It is not for nothing that the word "democracy" has a double meaning
in the political vocabulary. On the one hand, it means a state system
founded on universal suffrage and the other attributes of formal
"popular government." On the other hand, by the word "democracy" is
understood the mass of the people itself, in so far as it leads a
political existence. In the second sense, as in the first, the meaning
of democracy rises above class distinctions. This peculiarity of
terminology has its profound political significance. Democracy as a
political system is the more perfect and unshakable the greater is the
part played in the life of the country by the intermediate and less
differentiated mass of the population--the lower middle-class of the
town and the country. Democracy achieved its highest expression in the
nineteenth century in Switzerland and the United States of North
America. On the other side of the ocean the democratic organization of
power in a federal republic was based on the agrarian democracy of the
farmers. In the small Helvetian Republic, the lower middle-classes of
the towns and the rich peasantry constituted the basis of the
conservative democracy of the united cantons.
Born of the struggle of the Third Estate against the powers of
feudalism, the democratic State very soon becomes the weapon of defence
against the class antagonisms generated within bourgeois society.
Bourgeois society succeeds in this the more, the wider beneath it is
the layer of the lower middle-class, the greater is the importance of
the latter in the economic life of the country, and the less advanced,
consequently, is the development of class antagonism. However, the
intermediate classes become ever more and more helplessly behind
historical development, and, thereby, become ever more and more
incapable of speaking in the name of the nation. True, the lower
middle-class doctrinaires (Bernstein and Company) used to demonstrate
with satisfaction that the disappearance of the middle-classes was not
taking place with that swiftness that was expected by the Marxian
school. And, in reality, one might agree that, numerically, the
middle-class elements in the town, and especially in the country, still
maintain an extremely prominent position. But the chief meaning of
evolution has shown itself in the decline in importance on the part of
the middle-classes from the point of view of production: the amount of
values which this class brings to the general income of the nation has
fallen incomparably more rapidly than the numerical strength of the
middle-classes. Correspondingly, falls their social, political, and
cultural importance. Historical development has been relying more and
more, not on these conservative elements inherited from the past, but
on the polar classes of society--_i.e._, the capitalist bourgeoisie and
the proletariat.
The more the middle-classes lost their social importance, the less they
proved capable of playing the part of an authoritative arbitral judge
in the historical conflict between capital and labor. Yet the very
considerable numerical proportion of the town middle-classes, and still
more of the peasantry, continues to find direct expression in the
electoral statistics of parliamentarism. The formal equality of all
citizens as electors thereby only gives more open indication of the
incapacity of democratic parliamentarism to settle the root questions
of historical evolution. An "equal" vote for the proletariat, the
peasant, and the manager of a trust formally placed the peasant in the
position of a mediator between the two antagonists; but, in reality,
the peasantry, socially and culturally backward and politically
helpless, has in all countries always provided support for the most
reactionary, filibustering, and mercenary parties which, in the long
run, always supported capital against labor.
Absolutely contrary to all the prophecies of Bernstein, Sombart,
Tugan-Baranovsky, and others, the continued existence of the middle
classes has not softened, but has rendered to the last degree
acute, the revolutionary crisis of bourgeois society. If the
proletarianization of the lower middle-classes and the peasantry had
been proceeding in a chemically purified form, the peaceful conquest
of power by the proletariat through the democratic parliamentary
apparatus would have been much more probable than we can imagine at
present. Just the fact that was seized upon by the partisans of the
lower middle-class--its longevity--has proved fatal even for the
external forms of political democracy, now that capitalism has
undermined its essential foundations. Occupying in parliamentary
politics a place which it has lost in production, the middle-class has
finally compromised parliamentarism, and has transformed it into an
institution of confused chatter and legislative obstruction. From this
fact alone, there grew up before the proletariat the problem of
seizing the apparatus of state power as such, independently of the
middle-class, and even against it--not against its interests, but
against its stupidity and its policy, impossible to follow in its
helpless contortions.
"Imperialism," wrote Marx of the Empire of Napoleon III, "is the most
prostituted, and, at the same time, perfected form of the state which
the bourgeoisie, having attained its fullest development, transforms
into a weapon for the enslavement of labor by capital." This definition
has a wider significance than for the French Empire alone, and includes
the latest form of imperialism, born of the world conflict between the
national capitalisms of the great powers. In the economic sphere,
imperialism pre-supposed the final collapse of the rule of the
middle-class; in the political sphere, it signified the complete
destruction of democracy by means of an internal molecular
transformation, and a universal subordination of all democracy's
resources to its own ends. Seizing upon all countries, independently of
their previous political history, imperialism showed that all political
prejudices were foreign to it, and that it was equally ready and
capable of making use, after their transformation and subjection, of
the monarchy of Nicholas Romanoff or Wilhelm Hohenzollern, of the
presidential autocracy of the United States of North America, and of
the helplessness of a few hundred chocolate legislators in the French
parliament. The last great slaughter--the bloody font in which the
bourgeois world attempted to be re-baptised--presented to us a picture,
unparalleled in history, of the mobilization of all state forms,
systems of government, political tendencies, religious, and schools of
philosophy, in the service of imperialism. Even many of those pedants
who slept through the preparatory period of imperialist development
during the last decades, and continued to maintain a traditional
attitude towards ideas of democracy and universal suffrage, began to
feel during the war that their accustomed ideas had become fraught with
some new meaning. Absolutism, parliamentary monarchy, democracy--in the
presence of imperialism (and, consequently, in the presence of the
revolution rising to take its place), all the state forms of bourgeois
supremacy, from Russian Tsarism to North American quasi-democratic
federalism, have been given equal rights, bound up in such combinations
as to supplement one another in an indivisible whole. Imperialism
succeeded by means of all the resources it had at its disposal,
including parliamentarism, irrespective of the electoral arithmetic of
voting, to subordinate for its own purposes at the critical moment the
lower middle-classes of the towns and country and even the upper layers
of the proletariat. The national idea, under the watchword of which the
Third Estate rose to power, found in the imperialist war its rebirth in
the watchword of national defence. With unexpected clearness, national
ideology flamed up for the last time at the expense of class ideology.
The collapse of imperialist illusions, not only amongst the vanquished,
but--after a certain delay--amongst the victorious also, finally laid
low what was once national democracy, and, with it, its main weapon,
the democratic parliament. The flabbiness, rottenness, and helplessness
of the middle-classes and their parties everywhere became evident with
terrifying clearness. In all countries the question of the control of
the State assumed first-class importance as a question of an open
measuring of forces between the capitalist clique, openly or secretly
supreme and disposing of hundreds of thousands of mobilized and
hardened officers, devoid of all scruple, and the revolting,
revolutionary proletariat; while the intermediate classes were living
in a state of terror, confusion, and prostration. Under such
conditions, what pitiful nonsense are speeches about the peaceful
conquest of power by the proletariat by means of democratic
parliamentarism!
The scheme of the political situation on a world scale is quite clear.
The bourgeoisie, which has brought the nations, exhausted and bleeding
to death, to the brink of destruction--particularly the victorious
bourgeoisie--has displayed its complete inability to bring them out of
their terrible situation, and, thereby, its incompatibility with the
future development of humanity. All the intermediate political groups,
including here first and foremost the social-patriotic parties, are
rotting alive. The proletariat they have deceived is turning against
them more and more every day, and is becoming strengthened in its
revolutionary convictions as the only power that can save the peoples
from savagery and destruction. However, history has not at all
secured, just at this moment, a formal parliamentary majority on the
side of the party of the social revolution. In other words, history
has not transformed the nation into a debating society solemnly voting
the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On the
contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely
because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a
road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist
bourgeois calculates: "while I have in my hands lands, factories,
workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers, universities, schools;
while--and this most important of all--I retain control of the army:
the apparatus of democracy, however you reconstruct it, will remain
obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the
stupid, conservative, characterless lower middle-class, just as it
is subjected to me materially. I oppress, and will oppress, its
imagination by the gigantic scale of my buildings, my transactions, my
plans, and my crimes. For moments when it is dissatisfied and murmurs,
I have created scores of safety-valves and lightning-conductors. At
the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which
will disappear to-morrow, but which to-day accomplish their mission by
affording the possibility of the lower middle-class expressing their
indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism. I shall hold the
masses of the people, under cover of compulsory general education, on
the verge of complete ignorance, giving them no opportunity of rising
above the level which my experts in spiritual slavery consider safe. I
will corrupt, deceive, and terrorize the more privileged or the more
backward of the proletariat itself. By means of these measures, I
shall not allow the vanguard of the working class to gain the ear of
the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of
mastery and terrorism remain in my hands."
To this the revolutionary proletarian replies: "Consequently, the
first condition of salvation is to tear the weapons of domination out
of the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful
arrival to power while the bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the
apparatus of power. Three times over hopeless is the idea of coming to
power by the path which the bourgeoisie itself indicates and, at the
same time, barricades--the path of parliamentary democracy. There is
only one way: to seize power, taking away from the bourgeoisie the
material apparatus of government. Independently of the superficial
balance of forces in parliament, I shall take over for social
administration the chief forces and resources of production. I shall
free the mind of the lower middle-class from their capitalist
hypnosis. I shall show them in practice what is the meaning of
Socialist production. Then even the most backward, the most ignorant,
or most terrorized sections of the nation will support me, and
willingly and intelligently will join in the work of social
construction."
When the Russian Soviet Government dissolved the Constituent Assembly,
that fact seemed to the leading Social-Democrats of Western Europe, if
not the beginning of the end of the world, at all events a rude and
arbitrary break with all the previous developments of Socialism. In
reality, it was only the inevitable outcome of the new position
resulting from imperialism and the war. If Russian Communism was the
first to enter the path of casting up theoretical and practical
accounts, this was due to the same historical reasons which forced the
Russian proletariat to be the first to enter the path of the struggle
for power.
All that has happened since then in Europe bears witness to the fact
that we drew the right conclusion. To imagine that democracy can be
restored in its general purity means that one is living in a pitiful,
reactionary utopia.