Expropriation and Organisation.
The world-war made the working class take a backward step both morally and intellectually. It brutalised almost every strata of the population; it set the most undeveloped elements of the proletariat in the forefront of the movement, and finally increased the necessitous state of the proletariat to such an extent, that it brought despair in the place of quiet thought and reflection. The war also encouraged primitive ideas in the working-classes, by developing the military way of thinking, that form of thinking which, as it is, lies very near the surface in the thoughts of the average unintelligent man, who imagines that mere power is the determining factor in the world history—as if one needed only the necessary force and recklessness to accomplish everything that one undertakes. Marx and Engels have always attacked and opposed this conception. In Engels“classical book (“Herr Eugen Diihring’s Transformation of Science”) there are three chapters dealing exclusively with “theory of power” (3rd edition, pages 162-192). This theory, from beginning to end, is anti-Marxist. Engels did not hesitate to oppose it wherever it appeared in a revolutionary form. He was not of the view, so much upheld to-day, that one should never show up the mistakes of a movement, if it is a revolutionary proletarian movement, because one might, by so doing, weaken the force of the revolution. Obviously enough, one should not be too strict in judgment on the faults and follies in a revolution. The most difficult historical situation is that of a revolution, in which one stands face to face with a completely new situation, which it is impossible to survey. It would be the very cheapest form of Pharisaism for an observer, himself in a secure position, or regarding from afar, to blame too heavily the mistakes that are made by men who are in the centre of the fight, and who have to bear all its burdens and dangers. But on the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to blame mistakes that do not arise from conceivably false or insufficient information, but which proceed from an inherently false fundamental conception of things. They can be avoided only by overcoming such a conception; and they threaten every future revolutionary movement, if one allows them to pass uncriticised, or even defends them, and glorifies them in the supposed interests of the revolution.
Marx and Engels did not allow themselves to be hindered in such necessary criticism of the revolution, through their “volcanic temperament,” This is proved by the criticism that Engels published in the Leipsig Volkstaat, in the autumn of 1873. The insurrection, which broke out after the proclamation of the Republic in Spain on the 5th July of that year, was, as early as the 26th January, practically defeated, with some few exceptions, the Carthaginians prolonging the insurrection up to January 8, 1874. Thus, even before the rising was completely quelled, Engels published a very sharp criticism against “this absolutely shameful insurrection… which should be a warning to the rest of the world.”
This criticism appeared in the series of articles on “The Bakunists at Work” (Volkstaat, 31st October, 2nd and 5th November), newly-printed, 1894, in the magazine Internationales aus dem Volkstaat, by Freiderich Engels (Berlin Vorwärts edition).
We recommend this work to the study of all who are busying themselves with Bolshevism. For Bolshevism is, in many respects, foreshadowed in that work, since the situation of the Spanish Revolution bears many analogies to that of the Commune of the present day. Engels began with a reference to the fact that, in Spain, the Internationalists in their majority belonged to the Bakunist Alliance, and he continues:
“When, in February, 1873, the Republic was proclaimed, the Spanish Alliancists were in a very difficult position. Spain is a land so very backward in industry that, in that country, it is quite impossible to speak of an immediate and complete emancipation of the working classes. Before this is possible, Spain must pass through several preliminary stages on the road to development, and clear out of the way a vast number of obstacles. The Republic gave opportunity for the country to pass through these preliminary stages in the shortest possible period, and to remove the hindrances as soon as possible. But this occasion could only be put to any use through actual political participation on the part of the Spanish working-classes/’ (Pages 17 and 18).
That would, however, have meant to participate in the voting for the Cortés and the National Assembly, and to have taken active part in the same. But the Bakunists wanted the immediate and complete emancipation of the working-classes, As a means to this purpose, the parliamentary democracy, considering the then state of affairs in Spain, was absolutely incapable, however necessary it was as a means towards the development and the maturing of the proletariat. Participation in “any kind of vote appeared to them to be crime worthy of death.”
Now what did they want to put in the place of an election campaign? The working-men’s council, as a means for the “immediate and complete emancipation of the working-classes,” had not yet been discovered. The Bakunists proclaimed a general strike, and the dividing up of Spain into numberless small cantons; along with, from the very start, the splitting up of the whole movement into a series of local movements, and the declaration of the revolution. The end of the story was not merely the collapse of the movement, the ruin of the Spanish Internationale, but also “thfc abnegation of the principles hitherto preached by the Bakunists” (page 32), which they had to give up, one after the other, as a result of the force of circumstances.
Is it any different in Eussia to-day? It is true that, at the outbreak of the present revolution among the working classes of Eussia, it was Marxism and not anarchy that was reigning. As a Socialistic theory, Marxism has never received such general recognition as in Eussia.
For decades the Eussian Socialists had made a virtue out of necessity, and espied in the backward character of their agrarian problems a certain advantage. They thought that what there was of the village communism, in regard to land, made it’ particularly easy for them to establish and build up modem Socialism. It was the great service of the Marxists in Eussia, led by Axelrod and Plechanoff, to fight for recognition of this conception, and by a long and weary struggle to succeed, in view of the undeveloped state of the Eussian proletariat and of Eussian society in general, in making the inevitable revolution from the outset take on only a bourgeois character, even if the proletariat was called upon to play a prominent part in it. This view was triumphant in the Eussian Socialist movement, so long as the Revolution did not bring the proletariat into power, which had for its programme the problem of immediate emancipation; and also so long as Socialism was professed by the intellectuals and a certain high level of the working-classes. Consistent Marxism was thrown into a very difficult position when the Revolution set in motion the really great mass of the Eussian people, who were conscious only of their needs and desires, and who did not care at all whether what they desired was, under the then circumstances, possible and socially advantageous. In the case of the Bolsheviks, Marxism had no power on the situation. The mass psychology overruled them, and they allowed themselves to be carried away by it. Doubtless in consequence of this they have become the rulers of Russia. It is quite another question what will and must be the end of it all. By making the blind will of the masses the motive force of the Revolution, they threw overboard the Marxist system, to the victorious ascendancy of which they had, in a large measure, contributed. With their scientific knowledge, and as the result of the popularity of Marx’s name, they thought they had settled everything by taking a Marxist motto, the motto of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” With these words they hoped to gain absolution from all sins against the spirit of Marxism.
The Revolution came as a result of the war. The soldiers were tired of it and would no longer fight. The Bolsheviks made themselves the most formidable representatives of the disinclination to continue the war. They insisted on the dissolution of the army by every means in their power, caring not a bit whether this should be favourable to the German military autocracy or not. If this military autocracy did not win, and it came to a German Revolution, the Bolsheviks were certainly not responsible for that.
The complete collapse of the army gave complete freedom to the lower classes. The peasants immediately insisted on confiscating the landed property, and dividing it up into private property. It was impossible to avoid these large estates being given over to the peasantry, but the problem should have been tackled in such a way, that the technical advantages obtained from these estates should not be lost. But that would have required time, and besides, the peasants would not wait.
The Bolsheviks won the peasants over to their side, by introducing anarchy in the country, and by allowing every community to have a free hand; so that the destruction of these estates went on in the most primitive fashion, with technical loss and the destruction of many means of production. In return, however, the peasants allowed the Bolsheviks a completely free hand in the towns in which they had already likewise won over the working classes; so that these latter were obedient merely to the Bolsheviks’ will, and took no regard for the actual conditions of things.
The proletariat was starving. It felt itself repressed and exploited, so it demanded with increasing energy the immediate throwing off of the capitalist yoke. To satisfy its will there was no time for study or reflection. With a few heavy blows the whole edifice of, Russian capitalism lay in ruins. The substitution of Socialism for capitalism embraces two questions— one of property, and the other of organisation. It claims the abolition of private property in regard to means of production, and the transformation of social property in the form of a State and communistic property. It also claims the substitution of a socialistic in place of a capitalistic organisation of the management and of all such functions in one complete economic whole. Of these two transformations, that concerned with property is more simple. Nothing is easier than to expropriate a capitalist. That is a mere Question of force, and not necessarily to be connected with any social theory. Long before there was such a thing as industrial capitalism, at the time, namely, of mere commercial and monied capital, we find similar expropriation of merchants, bankers and money-lenders, through the feudal lords and princes, and indeed through the people themselves. In the Middle Ages, not only were the Jews often expropriated; but despite the piety of the time, from time to time also the treasury of a church, or of a particular order would be confiscated. For instance, Philip IV. of France, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, expropriated the enormously wealthy order of the Knights of the Temple. Long before there was such a thing as modem Socialism, many good, naïve people often regarded the noble robbers, who despoiled the rich in order to give to the poor, as benefactors of the human race. To carry out this form of Socialism was easy enough. It was in keeping with the undeveloped state of the Russian proletariat that Bakunin, in 1864, immediately before the war and the Commune, in his manifesto to the Russian youth of the time, pointed to the way taken by the Kussian robber-captain, Stenka Rasin, who in 1667 formed a band of robbers, with whom he lived four whole years in South Russia, until the Government overpowered and killed him.
It is not so easy to organise as it is to expropriate. A capitalist concern is a complex organisation, which finds its intelligence in the capitalist himself, or in his representative. If it is desired to abolish capitalism, some form of organisation must be created, which should be possible of functioning as well, if not better, without the capitalist head. This is not so simple as was the procedure of Philip IV. or of Stenka Razin; for it demands a certain set of conditions of a material as well as of a psychical order, a high development of capitalistic organisation, not only of production but also of the export and import of raw materials. Moreover, it also demands a proletariat, which is conscious of its duties, not only towards its own neighbours and comrades, but also towards society as a whole—a proletariat, moreover, which has become accustomed to voluntary discipline and self-administration through long years of mass organisation; and which, finally, is intelligent enough to distinguish the possible from the impossible, and the scientifically educated leader with character from an ignorant demigod without a conscience. Wherever these conditions are not present, capitalism cannot with any success be permanently dissolved by Socialism. And even in those districts, and in those branches of industry in which these conditional are already sufficiently highly developed, the Socialistic organisation must be carefully prepared by a profound examination of the actual conditions. For the forms which the new organisations have, for the time being, taken on are not necessarily the best for all branche of industry, for all lands and all times. They are not “ready-made Utopias” or eternal “ideals.” Under certain circumstances they can differ a good deal, and must be adapted according to the prevailing conditions in the most business-like manner possible, if they are to have any success.
But both factors in socialisation, that is, expropriation and reorganisation, must remain in closest connection, if chaos and an absolute standstill are not to follow on the state of production that has hitherto existed. Philip IV. or Stenka Razin could confine their activities to mere expropriation, for they had no intention of creating some new method of production. The transition to Socialism is not possible by this simple means. The masses were impatient. They would not wait. In order to appease them the Bolsheviks, when they came into power, cut the socialising process into two parts. They separated its factors one from the other, although the one without the other cannot live. They proceeded at first after Stenka Razin’s approved method, afterwards endeavouring to proceed with organisation as well as it would go. The two things that were intimately connected with one another, and could only work in conjunction, were separated and tom asunder. Lenin himself acknowledged this in April, 1918, in his book, “The immediate problema of the Soviet Power.”
“Up to the present, the first consideration was to find measures for an immediate expropriation of the expropriators. Now the first thing to be done is to organise the finance and control of all business concerns, in which the capitalists have already been expropriated, as well as in all other concerns” (page 14).
“Our work, which we have to accomplish with the aid of the proletariat, which consists in the organisation of the general financing, and control over the production and the distribution of material products, has been behind our efforts to secure the immediate expropriation of profiteers. In regard to the socialistic transformation in these departments (and they are very important and essential departments), we have been very backward; and we have remained backward for the very good reason that the financing and control have been far too little organised” (page 23).
Business concerns and branches of industry were expropriated without any attempt being made to discover whether their organisation on Socialist lines was possible. Even in such departments, where such organisation would have been possible, they were quite content, in the first place, with expropriation; because this alone was possible to carry out without preparation, and also because the working classes would not wait. But the consequences very soon showed themselves. Economic life in Russia is backward owing to the fact that its industry, in comparison with its agricultural life, employs but a very small section of the population; but inside this industry the most modem and up-to-date forms of large manufacture predominate. They had far surpassed the state of Parisian industry of 1871. For in this latter, in so far as anything can be said about socialisation at all, the form of productive associations alone came into question.
The Russian factories were for the most part large concerns, and therefore the first thing that appeared necessary to be done, after the abolition of capital, Seemed to be their nationalisation. In productive associations the wages of the labourer depend on his work and on his associates. The scale of these wages is determined by the number of products that are brought to market. They themselves must look after the buying and selling of raw materials. In the nationalised factories the workmen drew their money no more from the capitalists, as they had done before, but from the State. The maximum of their wages depended much less on their measure of productive activity than on the strength of their pressure on the power of the State. This latter power also had to look after the selling, as well as after the buying of raw materials. A well-disciplined and higjily-intelligent working-class was necessary, a w’orking-class which would recognise to what large extent the social prosperity, and therefore their own, depended on the productivity of their labour, in order, under these conditions, to make production successful and to keep it so. Moreover, from such a working class real production could be expected only if the necessary organising measures were taken which, apart from the workmen, as also apart from the State control and the consumers, would preserve the necessary influence on the single business concerns and the whole industrial branches; and also, if encouragement to work was created, which should supersede the dominating existence of capital.
From this time onwards, however, there was failing, not only organisation, but also the requisite intelligence and discipline of the working-classes. The more so, since the war and its results had put the most ignorant and most undeveloped sections of the proletariat in the wildest excitement. Certainly the Russian workman had derived a high sense of solidarity from his village commune; but the sphere of his influence was as limited as the village community itself, for it is really confined to a very small circle of his own personal comrades. The larger social unity is for him a matter of indifference. The unfortunate results arising from these circumstances the Bolshevists themselves regretted. Trotsky says in his book, “Work, Discipline and Order will save the Socialist Soviet Republic,” page 17:
“The Revolution, which awakened a sense of human personality in the most oppressed and downtrodden, naturally took on at the beginning of its awakening an apparently anarchist character. This awakening of the elementary instincts of personality often shows a grossly egoistic or, to use a philosophical expression, an ego-centric character. It endeavours to acquire for itself all that it possibly can. It thinks only of itself, and is not at all inclined to have regard for the standpoint of the class in general. Hence the flood of all kinds of disorganising voices, and of individualistic, anarchistic, and grasping tendencies, which we observe especially in the broader spheres of the lower elements in the country, as well as in the midst of the earlier army, and also among certain elements of the working-classes.”
These were quite other elements than those which appeared in the Paris Commune, where men contented themselves with a modest wage in order to further Socialism. Under such circumstances, the form taken by production in the expropriated concerns is clear. The wages were raised as high as was possible, and hence there was only an economy of labour. In order to facilitate this, work by agreement was abolished. Then there were occasions, such as in the case of the Poutilof works in Petersburg, which, in the period when they drew 96,000,000 roubles as a subsidy from the State, produced a total value of 50,000,000. It was only the unlimited employment of paper money that made it possible to avoid bankruptcy, which then seemed inevitable. If there was little work done in the factories, obviously the workmen withdrew, especially from the unpleasant, the dirty, and the heavy labour. How this kind of labour is to be established and assured in a Socialist community, in so far as it is indispensable, was a problem which has engaged the attention of Socialists of all times. Furier thought to solve it by engaging “gutter snipes” for dirty work, youths who in preference wallow in mud. But this humorous solution was clearly not satisfactory. The only solution, in fact, which is in accordance with Socialist principles, and which could promise any success, is that it demands of technical science the elimination of all injurious and disagreeable elements in work, which is by its nature wearisome and prejudicial to health. So long as this is not possible there remains no other course than to make this section of labour attractive by means of particular privileges, either extraordinarily high wages or extraordinarily short working hours.
The Bolsheviks discovered a new solution. It did not at all correspond with Socialist principles, but with the mass psychology of excited working masses. In other words, they introduced compulsory labour, not, however, compulsory labour for those who had hitherto been paid labourers. Why impose on them compulsory labour? Under the influence of new conditions one factory after the other, whether on account of lack of raw material or of transport difficulties, had to close down, so that the number of workers who could find no work increased. Oh, no! Compulsory labour was imposed only on those who had been deprived of all privileges under the excuse that they did not work, namely, the bourgeois. Instead of the universal formal democracy, the Soviet Republic established the proletarian democracy. Only those who worked should have political rights; only they should be sufficiently fed and protected by the State. The drones were to be deprived of all rights,
This was apparently a great Socialist idea, which had only one small error. For nearly two years already the Republic of the working men’s councils had given the vote to the workers alone. And yet up to this very day no solution to the riddle “What constitutes a worker?” has been given. From different communists we get different answers. At the outset, these working men’s councils were none other than representative bodies of the paid labourers of the large factories. As such, they formed definite though limited organisations, which were very important for the Revolution. The “council idea” then proceeded to substitute a Central Council of the working-men’s councils for the National Assembly, which had arisen from the general elections. Nevertheless, the foundation of this Central Council would have been very shaky, if its establishment had been confined to the Workingmen’s Councils of the large factories. But as soon as they went outside this circle, and at the same time excluded the bourgeoisie from having a vote, they became utterly lost. The demarcation of the middle class from the working-class can never be accurately drawn. There will always be something arbitrary in such endeavour, which fact makes the council idea peculiarly liable to become a foundation for a purely dictatorial and arbitrary rule, but very little calculated to establish and build up a clear and systematic State constitution., For instance, in the case of the educated class (intelligentsia) it rests entirely with the Soviet authorities whether they are to be reckoned as belonging to the middle class or not. The same applies to their right of voting, and also in respect to their being liable to compulsory labour.
In the Soviet Republic the bourgeois not only had to suffer the confiscation of all means of production and consumption, without any compensation whatever, and were not only deprived of all political rights; they were, at the same time, the victims of oppression, and they alone were liable to compulsory labour! They are the only people in Russia who are compelled to work, and at the same time the very people who are deprived of the vote, because they do not work! Moreover, in Soviet Russia, a man is not put into the class of workers or bourgeoisie according to the occupation that he for the moment has, but according to the occupation that he had before the Revolution. The bourgeoisie in this respect appears in the Soviet Republic as a special human species, whose characteristics are ineradicable. Just as a nigger remains a nigger, a Mongolian a Mongolian, whatever his appearance and however he may dress; so a bourgeois remains a bourgeois, even if he becomes a beggar, or lives by his work. And how he lives indeed!
The bourgeoisie are compelled to work, but they have not the right to choose the work that they understand, and which best corresponds to their abilities. On the contrary, they are forced to carry on the most filthy and most objectionable kind of labour. In return they receive not increased rations, but the very lowest, which scarce suffice to appease their hunger. Their food rations equal only a quarter of those of the soldiers, and of the working-men who are employed in the factories run by the Soviet Republic. Where these latter receive one pound of bread, the former get only a quarter of a pound; and where again the latter get sixteen pounds of potatoes, the others have only four. From all this we perceive not a sign of any attempt to place the proletariat on a hjgher level, to work out a “new and higher form of life,” but merely the thirst for vengeance on the part of the proletariat in its most primitive form. It thinks to gain happiness by being able to trample down those men who, by their destiny, have been in more favourable circumstances, who are better clothed, better housed and better educated than they themselves.
In setting free this “will” as the motive force of the Revolution, the Bolshevists have let things go much further, in certain cases, than even they themselves have wished. Thus, for instance, the idea that the bourgeois of bygone days have now become merely beasts of burden, deprived of all rights, caused the workers who formerly were in the employ of such bourgeoisie to issue the following manifesto of the Working Men’s Councils of Murzüovka:
“The Soviet gives herewith full power to Comrade Gregory Sareieff, according to his choice and orders, and for use in the artillery division, which is quartered in Murzilovka, in the district of Briantz, to requisition sixty women and girls of the bourgeois and financier class, and to hand them over to the barracks.” 16th September, 1918 (, page 10).
We should be doing an injustice to place the responsibility for this manifesto on the Bolsheviks, for it was certainly just as contrary to their wishes, as were the September massacres to the men of the Convention. But the thought that, in one single local Soviet organisation, hatred and contempt towards the bourgeois could reach such a etage is horrible in the extreme; for these men are deprived not only of all political rights, but even of the most elementary consideration(r) of human dignity.
The Growth Op Thb Pbolbtaeiat.
It is only natural that not even the Bolsheviks could entirely yield to a mass psychology that took on such forms. After they had expropriated tha bourgeois class, and declared them “free as the air,” and had made the proletariat into a “sacred entity,” they attempted to inculcate some necessary improvements in this “sacred entity,” which really should have been the pre-conditions of all socialisation and expropriation.
“We have known for some time past,” said Trotsky, “that we lack the necessary organisation, the necessary discipline, and the necessary historical education. We knew all bhis, but it did not prevent us in any way from endeavouring, with open eyes, to acquire power for ourselves. We were convinced that we could in time learn and arrange everything.” (“Work, Discipline, etc.,” page 16.)
But would Trotsky undertake to get on a locomotive and set it going, in the conviction that he would, during the journey, “learn and arrange everything”? There is no doubt that he would be quite capable of doing this, but would he have the necessary time? W’ould not the train be very likely soon to become derailed or explode? One must have acquired something of the qualities necessary to drive an engine, before one attempts to set it going. In like manner the proletariat should have acquired those qualities, which are indispensable for organisation and production, if it wishes to undertake this task. For such organisation endures no vacuum, no condition of void, no standing still; and least of all a condition such as that created by the war, which has deprived us of all means of equipment, so that we have to live from hand to mouth, and are threatened with death from starvation, as a result of the cessation of production. Lenin himself already regards it as necessary to put a check on the process of expropriation
“If we should now endeavour to continue any further expropriation of capital at the rate we did formerly, we should certainly suffer defeat. It is perfectly clear and obvious to every thinking man, that the task of organising the proletarian finance has remained subordinate to our work of the immediate expropriation of the expropriators.” (“The Immediate Duties of the Soviet Power,” page 14.)
But Lenin is in no spirit of renunciation. On the contrary, he still declares that, despite all, the Soviets would win in “the campaign against capital for the process of the development of the Eussian proletariat is proceeding in giant strides. He says:
“As a condition of the increase of the productivity of labour, there appears an increase in the culture and education of the masses of the population. This increase is proceeding at a remarkable rate, thanks to the ‘impetus’ to life and initiative, which has begun to show itself deep in the souls of the people.” (page 38.)
The rise in higher education of the masses of the people can take a double form. It may proceed in an orderly and systematic way through the schools. In this respect there is an enormous amount still to accomplish in Eussia. An adequate system of popular education demands enormous means and a flourishing state of production, which provides a great surplus for such services. But the state of production in Eussia brings such wretched results that the school system has had to suffer most grievously. Certainly the Bolsheviks have been striving all they can to spread knowledge of art and science among the masses; but all their endeavours have been frightfully hampered by the changed economic conditions in which they find themselves. From this it is clear that a speedy rise in education, which would make possible a rapid and satisfactory increase in production, cannot be expected. On the contrary, this increase in production is a pre-condition of the rise in education. Grown men, however, for the most part, do not learn any more in the schools that the State or the community sets up, but much more in the school of life. The best means of education are provided for them in a democracy, in which absolute freedom of discussion and publicity are essential. But this imposes on every party the obligation to strive for the emancipation of the souls of the people; and to put every member of the community in a position to examine the arguments of all sides, so that, by such means, each may arrive at some independent judgment.
Finally, class struggle takes over from democracy its best features; for in democracy each party addresses itself to the whole social community. Each party certainly defends definite class interests; but it is compelled to show every side of these interests, which are intimately connected with the general interest of the whole social community. In this way modern State democracy is superior to the narrowness of village church policy, as also to the cliquish nature of professional politics. In democracy the horizon of the masses becomes enormously extended by participation in politics. All these possibilities of education of the people become simply shattered if, as the Soviet Eepublic has done, democracy is set aside in favour of an autocracy of the working-men’s council, which deprives every “bourgeois” of his rights, and abolishes the freedom of the press. The particular interests of the wage-eamers in this way become detached from general social interests, and the working man himself is, at the same time, denied an independent examination of the arguments that arise in the struggle of the various classes and parties. For this examination is already settled for him by a patronising authority, which anxiously tries to keep from him every thought and every feeling, w’hich might cause doubts to arise in his heart as to the divine nature of the Soviet system. Naturally enough, this is exactly what should happen in the interests of truth. The poor ignorant people should be prevented from being deceived and poisoned by a bourgeois Press, with all its enormous and powerful machinery. But where in present-day Russia is this powerful machinery to be found, which grants to the bourgeois newspapers a superiority over the Bolshevik papers? Apart from all this, the bitterness of the Bolshevik enslaving of the press is employed not merely against the bourgeois papers alone, but against the whole of the press that does not swear allegiance to the existing system of government.
The justification of this system simply proceeds on the naive assumption that there really exists an absolute truth, and that the Communists alone are in possession of that truth. It also-proceeds on another assumption, namely, that all journalists are, by their very nature, liars; whereas only the Communists are the fanatics of truth. Everywhere there are to be found liars as well as fanatics, who accept as true everything that they see. But the lie flourishes best in those places where it has no control to fear, and where, moreover, the press of a certain tendency alone has the right to speak. In this way it simply has carte blanche to lie, and this encourages those elements that tend to deception. Therefore it is turned to account the more desperate the position of those in power, and the more they fear the truth. The truth in regard to information is in no way strengthened by the abolition of the freedom of the press. On the contrary, it is most adversely affected thereby. As to the truth of conceptions and ideas, we must say with Pilate: “What is truth?” There is no such thing as absolute truth. There is merely a process of knowledge, and this process is in every way impaired, and with it also men’s possibilities of acquiring knowledge, if one party uses its power to monopolise its own conceptions as the one blessed truth, and seeks to suppress every other opinion. It is not to be doubted that the idealists among the Bolsheviks have acted in perfect good faith, in believing that they were in complete possession of the truth, and that only sheer perverseness could make others think differently from them. But we must equally attribute good faith to the men of the Holy Inquisition of Spain. The rise in culture and education among the masses of the people certainly received and impetus under its regime.
There is certainly a difference between the Inquisitors and the leaders of the Soviet Republic. The former did not in any way desire the material and spiritual improvement of the masses on this earthly sphere. They wished merely to ensure their souls for the future life. The Soviet people believed they could, by means of the methods of the Inquisition, raise the masses of the people in every way. They do not at all see how very much they are degrading them. Besides, a high standard of popular education, a high “morale” among the masses is a pre-condition of Socialism, a morale which shows itself not merely in strong social instincts and feelings of solidarity, of sympathy and of self-sacrifice, but also in the extension of these feelings beyond the narrow circles of one’s comrades to the generality of mankind. We found such a morale strongly developed among the proletarians of the Paris Commune. It is utterly failing in the masses of the people who mostly constitute the Bolshevik proletariat.
But this “morale” must Be created at all costs, so says Trotsky. “This communist morale, my comrades, we are in duty bound to preach, to support, to develop and to establish. That is the finest and highest task of our party, in all departments of its activity.” (“Work, Discipline,” etc., page 21).
Yes, but does Trotsky really believe that you can create morale overnight? That can develop but slowly. On the other hand, the encouragement to production suffers no delay. If the morale of the communists has not formed itself before the beginning of socialisation, it will be too late to develop it after expropriation has taken place. And how is it to be developed? It shall be preached. As if ever in this world anything had come from moral sermons. Whenever Marxists base their hopes on moral sermons, they merely show into how deep a blind alley they have fallen. But indeed this new morale is not to be merely preached, but supported. But again, how?
“Morale” is the product of our lives and activities. From these it derives its nourishment and its form. The higher morale which the struggling proletariat develops depends on two factors. Being the poorest and weakest members of society, the proletariat can only assert itself by the most intimate co-operation. Sympathy and self-sacrifice of the individual are regarded in its ranks as the highest quality, in opposition to the capitalist class, in which the individual makes his wealth at the expense of the masses, without any consideration as to how he gains it. But even the strong feelings of solidarity can have a directly anti-social effect, if they are confined to a narrow circle, which seeks to gain its advantage at the cost of the rest of society, like the nobility, or the bureaucracy, or an officers’ corps. What, however, does raise the solidarity of the modern proletariat to the height of social morale is its extension to the whole of humanity. The extension of such solidarity springs from the consciousness that the proletariat cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of the human race. Long ago the youthful Engels hoped to derive from a knowledge of this fact the greatest aids to an improvement of the proletarian morale. He declares in his “Position of the Working Classes in England,” (2nd edition, page 299):—
“In proportion as the proletariat assimilates socialist and communist elements, the revolution abates in bloodshed and rage. In its very principles Communism stands over and above the division of the bourgeois and the proletariat. It recognises this division in its historical significance for the present day, but does not regard it as justified for the future. Communism wishes to remove this division. So long as this division is maintained, it recognises the bitterness of the proletarian against his oppressor as a necessary evil, as the most forceful lever to be employed in the labour agitation that is just taking place; but it seeks to rise above this bitterness, because it represents the cause of humanity, and not merely the cause of the working-class alone. Nevertheless, no communist ever wishes to wreak vengeance on the individual, nor does he really believe that the individual bourgeois can act differently in the existing circumstances than he actually does. The more, therefore, the English working man adopts Socialist ideas, the more will his present bitterness, which if it remains as it does can achieve nothing, become superfluous; and the more will all action against the bourgeois lose in brutality and cruelty. If it were in any way possible to make the whole proletariat communist before the struggle began, the struggle itself would proceed on most peaceful lines. But that is no longer possible. It is already too late. (Engels expected in 1845, the imminent outbreak of the Revolution which, however, came in 1848, but on the Continent and not in England, and the Revolution itself was not proletarian.—Editor.) I believe meanwhile that until the outbreak of the quite open and direct war of the poor against the rich, which has become inevitable in England, takes place, at least sufficient clearness over the social question will have spread among the proletariat; and that, with the help of coming events, the communist party will be in a position to overcome in time the brutal elements of the Revolution, and to yield to a Ninth Thermidor.”
(9th Thermidor was the day on which Robespierre was overthrown, and the Paris Regiment of Terror collapsed.) Such a similar collapse Engels wished to prevent; and for this purpose he urged that all the communists should set to work, by eliminating from the proletarian class-struggle its coarseness and brutality against the bourgeois, and by placing in the forefront the general interests of humanity. It is obvious that Engels understood communism in an utterly different sense from the Bolsheviks of the present day. What Engels wanted, those Russian Socialists who are in opposition to the Bolsheviks are now fighting for. Bolshevism triumphed over its social opponents, by making the ferocity and brutality of the coming labour agitation “the motive force of the Revolution.” This Bolshevism did, by degrading the social movement, by turning the cause of humanity into a mere cause of the working-men, and by announcing that to the wage earners alone belonged power (alongside of the poorest peasants in the country); further, by condemning all men to be deprived of their rights, if they did not blow the same trumpet as they did, and reducing them to the deepest misery; and further, by abolishing the different classes and virtually creating a new class of helots out of the existing bourgeois. Hence, by transforming what should have been the social struggle for liberty, and for the raising of the whole of humanity on a higher plane, into an outbreak of bitterness and revenge, which led to the worst abuses and tortures, Bolshevism has demoralised the proletariat, instead of raising it to a higher level of morale. It has further increased the demoralisation, by separating the “expropriating of the expropriators” from the intimate connection with the creation of a new social organisation, with which alone it can form a social element. This procedure soon extended in application from the means of production to the means of consumption. From this it was an easy step to brigandage, such as has been idealised in Steuka Razin.
“The masses had without any difficulty understood the negative programme of Bolshevism, which was that one need not fight. It did not recognise any more obligations. One had only to take, to seize, and to appropriate what one could get; or as Lenin so wonderfully puts it, one should steal what has been stolen.” (D. Gavronski, “The Balance of Eussian Bolihevism,” Berlin, 1919, page 39.)
It is in keeping with this conception that the robber captain has already received his memorial in the Soviet Eepublic. In this manner Bolshevism “supported” and preached the new communist morale, without which socialistic construction is impossible. It meant nothing other than the increasing demoralisation of further sections of the Eussian proletariat. This wag a feature over which the idealists among the Bolsheviks themselves were horrified; but they could only see the appearance without recognising its cause, for that would have meant upsetting their whole system of government. In desperation they looked round for a means that should give the communist morale to the masses. They could discover nothing, these Marxists, these bold revolutionaries and innovators, except the miserable expedient with which the old society endeavoured to absolve itself from the results of its own sins, namely, the tribunal, prison and execution, in other words, Terrorism. Lenin writes in his book (already several times quoted) on the “Immediate work of the Soviet Eepublic” (page 47):
“The tribunal is the instrument in education to discipline. There is not enough recognition of the very simple and obvious fact that, if all the misery that has befallen Eussia, hunger, and unemployment have made their appearance, this misfortune cannot be overcome by mere force and energy, but by a general all-embracing organisation and discipline; that’everyone, therefore, is responsible for misery, hunger, and unemployment who overrides the discipline determined by labour in any particular business concerned, or in any particular affair; and that it is one’s duty to find the culprits, bring them before the tribunal, and punish them mercilessly.”
Thus, with merciless punishment, the Eussian proletariat is to have pummelled into it the communist morale it lacks, in order to make it ripe for Socialism. But never was morale raised by merciless punishment. On the contrary, all that remained of it has always gone under. Merciless punishment was a necessary evil of the old order of things, when people did not know how to act differently, since the way towards a better morale and a better condition of life was barred to them. A Socialist regime, which could find no other way to awaken the proletariat to a higher morale than by means of merciless court proceedings proves its own state of bankruptcy.
The Dictatorship.
It seems as if Lenin himself does not expect any particular incentive to morale from his own tribunals; for immediately after his demand for such tribunals he makes another claim for “dictatorial and unlimited powers for the individual leaders of all concerns” (page 49). “Every great industry, which represents the origin and foundation of Socialism, demands the unconditional and the strictest unity of purpose. How can the strictest unity of will and purpose be assured? By the subordination of the will of thousands to the will of an individual. This subordination, which embodies an ideal understanding and sense of discipline on the part of those occupied in combined labour, bears some resemblance to the subtle direction of an orchestra conductor. It can claim dictatorial powers in their severest form, if no ideal sense of discipline and understanding exists” (page 51).
Hitherto we have always assumed that understanding and discipline on the part of the working-classes were to be the necessary conditions for the development and growth of the proletariat, without which real Socialism could not be possible. Lenin himself says at the beginning of this book from which we have just quoted:
“Such revolution can only be realised with success, if it has the co-operation of the majority of the population, especially of the majority of the working-classes.” After he has shown that Socialism cannot be the work of a minority, nor even of the majority of the population, but only “especially” and not exclusively of the working-classes; and after he has, by these admissions, justified democracy against his own will, he continues:—“Only when the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasantry have acquired for themselves sufficient self-consciousness, strength of ideas, self-sacrifice and determination, can the triumph of the Socialist Revolution be assured.” Nevertheless, its triumph is to be assured, it would seem, through the dictatorship of the tribunals and of the heads of factories.
“The Revolution has just destroyed the oldest, the strongest, and the heaviest chains, by which the masses were held in bondage under threat of the knout. Such was true of yesterday. To-day, however, this same revolution indeed in the interests of Socialism (page 52), demands the absolute subordination of the masses to the single will of the leaders of labour.”
The freedom which they gained yesterday for themselves is to-day to be taken from them, since the masses apparently have not acquired sufficient “self-consciousness, strength of ideas, self-sacrifice and determination.” But on page 7 the impracticability of Socialism as the result of the lack of these qualities has been shown, whereas on page 52, in the interests of Socialism, “the absolute subordination” of the immature masses to dictatorial leaders is demanded. By this means their position will sink below the level of that which they had on the old capitalist system. For in that system they were subordinated to capital, but, nevertheless, not absolutely subordinate. Lenin certainly comforts himself and the public by asserting that, in distinction from the old capitalist system of management, this dictatorship will become possible as the result of the co-operation of the masses of the workers, and of those who were formerly exploited; and, further, through the organisations, which will be so constructed that through them the masses will be roused, and will, by their active efforts, ultimately achieve something of historical importance. The Soviet organisations belong to this kind of organisation (page 51). In what way the exclusion and suppression of any kind of criticism is to help forward the awakening of the masses and their encouragement to creative activity has already been shown. The Soviet organisation alters nothing in this respect. How can this iron form of dictatorship of individuals, “with the absolute subordination of the masses,” be realised through the organisation of the masses into individual activity? Whoever is to be elected by the masses or deposed by them, or whoever is to be re-elected will always remain dependent on them, for he cannot carry anything through which does not meet with their approval. He can certainly attempt to break the obstinacy of individual members of the organisation which elects him, if they should be in opposition to the majority; but he would very soon be at the end of his tether if he should wish to impose on the majority, against their will, his own ideas and orders. For this reason a personal dictatorship and democracy are incompatible. Such is also true for the Soviet democracy. Lenin does indeed declare that these remarks are liable to criticism, but vehemence is substituted for strength in his arguments, for he can give no other answer than: —
“If we are not anarchists we accept the fact that the State as such is necessary, that is, we accept the need for compulsion in the period of transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (page 50).
With this we are in complete agreement. Even democracy itself does not exclude a certain kind of compulsion; but the only kind of compulsion it concedes is that of the majority over the minority. The compulsion necessary for the transition from Capitalism to Socialism is the compulsion of the majority of the workers over the minority of the capitalists; but this is not the case in the second stage of the Revolution, of which Lenin himself speaks, and in which the proletariat has already broken its chains. Here it is a question of the compulsion exercised by single individuals over the masses of the workers. That this form of compulsion is incompatible with democracy Lenin does not attempt to show. He seeks rather to make it compatible, by a sort of conjuror’s trick, by attempting to show that, since compulsion must be exercised by the great masses upon individual capitalists in order to bring about Socialism, and since such Socialism is perfectly well compatible with democracy, every form of compulsion which might be applied with a view to introducing Socialism is compatible with democracy, even if it should represent the absolute power of single individuals over the masses. He says:—
“Hence there is no fundamental opposition between the Soviet (i.e., Socialist) democracy and the delegation of the dictatorial powers to certain individuals.”
That may be; but it would only show that the Soviet democracy is a very peculiar structure, which one could employ to uphold any form of arbitary domination, provided one merely gave it the name of Socialism. If an absolute subordination of the workers in a business concern to their chief is to be brought about, he ought not to be elected by them, but should be put in command by some power superior to them. In such a case the business council in the concern should have nothing to say. Moreover, the Central Executive Committee, which appoints these dictators, would itself have acquired dictatorial power; and so the Soviets would be reduced to mere shadows, and the masses represented by them would lose all real power. A working-class which lacked “self-consciousness, strength of ideas, self-sacrifice and determination” is incapable itself of choosing its own dictator, through whom it is to be raised to a higher level, and to whom it must bend its will, if he should demand of them deeds which required “self-consciousness, strength of ideas, self-sacrifice and détermination.” It is as far from doing this as was Münehausen of extricating himself from the bog by means of his own hair. And where are these dictators with the necessary moral force, as well as the intellectual qualities and superiority, to be found? Every form of arbitrary rule carries with it the seed of corruption of the authority itself, be this a single individual or a small coterie. Only exceptional characters can remain exempt from pernicious consequences. Are we to assume that the Russian dictators are through and through all characters like this? Lenin promises that they are to be very carefully sifted.
“We wish to pursue our path by seeking, with all caution and patience, to examine the right organisations, and to take account of the men with clear intelligence and practical sense—men who combine enthusiasm for Socialism with the gift of being able, without undue bluster (and uninfluenced by the noise and bewilderment) to hold together a large number of men, and make them combine in determined, unified, and concerted labour within the framework of the Soviet organisations. Only such men, after the tenfold examination through which they go by passing from the most simple to the most difficult tasks, are to be placed in responsible positions as heads of administration. We have not yet learned to do this. We shall learn” (pages 41 and 42).
He does not say who is to be understood under this “we.” Obviously not the ignorant, undisciplined, bewildered masses; more likely the higher authority, the Central Executive Committee. But even this body has not yet learnt the art of selecting aright leaders of massed labour. It promises to learn this difficult art. No time limit is given. Only this is certain, that at the present moment the selection of these leaders is proceeding in a highly unsatisfactory manner. The necessary capacity of the men at the head is lacking, just as much as the necessary maturity of the masses.
After they have been expropriating and are now proceeding to organisation, they find that they have first to set about learning—even learning how to choose aright the higher administrators of State economy.
Corruption.
And what elements are insinuating themselves into the new regime! “No single profound and powerful mass movement has ever taken place in history without dubious means, without adventurers and swindlers who bleed inexperienced novices, without boasters and mob orators, without senseless vacillation and stupidity, without needless fuss, without attempts on the part of the individual leaders to attempt twenty different things without pursuing one to its end” (Lenin, “The immediate work, etc.,” page 40).
There is no doubt that every great mass movement has to suffer from such pernicious influences. We in Germany have also been made to feel this; but the Eussian Soviet regime has given proof besides of certain characteristics peculiar to it. In the first place, the novices were never so “inexperienced” as they are in Russia. That was inevitable. Under the absolutist regime all the elements who were striving upwards were denied all chance of insight, and still more all chance of participation in the administration of the State and of the community, as well as in all forms of higher organisation and administrative activity.
The interest of the revolutionaries, particularly of the most impatient and most violent elements among them, was concentrated on the struggle against the police and secret conspiracy. One has no right to reproach them for their inexperience, when they suddenly came to power. But this inexperience represents an important feature, which proves how unripe Russia was for Socialism at the time of the outbreak of the Revolution. Socialism can still less be carried out by ignorant and undisciplined masses, the more inexperienced the novices are who have to show the way. It is a further proof that the schooling and education of the masses, as well as of their leaders, in democracy is a necessary condition of Socialism. It is impossible in one bound to leap from Absolutism into a Socialist society. Again, the difference between the Soviet regime and the earlier great massed movements is shown in the fact that the Soviet has abolished the best means for exposing the adventurers, the swindlers, the boasters and the brawlers, namely, the freedom of the Press. These undesirable elements were thus exempt from all criticism by people who had expert knowledge. They had to do only with ignorant workmen and soldiers, as well as with inexperienced innovators, and they flourished exceedingly. Certainly the leaders of the Bolsheviks have undertaken to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to distinguish the true Socialists from the swindlers and the rogues. But long before this has been “Leant” production has failed, as the result of the backward state of the Eussian working-classes, and even threatens to come to a complete standstill. Their only hope of arresting this catastrophe lies in a dictatorship of the leaders, but they must give these leaders dictatorship, without being in the position to make adequate choice. Hence this kind of dictatorship, which from the outset is open to much criticism, can only work to disadvantage. Just as they first of all indulged in expropriation, and only then began to organise; so now they appoint dictators, and only afterwards attempt to learn the method of choosing them rightly. Such absurdities were inevitable as soon as they began to introduce Socialism arbitrarily, and without any relation to actual conditions. But the Soviet regime is not only endangered through the incursion of “adventurers and swindlers,” whom it cannot judge and examine accurately. It suffers from a danger, which is no less serious, from the fact that it alienates those members who have the highest character and who, intellectually, are among the most prominent. Without the collaboration of the educated and intellectual elements, Socialism at the present stage of production is impossible. So long as Socialism was in the stage of propaganda, so long as it was merely a question of bringing the proletariat to a consciousness of its place in society and of its tasks and obligations for the future arising therefrom, Socialism had need of the educated elements—whether these were men of universal education, drawn from among the middle classes, or self-educated men, who had sprung from the proletariat. But it needed them only for the carrying out and popularising of its theories. Here it was not a question of quantity, but solely of quality.
But it is quite different at the present time, when we are in the period in which Socialism in a practical form is to be introduced. Just as a capitalist system of production and the capitalist state could not exist without the help of numerous reliable and scientific men, social production and the State system, which is dominated by the working classes, requires such help equally urgently. Without such assistance, or in opposition to it, no Socialism is possible. For practical participation in the establishment of Socialism, as well as in the development and propagation of Socialist theories, a passionate devotion to the great cause of the emancipation of the human race is not essential. What is most necessary is, that a large section of them at least should be convinced of the possibility and advantage of Socialist production, so that no sacrifice of intelligence is necessary if one wishes to co-operate. If in the matter of manual labour an improved production is impossible with any kind of compulsory labour, this is all the more the case in the sphere of intellectual work.
The removal of doubt on the part of the educated as to the practical introduction of Socialism, and the willingness of such elements to co-operate in its construction and development, as soon as the necessary power arises, belong to the necessary conditions of Socialist production, to the conditions to which society will have progressed, if it is to be ripe for Socialism. The importance of these conditions will be all the more obvious the more other necessary conditions of Socialism are to hand; so that a recognition of the practicability of Socialism will lead the unbiassed educated classes to a conviction of its sound reasonableness.
This importance of the educated classes the Bolsheviks did not recognise at first. For since at the beginning they merely served to increase the blind passion of the soldiers, the peasants and the town labourers, the masses of the educated were from the very beginning hostile to the Bolsheviks, and even the Socialists among them; because they recognised that Russia was not yet ripe for the kind of immediate socialisation which the Bolsheviks had undertaken. They did not trouble to think about the treatment which was meted out to the “intelligentsia.” A man of this class, for instance, would be expelled from the factory which the workers alone wished to manage. He was deprived of all political rights, since the authority of the Workmen’s Council granted to manual labourers alone the right to vote. He was expropriated, so far as he had any possessions, and was deprived of every means of living his refined form of life. He was even condemned later on to compulsory labour and to death by starvation.
The Bolsheviks thought at first to get along without the “intelligentsia,” without the experts. Tsarism was of the opinion that a general was capable of filling any and every position in the State without any special qualification or education. The Soviet Eepublic took over from Tsarism, along with many other ideas, this one also; only in the place of the general they put the proletariat. The theoreticians among the Bolsheviks called this procedure “the development of Socialism from science to action.” One could better describe it as “the development of Socialism from science to dilettantism.”
As is generally the case wdth the Soviet Eepublic, it allows itself to be guided by mere instinct, and not by real insight into the actual circumstances. Thus it happened that they discovered, after the child had fallen into the well, what was necessary, and so they tried to cover up the well. They sought to attract the educated to work apart from any compulsory labour, as had been the case some time before, and, indeed, to do work for which they were suited, and which they understood. Whereupon the educated classes who entered the service of the Government ceased to count as bourgeois, to be treated and ill-treated as such. They rose in the circle of the “active and working” population by performing “productive” and “useful” labour. They were protected from expropriation and received adequate salary. Since it was not conviction, but only fear of ill-treatment that drove most of these educated into the service of the Government, naturally enough their work was in reality neither very productive nor very useful. Trotsky complains about this, for instance, in his essay on “Work, Discipline, etc.,” quoted above; he says: — “The first epoch of the fight against the sabotage (of the intellectuals) consisted in mercilessly destroying the organisations of the saboteurs. That was necessary, and therefore right. Now in the period where the power of the Soviets has become assured, this struggle against the saboteurs must take the form of transforming the saboteurs of yesterday into servants, into administrators, and technical managers, wherever the new regime demands it.”
Trotsky, therefore, implies that the “necessary and therefore right” way to make these intellectuals servants and leaders of socialisation is, first of all, mercilessly to trample them under foot. The result of this he himself gives us:—
“We have destroyed the old forms of sabotage, and swept away the old officials with an iron broom. The substitutes for these old officials proved themselves to be by no means first-class material in any branch whatsoever of administration. On the one hand, the posts that have become vacant were filled by comrades of each party, who had done all the “spade work,” and who had been schooled in the revolution. They formed the best elements, the fighters, the honourable men, the men who were not self-seekers. On the other hand, there appeared on the scene fortune-seekers, social failures who under the old regime had been, so to speak, without occupation. When, therefore, it was necessary to get tens of thousands of new qualified labour at one stroke, it is not to be wondered at if many intruders succeeded in penetrating into the new regime. We must also admit that many of the Socialist comrades, who are now at work in different offices and institutions, have by no means shown themselves to be always capable of organising creative and energetic labour. We can follow the movements of such comrades in the minister ial offices, especially of those in the ranks of the October Bolsheviks, who work four or five hours a day, and not very intensively at that; whereas our whole position now demands the most strenuous labour, not out of fear, but from a sense of duty.”
That was the necessary, though by no means the right consequence of a policy which sought to win the educated classes, not through conviction, but merely through kicks from behind as well as from the front.
Another means was devised to increase the supply of active labour. The Paris Commune of 1871 reduced the pay of State officials, and decided on the sum of 6,000 francs as a maximum salary. The Soviet Republic endeavoured to do likewise; but this would not work, so they had to revert to the old system. Lenin remarks in this connection: —
“We must needs return to the old bourgeois methods, and establish very high payment for all service rendered’ by the best of the bourgeois experts. It is clear that such a measure is a compromise, and somewhat of a departure from the principles of the Paris Commune and of every proletarian power.… It is clear that such a measure means not only the standstill—in certain departments and to a certain degree—of the offensive against capital, but also a retrograde step in our socialising power as a Soviet” (“The Immediate Work of the Soviet Power,” page 19.)
But Lenin implies that it cannot be otherwise, and he is perfectly right. The necessity for high salaries can arise from two causes. The bigger the concern, the greater the number of its workers. So much more important under equal circumstances, therefore, is the mass of the gross value which it delivers. If the workman produces value equivalent to five shillings a day, the concern with a hundred workmen will produce to the value of 500 shillings a day, and one with a thousand workmen will produce 5,000 shillings a day. The bigger the concern, the more difficult it is to organise and guide it, and all the rarer is the necessary efficiency for its organisation. But all the greater will be the means which the owner or owners of the concern will have at their disposal, in order to engage the services of such select equipment. In proportion, therefore, as these large industries increase, the salaries of their heads increase also, and finally reach vast dimensions. With this circumstance the State administration has to reckon. If it does not raise proportionately the salaries of its higher officials, it must be prepared to find that private industry will attract them away—so far as they are at all capable, and not mere holders of sinecures. In this way the State administration becomes impoverished, and that is one of the reasons why State economy is unable to cope with competition of private enterprise.
It is questionable whether the Commune, once it had become established, and whether industry on a large scale, once it had been developed on capitalistic lines under the Commune, instead of becoming socialised, which was possible, could have maintained this system of fixed salaries at 6,000 frs. The decree issued on April 2nd shows the small bourgeois character of the Paris industry at that time. Moreover it proves the disinterestedness of the members of the Commune. We have already referred to the well-known example of the Financial Minister, Jourde. Competition, however, arising from a flourishing and powerful private industry in Soviet Russia makes it impossible to force up the wages of the most skilled “specialists”;for either such an industry is expropriated and ruined, or it soon deprives the private owner of all value. High wages can have only one object. They are calculated to overcome the objection to serve the Soviet Republic, which objection the most capable among the educated secretly cherish in their hearts, and also to awaken their interest for the new regime.
Since the way of conviction does not work, and since the lash of hunger does not obtain any startling results, there remains but one way open to buy the people, and that is, to provide for them at least such conditions as they had under the capitalist system. We now see what are the elements which are to become leaders of Socialist production in the Soviet Republic. On the one side a few old conspirators, honourable fighters of blameless intentions, yet in matters of business merely inexperienced novices; and on the other side, numerous educated men who, against their own convictions, either as mere seekers try to adapt themselves to the new power, as they would adapt themselves to any other power, if occasion arose; or who are driven through fear and hunger and punishment; or, finally, such men as allowed themselves to be bought by high wages. They are, as Trotsky admits, by no means first-class elements. Moreover, in so far as they know anything at all, they do not belong to the best, the worthiest of their kind. People among them, who at the same time possessed strong character as well as business knowledge, were as rare as white crows. In the hands of such elements dictatorial power has now been placed in order to save Socialism; a power which the workers have to accept without opposition. Such power tends to corrupt even the best. In this respect it is often entrusted to people who are corrupt from the very start.
In the midst of the general misery and the general expropriation they gather together in their hands the beginnings of a new capitalism. Of course the production of commodities proceeds, and must proceed; since agricultural activity, regarded as private enterprise, as a matter of fact represents the production of commodities, and influences life as a whole. For this reason the peasant community has less and less of surplus stocks to sell. The Soviet Eepublic grants full power in a village to the poor peasants, who possess so little land that they can produce no surplus in foodstuffs. From the well-to-do peasants all surplus commodities are to be taken without any compensation, and placed at the service of the State granaries. This practice, in so far as it is ever carried out, can take place only once, for, in the following year, the well-to-do peasant will take very good care that he does not produce more than he himself needs. In this way the returns of agirculture will be limited. Whatever of surplus stock the peasant produces, in spite of this, he conceals, and merely sells it secretly to the profiteers.
At the same time industry comes to a standstill. As a consequence, the State expenditure can only be covered by a new paper money. Hence, as at the time of the French Revolution, and as again at the present day, although in a less degree in Germany, there flourish speculators, profiteers, and smugglers. Formerly they were guillotined. Nowadays it is the fashion to shoot them. But the failure is the same. The only result is that, at the present day, just as much as in 1793, the uncertain nature of the capital thus acquired by swindlers increases, as well as the amount of the bribes that the new dictators demand, and which they get if, by chance, an incautious person should fall into their net. Even that in its turn becomes a fresh basis for the collecting together of new property.
Whoever is anxious for further information over this bribery system of the new Eussian bureaucracy should turn to Gavronsky’s “Balance of the Eussian Bevolution,” which, from page 58 and several pages onwards, is full of accounts of bribery and corruption.
How shall one get the better of these new “dictat ors,” before whom the working masses are to bow without opposition? As in its attempts to “moralise” the masses, the Soviet Government knows no better means of “moralising’ its leaders than by the threat of tribunals. If the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be over-ridden by the dictatorship of its organisers, these in their turn will be over-ruled by the dictatorship of the tribunals.
A network of revolutionary tribunals and extraordinary commissions has been formed “to oppose the counter-revolution, speculation, and abuse.” They have the arbitrary power to condemn anyone who shall be denounced to them, and at their discrimination to shoot those of whom they do not approve; that is to say, all those speculators and profiteers whom they catch, as well as their accomplices among the Soviet officials. They do not stop merely at that, but involve every honourable man who dares to criticise their fearful misrule. Under the collective name of “counter-revolution” every form of opposition is included, in whatever circles it arises and from whatever motives it springs, whatever the means employed and whatever the ends aimed for. But unfortunately this, summary procedure has no result.
As often as not the sincere fighters among the Bolsheviks become indignant, when they realise that these extraordinary commissions, which are the last hope for the cleansing of the Revolution, are themselves likewise corrupt. Gawronsky quotes (page 61) the following heart-cry of the weekly journal of the special commission: —
“From all sides there reach us news that not only worthless elements, but direct criminals, are endeavouring to slip into the commissions, and especially into commissions in the various local districts.” Gawronsky also mentions people (page 62) who have shown that this attempt at intrusion is not only made, but very often made with success. So runs an article out of “The Will to Labour,” the central organ of Revolutionary Communism, October 10th, 1918.
“Fresh in our memory there are still cases in which the local Soviets have been literally terrorised by the special and extraordinary Soviets. Naturally a local selection was made. In the Soviets the better elements remained, whereas in the extraordinary commissions were to be found bands of men who were ready for any kind of brigandage. Hence there is nothing left of the programme for the renovation of humanity by means of Socialism on Bolshevik methods, except two or three sincere strugglers in the midst of an ever growing morass of ignorance, corruption, and desperation, which extends further and further, and finally threatens to engulf and drown them.”
The Change in Bolshevism.
Many revolutionaries of the West point triumphantly to the fact that Bolshevism is still in power, and apparently, even at the time when these lines are being written (May, 1919), is still outwardly intact; yet the critics of Bolshevism at the very beginning of its rule prophesied a speedy collapse. This collapse would have actually taken place long ago, if the Bolsheviks had been true to their programme. They have merely kept themselves going by discarding one after another some part of their programme, so that finally they have achieved the very contrary to that which they set out to obtain. For instance, in order to come into power they threw overboard all their democratic principles. In order to keep themselves in power they have had to let their Socialist principles go the way of the democratic. They have maintained themselves as individuals; but they have sacrificed their principles, and have proved themselves to be thoroughgoing opportunists.
Bolshevism has, up to the present, triumphed in Eussia, but Socialism has already suffered a defeat. We have only to look at the form of society which has developed under the Bolshevik regime, and which was bound so to develop, as soon as the Bolshevik method was applied.
Let us now briefly recapitulate what has been the development. We find in present-day Bolshevik Eussia a peasantry established on the basis of unlimited private property and of fullest possibility for production. These peasants live their own lives, without any organic association with town industries. Since these industries cannot produce any surplus goods for the uncultivated land, the voluntary and perfectly legal transport of agricultural products into the towns becomes more and more handicapped. In compensation for this, recourse has been made to requisition, to plundering without payment, on the one hand; and on the other, to illegal smuggling, which succeeds in depleting the towns of the last remnants of industrial products, which have been accumulating for some time past.
After the destruction of the large estates Bolshevism had nothing more to offer the peasants. Indeed, the peasants’ love for the Bolshevik was soon changed to hatred for the town workers, who did not work and who could not deliver goods for agricultural purposes; to hatred also against the ruling powers, who sent soldiers into the villages in order to commandeer the commodities; to contempt, moreover, for the town profiteers and smugglers, who seek to foist on the peasants, by all sorts of deceptive means of exchange, their surplus stocks of every kind.
Besides this purely bourgeois state of affaira in the country, there has arisen in the towns a form of society which insists on being socialistic; only it endeavoured to abolish class differences. It began by humiliating and destroying the upper classes, and hence it really threatens to end in a new kind of class-society. It comprises in fact three classes. The lowest consists of the former bourgeois, capitalists, the small middle class, and the so-called intellectuals, in so far as they show any opposition. Deprived of all political rights, and robbed of all means of subsistence, they are from time to time forced to do compulsory labour of the most objectionable kind, for which in return they receive rations in food, which barely represent the most wretched form of hunger rations, or, more truly said, starvation rations. The infernal state of such slavery can only be compared with the most horrible excesses that capitalism has ever shown. The creation of this state of affairs is the original and most characteristic act of the Bolsheviks. It represents their first step towards the emancipation of the human race.
Above this lowest class there stands the middle class, representing the paid workers. This class has political privileges. It alone, according to the actual words of the constitution, has a right to vote in the town; it has, moreover, complete freedom in regard to the Press, and the right of forming its members into associated bodies. The members of this class are allowed to choose their own occupations, and are sufficiently well paid for the work which they themselves choose. Or rather such was the case; for it soon became more and more obvious that, as a result of the low level of the great mass of the workers in Eussia, industry threatened more and more, in consequence of these arrangements, to cease functioning altogether. In order to save industry, therefore, a new class of officials had to be formed and put in authority over the workers. This new class gradually appropriated to itself all actual and virtual control, and transformed the freedom of the workers into a mere illusory freedom. Naturally all this did not happen without opposition on the part of the workers themselves; and this opposition became atf the stronger, since, in consequence of the general decay, both in industry as well as in the means of transport and on account of the increasing isolation of the open land from the towns, the food problem became more and more hopeless, even for the workmen, in spite of their increased wages. So enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks disappeared from one set of workers after the other. But the opposition that these latter could offer remained unorganised, dissipated, and could form no compact phalanx in opposition to the more highly organised bureaucracy. They could not compete with them.
Out of the absolute authority of the Workmen’s Council there developed the absolute authority of a new class of governors, which was formed, in part, of representatives who were formerly in the Workmen’s Council; in part of men who were appointed by them; and also in part of members of a new form of bureaucracy, which was thrust upon them. This new class of governors was formed under the leadership of the old Communist idealists and fighters.
The absolutism of the old bureaucracy has come again to life in a new but, as we have seen, by no means improved form; and also alongside of this absolutism are being formed the seeds of a new capitalism, which is responsible for direct criminal practices, and which in reality stands on a much lower level than the industrial capitalism of former days. It is only the ancient feudal land estate which exists no more. For its abolition conditions in Russia were ripe. But they were not ripe for the abolition of capitalism. This latter system is now undergoing resuscitation, nevertheless in forms which, for the proletariat, are more oppressing and more harmful than those of yore. Private capitalism has now taken on, in place of the higher industrial forms, the most wretched and corrupt form of smuggling, of profiteering, and of money speculation. Industrial capitalism, from being a private system, has now become a State capitalism. Formerly the bureaucrats of the State and those of private capital were often very critical, if not directly hostile, towards one another. In consequence the working-man found advantage sometimes with the one, and sometimes with the other. To-day, however, both State and capitalist bureaucracy have merged into one system. That is the final result of the great Socialist upheaval, which the Bolsheviks have introduced. It represents the most oppressive of all forms of despotism that Russia has ever had. The substitution of democracy bý the arbitrary rule of the Workmen’s Council, which was to serve for the “expropriation of the expropriators,” has now given place to the arbitrary rule of a new form of bureaucracy. Thus it has been made possible for this latter to render democracy for the workmen a complete dead letter; since the working-class community has, at the same time, been driven into greater economic dependence than it ever had to endure before.
Moreover, this loss of liberty is not compensated for by increase of prosperity. Certainly the new economic dictatorship functions in a better way than the economic anarchy, which preceded this dictatorship, and which would have led to a sudden end. This end has been merely delayed by the dictatorship; for, economically considered, this new bureaucracy is incapable of functioning.
How very unsatisfactory the functioning of the new organisation has been is proved, among other things, by the following outcry of the Commissioner for Transport, M. Krassin, which he published recently in the “Pravda” (Truth). His manifesto ran as follows:
1. The existing system of railway administration in combination with the other objective difficulties created by the Five Years’ War, has brought the transport service to complete ruin, which threatens to bring about an absolute cessation of all transport whatsoever.
2. Its collapse is not attributable merely to faulty methods of administration and forms of organisation, and not merely to the diminished capacity of the personnel, but rather to frequent changes in forms of administration and organisation.
3. The task which lies before us consists in restoring the transport system to such an extent that at least the needs and requirements of the hunger-rations and of industry may be satisfied. This task can be faced only by the most heroic combination and application of all the strength the railway system can muster.
4. This work must be undertaken immediately and not a single hour must be delayed; otherwise we are threatened with the destruction of all that has been achieved by the Revolution.
5. In place of collective administration, which in reality has been wholly irresponsible, the principles of personal administration and of an increased sense ol responsibility must be established. Everybody from the office boy to the member of the Governing Board must carry out, exactly and without any deviation, all his full orders. All reforms must be stopped, and, wherever it is possible, the old appointments should be maintained; and the old technical apparatus, both at the centre and in all its ramifications, must be restored and upheld.
6. The introduction of piece-work is essential.
Of all the Soviet Government officials, Krassin has shown most talent for organisation in a scientific and educated manner, born of experience. The railway workers form, as it were, the élite of the Russian working-class. Already under Tsarist regime it had developed into a good organisation, which always showed great intelligence. Yet in spite of all this, such are the conditions at the present day!
This manifesto shows clearly enough that the consequences of the war are not alone responsible for this necessitous condition, as has often been maintained. These consequences of the war have merely aggravated the stress. It is the immaturity of the existing relations which threatens to destroy all that lias been achieved by the Revolution. In order to save the Revolution it seems to be absolutely imperative to discard the reforms, to restore the old positions, and to replace the old apparatus—in other words, to nullify the Revolution of the system, in order to save the men of the Revolution. Naturally enough this decree will succeed in changing the men who are to carry it out as little as any other decrees have succeeded in the past.
Like the old capitalism, this new “communism” has itself produced its own “gravediggers.” But the old capitalism did not merely produce these gravediggers; it provided these latter with strength and productive energy to infuse fresh life into what was already moribund.
Communism, under present conditions in Eussia, can only do harm to the productive forces that it finds in existence. Its “gravediggers’ will not be able to develop some higher form of life, but they will be forced to begin all over again with barbarian forms of life which are coming into existence. Even provisionally such a kind of regime could only continue by having some powerful means of violence to support it, such as a blindly obedient and disciplined army. Such the Bolsheviks have created, and even in this determination their principles had to suffer defeat, in order that they themselves might be saved. They started off with the intention of destroying ready-made State machinery, with all its military and bureaucratic apparatus. After they have settled this, however, they find themselves compelled, in the interests of self-preservation, to erect anew the self-same apparatus. They came into power as pioneers of the dissolution of the army by means of Soldiers’ Councils, which were to appoint their own officers at will, and which should obey those whom it pleased them to obey. The Soldiers’ Councils, alongside of the Workmen’s Councils, formed the Alpha and Omega of Bolshevik policy. By this method they were to become possessed of all power. But after this was done things turned out very differently. As soon as the Bolsheviks met with open opposition they needed an army to fight— one which would be obedient to every command; not an army which was dissolving, or in which the battalions decided on operations according to their own liking. At the beginning, enthusiasm seemed successfully to compensate for sheer blind obedience; but what was to be done when the enthusiasm of the workers began to dwindle, when volunteers became rarer and rarer, and when single divisions of troops began to get out of hand? In industry a democratic system of management and control requires a certain mature development of material, as well as spiritual, conditions. Democracy by its very essence must be excluded from an army that is to be developed up to perfect fighting strength. The war was always the grave of democracy; even civil war, if it went on for any length of time. The Bolsheviks of necessity were responsible for civil war and, as a result also of necessity, for the abolition of the Soldiers’ Councils. The Bolshevik dictatorship has reduced these Workmen’s Councils to mere shadows, by opposing all sorts of difficulties to the new elections, and by excluding every possible form of opposition. But it has taken from these Soldiers’ Councils all their most important functions, and even their right of election of their own officers. As in former days these latter are new appointed by the Government; and since the volunteers are not sufficient, they have had recourse to compulsory recruiting, as in the times before Bolshevism existed. This forms another object of conflict between the population and the Government. Numerous peasant revolts have their origin in this, and it also makes imperative an increase in the army. Desertions in whole numbers belong to the order of the day, and they are punished by mass executions.
The Humanité of May 29th, 1919, published a very friendly account of Bolshevism, based on the observations of an eye-witness who had been in Russia. The article under the title of “Les Principes Communistes et leur Application” closed with the following words: “The Red Army is the work of the Entente. The Bolshevik regime has repeatedly proclaimed its antimilitarism. The peace-loving people has as much horror of war to-day as it had yesterday, and at all times in the past. It is making very strong opposition to recruiting—in the Red Army there are as many cases of desertion as there were formerly in the Tsarist Army. It often happens that a regiment does not accomplish what has been prescribed for it, because all the men concerned have fled.”
This behaviour on the part of the Red Army is a curious and unusual means of showing its enthusiasm for Bolshevik principles. Even if we merely confined ourselves to facts, without giving them an apologetic foundation, it would seem that in military matters the old Tsarist conditions have returned, only in some worse form; for the new form of militarism without doubt is developing far greater energy than the old, in spite of its proclamation of anti-military discipline.
Thus the conditions are repeating themselves which prepared the way, at the time of the great French Revolution, for the transformation of the Republic into a Napoleonic Empire. But it is certain that Lenin is not destined to end as a Russian Napoleon. The Corsican Bonaparte won his way to the hearts of the French people, because he led the banners of France triumphant throughout the whole of Europe. This satisfied some people that it was the principles of the Revolution which were conquering Europe. Others, perhaps, were still more satisfied, because the armies of France were plundering the whole of Europe, and their booty was enriching France. But Eussia is at present on the defensive. The same difficulties of transport, which would check an army of invasion, prevent Eussia from allowing its own army to press triumphantly beyond its own borders. Lenin also would very much like to carry the banners of his Revolution triumphantly throughout Europe, but there is no prospect of that. The revolutionary militarism of the Bolsheviks will not enrich Eussia. It can only become a new source of impoverishment. At the present moment Eussian industry, in so far as it have been set going again, is working for the army, and not for any productive ends. Eussian Communism has, in very fact, become in this respect a sort of “barrack Socialism”
The economic, and with it also the moral failure of Bolshevik methods is inevitable. It can only be veiled over if it should end in a military collapse. No world revolution, no help from without could hinder the economic failure of Bolshevik methods. The task of European Socialism, as against Communism, is quite different, namely, to take care that the moral catastrophe resulting from a particular method of Socialism shall not lead to the catastrophe of Socialism in general; and, further, to endeavour to make a sharp distinction between these methods and the Marxist method, and bring this distinction to the knowledge of the masses. Any Eadical-Socialist Press must ill understand the interests of social revolution, if it really imagines it serves those interests by proclaiming to the masses the identity of Bolshevism and Socialism, making them believe that the present form of the Soviet Eepublic, just because it is sailing under the flag of the omnipotence of the working-classes and of Socialism, is in truth the realisation of Socialism itself.
The Terror.
The development we have just sketched did not, of course, arise in accordance with the intentions of the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, it was really something quite different from what they wanted, and they sought by all means in their power to arrest its development. But in the end they had to resort to the same recipe from which the Bolshevik regime from the very beginning had worked, i.e., to the arbitrary force of a few dictators, whom it was impossible to affect by the slightest criticism. The Begiment of Terror thus became the inevitable result of Communist methods. It is the desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of its own methods.
Among the phenomena for which Bolshevism has been responsible, Terrorism, which begins with the abolition of every form of freedom of the Press, and ends in a system of wholesale execution, is certainly the most striking and the most repellant of all. It is that which gave rise to the greatest hatred against the Bolsheviks. Yet this is really no more than their tragic fate, not their fault—in so far as it is permissible to speak of fault or blame in so enormous an historical upheaval as we are now experiencing. In any case, at bottom any fault or blame can only be a personal one. Whoever sets about to discuss a question of culpability must set about to examine the defiance of certain moral laws on the part of individual persons; since the “will” taken in its strictest sense can cnly be the will of individual persons. A mass, a class, a nation cannot in reality will. It lacks the necessary faculties for such. Therefore it cannot sin. A mass of people or an organisation can act universally. Never theless, the motives of each person actively concerned may be very different. But it is the motives which form the determining factor in the question of apportioning culpability.
The motives of the Bolsheviks were certainly of the best. Right from the beginning of their supremacy they showed themselves to be filled with human ideals, which had their origin in the conditions of the proletariat as a class. Their first decree was concerned with the abolition of the death penalty; and yet if we would consider the question of their culpability, we should find that this came to light at the very time when this decree was promulgated, namely, when they decided, in order to gain power, to sacrifice the principles of democracy and of historical materialism, for which they during many long years had fought with unswerving determination. Their culpability comes to light at the time when they, like the Bakunists of Spain in the year 1873, proclaimed the “immediate and complete emancipation of the working-classes” in spite of the backward state of Russia; and with this end in view, since the democracy had not fulfilled their expectations, established their own dictatorship in the name of “The dictatorship of the proletariat.” It is here where the culpability can be looked for. Erom the moment they started on this path they could not avoid terrorism. The idea of a peaceful and yet real dictatorship without violence is an illusion.
The instruments of terrorism were the revolutionary tribunals and the extraordinary commissions, about which we have already spoken. Both have carried on fearful work, quite apart from the so-called military punitive expeditions, the victims of which are incalculable. The number of victims of the extraordinary commissions will never be easy to ascertain. In any case they number their thousands. The lowest estimate puts the number at 6,000; others give the total as double that number, others treble; and ever and above these are numberless cases of people who have been immured alive or ill-treated and tortured to death.
Those who defend Bolshevism do so by pointing out that their opponents, the White Guards of the Finns, the Baltic barons, the counter-revolutionary Tsarist generals and admirals have not done any better. But ist it a justification of theft to show that others steal? In any case, these others do not go against their own principles, if they deliberately sacrifice human life in order to maintain their power; whereas the Bolsheviks most certainly do. For they thus become unfaithful to the principles of the sanctity of human life, which they themselves openly proclaimed, and by means of which they have themselves become raised to power and justified in their actions. Do we not indeed all equally oppose these barons and generals just because they held human life so cheap and regarded it as a mere means for their own ends? It will be urged, perhaps, that it is the object in view that makes the difference; that the higher object in view should sanctify means, which, in the case of mere seekers after power, become infamous and wicked because of their evil ends. But the end does not justify every means, but only such as are in agreement with that means. A means which is in opposition to the end cannot be sanctified by that end. One should just as little strive to defend one’s principles by surrendering them, as to defend one’s life by sacrificing what gives to that life content and purpose. Good intentions may excuse those who have recourse to wrong means; but these means nevertheless remain reprehensible, the more so the greater the damage that may be caused by them.
But not even the aim of the Bolsheviks is free from objection. Its immediate endeavour is to preserve the militarist bureaucratic apparatus of power, which it has created; but most certainly this should be done by opposition to the corruption that has made itself manifest within that apparatus.
In the Pravda of April 1st, 1919, Prof. Dukelski insisted that Bolshevism and the government institutions should be cleansed of all the rogues and adventurers who had thrown in their lot with Communism, and who were simply exploiting it for their own criminal ends. Whereupon Lenin replied:
“The writer of this letter demands that we should cleanse our Party of the adventurers and rogues—a perfectly justifiable demand which we ourselves have for some time past been making and have carried out. The rogues and adventurers we shoot down, and we shall continue to shoot them down. Yet, in order to carry out more expeditiously and more thoroughly this cleansing process, we need the help of sincere and unbiassed intelligence.”
Shooting—that is the Alpha and Omega of Communist government wisdom. Yet does not Lenin himself call upon the “intelligentsia” to help him in the struggle against the rogues and the adventurers? Certainly he does; only he withholds from them the one and only means that can help, namely, the freedom of the Press. The control exercised by the Press, in every respect free and unimpeded, alone can keep in check those rogues and adventurers who inevitably fasten on to any Government which is unlimited in its powers and uncontrolled. Indeed, often through the very lack of the freedom of the Press these parasites thrive the more.
Yet the Russian Press is at the present day entirely in the hands of those government institutions in which the rogues and adventurers have found their place. And what guarantee has Lenin, under the present circumstances, that these very rogues and adventurers shall not somehow work their way into the revolutionary tribunals and the extraordinary commissions, and will not cause the sincere and unbiassed “intelligentsia” to be shot down with their aid? It is just the extraordinary commissions instituted to fight corruption which have the most absolute and supreme power. They are entirely free from every form of control, i.e., they work for the most part under conditions that are actually favourable to corruption.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of 1793, even at that time, possessed an unheard-of degree of arbitrary power. The guarantees in favour of the rights of those who were indicted were at a minimum. Nevertheless, the Tribunal at that time did at least function in public, so that a certain control of its activity was possible. But the Extraordinary Commissions of the Soviet Eepublic deliberate in secret, without any sort of guarantee that the accused shall have their due rights. For it is not absolutely imperative that the accused himself should be heard, let alone his witnesses. A mere denunciation, a mere suspicion suffices to remove him.
This evil took on such enormous dimensions that it had to be abolished. It was therefore determined that these Commissions should no longer proceed to execution without examination and judgment. But despotism is so much of the very essence of dictatorship that it cannot be abolished without abolishing dictatorship as well. Hence this particular decree becomes itself annulled, by reason of an exception which admits summary execution in the case of “obviously counter-revolutionary conspiracy.” Thus naturally the door is wide open for every kind of arbitrary execution! If, however, this decision is observed within the proper bounds, it merely succeeds in protecting the robbers and the rogues; but not the sincere and unbiassed “intelligentsia,” through whose appearance the Government institutions are to be cleansed. For what is such a cleansing process if it is not a counter-revolution? The slightest expression of discontent is threatened with the same severity as is any form of roguery. And the threat is not rendered abortive by any counter-measure, since it relates to matters in which the sincere communist as well as the rogues iiave equal interest. For in their criticism of the Soviet regime they both work hand in hand. Hence any modification is out of the question. Thus, quite recently, the “All Eussian Extraordinary Commission for Opposing the Counter-Revolution” made the following proclamation: —
“A series of revolts, which have broken out recently, proves that the laurels acquired by Krassnoff, as well as the Socialist revolutionaries of the Left Wing and the Mensheviks of the Left Wing, have not caused them to cease their activity. It is their exclusive aim to undermine our army (Briansk, Samara, and Smolensk), to destroy our industry (Petrograd and Tula), as well as our means of transport and food supply through railway strikes. The ‘All Eussian Extraordinary Commission’ declares herewith that it will make no difference whatever between the White Guards among Krassnoff’s troops and the White Guards belonging to the party of the Mensheviks and of the social revolutionaries of the Left Wing. The chastising hand of the Extraordinary Commission will work with equal severity in the one case as well as in the other. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks who have been arrested by us will be held as hostages, and their fate will depend entirely upon the attitude of both parties”—President of the All-Eussian Extraordinary Commission, F. Jershinski (taken from the Isvestia of the All-Bussian Central Executive Committee, Number 59, March 1st, 1919).
Hence, because in the army there are signs of dissolution visible, and because discontent is growing among the industrial workers and the railway employees, the leading elements of the non-Bolshevik Socialists are to be arrested, so that they may be summarily shot at the slightest sign of any further proletarian opposition. The quelling of a discontented proletariat— that is the sublime object with which it is attempted to sanctify the fatuous means of wholesale executions in Eussia. It cannot possibly turn economic failure into a success. It can only lead to the possibility that the fall of Bolshevism will not be accepted by the masses of Eussia in the same way as the fall of the Second Paris Commune was received by the whole of the Socialist proletariat at that time; but rather as the fall of Bobespierre of the 9th Thermidor, 1794, was received by the whole of France, namely, as salvation from some heavy load, and by no means as a defeat felt with intense pain and sorrow.
The Outlook for the Soviet Eepublic.
Lenin’s government is threatened by another 9th “Thermidor, but it may come about in some other way. History does not repeat itself. A government that sets an object in view, which under the circumstances is unattainable, may go to pieces in two different ways. It will in the end be overthrown if it stands by its programme and falls with it. But it can only maintain itself if it makes some corresponding change in its programme, and finally abandons it altogether. Whatever happens, one way just as much as the other, will lead to failure, so far as the thing itself is concerned. For those persons implicated, however, it makes an enormous difference whether they retain the State power in their own hands, or whether they are to be delivered up as fallen idols to the rage and fury of their enemy.
Robespierre fell on the 9th Thermidor, but not all the Jacobins shared his fate. By means of clever adaptation to circumstances many of them rose to a Tiigh position. Napoleon himself originally belonged’to the Terrorists, and indeed was a friend of Eobespierre’s brother. Their sister says later on, “Bonaparte was a Eepublican. I will even go so far as to say that he was on the side of the ‘Mountain.’ His admiration for my elder brother, his friendship for my younger brother, and perhaps also the sympathy he-showed in my misfortune, were responsible for my receiving from the Consulate a donation of 3,600 frs.” (Quoted by J. H. Eose, “Napoleon I.,” 1916, volume 1, page 50.)
But not only individuals. Whole parties can so transform themselves as to extricate themselves from an untenable position, not only with a whole skin, but even with enhanced power and respect. It is not impossible that the collapse of the communist experiment in Eussia may not equally transform the Bolsheviks, and save them as a governing party. They are already on the way. As thorough-going, practical politicians, the Bolsheviks have developed the art of adaptation to circumstances in the course of their rule to a remarkable degree. Originally they were whole hearted protagonists of a National Assembly, elected on the strength of a universal and equal vote. But they set this aside, as soon as it stood in their way. They were thorough-going opponents of the death penalty, yet they established a bloody rule. When democracy was being abandoned in the State they became fiery upholders of democracy within the proletariat, but they are repressing this democracy more and more by means of their personal dictatorship. They abolished the piece-work system, and are now reintroducing it. At the beginning of their regime they declared it to be their object to smash the bureaucratic apparatus, which represented tho means of power of the old State; but they have introduced in its place a new form of bureaucratic rule. They came into power by dissolving the discipline of the army, and finally the army itself. They have created a new army, severely disciplined. They strove to reduce all classes to the same level, instead of which they have called into being a new class distinction. They have created a class which stands on a lower level than the proletariat, which latter they have raised to a privileged class; and over and above this they have caused still another class to appear, which is in receipt of large incomes and enjoys high privileges. They hoped in the villages to cripple the peasants who had property, by meting out political rights exclusively to the poorest among the peasantry. Now they have granted these propertied peasants some measure of representation. They began with a merciless expropriation of capital, and at the present moment are preparing to hand over to American capitalists the mineral treasures of half Eussia, in order to gain their assistance, and in every way to come to some terms with foreign capital. The French war correspondent, Ludovic Naudeau, gave a report recently in the Temps of a conversation he had had with Lenin, in which the latter, among other remarks, gave the following account of his friendly attitude towards capital: —
“We are very willing to propose that we should acknowledge and pay the interest on our foreign leans; and since we lack other means of payment, that this should take the form of the delivery of wheat, petroleum, and all kinds of raw material, of which we without doubt have superfluous stocks, as soon as work in Eussia can be undertaken to its fullest extent. We have also decided, on the strength of our contracts, which, of course, must first receive diplomatic sanction, to grant concessions to subjects of the Entente Powers for the exploiting of forests and mines, naturally subject to the condition that the essential basis of government of the Eussian Soviet Eepublic be acknowledged. We know that English, Japanese, and American capitalists are keenly striving for such concessions.”
Interviews are not documents upon which one can swear, but the views of the Soviet Eepublic, about which we are here speaking, are proved by other responsible reporters on Eussia. They give evidence of a strong sense of the actual realities of life; but show that they have already renounced their Communist programme, since its realisation will be delayed for some long time to come, if they are prepared to farm out to foreign capitalists a part of Russia for eighty years. Communism, as a means towards the immediate emancipation of the Eussian proletariat, has now collapsed. It is now only a question whether Lenin’s government will announce in a veiled manner the bankruptcy of Bolshevik methods, and seek thereby to maintain its position; or whether a counter-revolutionary power will overthrow this government and proclaim its bankruptcy in a very brutal way. We should ourselves prefer the first way, namely, that Bolshevism should once more consciously establish itself on the basis of Marxist evolution, which holds that natural phases of development cannot be precipitated. It would be the least painful, and it would also be the most beneficial way for the International proletariat. But, unfortunately, the course of world-history does not always run according to our wishes. The hereditary sin of Bolshevism has been its suppression of democracy through a form of government, namely, the dictatorship, which has no meaning unless it represents the unlimited and despotic power, either of one single person, or of a small organisation intimately bound together. With a dictatorship it is as with war. This should be borne in mind by those in Germany who are under the influence of the Eussian method, and who are now coquetting, with the idea of a dictatorship, without thinking it out to ’its logical conclusion. It is easy to begin a dictatorship as it is to begin war, if one has the State power under control. But when once such steps have been taken, it is as difficult at will to stop the one as the other. One has to choose between two alternatives, either to triumph or to end in catastrophe. Eussia has an imperative need of foreign capital. But this help will not be forthcoming to the Soviet Eepublic, unless it upholds the National Assembly and the freedom of the Press. This is not to imply that the capitalists were ever democratic idealists. Without hesitation they gave millions in support of Tsarism; but they have no strong confidence in regard to the business capacity of the present revolutionary government. They are in doubt as to its constitution, when it suffers no criticism to appear in the Press, and obviously has not the majority of the population behind it. Will the Soviet Government find a way to preserve the freedom of the Press and to convoke a Constituent Assembly? A certain number of Bolsheviks have declared that they fear the one just as little as the other. But why, then, do they not uphold them? Why do they despise a means which, if they use it well, must help towards an enormous increase of their moral strength, and of other people’s confidence in them? In the aforementioned preface to Bucharin’s “Programme of the Communists” there is written: —
“The conditions which Kautsky and company would impose upon a revolution appear to be that the revolution certainly has the right to dictate its will to the bourgeoisie, but that at the same time it is pledged to grant the bourgeoisie every facility, whether through freedom of the Press or through the Constituent Assembly, to air its complaints. This masterly suggestion of a learned expert, who does not seem to bother whether he has right on his side, but only whether he can lodge his accusation on the particular man for whom he is looking, might quite well be put into practice, abstractly regarded, without its doing any harm to the Revolution. But the Revolution consists in being a civil war, and those classes who have to fight with cannons and machine-guns readily forego such Homeric form of controversy. The Revolution never discussed with its enemies. It destroys them, and the counter-revolution does the same thing, and both are quite capable of shouldering the reproof that they have disregarded the orders of the German Reichstag”
This justification of slaughter, also in regard to the counter-revolution, is all the more sublime, when it is compared with what the author says a few pages before concerning the revolution: —
“The Socialist Revolution is a long process, which begins with the dethronement of the capitalist class;, but it can only end with the transformation of the capitalist system into one for the community of Labour. This process ivill take a generation, at least, in each country. This period is exactly the period of the proletarian dictatorship; the period, that is to say, in which the proletariat, with one hand, must continue to crush the capitalist class, while the other hand alone is free to aid in other Socialistic reconstruction” (page 18).
That is to say, the revolution is synonymous with civil war, with a war in which no pardon is given, in which the one side attempts to crush the other without any lasting effect, since this pleasant process must-continue “for a generation at least.“This devastating civil war, carried on by means of machine-guns and gas-bombs, which must work more dire destruction on land than ever happened before in the Thirty Years’ War; which decimates the population, increases their brutality until it becomes the wildest barbarism, and which completely stops all sources of production—this, indeed, is to be the way to the working out of the higher form of life for which Socialism stands! This masterly conception of the Socialist Revolution is certainly not that of a “learned expert,” but of a professional revolutionary for whom insurrection is synonymous with revolution, and who really loses his health and life if such revolution assumes the form of democracy, and not that of a civil war. But one thing is certainly correct. There are only two possibilities—either democracy or civil war. Whoever abolishes the one must be prepared for the other. He can only escape from a dictatorship where he has to deal with an absolutely hopeless and apathetic population, which by its very nature represents the lack of human material on which to build the structure of a Socialist society.
As we have only the two alternatives—democracy or civil war—I myself draw the conclusion that wherever Socialism does not appear to be possible on a democratic basis, and where the majority of the population rejects it, its time has not yet fully come. Bolshevism, on the other hand, argues that Socialism can only be introduced by being forced on a majority by a minority, and such can happen only through dictatorship and civil war. The fact alone that Bolshevism feels itself to be in a minority among the people makes it clear why it so obstinately rejects democracy, in spite of its assurance that democracy cannot “harm the revolution.” If it thought it had the majority behind it, it would not need to reject democracy, even if it did regard fighting with cannons and machine-guns as the one and only possible form of revolutionary struggle. Moreover, this struggle would be made easier for Bolshevism, as it was for the revolutionary Parisians in 1793, if a revolutionary Convention was behind it all. But such a Convention would not stand behind it. When the Bolsheviks came into power they found themselves at the height of their influence over the workmen, the soldiers, and a large section of the peasants; and yet they themselves at that time did not dare to appeal for a universal election. Instead of dissolving the Constituent Assembly and introducing a new election, they simply smashed it. Ever since, the opposition against the Bolsheviks has been increasing from day to day. The growing nervousness betrayed by its disciples over every kind of Press which is not official, as well as the exclusion of Socialist critics from the Soviets, shows the transition to the Regiment of Terror. In such a situation, to demolish the dictatorship in order gradually to return to democracy is scarcely possible. All such attempts hitherto have quickly come to an end. The Bolsheviks are prepared, in order to maintain their position, to make all sorts of possible concessions to bureaucracy, to militarism, and to capitalism, whereas any concession to democracy seems to them to be sheer suicide. And yet that alone offers any possibility of bringing the civil war to an end, and of leading Russia again along paths of economic progress and prosperous development towards some higher form of existence. Without democracy Russia will go to pieces; but through democracy the proletariat must go to pieces. The final result is quite predictable. It need not be a 9th Thermidor, but I fear it will not be far removed from that.
The Outlook for the World Revolution.
The Bolsheviks themselves seem to have no great confidence in their ultimate victory. Yet they have anchored all their hopes on one thing. For if Russia ceases to be a chosen people of the revolution then the World-R evolution must be the Messiah that shall redeem the Russian people. But what is this world-re volution? It may be regarded in two quite different ways. One may regard it as representing such a growth of the Socialist idea in the world, alongside of the strengthening of the proletariat, accompanied by an increased bitterness of the class-struggle, that Socialism will become a great power, capable of stirring the whole world, and affecting the life of more and more States as it develops. On the other hand, one might understand under this head a revolutionising of the world in the Bolshevik sense, i.e., the conquest of political power by the proletariat in all the great States; otherwise, the Soviet Republic can no longer save the Revolution. It would mean, further, the establishment everywhere of Soviet Republics, and the depriving of all non-communist elements of their rights. It would mean the dictatorship of the Communist Party, and, as a consequence, the letting loose of a civil war throughout the whole world for at least a generation to come.
A strenuous propaganda is at work to bring about this result. To produce a world-re volution, in the Bolshevik sense is beyond their power. But they might certainly be able, should they succeed, in exerting a very considerable influence on West Europe, and so endanger the world-revolution in the other sense of the word. For the chief task of the preachers of the world-revolution, in the Russian sense, is the letting loose of a fratricidal war among the proletarian masses of the world.
Being from its very beginning a child of party dissension, and having come to power as the result of its struggle with other Socialist parties of its own country, Bolshevism endeavours to establish itself in Russia by means of a civil war, which makes it into a war between brother and brother; and, as a final means towards its supremacy, it adds the attempt to split up all other Socialist parties which have still remained in unity—so long as they do not prove to have a Bolshevist majority. Such is the meaning of the Third International. By this means they hope to introduce the world-revolution. Yet this is not the consequence of a mere whim or of sheer malice, but proceeds from the very essence of Bolshevism itself, which is incompatible with the higher form of existence, for which pioneer work has already been done in Western Europe.
In Western Europe, democracy is not a thing of yesterday, as is the case with Russia. It has won its way through a series of revolutions, and is the result of a struggle extending over hundreds of years. It has been absorbed by the masses in their very flesh and blood. As a consequence, it is absolutely impossible to deprive all society of all political rights. In France the peasants represent a power which one dare not flout, and which very jealously watches over its own private property. Moreover, the bourgeoisie in France, and still more in England, is a class accustomed to struggle. The proletariat in Russia is certainly weaker than that in West Europe; but infinitely weaker in the Russian Empire is the bourgeoisie itself. There, as everywhere in those countries where a strong military autocracy has been in power, the bourgeoisie is just as much in cowardly fear of the State power, as it is inspired with blind confidence in its protection. Hence the miserable state of present-day Liberalism. The collapse of State power, the failure of the military “wall of protection,” the transference of all powers of a State into the hands of the proletariat, so frightened the bourgeoisie, which has never accustomed itself to undertake any energetic political fight, that it absolutely collapsed, and left the ground uncontested in the hands of its opponents.
In West Europe the lower classes, as the result of their class-struggle extending over hundreds of years, liave educated not only themselves, but also the upper classes. These latter have gained respect for the proletariat; but they have become, moreover, masters of the art of meeting any attack at the right moment by making concessions, thus avoiding catastrophes. In the Anglo-Saxon countries. however, the bourgeoisie has had, for a long time since, to fend for itself without any strong standing army. It has learnt, both in relation with the State-power as also with the proletariat, to depend on its own strength alone; hence it does not easily turn tail when any danger is threatened. And it is these countries that have been victorious in the war.
The war has not crushed and dissolved the armies of these countries as it has those of the Central Powers and Eussia. In East Europe, at the time of the dissolution of the army, it was the soldiers, from whatever class of the population they may have been drawn, who always represented an element of revolt. But this enormous power, which hastens a revolution, may also have the effect of bringing weak revolutionary factors to power prematurely, thus causing them to be faced with problems which they are not competent to solve. It is this power which is lacking in the victorious countries. For there Socialism will only acquire for itself State power, when it is strong enough, within the framework of democracy, to gain the balance over the other parties. In éuch countries it has not the slightest cause to abjure democracy; for it is just in such countries that the highest and best strata of the proletariat could never be found ready to accept the substitution of democracy by a dictatorship, which after all simply means the dictatorship of a single person. It is certain that at the present day in France Bolshevik sympathisers among the Socialists are very strong; but they arose solely in consequence of the very justifiable opposition to all attempts of their own capitalist government to crush Socialist governments abroad.
There are also many who think that Bolshevik methods are suitable for Eussia; but they have no intention of recommending the same methods to be applied in France. Nevertheless, even there the Blanquiste traditions of revolt, and the Proudhonist traditions of anti-parliamentarianism have not quite died out. These two hostile elements have gained fresh life by some strange fusion in syndicalism. They might offer some basis for Bolshevism. But it is quite out of the. question that they should ever gain hold of the proletariat of France, or indeed of England and America. Its growth there would only end in its splitting up, just at the time when it would have great and decisive struggles to fight—struggles in which it could only possibly become victorious by showing the utmost cohesion and co-operation. The Bolshevik propaganda for a world-revolufcion, as we have already said, cannot therefore further the world-revolution, which is already in preparation. The utmost it can do is to endanger it.
Communism, as a result of its diversi ve tendencies, has already endangered the revolution in Germany. German Social democracy before the war was a strong Socialist party in the country. United on the basis of a common and single aspect of society shared by all its members, it was on the point of embracing the majority of the population, as soon as it had succeeded in winning over the Catholic workers, who followed the banner of the Centrum. If it had possessed the majority, the struggle for democracy, that is to say the struggle for the voting reform in Prussia, would have become a struggle for political power. If this had been gained the party would at once have reaped the finest fruits of its activity, considering the wealth which German capitalism had developed and amassed, and which made it possible to ameliorate rapidly the general condition of the masses. The world-war has made a complete end to this wealth. Peace hasi now found Germany in the most desperate situation. It precludes any attempt at creating better conditions for the masses, whatever the means of production may be. But this world-war, as a result of the collapse and the dissolution of the army, has also caused social democracy, not through its own strength but through the bankruptcy of its opponents, to come to the fore, at a time when itself has become weakened through the cleavage which the war has brought about. If social democracy wishes to become the dominating party, its immediate reunion has become an imperative necessity. One would have thought that the demands of the present moment would have been carried out all the more expeditiously, since the cause of the cleavage within the Socialist party, namely, the attitude towards the war, has now disappeared.
But, unfortunately, since the rise of the Soviet Eepublic, a new wedge has been driven through the Socialist ranks of Germany by Bolshevik propaganda, which has demanded that our Party should relinquish the essential claims of democracy, and set up the dictatorship of the workmen’s council a& a form of State. In order to be under no false impression, the Bolsheviks ceased to call themselves social democrats. They therefore called themselves Communists, apparently in order to ally themselves with the true form of Marxism laid down in the Communist Manifesto. They forgot, however, that Marx and Engels, towards the end of 1847, published tha Communist Manifesto, and a few months later issued the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the organ of democracy, so little in their eyes was the antagonism between democracy and communism. The opposition between dictatorship and democracy has created in Germany, alongside of the two Socialist parties which existed before the revolution, yet another, namely, that of the Communists. It has given rise to uncertainty and division in the politics of each of these two parties, and among the Independents has produced strong Bolshevik tendencies. Further, it has resulted in a reaction among a section of the Socialists of the Eight against these very tendencies, which, however, overshot the mark, and caused leanings towards the Bourgeois party, with which the Socialists of the Right, already as the result of the war policy, had a good deal in common.
The revolution of November 9th broke this coalition with the bourgeoisie, and brought about an understanding with the Independents. Unfortunately this was only temporary. In Germany it is just as little possible as in West Europe to introduce a real, permanent, and active form of dictatorship, which should embrace the whole Empire. The population has progressed far too much for this. All attempts of separate and proletarian sections to assume the dictatorship can have only temporary success. They are bound to lead to one result, namely, the increase of the political and economic dissolution of the Empire, and to prepare the way for a counter revolutionary military dictatorship. But this latter also can never become a permanent and universal power. It is impossible in Germany to continue to govern against the interests of the workers.
The excesses of the Noske Guards in Berlin, the terrible fury in Munich, are no proof of the dictatorial power of the government. They show rather the helplessness of the government in its attitude towards those spirits, which it has conjured up, which are certainly capable of committing with impunity horrible deeds of revenge, but which are nevertheless incapable themselves of guiding the State.
This striving for dictatorship, whether from the Left or the Right, cannot lead to a real dictatorship, but only to anarchy and complete ruin, which will lead us, not to any higher forms of life but to cannibalism, when all production will be at an end, and all food commodities will have been consumed. And even before it can get so far, it may happen that all attempts to introduce a dictatorship will only lead, as the one result of its activity, to an increase of the cruelty and brutality with which political and economic struggles are being fought out, as well as to an increase in the number of victims. This will render any positive construction quite impossible. This is just as true of Noske’s regiment as of the Soviet dictatorship.
At the present moment propaganda is being made for a certain form of dictatorship, which is to be only temporary, and which, in any case, is not to have recourse to violence. This is the worst of all possible illusions. In a country in which all classes have already awakened to the importance of political life, no party can exercise a dictatorship without some recourse to despotism. However peaceful their views may be, however great their determination to use the dictatorship merely as a means of acquiring the strength necessary for positive work, it will soon happen, after they have once started their regime, that nothing will remain over of their dictatorial methods but despotism itself.
Democracy alone offers the one means of avoiding despotism, and of coming to some calm and positive construction. But at the present moment democracy has been overpowered theoretically by the Left, and practically by the Eight Wing o£ the Socialist Party. The National Assembly itself is far from being a democracy; for no democracy is possible without the representation of the people by means of a universal and equal vote. The one and only institution at the present moment that might to some extent keep the Empire together can come, not through Workmen’s Councils, nor through a dictatorial government, but cnly through a National Assembly, consisting of representatives from all parts of the Empire. Certainly the present constitution is highly unsatisfactory, but who has elected the majority in it? It is the active population, the very people who are to elect the Workmen’s Councils, so soon as these latter have been erected into a system. The votes of the Independent Social Democrats in the constitution form not one-tenth of the National Assembly. The working-classes represent nine-tenths of the whole nation.
The Workmen’s Councils present a very different picture from the National Assembly, only so long as they embrace the wage-earners of the great industries. As such, they can become important for progressive policy, and they are indispensable for all attempts at socialisation. But, as such alone, they are incapable of being an adequate substitution for the National Assembly.! For the more this system of councils is extended over the whole province of large industry, and the more it embraces the whole of the working population, so much the more must the central council in its constitution approximate to the National Assembly, without investing its majority with that authority which the majority of the National Assembly possesses, as the result of its openly claiming to be the majority of the nation.
Nothing can be more erroneous than the assertion, which has also figured lately in the discussions of the recent Congress of the Third International in Moscow, that pariiamentarianism and democracy in their very essentials are bourgeois institutions. They are forms which may be utterly different in content, according to the kind of people they represent. If in any parliament the bourgeois elements are to be in the majority, then pariiamentarianism will be bourgeois in character; and if these parties prove to be of no use their pariiamentarianism is also useless. But as soon as a Socialist majority appears in Parliament, the whole situation is radically changed. Now it has been said that such a Socialist majority is out of the question, even with the most liberal and complete seôrèt ballot, because the capitalists dominate the Press and buy off the workers. But if the capitalists are really in a position to buy off the workers in this manner, especially after a revolution like the present, they should be just as capable of influencing those who have the right of voting for these Workmen’s Councils. The further assertion that, for the Socialists, even by the complete secret ballot, and even with a majority of wage-eamers in the population, it is impossible to gain a majority in any parliament, on account of the financial power which the capitalists exercise over the proletariat, is equivalent to calling the proletariat nothing but a feeble and cowardly band of illiterates, and simply announces the bankruptcy of the proletarian cause. For if the proletariat were of such poor and wretched constitution, then no institution in the world can help it, however elaborately it might be decked out to ensure victory in spite of its moral and intellectual impotence.
If the German National Assembly of the present day has a specifically bourgeois character, it is the Bolshevik propaganda which has contributed not a little to that. It has caused among the working-classes, and also among the independents, a certain mistrust of the National Assembly, and has further impaired the latter’s interests in the elections. And the other working-class elements, namely, the Catholics, who were on the point of disassociating themselves from the bourgeois cliques, were likewise weakened, and given over to bourgeois guidance
It is quite certain that Germany cannot recover her health under the present National Assembly. The process of convalescence will not be furthered, but on the other hand hindered, if the struggle against the existing Assembly is transformed into a fight against democracy, against universal suffrage, and against the constitution of the National Assembly as such. For in this way a hindrance will be caused, which will prevent the struggle from concentrating on the one point where reform can proceed, namely, the election of a National Assembly, in which the representatives of the proletariat shall form the majority, and be prepared to set about as energetically as they can the socialising of the country, in so far as it is possible. They must also be determined unhesitatingly to carry on the démocratisation of Germany, which has only just begun. This, and not a dictatorship, must be the programme of any purely Socialist Government that may come into power. In this way it would also gain the allegiance of the Catholic workers, and indeed of all bourgeois circles, if they could see in such a programme the means to help rescue the Republic from the civil war, which has arisen as a result of the dictatorial tendencies among those parties struggling for pre-eminence. If the Communists assert that democracy is none other than the method of bourgeois domination, the answer to that would be, that the alternative to democracy, namely, the dictatorship itself, could lead to nothing else but a revolution, and to methods of violence characteristic of byegone days. Democracy, with its universal equal suffrage, does not represent the domination of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie in its period of revolution did not introduce equal suffrage, but only suffrage according to census, which was introduced into France, England, Belgium and elsewhere. It was only after long and bitter struggle that the proletariat succeeded in acquiring universal and equal suffrage—a perfectly well-known fact, which, however, all Communists and their friends seem to have completely forgotten. Democracy, with its universal equal suffrage, is the method to transform the class-struggle out of a hand-to-hand fight into a battle of intelligence, in which one particular class can triumph only if it is intellectually and morally on a level with its opponent. Democracy is the one and only method through which the higher form of life can be realised, and which Socialism declares is the right of civilised men. Dictatorship leads only to that form of Socialism Which has been called Asiatic; but unjustly,; for Asia has given birth to a Confucius and a Buddha. It would be more exact to call it Tartar Socialism.
Quite apart from the terrible consequences of the woïld-war, which naturally bear the greater responsibility, it is due in a great measure to the subversive and destructive activity of the Communists, to their dissipation of the strength of the proletariat by fruitless adventures, that the working-classes of Germany have gained little from their own victory, and have not understood how to make democracy an adequate instrument for their own emancipation.
Democracy offers far better prospects for Socialism in West Europe and America. These regions, especially the Anglo-Saxon countries, have issued from the world-war less weakened economically than the others. Every form of progress, and every gain of power on the part of the proletariat, mùst immediately bring with it an improvement in the conditions of life.
But at the same time the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeois world must assume more intensive forms than ever it did before the war.
The period of patriotic exuberance, which war and, after it, victory, had given rise to, is rapidly passing. The change has already begun, and will proceed at an increasing rate, when once peace has been signed. For, however great the burdens placed by the Peace Treaty on the conquered, the sacrifices entailed by the victorious peoples will be felt none the less, since everywhere now the chief interest will be turned from external problems to problems of home policy.
The opposition of the proletariat will, in such case, always assume more and more energetic forms, according as its seltf-consciousness increases. The German, and still more the Russian, Revolution has in this respect acted as an incentive. Whatever one may think of the Bolshevik methods, the fact that a proletarian government in a great State has not only come into power, but been able to maintain itself for nearly two years under the most difficult conditions conceivable, naturally increases the feeling of power among the proletariat of all countries, For the world-revolution therefore, in this respect, the Bolsheviks have rendered an enormous service, far more than they have through their emissaries and propagandists, who have been responsible for more harm to the proletarian cause than for any revolutionary achievement.
The proletariat of the whole world has now been set in motion, and its international pressure will be strong enough to cause all economic progress of the future to develop on Socialist, and no longer on capitalist lines.
In this respect, therefore, the world-war has made this epoch significant; for it has meant the end of capitalist and the beginning of Socialist development. Clearly, we shall not be able to leap at one bound out of a capitalist into a Socialist world. Socialism is not a piece of mechanism, which one can put together on a pre-conceived plan, and which, once it has been set in motion, can go on working in a regular manner. On the contrary, it is in reality a process of social co-operation, which has its own special laws just like any other form of social activity; which however, within these laws can assume the most varied forms, and is also capable of fuller development, the outcome of which it is impossible for us at the present moment to see.
We of the present day have no “ready-made Utopias to introduce by popular decision.” What is now happening is the liberating-of those elements that mark the beginning of Socialist development. If we care to call that the world-revolution, because this is happening throughout the world, then we are certainly confronted with a world-revolution. It will not proceed on the lines of a dictatorship, nor by means of cannons and guns, nor through the destruction of one’s political and social adversaries, but only through democracy and humanity. In this way alone can we hope to arrive at those higher forms of life, the working out of which belongs to the future task of the proletariat.
The National Labour Press, Ltd., Manchester and London. 30842