Feeling the historical ground shaking under his feet on the question
of democracy, Kautsky crosses to the ground of metaphysics. Instead of
inquiring into what is, he deliberates about what ought to be.
The principles of democracy--the sovereignty of the people, universal
and equal suffrage, personal liberties--appear, as presented to him,
in a halo of moral duty. They are turned from their historical meaning
and presented as unalterable and sacred things-in-themselves. This
metaphysical fall from grace is not accidental. It is instructive that
the late Plekhanov, a merciless enemy of Kantism at the best period of
his activity, attempted at the end of his life, when the wave of
patriotism had washed over him, to clutch at the straw of the
categorical imperative.
That real democracy with which the German people is now making
practical acquaintance Kautsky confronts with a kind of ideal
democracy, as he would confront a common phenomenon with the
thing-in-itself. Kautsky indicates with certitude not one country in
which democracy is really capable of guaranteeing a painless
transition to Socialism. But he does know, and firmly, that such
democracy ought to exist. The present German National Assembly, that
organ of helplessness, reactionary malice, and degraded solicitations,
is confronted by Kautsky with a different, real, true National
Assembly, which possesses all virtues--excepting the small virtue of
reality.
The doctrine of formal democracy is not scientific Socialism, but the
theory of so-called natural law. The essence of the latter consists in
the recognition of eternal and unchanging standards of law, which
among different peoples and at different periods find a different,
more or less limited and distorted expression. The natural law of the
latest history--_i.e._, as it emerged from the middle ages--included
first of all a protest against class privileges, the abuse of despotic
legislation, and the other "artificial" products of feudal positive
law. The theoreticians of the, as yet, weak Third Estate expressed its
class interests in a few ideal standards, which later on developed
into the teaching of democracy, acquiring at the same time an
individualist character. The individual is absolute; all persons have
the right of expressing their thoughts in speech and print; every man
must enjoy equal electoral rights. As a battle cry against feudalism,
the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on,
however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal
democracy) began to show its reactionary side--the establishment of an
ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and
the revolutionary parties.
If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the
theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian
spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to
the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in
this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly
tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became
for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave
found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded
condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation.
Christianity told him:--"You have an immortal soul, although you
resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the
same Christianity said:--"Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your
immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the
voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical
Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst
different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other
religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the
oppressed masses.
Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the
worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their
origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal
right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion
revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a
condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property
qualification. But the longer it went on, the more it sent the
consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation:
for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal
right in determining the fate of the nation?
Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the
gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary
elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name,
sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders
through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as
a trustee of the nation's sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in
the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in
the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life,
people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated
at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere
of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions
disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal
shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian,
the minister, the bootblack--all are equal as "citizens" and as
"legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step
down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality
of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic
foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life
remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal
right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the
parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace
which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven.
In the practical interests of the development of the working class,
the Socialist Party took its stand at a certain period on the path of
parliamentarism. But this did not mean in the slightest that it
accepted in principle the metaphysical theory of democracy, based on
extra-historical, super-class rights. The proletarian doctrines
examined democracy as the instrument of bourgeois society entirely
adapted to the problems and requirements of the ruling classes; but as
bourgeois society lived by the labor of the proletariat and could not
deny it the legalization of a certain part of its class struggle
without destroying itself, this gave the Socialist Party the
possibility of utilizing, at a certain period, and within certain
limits, the mechanism of democracy, without taking an oath to do so as
an unshakable principle.
The root problem of the party, at all periods of its struggle, was to
create the conditions for real, economic, living equality for mankind
as members of a united human commonwealth. It was just for this reason
that the theoreticians of the proletariat had to expose the
metaphysics of democracy as a philosophic mask for political
mystification.
The democratic party at the period of its revolutionary enthusiasm,
when exposing the enslaving and stupefying lie of church dogma,
preached to the masses:--"You are lulled to sleep by promises of
eternal bliss at the end of your life, while here you have no rights
and you are bound with the chains of tyranny." The Socialist Party, a
few decades later, said to the same masses with no less right:--"You
are lulled to sleep with the fiction of civic equality and political
rights, but you are deprived of the possibility of realizing those
rights. Conditional and shadowy legal equality has been transformed
into the convicts' chain with which each of you is fastened to the
chariot of capitalism."
In the name of its fundamental task, the Socialist Party mobilized the
masses on the parliamentary ground as well as on others; but nowhere
and at no time did any party bind itself to bring the masses to
Socialism only through the gates of democracy. In adapting ourselves
to the parliamentary regime, we stopped at a theoretical exposure of
democracy, because we were still too weak to overcome it in practice.
But the path of Socialist ideas which is visible through all
deviations, and even betrayals, foreshadows no other outcome but this:
to throw democracy aside and replace it by the mechanism of the
proletariat, at the moment when the latter is strong enough to carry
out such a task.
We shall bring one piece of evidence, albeit a sufficiently striking
one. "Parliamentarism," wrote Paul Lafargue in the Russian review,
_Sozialdemokrat_, in 1888, "is a system of government in which the
people acquires the illusion that it is controlling the forces of the
country itself, when, in reality, the actual power is concentrated in
the hands of the bourgeoisie--and not even of the whole bourgeoisie,
but only of certain sections of that class. In the first period of its
supremacy the bourgeoisie does not understand, or, more correctly,
does not feel, the necessity for making the people believe in the
illusion of self-government. Hence it was that all the parliamentary
countries of Europe began with a limited franchise. Everywhere the
right of influencing the policy of the country by means of the
election of deputies belonged at first only to more or less large
property holders, and was only gradually extended to less substantial
citizens, until finally in some countries it became from a privilege
the universal right of all and sundry.
"In bourgeois society, the more considerable becomes the amount of
social wealth, the smaller becomes the number of individuals by whom
it is appropriated. The same takes place with power: in proportion as
the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the
number of elected rulers increases, the actual power is concentrated
and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of
individuals." Such is the secret of the majority.
For the Marxist, Lafargue, parliamentarism remains as long as the
supremacy of the bourgeoisie remains. "On the day," writes Lafargue,
"when the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will
have to organize a revolutionary government, and govern society as a
dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class."
Kautsky in his time knew this Marxist estimate of parliamentarism, and
more than once repeated it himself, although with no such Gallic
sharpness and lucidity. The theoretical apostasy of Kautsky lies just
in this point: having recognized the principle of democracy as
absolute and eternal, he has stepped back from materialist dialectics
to natural law. That which was exposed by Marxism as the passing
mechanism of the bourgeoisie, and was subjected only to temporary
utilization with the object of preparing the proletarian revolution,
has been newly sanctified by Kautsky as the supreme principle standing
above classes, and unconditionally subordinating to itself the methods
of the proletarian struggle. The counter-revolutionary degeneration of
parliamentarism finds its most perfect expression in the deification
of democracy by the decaying theoreticians of the Second
International.