The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY.
The question so unscrupulously distorted by Kautsky is in reality as follows: It is obvious, if we are not to indulge in mockery over commmonsense and history, that one cannot speak of "pure democracy" so long as different classes exist. One can only speak of class democracy. (One may remark in passing that "pure democracy" is not only an ignorant phrase showing lack of understanding both of the struggle of classes and of the nature of the State, but also a hollow phrase, since in Communist society democracy will gradually become a habit, and finally wither away, but never will be "pure democracy.") In fact, "pure democracy" is the mendacious phrase of a Liberal who wants to dupe the working-class. History only knows a bourgeois democracy which replaces feudalism, and a proletarian democracy which replaces bourgeois democracy. When Kautsky devotes scores of pages to the proof of the fact that bourgeois democracy is a progressive order in comparison with the mediaeval one and must be made use of by the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, he is just indulging in the usual Liberal twaddle which has for its object to gull the workers. For it is a bare truism not only in educated Germany, but also in uneducated Russia, Kautsky is simply throwing "learned" dust into the eyes of the workers when he tells them with an air of importance about Weitling and the Jesuits of Paraguay and many other things, In order to hide from their sight the bourgeois essence of modern, that is, capitalist, democracy.
Kautsky takes from Marxism only what is acceptable to Liberals, to the bourgeoisie (viz., the criticism of the Middle Ages, and the progressive historical part played by capitalism in general, and capitalist democracy in particular) and eliminates, suppresses, hushes up in Marxism all that is unacceptable to the bourgeoisie (such as the importance of the revolutionary violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie with a view to its destruction). That is why Kautsky, in virtue of his objective, attitude and in spite of his subjective inclinations, becomes the lackey of the bourgeoisie.
Bourgeois democracy, while constituting a great historical advance in comparison with feudalism, nevertheless remains, and cannot but remain ,a very limited, a very hypocritical institution, a paradise for the rich and a trap and a delusion for the exploited and for the poor. It is this simple truth, which forms the essential part of Marx's doctrines, that Kautsky "the Marxist," has failed to understand. On this fundamental question Kautsky gives us only what is agreeable to the bourgeoisie, and does not give us any scientific criticism of the conditions which make every bourgeois democracy only a democracy for the rich.
Let us recall to the learned mind of Mr. Kautsky the theoretical propositions of Marx and Engels, which our schoolman has so disgracefully "forgotten" (in order to please the bourgeoisie), and then we shall explain the question more popularly. Not only the ancient and feudal, but also the "representative State of to-day is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital" (Engels, in his book on the State). "Since the State is only a temporary institution which is to be made use of in revolution in order forcibly to suppress the opponents, it is perfectly absurd to talk about a free popular State; so long as the proletariat still needs the State, it needs it not in the interests of freedom, but in order to suppress its opponents and when it becomes possible to speak of freedom, the State as such ceases to exist" (Engels in his letter to Bebel March 28th, 1875). "The State is nothing but a machine for the suppression of one class by another—this, in a democratic republic no less than in a monarchy" (Engels, in his preface to Marx's "Civil War"). "Universal suffrage is an index of the maturity of the working-class: it cannot, and will not, give anything more in the present State" (Engels, in his book on the State. Mr. Kautsky tediously chews at great length the first part of the proposition, which is acceptable to the bourgeoisie, but, as a renegade, conveniently omits the second half, which is not agreeable to the bourgeoisie). "The Commune was to be not a parliament, but a working body, legislating and executing at the same time. … Instead of deciding once in three or six years what member of the ruling class was to represent and repress the people in parliament, universal suffrage was to be the means whereby the people, organized in Communes, was to seek out, for its gigantic business, workers, foremen, book-keepers, just in the same way in which employers use their individual suffrage" (Marx, in his "Civil War in France").
Every one of these propositions, which are well-known to the most learned Mr. Kautsky is a direct challenge to him and lays bare his apostasy. Kautsky nowhere in his pamphlet shows the slightest understanding of these truths. The whole of his pamphlet is but a mockery of Marxism.
Take the fundamental laws of modern States, take their internal administration, take the right of meeting and the freedom of the press and the so-called equality of all citizens before the law and you will see at every step evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy, with which every honest and intelligent worker is familiar. There is not a single State ,however democratic, which does not contain loopholes or limiting clauses in its constitution which guarantee the bourgeoisie the legal possibility of dispatching troops against the workers, of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of the disturbance of public order, that is, in case of the "disturbance" by the servile class of its servile condition, and of attempts to strike up a non-servile attitude. Kautsky shamelessly gives attractive airs to bourgeois democracy by suppressing, for instance, such acts as are committed by the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie of America and Switzerland against strikers.
Yes, the all-wise and most learned Kautsky hushes up these things. He does not evidently realize, this great political theoretician, that such silence is an infamy. He prefers telling the workers nursery tales, such as that democracy means the "protection of minorities." it is incredible, but it is a fact. In the year 1918 of our Lord, in the fifth year of the universal Imperialist slaughter and strangulation of internationalist (that is, not such as have infamously sold Socialism, like, for insance, the Renaudels and the Longuets, the Scheidemanns, and the Kautskys, the Hendersons and the Webbs, etc.) minorities in all "democracies of the world," the learned Mr. Kautsky sweetly sings the praises of the "protection of minorities." Those who are interested may read this on page 15 of Kautsky's pamphlet. And on page 16 this learned personage tells you about the Whigs and Tories in England in the 18th century!
Oh, this wonderful erudition! Oh, this refined flunkeyism before the bourgeoisie. Oh, this civilized way of crawling on the belly before the capitalists and of licking their boots! If I were a Krupp or a Scheidemann, a Clemenceau, or a Renaudel, I would give Mr. Kautsky millions, would cover him with thousands of Judas kisses, would press him upon the workers, and recommend "Socialist unity" with respectable men like him. To write pamphlets against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to tell about the Whigs and Tories in England in the 18th century, to give assurances that democracy means the "protection of minorities," and to suppress the facts about pogroms of internationalists in republican and democratic America,—why, the bourgeoisie cannot get a more servile lackey!
The learned Mr. Kautsky has "forgotten"—no doubt accidentally—one little thing; namely, that the protection of minorities is extended by the ruling party in a bourgeois democracy only to the other bourgeois parties, while on all serious, fundamental issues, the working-class gets, instead of the "protection of minorities," martial law and pogroms. The more developed democracy is, the nearer at hand is the danger of a pogrom or civil war in connection with any profound political divergence which threatens the existence of the bourgeoisie. This "law" of bourgeois democracy the learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied in connection with the Dreyfus affair in the republic of France, with the lynching, of negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the conflicts between Ireland and Ulster in democratic England, with the hunting down of the Bolsheviks and the organization of pogroms against them, in July, 1917, in the democratic republic of Russia. I have purposely chosen these examples from among the incidents not only of war, but also of pre-war time. But sweet Mr. Kautsky finds it more pleasant to shut his eyes to these facts of the twentieth century, and to tell the workers, instead, the wonderfully novel, the remarkably exciting, the extraordinary, the instructive, and highly important facts about the Tories and Whigs of the eighteenth century!
Or take the bourgeois parliaments. Is it to be supposed that learned Mr. Kautsky has never heard of the fact that the more democracy is developed, the more do the bourgeois parliaments fall under the control of the Stock Exchange and the bankers? This, of course, does not mean that bourgeois parliamentarism ought not to be made use of; the Bolsheviks, for instance, made, perhaps, more successful use of it than any party in the world, having in 1912–14 captured the entire Labor representation in the fourth Duma. But it does mean that only a Liberal can forget the historical limitation and relativeness of bourgeois parliamentarism in the manner in which Kautsky does. At every step, even in the most democratic bourgeois States, the oppressed masses come across the crying contradiction between the formal equality proclaimed by the "democracy" of the capitalists and the thousand and one de facto limitations and restrictions which make the proletarians wage-slaves. It is this contradiction which opens the eyes of the masses to the rottenness, hypocrisy, and mendacity of Capitalism. It is this contradiction which the agitators and propagandists of Socialism are constantly showing up to the masses, in order to prepare them for the revolution. And when the era of revolution has begun, Kautsky turns his back upon it and starts to extol the charms of moribund bourgeois democracy!
Proletarian democracy, of which the Soviet régime constitutes one of the forms, has given to the world a hitherto unknown expansion and development of democracy for the gigantic majority of the population, for the exploited and laboring masses. To have written a whole pamphlet about democracy, as Kautsky has done (who devotes two pages to the question of dictatorship and scores of pages to that of "pure democracy") and not to have noticed this fact, means simply that he has distorted the facts, after the approved Liberal manner.
Or take foreign policy. In no bourgeois State, not even in the most democratic one, is it carried out openly. Everywhere the masses are deceived—in democratic France, Switzerland, America, or England in an incomparably more refined and wholesale manner than in other countries. It was the Soviet Government which by a revolutionary act has torn off the veil of mystery from foreign policy. But Kautsky has not noticed this, and passes it over in silence, although in the present era of predatory wars and secret treaties about spheres of influence (that is, about the partition of the world between the capitalist bandits), the subject is one of cardinal importance, on which the happiness and the life and death of millions depends.
Or take the organization of the State. Kautsky seizes upon all manner of petty things, including the system of "indirect" elections under the Soviet constitution, but the essence of things wholly escapes him. He does not see the class nature of the State machinery. By a thousand-and-one tricks the capitalists, in a bourgeois democracy—and these tricks are the more skillful and the more effective, the further "pure" democracy has developed—keep the masses out of the administration and frustrate the freedom of the press, the right of meeting, etc. The Soviet régime, on the contrary, is the first in the world (or strictly speaking, the second, because the Commune of Paris attempted to do the same thing) to attract the masses, that is, the exploited, masses, to the work of administration. The laboring masses are kept away from bourgois parliament (which never decides the most important questions in a bourgeois democracy, as they are decided by the Stock Exchange and the banks) by a thousand-and-one barriers, in consequence of which the working-class perfectly well realizes that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions foreign to them, are an instrument of oppression, of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, are an institution of the hostile class, of the exploiting minority.
As against this, the Soviets are the direct organization of the laboring and exploited masses themselves, which enables them to organize and to administer the State by their own efforts in their own manner. The urban proletariat, the advance guard of the toiling and exploited, enjoys under this arrangement a position of advantage due to its being best organized by the large industrial concerns, which enables it best to hold elections and to control the elected. The Soviet system automatically facilitates the rallying of all those who work and are exploited around their advance guard, the proletariat. The old bourgeois apparatus, the bureaucracy, the privileges of wealth, of bourgeois education, of social connections, etc. which aге the more varied, the more highly bourgeois democracy has developed—all this disappears under the Soviet system. Freedom of the press ceases to be an hypocrisy because the printing presses and the paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie. It is the same with the best buildings, the palaces, the villas and the country houses. Thousands and thousands of these best buildings have been taken away from the exploiters by the Soviet authority, which has thereby made the right of meeting for the masses a thousand times more "democratic" than before, since without this right all democracy is a fraud and a delusion. The indirect elections to the non-local Soviets make it easier to arrange for congresses of the Soviets, render the entire apparatus cheaper, more elastic, more accessible to the workers and peasants at a time when life is overflowing and it is necessary to be able rapidly to recall a delegate or to send him to the General Congress of the Soviets. Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy, and the Soviet régime is a million times more democratic than the most democratic régime in a bourgeois republic.
This could only have remained unnoticed by a person who is either the deliberate henchman of the bourgeoisie or is politically dead, does not see life from behind the dusty pages of bourgeois books, is permeated through and through by bourgeois democratic prejudices, and thereby, objectively speaking, becomes the lackey of the bourgeoisie.
This could only have remained unnoticed by a man who is incapable of putting the question from the point of view of the exploited classes: is there one single country in the world, even among the most democratic bourgeois countries, in which the ordinary rank-and-file worker, the ordinary rank-and-file village laborer or village semi-proletarian (that is, the overwhelming majority of the population), enjoys anything approaching such liberty of holding meetings in the best buildings, such liberty of giving utterance to his ideas and of protecting his interests in print by means of the best printing works and largest stocks of paper, such liberty of appointing men and women of his own class to administer and to organize the State, as in Soviet Russia?
The mere thought is absurd that Mr. Kautsky could find in any country one single worker or agricultural laborer in a thousand who, on being informed of the fасts, would hesitate in replying to this question. Instinctively, through reading the bare fragments of truth in the bourgeois press, the workers of the entire world sympathize with the Soviet Republic, just because they see in it a proletarian democracy, a democracy for the poor, and not a democracy for the rich, as is the case with every bourgeois democracy, even the best. "We are ruled, and our State is run, by bourgeois bureaucrats, by capitalist parliaments, by capitalist judges"—such is the simple, indisputable, and obvious truth, which is known and felt, through their own daily experience, by tens and hundreds of millions of the exploited classes in all bourgeois countries, including the most democratic. In Russia, on the other hand, the bureaucratic apparatus has been completely smashed up, the old judges have all been driven from their seats, the bourgeois parliament has been dispersed, and instead the workers and peasants have received a much more popular representation, their Soviets have replaced the bureaucrats, or are controlling them, and their Soviets have become the authorities who elect the judges. This fact alone is enough to justify all the oppressed classes in regarding the Soviet régime, that is, the Soviet form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic.
But Kautsky does not understand this truth, so obvious to every worker, because he has forgotten how to put the question: democracy for what class? If he starts from "pure" (does it mean non-class or above-class democracy?) and simply says: without equality of all citizens there can be no democracy, one has to ask the learned Mr Kautsky, the "Marxist" and the "Socialist," the following question: can there be any equality between the exploited and the exploiters? It is monstrous, it is incredible that one should have to ask such a question in discussing a book by the leading thinker of the Second International. But there is no way of escaping from this necessity. In writing about Kautsky one has to explain to him, learned man that he is, why there can be no equality between the exploiters and the exploited.