Dictatorship vs. Democracy Part 7

One of the most coa.r.s.e, unfounded, and politically disgraceful comparisons which Kautsky makes between the Commune and Soviet Russia is touching the character of the Paris worker in 1871 and the Russian proletarian of 1917-19. The first Kautsky depicts as a revolutionary enthusiast capable of a high measure of self-sacrifice; the second, as an egoist and a coward, an irresponsible anarchist.

The Parisian worker has behind him too definite a past to need revolutionary recommendations--or protection from the praises of the present Kautsky. None the less, the Petrograd proletarian has not, and cannot have, any reason for avoiding a comparison with his heroic elder brother. The continuous three years' struggle of the Petrograd workers--first for the conquest of power, and then for its maintenance and consolidation--represents an exceptional story of collective heroism and self-sacrifice, amidst unprecedented tortures in the shape of hunger, cold, and constant perils.

Kautsky, as we can discover in another connection, takes for contrast with the flower of the Communards the most sinister elements of the Russian proletariat. In this respect also he is in no way different from the bourgeois sycophants, to whom dead Communards always appear infinitely more attractive than the living.

The Petrograd proletariat seized power four and a half decades after the Parisian. This period has told enormously in our favor. The petty bourgeois craft character of old and partly of new Paris is quite foreign to Petrograd, the centre of the most concentrated industry in the world. The latter circ.u.mstances has extremely facilitated our tasks of agitation and organization, as well as the setting up of the Soviet system.

Our proletariat did not have even a faint measure of the rich revolutionary traditions of the French proletariat. But, instead, there was still very fresh in the memory of the older generation of our workers, at the beginning of the present revolution, the great experiment of 1905, its failure, and the duty of vengeance it had handed down.

The Russian workers had not, like the French, pa.s.sed through a long school of democracy and parliamentarism, which at a certain epoch represented an important factor in the political education of the proletariat. But, on the other hand, the Russian working cla.s.s had not had seared into its soul the bitterness of dissolution and the poison of scepticism, which up to a certain, and--let us hope--not very distant moment, still restrain the revolutionary will of the French proletariat.

The Paris Commune suffered a military defeat before economic problems had arisen before it in their full magnitude. In spite of the splendid fighting qualities of the Paris workers, the military fate of the Commune was at once determined as hopeless. Indecision and compromise-mongering above brought about collapse below.

The pay of the National Guard was issued on the basis of the existence of 162,000 rank and file and 6,500 officers; the number of those who actually went into battle, especially after the unsuccessful sortie of April 3, varied between twenty and thirty thousand.

These facts do not in the least compromise the Paris workers, and do not give us the right to consider them cowards and deserters--although, of course, there was no lack of desertion. For a fighting army there must be, first of all, a centralized and accurate apparatus of administration. Of this the Commune had not even a trace.

The War Department of the Commune, was, in the expression of one writer, as it were a dark room, in which all collided. The office of the Ministry was filled with officers and ordinary Guards, who demanded military supplies and food, and complained that they were not relieved. They were sent to the garrison....

"One battalion remained in the trenches for 20 and 30 days, while others were constantly in reserve.... This carelessness soon killed any discipline. Courageous men soon determined to rely only on themselves; others avoided service. In the same way did officers behave. One would leave his post to go to the help of a neighbor who was under fire; others went away to the city...." (Lavrov, page 100.)

Such a regime could not remain unpunished; the Commune was drowned in blood. But in this connection Kautsky has a marvelous solution.

"The waging of war," he says, sagely shaking his head, "is, after all, not a strong side of the proletariat." (Page 76.)

This aphorism, worthy of Pangloss, is fully on a level with the other great remark of Kautsky, namely, that the International is not a suitable weapon to use in wartime, being in its essence an "instrument of peace."

In these two aphorisms, in reality, may be found the present Kautsky, complete, in his entirety--_i.e._, just a little over a round zero.

The waging of war, do you see, is on the whole, not a strong side of the proletariat, the more that the International itself was not created for wartime. Kautsky's s.h.i.+p was built for lakes and quiet harbors, not at all for the open sea, and not for a period of storms.

If that s.h.i.+p has sprung a leak, and has begun to fill, and is now comfortably going to the bottom, we must throw all the blame upon the storm, the unnecessary ma.s.s of water, the extraordinary size of the waves, and a series of other unforeseen circ.u.mstances for which Kautsky did not build his marvelous instrument.

The international proletariat put before itself as its problem the conquest of power. Independently of whether civil war, "generally,"

belongs to the inevitable attributes of revolution, "generally," this fact remains unquestioned--that the advance of the proletariat, at any rate in Russia, Germany, and parts of former Austro-Hungary, took the form of an intense civil war not only on internal but also on external fronts. If the waging of war is not the strong side of the proletariat, while the workers' International is suited only for peaceful epochs, then we may as well erect a cross over the revolution and over Socialism; for the waging of war is a fairly _strong_ side of the capitalist State, which _without_ a war will not admit the workers to supremacy. In that case there remains only to proclaim the so-called "Socialist" democracy to be merely the accompanying feature of capitalist society and bourgeois parliamentarism--_i.e._, openly to sanction what the Eberts, Schneidermanns, Renaudels, carry out in practice and what Kautsky still, it seems, protests against in words.

The waging of war was not a strong side of the Commune. Quite so; that was why it was crushed. And how mercilessly crushed!

"We have to recall the proscriptions of Sulla, Antony, and Octavius,"

wrote in his time the very moderate liberal, Fiaux, "to meet such ma.s.sacres in the history of civilized nations. The religious wars under the last Valois, the night of St. Bartholomew, the Reign of Terror were, in comparison with it, child's play. In the last week of May alone, in Paris, 17,000 corpses of the insurgent Federals were picked up ... the killing was still going on about June 15."

"The waging of war, after all, is not the strong side of the proletariat."

It is not true! The Russian workers have shown that they are capable of wielding the "instrument of war" as well. We see here a gigantic step forward in comparison with the Commune. It is not a renunciation of the Commune--for the traditions of the Commune consist not at all in its helplessness--but the continuation of its work. The Commune was weak. To complete its work we have become strong. The Commune was crushed. We are inflicting blow after blow upon the executioners of the Commune. We are taking vengeance for the Commune, and we shall avenge it.

Out of 167,000 National Guards who received pay, only twenty or thirty thousand went into battle. These figures serve as interesting material for conclusions as to the role of formal democracy in a revolutionary epoch. The vote of the Paris Commune was decided, not at the elections, but in the battles with the troops of Thiers. One hundred and sixty-seven thousand National Guards represented the great ma.s.s of the electorate. But in reality, in the battles, the fate of the Commune was decided by twenty or thirty thousand persons; the most devoted fighting minority. This minority did not stand alone: it simply expressed, in a more courageous and self-sacrificing manner, the will of the majority. But none the less it was a minority. The others who hid at the critical moment were not hostile to the Commune; on the contrary, they actively or pa.s.sively supported it, but they were less politically conscious, less decisive. On the arena of political democracy, their lower level of political consciousness afforded the possibility of their being deceived by adventurers, swindlers, middle-cla.s.s cheats, and honest dullards who really deceived themselves. But, at the moment of open cla.s.s war, they, to a greater or lesser degree, followed the self-sacrificing minority. It was this that found its expression in the organization of the National Guard. If the existence of the Commune had been prolonged, this relations.h.i.+p between the advance guard and the ma.s.s of the proletariat would have grown more and more firm.

The organization which would have been formed and consolidated in the process of the open struggle, as the organization of the laboring ma.s.ses, would have become the organization of their dictators.h.i.+p--the Council of Deputies of the armed proletariat.

6

MARX AND ... KAUTSKY.

Kautsky loftily sweeps aside Marx's views on terror, expressed by him in the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_--as at that time, do you see, Marx was still very "young," and consequently his views had not yet had time to arrive at that condition of complete enfeeblement which is so clearly to be observed in the case of certain theoreticians in the seventh decade of their life. As a contrast to the green Marx of 1848-49 (the author of the _Communist Manifesto_!) Kautsky quotes the mature Marx of the epoch of the Paris Commune--and the latter, under the pen of Kautsky, loses his great lion's mane, and appears before us as an extremely respectable reasoner, bowing before the holy places of democracy, declaiming on the sacredness of human life, and filled with all due reverence for the political charms of Schneidermann, Vandervelde, and particularly of his own physical grandson, Jean Longuet. In a word, Marx, instructed by the experience of life, proves to be a well-behaved Kautskian.

From the deathless _Civil War in France_, the pages of which have been filled with a new and intense life in our own epoch, Kautsky has quoted only those lines in which the mighty theoretician of the social revolution contrasted the generosity of the Communards with the bourgeois ferocity of the Versaillese. Kautsky has devastated these lines and made them commonplace. Marx, as the preacher of detached humanity, as the apostle of general love of mankind! Just as if we were talking about Buddha or Leo Tolstoy.... It is more than natural that, against the international campaign which represented the Communards as _souteneurs_ and the women of the Commune as prost.i.tutes, against the vile slanders which attributed to the conquered fighters ferocious features drawn from the degenerate imagination of the victorious bourgeoisie, Marx should emphasize and underline those features of tenderness and n.o.bility which not infrequently were merely the reverse side of indecision. Marx was Marx. He was neither an empty pedant, nor, all the more, the legal defender of the revolution: he combined a scientific a.n.a.lysis of the Commune with its revolutionary apology. He not only explained and criticised--he defended and struggled. But, emphasizing the mildness of the Commune which failed, Marx left no doubt possible concerning the measures which the Commune ought to have taken in order not to fail.

The author of the _Civil War_ accuses the Central Committee--_i.e._, the then Council of National Guards' Deputies, of having too soon given up its place to the elective Commune. Kautsky "does not understand" the reason for such a reproach. This conscientious non-understanding is one of the symptoms of Kautsky's mental decline in connection with questions of the revolution generally. The first place, according to Marx, ought to have been filled by a purely fighting organ, a centre of the insurrection and of military operations against Versailles, and not the organized self-government of the labor democracy. For the latter the turn would come later.

Marx accuses the Commune of not having at once begun an attack against the Versailles, and of having entered upon the defensive, which always appears "more humane," and gives more possibilities of appealing to moral law and the sacredness of human life, but in conditions of civil war never leads to victory. Marx, on the other hand, first and foremost wanted a revolutionary victory. Nowhere, by one word, does he put forward the principle of democracy as something standing above the cla.s.s struggle. On the contrary, with the concentrated contempt of the revolutionary and the Communist, Marx--not the young editor of the _Rhine Paper_, but the mature author of _Capital_: our genuine Marx with the mighty leonine mane, not as yet fallen under the hands of the hairdressers of the Kautsky school--with what concentrated contempt he speaks about the "artificial atmosphere of parliamentarism" in which physical and spiritual dwarfs like Thiers seem giants! The _Civil War_, after the barren and pedantic pamphlet of Kautsky, acts like a storm that clears the air.

In spite of Kautsky's slanders, Marx had nothing in common with the view of democracy as the last, absolute, supreme product of history.

The development of bourgeois society itself, out of which contemporary democracy grew up, in no way represents that process of gradual democratization which figured before the war in the dreams of the greatest Socialist illusionist of democracy--Jean Jaures--and now in those of the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky. In the empire of Napoleon III, Marx sees "the only possible form of government in the epoch in which the bourgeoisie has already lost the possibility of governing the people, while the working cla.s.s has not yet acquired it." In this way, not democracy, but Bonapartism, appears in Marx's eyes as the final form of bourgeois power. Learned men may say that Marx was mistaken, as the Bonapartist empire gave way for half a century to the "Democratic Republic." But Marx was not mistaken. In essence he was right. The Third Republic has been the period of the complete decay of democracy. Bonapartism has found in the Stock Exchange Republic of Poincare-Clemenceau, a more finished expression than in the Second Empire. True, the Third Republic was not crowned by the imperial diadem; but in return there loomed over it the shadow of the Russian Tsar.

In his estimate of the Commune, Marx carefully avoids using the worn currency of democratic terminology. "The Commune was," he writes, "not a parliament, but a working inst.i.tution, and united in itself both executive and legislative power." In the first place, Marx puts forward, not the particular democratic form of the Commune, but its cla.s.s essence. The Commune, as is known, abolished the regular army and the police, and decreed the confiscation of Church property. It did this in the right of the revolutionary dictators.h.i.+p of Paris, without the permission of the general democracy of the State, which at that moment formally had found a much more "lawful" expression in the National a.s.sembly of Thiers. But a revolution is not decided by votes.

"The National a.s.sembly," says Marx, "was nothing more nor less than one of the episodes of that revolution, the true embodiment of which was, nevertheless, armed Paris." How far this is from formal democracy!

"It only required that the Communal order of things," says Marx, "should be set up in Paris and in the secondary centres, and the old central government would in the provinces also have yielded to the _self-government of the producers_." Marx, consequently, sees the problem of revolutionary Paris, not in appealing from its victory to the frail will of the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, but in covering the whole of France with a centralized organization of Communes, built up not on the external principles of democracy but on the genuine self-government of the producers.

Kautsky has cited as an argument against the Soviet Const.i.tution the indirectness of elections, which contradicts the fixed laws of bourgeois democracy. Marx characterizes the proposed structure of labor France in the following words:--"The management of the general affairs of the village communes of every district was to devolve on the a.s.sembly of plenipotentiary delegates meeting in the chief town of the district; while the district a.s.semblies were in turn to send delegates to the National a.s.sembly sitting in Paris."

Marx, as we can see, was not in the least degree disturbed by the many degrees of indirect election, in so far as it was a question of the State organization of the proletariat itself. In the framework of bourgeois democracy, indirectness of election confuses the demarcation line of parties and cla.s.ses; but in the "self-government of the producers"--_i.e._, in the cla.s.s proletarian State, indirectness of election is a question not of politics, but of the technical requirements of self-government, and within certain limits may present the same advantages as in the realm of trade union organization.

The Philistines of democracy are indignant at the inequality in representation of the workers and peasants which, in the Soviet Const.i.tution, reflects the difference in the revolutionary roles of the town and the country. Marx writes: "The Commune desired to bring the rural producers under the intellectual leaders.h.i.+p of the central towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in the workmen of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests." The question was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper, but of spiritually raising the peasant to the level of the worker. All questions of the proletarian State Marx decides according to the revolutionary dynamics of living forces, and not according to the play of shadows upon the market-place screen of parliamentarism.

In order to reach the last confines of mental collapse, Kautsky denies the universal authority of the Workers' Councils on the ground that there is no legal boundary between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In the indeterminate nature of the social divisions Kautsky sees the source of the arbitrary authority of the Soviet dictators.h.i.+p. Marx sees directly the contrary. "The Commune was an extremely elastic form of the State, while all former forms of government had suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this, that in its very essence it was the government of the working cla.s.s, the result of the struggle between the cla.s.s of producers and the cla.s.s of appropriators, the political form, long sought, under which there could be accomplished the economic emanc.i.p.ation of labor." The secret of the Commune consisted in the fact that by its very essence it was a government of the working cla.s.s. This secret, explained by Marx, has remained, for Kautsky, even to this day, a mystery sealed with seven seals.

The Pharisees of democracy speak with indignation of the repressive measures of the Soviet Government, of the closing of newspapers, of arrests and shooting. Marx replies to "the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press" and to the reproaches of the "well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaries," in connection with the repressive measures of the Commune in the following words:--"Not satisfied with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the Commune at such a time _without shamefully betraying its trust_, have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it? Had the government of the Commune been akin in spirit to that of Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress newspapers of the party of order in Paris than there was to suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles." In this way, what Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of democracy Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust.

Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of which now the Soviet Government is accused, Marx speaks as of "an inevitable and comparatively insignificant episode in the t.i.tanic struggle of the new-born order with the old in its collapse."

Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants can consider them a crime "in the war of the slaves against their oppressors, _the only just war in history_." (Marx.) Yet our dread accuser Kautsky, in his whole book, does not breathe a word of the fact that we are in a condition of perpetual revolutionary self-defence, that we are waging an intensive war against the oppressors of the world, the "only just war in history."

Kautsky yet again tears his hair because the Soviet Government, during the Civil War, has made use of the severe method of taking hostages.

He once again brings forward pointless and dishonest comparisons between the fierce Soviet Government and the humane Commune. Clear and definite in this connection sounds the opinion of Marx. "When Thiers, from the very beginning of the conflict, had enforced the humane practice of shooting down captured Communards, the Commune, to protect the lives of those prisoners, _had nothing left for it_ but to resort to the Prussian custom of taking hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of the prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. _How could their lives be spared any longer_ after the blood-bath with which MacMahon's Pretorians celebrated their entry into Paris?" How otherwise we shall ask together with Marx, can one act in conditions of civil war, when the counter-revolution, occupying a considerable portion of the national territory, seizes wherever it can the unarmed workers, their wives, their mothers, and shoots or hangs them: how otherwise can one act than to seize as hostages the beloved or the trusted of the bourgeoisie, thus placing the whole bourgeois cla.s.s under the Damocles' sword of mutual responsibility?

It would not be difficult to show, day by day through the history of the civil war, that all the severe measures of the Soviet Government were forced upon it as measures of revolutionary self-defense. We shall not here enter into details. But, to give though it be but a partial criterion for valuing the conditions of the struggle, let us remind the reader that, at the moment when the White Guards, in company with their Anglo-French allies, shoot every Communist without exception who falls into their hands, the Red Army spares all prisoners without exception, including even officers of high rank.

"Fully grasping its historical task, filled with the heroic decision to remain equal to that task," Marx wrote, "the working cla.s.s may reply with a smile of calm contempt to the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press and to the learned patronage of well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires, who utter their ignorant stereotyped common-places, their characteristic nonsense, with the profound tone of oracles of scientific immaculateness."

If the well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires sometimes appear in the guise of retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no way deprives their characteristic nonsense of the right of remaining nonsense.