by Roger Silverman – 7th November 2017.
We revolutionaries are often misrepresented as enemies of democracy. Didn’t the Bolsheviks ban opposition parties, shut down the Constituent Assembly, impose war communism, create a one-party police state…? On the contrary. For instance, far from imposing a one-party state, the first Soviet government was not even a one-party government: it was a coalition with the left SRs. This is not the place to explain the later emergence of a tyrannical Stalinist police state which had nothing in common with Bolshevik traditions. The constant efforts of the enemies of democracy and the working class to ascribe to the Bolsheviks the crimes of their Stalinist gravediggers are a travesty. Let’s examine the attitude of Marxists and specifically the Bolsheviks towards parliament and elections.
First, a word about one of the attributes of Marxism least recognized, often by its own adherents: its modesty. Unlike the assorted sectarians that were their contemporaries, Marx and Engels had never sought to impose a priori utopian fantasies upon the realities of the class struggle; they simply learned from the actual historic experience of the working class and adapted their scientific conclusions accordingly.
It was after all the workers of Paris in the Commune of 1871 who demonstrated to Marx, and not the other way round, the necessity of smashing and replacing the bourgeois state machine rather than simply commandeering it. The workers rose up in the struggle to take hold of their own destiny, and in the course of that experience it was their own collective leap of imagination and improvisation that shaped the form that workers’ power would take. Marx’s genius consisted above all in his ability to watch, to listen and learn from their experience and condense it into theoretical conclusions. All the elements of workers’ democracy – the rotation of administrative duties, the strict limitation on official remuneration, a workers’ militia, Soviets, etc. – these were not devised by Marx or Lenin in their own heads and then imposed on the living reality of the movement; that, after all, is the definition of sectarianism. All these attributes of workers’ democracy were derived from the process of the struggle itself as it unfolded.
Again and again, at the high points of history, it was always the creative energies of workers in struggle which showed the way forward. The mark of the great revolutionaries was their insight in grasping the lessons. There are countless examples. It was the actual course of the Russian revolution which sharpened up Lenin’s earlier incomplete and “algebraic” formulation of its tasks as “a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasantry” into workers’ rule. It was the course of the revolution itself which demonstrated to Trotsky something to which he had previously, as he freely admitted, given inadequate weight: the “imperious necessity” of a centralised Bolshevik Party. We are all constantly reminded of the need to question outworn shibboleths and test them against reality as it unfolds.
Another relevant example: in 1905, it was by their own spontaneous improvisation that the workers in what was still then Saint Petersburg demonstrated in action the crucial role of the Soviets as democratic organs of workers’ power – to the dismay of the local Bolsheviks, who were initially sceptical and distrustful of what they perceived as a threat to their precious “leading role of the party”. Trotsky was its chair, and it was to the lasting credit of Lenin (at that time they belonged to rival factions) that the Bolsheviks were so quick to acknowledge the form of organization that the workers themselves had created.
Flexibility is needed all the more with purely tactical questions. So there’s no single fixed definitive answer to the question: are Marxists for or against participation in parliament?
In 1850 Marx insisted on participation even in rigged elections for the advantages they held: “Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint.”
But twenty years later, when it came to his review of the experiences of the Paris commune, Marx contrasted its incomparably more democratic character to the bourgeois parliamentary system, which he mocked as “deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament”.
Lenin too described“the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism” as being “to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament”.
But over a period of just twelve years, Russia went through a series of political convulsions and upheavals requiring constantly changing kaleidoscopic shifts of tactics. Lenin divided these years into sharply distinct phases: the years of revolution (1905-7), the years of reaction (1907-1910), the years of revival (1910-14), the imperialist war (1914-17), and the second revolution in Russia (February to October 1917). As he explained in relation to this varied experience of the Bolsheviks: “The alternation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle, of the tactics of boycotting parliament and that of participating in parliament, of legal and illegal forms of struggle, and likewise their interrelations and connections – all this was marked by an extraordinary wealth of content.”
And their attitude towards parliament and their corresponding tactics changed accordingly. First let’s examine the Bolsheviks’ attitude towards the Duma: a quasi-parliamentary institution set up by the Tsarist regime as a token concession wrung out of it following the outbreak of the 1905 revolution.
The Duma
The establishment of the Duma was a gain of the 1905 Revolution, a revolution which shook the absolutist state to its foundations. It was a token acknowledgement of the end of personal autocracy, the first hint of accountability. While it failed to overthrow the monarchy and overturn the semi-feudal social relations of Russian life, it did force the Tsar to grant this limited constitutional reform: a legislative assembly.
But from its birth, this state Duma was a deeply undemocratic institution. Rather than being elected on a one-person, one-vote basis, parliamentary representatives were elected separately from each social class – landlords, wealthy city-dwellers, workers and peasants – and the allocation of delegates was heavily weighted towards the rich. There was to be one deputy for every 2,000 landlords, but only one for every 30,000 peasants or 90,000 workers. Moreover, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) – which had split into its Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) wings – was still an illegal organisation, which the Tsarist state constantly clamped down on.
Should revolutionaries have participated? Faced with this monstrous caricature of democracy, the immediate reaction of the entire RSDLP (both factions alike) was: boycott. Lenin faced an uphill struggle trying to win support for participation in elections; not only among groups like the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were exclusively focused on terrorism as the sole weapon to be waged against Tsarism, but also from Lenin’s own comrades.
Lenin argued that despite the rigging of the elections, participation in them would offer real advantages. Since deputies were to be elected separately from each social class, that meant that workers’ deputies had to be elected in all the big factories in every major industrial area. This gave revolutionaries the opportunity to lay out their election programme in front of mass meetings of workers in each of the major workplaces and have their candidates elected by a show of hands – an opportunity that Marxist parties in Western Europe could only dream about. And once socialists were elected to the Duma, they would gain a vital platform in a society in which political discussion was repressed by police surveillance, state violence and the threat of deportation to Siberia.
At first Lenin failed to convince the Bolsheviks to run candidates. But when the first Duma was disbanded in July 1906, after just two months, for Lenin, this abrupt autocratic shutdown of Russia’s first elected assembly was a key moment that shed new light on the realities of Tsarist society: lessons that he would constantly impress upon the Bolshevik parliamentary deputies, until the RSDLP Duma faction was finally outlawed, having agitated against the First World War in 1915.
The main party of the capitalist class, the Cadets, had failed to do anything to defend the first Duma beyond giving pompous speeches in its chamber. Lenin believed this highlighted two important lessons. First, it demonstrated the danger of “parliamentary cretinism”, a term Lenin borrowed from Karl Marx. Secondly, it dramatically underlined Lenin’s thesis that the Russian capitalist class was incapable of leading the sort of bourgeois revolutions that their English and French counterparts had made in the 17th and 18th century to destroy feudalism and smash the power of the old aristocratic ruling classes. The liberal capitalists and their political arm, the Cadets, were simply too scared of the risk of working-class uprisings to lead a movement against the Tsar and the great landowning nobility. Thus Lenin was able to expose the fact that instead of the capitalists leading a bourgeois-democratic revolution to overthrow the feudal aristocracy, it was the task of the working class to take matters into its own hands, in alliance with the peasantry, to overthrow Tsarism. Lenin used the debates in the Duma to expose to the working class the unwillingness of the liberals to confront the aristocracy, and simultaneously to the peasantry the fact that only a revolutionary alliance with the working class could give them the land.
Lenin was thus shown to be a champion of democracy, in the face of the dirty smears that he was an elitist or a despot. Not only did the Bolsheviks grasp with both hands the opportunity to participate in elections, despite the utter rottenness of the Duma, but they also went to great lengths to ensure that their deputies were accountable to the rank and file of the party.
The second Duma lasted little longer than the first; and when it too was dissolved, the question of future participation in the new Duma, which was convened in 1907, became the flashpoint of a new debate. This time Lenin was categorically opposed to participation. He called, not for abstention but for something very different: an active boycott. On the eve of a conference called to reunite the two wings of the party following the earlier split, Lenin welcomed the prospect of unification, but added…
“There is still one point on which the two halves of the Party disagree: the State Duma. All Party members must be clear on this question… Bolsheviks and Mensheviks are agreed that the present Duma is a miserable travesty of popular representation, that this fraud must be exposed, and that preparations must be made for an armed uprising to bring about the convocation of a constituent assembly freely elected by the whole people. The dispute is only about the tactics to be adopted towards the Duma. The Mensheviks say that our Party should take part in the election of delegates and electors. The Bolsheviks advocate an active boycott of the Duma…
What does an active boycott of the Duma mean? Boycott means refusing to take part in the elections. We have no wish to elect either Duma deputies, electors or delegates. Active boycott does not merely mean keeping out of the elections; it also means making extensive use of election meetings for Social-Democratic agitation and organisation. Making use of these meetings means gaining entry to them both legally (by registering in the voters’ lists) and illegally, expounding at them the whole programme and all the views of the socialists, exposing the Duma as a fraud and humbug, and calling for a struggle for a constituent assembly.
Why do we refuse to take part in the elections? Because by taking part in the elections we should involuntarily foster belief in the Duma among the people and thereby weaken the effectiveness of our struggle against this travesty of popular representation. The Duma is not a parliament, it is a ruse employed by the autocracy. We must expose this ruse by refusing to take any part in the elections… The Duma is not a parliament, but a new police fraud.
Because we cannot at present derive any advantage for the Party from the elections. There is no freedom to carry on agitation. The party of the working class is outlawed; its representatives are imprisoned without trial; its newspapers have been closed and its meetings prohibited. The Party cannot legally unfurl its banner at the elections, it cannot publicly nominate its representatives without betraying them to the police. In this situation, our work of agitation and organisation is far better served by making revolutionary use of meetings without taking part in the elections than by taking part in meetings for legal elections…
Down with the Duma! Down with the new police fraud! Citizens! Honour the memory of the fallen Moscow heroes by fresh preparations for an armed uprising! Long live a freely-elected national constituent assembly! Such is our battle-cry; and only the tactics of an active boycott are compatible with it.”
The Constituent Assembly
In 1917, the Bolsheviks had a similarly flexible approach to the constituent assembly. The call for it was a principal demand following the overthrow of Tsarism. A constituent assembly is not just a parliamentary legislative body: it is a special tribunal convened in order to formulate a new constitution. A constituent assembly is an assembly created to constitute a new state apparatus: a constitution.
The constituent assembly figured prominently in the Bolsheviks’ programme in February 1917. They demanded an immediate peace, land to the peasants, workers’ control of the factories, immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly, a truly democratic republic.
Even on October 25th, the first day of the October revolution – at the congress of Soviets which had started with Lenin’s historic announcement that “we will now proceed to the construction of the socialist order” – he continued: “the Soviet government will ensure the convocation of a constituent assembly…”
And, sure enough, elections did take place on 12th November. The early election returns, from the cities of Petrograd and Moscow, gave big majorities to the Bolsheviks; but when results arrived from the provinces it was the Social Revolutionaries, and especially their right wing, who were the winners. The final tally was: SRs 299, Ukrainian SRs 81, Left SRs 39, Bolsheviks 168, Mensheviks 18, Cadets 15, assorted others 83.
How could this have happened: a proletarian insurrection in Petrograd, and an endorsement of the status quo in the provinces? Why was this? Because the provinces were remote from the scene of the decisive battles. Without media communications, and moreover in conditions of mass illiteracy, the participants in the provinces were unaware of the rapidly moving developments in Petrograd and Moscow, and mostly unaware even of the fact of the October revolution. The Right SRs prevailed because the peasantry were far removed from the daily debates and rising consciousness among the workers in the factories and the soldiers in the garrison (who constituted in effect the armed peasantry), whose consciousness had overtaken them by leaps and bounds.
How then in this situation to react? The Bolsheviks were uncertain and irresolute, and Lenin took no part in the discussion; he was himself at first undecided. They were in doubt and divided. The Bolshevik parliamentarian deputies (Kamenev and others) were keen to participate. On December 11th Lenin finally proposed that the Bolshevik delegation be dissolved; but he was overruled.
Lenin went on the offensive. He argued that the inevitable coming clash between the constituent assembly and the congress of Soviets would amount to a confrontation leading to civil war. From being a revolutionary call to arms, the call for a Constituent Assembly had by now been opportunistically taken up by the Cadets and the White generals; it had become objectively a counter-revolutionary slogan. It was the Mensheviks and SRs who were demanding the immediate convocation of the assembly; meanwhile, the forces of armed counter-revolution – the fascist White Guards – were already mobilising their forces.
In parenthesis, it should be noted that far from the caricature of the Bolsheviks as ruthless bloodthirsty tyrants, they were initially hopelessly soft and naïve. The first counter-revolutionary revolt was led by the Cossack General Krasnov. How was the snake defanged? By a friendly visit to their garrison by just two Bolsheviks, who convinced the troops to hold fire pending peaceful negotiations; following which they released Krasnov himself, simply on his assurances that he would not try to subvert the authority of the Soviets. Of course he promptly fled south to mobilise a counter-revolutionary army.
The Constituent Assembly finally met on January 18th 1918. The Bolsheviks immediately proposed a motion: that it duly ratify the measures taken by the Soviet government, thereby legitimising it. This proposal was rejected by 237 votes to 138. The Bolsheviks and Left SRs then walked out, never to return. After a few hours of inconclusive blather, the assembly dispersed… never to reconvene. And public opinion was supremely indifferent.
By now the revolution had far outpaced and overtaken this constitutional trapping. It had become a cheap bauble. In the context of Soviet power and simmering civil war, the Constituent Assembly could now have served only as a rallying center, a war-cry for the counter-revolution. Suddenly every Tsarist and counter-revolutionary and fascist in the world was raising the unfamiliar banner of parliamentary democracy and a Constituent Assembly; everyone from Cossack generals to Winston Churchill, who was soon to spend millions of pounds in the attempt to overthrow workers’ and peasants’ power in Russia. Nowhere did the cry for the Constituent Assembly have any appeal or meet any response from the workers and peasants. They understood who championed it and why. That’s why it was dispersed by the revolutionary regime; and that’s why it was not mourned or missed or even remembered by the people of Russia. The result was inevitable: they rallied ever more firmly around the Soviets and the Soviet regime.
So were the Bolsheviks inconsistent in their approach? Yes – and rightly so! Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks adapted empirically to the rapidly advancing march and progress of the revolution.
In his book Leninism under Lenin, the writer Liebman wrote: “Today it appears to us that each leap forward made by the revolution… transcending its bourgeois limits, intensified its character as a socialist revolution. Lenin, however, hesitated on this point, groping his way, and sometimes contradicting himself… These approximations and varying definitions will surprise only those who wish to see in Lenin an infallible master and omniscient planner… of revolutionary strategy. This he was not. He was not even the real theoretician of the revolution, but merely the ‘maker’ of it. And it was his absorption in practical activity that, doubtless, prevented him in 1917 from deducing theoretical conclusions from the lessons of events. Hence the theoretical hesitancy of his approach to the problem of the Constituent Assembly – which he made up for, and very greatly, by his boldness in practice.”
Liebman may have overstated his case in understating Lenin’s theoretical contribution; but he is absolutely right to underline his flexibility and readiness to adapt to changing circumstances. Quite rightly, as the context of the debate shifted, so too, necessarily, the approach of the Bolsheviks changed accordingly. It was only subsequently, and implicitly, that Lenin in practice even acknowledged Trotsky’s formulation of the tasks of the revolution, as set out in his prophetic earlier writings on the theory of permanent revolution.
Lenin wrote later, with characteristic clarity and simplicity:
“The Bolsheviks began their victorious struggle against Mensheviks in a very cautious manner, and the preparations they made for it were by no means simple…. At the beginning of the period mentioned, we did not proclaim a boycott of the bourgeois parliament, the constituent assembly, but said – and following the April conference of our party began to state officially in the name of the party – that a bourgeois republic with a constituent assembly would be better than a bourgeois republic without a constituent assembly, but that a workers’ and peasants’ republic, a Soviet republic, would be better than any bourgeois-democratic republic.”
So what would replace a bourgeois democratic constitution? Soviet power! And as we said earlier, its principles were not artificially imposed from the sidelines, let alone dictated from on high: they arose from the organic process of the revolution itself. It was in the feverish months of the revolution itself In 1917 – not at some projected promised land of the future, but in the course of the actual living process of history; when Lenin was in hiding following the premature uprising of the “July days” in Petrograd – that Lenin set out, once again not from a preconceived recipe but from actual historical experience, the practical form that workers’ democracy was taking:
No standing army but the armed people!
All officials to be elected by the workers, with direct right of recall!
All officials to receive the wage of a skilled worker!
(Note: in the prevailing conditions, the shortage of skilled technicians, etc., a clearly defined maximum differential of four to one was permitted – a fatal concession which, given the continuing isolation of the Russian revolution, led to the crystallisation of a privileged bureaucratic elite and the monstrosity of Stalinism).
Popular participation in all administrative duties; direct management through soviets (workers’ councils)!
Way above the petty provisions of even the most democratic of republican constitutions, this was a means of running society more rational and creative than any in history.