Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to
depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute a
piece of absolute theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition
and in the conception of its leading political party--the Blanquists--was
the expression of _the dictatorship of the revolutionary city over the
country_. So it was in the great French Revolution; so it would have
been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in the
first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected
on the basis of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more
significant fact--namely, that of the military operations carried on
by the Commune, one city, against peasant France, that is the whole
country. To satisfy the great democrat, Kautsky, the revolutionaries
of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have consulted, by means of
universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to whether it
permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers' bands.
Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the
bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after
Thiers' troops had been evacuated. The bourgeoisie that remained in
Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid of the
revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the
auspices of that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future
would have been inevitable--namely, of the Red Terror. But to console
oneself with the thought that the Central Committee of the National
Guard, under the dictatorship of which--unfortunately a very feeble
and formalist dictatorship--the elections to the Commune were held,
did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is truly to
brush with the shadow of a broom.
Amusing himself by barren analogies, Kautsky benefits by the
circumstance that his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In
Petrograd, in November, 1917, we also elected a Commune (Town Council)
on the basis of the most "democratic" voting, without limitations for
the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted by the bourgeoisie
parties, gave us a crushing majority. The "democratically" elected
Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--_i.e._, placed
the fact of the dictatorship of the proletariat higher than the
"principle" of universal suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved
itself altogether by its own act, in favor of one of the sections of
the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd Soviet--that true father of
the Soviet regime--has upon itself the seal of a formal "democratic"
benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune.[6]
[6] It is not without interest to observe that in the
Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there participated
230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917,
in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the
part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social
Revolutionaries, who had no influence in the capital, there
participated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the
population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November,
1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be
noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more
democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard
carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law
of the empire.
"At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the
Commune. Of these, fifteen were members of the government party
(Thiers), and six were bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to
the Government, but condemned the rising (of the Paris workers).
"The Soviet Republic," Kautsky teaches us, "would never have allowed
such counter-revolutionary elements to stand as candidates, let alone
be elected. The Commune, on the other hand, out of respect for
democracy, did not place the least obstacle in the way of the election
of its bourgeois opponents." (Page 74.)
We have already seen above that here Kautsky completely misses the
mark. First of all, at a similar stage of development of the Russian
Revolution, there did not take place democratic elections to the
Petrograd Commune, in which the Soviet Government placed no obstacle
in the way of the bourgeois parties; and if the Cadets, the S.R.s and
the Mensheviks, who had their press which was openly calling for the
overthrow of the Soviet Government, boycotted the elections, it was
only because at that time they still hoped soon to make an end of us
with the help of armed force. Secondly, no democracy expressing all
classes was actually to be found in the Paris Commune. The bourgeois
deputies--Conservatives, Liberals, Gambettists--found no place in it.
"Nearly all these individuals," says Lavrov, "either immediately or
very soon, left the Council of the Commune. They might have been
representatives of Paris as a free city under the rule of the
bourgeoisie, but were quite out of place in the Council of the
Commune, which, willy-nilly, consistently or inconsistently,
completely or incompletely, did represent the revolution of the
proletariat, and an attempt, feeble though it might be, of building up
forms of society corresponding to that revolution." (Pages 111-112.)
If the Petrograd bourgeoisie had not boycotted the municipal
elections, its representatives would have entered the Petrograd
Council. They would have remained there up to the first Social
Revolutionary and Cadet rising, after which--with the permission or
without the permission of Kautsky--they would probably have been
arrested if they did not leave the Council in good time, as at a
certain moment did the bourgeois members of the Paris Commune. The
course of events would have remained the same: only on their surface
would certain episodes have worked out differently.
In supporting the democracy of the Commune, and at the same time
accusing it of an insufficiently decisive note in its attitude to
Versailles, Kautsky does not understand that the Communal elections,
carried out with the ambiguous help of the "lawful" mayors and
deputies, reflected the hope of a peaceful agreement with Versailles.
This is the whole point. The leaders were anxious for a compromise,
not for a struggle. The masses had not yet outlived their illusions.
Undeserved revolutionary reputations had not yet had time to be
exposed. Everything taken together was called democracy.
"We must rise above our enemies by moral force...." preached Vermorel.
"We must not infringe liberty and individual life...." Striving to
avoid fratricidal war, Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie,
whom hitherto he had so mercilessly exposed, to set up "a lawful
Government, recognized and respected by the whole population of
Paris." The _Journal Officiel_, published under the editorship of
the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding, which
in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each
other, cannot be renewed.... Class antagonism has ceased to exist...."
(March 30.) And, further: "Now all conflicts will be appeased, because
all are inspired with a feeling of solidarity, because never yet was
there so little social hatred and social antagonism." (April 3.)
At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourde, and not without
foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had
"never yet infringed the principle of private property." By this means
they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to
compromise.
"Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least
disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with
what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian
energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its
irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But this enfeebling doctrine was
inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock
legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be
solved without a struggle. "As far as the mass of the population is
concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it was to
a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the
very least, a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract
the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the
proletariat.
The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable
and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed
only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the
senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of
April 6. At this moment, "it was no longer a question of voting,"
writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had become so tragic that there
was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct
functioning of the elections.... All persons devoted to the Commune
were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost
detachments.... The people attributed no importance whatever to these
supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely
parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to
have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the
Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From
these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so
simple to combine class war with interclass democracy.
"The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly," wrote in his book,
Milliere, one of the best brains of the Commune. "It is a military
Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law,
the law of social salvation."
"They could never understand," Lissagaray accuses the leaders, "that
the Commune was a barricade, and not an administration."
They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky
has not understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that
he will ever understand it.
* * * * *
The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its
development it signified the dictatorship of working class Paris over
the peasant country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest.
However much the political doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune
itself, clung to the appearances of democratic legality, every action
of the Commune, though insufficient for victory, was sufficient to
reveal its illegal nature.
The Commune--that is to say, the Paris City Council--repealed the
national law concerning conscription. It called its official organ
_The Official Journal of the French Republic_. Though cautiously,
it still laid hands on the State Bank. It proclaimed the separation of
Church and State, and abolished the Church Budgets. It entered into
relations with various embassies. And so on, and so on. It did all
this in virtue of the revolutionary dictatorship. But Clemenceau,
young democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue.
At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: "The
rising had an unlawful beginning.... Soon the Committee will become
ridiculous, and its decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not
the right to rise against France, and must unconditionally accept the
authority of the Assembly."
The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National Assembly.
Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. To-day Kautsky seeks to
discover for its criminal intentions some mitigating circumstances.
He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the
National Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent
Assembly had against us ... Socialists, in the persons of the S.R.s,
and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the
Mensheviks and the S.R.s, but forgets our sole serious foe--the
Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party--_i.e._,
a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor
Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the "little great man." Very soon
indeed--long before the October Revolution--Miliukov began to seek his
Gallifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in
turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and
had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole
serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and
through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary
devoted more sympathy to him than before.
The Mensheviks and the S.R.s played no independent role amongst
us--just like Kautsky's party during the revolutionary events
in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with
the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate
quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The
Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an
intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings
and elections, the political confidence of the masses awakened
by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the
counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets--independently
of the issue of the elections.
The purely vassal-like dependence of the S.R.s and Menshevik _majority_
on the Cadet _minority_ itself represented a very thinly-veiled
insult to the idea of "democracy." But this is not all.
In all districts of the country where the regime of "democracy" lived
too long, it inevitably ended in an open _coup d'etat_ of the
counter-revolution. So it was in the Ukraine, where the democratic
Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to German imperialism, found
itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky. So it was in the
Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of
Denikin. So it was--and this was the most important experiment of our
"democracy"--in Siberia, where the Constituent Assembly, with the
formal supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of
the Bolsheviks, and the _de facto_ guidance of the Cadets, led in
the end to the dictatorship of the Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was,
finally, in the north, where the Constituent Assembly government of
the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became merely a tinsel
decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian and
British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States--in Finland,
Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia--where, under
the formal banner of "democracy," there is being consolidated the
supremacy of the landlords, the capitalists, and the foreign
militarists.