder of Uritsky, etc., etc.

The same tendencies, only in an embryonic form, we see in the history of the Commune.

Driven by the logic of the struggle, it took its stand in principle on the path of intimidation. The creation of the Committee of Public Safety was dictated, in the case of many of its supporters, by the idea of the Red Terror. The Committee was appointed "to cut off the heads of traitors" (Journal Officiel No. 123), "to avenge treachery"

(No. 124). Under the head of "intimidatory" decrees we must cla.s.s the order to seize the property of Thiers and of his ministers, to destroy Thiers' house, to destroy the Vendome column, and especially the decree on hostages. For every captured Communard or sympathizer with the Commune shot by the Versaillese, three hostages were to be shot.

The activity of the Prefecture of Paris controlled by Raoul Rigault had a purely terroristic, though not always a useful, purpose.

The effect of all these measures of intimidation was paralyzed by the helpless opportunism of the guiding elements in the Commune, by their striving to reconcile the bourgeoisie with the _fait accompli_ by the help of pitiful phrases, by their vacillations between the fiction of democracy and the reality of dictators.h.i.+p. The late Lavrov expresses the latter idea splendidly in his book on the Commune.

"The Paris of the rich bourgeois and the poor proletarians, as a political community of different cla.s.ses, demanded, in the name of liberal principles, complete freedom of speech, of a.s.sembly, of criticism of the government, etc. The Paris which had accomplished the revolution in the interests of the proletariat, and had before it the task of realizing this revolution in the shape of inst.i.tutions, Paris, as the community of the emanc.i.p.ated working-cla.s.s proletariat, demanded revolutionary--_i.e._, dictatorial, measures against the enemies of the new order." (Pages 143-144.)

If the Paris Commune had not fallen, but had continued to exist in the midst of a ceaseless struggle, there can be no doubt that it would have been obliged to have recourse to more and more severe measures for the suppression of the counter-revolution. True, Kautsky would not then have had the possibility of contrasting the humane Communards with the inhumane Bolsheviks. But in return, probably, Thiers, would not have had the possibility of inflicting his monstrous bloodletting upon the proletariat of Paris. History, possibly, would not have been the loser.

THE IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND THE "DEMOCRATIC" COMMUNE

"On March 19," Kautsky informs us, "in the Central Committee of the National Guard, some demanded a march on Versailles, others an appeal to the electors, and a third party the adoption first of all of revolutionary measures; as if every one of these steps," he proceeds very learnedly to inform us, "were not equally necessary, and as if one excluded the other." (Page 72.) Further on, Kautsky, in connection with these disputes in the Commune, presents us with various warmed-up plat.i.tudes as to the mutual relations of reform and revolution. In reality, the following was the situation. If it were decided to march on Versailles, and to do this without losing an hour it was necessary immediately to reorganize the National Guard, to place at its head the best fighting elements of the Paris proletariat, and thereby temporarily to weaken Paris from the revolutionary point of view. But to organize elections in Paris, while at the same time sending out of its walls the flower of the working cla.s.s, would have been senseless from the point of view of the revolutionary party. Theoretically, a march on Versailles and elections to the Commune, of course, did not exclude each other in the slightest degree, but in practice they did exclude each other: for the success of the elections, it was necessary to postpone the attack; for the attack to succeed, the elections must be put off. Finally, leading the proletariat out to the field and thereby temporarily weakening Paris, it was essential to obtain some guarantee against the possibility of counter-revolutionary attempts in the capital; for Thiers would not have hesitated at any measures to raise a white revolt in the rear of the Communards. It was essential to establish a more military--_i.e._, a more stringent regime in the capital. "They had to fight," writes Lavrov, "against many internal foes with whom Paris was full, who only yesterday had been rioting around the Exchange and the Vendome Square, who had their representatives in the administration and in the National Guard, who possessed their press, and their meetings, who almost openly maintained contact with the Versaillese, and who became more determined and more audacious at every piece of carelessness, at every check of the Commune." (Page 87.)

It was necessary, side by side with this, to carry out revolutionary measures of a financial and generally of an economic character: first and foremost, for the equipment of the revolutionary army. All these most necessary measures of revolutionary dictators.h.i.+p could with difficulty be reconciled with an extensive electoral campaign. But Kautsky has not the least idea of what a revolution is in practice. He thinks that theoretically to reconcile is the same as practically to accomplish.

The Central Committee appointed March 22 as the day of elections for the Commune; but, not sure of itself, frightened at its own illegality, striving to act in unison with more "legal" inst.i.tutions, entered into ridiculous and endless negotiations with a quite helpless a.s.sembly of mayors and deputies of Paris, showing its readiness to divide power with them if only an agreement could be arrived at.

Meanwhile precious time was slipping by.

Marx, on whom Kautsky, through old habit, tries to rely, did not under any circ.u.mstances propose that, at one and the same time, the Commune should be elected and the workers should be led out into the field for the war. In his letter to Kugelmann, Marx wrote, on April 12, 1871, that the Central Committee of the National Guard had too soon given up its power in favor of the Commune. Kautsky, in his own words, "does not understand" this opinion of Marx. It is quite simple. Marx at any rate understood that the problem was not one of chasing legality, but of inflicting a fatal blow upon the enemy. "If the Central Committee had consisted of real revolutionaries," says Lavrov, and rightly, "it ought to have acted differently. It would have been quite unforgivable for it to have given the enemy ten days' respite before the election and a.s.sembly of the Commune, while the leaders of the proletariat refused to carry out their duty and did not recognize that they had the right immediately to _lead_ the proletariat. As it was, the feeble immaturity of the popular parties created a Committee which considered those ten days of inaction inc.u.mbent upon it." (Page 78.)

The yearning of the Central Committee to hand over power as soon as possible to a "legal" Government was dictated, not so much by the superst.i.tions of former democracy, of which, by the way, there was no lack, as by fear of responsibility. Under the plea that it was a temporary inst.i.tution, the Central Committee avoided the taking of the most necessary and absolutely pressing measures, in spite of the fact that all the material apparatus of power was centred in its hands. But the Commune itself did not take over political power in full from the Central Committee, and the latter continued to interfere in all business quite unceremoniously. This created a dual Government, which was extremely dangerous, particularly under military conditions.

On May 3 the Central Committee sent deputies to the Commune demanding that the Ministry for War should be placed under its control. Again there arose, as Lissagaray writes, the question as to whether "the Central Committee should be dissolved, or arrested, or entrusted with the administration of the Ministry for War."

Here was a question, not of the principles of democracy, but of the absence, in the case of both parties, of a clear programme of action, and of the readiness, both of the irresponsible revolutionary organizations in the shape of the Central Committee and of the "democratic" organization of the Commune, to s.h.i.+ft the responsibility on to the other's shoulders, while at the same time not entirely renouncing power.

These were political relations which it might seem no one could call worthy of imitation.

"But the Central Committee," Kautsky consoles himself, "never attempted to infringe the principle in virtue of which the supreme power must belong to the delegates elected by universal suffrage." In this respect the "Paris Commune was the direct ant.i.thesis of the Soviet Republic." (Page 74.) There was no unity of government, there was no revolutionary decision, there existed a division of power, and, as a result, there came swift and terrible destruction. But to counter-balance this--is it not comforting?--there was no infringement of the "principle" of democracy.

THE DEMOCRATIC COMMUNE AND THE REVOLUTIONARY DICTATORs.h.i.+P

Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy const.i.tute a piece of absolute theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition and in the conception of its leading political party--the Blanquists--was the expression of _the dictators.h.i.+p of the revolutionary city over the country_. So it was in the great French Revolution; so it would have been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in the first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected on the basis of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more significant fact--namely, that of the military operations carried on by the Commune, one city, against peasant France, that is the whole country. To satisfy the great democrat, Kautsky, the revolutionaries of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have consulted, by means of universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to whether it permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers' bands.

Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers' troops had been evacuated. The bourgeoisie that remained in Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid of the revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the auspices of that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future would have been inevitable--namely, of the Red Terror. But to console oneself with the thought that the Central Committee of the National Guard, under the dictators.h.i.+p of which--unfortunately a very feeble and formalist dictators.h.i.+p--the elections to the Commune were held, did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is truly to brush with the shadow of a broom.

Amusing himself by barren a.n.a.logies, Kautsky benefits by the circ.u.mstance that his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, we also elected a Commune (Town Council) on the basis of the most "democratic" voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted by the bourgeoisie parties, gave us a crus.h.i.+ng majority. The "democratically" elected Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--_i.e._, placed the fact of the dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat higher than the "principle" of universal suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved itself altogether by its own act, in favor of one of the sections of the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd Soviet--that true father of the Soviet regime--has upon itself the seal of a formal "democratic"

benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune.[6]

[6] It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there partic.i.p.ated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917, in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had no influence in the capital, there partic.i.p.ated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire.

"At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the Commune. Of these, fifteen were members of the government party (Thiers), and six were bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to the Government, but condemned the rising (of the Paris workers).

"The Soviet Republic," Kautsky teaches us, "would never have allowed such counter-revolutionary elements to stand as candidates, let alone be elected. The Commune, on the other hand, out of respect for democracy, did not place the least obstacle in the way of the election of its bourgeois opponents." (Page 74.)

We have already seen above that here Kautsky completely misses the mark. First of all, at a similar stage of development of the Russian Revolution, there did not take place democratic elections to the Petrograd Commune, in which the Soviet Government placed no obstacle in the way of the bourgeois parties; and if the Cadets, the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, who had their press which was openly calling for the overthrow of the Soviet Government, boycotted the elections, it was only because at that time they still hoped soon to make an end of us with the help of armed force. Secondly, no democracy expressing all cla.s.ses was actually to be found in the Paris Commune. The bourgeois deputies--Conservatives, Liberals, Gambettists--found no place in it.

"Nearly all these individuals," says Lavrov, "either immediately or very soon, left the Council of the Commune. They might have been representatives of Paris as a free city under the rule of the bourgeoisie, but were quite out of place in the Council of the Commune, which, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, consistently or inconsistently, completely or incompletely, did represent the revolution of the proletariat, and an attempt, feeble though it might be, of building up forms of society corresponding to that revolution." (Pages 111-112.) If the Petrograd bourgeoisie had not boycotted the munic.i.p.al elections, its representatives would have entered the Petrograd Council. They would have remained there up to the first Social Revolutionary and Cadet rising, after which--with the permission or without the permission of Kautsky--they would probably have been arrested if they did not leave the Council in good time, as at a certain moment did the bourgeois members of the Paris Commune. The course of events would have remained the same: only on their surface would certain episodes have worked out differently.

In supporting the democracy of the Commune, and at the same time accusing it of an insufficiently decisive note in its att.i.tude to Versailles, Kautsky does not understand that the Communal elections, carried out with the ambiguous help of the "lawful" mayors and deputies, reflected the hope of a peaceful agreement with Versailles.

This is the whole point. The leaders were anxious for a compromise, not for a struggle. The ma.s.ses had not yet outlived their illusions.

Undeserved revolutionary reputations had not yet had time to be exposed. Everything taken together was called democracy.

"We must rise above our enemies by moral force...." preached Vermorel.

"We must not infringe liberty and individual life...." Striving to avoid fratricidal war, Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie, whom hitherto he had so mercilessly exposed, to set up "a lawful Government, recognized and respected by the whole population of Paris." The _Journal Officiel_, published under the editors.h.i.+p of the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding, which in the June days (1848) armed two cla.s.ses of society against each other, cannot be renewed.... Cla.s.s antagonism has ceased to exist...."

(March 30.) And, further: "Now all conflicts will be appeased, because all are inspired with a feeling of solidarity, because never yet was there so little social hatred and social antagonism." (April 3.)

At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourde, and not without foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had "never yet infringed the principle of private property." By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to compromise.

"Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. "As far as the ma.s.s of the population is concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat.

The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, "it was no longer a question of voting,"

writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections.... All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments.... The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine cla.s.s war with intercla.s.s democracy.

"The Commune is not a Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly," wrote in his book, Milliere, one of the best brains of the Commune. "It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation."

"They could never understand," Lissagaray accuses the leaders, "that the Commune was a barricade, and not an administration."

They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky has not understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that he will ever understand it.

The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its development it signified the dictators.h.i.+p of working cla.s.s Paris over the peasant country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest.

However much the political doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune itself, clung to the appearances of democratic legality, every action of the Commune, though insufficient for victory, was sufficient to reveal its illegal nature.

The Commune--that is to say, the Paris City Council--repealed the national law concerning conscription. It called its official organ _The Official Journal of the French Republic_. Though cautiously, it still laid hands on the State Bank. It proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and abolished the Church Budgets. It entered into relations with various emba.s.sies. And so on, and so on. It did all this in virtue of the revolutionary dictators.h.i.+p. But Clemenceau, young democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue.

At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: "The rising had an unlawful beginning.... Soon the Committee will become ridiculous, and its decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not the right to rise against France, and must unconditionally accept the authority of the a.s.sembly."

The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National a.s.sembly.

Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. To-day Kautsky seeks to discover for its criminal intentions some mitigating circ.u.mstances.

He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National a.s.sembly the monarchists, while we in the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly had against us ... Socialists, in the persons of the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the S.R.s, but forgets our sole serious foe--the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party--_i.e._, a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the "little great man." Very soon indeed--long before the October Revolution--Miliukov began to seek his Gallifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before.

The Mensheviks and the S.R.s played no independent role amongst us--just like Kautsky's party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political confidence of the ma.s.ses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets--independently of the issue of the elections.

The purely va.s.sal-like dependence of the S.R.s and Menshevik _majority_ on the Cadet _minority_ itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of "democracy." But this is not all.

In all districts of the country where the regime of "democracy" lived too long, it inevitably ended in an open _coup d'etat_ of the counter-revolution. So it was in the Ukraine, where the democratic Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to German imperialism, found itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky. So it was in the Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of Denikin. So it was--and this was the most important experiment of our "democracy"--in Siberia, where the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, with the formal supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of the Bolsheviks, and the _de facto_ guidance of the Cadets, led in the end to the dictators.h.i.+p of the Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was, finally, in the north, where the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly government of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became merely a tinsel decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian and British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States--in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia--where, under the formal banner of "democracy," there is being consolidated the supremacy of the landlords, the capitalists, and the foreign militarists.

THE PARIS WORKER OF 1871 AND THE PETROGRAD PROLETARIAN OF 1917