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Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky

by Leon Trotsky · English · Gutenberg #38982 · 454,658 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky

Author: Leon Trotsky


        
Release date: February 25, 2012 [eBook #38982]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DICTATORSHIP VS. DEMOCRACY (TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM): A REPLY TO KARL KANTSKY ***




Produced by Odessa Paige Turner and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from scanned images of public domain material
from the Google Print project.)






WORKERS PARTY LIBRARY, Vol. I


DICTATORSHIP vs. DEMOCRACY

(_TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM_)


A Reply to Karl Kautsky by
LEON TROTSKY


With a Preface by
H. N. BRAILSFORD
and Foreword by Max Bedact

[Illustration: WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA. WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.]


Published 1922 by
WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA
799 Broadway, Room 405
New York City




CONTENTS


FOREWORD                                      V

PREFACE                                      XI

INTRODUCTION                                  5

THE BALANCE OF POWER                         12

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT          20

DEMOCRACY                                    28

TERRORISM                                    48

THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA          69

MARX AND ... KAUTSKY                         91

THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY      98

PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR       128

KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK       177

IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE                     188




Foreword

By MAX BEDACT


In a land where "democracy" is so deeply entrenched as in our United
States of America it may seem futile to try to make friends for a
dictatorship, by a close comparison of the principles of the
two--Dictatorship versus Democracy. But then, confiding in the
inviting gesture of the Goddess of Liberty many of our friends and
fellow citizens have tested that sacred principle of democracy,
freedom of speech, a little too freely--and landed in the penitentiary
for it. Others again, relying on the not less sacred principle of
democracy, freedom of assembly, have come in unpleasant contact with a
substantial stick of hardwood, wielded by an unwieldily guardian of
the law, and awoke from the immediate effects of this collision in
some jail. Again others, leaning a little too heavily against the
democratic principle of freedom of press broke down that pasteboard
pillar of democracy, and incidentally into prison.

Looking at this side of the bright shining medal of our beloved
democracy it seems that there is not the slightest bit of difference
between the democracy of capitalist America and the dictatorship of
Soviet Russia. But there is a great difference. The dictatorship in
Russia is bold and upright class rule, which has as its ultimate
object the abolition of all class rule and all dictatorships. Our
democracy, on the other hand, is a Pecksniffian Dictatorship, is
hypocrisy incarnate, promising all liberty in phrases, but in reality
even penalizing free thinking, consistently working only for one
object: to perpetuate the rule of the capitalist class, the capitalist
dictatorship.

"Dictatorship versus Democracy" is, therefore, enough of an open
question even in our own country to deserve some consideration. To
give food for thought on this subject is the object of the publication
of Trotsky's book.

This book is an answer to a book by Karl Kautsky, "Terrorism and
Communism." It is polemical in character. Polemical writings are,
as a rule, only thoroughly understood if one reads both sides of
the question. But even if we could not take for granted that the
proletarian reader is fully familiar with the question at issue we
could not conscientiously advise a worker to get Kautsky's book. It is
really asking our readers to undertake the superhuman task of reading a
book which in the guise of a scientific treatise is foully hitting him
below the belt, and then expect him to pay two dollars for it in the
bargain.

Anyhow, to read Kautsky's book is an ordeal for any revolutionist.
Kautsky, in his book, tries to prove that the humanitarian instincts
of the masses must defeat any attempt to overpower and suppress the
bourgeoisie by terrorist means. But to read his book must kill in the
proletarian reader the last remnants of those instincts on which
Kautsky's hope for the safety of the bourgeoisie is based. There would
even not be enough of those instincts left to save Kautsky from the
utter contempt of the proletarian masses, a fate he so richly deserves.

Mr. Kautsky was once the foremost exponent of Marxism. Many of those
fighting to-day in the front ranks of the proletarian army revered
Kautsky as their teacher. But even in his most glorious days as a
Marxist his was the musty pedantry of the German professor, which was
hardly ever penetrated by a live spark of revolutionary spirit. Still,
the Russian revolution of 1905 found a friend in him. That revolution
did not commit the unpardonable sin of being successful. But when the
tornado of the first victorious proletarian revolution swept over
Russia and destroyed in its fury some of the tormentors and exploiters
of the working class--then Kautsky's "humanitarianism" killed the last
remnant of revolutionary spirit and instinct in him and left only a
pitiful wreck of an apologist for capitalism, that was once Kautsky,
the Marxist.

July, 1914. The echoes of the shots fired in Sarajewo threaten to set
the world in flames. Will it come, the seeming inevitable? No!--A
thousand times no! Had not the forces of a future order, had not the
International of Labor--the Second International--solemnly declared in
1907 in Stuttgart, in 1911 in Copenhagen and in 1912 in Basel: "We will
fight war by all means at our disposal. Let the exploiters start a war.
It will begin as a war of capitalist governments against each other; it
will end--it must end--as a war of the working class of the world
against world capitalism; it must end in the proletarian revolution."
We, the socialists of the world, comrades from England and Russia, from
America and Germany, from France and Austria; we comrades from all over
the world, had solemnly promised ourselves: "War against war!" We had
promised ourselves and our cause to answer the call of capitalism for a
world war with a call on the proletariat for a world revolution.

Days passed. July disappeared in the ocean of time. The first days of
August brought the booming of the cannon to our ears, messengers of
the grim reality of war. And then the news of the collapse of the
Second International; reports of betrayal by the socialists; betrayal
in London and Vienna; betrayal in Berlin and Brussels; betrayal in
Paris; betrayal everywhere. What would Kautsky say to this rank
betrayal, Kautsky, the foremost disciple of Marx, Kautsky, the
foremost theoretician of the Second International? Will he at least
speak up? He did not speak up. Commenting on the betrayal he wrote in
"Die Neue Zeit": "Die Kritik der Waffen hat eingesetzt; jetzt hat die
Waffe der Kritik zu schweigen."[1] With this one sentence Kautsky
replaced Marxism as the basis of his science with rank and undisguised
hypocrisy. From then on although trying to retain the toga of a
Marxist scholar on his shoulders, with thousands of "if's" and
"when's" and "but's" he became the apologist for the betrayal of the
German Social-Democracy, and the betrayal of the Second International.

          [1] The arbitrament of arms is on; now the weapon of
          criticism must rest.

It is true that his "if's" and "when's" and "but's" did not satisfy
the Executive Committee of the Social-Democratic Party. They hoped for
a victory of the imperial army and wanted to secure a full and
unmitigated share of the glory of "His Majesty's" victory. That is why
they did not appreciate Kautsky's excellent service. So they helped
the renegade to a cheap martyrdom by removing him from the editorship
of "Die Neue Zeit." After 1918 it may have dawned upon Scheidemann and
Ebert how much better Kautsky served the capitalist cause by couching
his betrayal in words that did not lose him outright all the
confidence of the proletariat. And Kautsky himself is now exhausting
every effort to prove to Noske and Scheidemann how cruelly he was
mistreated and how well he deserves to be taken back to their bosom.

Kautsky's book "Terrorism and Communism" is dictated by hatred of the
Russian revolution. It is influenced by fear of a like revolution in
Germany. It is written with tears for the counter-revolutionary
bourgeoisie and its pseudo-"socialist" henchmen who have been
sacrificed on the altar of revolution by the proletarian dictatorship
in Russia. Kautsky prefers to sacrifice the revolution and the
revolutionists on the altar of "humanitarianism." The author of
"Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History" knows--must
know--that humanitarianism under capitalism is capitalist
humanitarianism. This humanitarianism mints gold out of the bones, the
blood, the health and the suffering of the whole working class while
it sheds tears about an individual case of cruelty to one human being.
This humanitarianism punishes murder with death and beats to death the
pacifist who protests against war as an act of mass murder. Under the
cloak of "humanitarian instincts" Kautsky only hides the enemy of the
proletarian revolution. The question at issue is not _terrorism_. It
is the _dictatorship_; it is _revolution_ itself. If the Russian
proletariat was justified in taking over power it was in duty bound to
use _all_ means necessary to keep it. If it is a crime for them to use
terrorist means then it was a crime to take a power which they could
maintain only by terrorist means. And that is really Kautsky's point.
The crime of the Bolsheviki is that they took power. If Kautsky were a
mere sentimentalist and yet a revolutionist he could shed tears over
the unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to give up power without a
struggle. But not being a revolutionist he condemns the proletariat
for having taken and maintained power by the only means possible, by
_force_. Kautsky would much prefer to shed crocodile tears over
tens of thousands of proletarian revolutionists slaughtered by a
successful counter-revolution. He scorns the Russian Communists
because they robbed him of the opportunity to parade his petit
bourgeois and consequently pro-capitalist "humanitarian" sentiments in
a pro-revolutionary cloak. But he must parade them at any cost. So he
parades them without disguise as a mourner for the suppressed
bourgeoisie in Russia.

Trotsky's answer to Kautsky is not only one side of a controversy. It
is one of the literary fruits of the revolution itself. It breathes
the breath of revolution. It conquers the gray scholastic theory of
the renegade with the irresistible weapon of the revolutionary
experience of the Russian proletariat. It refuses to shed tears over
the victims of Gallifet and shows what alone saved the Russian
revolution from the Russian Gallifets, the Kolchaks, Wrangels, etc.

Trotsky's book is not only an answer to Karl Kautsky; it is an answer
to the thousands of Kautskys in the socialist movement the world over
who want the proletariat to drown the memory of seas of proletarian
blood shed by their treachery in an ocean of tears shed for the
suppressed bourgeoisie of Russia.

Trotsky's book is one of the most effective weapons in the literary
arsenal of the revolutionary proletariat in its fight against the
social traitors for leadership of the proletarian masses.




PREFACE

By H. N. BRAILSFORD


It has been said of the Bolsheviks that they are more interesting than
Bolshevism. To those who hold to the economic interpretation of
history that may seem a heresy. None the less, I believe that the
personality not merely of the leaders but also of their party goes far
to explain the making and survival of the Russian Revolution. To us in
the West they seem a wholly foreign type. With Socialist leaders and
organizations we and our fathers have been familiar for three-quarters
of a century. There has been no lack of talent and even of genius
among them. The movement has produced its great theorist in Marx, its
orator in Jaures, its powerful tacticians like Bebel, and it has
influenced literature in Morris, Anatole France and Shaw. It bred,
however, no considerable man of action, and it was left for the
Russians to do what generations of Western Socialists had spent their
lives in discussing. There was in this Russian achievement an almost
barbaric simplicity and directness. Here were man who really believed
the formulae of our theorists and the resolutions of our Congresses.
What had become for us a sterilized and almost respectable orthodoxy
rang to their ears as a trumpet call to action. The older generation
has found it difficult to pardon their sincerity. The rest of us want
to understand the miracle.

The real audacity of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that they made a
proletarian revolution precisely in that country which, of all
portions of the civilized world, seemed the least prepared for it by
its economic development. For an agrarian revolt, for the subdivision
of the soil, even for the overthrow of the old governing class, Russia
was certainly ready. But any spontaneous revolution, with its
foundations laid in the masses of the peasantry, would have been
individualistic and not communistic. The daring of the Bolsheviks lay
in their belief that the minute minority of the urban working class
could, by its concentration, its greater intelligence and its relative
capacity for organization, dominate the inert peasant mass, and give
to their outbreak of land-hunger the character and form of a
constructive proletarian revolution. The bitter struggle among Russian
parties which lasted from March, 1917, down to the defeat of Wrangel
in November, 1920, was really an internecine competition among them
for the leadership of the peasants. Which of these several groups
could enlist their confidence, to the extent of inducing them not
merely to fight, but to accept the discipline, military and civilian,
necessary for victory? At the start the Bolsheviks had everything
against them. They are nearly all townsmen. They talked in terms of a
foreign and very German doctrine. Few of them, save Lenin, grasped the
problems of rural life at all. The landed class should at least have
known the peasant better. Their chief rivals were the Social
Revolutionaries, a party which from its first beginnings had made a
cult of the Russian peasant, studied him, idealized him and courted
him, which even seemed in 1917 to have won him. Many circumstances
explain the success of the Bolsheviks, who proved once again in
history the capacity of the town, even when its population is
relatively minute, for swift and concentrated action. They also had
the luck to deal with opponents who committed the supreme mistake of
invoking foreign aid. But none of these advantages would have availed
without an immense superiority of character. The Slav temperament,
dreamy, emotional, undisciplined, showed itself at its worst in the
incorrigible self-indulgence of the more aristocratic "Whites," while
the "intellectuals" of the moderate Socialist and Liberal groups have
been ruined for action by their exclusively literary and aesthetic
education. The Bolsheviks may be a less cultivated group, but, in
their underground life of conspiracy, they had learned sobriety,
discipline, obedience, and mutual confidence. Their rigid dogmatic
Marxist faith gives to them the power of action which belongs only to
those who believe without criticism or question. Their ability to lead
depends much less than most Englishmen suppose, on their ruthlessness
and their readiness to practise the arts of intimidation and
suppression. Their chief asset is their self-confidence. In every
emergency they are always sure that they have the only workable plan.
They stand before the rest of Russia as one man. They never doubt or
despair, and even when they compromise, they do it with an air of
truculence. Their survival amid invasion, famine, blockade, and
economic collapse has been from first to last a triumph of the
unflinching will and the fanatical faith. They have spurred a lazy and
demoralized people to notable feats of arms and to still more
astonishing feats of endurance. To hypnotize a nation in this fashion
is, perhaps, the most remarkable feat of the human will in modern
times.

This book is, so far, by far the most typical expression of the
Bolshevik temperament which the revolution has produced.
Characteristically it is a polemic, and not a constructive essay. Its
self-confidence, its dash, even its insolence, are a true expression
of the movement. Its author bears a world-famous name. Everyone can
visualize the powerful head, the singularly handsome features, the
athletic figure of the man. He makes in private talk an impression of
decision and definiteness. He is not rapid or expansive in speech, for
everything that he says is calculated and clear cut. One has the sense
that one is in the presence of abounding yet disciplined vitality. The
background is an office which by its military order and punctuality
rebukes the habitual slovenliness of Russia. On the platform his
manner was much quieter than I expected. He spoke rather slowly, in a
pleasant tenor voice, walking to and fro across the stage and choosing
his words, obviously anxious to express his thoughts forcibly but also
exactly. A flash of wit and a striking phrase came frequently, but the
manner was emphatically not that of a demagogue. The man, indeed, is a
natural aristocrat, and his tendency, which Lenin, the aristocrat by
birth, corrects, is towards military discipline and authoritative
regimentation.

There is nothing surprising to-day in the note of authority which one
hears in Trotsky's voice and detects in his writing, for he is the
chief of a considerable army, which owes everything to his talent for
organization. It was at Brest-Litovsk that he displayed the audacity
which is genius. Up to that moment there was little in his career to
distinguish him from his comrades of the revolutionary under-world--a
university course cut short by prison, an apprenticeship to agitation
in Russia, some years of exile spent in Vienna, Paris, and New York,
the distinction which he shares with Tchitcherin of "sitting" in a
British prison, a ready wit, a gift of trenchant speech, but as yet
neither the solid achievement nor the legend which gives confidence.
Yet this obscure agitator, handicapped in such a task by his Jewish
birth, faced the diplomatist and soldiers of the Central Empires,
flushed as they were with victory and the insolence of their kind,
forced them into public debate, staggered them by talking of first
principles as though the defeat and impotence of Russia counted for
nothing, and actually used the negotiations to shout across their
heads his summons to their own subjects to revolt. He showed in this
astonishing performance the grace and audacity of a "matador." This
unique bit of drama revealed the persistent belief of the Bolsheviks
in the power of the defiant challenge, the magnetic effect of sheer
will. Since this episode his services to the revolution have been more
solid but not less brilliant. He had no military knowledge or
experience, yet he took in hand the almost desperate task of creating
an army. He has often been compared to Carnot. But, save that both had
lost officers, there was little in common between the French and the
Russian armies in the early stages of the two revolutions. The French
army had not been demoralized by defeat, or wearied by long inaction,
or sapped by destructive propaganda. Trotsky had to create his Red
Army from the foundations. He imposed firm discipline, and yet
contrived to preserve the elan of the revolutionary spirit. Hampered
by the inconceivable difficulties that arose from ruined railways and
decayed industries, he none the less contrived to make a military
machine which overthrew the armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel,
with the flower of the old professional officers at their head. As a
feat of organization under inordinate difficulties, his work ranks as
the most remarkable performance of the revolution.

It is not the business of a preface to anticipate the argument of a
book, still less to obtrude personal opinions. Kautsky's labored
essay, to which this book is the brilliant reply, has been translated
into English, and is widely known. The case against the possibility of
political democracy in a capitalist society could hardly be better put
than in these pages, and the polemic against purely evolutionary
methods is formidable. The English reader of to-day is aware, however,
that the Russian revolution has not stood still since Trotsky wrote.
We have to realize that, even in the view of the Bolsheviks
themselves, the evolution towards Communism is in Russia only in its
early stages. The recent compromises imply, at the best, a very long
period of transition, through controlled capitalist production, to
Socialism. Experience has proved that catastrophic revolution and the
seizure of political power do not in themselves avail to make a
Socialist society. The economic development in that direction has
actually been retarded, and Russia, under the stress of civil war, has
retrograded into a primitive village system of production and
exchange. To every reader's mind the question will be present whether
the peculiar temperament of the Bolsheviks has led them to
over-estimate the importance of political power, to underestimate the
inert resistance of the majority, and to risk too much for the
illusion of dictating. To that question history has not yet given the
decisive answer. The daemonic will that made the revolution and
defended it by achieving the impossible, may yet vindicate itself
against the dull trend of impersonal forces.




Dictatorship vs. Democracy




Introduction


The origin of this book was the learned brochure by Kautsky with the
same name. My work was begun at the most intense period of the
struggle with Denikin and Yudenich, and more than once was interrupted
by events at the front. In the most difficult days, when the first
chapters were being written, all the attention of Soviet Russia was
concentrated on purely military problems. We were obliged to defend
first of all the very possibility of Socialist economic
reconstruction. We could busy ourselves little with industry, further
than was necessary to maintain the front. We were obliged to expose
Kautsky's economic slanders mainly by analogy with his political
slanders. The monstrous assertions of Kautsky--to the effect that the
Russian workers were incapable of labor discipline and economic
self-control--could, at the beginning of this work, nearly a year ago,
be combatted chiefly by pointing to the high state of discipline and
heroism in battle of the Russian workers at the front created by the
civil war. That experience was more than enough to explode these
bourgeois slanders. But now a few months have gone by, and we can turn
to facts and conclusions drawn directly from the economic life of
Soviet Russia.

As soon as the military pressure relaxed after the defeat of Kolchak
and Yudenich and the infliction of decisive blows on Denikin, after
the conclusion of peace with Esthonia and the beginning of
negotiations with Lithuania and Poland, the whole country turned its
mind to things economic. And this one fact, of a swift and
concentrated transference of attention and energy from one set of
problems to another--very different, but requiring not less
sacrifice--is incontrovertible evidence of the mighty vigor of the
Soviet order. In spite of political tortures, physical sufferings and
horrors, the laboring masses are infinitely distant from political
decomposition, from moral collapse, or from apathy. Thanks to a regime
which, though it has inflicted great hardships upon them, has given
their life a purpose and a high goal, they preserve an extraordinary
moral stubbornness and ability unexampled in history, and concentrate
their attention and will on collective problems. To-day, in all
branches of industry, there is going on an energetic struggle for the
establishment of strict labor discipline, and for the increase of the
productivity of labor. The party organizations, the trade unions, the
factory and workshop administrative committees, rival one another in
this respect, with the undivided support of the public opinion of the
working class as a whole. Factory after factory willingly, by
resolution at its general meeting, increases its working day.
Petrograd and Moscow set the example, and the provinces emulate
Petrograd. Communist Saturdays and Sundays--that is to say, voluntary
and unpaid work in hours appointed for rest--spread ever wider and
wider, drawing into their reach many, many hundreds of thousands of
working men and women. The industry and productivity of labor at the
Communist Saturdays and Sundays, according to the report of experts
and the evidence of figures, is of a remarkably high standard.

Voluntary mobilizations for labor problems in the party and in the
Young Communist League are carried out with just as much enthusiasm as
hitherto for military tasks. Voluntarism supplements and gives life to
universal labor service. The Committees for universal labor service
recently set up have spread all over the country. The attraction of
the population to work on a mass scale (clearing snow from the roads,
repairing railway lines, cutting timber, chopping and bringing up of
wood to the towns, the simplest building operations, the cutting of
slate and of peat) become more and more widespread and organized every
day. The ever-increasing employment of military formations on the
labor front would be quite impossible in the absence of elevated
enthusiasm for labor.

True, we live in the midst of a very difficult period of economic
depression--exhausted, poverty-stricken, and hungry. But this is no
argument against the Soviet regime. All periods of transition have
been characterized by just such tragic features. Every class society
(serf, feudal, capitalist), having exhausted its vitality, does not
simply leave the arena, but is violently swept off by an intense
struggle, which immediately brings to its participants even greater
privations and sufferings than those against which they rose.

The transition from feudal economy to bourgeois society--a step of
gigantic importance from the point of view of progress--gave us a
terrifying list of martyrs. However the masses of serfs suffered under
feudalism, however difficult it has been, and is, for the proletariat
to live under capitalism, never have the sufferings of the workers
reached such a pitch as at the epochs when the old feudal order was
being violently shattered, and was yielding place to the new. The
French Revolution of the eighteenth century, which attained its
titanic dimensions under the pressure of the masses exhausted with
suffering, itself deepened and rendered more acute their misfortunes
for a prolonged period and to an extraordinary extent. Can it be
otherwise?

Palace revolutions, which end merely by personal reshufflings at the
top, can take place in a short space of time, having practically no
effect on the economic life of the country. Quite another matter are
revolutions which drag into their whirlpool millions of workers.
Whatever be the form of society, it rests on the foundation of labor.
Dragging the mass of the people away from labor, drawing them for a
prolonged period into the struggle, thereby destroying their
connection with production, the revolution in all these ways strikes
deadly blows at economic life, and inevitably lowers the standard
which it found at its birth. The more perfect the revolution, the
greater are the masses it draws in; and the longer it is prolonged,
the greater is the destruction it achieves in the apparatus of
production, and the more terrible inroads does it make upon public
resources. From this there follows merely the conclusion which did not
require proof--that a civil war is harmful to economic life. But to
lay this at the door of the Soviet economic system is like accusing a
new-born human being of the birth-pangs of the mother who brought him
into the world. The problem is to make a civil war a short one; and
this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just
against revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky's whole book is
directed.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Since the time that the book under examination appeared, not only in
Russia, but throughout the world--and first of all in Europe--the
greatest events have taken place, or processes of great importance
have developed, undermining the last buttresses of Kautskianism.

In Germany, the civil war has been adopting an ever fiercer character.
The external strength in organization of the old party and trade union
democracy of the working class has not only not created conditions for
a more peaceful and "humane" transition to Socialism--as follows from
the present theory of Kautsky--but, on the contrary, has served as one
of the principal reasons for the long-drawn-out character of the
struggle, and its constantly growing ferocity. The more German
Social-Democracy became a conservative, retarding force, the more
energy, lives, and blood have had to be spent by the German
proletariat, devoted to it, in a series of systematic attacks on the
foundation of bourgeois society, in order, in the process of the
struggle itself, to create an actually revolutionary organization,
capable of guiding the proletariat to final victory. The conspiracy of
the German generals, their fleeting seizure of power, and the bloody
events which followed, have again shown what a worthless and wretched
masquerade is so-called democracy, during the collapse of imperialism
and a civil war. This democracy that has outlived itself has not
decided one question, has not reconciled one contradiction, has not
healed one wound, has not warded off risings either of the Right or of
the Left; it is helpless, worthless, fraudulent, and serves only to
confuse the backward sections of the people, especially the lower
middle-classes.

The hope expressed by Kautsky, in the conclusion of his book, that the
Western countries, the "old democracies" of France and England--crowned
as they are with victory--will afford us a picture of a healthy,
normal, peaceful, truly Kautskian development of Socialism, is one
of the most puerile illusions possible. The so-called Republican
democracy of victorious France, at the present moment, is nothing but
the most reactionary, grasping government that has ever existed in the
world. Its internal policy is built upon fear, greed, and violence, in
just as great a measure as its external policy. On the other hand, the
French proletariat, misled more than any other class has ever been
misled, is more and more entering on the path of direct action. The
repressions which the government of the Republic has hurled upon
the General Confederation of Labor show that even syndicalist
Kautskianism--_i.e._, hypocritical compromise--has no legal place
within the framework of bourgeois democracy. The revolutionizing of
the masses, the growing ferocity of the propertied classes, and the
disintegration of intermediate groups--three parallel processes which
determine the character and herald the coming of a cruel civil
war--have been going on before our eyes in full blast during the last
few months in France.

In Great Britain, events, different in form, are moving along the
self-same fundamental road. In that country, the ruling class of which
is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before,
the formulae of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of
parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere,
Lloyd George, appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of
Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class.
In his arguments there remains not a trace of the vague democracy of
the "Marxist" Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of class
realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil
war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by
experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that
stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism
will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming
victorious revolt of the French proletariat.

Precisely because historical events have, with stern energy, been
developing in these last months their revolutionary logic, the author
of this present work asks himself: Does it still require to be
published? Is it still necessary to confute Kautsky theoretically? Is
there still theoretical necessity to justify revolutionary terrorism?

Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays in the
Socialist movement an enormous part. Even for practical England the
period has arrived when the working class must exhibit an
ever-increasing demand for a theoretical statement of its experiences
and its problems. On the other hand, even the proletarian psychology
includes in itself a terrible inertia of conservatism--the more that,
in the present case, there is a question of nothing less than the
traditional ideology of the parties of the Second International which
first roused the proletariat, and recently were so powerful. After the
collapse of official social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Victor Adler,
Renaudel, Vandervelde, Henderson, Plekhanov, etc.), international
Kautskianism (the staff of the German Independents, Friedrich Adler,
Longuet, a considerable section of the Italians, the British
Independent Labor Party, the Martov group, etc.) has become the chief
political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist
society depends. It may be said that the will of the working masses of
the whole of the civilized world, directly influenced by the course of
events, is at the present moment incomparably more revolutionary than
their consciousness, which is still dominated by the prejudices of
parliamentarism and compromise. The struggle for the dictatorship of
the working class means, at the present moment, an embittered struggle
with Kautskianism within the working class. The lies and prejudices of
the policy of compromise, still poisoning the atmosphere even in
parties tending towards the Third International, must be thrown aside.
This book must serve the ends of an irreconcilable struggle against
the cowardice, half-measures, and hypocrisy of Kautskianism in all
countries.

                 *       *       *       *       *

P.S.--To-day (May, 1920) the clouds have again gathered over Soviet
Russia. Bourgeois Poland, by its attack on the Ukraine, has opened the
new offensive of world imperialism against the Soviet Republic. The
gigantic perils again growing up before the revolution, and the great
sacrifices again imposed on the laboring masses by the war, are once
again pushing Russian Kautskianism on to the path of open opposition
to the Soviet Government--_i.e._, in reality, on to the path of
assistance to the world murderers of Soviet Russia. It is the fate of
Kautskianism to try to help the proletarian revolution when it is in
satisfactory circumstances, and to raise all kinds of obstacles in its
way when it is particularly in need of help. Kautsky has more than
once foretold our destruction, which must serve as the best proof of
his, Kautsky's, theoretical rectitude. In his fall, this "successor of
Marx" has reached a stage at which his sole serious political
programme consists in speculations on the collapse of the proletarian
dictatorship.

He will be once again mistaken. The destruction of bourgeois Poland by
the Red Army, guided by Communist working men, will appear as a new
manifestation of the power of the proletarian dictatorship, and will
thereby inflict a crushing blow on bourgeois scepticism (Kautskianism)
in the working class movement. In spite of mad confusion of external
forms, watchwords, and appearances, history has extremely simplified
the fundamental meaning of its own process, reducing it to a struggle
of imperialism against Communism. Pilsudsky is fighting, not only for
the lands of the Polish magnates in the Ukraine and in White Russia,
not only for capitalist property and for the Catholic Church, but also
for parliamentary democracy and for evolutionary Socialism, for the
Second International, and for the right of Kautsky to remain a
critical hanger-on of the bourgeoisie. We are fighting for the
Communist International, and for the international proletarian
revolution. The stakes are great on either side. The struggle will be
obstinate and painful. We hope for the victory, for we have every
historical right to it.

L. TROTSKY.

Moscow, May 29, 1920.




Dictatorship vs. Democracy

_A Reply to Karl Kautsky_

_By_ LEON TROTSKY




1

THE BALANCE OF POWER


The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the
Soviet system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of
revolutionary attempts to set up a similar structure in other
countries, is the argument based on the balance of power. The Soviet
regime in Russia is utopian--"because it does not correspond to the
balance of power." Backward Russia cannot put objects before itself
which would be appropriate to advanced Germany. And for the
proletariat of Germany it would be madness to take political power
into its own hands, as this "at the present moment" would disturb the
balance of power. The League of Nations is imperfect, but still
corresponds to the balance of power. The struggle for the overthrow of
imperialist supremacy is utopian--the balance of power only requires a
revision of the Versailles Treaty. When Longuet hobbled after Wilson
this took place, not because of the political decomposition of
Longuet, but in honor of the law of the balance of power. The Austrian
president, Seitz, and the chancellor, Renner, must, in the opinion of
Friedrich Adler, exercise their bourgeois impotence at the central
posts of the bourgeois republic, for otherwise the balance of power
would be infringed. Two years before the world war, Karl Renner, then
not a chancellor, but a "Marxist" advocate of opportunism, explained
to me that the regime of June 3--that is, the union of landlords and
capitalists crowned by the monarchy--must inevitably maintain itself
in Russia during a whole historical period, as it answered to the
balance of power.

What is this balance of power after all--that sacramental formula
which is to define, direct, and explain the whole course of history,
wholesale and retail? Why exactly is it that the formula of the
balance of power, in the mouth of Kautsky and his present school,
inevitably appears as a justification of indecision, stagnation,
cowardice and treachery?

By the balance of power they understand everything you please: the
level of production attained, the degree of differentiation of
classes, the number of organized workers, the total funds at the
disposal of the trade unions, sometimes the results of the last
parliamentary elections, frequently the degree of readiness for
compromise on the part of the ministry, or the degree of effrontery of
the financial oligarchy. Most frequently, it means that summary
political impression which exists in the mind of a half-blind pedant,
or a so-called realist politician, who, though he has absorbed the
phraseology of Marxism, in reality is guided by the most shallow
manoeuvres, bourgeois prejudices, and parliamentary "tactics." After
a whispered conversation with the director of the police department,
an Austrian Social-Democratic politician in the good, and not so far
off, old times always knew exactly whether the balance of power
permitted a peaceful street demonstration in Vienna on May Day. In the
case of the Eberts, Scheidemanns and Davids, the balance of power was,
not so very long ago, calculated exactly by the number of fingers
which were extended to them at their meeting in the Reichstag with
Bethmann-Hollweg, or with Ludendorff himself.

According to Friedrich Adler, the establishment of a Soviet
dictatorship in Austria would be a fatal infraction of the balance of
power; the Entente would condemn Austria to starvation. In proof of
this, Friedrich Adler, at the July congress of Soviets, pointed to
Hungary, where at that time the Hungarian Renners had not yet, with
the help of the Hungarian Adlers, overthrown the dictatorship of the
Soviets. At the first glance, it might really seem that Friedrich
Adler was right in the case of Hungary. The proletarian dictatorship
was overthrown there soon afterwards, and its place was filled by the
ministry of the reactionary Friedrich. But it is quite justifiable to
ask: Did the latter correspond to the balance of power? At all events,
Friedrich and his Huszar might not even temporarily have seized power
had it not been for the Roumanian army. Hence, it is clear that, when
discussing the fate of the Soviet Government in Hungary, it is
necessary to take account of the "balance of power," at all events in
two countries--in Hungary itself, and in its neighbor, Roumania. But
it is not difficult to grasp that we cannot stop at this. If the
dictatorship of the Soviets had been set up in Austria before the
maturing of the Hungarian crisis, the overthrow of the Soviet regime
in Budapest would have been an infinitely more difficult task.
Consequently, we have to include Austria also, together with the
treacherous policy of Friedrich Adler, in that balance of power which
determined the temporary fall of the Soviet Government in Hungary.

Friedrich Adler himself, however, seeks the key to the balance of
power, not in Russia and Hungary, but in the West, in the countries of
Clemenceau and Lloyd George. They have in their hands bread and
coal--and really bread and coal, especially in our time, are just as
foremost factors in the mechanism of the balance of power as cannon in
the constitution of Lassalle. Brought down from the heights, Adler's
idea consists, consequently, in this: that the Austrian proletariat
must not seize power until such time, as it is permitted to do so by
Clemenceau (or Millerand--_i.e._, a Clemenceau of the second
order).

However, even here it is permissible to ask: Does the policy of
Clemenceau himself really correspond to the balance of power? At the
first glance it may appear that it corresponds well enough, and, if
it cannot be proved, it is, at least, guaranteed by Clemenceau's
gendarmes, who break up working-class meetings, and arrest and
shoot Communists. But here we cannot but remember that the
terrorist measures of the Soviet Government--that is, the same
searches, arrests, and executions, only directed against the
counter-revolutionaries--are considered by some people as a proof that
the Soviet Government does _not_ correspond to the balance of power.
In vain would we, however, begin to seek in our time, anywhere in the
world, a regime which, to preserve itself, did not have recourse to
measures of stern mass repression. This means that hostile class
forces, having broken through the framework of every kind of
law--including that of "democracy"--are striving to find their new
balance by means of a merciless struggle.

When the Soviet system was being instituted in Russia, not only the
capitalist politicians, but also the Socialist opportunists of all
countries proclaimed it an insolent challenge to the balance of
forces. On this score, there was no quarrel between Kautsky, the
Austrian Count Czernin, and the Bulgarian Premier, Radoslavov. Since
that time, the Austro-Hungarian and German monarchies have collapsed,
and the most powerful militarism in the world has fallen into dust.
The Soviet regime has held out. The victorious countries of the
Entente have mobilized and hurled against it all they could. The
Soviet Government has stood firm. Had Kautsky, Friedrich Adler, and
Otto Bauer been told that the system of the dictatorship of the
proletariat would hold out in Russia--first against the attack of
German militarism, and then in a ceaseless war with the militarism of
the Entente countries--the sages of the Second International would
have considered such a prophecy a laughable misunderstanding of the
"balance of power."

The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under
the influence of fundamental and secondary factors of differing
degrees of effectiveness, and only in its most fundamental quality is
it determined by the stage of the development of production. The
social structure of a people is extraordinarily behind the development
of its productive forces. The lower middle-classes, and particularly
the peasantry, retain their existence long after their economic
methods have been made obsolete, and have been condemned, by the
technical development of the productive powers of society. The
consciousness of the masses, in its turn, is extraordinarily behind
the development of their social relations, the consciousness of the
old Socialist parties is a whole epoch behind the state of mind of the
masses, and the consciousness of the old parliamentary and trade union
leaders, more reactionary than the consciousness of their party,
represents a petrified mass which history has been unable hitherto
either to digest or reject. In the parliamentary epoch, during the
period of stability of social relations, the psychological
factor--without great error--was the foundation upon which all current
calculations were based. It was considered that parliamentary
elections reflected the balance of power with sufficient exactness.
The imperialist war, which upset all bourgeois society, displayed the
complete uselessness of the old criteria. The latter completely
ignored those profound historical factors which had gradually been
accumulating in the preceding period, and have now, all at once,
appeared on the surface, and have begun to determine the course of
history.

The political worshippers of routine, incapable of surveying the
historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and
contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the
way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all
sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a
Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature
simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority.
Hence the purely mechanical attitude towards parliamentarism, which,
in the eyes of the majority of the statesmen of the Second
International, indicated the degree to which society was prepared for
Socialism as accurately as the manometer indicates the pressure of
steam. Yet there is nothing more senseless than this mechanized
representation of the development of social relations.

If, beginning with the productive bases of society, we ascend the
stages of the superstructure--classes, the State, laws, parties, and
so on--it may be established that the weight of each additional part
of the superstructure is not simply to be added to, but in many cases
to be multiplied by, the weight of all the preceding stages. As a
result, the political consciousness of groups which long imagined
themselves to be among the most advanced, displays itself, at a moment
of change, as a colossal obstacle in the path of historical
development. To-day it is quite beyond doubt that the parties of the
Second International, standing at the head of the proletariat, which
dared not, could not, and would not take power into their hands at the
most critical moment of human history, and which led the proletariat
along the road of mutual destruction in the interests of imperialism,
proved a _decisive factor_ of the counter-revolution.

The great forces of production--that shock factor in historical
development--were choked in those obsolete institutions of the
superstructure (private property and the national State) in which they
found themselves locked by all preceding development. Engendered by
capitalism, the forces of production were knocking at all the walls of
the bourgeois national State, demanding their emancipation by means of
the Socialist organization of economic life on a world scale. The
stagnation of social groupings, the stagnation of political forces,
which proved themselves incapable of destroying the old class
groupings, the stagnation, stupidity and treachery of the directing
Socialist parties, which had assumed to themselves in reality the
defense of bourgeois society--all these factors led to an elemental
revolt of the forces of production, in the shape of the imperialist
war. Human technical skill, the most revolutionary factor in history,
arose with the might accumulated during scores of years against the
disgusting conservatism and criminal stupidity of the Scheidemanns,
Kautskies, Renaudels, Vanderveldes and Longuets, and, by means of its
howitzers, machine-guns, dreadnoughts and aeroplanes, it began a
furious pogrom of human culture.

In this way the cause of the misfortunes at present experienced by
humanity is precisely that the development of the technical command of
men over nature has _long ago_ grown ripe for the socialization
of economic life. The proletariat has occupied a place in production
which completely guarantees its dictatorship, while the most
intelligent forces in history--the parties and their leaders--have
been discovered to be still wholly under the yoke of the old
prejudices, and only fostered a lack of faith among the masses in
their own power. In quite recent years Kautsky used to understand
this. "The proletariat at the present time has grown so strong," wrote
Kautsky in his pamphlet, _The Path to Power_, "that it can calmly
await the coming war. There can be no more talk of a _premature
revolution_, now that the proletariat has drawn from the present
structure of the State such strength as could be drawn therefrom, and
now that its reconstruction has become a condition of the
proletariat's further progress." From the moment that the development
of productive forces, outgrowing the framework of the bourgeois
national State, drew mankind into an epoch of crises and convulsions,
the consciousness of the masses was shaken by dread shocks out of the
comparative equilibrium of the preceding epoch. The routine and
stagnation of its mode of living, the hypnotic suggestion of peaceful
legality, had already ceased to dominate the proletariat. But it had
not yet stepped, consciously and courageously, on to the path of open
revolutionary struggle. It wavered, passing through the last moment of
unstable equilibrium. At such a moment of psychological change, the
part played by the summit--the State, on the one hand, and the
revolutionary Party on the other--acquires a colossal importance. A
determined push from left or right is sufficient to move the
proletariat, for a certain period, to one or the other side. We saw
this in 1914, when, under the united pressure of imperialist
governments and Socialist patriotic parties, the working class was all
at once thrown out of its equilibrium and hurled on to the path of
imperialism. We have since seen how the experience of the war, the
contrasts between its results and its first objects, is shaking the
masses in a revolutionary sense, making them more and more capable of
an open revolt against capitalism. In such conditions, the presence of
a revolutionary party, which renders to itself a clear account of the
motive forces of the present epoch, and understands the exceptional
role amongst them of a revolutionary class; which knows its
inexhaustible, but unrevealed, powers; which believes in that class
and believes in itself; which knows the power of revolutionary method
in an epoch of instability of all social relations; which is ready to
employ that method and carry it through to the end--the presence of
such a party represents a factor of incalculable historical
importance.

And, on the other hand, the Socialist party, enjoying traditional
influence, which does _not_ render itself an account of what is going
on around it, which does _not_ understand the revolutionary situation,
and, therefore, finds no key to it, which does _not_ believe in either
the proletariat or itself--such a party in our time is the most
mischievous stumbling block in history, and a source of confusion and
inevitable chaos.

Such is now the role of Kautsky and his sympathizers. They teach the
proletariat not to believe in itself, but to believe its reflection in
the crooked mirror of democracy which has been shattered by the
jack-boot of militarism into a thousand fragments. The decisive factor
in the revolutionary policy of the working class must be, in their
view, not the international situation, not the actual collapse of
capitalism, not that social collapse which is generated thereby, not
that concrete necessity of the supremacy of the working class for
which the cry arises from the smoking ruins of capitalist
civilization--not all this must determine the policy of the
revolutionary party of the proletariat--but that counting of votes
which is carried out by the capitalist tellers of parliamentarism.
Only a few years ago, we repeat, Kautsky seemed to understand the real
inner meaning of the problem of revolution. "Yes, the proletariat
represents the sole revolutionary class of the nation," wrote Kautsky
in his pamphlet, _The Path to Power_. It follows that every collapse
of the capitalist order, whether it be of a moral, financial, or
military character, implies the bankruptcy of all the bourgeois
parties responsible for it, and signifies that the sole way out of the
blind alley is the establishment of the power of the _proletariat_.
And to-day the party of prostration and cowardice, the party of
Kautsky, says to the working class: "The question is not whether you
to-day are the sole creative force in history; whether you are capable
of throwing aside that ruling band of robbers into which the
propertied classes have developed; the question is not whether anyone
else can accomplish this task on your behalf; the question is not
whether history allows you any postponement (for the present condition
of bloody chaos threatens to bury you yourself, in the near future,
under the last ruins of capitalism). The problem is for the ruling
imperialist bandits to succeed--yesterday or to-day--to deceive,
violate, and swindle public opinion, by collecting 51 per cent. of the
votes against your 49. Perish the world, but long live the
parliamentary majority!"




2

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT


"Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, which Engels stubbornly defended in 1891, shortly before
his death--the idea that the political autocracy of the proletariat is
the sole form in which it can realize its control of the state."

That is what Kautsky wrote about ten years ago. The sole form of power
for the proletariat he considered to be not a Socialist majority in a
democratic parliament, but the political autocracy of the proletariat,
its dictatorship. And it is quite clear that, if our problem is the
abolition of private property in the means of production, the only
road to its solution lies through the concentration of State power in
its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for
the transitional period of an exceptional regime--a regime in which
the ruling class is guided, not by general principles calculated for a
prolonged period, but by considerations of revolutionary policy.

The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial
changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is
possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor. The
dictatorship of the proletariat does not exclude, of course, either
separate agreements, or considerable concessions, especially in
connection with the lower middle-class and the peasantry. But the
proletariat can only conclude these agreements after having gained
possession of the apparatus of power, and having guaranteed to itself
the possibility of independently deciding on which points to yield and
on which to stand firm, in the interests of the general Socialist
task.

Kautsky now repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat at the very
outset, as the "tyranny of the minority over the majority." That is,
he discerns in the revolutionary regime of the proletariat those very
features by which the honest Socialists of all countries invariably
describe the dictatorship of the exploiters, albeit masked by the
forms of democracy.

Abandoning the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky
transforms the question of the conquest of power by the proletariat
into a question of the conquest of a majority of votes by the
Social-Democratic Party in one of the electoral campaigns of the
future. Universal suffrage, according to the legal fiction of
parliamentarism, expresses the will of the citizens of all classes in
the nation, and, consequently, gives a possibility of attracting a
majority to the side of Socialism. While the theoretical possibility
has not been realized, the Socialist minority must submit to the
bourgeois majority. This fetishism of the parliamentary majority
represents a brutal repudiation, not only of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, but of Marxism and of the revolution altogether. If, in
principle, we are to subordinate Socialist policy to the parliamentary
mystery of majority and minority, it follows that, in countries where
formal democracy prevails, there is no place at all for the
revolutionary struggle. If the majority elected on the basis of
universal suffrage in Switzerland pass draconian legislation against
strikers, or if the executive elected by the will of a formal majority
in Northern America shoots workers, have the Swiss and American
workers the "right" of protest by organizing a general strike?
Obviously, no. The political strike is a form of extra-parliamentary
pressure on the "national will," as it has expressed itself through
universal suffrage. True, Kautsky himself, apparently, is ashamed to
go as far as the logic of his new position demands. Bound by some sort
of remnant of the past, he is obliged to acknowledge the possibility
of correcting universal suffrage by action. Parliamentary elections,
at all events in principle, never took the place, in the eyes of the
Social-Democrats, of the real class struggle, of its conflicts,
repulses, attacks, revolts; they were considered merely as a
contributory fact in this struggle, playing a greater part at one
period, a smaller at another, and no part at all in the period of
dictatorship.

In 1891, that is, not long before his death, Engels, as we just heard,
obstinately defended the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only
possible form of its control of the State. Kautsky himself more than
once repeated this definition. Hence, by the way, we can see what an
unworthy forgery is Kautsky's present attempt to throw back the
dictatorship of the proletariat at us as a purely Russian invention.

Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be
carried on with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy
of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a
dictatorship--"the sole form in which the proletariat can achieve
control of the State"--it follows that the dictatorship must be
guaranteed at all cost.

To write a pamphlet about dictatorship one needs an ink-pot and a pile
of paper, and possibly, in addition, a certain number of ideas in
one's head. But in order to establish and consolidate the
dictatorship, one has to prevent the bourgeoisie from undermining the
State power of the proletariat. Kautsky apparently thinks that this
can be achieved by tearful pamphlets. But his own experience ought to
have shown him that it is not sufficient to have lost all influence
with the proletariat, to acquire influence with the bourgeoisie.

It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by
forcing the bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too
dangerous an undertaking for it to revolt against the dictatorship of
the proletariat, to undermine it by conspiracies, sabotage,
insurrections, or the calling in of foreign troops. The bourgeoisie,
hurled from power, must be forced to obey. In what way? The priests
used to terrify the people with future penalties. We have no such
resources at our disposal. But even the priests' hell never stood
alone, but was always bracketed with the material fire of the Holy
Inquisition, and with the scorpions of the democratic State. Is it
possible that Kautsky is leaning to the idea that the bourgeoisie can
be held down with the help of the categorical imperative, which in his
last writings plays the part of the Holy Ghost? We, on our part, can
only promise him our material assistance if he decides to equip a
Kantian-humanitarian mission to the realms of Denikin and Kolchak. At
all events, there he would have the possibility of convincing himself
that the counter-revolutionaries are not naturally devoid of
character, and that, thanks to their six years' existence in the fire
and smoke of war, their character has managed to become thoroughly
hardened. Every White Guard has long ago acquired the simple truth
that it is easier to hang a Communist to the branch of a tree than to
convert him with a book of Kautsky's. These gentlemen have no
superstitious fear, either of the principles of democracy or of the
flames of hell--the more so because the priests of the church and of
official learning act in collusion with them, and pour their combined
thunders exclusively on the heads of the Bolsheviks. The Russian White
Guards resemble the German and all other White Guards in this
respect--that they cannot be convinced or shamed, but only terrorized
or crushed.

The man who repudiates terrorism in principle--_i.e._, repudiates
measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed
counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of
the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who
repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the
Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism.

                 *       *       *       *       *

At the present time, Kautsky has no theory of the social revolution.
Every time he tries to generalize his slanders against the revolution
and the dictatorship of the proletariat, he produces merely a
rechauffe of the prejudices of Jauresism and Bernsteinism.

"The revolution of 1789," writes Kautsky, "itself put an end to the
most important causes which gave it its harsh and violent character,
and prepared the way for milder forms of the future revolution." (Page
140.)[2] Let us admit this, though to do so we have to forget the June
days of 1848 and the horrors of the suppression of the Commune. Let us
admit that the great revolution of the eighteenth century, which by
measures of merciless terror destroyed the rule of absolutism, of
feudalism, and of clericalism, really prepared the way for more
peaceful and milder solutions of social problems. But, even if we
admit this purely liberal standpoint, even here our accuser will prove
to be completely in the wrong; for the Russian Revolution, which
culminated in the dictatorship of the proletariat, began with just
that work which was done in France at the end of the eighteenth
century. Our forefathers, in centuries gone by, did not take the
trouble to prepare the democratic way--by means of revolutionary
terrorism--for milder manners in our revolution. The ethical mandarin,
Kautsky, ought to take these circumstances into account, and accuse
our forefathers, not us.

          [2] Translator's Note--For convenience sake, the references
          throughout have been altered to fall in the English
          translation of Kautsky's book. Mr. Kerridge's translation,
          however, has not been adhered to.

Kautsky, however, seems to make a little concession in this direction.
"True," he says, "no man of insight could doubt that a military
monarchy like the German, the Austrian, or the Russian could be
overthrown only by violent methods. But in this connection there was
always less thought" (amongst whom?), "of the bloody use of arms, and
more of the working class weapon peculiar to the proletariat--the
mass strike. And that a considerable portion of the proletariat,
after seizing power, would again--as at the end of the eighteenth
century--give vent to its rage and revenge in bloodshed could not be
expected. This would have meant a complete negation of all progress."
(Page 147.)

As we see, the war and a series of revolutions were required to enable
us to get a proper view of what was going on in reality in the heads of
some of our most learned theoreticians. It turns out that Kautsky did
not think that a Romanoff or a Hohenzollern could be put away by means
of conversations; but at the same time he seriously imagined that a
military monarchy could be overthrown by a general strike--_i.e._, by
a peaceful demonstration of folded arms. In spite of the Russian
revolution, and the world discussion of this question, Kautsky, it
turns out, retains the anarcho-reformist view of the general strike.
We might point out to him that, in the pages of its own journal, the
_Neue Zeit_, it was explained twelve years ago that the general strike
is only a mobilization of the proletariat and its setting up against
its enemy, the State; but that the strike in itself cannot produce
the solution of the problem, because it exhausts the forces of the
proletariat sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or
later, forces the workers to return to the factories. The general
strike acquires a decisive importance only as a preliminary to a
conflict between the proletariat and the armed forces of the
opposition--_i.e._, to the open revolutionary rising of the workers.
Only by breaking the will of the armies thrown against it can the
revolutionary class solve the problem of power--the root problem of
every revolution. The general strike produces the mobilization of both
sides, and gives the first serious estimate of the powers of resistance
of the counter-revolution. But only in the further stages of the
struggle, after the transition to the path of armed insurrection, can
that bloody price be fixed which the revolutionary class has to pay for
power. But that it will have to pay with blood, that, in the struggle
for the conquest of power and for its consolidation, the proletariat
will have not only to be killed, but also to kill--of this no serious
revolutionary ever had any doubt. To announce that the existence of a
determined life-and-death struggle between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie "is a complete negation of all progress," means simply that
the heads of some of our most reverend theoreticians take the form of a
camera-obscura, in which objects are represented upside down.

But, even when applied to more advanced and cultured countries with
established democratic traditions, there is absolutely no proof of
the justice of Kautsky's historical argument. As a matter of fact, the
argument itself is not new. Once upon a time the Revisionists gave it a
character more based on principle. They strove to prove that the growth
of proletarian organizations under democratic conditions guaranteed the
gradual and imperceptible--reformist and evolutionary--transition to
Socialist society--without general strikes and risings, without the
dictatorship of the proletariat.

Kautsky, at that culminating period of his activity, showed that,
in spite of the forms of democracy, the class contradictions of
capitalist society grew deeper, and that this process must inevitably
lead to a revolution and the conquest of power by the proletariat.

No one, of course, attempted to reckon up beforehand the number of
victims that will be called for by the revolutionary insurrection of
the proletariat, and by the regime of its dictatorship. But it was
clear to all that the number of victims will vary with the strength of
resistance of the propertied classes. If Kautsky desires to say in his
book that a democratic upbringing has not weakened the class egoism of
the bourgeoisie, this can be admitted without further parley.

If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and
continued for four years, _in spite of_ democracy, brought about
a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and
action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of
awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity--here
also he will be right.

All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real
conditions. The contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois
manikins produced in the retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real
proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as they have emerged from the
last imperialist slaughter.

In this fact of merciless civil war that is spreading over the whole
world, Kautsky sees only the result of a fatal lapse from the
"experienced tactics" of the Second International.

"In reality, since the time," he writes, "that Marxism has dominated
the Socialist movement, the latter, up to the world war, was, in spite
of its great activities, preserved from great defeats. And the idea of
insuring victory by means of terrorist domination had completely
disappeared from its ranks.

"Much was contributed in this connection by the fact that, at the time
when Marxism was the dominating Socialist teaching, democracy threw
out firm roots in Western Europe, and began there to change from an
end of the struggle to a trustworthy basis of political life." (Page
145.)

In this "formula of progress" there is not one atom of Marxism. The
real process of the struggle of classes and their material conflicts
has been lost in Marxist propaganda, which, thanks to the conditions
of democracy, guarantees, forsooth, a painless transition to a new and
"wiser" order. This is the most vulgar liberalism, a belated piece of
rationalism in the spirit of the eighteenth century--with the
difference that the ideas of Condorcet are replaced by a vulgarisation
of the Communist Manifesto. All history resolves itself into an
endless sheet of printed paper, and the centre of this "humane"
process proves to be the well-worn writing table of Kautsky.

We are given as an example the working-class movement in the period of
the Second International, which, going forward under the banner of
Marxism, never sustained great defeats whenever it deliberately
challenged them. But did not the whole working-class movement, the
proletariat of the whole world, and with it the whole of human
culture, sustain an incalculable defeat in August, 1914, when history
cast up the accounts of all the forces and possibilities of the
Socialist parties, amongst whom, we are told, the guiding role
belonged to Marxism, "on the firm footing of democracy"? _Those
parties proved bankrupt._ Those features of their previous work
which Kautsky now wishes to render permanent--self-adaptation,
repudiation of "illegal" activity, repudiation of the open fight,
hopes placed in democracy as the road to a painless revolution--all
these fell into dust. In their fear of defeat, holding back the masses
from open conflict, dissolving the general strike discussions, the
parties of the Second International were preparing their own
terrifying defeat; for they were not able to move one finger to avert
the greatest catastrophe in world history, the four years' imperialist
slaughter, which foreshadowed the violent character of the civil war.
Truly, one has to put a wadded night-cap not only over one's eyes, but
over one's nose and ears, to be able to-day, after the inglorious
collapse of the Second International, after the disgraceful bankruptcy
of its leading party--the German Social-Democracy--after the bloody
lunacy of the world slaughter and the gigantic sweep of the civil war,
to set up in contrast to us, the profundity, the loyalty, the
peacefulness and the sobriety of the Second International, the
heritage of which we are still liquidating.




3

DEMOCRACY


"EITHER DEMOCRACY, OR CIVIL WAR"

Kautsky has a clear and solitary path to salvation: _democracy_. All
that is necessary is that every one should acknowledge it and bind
himself to support it. The Right Socialists must renounce the
sanguinary slaughter with which they have been carrying out the will of
the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie itself must abandon the idea of using
its Noskes and Lieutenant Vogels to defend its privileges to the last
breath. Finally, the proletariat must once and for all reject the idea
of overthrowing the bourgeoisie by means other than those laid down in
the Constitution. If the conditions enumerated are observed, the social
revolution will painlessly melt into democracy. In order to succeed it
is sufficient, as we see, for our stormy history to draw a nightcap
over its head, and take a pinch of wisdom out of Kautsky's snuffbox.

"There exist only two possibilities," says our sage, "either democracy,
or civil war." (Page 220.) Yet, in Germany, where the formal elements
of "democracy" are present before our eyes, the civil war does not
cease for a moment. "Unquestionably," agrees Kautsky, "under the
present National Assembly Germany cannot arrive at a healthy condition.
But that process of recovery will not be assisted, but hindered, if we
transform the struggle against the present Assembly into a struggle
against the democratic franchise." (Page 230.) As if the question in
Germany really did reduce itself to one of electoral forms and not to
one of the real possession of power!

The present National Assembly, as Kautsky admits, cannot "bring the
country to a healthy condition." Therefore let us begin the game again
at the beginning. But will the partners agree? It is doubtful. If the
rubber is not favorable to us, obviously it is so to them. The National
Assembly which "is incapable of bringing the country to a healthy
condition," is quite capable, through the mediocre dictatorship of
Noske, of preparing the way for the dictatorship of Ludendorff. So it
was with the Constituent Assembly which prepared the way for Kolchak.
The historical mission of Kautsky consists precisely in having waited
for the revolution to write his (n + 1th) book, which should explain
the collapse of the revolution by all the previous course of history,
from the ape to Noske, and from Noske to Ludendorff. The problem before
the revolutionary party is a difficult one: its problem is to foresee
the peril in good time, and to forestall it by _action_. And for this
there is no other way at present than to tear the power out of the
hands of its real possessors, the agrarian and capitalist magnates, who
are only temporarily hiding behind Messrs. Ebert and Noske. Thus, from
the present National Assembly, the path divides into two: either the
dictatorship of the imperialist clique, or the dictatorship of the
proletariat. On neither side does the path lead to "democracy." Kautsky
does not see this. He explains at great length that democracy is of
great importance for its political development and its education in
organization of the masses, and that through it the proletariat can
come to complete emancipation. One might imagine that, since the day on
which the Erfurt Programme was written, nothing worthy of notice had
ever happened in the world!

Yet meanwhile, for decades, the proletariat of France, Germany, and
the other most important countries has been struggling and developing,
making the widest possible use of the institutions of democracy, and
building up on that basis powerful political organizations. This path
of the education of the proletariat through democracy to Socialism
proved, however, to be interrupted by an event of no inconsiderable
importance--the world imperialist war. The class state at the
moment when, thanks to its machinations, the war broke out succeeded
in enlisting the assistance of the guiding organizations of
Social-Democracy to deceive the proletariat and draw it into the
whirlpool. So that, taken as they stand, the methods of democracy, in
spite of the incontestable benefits which they afford at a certain
period, displayed an extremely limited power of action; with the result
that two generations of the proletariat, educated under conditions of
democracy, by no means guaranteed the necessary political preparation
for judging accurately an event like the world imperialist war. That
experience gives us no reasons for affirming that, if the war had
broken out ten or fifteen years later, the proletariat would have been
more prepared for it. The bourgeois democratic state not only creates
more favorable conditions for the political education of the workers,
as compared with absolutism, but also sets a limit to that development
in the shape of bourgeois legality, which skilfully accumulates and
builds on the upper strata of the proletariat opportunist habits
and law-abiding prejudices. The school of democracy proved quite
insufficient to rouse the German proletariat to revolution when the
catastrophe of the war was at hand. The barbarous school of the war,
social-imperialist ambitions, colossal military victories, and
unparalleled defeats were required. After these events, which made a
certain amount of difference in the universe, and even in the Erfurt
Programme, to come out with common-places as to meaning of democratic
parliamentarism for the education of the proletariat signifies a fall
into political childhood. This is just the misfortune which has
overtaken Kautsky.

"Profound disbelief in the political struggle of the proletariat," he
writes, "and in its participation in politics, was the characteristic
of Proudhonism. To-day there arises a similar (!!) view, and it is
recommended to us as the new gospel of Socialist thought, as the result
of an experience which Marx did not, and could not, know. In reality,
it is only a variation of an idea which half a century ago Marx was
fighting, and which he in the end defeated." (Page 79.)

Bolshevism proves to be warmed-up Proudhonism! From a purely theoretical
point of view, this is one of the most brazen remarks in the pamphlet.

The Proudhonists repudiated democracy for the same reason that they
repudiated the political struggle generally. They stood for the
economic organization of the workers without the interference of the
State, without revolutionary outbreaks--for self-help of the workers on
the basis of production for profit. As far as they were driven by the
course of events on to the path of the political struggle, they, as
lower middle-class theoreticians, preferred democracy, not only to
plutocracy, but to revolutionary dictatorship. What thoughts have they
in common with us? While we repudiate democracy in the name of the
concentrated power of the proletariat, the Proudhonists, on the other
hand, were prepared to make their peace with democracy, diluted by a
federal basis, in order to avoid the revolutionary monopoly of power by
the proletariat. With more foundation Kautsky might have compared us
with the opponents of the Proudhonists, the _Blanquists_, who
understood the meaning of a revolutionary government, but did not
superstitiously make the question of seizing it depend on the formal
signs of democracy. But in order to put the comparison of the
Communists with the Blanquists on a reasonable footing, it would have
to be added that, in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, we had at our
disposal such an organization for revolution as the Blanquists could
not even dream of; in our party we had, and have, an invaluable
organization of political leadership with a perfected programme of the
social revolution. Finally, we had, and have, a powerful apparatus of
economic transformation in our trade unions, which stand as a whole
under the banner of Communism, and support the Soviet Government. Under
such conditions, to talk of the renaissance of Proudhonist prejudices
in the shape of Bolshevism can only take place when one has lost all
traces of theoretical honesty and historical understanding.


THE IMPERIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY

It is not for nothing that the word "democracy" has a double meaning
in the political vocabulary. On the one hand, it means a state system
founded on universal suffrage and the other attributes of formal
"popular government." On the other hand, by the word "democracy" is
understood the mass of the people itself, in so far as it leads a
political existence. In the second sense, as in the first, the meaning
of democracy rises above class distinctions. This peculiarity of
terminology has its profound political significance. Democracy as a
political system is the more perfect and unshakable the greater is the
part played in the life of the country by the intermediate and less
differentiated mass of the population--the lower middle-class of the
town and the country. Democracy achieved its highest expression in the
nineteenth century in Switzerland and the United States of North
America. On the other side of the ocean the democratic organization of
power in a federal republic was based on the agrarian democracy of the
farmers. In the small Helvetian Republic, the lower middle-classes of
the towns and the rich peasantry constituted the basis of the
conservative democracy of the united cantons.

Born of the struggle of the Third Estate against the powers of
feudalism, the democratic State very soon becomes the weapon of defence
against the class antagonisms generated within bourgeois society.
Bourgeois society succeeds in this the more, the wider beneath it is
the layer of the lower middle-class, the greater is the importance of
the latter in the economic life of the country, and the less advanced,
consequently, is the development of class antagonism. However, the
intermediate classes become ever more and more helplessly behind
historical development, and, thereby, become ever more and more
incapable of speaking in the name of the nation. True, the lower
middle-class doctrinaires (Bernstein and Company) used to demonstrate
with satisfaction that the disappearance of the middle-classes was not
taking place with that swiftness that was expected by the Marxian
school. And, in reality, one might agree that, numerically, the
middle-class elements in the town, and especially in the country, still
maintain an extremely prominent position. But the chief meaning of
evolution has shown itself in the decline in importance on the part of
the middle-classes from the point of view of production: the amount of
values which this class brings to the general income of the nation has
fallen incomparably more rapidly than the numerical strength of the
middle-classes. Correspondingly, falls their social, political, and
cultural importance. Historical development has been relying more and
more, not on these conservative elements inherited from the past, but
on the polar classes of society--_i.e._, the capitalist bourgeoisie and
the proletariat.

The more the middle-classes lost their social importance, the less they
proved capable of playing the part of an authoritative arbitral judge
in the historical conflict between capital and labor. Yet the very
considerable numerical proportion of the town middle-classes, and still
more of the peasantry, continues to find direct expression in the
electoral statistics of parliamentarism. The formal equality of all
citizens as electors thereby only gives more open indication of the
incapacity of democratic parliamentarism to settle the root questions
of historical evolution. An "equal" vote for the proletariat, the
peasant, and the manager of a trust formally placed the peasant in the
position of a mediator between the two antagonists; but, in reality,
the peasantry, socially and culturally backward and politically
helpless, has in all countries always provided support for the most
reactionary, filibustering, and mercenary parties which, in the long
run, always supported capital against labor.

Absolutely contrary to all the prophecies of Bernstein, Sombart,
Tugan-Baranovsky, and others, the continued existence of the middle
classes has not softened, but has rendered to the last degree
acute, the revolutionary crisis of bourgeois society. If the
proletarianization of the lower middle-classes and the peasantry had
been proceeding in a chemically purified form, the peaceful conquest
of power by the proletariat through the democratic parliamentary
apparatus would have been much more probable than we can imagine at
present. Just the fact that was seized upon by the partisans of the
lower middle-class--its longevity--has proved fatal even for the
external forms of political democracy, now that capitalism has
undermined its essential foundations. Occupying in parliamentary
politics a place which it has lost in production, the middle-class has
finally compromised parliamentarism, and has transformed it into an
institution of confused chatter and legislative obstruction. From this
fact alone, there grew up before the proletariat the problem of
seizing the apparatus of state power as such, independently of the
middle-class, and even against it--not against its interests, but
against its stupidity and its policy, impossible to follow in its
helpless contortions.

"Imperialism," wrote Marx of the Empire of Napoleon III, "is the most
prostituted, and, at the same time, perfected form of the state which
the bourgeoisie, having attained its fullest development, transforms
into a weapon for the enslavement of labor by capital." This definition
has a wider significance than for the French Empire alone, and includes
the latest form of imperialism, born of the world conflict between the
national capitalisms of the great powers. In the economic sphere,
imperialism pre-supposed the final collapse of the rule of the
middle-class; in the political sphere, it signified the complete
destruction of democracy by means of an internal molecular
transformation, and a universal subordination of all democracy's
resources to its own ends. Seizing upon all countries, independently of
their previous political history, imperialism showed that all political
prejudices were foreign to it, and that it was equally ready and
capable of making use, after their transformation and subjection, of
the monarchy of Nicholas Romanoff or Wilhelm Hohenzollern, of the
presidential autocracy of the United States of North America, and of
the helplessness of a few hundred chocolate legislators in the French
parliament. The last great slaughter--the bloody font in which the
bourgeois world attempted to be re-baptised--presented to us a picture,
unparalleled in history, of the mobilization of all state forms,
systems of government, political tendencies, religious, and schools of
philosophy, in the service of imperialism. Even many of those pedants
who slept through the preparatory period of imperialist development
during the last decades, and continued to maintain a traditional
attitude towards ideas of democracy and universal suffrage, began to
feel during the war that their accustomed ideas had become fraught with
some new meaning. Absolutism, parliamentary monarchy, democracy--in the
presence of imperialism (and, consequently, in the presence of the
revolution rising to take its place), all the state forms of bourgeois
supremacy, from Russian Tsarism to North American quasi-democratic
federalism, have been given equal rights, bound up in such combinations
as to supplement one another in an indivisible whole. Imperialism
succeeded by means of all the resources it had at its disposal,
including parliamentarism, irrespective of the electoral arithmetic of
voting, to subordinate for its own purposes at the critical moment the
lower middle-classes of the towns and country and even the upper layers
of the proletariat. The national idea, under the watchword of which the
Third Estate rose to power, found in the imperialist war its rebirth in
the watchword of national defence. With unexpected clearness, national
ideology flamed up for the last time at the expense of class ideology.
The collapse of imperialist illusions, not only amongst the vanquished,
but--after a certain delay--amongst the victorious also, finally laid
low what was once national democracy, and, with it, its main weapon,
the democratic parliament. The flabbiness, rottenness, and helplessness
of the middle-classes and their parties everywhere became evident with
terrifying clearness. In all countries the question of the control of
the State assumed first-class importance as a question of an open
measuring of forces between the capitalist clique, openly or secretly
supreme and disposing of hundreds of thousands of mobilized and
hardened officers, devoid of all scruple, and the revolting,
revolutionary proletariat; while the intermediate classes were living
in a state of terror, confusion, and prostration. Under such
conditions, what pitiful nonsense are speeches about the peaceful
conquest of power by the proletariat by means of democratic
parliamentarism!

The scheme of the political situation on a world scale is quite clear.
The bourgeoisie, which has brought the nations, exhausted and bleeding
to death, to the brink of destruction--particularly the victorious
bourgeoisie--has displayed its complete inability to bring them out of
their terrible situation, and, thereby, its incompatibility with the
future development of humanity. All the intermediate political groups,
including here first and foremost the social-patriotic parties, are
rotting alive. The proletariat they have deceived is turning against
them more and more every day, and is becoming strengthened in its
revolutionary convictions as the only power that can save the peoples
from savagery and destruction. However, history has not at all
secured, just at this moment, a formal parliamentary majority on the
side of the party of the social revolution. In other words, history
has not transformed the nation into a debating society solemnly voting
the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On the
contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely
because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a
road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist
bourgeois calculates: "while I have in my hands lands, factories,
workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers, universities, schools;
while--and this most important of all--I retain control of the army:
the apparatus of democracy, however you reconstruct it, will remain
obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the
stupid, conservative, characterless lower middle-class, just as it
is subjected to me materially. I oppress, and will oppress, its
imagination by the gigantic scale of my buildings, my transactions, my
plans, and my crimes. For moments when it is dissatisfied and murmurs,
I have created scores of safety-valves and lightning-conductors. At
the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which
will disappear to-morrow, but which to-day accomplish their mission by
affording the possibility of the lower middle-class expressing their
indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism. I shall hold the
masses of the people, under cover of compulsory general education, on
the verge of complete ignorance, giving them no opportunity of rising
above the level which my experts in spiritual slavery consider safe. I
will corrupt, deceive, and terrorize the more privileged or the more
backward of the proletariat itself. By means of these measures, I
shall not allow the vanguard of the working class to gain the ear of
the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of
mastery and terrorism remain in my hands."

To this the revolutionary proletarian replies: "Consequently, the
first condition of salvation is to tear the weapons of domination out
of the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful
arrival to power while the bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the
apparatus of power. Three times over hopeless is the idea of coming to
power by the path which the bourgeoisie itself indicates and, at the
same time, barricades--the path of parliamentary democracy. There is
only one way: to seize power, taking away from the bourgeoisie the
material apparatus of government. Independently of the superficial
balance of forces in parliament, I shall take over for social
administration the chief forces and resources of production. I shall
free the mind of the lower middle-class from their capitalist
hypnosis. I shall show them in practice what is the meaning of
Socialist production. Then even the most backward, the most ignorant,
or most terrorized sections of the nation will support me, and
willingly and intelligently will join in the work of social
construction."

When the Russian Soviet Government dissolved the Constituent Assembly,
that fact seemed to the leading Social-Democrats of Western Europe, if
not the beginning of the end of the world, at all events a rude and
arbitrary break with all the previous developments of Socialism. In
reality, it was only the inevitable outcome of the new position
resulting from imperialism and the war. If Russian Communism was the
first to enter the path of casting up theoretical and practical
accounts, this was due to the same historical reasons which forced the
Russian proletariat to be the first to enter the path of the struggle
for power.

All that has happened since then in Europe bears witness to the fact
that we drew the right conclusion. To imagine that democracy can be
restored in its general purity means that one is living in a pitiful,
reactionary utopia.


THE METAPHYSICS OF DEMOCRACY

Feeling the historical ground shaking under his feet on the question
of democracy, Kautsky crosses to the ground of metaphysics. Instead of
inquiring into what is, he deliberates about what ought to be.

The principles of democracy--the sovereignty of the people, universal
and equal suffrage, personal liberties--appear, as presented to him,
in a halo of moral duty. They are turned from their historical meaning
and presented as unalterable and sacred things-in-themselves. This
metaphysical fall from grace is not accidental. It is instructive that
the late Plekhanov, a merciless enemy of Kantism at the best period of
his activity, attempted at the end of his life, when the wave of
patriotism had washed over him, to clutch at the straw of the
categorical imperative.

That real democracy with which the German people is now making
practical acquaintance Kautsky confronts with a kind of ideal
democracy, as he would confront a common phenomenon with the
thing-in-itself. Kautsky indicates with certitude not one country in
which democracy is really capable of guaranteeing a painless
transition to Socialism. But he does know, and firmly, that such
democracy ought to exist. The present German National Assembly, that
organ of helplessness, reactionary malice, and degraded solicitations,
is confronted by Kautsky with a different, real, true National
Assembly, which possesses all virtues--excepting the small virtue of
reality.

The doctrine of formal democracy is not scientific Socialism, but the
theory of so-called natural law. The essence of the latter consists in
the recognition of eternal and unchanging standards of law, which
among different peoples and at different periods find a different,
more or less limited and distorted expression. The natural law of the
latest history--_i.e._, as it emerged from the middle ages--included
first of all a protest against class privileges, the abuse of despotic
legislation, and the other "artificial" products of feudal positive
law. The theoreticians of the, as yet, weak Third Estate expressed its
class interests in a few ideal standards, which later on developed
into the teaching of democracy, acquiring at the same time an
individualist character. The individual is absolute; all persons have
the right of expressing their thoughts in speech and print; every man
must enjoy equal electoral rights. As a battle cry against feudalism,
the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on,
however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal
democracy) began to show its reactionary side--the establishment of an
ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and
the revolutionary parties.

If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the
theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian
spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to
the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in
this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly
tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became
for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave
found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded
condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation.
Christianity told him:--"You have an immortal soul, although you
resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the
same Christianity said:--"Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your
immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the
voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical
Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst
different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other
religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the
oppressed masses.

Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the
worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their
origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal
right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion
revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a
condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property
qualification. But the longer it went on, the more it sent the
consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation:
for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal
right in determining the fate of the nation?

Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the
gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary
elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name,
sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders
through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as
a trustee of the nation's sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in
the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in
the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life,
people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated
at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere
of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions
disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal
shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian,
the minister, the bootblack--all are equal as "citizens" and as
"legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step
down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality
of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic
foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life
remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal
right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the
parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace
which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.

In the practical interests of the development of the working class,
the Socialist Party took its stand at a certain period on the path of
parliamentarism. But this did not mean in the slightest that it
accepted in principle the metaphysical theory of democracy, based on
extra-historical, super-class rights. The proletarian doctrines
examined democracy as the instrument of bourgeois society entirely
adapted to the problems and requirements of the ruling classes; but as
bourgeois society lived by the labor of the proletariat and could not
deny it the legalization of a certain part of its class struggle
without destroying itself, this gave the Socialist Party the
possibility of utilizing, at a certain period, and within certain
limits, the mechanism of democracy, without taking an oath to do so as
an unshakable principle.

The root problem of the party, at all periods of its struggle, was to
create the conditions for real, economic, living equality for mankind
as members of a united human commonwealth. It was just for this reason
that the theoreticians of the proletariat had to expose the
metaphysics of democracy as a philosophic mask for political
mystification.

The democratic party at the period of its revolutionary enthusiasm,
when exposing the enslaving and stupefying lie of church dogma,
preached to the masses:--"You are lulled to sleep by promises of
eternal bliss at the end of your life, while here you have no rights
and you are bound with the chains of tyranny." The Socialist Party, a
few decades later, said to the same masses with no less right:--"You
are lulled to sleep with the fiction of civic equality and political
rights, but you are deprived of the possibility of realizing those
rights. Conditional and shadowy legal equality has been transformed
into the convicts' chain with which each of you is fastened to the
chariot of capitalism."

In the name of its fundamental task, the Socialist Party mobilized the
masses on the parliamentary ground as well as on others; but nowhere
and at no time did any party bind itself to bring the masses to
Socialism only through the gates of democracy. In adapting ourselves
to the parliamentary regime, we stopped at a theoretical exposure of
democracy, because we were still too weak to overcome it in practice.
But the path of Socialist ideas which is visible through all
deviations, and even betrayals, foreshadows no other outcome but this:
to throw democracy aside and replace it by the mechanism of the
proletariat, at the moment when the latter is strong enough to carry
out such a task.

We shall bring one piece of evidence, albeit a sufficiently striking
one. "Parliamentarism," wrote Paul Lafargue in the Russian review,
_Sozialdemokrat_, in 1888, "is a system of government in which the
people acquires the illusion that it is controlling the forces of the
country itself, when, in reality, the actual power is concentrated in
the hands of the bourgeoisie--and not even of the whole bourgeoisie,
but only of certain sections of that class. In the first period of its
supremacy the bourgeoisie does not understand, or, more correctly,
does not feel, the necessity for making the people believe in the
illusion of self-government. Hence it was that all the parliamentary
countries of Europe began with a limited franchise. Everywhere the
right of influencing the policy of the country by means of the
election of deputies belonged at first only to more or less large
property holders, and was only gradually extended to less substantial
citizens, until finally in some countries it became from a privilege
the universal right of all and sundry.

"In bourgeois society, the more considerable becomes the amount of
social wealth, the smaller becomes the number of individuals by whom
it is appropriated. The same takes place with power: in proportion as
the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the
number of elected rulers increases, the actual power is concentrated
and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of
individuals." Such is the secret of the majority.

For the Marxist, Lafargue, parliamentarism remains as long as the
supremacy of the bourgeoisie remains. "On the day," writes Lafargue,
"when the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will
have to organize a revolutionary government, and govern society as a
dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class."

Kautsky in his time knew this Marxist estimate of parliamentarism, and
more than once repeated it himself, although with no such Gallic
sharpness and lucidity. The theoretical apostasy of Kautsky lies just
in this point: having recognized the principle of democracy as
absolute and eternal, he has stepped back from materialist dialectics
to natural law. That which was exposed by Marxism as the passing
mechanism of the bourgeoisie, and was subjected only to temporary
utilization with the object of preparing the proletarian revolution,
has been newly sanctified by Kautsky as the supreme principle standing
above classes, and unconditionally subordinating to itself the methods
of the proletarian struggle. The counter-revolutionary degeneration of
parliamentarism finds its most perfect expression in the deification
of democracy by the decaying theoreticians of the Second
International.


THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

Speaking generally, the attainment of a majority in a democratic
parliament by the party of the proletariat is not an absolute
impossibility. But such a fact, even if it were realized, would not
introduce any new principle into the course of events. The
intermediate elements of the intelligentsia, under the influence of
the parliamentary victory of the proletariat, might possibly display
less resistance to the new regime. But the fundamental resistance of
the bourgeoisie would be decided by such facts as the attitude of the
army, the degree to which the workers were armed, the situation in the
neighboring states: and the civil war would develop under the pressure
of these most real circumstances, and not by the mobile arithmetic of
parliamentarism.

Our party has never refused to lead the way for proletarian
dictatorship through the gates of democracy, having clearly summed up
in its mind certain agitational and political advantages of such a
"legalized" transition to the new regime. Hence, our attempt to call
the Constituent Assembly. The Russian peasant, only just awakened by
the revolution to political life, found himself face to face with half
a dozen parties, each of which apparently had made up its mind to
confuse his mind. The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the
path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside.

The opportunist majority in the Constituent Assembly represented only
the political reflection of the mental confusion and indecision
which reigned amidst the middle-classes in the town and country
and amidst the more backward elements of the proletariat. If we
take the viewpoint of isolated historical possibilities, one
might say that it would have been more painless if the Constituent
Assembly had worked for a year or two, had finally discredited the
Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks by their connection
with the Cadets, and had thereby led to the formal majority of the
Bolsheviks, showing the masses that in reality only two forces
existed: the revolutionary proletariat, led by the Communists, and
the counter-revolutionary democracy, headed by the generals and the
admirals. But the point is that the pulse of the internal relations of
the revolution was beating not at all in time with the pulse of the
development of its external relations. If our party had thrown all
responsibility on to the objective formula of "the course of events"
the development of military operations might have forestalled us.
German imperialism might have seized Petrograd, the evacuation of
which the Kerensky Government had already begun. The fall of Petrograd
would at that time have meant a death-blow to the proletariat, for all
the best forces of the revolution were concentrated there, in the
Baltic Fleet and in the Red capital.

                 *       *       *       *       *

Our party may be accused, therefore, not of going against the course
of historical development, but of having taken at a stride several
political steps. It stepped over the heads of the Mensheviks and the
Socialist-Revolutionaries, in order not to allow German imperialism to
step across the head of the Russian proletariat and conclude peace
with the Entente on the back of the revolution before it was able to
spread its wings over the whole world.

From the above it will not be difficult to deduce the answers to the
two questions with which Kautsky pestered us. Firstly: Why did we
summon the Constituent Assembly when we had in view the dictatorship
of the proletariat? Secondly: If the first Constituent Assembly which
we summoned proved backward and not in harmony with the interests of
the revolution, why did we reject the idea of a new Assembly? The
thought at the back of Kautsky's mind is that we repudiated democracy,
not on the ground of principle, but only because it proved against us.
In order to seize this insinuation by its long ears, let us establish
the facts.

The watchword, "All power to the Soviets," was put forward by our
Party at the very beginning of the revolution--_i.e._, long before,
not merely the decree as to the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly, but the decree as to its convocation. True, we did not set
up the Soviets in opposition to the future Constituent Assembly, the
summoning of which was constantly postponed by the Government of
Kerensky, and consequently became more and more problematical. But in
any case, we did not consider the Constituent Assembly, after the
manner of the democrats, as the future master of the Russian land, who
would come and settle everything. We explained to the masses that the
Soviets, the revolutionary organizations of the laboring masses
themselves, can and must become the true masters. If we did not
formally repudiate the Constituent Assembly beforehand, it was only
because it stood in contrast, not to the power of the Soviets, but to
the power of Kerensky himself, who, in his turn, was only a screen for
the bourgeoisie. At the same time we did decide beforehand that, if,
in the Constituent Assembly, the majority proved in our favor, that
body must dissolve itself and hand over the power to the Soviets--as
later on the Petrograd Town Council did, elected as it was on the
basis of the most democratic electoral franchise. In my book on the
October Revolution, I tried to explain the reasons which made the
Constituent Assembly the out-of-date reflection of an epoch through
which the revolution had already passed. As we saw the organization of
revolutionary power only in the Soviets, and at the moment of the
summoning of the Constituent Assembly the Soviets were already the de
facto power, the question was inevitably decided for us in the sense
of the violent dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, since it would
not dissolve itself in favor of the Government of the Soviets.

"But why," asks Kautsky, "did you not summon a new Constituent
Assembly?"

Because we saw no need for it. If the first Constituent Assembly could
still play a fleeting progressive part, conferring a sanction upon the
Soviet regime in its first days, convincing for the middle-class
elements, now, after two years of victorious proletarian dictatorship
and the complete collapse of all democratic attempts in Siberia, on
the shores of the White Sea, in the Ukraine, and in the Caucasus, the
power of the Soviets truly does not need the blessing of the faded
authority of the Constituent Assembly. "Are we not right in that case
to conclude," asks Kautsky in the tone of Lloyd George, "that the
Soviet Government rules by the will of the minority, since it avoids
testing its supremacy by universal suffrage?" Here is a blow that
misses its mark.

If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful," stable
development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of
the country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost
its capacity to follow the course of the struggle and the development
of revolutionary consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more
closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of
the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a
majority, but in dynamically creating it. Having taken its stand on
the path of revolutionary dictatorship, the working class of Russia
has thereby declared that it builds its policy in the period of
transition, not on the shadowy art of rivalry with chameleon-hued
parties in the chase for peasant votes, but on the actual attraction
of the peasant masses, side by side with the proletariat, into the
work of ruling the country in the real interests of the laboring
masses. Such democracy goes a little deeper down than parliamentarism.

To-day, when the main problem--the question of life and death--of the
revolution consists in the military repulse of the various attacks of
the White Guard bands, does Kautsky imagine that any form of
parliamentary "majority" is capable of guaranteeing a more energetic,
devoted, and successful organization of revolutionary defence? The
conditions of the struggle are so defined, in a revolutionary country
throttled by the criminal ring of the blockade, that all the
middle-class groups are confronted only with the alternative of
Denikin or the Soviet Government. What further proof is needed when
even parties, which stand for compromise in principle, like the
Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, have split along that
very line?

When suggesting to us the election of a Constituent Assembly, does
Kautsky propose the stopping of the civil war for the purpose of the
elections? By whose decision? If he intends for this purpose to bring
into motion the authority of the Second International, we hasten to
inform him that that institution enjoys in Denikin's camp only a
little more authority than it does in ours. But to the extent that the
civil war between the Workers' and Peasants' Army and the imperialist
bands is still going on, the elections must of necessity be limited to
Soviet territory. Does Kautsky desire to insist that we should allow
the parties which support Denikin to come out into the open? Empty and
contemptible chatter! There is not one government, at any time and
under any conditions, which would allow its enemies to mobilize
hostile forces in the rear of its armies.

A not unimportant place in the discussion of the question is occupied
by the fact that the flower of the laboring population is at present
on active service. The foremost workers and the most class-conscious
peasants, who take the first place at all elections, as in all
important political activities, directing the public opinion of the
workers, are at present fighting and dying as commanders, commissars,
or rank and file in the Red Army. If the most "democratic" governments
in the bourgeois states, whose regime is founded on parliamentarism,
consider it impossible to carry on elections to parliament in
wartime, it is all the more senseless to demand such elections during
the war of the Soviet Republic, the regime of which is not for one
moment founded on parliamentarism. It is quite sufficient that the
revolutionary government of Russia, in the most difficult months and
times, never stood in the way of periodic re-elections of its _own_
elective institutions--the local and central Soviets.

Finally, as a last argument--the last and the least--we have to
present to the notice of Kautsky that even the Russian Kautskians, the
Mensheviks like Martov and Dan, do not consider it possible to put
forward at the present moment a demand for a Constituent Assembly,
postponing it to better times in the future. Will there be any need of
it then? Of this one may be permitted to doubt. When the civil war is
over, the dictatorship of the working class will disclose all its
creative energy, and will, in practice, show the most backward masses
what it can give them. By means of a systematically applied universal
labor service, and a centralized organization of distribution, the
whole population of the country will be drawn into the general Soviet
system of economic arrangement and self-government. The Soviets
themselves, at present the organs of government, will gradually melt
into purely economic organizations. Under such conditions it is
doubtful whether any one will think of erecting, over the real fabric
of Socialist society, an archaic crown in the shape of the Constituent
Assembly, which would only have to register the fact that everything
necessary has already been "constituted" before it and without it.[3]

          [3] In order to charm us in favor of a Constituent Assembly
          Kautsky brings forward an argument based on the rate of
          exchange to the assistance of his argument, based on the
          categorical imperative. "Russia requires," he writes, "the
          help of foreign capital, but this help will not come to the
          Soviet Republic if the latter does not summon a Constituent
          Assembly, and does not give freedom of the Press; not
          because the capitalists are democratic idealists--to Tsarism
          they gave without any hesitation many milliards--but because
          they have no business faith in a revolutionary government."
          (Page 218.)

          There are scraps of truth in this rubbish. The Stock
          Exchange did really support the government of Kolchak when
          it relied for support on the Constituent Assembly. From its
          experience of Kolchak the Stock Exchange became confirmed in
          its conviction that the mechanism of bourgeois democracy can
          be utilized in capitalist interests, and then thrown aside
          like a worn-out pair of puttees. It is quite possible that
          the Stock Exchange would again give a parliamentary loan on
          the guarantee of a Constituent Assembly, believing, on the
          basis of its former experience, that such a body would prove
          only an intermediate step to capitalist dictatorship. We do
          not propose to buy the "business faith" of the Stock
          Exchange at such a price, and decidedly prefer the "faith"
          which is aroused in the realist Stock Exchange by the weapon
          of the Red Army.




4

TERRORISM


The chief theme of Kautsky's book is terrorism. The view that
terrorism is of the essence of revolution Kautsky proclaims to be a
widespread delusion. It is untrue that he who desires revolution must
put up with terrorism. As far as he, Kautsky, is concerned, he is,
generally speaking, for revolution, but decidedly against terrorism.
From there, however, complications begin.

"The revolution brings us," Kautsky complains, "a bloody terrorism
carried out by Socialist governments. The Bolsheviks in Russia first
stepped on to this path, and were, consequently, sternly condemned by
all Socialists who had not adopted the Bolshevik point of view,
including the Socialists of the German Majority. But as soon as the
latter found themselves threatened in their supremacy, they had
recourse to the methods of the same terrorist regime which they
attacked in the East." (Page 9.) It would seem that from this follows
the conclusion that terrorism is much more profoundly bound up with
the nature of revolution than certain sages think. But Kautsky makes
an absolutely opposite conclusion. The gigantic development of White
and Red terrorism in all the last revolutions--the Russian, the
German, the Austrian, and the Hungarian--is evidence to him that these
revolutions turned aside from their true path and turned out to be not
the revolution they ought to have been according to the theoretical
visions of Kautsky. Without going into the question whether terrorism
"as such" is "immanent" to the revolution "as such," let us consider a
few of the revolutions as they pass before us in the living history of
mankind.

Let us first regard the religious Reformation, which proved the
watershed between the Middle Ages and modern history: the deeper were
the interests of the masses that it involved, the wider was its sweep,
the more fiercely did the civil war develop under the religious
banner, and the more merciless did the terror become on the other
side.

In the seventeenth century England carried out two revolutions. The
first, which brought forth great social upheavals and wars, brought
amongst other things the execution of King Charles I, while the second
ended happily with the accession of a new dynasty. The British
bourgeoisie and its historians maintain quite different attitudes to
these two revolutions: the first is for them a rising of the mob--the
"Great Rebellion"; the second has been handed down under the title of
the "Glorious Revolution." The reason for this difference in estimates
was explained by the French historian, Augustin Thierry. In the first
English revolution, in the "Great Rebellion," the active force was the
people; while in the second it was almost "silent." Hence, it follows
that, in surroundings of class slavery, it is difficult to teach the
oppressed masses good manners. When provoked to fury they use clubs,
stones, fire, and the rope. The court historians of the exploiters are
offended at this. But the great event in modern "bourgeois" history
is, none the less, not the "Glorious Revolution," but the "Great
Rebellion."

The greatest event in modern history after the Reformation and the
"Great Rebellion," and far surpassing its two predecessors in
significance, was the great French Revolution of the eighteenth
century. To this classical revolution there was a corresponding
classical terrorism. Kautsky is ready to forgive the terrorism of the
Jacobins, acknowledging that they had no other way of saving the
republic. But by this justification after the event no one is either
helped or hindered. The Kautskies of the end of the eighteenth century
(the leaders of the French Girondists) saw in the Jacobins the
personification of evil. Here is a comparison, sufficiently
instructive in its banality, between the Jacobins and the Girondists
from the pen of one of the bourgeois French historians: "Both one side
and the other desired the republic." But the Girondists "desired a
free, legal, and merciful republic. The Montagnards desired a despotic
and terrorist republic. Both stood for the supreme power of the
people; but the Girondist justly understood all by the people, while
the Montagnards considered only the working class to be the people.
That was why only to such persons, in the opinion of the Montagnards,
did the supremacy belong." The antithesis between the noble champions
of the Constituent Assembly and the bloodthirsty agents of the
revolutionary dictatorship is here outlined fairly clearly, although
in the political terms of the epoch.

The iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was evoked by the monstrously
difficult position of revolutionary France. Here is what the bourgeois
historian says of this period: "Foreign troops had entered French
territory from four sides. In the north, the British and the
Austrians, in Alsace, the Prussians, in Dauphine and up to Lyons, the
Piedmontese, in Roussillon the Spaniards. And this at a time, when
civil war was raging at four different points: in Normandy, in the
Vendee, at Lyons, and at Toulon." (Page 176). To this we must add
internal enemies in the form of numerous secret supporters of the old
regime, ready by all methods to assist the enemy.

The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point
out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances. There
was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and
west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and
others, there are attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn:
Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians,
Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Esthonians,
Lithuanians.... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by
hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and
destruction of roads and bridges.

"The government which had taken on itself the struggle with countless
external and internal enemies had neither money, nor sufficient
troops, nor anything except boundless energy, enthusiastic support on
the part of the revolutionary elements of the country, and the
gigantic courage to take all measures necessary for the safety of the
country, however arbitrary and severe they were." In such words did
once upon a time Plekhanov describe the government of the--Jacobins.
(_Sozial-demokrat_, a quarterly review of literature and politics.
Book I, February, 1890, London. The article on "The Centenary of the
Great Revolution," pages 6-7).

Let us now turn to the revolution which took place in the second half
of the nineteenth century, in the country of "democracy"--in the
United States of North America. Although the question was not the
abolition of property altogether, but only of the abolition of
property in negroes, nevertheless, the institutions of democracy
proved absolutely powerless to decide the argument in a peaceful way.
The southern states, defeated at the presidential elections in 1860,
decided by all possible means to regain the influence they had
hitherto exerted in the question of slave-owning; and uttering, as was
right, the proper sounding words about freedom and independence, rose
in a slave-owners' insurrection. Hence inevitably followed all the
later consequences of civil war. At the very beginning of the
struggle, the military government in Baltimore imprisoned in Fort
MacHenry a few citizens, sympathizers with the slave-holding South, in
spite of Habeas Corpus. The question of the lawfulness or the
unlawfulness of such action became the object of fierce disputes
between so-called "high authorities." The judge of the Supreme Court,
decided that the President had neither the right to arrest the
operation of Habeas Corpus nor to give plenipotentiary powers to that
end to the military authorities. "Such, in all probability, is the
correct Constitutional solution of the question," says one of the
first historians of the American Civil War. "But the state of affairs
was to such a degree critical, and the necessity of taking decisive
measures against the population of Baltimore so great, that not only
the Government but the people of the United States also supported the
most energetic measures."[4]

          [4] (The History of the American War, by Fletcher,
          Lieut.-Colonel in the Scots Guards, St. Petersburg, 1867,
          page 95.)

Some goods that the rebellious South required were secretly supplied
by the merchants of the North. Naturally, the Northerners had no other
course but to introduce methods of repression. On August 6, 1861, the
President confirmed a resolution of Congress as to "the confiscation
of property used for insurrectionary purposes." The people, in the
shape of the most democratic elements, were in favor of extreme
measures. The Republican Party had a decided majority in the North,
and persons suspected of secessionism, _i.e._, of sympathizing with
the rebellious Southern states, were subjected to violence. In some
northern towns, and even in the states of New England, famous for
their order, the people frequently burst into the offices of
newspapers which supported the revolting slave-owners and smashed
their printing presses. It occasionally happened that reactionary
publishers were smeared with tar, decorated with feathers, and carried
in such array through the public squares until they swore an oath of
loyalty to the Union. The personality of a planter smeared in tar bore
little resemblance to the "end-in-itself;" so that the categorical
imperative of Kautsky suffered in the civil war of the states a
considerable blow. But this is not all. "The government, on its part,"
the historian tells us, "adopted repressive measures of various kinds
against publications holding views opposed to its own: and in a short
time the hitherto free American press was reduced to a condition
_scarcely superior to that prevailing in the autocratic European
States_." The same fate overtook the freedom of speech. "In this way,"
Lieut.-Colonel Fletcher continues, "the American people at this time
denied itself the greater part of its freedom. It should be observed,"
he moralizes, "that _the majority of the people_ was to such an
extent occupied with the war, and to such a degree imbued with the
readiness for any kind of sacrifice to attain its end, that it not
only did not regret its vanished liberties, but scarcely even noticed
their disappearance."[5]

          [5] Fletcher's History of the American War, pages 162-164.

Infinitely more ruthlessly did the bloodthirsty slave-owners of the
South employ their uncontrollable hordes. "Wherever there was a
majority in favor of slavery," writes the Count of Paris, "public
opinion behaved despotically to the minority. All who expressed pity
for the national banner ... were forced to be silent. But soon this
itself became insufficient; as in all revolutions, the indifferent
were forced to express their loyalty to the new order of things....
Those who did not agree to this were given up as a sacrifice to the
hatred and violence of the mass of the people.... In each centre of
growing civilization (South-Western states) vigilance committees were
formed, composed of all those who had been distinguished by their
extreme views in the electoral struggle.... A tavern was the usual
place of their sessions, and a noisy orgy was mingled with a
contemptible parody of public forms of justice. A few madmen sitting
around a desk on which gin and whisky flowed judged their present
and absent fellow citizens. The accused, even before having been
questioned, could see the rope being prepared. He who did not appear
at the court learned his sentence when falling under the bullets
of the executioner concealed in the forest...." This picture is
extremely reminiscent of the scenes which day by day took place in
the camps of Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and the other heroes of
Anglo-Franco-American "democracy."

We shall see later how the question of terrorism stood in regard to
the Paris Commune of 1871. In any case, the attempts of Kautsky to
contrast the Commune with us are false at their very root, and only
bring the author to a juggling with words of the most petty character.

The institution of hostages apparently must be recognized as "immanent"
in the terrorism of the civil war. Kautsky is against terrorism and
against the institution of hostages, but in favor of the Paris
Commune. (N.B.--The Commune existed fifty years ago.) Yet the Commune
took hostages. A difficulty arises. But what does the art of exegesis
exist for?

The decree of the Commune concerning hostages and their execution in
reply to the atrocities of the Versaillese arose, according to the
profound explanation of Kautsky, "from a striving to preserve human
life, not to destroy it." A marvellous discovery! It only requires to
be developed. It could, and must, be explained that in the civil war
we destroyed White Guards in order that they should not destroy the
workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human
life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the
preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the
destruction of human life--a puzzle the dialectical secret of which
was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient
sages.

The Commune could maintain itself and consolidate its position only by
a determined struggle with the Versaillese. The latter, on the other
hand, had a large number of agents in Paris. Fighting with the agents
of Thiers, the Commune could not abstain from destroying the
Versaillese at the front and in the rear. If its rule had crossed the
bounds of Paris, in the provinces it would have found--during the
process of the civil war with the Army of the National Assembly--still
more determined foes in the midst of the peaceful population. The
Commune when fighting the royalists could not allow freedom of speech
to royalist agents in the rear.

Kautsky, in spite of all the happenings in the world to-day, completely
fails to realize what war is in general, and the civil war in
particular. He does not understand that every, or nearly every,
sympathizer with Thiers in Paris was not merely an "opponent" of the
Communards in ideas, but an agent and spy of Thiers, a ferocious enemy
ready to shoot one in the back. The enemy must be made harmless, and in
wartime this means that he must be destroyed.

The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of
the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the
conqueror. The will, of course, is a fact of the physical world, but
in contradistinction to a meeting, a dispute, or a congress, the
revolution carries out its object by means of the employment of
material resources--though to a less degree than war. The bourgeoisie
itself conquered power by means of revolts, and consolidated it by the
civil war. In the peaceful period, it retains power by means of a
system of repression. As long as class society, founded on the most
deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a
necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side.

Even if, in one country or another, the dictatorship of the proletariat
grew up within the external framework of democracy, this would by
no means avert the civil war. The question as to who is to rule
the country, _i.e._, of the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will
be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of
the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence.
However deeply Kautsky goes into the question of the food of the
anthropopithecus (see page 122 et seq. of his book) and other immediate
and remote conditions which determine the cause of human cruelty, he
will find in history no other way of breaking the class will of the
enemy except the systematic and energetic use of violence.

The degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal
and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is
the resistance of the class enemy who have been overthrown, the more
inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of
terror.

But here Kautsky unexpectedly takes up a new position in his struggle
with Soviet terrorism. He simply waves aside all reference to the
ferocity of the counter-revolutionary opposition of the Russian
bourgeoisie.

"Such ferocity," he says, "could not be noticed in November, 1917, in
Petrograd and Moscow, and still less more recently in Budapest." (Page
149.) With such a happy formulation of the question, revolutionary
terrorism merely proves to be a product of the blood-thirstiness of
the Bolsheviks, who simultaneously abandoned the traditions of the
vegetarian anthropopithecus and the moral lessons of Kautsky.

The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of
November, 1917 (new style), was actually accomplished with
insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such
a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally
helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so
demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any
resistance. In Petrograd the power of Kerensky was overthrown almost
without a fight. In Moscow its resistance was dragged out, mainly owing
to the indecisive character of our own actions. In the majority of the
provincial towns, power was transferred to the Soviet on the mere
receipt of a telegram from Petrograd or Moscow. If the matter had ended
there, there would have been no word of the Red Terror. But in
November, 1917, there was already evidence of the beginning of the
resistance of the propertied classes. True, there was required the
intervention of the imperialist governments of the West in order to
give the Russian counter-revolution faith in itself, and to add
ever-increasing power to its resistance. This can be shown from facts,
both important and insignificant, day by day during the whole epoch of
the Soviet revolution.

Kerensky's "Staff" felt no support forthcoming from the mass of the
soldiery, and was inclined to recognize the Soviet Government, which
had begun negotiations for an armistice with the Germans. But there
followed the protest of the military missions of the Entente, followed
by open threats. The Staff was frightened; incited by "Allied"
officers, it entered the path of opposition. This led to armed
conflict and to the murder of the chief of the field staff, General
Dukhonin, by a group of revolutionary sailors.

In Petrograd, the official agents of the Entente, especially the
French Military Mission, hand in hand with the S.R.s and the
Mensheviks, openly organized the opposition, mobilizing, arming,
inciting against us the cadets, and the bourgeois youth generally,
from the second day of the Soviet revolution. The rising of the
junkers on November 10 brought about a hundred times more victims than
the revolution of November 7. The campaign of the adventurers Kerensky
and Krasnov against Petrograd, organized at the same time by the
Entente, naturally introduced into the struggle the first elements of
savagery. Nevertheless, General Krasnov was set free on his word of
honor. The Yaroslav rising (in the summer of 1918) which involved so
many victims, was organized by Savinkov on the instructions of the
French Embassy, and with its resources. Archangel was captured
according to the plans of British naval agents, with the help of
British warships and aeroplanes. The beginning of the empire of
Kolchak, the nominee of the American Stock Exchange, was brought about
by the foreign Czecho-Slovak Corps maintained by the resources of the
French Government. Kaledin and Krasnov (liberated by us), the first
leaders of the counter-revolution on the Don, could enjoy partial
success only thanks to the open military and financial aid of Germany.
In the Ukraine the Soviet power was overthrown in the beginning of
1918 by German militarism. The Volunteer Army of Denikin was created
with the financial and technical help of Great Britain and France.
Only in the hope of British intervention and of British military
support was Yudenich's army created. The politicians, the diplomats,
and the journalists of the Entente have for two years on end been
debating with complete frankness the question of whether the financing
of the civil war in Russia is a sufficiently profitable enterprise. In
such circumstances, one needs truly a brazen forehead to seek the
reason for the sanguinary character of the civil war in Russia in the
malevolence of the Bolsheviks, and not in the international situation.

The Russian proletariat was the first to enter the path of the social
revolution, and the Russian bourgeoisie, politically helpless, was
emboldened to struggle against its political and economic
expropriation only because it saw its elder sister in all countries
still in power, and still maintaining economic, political, and, to a
certain extent, military supremacy.

If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few
weeks, after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in
Germany, France, and England, there can be no doubt that our
revolution would have been the most "peaceful," the most "bloodless"
of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth. But this historical
sequence--the most "natural" at the first glance, and, in any case,
the most beneficial for the Russian working class--found itself
infringed--not through our fault, but through the will of events.
Instead of being the last, the Russian proletariat proved to be the
first. It was just this circumstance, after the first period of
confusion, that imparted desperation to the character of the
resistance of the classes which had ruled in Russia previously, and
forced the Russian proletariat, in a moment of the greatest peril,
foreign attacks, and internal plots and insurrections, to have
recourse to severe measures of State terror. No one will now say that
those measures proved futile. But, perhaps, we are expected to
consider them "intolerable"?

The working class, which seized power in battle, had as its object and
its duty to establish that power unshakeably, to guarantee its own
supremacy beyond question, to destroy its enemies' hankering for a new
revolution, and thereby to make sure of carrying out Socialist
reforms. Otherwise there would be no point in seizing power.

The revolution "logically" does not demand terrorism, just as
"logically" it does not demand an armed insurrection. What a profound
commonplace! But the revolution does require of the revolutionary
class that it should attain its end by all methods at its
disposal--if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by
terrorism. A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms
in its hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all
attempts to tear the power out of its hands. Where it has against it
a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is
confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it
will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty. Perhaps
Kautsky has invented other methods? Or does he reduce the whole
question to the _degree_ of repression, and recommend in all
circumstances imprisonment instead of execution?

The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course,
is not one of "principle." It is a question of expediency. In a
revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power,
which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling
class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the
latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does
not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact
that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war.

Or, perhaps, Kautsky wishes to say that execution is not expedient,
that "classes cannot be cowed." This is untrue. Terror is
helpless--and then only "in the long run"--if it is employed by
reaction against a historically rising class. But terror can be very
efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the
scene of operations. _Intimidation_ is a powerful weapon of policy,
both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded
upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys
only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the
remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same
way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense,
the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection,
the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror
of a revolutionary class can be condemned "morally" only by a man
who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence
whatsoever--consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has
to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker.

"But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of
Tsarism?" we are asked, by the high priests of Liberalism and
Kautskianism.

You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The
terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The
gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the
Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords,
capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist
order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is
quite sufficient.


"FREEDOM OF THE PRESS"

One point particularly worries Kautsky, the author of a great many
books and articles--the freedom of the Press. Is it permissible to
suppress newspapers?

During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public
opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is
particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious
war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or
indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The
nature of the latter is such that each of the struggling sides has in
the rear of its armies considerable circles of the population on the
side of the enemy. In war, where both success and failure are repaid
by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to
execution. This is inhumane, but no one ever considered war a school
of humanity--still less civil war. Can it be seriously demanded that,
during a civil war with the White Guards of Denikin, the publications
of parties supporting Denikin should come out unhindered in Moscow and
Petrograd? To propose this in the name of the "freedom" of the Press
is just the same as, in the name of open dealing, to demand the
publication of military secrets. "A besieged city," wrote a Communard,
Arthur Arnould of Paris, "cannot permit within its midst that hopes
for its fall should openly be expressed, that the fighters defending
it should be incited to treason, that the movements of its troops
should be communicated to the enemy. Such was the position of Paris
under the Commune." Such is the position of the Soviet Republic during
the two years of its existence.

Let us, however, listen to what Kautsky has to say in this connection.

"The justification of this system (_i.e._, repressions in connection
with the Press) is reduced to the naive idea that an absolute truth
(!) exists, and that only the Communists possess it (!). Similarly,"
continues Kautsky, "it reduces itself to another point of view, that
all writers are by nature liars (!) and that only Communists are
fanatics for truth (!). In reality, liars and fanatics for what they
consider truth are to be found in all camps." And so on, and so on,
and so on. (Page 176.)

In this way, in Kautsky's eyes, the revolution, in its most acute
phase, when it is a question of the life and death of classes,
continues as hitherto to be a literary discussion with the object of
establishing ... the truth. What profundity!... Our "truth," of
course, is not absolute. But as in its name we are, at the present
moment, shedding our blood, we have neither cause nor possibility to
carry on a literary discussion as to the relativity of truth with
those who "criticize" us with the help of all forms of arms.
Similarly, our problem is not to punish liars and to encourage just
men amongst journalists of all shades of opinion, but to throttle the
class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the
proletariat, irrespective of the fact that in both camps there are
fanatics and liars.

"The Soviet Government," Kautsky thunders, "has destroyed the sole
remedy that might militate against corruption: the freedom of the
Press. Control by means of unlimited freedom of the Press alone could
have restrained those bandits and adventurers who will inevitably
cling like leeches to every unlimited, uncontrolled power." (Page
188.) And so on.

The Press as a trusty weapon of the struggle with corruption! This
liberal recipe sounds particularly pitiful when one remembers the two
countries with the greatest "freedom" of the Press--North America and
France--which, at the same time, are countries of the most highly
developed stage of capitalist corruption.

Feeding on the old scandal of the political ante-rooms of the Russian
revolution, Kautsky imagines that without Cadet and Menshevik freedom
the Soviet apparatus is honey-combed with "bandits" and "adventurers."
Such was the voice of the Mensheviks a year or eighteen months ago.
Now even they will not dare to repeat this. With the help of Soviet
control and party selection, the Soviet Government, in the intense
atmosphere of the struggle, has dealt with the bandits and adventurers
who appeared on the surface at the moment of the revolution
incomparably better than any government whatsoever, at any time
whatsoever.

We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press
is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable,
armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the
counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its
stores, its communications, and its intelligence system. Are we
depriving ourselves of Cadet and Menshevik criticisms of the
corruption of the working class? In return we are victoriously
destroying the very foundations of capitalist corruption.

But Kautsky goes further to develop his theme. He complains that we
suppress the newspapers of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, and
even--such things have been known--arrest their leaders. Are we not
dealing here with "shades of opinion" in the proletarian or the
Socialist movement? The scholastic pedant does not see facts beyond
his accustomed words. The Mensheviks and S.R.s for him are simply
tendencies in Socialism, whereas, in the course of the revolution,
they have been transformed into an organization which works in active
co-operation with the counter-revolution and carries on against us
an open war. The army of Kolchak was organized by Socialist
Revolutionaries (how that name savours to-day of the charlatan!), and
was supported by Mensheviks. Both carried on--and carry on--against
us, for a year and a half, a war on the Northern front. The Mensheviks
who rule the Caucasus, formerly the allies of Hohenzollern, and to-day
the allies of Lloyd George, arrested and shot Bolsheviks hand in hand
with German and British officers. The Mensheviks and S.R.s of the
Kuban Rada organized the army of Denikin. The Esthonian Mensheviks who
participate in their government were directly concerned in the last
advance of Yudenich against Petrograd. Such are these "tendencies" in
the Socialist movement. Kautsky considers that one can be in a state
of open and civil war with the Mensheviks and S.R.s, who, with the
help of the troops they themselves have organized for Yudenich,
Kolchak and Denikin, are fighting for their "shade of opinions" in
Socialism, and at the same time to allow those innocent "shades of
opinion" freedom of the Press in our rear. If the dispute with the
S.R.s and the Mensheviks could be settled by means of persuasion and
voting--that is, if there were not behind their backs the Russian and
foreign imperialists--there would be no civil war.

Kautsky, of course, is ready to "condemn"--an extra drop of ink--the
blockade, and the Entente support of Denikin, and the White Terror.
But in his high impartiality he cannot refuse the latter certain
extenuating circumstances. The White Terror, you see, does not
infringe their own principles, while the Bolsheviks, making use of the
Red Terror, betray the principle of "the sacredness of human life
which they themselves proclaimed." (Page 210.)

What is the meaning of the principle of the sacredness of human life
in practice, and in what does it differ from the commandment, "Thou
shalt not kill," Kautsky does not explain. When a murderer raises his
knife over a child, may one kill the murderer to save the child? Will
not thereby the principle of the "sacredness of human life" be
infringed? May one kill the murderer to save oneself? Is an
insurrection of oppressed slaves against their masters permissible?
Is it permissible to purchase one's freedom at the cost of the
life of one's jailers? If human life in general is sacred and
inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only the use of terror, not
only war, but also revolution itself. Kautsky simply does not realize
the counter-revolutionary meaning of the "principle" which he attempts
to force upon us. Elsewhere we shall see that Kautsky accuses us of
concluding the Brest-Litovsk peace: in his opinion we ought to have
continued war. But what then becomes of the sacredness of human life?
Does life cease to be sacred when it is a question of people talking
another language, or does Kautsky consider that mass murders organized
on principles of strategy and tactics are not murders at all? Truly it
is difficult to put forward in our age a principle more hypocritical
and more stupid. As long as human labor-power, and, consequently, life
itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and
robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a
shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves
in their chains.

We used to fight against the death penalty introduced by Kerensky,
because that penalty was inflicted by the courts-martial of the old
army on soldiers who refused to continue the imperialist war. We tore
this weapon out of the hands of the old courts-martial, destroyed the
courts-martial themselves, and demobilized the old army which had
brought them forth. Destroying in the Red Army, and generally
throughout the country, counter-revolutionary conspirators who strive
by means of insurrections, murders, and disorganization, to restore
the old regime, we are acting in accordance with the iron laws of a
war in which we desire to guarantee our victory.

If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously
we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of
classes which consider themselves "Christian," patronize idealist
philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their
own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the
Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness
of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have
remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we
must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem
can only be solved by blood and iron.

There is another difference between the White Terror and the Red,
which Kautsky to-day ignores, but which in the eyes of a Marxist is
of decisive significance. The White Terror is the weapon of the
historically reactionary class. When we exposed the futility of the
repressions of the bourgeois State against the proletariat, we never
denied that by arrests and executions the ruling class, under certain
conditions, might temporarily retard the development of the social
revolution. But we were convinced that they would not be able to
bring it to a halt. We relied on the fact that the proletariat is the
historically rising class, and that bourgeois society could not
develop without increasing the forces of the proletariat. The
bourgeoisie to-day is a falling class. It not only no longer plays an
essential part in production, but by its imperialist methods of
appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and
human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of
the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to
abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into the abyss the
whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The
Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to
destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can
only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror
hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This hastening--a pure
question of acceleration--is at certain periods of decisive
importance. Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together
with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming
of the revolution in Europe. One must be blind not to see this, or a
swindler to deny it.

The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the
very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the
Red Terror. Kautsky, who, during the last two years, has covered
mountains of paper with polemics against Communism and Terrorism, is
obliged, at the end of his pamphlet, to recognize the facts, and
unexpectedly to admit that the Russian Soviet Government is to-day the
most important factor in the world revolution. "However one regards
the Bolshevik methods," he writes, "the fact that a proletarian
government in a large country has not only reached power, but has
retained it for two years up to the present time, amidst great
difficulties, extraordinarily increases the sense of power amongst the
proletariat of all countries. For the actual revolution the Bolsheviks
have thereby accomplished a great work--_grosses geleistet_." (Page
233.)

This announcement stuns us as a completely unexpected recognition of
historical truth from a quarter whence we had long since ceased to
await it. The Bolsheviks have accomplished a great historical task by
existing for two years against the united capitalist world. But the
Bolsheviks held out not only by ideas, but by the sword. Kautsky's
admission is an involuntary sanctioning of the methods of the Red
Terror, and at the same time the most effective condemnation of his
own critical concoction.


THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR

Kautsky sees one of the reasons for the extremely bloody character of
the revolution in the war and in its hardening influence on manners.
Quite undeniable. That influence, with all the consequences that
follow from it, might have been foreseen earlier--approximately in the
period when Kautsky was not certain whether one ought to vote for the
war credits or against them.

"Imperialism has violently torn society out of its condition of
unstable equilibrium," he wrote five years ago in our German
book--_The War and the International_. "It has blown up the sluices
with which Social-Democracy held back the current of the revolutionary
energy of the proletariat, and has directed that current into its own
channels. This monstrous historical experiment, which at one blow has
broken the back of the Socialist International, represents a deadly
danger for bourgeoisie society itself. The hammer has been taken from
the hand of the worker, and has been replaced by the sword. The
worker, bound hand and foot by the mechanism of capitalist society,
has suddenly burst out of its midst, and is learning to put the aims
of the community higher than his own domestic happiness and than life
itself.

"With this weapon, which he himself has forged, in his hand, the
worker is placed in a position in which the political destiny of the
State depends directly on him. Those who in former times oppressed and
despised him now flatter and caress him. At the same time he is
entering into intimate relations with those same guns which, according
to Lassalle, constitute the most important integral part of the
constitution. He crosses the boundaries of states, participates in
violent requisitions, and under his blows towns pass from hand to
hand. Changes take place such as the last generation did not dream of.

"If the most advanced workers were aware that force was the mother of
law, their political thought still remained saturated with the spirit
of opportunism and self-adaptation to bourgeois legality. To-day the
worker has learned in practice to despise that legality, and violently
to destroy it. The static moments in his psychology are giving place
to the dynamic. Heavy guns are knocking into his head the idea that,
in cases where it is impossible to avoid an obstacle, there remains
the possibility of destroying it. Nearly the whole adult male
population is passing through this school of war, terrible in its
social realism, which is bringing forth a new type of humanity.

"Over all the criteria of bourgeois society--its law, its morality,
its religion--is now raised the fist of iron necessity. 'Necessity
knows no law' was the declaration of the German Chancellor (August 4,
1914). Monarchs come out into the market-place to accuse one another
of lying in the language of fishwives; governments break promises they
have solemnly made, while the national church binds its Lord God like
a convict to the national cannon. Is it not obvious that these
circumstances must create important alterations in the psychology of
the working class, radically curing it of that hypnosis of legality
which was created by the period of political stagnation? The
propertied classes will soon, to their sorrow, have to be convinced of
this. The proletariat, after passing through the school of war, at the
first serious obstacle within its own country will feel the necessity
of speaking with the language of force. 'Necessity knows no law,' he
will throw in the face of those who attempt to stop him by laws of
bourgeois legality. And the terrible economic necessity which will
arise during the course of this war, and particularly at its end, will
drive the masses to spurn very many laws." (Page 56-57.)

All this is undeniable. But to what is said above one must add that
the war has exercised no less influence on the psychology of the
ruling classes. As the masses become more insistent in their demands,
so the bourgeoisie has become more unyielding.

In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests
by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they
served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless
human lives. This has imparted to their consciousness as a master
class a new "Napoleonic" trait. The capitalists during the war became
accustomed to send to their death millions of slaves--fellow-countrymen
and colonials--for the sake of coal, railway, and other profits.

During the war there emerged from the ranks of the bourgeoisie--large,
middle, and small--hundreds of thousands of officers, professional
fighters, men whose character has received the hardening of battle,
and has become freed from all external restraints: qualified soldiers,
ready and able to defend the privileged position of the bourgeoisie
which produced them with a ferocity which, in its way, borders on
heroism.

The revolution would probably be more humane if the proletariat had
the possibility of "buying off all this band," as Marx once put it.
But capitalism during the war has imposed upon the toilers too great a
load of debt, and has too deeply undermined the foundations of
production, for us to be able seriously to contemplate a ransom in
return for which the bourgeoisie would silently make its peace with
the revolution. The masses have lost too much blood, have suffered too
much, have become too savage, to accept a decision which economically
would be beyond their capacity.

To this there must be added other circumstances working in the same
direction. The bourgeoisie of the conquered countries has been
embittered by defeat, the responsibility for which it is inclined to
throw on the rank and file--on the workers and peasants who proved
incapable of carrying on "the great national war" to a victorious
conclusion. From this point of view, one finds very instructive those
explanations, unparalleled for their effrontery, which Ludendorff gave
to the Commission of the National Assembly. The bands of Ludendorff
are burning with the desire to take revenge for their humiliation
abroad on the blood of their own proletariat. As for the bourgeoisie
of the victorious countries, it has become inflated with arrogance,
and is more than ever ready to defend its social position with the
help of the bestial methods which guaranteed its victory. We have seen
that the bourgeoisie is incapable of organizing the division of the
booty amongst its own ranks without war and destruction. Can it,
without a fight, abandon its booty altogether? The experience of the
last five years leaves no doubt whatsoever on this score: if even
previously it was absolutely utopian to expect that the expropriation
of the propertied classes--thanks to "democracy"--would take place
imperceptibly and painlessly, without insurrections, armed conflicts,
attempts at counter-revolution, and severe repression, the state of
affairs we have inherited from the imperialist war predetermines,
doubly and trebly, the tense character of the civil war and the
dictatorship of the proletariat.




5

THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA

_"The short episode of the first revolution carried out by the
proletariat for the proletariat ended in the triumph of its enemy.
This episode--from March 18 to May 28--lasted seventy-two days."--"The
Paris Commune" of March 18, 1871, P. L. Lavrov, Petrograd. 'Kolos'
Publishing House, 1919, pp. 160._


THE IMMATURITY OF THE SOCIALIST PARTIES IN THE COMMUNE.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first, as yet weak, historic attempt
of the working class to impose its supremacy. We cherished the memory
of the Commune in spite of the extremely limited character of its
experience, the immaturity of its participants, the confusion of its
programme, the lack of unity amongst its leaders, the indecision of
their plans, the hopeless panic of its executive organs, and the
terrifying defeat fatally precipitated by all these. We cherish in the
Commune, in the words of Lavrov, "the first, though still pale, dawn
of the proletarian republic." Quite otherwise with Kautsky. Devoting a
considerable part of his book to a crudely tendencious contrast
between the Commune and the Soviet power, he sees the main advantages
of the Commune in features that we find are its misfortune and its
fault.

Kautsky laboriously proves that the Paris Commune of 1871 was not
"artificially" prepared, but emerged unexpectedly, taking the
revolutionaries by surprise--in contrast to the November revolution,
which was carefully prepared by our party. This is incontestable. Not
daring clearly to formulate his profoundly reactionary ideas, Kautsky
does not say outright whether the Paris revolutionaries of 1871
deserve praise for not having foreseen the proletarian insurrection,
and for not having foreseen the inevitable and consciously gone to
meet it. However, all Kautsky's picture was built up in such a way as
to produce in the reader just this idea: the Communards were simply
overtaken by misfortune (the Bavarian philistine, Vollmar, once
expressed his regret that the Communards had not gone to bed instead
of taking power into their hands), and, therefore, deserve pity. The
Bolsheviks consciously went to meet misfortune (the conquest of
power), and, therefore, there is no forgiveness for them either in
this or the future world. Such a formulation of the question may seem
incredible in its internal inconsistency. None the less, it follows
quite inevitably from the position of the Kautskian "Independents,"
who draw their heads into their shoulders in order to see and foresee
nothing; and, if they do move forward, it is only after having
received a preliminary stout blow in the rear.

"To humiliate Paris," writes Kautsky, "not to give it self-government,
to deprive it of its position as capital, to disarm it in order
afterwards to attempt with greater confidence a monarchist _coup
d'etat_--such was the most important task of the National Assembly
and the chief of the executive power it elected, Thiers. Out of this
situation arose the conflict which led to the Paris insurrection.

"It is clear how different from this was the character of the _coup
d'etat_ carried out by the Bolsheviks, which drew its strength from
the yearning for peace; which had the peasantry behind it; which had
in the National Assembly against it, not monarchists, but S.R.s and
Menshevik Social-Democrats.

"The Bolsheviks came to power by means of a well-prepared _coup
d'etat_; which at one blow handed over to them the whole machinery
of the State--immediately utilized in the most energetic and merciless
manner for the purpose of suppressing their opponents, amongst them
their proletarian opponents.

"No one, on the other hand, was more surprised by the insurrection of
the Commune than the revolutionaries themselves, and for a
considerable number amongst them the conflict was in the highest
degree undesirable." (Page 56.)

In order more clearly to realize the actual sense of what Kautsky has
written here of the Communards, let us bring forward the following
evidence.

"On March 1, 1871," writes Lavrov, in his very instructive book on the
Commune, "six months after the fall of the Empire, and a few days
before the explosion of the Commune, the guiding personalities in the
Paris International still had no definite political programme." (Pages
64-65.)

"After March 18," writes the same author, "Paris was in the hands of
the proletariat, but its leaders, overwhelmed by their unexpected
power, did not take the most elementary measures." (Page 71.)

"'Your part is too big for you to play, and your sole aim is to get
rid of responsibility,' said one member of the Central Committee of
the National Guard. In this was a great deal of truth," writes the
Communard and historian of the Commune, Lissagaray. "But at the moment
of action itself the absence of preliminary organization and
preparation is very often a reason why parts are assigned to men which
are too big for them to play." (Brussels, 1876; page 106.)

From this one can already see (later on it will become still more
obvious) that the absence of a direct struggle for power on the part
of the Paris Socialists was explained by their theoretical
shapelessness and political helplessness, and not at all by higher
considerations of tactics.

We have no doubt that Kautsky's own loyalty to the traditions of the
Commune will be expressed mainly in that extraordinary surprise with
which he will greet the proletarian revolution in Germany as "a
conflict in the highest degree undesirable." We doubt, however,
whether this will be ascribed by posterity to his credit. In reality,
one must describe his historical analogy as a combination of
confusion, omission, and fraudulent suggestion.

The intentions which were entertained by Thiers towards Paris were
entertained by Miliukov, who was openly supported by Tseretelli and
Chernov, towards Petrograd. All of them, from Kornilov to Potressov,
affirmed day after day that Petrograd had alienated itself from the
country, had nothing in common with it, was completely corrupted, and
was attempting to impose its will upon the community. To overthrow and
humiliate Petrograd was the first task of Miliukov and his assistants.
And this took place at a period when Petrograd was the true centre of
the revolution, which had not yet been able to consolidate its
position in the rest of the country. The former president of the Duma,
Rodzianko, openly talked about handing over Petrograd to the Germans
for educative purposes, as Riga had been handed over. Rodzianko only
called by its name what Miliukov was trying to carry out, and what
Kerensky assisted by his whole policy.

Miliukov, like Thiers, wished to disarm the proletariat. More than
that, thanks to Kerensky, Chernov, and Tseretelli, the Petrograd
proletariat was to a considerable extent disarmed in July, 1917. It
was partially re-armed during Kornilov's march on Petrograd in August.
And this new arming was a serious element in the preparation of the
November insurrection. In this way, it is just the points in which
Kautsky contrasts our November revolution to the March revolt of the
Paris workers that, to a very large extent, coincide.

In what, however, lies the difference between them? First of all, in
the fact that Thiers' criminal plans succeeded: Paris was throttled by
him, and tens of thousands of workers were destroyed. Miliukov, on the
other hand, had a complete fiasco: Petrograd remained an impregnable
fortress of the proletariat, and the leader of the bourgeoisie went to
the Ukraine to petition that the Kaiser's troops should occupy Russia.
For this difference we were to a considerable extent responsible--and
we are ready to bear the responsibility. There is a capital difference
also in the fact--that this told more than once in the further course
of events--that, while the Communards began mainly with considerations
of patriotism, we were invariably guided by the point of view of the
international revolution. The defeat of the Commune led to the
practical collapse of the First International. The victory of the
Soviet power has led to the creation of the Third International.

But Marx--on the eve of the insurrection--advised the Communards not
to revolt, but to create an organization! One might understand Kautsky
if he adduced this evidence in order to show that Marx had
insufficiently gauged the acuteness of the situation in Paris. But
Kautsky attempts to exploit Marx's advice as a proof of his
condemnation of insurrection in general. Like all the mandarins of
German Social-Democracy, Kautsky sees in organization first and
foremost a method of hindering revolutionary action.

But limiting ourselves to the question of organization as such, we
must not forget that the November revolution was preceded by nine
months of Kerensky's Government, during which our party, not without
success, devoted itself not only to agitation, but also to
organization. The November revolution took place after we had achieved
a crushing majority in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils of
Petrograd, Moscow, and all the industrial centres in the country, and
had transformed the Soviets into powerful organizations directed by
our party. The Communards did nothing of the kind. Finally, we had
behind us the heroic Commune of Paris, from the defeat of which we had
drawn the deduction that revolutionaries must foresee events and
prepare for them. For this also we are to blame.

Kautsky requires his extensive comparison of the Commune and Soviet
Russia only in order to slander and humiliate a living and victorious
dictatorship of the proletariat in the interests of an attempted
dictatorship, in the already fairly distant past.

Kautsky quotes with extreme satisfaction the statement of the Central
Committee of the National Guard on March 19 in connection with the
murder of the two generals by the soldiery. "We say indignantly: the
bloody filth with the help of which it is hoped to stain our honor is
a pitiful slander. We never organized murder, and never did the
National Guard take part in the execution of crime."

Naturally, the Central Committee had no cause to assume responsibility
for murders with which it had no concern. But the sentimental,
pathetic tone of the statement very clearly characterises the
political timorousness of these men in the face of bourgeois public
opinion. Nor is this surprising. The representatives of the National
Guard were men in most cases with a very modest revolutionary past.
"Not one well-known name," writes Lissagaray. "They were petty
bourgeois shop-keepers, strangers to all but limited circles, and, in
most cases, strangers hitherto to politics." (Page 70.)

"The modest and, to some extent, fearful sense of terrible historical
responsibility, and the desire to get rid of it as soon as possible,"
writes Lavrov of them, "is evident in all the proclamations of this
Central Committee, into the hands of which the destiny of Paris had
fallen." (Page 77.)

After bringing forward, to our confusion, the declamation concerning
bloodshed, Kautsky later on follows Marx and Engels in criticizing the
indecision of the Commune. "If the Parisians (_i.e._, the Communards)
had persistently followed up the tracts of Thiers, they would,
perhaps, have managed to seize the government. The troops falling back
from Paris would not have shown the least resistance ... but they let
Thiers go without hindrance. They allowed him to lead away his troops
and reorganize them at Versailles, to inspire a new spirit in, and
strengthen, them." (Page 49.)

Kautsky cannot understand that it was the same men, and for the very
same reasons, who published the statement of March 19 quoted above,
who allowed Thiers to leave Paris with impunity and gather his forces.
If the Communards had _conquered_ with the help of resources of a
purely moral character, their statement would have acquired great
weight. But this did not take place. In reality, their sentimental
humaneness was simply the obverse of their revolutionary passivity.
The men who, by the will of fate, had received power in Paris, could
not understand the necessity of immediately utilizing that power to
the end, of hurling themselves after Thiers, and, before he recovered
his grasp of the situation, of crushing him, of concentrating the
troops in their hands, of carrying out the necessary weeding-out of
the officer class, of seizing the provinces. Such men, of course, were
not inclined to severe measures with counter-revolutionary elements.
The one was closely bound up with the other. Thiers could not be
followed up without arresting Thiers' agents in Paris and shooting
conspirators and spies. When one considered the execution of
counter-revolutionary generals as an indelible "crime," one could not
develop energy in following up troops who were under the direction of
counter-revolutionary generals.

In the revolution in the highest degree of energy is the highest
degree of humanity. "Just the men," Lavrov justly remarks, "who hold
human life and human blood dear must strive to organize the
possibility for a swift and decisive victory, and then to act with the
greatest swiftness and energy, in order to crush the enemy. For only
in this way can we achieve the minimum of inevitable sacrifice and the
minimum of bloodshed." (Page 225.)

The statement of March 19 will, however, be considered with more
justice if we examine it, not as an unconditional confession of faith,
but as the expression of transient moods the day after an unexpected
and bloodless victory. Being an absolute stranger to the understanding
of the dynamics of revolution, and the internal limitations of its
swiftly-developing moods, Kautsky thinks in lifeless schemes, and
distorts the perspective of events by arbitrarily selected analogies.
He does not understand that soft-hearted indecision is generally
characteristic of the masses in the first period of the revolution.
The workers pursue the offensive only under the pressure of iron
necessity, just as they have recourse to the Red Terror only under the
threat of destruction by the White Guards. That which Kautsky
represents as the result of the peculiarly elevated moral feeling of
the Parisian proletariat in 1871 is, in reality, merely a
characteristic of the first stage of the civil war. A similar
phenomenon could have been witnessed in our case.

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 passed 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
assumed 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 mass 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 class 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 dictatorship. 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 classes, demanded, in the name of
liberal principles, complete freedom of speech, of assembly, 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 institutions, Paris,
as the community of the emancipated working-class 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
platitudes 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 class, 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 dictatorship 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" institutions,
entered into ridiculous and endless negotiations with a quite helpless
assembly 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 circumstances 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 assembly 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 incumbent 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
superstitions 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 institution, 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 shift 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 antithesis 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 DICTATORSHIP

Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to
depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute 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 dictatorship 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 dictatorship of which--unfortunately a very feeble
and formalist dictatorship--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 analogies, Kautsky benefits by the
circumstance 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 crushing majority. The "democratically" elected
Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--_i.e._, placed
the fact of the dictatorship 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 participated
          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
          participated 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
classes 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, willy-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 municipal
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 attitude 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 masses 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 editorship of
the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding, which
in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each
other, cannot be renewed.... Class 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 mass 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 class war with interclass democracy.

"The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly," 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."

Th

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