The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION.
As I have pointed out already, the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie does not constitute a necessary element of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Nor did the Bolsheviks in Russia, when putting forward the demand for such a dictatorship, long before the November revolution anything in advance about the disfranchisement of the exploiters. This particular element of the dictatorship was not born according to a plan conceived by some party, but grew up spontaneously in the course of the fight. Of course, Kautsky, the historian, has not noticed this. He has not perceived that even at the time of the predominance of the Mensheviks, those advocates of a compromise with the bouregoisie, in the Soviets, the bourgeoisie of its own accord separated itself from the Soviets, boycotted them, put itself up and intrigued against them. The Soviets arose without any constitution, and existed for more than twelve months (from the spring of 1917 to the summer of 1918) without any constitution. The rage of the bourgeoisie against these independent and omnipotent (because all-embracing) organizations of the oppressed; the unscrupulous, self-seeking, and dirty fight of the bourgeoisie against the Soviets; and lastly, the overt participation of the bourgeoisie, from the Cadets to the Right Social-Revolutinaries, from Miliukoff to Kerensky in the Korniloff mutiny—all this had prepared the formal exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the Soviets.
Kautsky has heard about this Korniloff business, but majestically snaps his fingers at historical facts and at the course and the forms of the fight which had determined the forms of the dictatorship. Why, indeed, take stock of facts when "pure democracy" is the sole question at issue? Kautsky's criticism directed against the disfranchisement of the bourgeoisie is, therefore, characterized by a sweet naiveté which would have been touching in a child, but which is repulsive in a person who has not yet been officially certified to be feeble-minded.
"If the capitalists under universal suffrage had found themselves an insignificant minority, they would have more easily reconciled themselves to their fate" (p. 33). Is it not charming? Clever Kautsky has seen many instances in history and, of course, knows it perfectly well by observation of real life, that there are plenty of such landlords and capitalists who are ready to obey the will of a majority of the oppressed. Clever Kautsky persists in an attitude of "opposition" that is, in an attitude derived from Parliamentary warfare. He, indeed, textually says "opposition" (p. 34 and elsewhere). Oh, what a learned historian and politican! It would have done him good to know that "opposition" is a conception belonging to the peaceful and Parliamentary warfare only; that is, a conception corresponding to a non-revolutionary situation, to a situation marked by an absence of revolution. But in time of revolution one has to deal with a ruthless enemy, a party in civil war; and no amount of reactionary lamentations on the part of a petty bourgeois, who is afraid of such a war, as Kautsky is, will alter the fact. To view a ruthless civil war when the bourgeoisie is prepared to commit all sorts of crimes (the example of the Versaillese and their deals with Bismarck must have a meaning for every sane person who does not treat history like a Simple Simon) when the bourgeoisie summons to its assistance foreign States, and intrigues with them against the revolution—to consider such a war from the point of view of Parliamentary "opposition" is simply comical. It would appear that, according to Kautsky the muddle-head, the revolutionary proletariat ought to put on a night-cap and treat the bourgeoisie, which is organizing Czecho-Slovak and various Cossack counter-revolutionary insurrections, and which is paying millions to subsidize saboteurs, as a Parliamentary "opposition." What a profound philosophy!
Kautsky is only interested in the formal and legal aspect оf the question, and, when reading his disquistions on the Soviet constitution, one is reminded, of Bebel's word that lawyers are all thorough reactionaries. Kautsky, for instance, writes: "In reality the capitalists alone cannot be disfranchised. What are they, in the legal sense of the term? Property owners? Even in a country so far advanced economically as Germany, where the proletariat is so numerous the establishment of a Soviet republic would have disfranchised large masses of the people. In 1907, in the German Empire, the number of persons occupied in earning a livelihood for themselves and their families in the three great groups, agriculture, industry, and commerce, amounted roughly to thirty-five million wage earners and salaried employees, and seventeen million independent. Hence a party could well be a majority among the wage earners, but a minority of the population" (p. 33).
This is an example of Kautsky's arguments. Is it not the counter-revolutionary whining of a bourgeois? Why have you, Mr. Kautsky, relegated all the independent earners to the class of the disfranchised, when you well know that the overwhelming majority of the Russian peasants do not employ hired labor, and do not, therefore, lose their political rights? Is it not a downright falsification? Why have you not, oh, most learned economist, quoted the facts well known to you, and to be found in the same German statistical return for 1907, relating to hired labor in agriculture according to the size of farms? Why have you not produced for the benefit of the German workers, who are your readers, these facts which would show how very few are exploiters among the total number of "farmers" who figure in the German statistical returns? I will tell you why: because you are a renegade, and have become a sycophant of the bouigeoisie.
"Capitalist," don’t you see, is a vague legal term, and Kautsky thunders forth, for the space of several pages, against the "arbitrariness" of the Soviet constitution. This great scholar permits the British bourgeoisie to elaborate, during several centuries, a new bourgeois constitution, but we, the workers and peasants of Russia, are not to be given any time by this representative of servile science: we must produce a constitution, worked out to the last detail, in the space of a few months!
Arbitrariness! Only think what a depth of meanest subserviency to the bourgeoisie, and of the most idiotic pedantry, is contained in such a reproach. When thoroughly bourgeois and, for the most part, even reactionary jurists of capitalist countries have in the course of, we may almost say, centuries, been drawing up rules and regulations and writing up hundreds of volumes of various codes and laws, and of interpretations of them to oppress the workers, to bind hand and foot of the poor man and to place a hundred and one hindrances and obstacles in the way of the simple and toiling mass of the people—when this is done the bourgeois Liberals and Mr. Kautsky can see no "arbitrariness"! It is all law and order! It has all been thought out and written down, how the poor man is to be kept down and squeezed. There are thousands and thouands of bourgeois lawyers and officials able so to interpret the laws that the worker and average peasant can never break through their barbed wire entanglements. This, of course, is not any arbitrariness; this, of course, is not a dictatorship of the filthy and profit-seeking exploiters who are drinking the blood of the people. Oh, it is nothing of the kind. It is but "pure democracy." which is becoming purer and purer every day. But when the toiling and exploited masses for the first time in history, separated by an Imperialist war from their brothers across the frontier, have constructed their Soviets, have summoned to the work of political construction the classes which the bourgeoisie used to oppress and to stupefy, and begun themselves to build up a new porletarian State, begun, in the midst of raging battles, in the fire of civil-war, to lay down the fundamental principles of a State without exploiters, then all the scoundrels of the bourgeoisie, the entire band of blood-suckers, with Kautsky singing obligato, scream out about arbitrariness! Indeed, how can these workers and peasants, this mob, interpret their own laws? Whence are they to take the sense of justice—they, the common toilers, who are not seeking the assistance of educated lawyers, of bourgeois writers, of the Kautskys, and the wise old bureaucrats?
Mr. Kausky quotes from my speech of April 28th, 1918, the words: "The masses themselves determine the procedure and the time of elections." And Kautsky, the "pure democrat," infers: "Hence it would seem that every assembly of electors may determine the procedure of elections at their own discretion. Arbitrariness and the chance of getting rid of inconvenient oppositional elements within the ranks of the proletariat itself have thus been brought to a high level of perfection" (p. 37).
What is the difference between these remarks and the usual talk of the capitalist hack journalist who howls about the terrorism exercised in time of strikes by the men against the "industrious" and "willing" blacklegs? Why is the bureaucratic and bourgeois method of determining the electoral procedure in a purely bourgeois democracy not, arbitrariness? Why should the sense of justice be lower among the masses who have risen against their age-long exploiters, and who are being educated and hardened by this desperate struggle, than among the handful of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and lawyers brought up in bourgeois prejudices?
Kautsky is a true Socialist. You must not suspect sincerity of this most respectable family man, this most honest citizen. He is an ardent believer in the victory of the working class, in the proletarian revolution. He would only have liked that sweetly reasonable Philistines in night-caps should, in advance—that is, before the masses have begun to move, and before they have engaged in raging battles with the exploiters, and certainly without any civil war—have drawn up a nice and model set of rules for the development of the revolution!
Our most learned Tartuffe tells the German workers, with profound indignation, that on June 14th, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets decided to exclude from the Soviets the representatives of the Socialist Evolutionary and Menshevik parties. "This measure," our Tartuffe says, burning with noble indignation, "is directed not against definite persons guilty of definite punishable offences. … The constitution of the Soviet Republic does not mention the inviolability of the Soviet members at all. It is not definite persons, but definite parties, that have been excluded from the Soviets" (p. 37).
Indeed, it is a most terrible, most intolerable departure from pure democracy, according to whose rules our revolutionary Tartuffe would like to make a revolution. We, Russian Bolsheviks, ought first to have promised inviolability to the Savinkoffs and Co., to the Liebers and Dans and Potressoffs (so-called "Activists"), then to have drawn up a criminal code proclaiming any participation in the Czecho-Slovak counter-revolutionary war, any alliance with the German Imperialists in the Ukraine or in Georgia, against the workers of the country, to be punishable offences, and then, and only then, on the strength of this criminal code, we should have been justified, according to the principles of the bourgeoisie, in excluding from the Soviets "definite individuals." It goes without saying that the Czecho-Slovaks, who were receiving subsidies from Anglo-French capitalists through the medium, or thanks to the agitation, of the Savinkoffs, Pottressoffs, and Liebers, well as the Krasnoffs, who were receiving shells from the Germans through the Ukrainian and Tiflis Mensheviks, would have sat quietly waiting until we were ready with out proper criminal code, and, like the purest democrats, would have confined themselves to the role of an "opposition."
No less indignation has been aroused in Kautsky's breast by the fact that the Soviet constitution disfranchises all those who "employ hired labor with a view to profit." "A home worker or a small master," Kautsky writes, "with one single journeyman, may live and feel quite like a proletarian, but he has no vote!" (p. 36.) What a departure from bourgeois "democracy!" What an act of injustice! Up till now all Marxists thought—and proved it by thousands of facts—that the small masters were most unscrupulous exploiters of hired labor, but our Tartuffe takes not the class of small masters, of course (why keep on always recalling the mischievous theory of class war?), but single individuals, single exploiters, who "live and feel and like proletarians." The famous "thrifty Agnes," who was thought to have been long dead, is risen to life again under Kautsky's pen. This "thrifty Agnes" was invented and set going in German literature a score of years ago by that "pure" democrat, the bourgeois Liberal, Eugen Richter. He was predicting untold calamities from the dictatorship of the proletariat, from the confiscation of the capital of the exploiters, and used to ask with an innocent air, Who was a capitalist in the legal sense of the term? He took as an example the poor, thrifty seamstress, the "thrifty Agnes," who was robbed of her last coppers by the evil-minded proletarian dictators. There was a time when all German Social-Democracy was poking fun at this "thrifty Agnes" of the pure democrat, Eugen Richter. But this was a long, long time ago, when Bebel was still living, who used to tell the truth publicly that there was a large number of Nationalrals in the Socialist ranks; and when Kautsky was not yet a renegade.
But now "thrifty Agnes" has again to come to life, in the person of the "small master, living and feeling like a proletarian," and employing "only one" journeyman. The evil-minded Bolsheviks are hurting him, are taking away from him his vote! It is true that any electoral assembly, as Kautsky tells us, may, in the Soviet Republic admit into its midst a poor "little master" who, for instance, may be connected with this or that factory, if, by way of an exception, he is not an exploiter, and lives and feels like a proletarian. But can one rely upon the knowledge of actual conditions, upon the sense of justice of a factory meeting of common workers who are acting without a written code? Is it not clear that it is preferable to grant the vote to all exploiters, to all those who employ hired labor, than to risk doing wrong in respect of a "thrifty Agnes" and a "small master living and feeling like a proletarian?"
**
Let the contemptible scoundrels of apostasy abuse amidst the applause of the bourgeoisie and the Social Chauvinists,[1] our Soviet constitution for disfranchising the exploiters. This is good, because it will accelerate and deepen the split between the revolutionary workers of Europe and the Scheidemanns and Kautskys, the Renaudels and Longuets, the Hendersons and Macdonalds and all the old leaders and old traitors of Socialism. The masses of the oppressed, the class-conscious and honest leaders of the revolutionary proletariats will be with us Such proletariats and such masses will only have to peruse our Soviet constitution, and they will at once say, here are our real men; here is a real labor party; here is a real workers' government, for it has not gulled the workers by talk about revolutions, as we used to be gulled by those leaders, and is really waging a war against the exploiters, is really carrying on a revolution, is really fighting for the complete emancipation of the working class!
If the exploiters have been disfranchised by the Soviets after twelve months' experience, it means that the Soviets are really organizations of the oppressed masses, and not organizations of Social Imperialists and Social Pacifists, who have sold themselves to the bourgeoisie. If the Soviets have disfranchised the exploiters, it means that they are not organs of petty bourgeois compromise with the capitalists, not parliamentary talking-shops after the heart of the Kautskys and the Macdonalds, but the organs of a real revolutionary proletariat who are waging a life-and-death struggle against the exploiters.
"Kautsky's pamphlet is almost unknown here," a well-informed comrade has written to me from Berlin a couple of days ago (to-day is October 30th). I should advise our ambassadors in Germany and Switzerland not to stint money in buying up this book and in distributing it gratis among the class-conscious workers, in order to trample in the mud the so-called European—that is, the Imperialist and reformist—Social-Democracy, which has long become a whited sepulchre.
**
At the end of his book, on pages 61 and 63, Mr. Kautsky laments over the fact that “the new theory [as he calls Bolshevism, in his fear even to approach the analysis o! the Commune of Paris made by Marx and Engels] "finds supporters even in old democracies, like, for instance, a Switzerland." Kautsky finds it unintelligible "how this theory could also be adopted by German Social-Democrats.
No; it is quite intelligible, as the revolutionary masses after the serious lessons of the war, are getting sick of the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys.
"We" have always been in favor of democracy—Kautsky writes—and all of a sudden we are asked to renounce it! Yes, "we," the opportunists of Social-Democracy, have always been against the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Kolb and Co. proclaimed this long ago. Kautsky knows it, and it is futile for him to imagine that he can hide from the readers the obvious fact of his return to the fold of the Bernsteins and Kolbs.
But "we," revolutionary Marxists, never advised the people to worship so-called "pure"—that is, bourgeois—democracy. In 1903, as is well known, Plekhanoff was still a revolutionary Marxist (up to the time when he took the wrong turning which brought him to the position of a Russian Scheidemann.) Plekhanoff in that year declared at the congress of our party, which was at that time drawing up its programme, that in the revolution the proletariat would, if necessary, disfranchise the capitalists and suppress any parliament, if it should turn out counter-revolutionary. That this view is alone in agreement with Marxism will be clear to anybody from the statements by Marx and Engels which I have quoted above. In fact, it directly follows from all the fundamental principles of Marxism.
"We," revolutionary Marxists, never spoke to the people in the manner beloved of the Kautskians of all nations, who are fond of acting the flunkey to the bourgeoisie, of adapting themselves to the bourgeois parliament, and of keeping discreet silence as to the bourgeois character of modern democracy, and only demanding its extension to the extreme limit.
"We" used to say to the bourgeoisie: you, exploiters and hypocrites, you talk of democracy while placing at every step a thousand and one barriers to prevent the oppressed masses from taking part in politics. We take you at your word, and demand in the interests of those masses the extension of your bourgeois democracy, in order to prepare the masses for revolution, for your overthrow. And if you, exploiters should attempt to offer resistance to our proletarian revolution, we shall ruthlessly suppress you; we shall deprive you of your rights, and, even more we shall not give you any bread, because in our proletarian republic the exploiters will lose their rights, will be deprived of fire and water, as we are Socialists in real earnest, and not in a Scheidemann or Kautskian fashion.
This is how we spoke and shall speak—"we," revolutionary Marxists—and this is why the oppressed masses will be for us and with us, while the Scheidemanns and the Kautskys will be swept into a renegades' dust-hole.
- ↑ I have just read a leader in the "Frankfurter Zeitung," of October 22nd, 1918, enthusiastically reviewing Kautsky's pamphlet. The organ of the Stock Exchange is satisfied and no wonder. At the same time a comrade writes to me from Berlin that "Vorwaerts," the organ of the Scheidemannites. has stated in a special article that it subscribes to almost every line of Kautsky. We congratulate Kautsky heartily. [A similar review has appeared in "The Times"—Trans.]