Lucio Colletti

Power and Democracy in Socialist Society

The basic theme of State and Revolutionthe one that indelibly inscribes itself on the memory, and immediately comes to mind when one thinks of the work is the theme of the revolution as a destructive and violent act. The revolution cannot be restricted to the seizure of power, it must also be the destruction of the old State. The point is whether the old State machine shall remain, or be destroyed, says Lenin.1 Sprengen, zerbrechen, destroy, smash: these words capture the tone of the text. Lenins polemic is not directed against those who do not wish for the seizure of power. The object of his attack is not reformism. On the contrary, it is directed against those who wish for the seizure of power but not for the destruction of the old State as well. The author he aims at is Kautsky. But not, let it be clear, the Kautsky who was to emerge after 1917 (in Terrorism and Communism, for example), but rather the Kautsky of the writings devoted to
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the struggle against opportunism: the Kautsky who wants revolution, and yet does not want the destruction of the old State machine. At first impression the text seems an implacable but sectarian essay, primitive, steeped in Asiatic furya kind of hymn to violence for violences sake. What seems to emerge from it is a reduction of revolution to its most elementary and external features: the capture of the Winter Palace, the Ministry of the Interior in flames, the arrest and execution of the political personnel of the old government. It was precisely this interpretation that ensured the success of State and Revolution throughout the Stalin era, for more than a quarter of a century from 1928 to 1953, not only in Russia but in all the Communist Parties of the world. The revolution is violence. Kautsky is a socialdemocrat because he does not want violence. It is impossible to be a Communist if your aim is not the violent seizure of power. Until 1953, any militant in a Communist Party (the Italian Party included) who had dared to cast doubts on this necessity of violence would have found himself in the same position as anyone today who expresses doubts about the peaceful, parliamentary road. I shall not be so stupid as to suggest that Lenin was against violence. He was in favour of a violent insurrection, just as in June 1917 he had supported the peaceful development of the revolution. He was for one or the other, according to the circumstances. But on one point his thought was immutable: in each and every case, the State machine must be destroyed. The ways in which the revolution can be achieved are to some extent contingent: they depend on a constellation of events which it is useless to discuss beforehand. Nor does the amount of bloodshed in itself indicate the thoroughness of the revolutionary process. The essential point of the revolution, the destruction it cannot forgo (and of which violence is not in itself a sufficient guarantee) is rather the destruction of the bourgeois State as a power separate from and counterposed to the masses, and its replacement by a power of a new type. This is the essential point. According to Lenin, the old State machine must be destroyed because the bourgeois State depends on the separation and alienation of power from the masses. In capitalist society, democracy is, at best, always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation. The majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. All the mechanisms of the bourgeois State are restrictions that exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.2 A socialist revolution that maintained this type of State would keep alive the separation between the masses and power, their dependence and subordination. If the socialization of the means of production means that, emancipating itself from the rule of capital, the society becomes its own master and
1 2

V. I. Lenin: State and Revolution, Selected Works in Three Vo/umes, Vol. II, p. 395. Ibid., pp. 37172.

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brings the productive forces under its own conscious, planned control, the political form in which this economic emancipation can be achieved can only be one axed upon the initiative and self-government of the producers. Here we have the really basic theme of State and Revolution. The destruction of the bourgeois state machine is not the Ministry of the Interior in flames, it is not the barricades. All this may take place, but it is not the essential point. What is essential to the revolution is the destruction of the diaphragm that separates the working classes from power, the emancipation and self-determination of the former, the transmission of power directly into the hands of the people. Marx said that the Commune had proved that the working-class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. It cannot: for the aim of the socialist revolution is not to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another3 but to transfer power directly into the hands of the people and that is impossible if this machine is not first smashed. These few lines require the most serious reflection: the socialist revolution does not consist in transferring from one hand to another the military-bureaucratic machine; the destruction of the militarybureaucratic state machine is, according to Marx, the preliminary condition for every real peoples revolution, and, comments Lenin, a peoples revolution is one in which the mass of the people, its majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rise independently and place on the entire course of the revolution the impress of their own demands, of their attempts to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that is being destroyed.4 The sense of the passage is clear. The destruction of the old machine is the destruction of the limits imposed on democracy by the bourgeois State. It is the passage from a narrow, restricted democracy to full democracy. And, adds Lenin, full democracy is not, qualitatively, the same thing as incomplete democracy. Behind what might seem formally a difference in quantity, what is actually at stake is a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different order.5 The significance of the polemic against Kautsky emerges here too. The clash with Kautsky is important because it reveals a dilemma which has since become the crux of the whole experience of the workers movement after Lenin. Kautsky wished for the seizure of power but not the destruction of the State. What is essential, he said, is purely and simply to take possession of the state machine which is already there, and to use it for ones own ends. Anyone who reflects on the diversity of the two formulae will find, behind the innocent verbal difference, a far more substantial and profound divergence. For Lenin, the revolu3 4

Ibid., pp. 33031. Ibid., pp. 33233. 5 Ibid., p. 335.

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tion is not only the transfer of power from one class to another, it is also the passage from one type of power to another: for him, the two things go together because the working class that seizes power is the working class that governs itself. For Kautsky, on the other hand, the seizure of power does not mean the construction of a new power, but simply the promotion to the use of the old power of the political personnel who represent the working class, but are not themselves the working class. For the former, socialism is the self-government of the masses: in socialism, says Lenin, the mass of the population will rise to the level of taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of affairs. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.6 For the latter, socialism is the management of power in the name of the masses. For Lenin, the socialist revolution has to destroy the old State because it must destroy the difference between governors and governed itself. For Kautsky, the State and its bureaucratic apparatus is not to be destroyed, because bureaucracy, i.e. the difference between governors and governed, cannot be suppressed and will always survive. For Lenin, the revolution is the end of all masters; for Kautsky, it is merely the arrival of a new master. I repeat, the Kautsky against whom Lenin directed this polemic was still a Marxist, holding firmly to the class conception of the State. His political vision, indeed, had a rigidly ouvrierist cast. As with all the Marxism of the Second International, his class position was, in fact, so strict that it often turned into a closed corporatism. What Lenin wrote in opposition to Plekhanov et al., on Marxs concept of the peoples revolution, could easily have been extended to Kautsky as well. And yet, despite its rigid class standpoint, Kautskys idea of power already contained the germ of all his subsequent developments. The State that must not be destroyed but which can be taken over and turned to ones own ends, the military-bureaucratic machine that is not to be dismantled but transferred from one hand to another, is already embryonically a State indifferent in class nature: it is a technical or neutral instrument, a mere means that can do good or ill, according to who controls it and uses it. Hence the theory of the simple seizure, without at the same time the destruction-transformation of power, contains the germ of an interclass theory of the State. Or rather it is a perennial oscillation between two extreme poles: a reckless subjectivism that sees the essence of the revolution and socialism in the promotion to power of particular political personnel, who are, as we know, the party bureaucracy; and an inter-class conception of the State. The first pole gives the so-called Rakosi-type rgime: the dictatorship of the proletariat by decree, which can then in due time evolve towards the conception of . . . the State of the whole people. The second pole gives the mandarins of social-democratic bureaucracy: the Scheidemanns, Lon Blums,
6

Ibid., p. 396.

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Mollets, Wilsons, whowhile serving the bourgeois State, and precisely because they are serving the bourgeois Statebelieve that they are thereby serving the interests of the whole society, the general and common interest. The aim of our political struggle, wrote Kautsky, is the conquest of State power by winning a majority in parliament, and by converting parliament into the master of the government.7 Parliamentevidently has existed hitherto, will continue to exist hereafter, indeed must always exist. Not only is it independent of classes, but even of historical epochs. This is the acme of inter-classism. Kautskys formula (and that of his present-day imitators) does not suggest even as a hypothesis that the parliamentary rgime might be linked in some way to the class structure of bourgeois society. This formula makes tabula rasa of the whole of Marxs critique of the modern representative State. Furthermore, insofar as it is prepared to concede that the parliamentary rgime has any class character whatsoever, it identifies this not in the rgime itself as such but in its abuses: electoral frauds, trasformismo,8 pork-barrelling, sottogoverno,8 etc. It stresses these anomalies all the more willingly in that they allow it to invoke the true parliament, true mirror of the nation, which Togliatti, too, foretold: the only utopianism which the old foxes can envisage. To win a parliamentary majority and convert parliament into the master of the government. The essential question for Kautsky is who is in control in parliament; simply a change, even if a radical one, in the governments political personnel. That it is possible and necessary to go further, that the essential point is precisely to destroy the distinction between governors and governedKautsky cannot even imagine such a thing. His formula is parliament as master of the government; Lenins is the people as masters of the parliamenti.e. the suppression of parliament as such. We must make sure that we understand properly this Leninist critique of the parliamentary system. It is not a primitive and sectarian critique, the impotent critique of Bordiga, the denunciation of parliament as a fraud, of political democracy as a fraud, etc. This latter is the critique that has prevailed historically in the Communist tradition. It is an elementary critique which, failing to give a class analysis of liberal democracy or to grasp the organic way in which its growth is linked to that of the capitalist socio-economic order, denounces parliament and the modern representative State in subjectivist terms as if it were an
p. 397. is the process whereby opposition forces, or their leaders, are absorbed into the ruling elite; the term was first applied to Mazzinis Partito d Azione after the Risorgimento. Sottogoverno is the practice, prevalent in Italy, whereby the party in power bypasses sections of the State administration by setting up parallel bureaucratic organizations directly dependent upon itself. The best-known example is perhaps the Federconsorzi, a farmers union controlled by the Christian Democrat ex-minister Bonomi, which is used as the main source of government finance for Italian farming, and as such is a bastion of their political power.
8 Trasformismo 7 Ibid.,

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institution consciously invented by the ruling class to fool the people (rather as, according to Voltaire, religion is an invention of the priests). The superficiality and impotence of this critique emerges clearly when we remember that from it has descended precisely the nihilistic contempt for the problem of democracy and of the power structure in a socialist society that has permeated the whole experience of Stalinist and postStalinist political circles to this day. In State and Revolution, on the contrary, Lenins critique of parliament succeeds for the first time and, note, for the first time within Lenins own thought (hence the crucial importance of this text, which is far and away his greatest contribution to political theory)in restoring some of the basic lines of Marxs critique of the modern representative State. So much so that, just as on the level of political practice State and Revolution coincides with Lenins first real penetration and discovery of the significance of the soviet (which had first emerged much earlier, during the 1905 Revolution, but which he had long failed to understand), so on the level of political theory State and Revolution coincides with his discovery that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the dictatorship of the party but the Paris Commune, the very same Commune that, even as late as the early months of 1917, Lenin had still regarded as only a form, though an extreme one, of bourgeois democratism. The difference between the two view-points is so radical that whereas in the first case the critique of parliament becomes a critique of democracy, in Lenins case, on the contrary, the critique of parliament, i.e. of liberal or bourgeois democracy, is a critique of the anti-democratic nature of parliamenta critique made in the name of that infinitely fuller (and hence qualitatively different) democracy, the democracy of the soviets, the only democracy that deserves the name of socialist democracy. Marxist literature since Marx knows nothing that could even remotely compete with the seriousness of the critique of parliament contained in State and Revolution; nor, at the same time, anything pervaded with such a profound democratic inspiration as that which animates Lenins text from beginning to end. The imperative mandate, the permanent and constant revocability of representatives by those they represent, the demand for a legislative power which would be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time and in which, hence, the representatives have to work, have to execute their own laws, have themselves to test their results in real life, and to account directly to their constituents.9 All this is no reform of parliament (as imagined in the extremist folklore of some tiny sects, prey to party bureaucracy, but implacable in their denunciations of Lenins parliamentarianism!); it is rather the suppression of parliament, and its replacement by representative organs of a council or soviet type: to refer again to Lenins own words, it is a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different order. Hence the destruction of the State and its replacement by institutions of
9

Ibid., pp. 33839.

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proletarian democracy, i.e. by the self-government of the mass of producers. Lenins line of thought is so rigorous that he does not hesitate to draw the most extreme conclusions from this: the socialist State itselfin so far as socialism (i.e. the first phase of communist society) still has need of a Stateis a remnant of the bourgeois State. The State withers away in so far as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed. But the State has not yet completely withered away, since there still remains the safeguarding of bourgeois right (i.e. of the principle of to each according to his labour rather than according to his needs) which consecrates actual inequality.10 Hence in its first phase, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or traces of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains the narrow horizon of bourgeois right. And since bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of consumption goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois State (for right is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the standards of right), it follows concludes Leninthat under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie!.11 As we see, the level of development of socialism is here measured by the level of development of democracy. The further the withering away of the State has advanced and the self-government of the masses has been extended, the more progress has been made in the transition from socialism to communism. Communism is not the Volga-Don Canal plus the State. It is not swathes of forest windbreaks plus the police, concentration camps and bureaucratic omnipotence. Lenin has a different idea. But precisely because this idea is still today only an idea, we should reject all taboos and speak frankly. State and Revolution was written in August and September 1917 at the height of the revolutionary process. None of Lenins writings have a contemplative character. This is less than ever the case with State and Revolution. Lenin embarked upon it so as to decide what to do in the on-going revolution. He was a realist who did not trust to inspiration, to the political improvisation of the moment, but aspired to act with a full consciousness of what he was doing. This was the moment and this the man of which State and Revolution was born. And yet we only have to look around today to see that the relation between this idea of socialism and socialism as it exists is not much different from the relationship between the Sermon on the Mount and the Vatican. The answer we must acceptbut which we should give thoughtfully and calmly, without dramatizationis the answer we all know: the countries we call socialist are only socialist metaphorically. They are countries which are no longer capitalist. They are countries where all the principal means of production have been nationalized and are state10 11

Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 381.

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ownedbut not socialized, which is quite different. They are those links in the world imperialist chain that have broken and so far this chain has broken at its weakest links. This is true of China, of the peoples democracies, not to speak of the Soviet Union. None of these countries is really socialist, nor could they be. Socialism is not a national process but a world process. This tremendous process which today is above all the disintegration of the world capitalist systemis precisely the process we are living and which, simply in terms of its totally unprecedented proportions, obviously cannot reach harbour in a single day. The process is visible to everybody. Only the purblind concreteness of Social-Democracy, convinced that it will be in the saddle for all time, can grant itself the luxury of ignoring it. This social-democratic illusion is the fate of anyone who thinks the idea of State and Revolution is outdated. There are few writings more timely or more relevant. Lenin is not outdated. National socialism, the construction of socialism in one country, these are outdated. Communism, said Marx, cannot exist as a local event: The proletariat can thus only exist on the world-historical plane, just as communism, its activity, can only have a world-historical existence.12
12

Karl Marx: The German Ideology, London and Moscow 1965, pp. 4647.

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