Colletti, Lucio - Power and Democracy in Socialist Society

8/12/2019 Colletti, Lucio - Power and Democracy in Socialist Society

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Lucio Colletti

Power and Democracyin 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 forviolences sake. What seems to emerge from it is a reduction ofrevolution to its most elementary and external features: the capture

of the Winter Palace, the Ministry of the Interior in flames, the arrestand execution of the political personnel of the old government. It wasprecisely this interpretation that ensured the success of State and

Revolution throughout the Stalin era, for more than a quarter of acentury from 1928 to 1953, not only in Russia but in all the CommunistParties of the world. The revolution is violence. Kautsky is a social-democrat because he does not want violence. It is impossible to be aCommunist if your aim is not the violent seizure of power. Until 1953,any militant in a Communist Party (the Italian Party included) who haddared to cast doubts on this necessity of violence would have foundhimself in the same position as anyone today who expresses doubtsabout 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 hadsupported the peaceful development of the revolution. He was for oneor the other, according to the circumstances. But on one point histhought was immutable: in each and every case, the State machine mustbe destroyed.

The ways in which the revolution can be achieved are to some extentcontingent: they depend on a constellation of events which it is uselessto discuss beforehand. Nor does the amount of bloodshed in itselfindicate the thoroughness of the revolutionary process. The essentialpoint of the revolution, the destruction it cannot forgo (and of whichviolence is not in itself a sufficient guarantee) is rather the destruction ofthe bourgeois State as a power separate from and counterposed to themasses, and its replacement by a power of a new type. This is theessential point.

According to Lenin, the old State machine must be destroyed becausethe bourgeois State depends on the separation and alienation of powerfrom the masses. In capitalist society, democracy is, at best, alwayshemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation. Themajority of the population is debarred from participation in publicand political life. All the mechanisms of the bourgeois State arerestrictions that exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, fromactive participation in democracy.2 A socialist revolution that main-tained 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, emancipatingitself from the rule of capital, the society becomes its own master and

1 V. I. Lenin: State and Revolution,Selected Works in Three Vo/umes, Vol. II, p. 395.2 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 achievedcan only be one axed upon the initiative and self-government of theproducers.

Here we have the really basic theme of State and Revolution. Thedestruction 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 revolutionis the destruction of the diaphragm that separates the working classesfrom power, the emancipation and self-determination of the former,the transmission of power directly into the hands of the people. Marxsaid that the Commune had proved that the working-class cannotsimply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for itsown purposes. It cannot: for the aim of the socialist revolution isnot to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand toanother3 but to transfer power directly into the hands of the peopleand that is impossible if this machine is not first smashed.

These few lines require the most serious reflection: the socialistrevolution does not consist in transferring from one hand to anotherthe military-bureaucratic machine; the destruction of the military-bureaucratic state machine is, according to Marx, the preliminarycondition for every real peoples revolution, and, comments Lenin, apeoples revolution is one in which the mass of the people, itsmajority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and

exploitation, rise independently and place on the entire course of therevolution the impress of their own demands, of their attempts to buildin their own way a new society in place of the old society that isbeing destroyed.4

The sense of the passage is clear. The destruction of the old machineis the destruction of the limits imposed on democracy by the bourgeoisState. It is the passage from a narrow, restricted democracy to fulldemocracy. 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 giganticreplacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a funda-mentally different order.5

The significance of the polemic against Kautsky emerges here too. Theclash with Kautsky is important because it reveals a dilemma whichhas since become the crux of the whole experience of the workersmovement after Lenin. Kautsky wished for the seizure of power butnot the destruction of the State. What is essential, he said, is purely andsimply to take possession of the state machine which is already there,

and to use it for ones own ends. Anyone who reflects on the diversityof the two formulae will find, behind the innocent verbal difference, afar more substantial and profound divergence. For Lenin, the revolu-

3 Ibid., pp. 33031.4 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 alsothe passage from one type of power to another: for him, the two things gotogether because the working class that seizes power is the workingclass that governs itself. For Kautsky, on the other hand, the seizure ofpower does not mean the construction of a new power, but simply thepromotion to the use of the old power of the political personnel whorepresent the working class, but are not themselves the working class.

For the former, socialism is the self-government of the masses: insocialism, says Lenin, the mass of the population will rise to the levelof taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but alsoin the everyday administration of affairs. Under socialismall will governin turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.6

For the latter, socialism is the management of power in the name of themasses. For Lenin, the socialist revolution has to destroy the old Statebecause it must destroy the difference between governors and governed itself.For Kautsky, the State and its bureaucratic apparatus is not to be des-troyed, because bureaucracy, i.e. the difference between governorsand governed, cannot be suppressed and will always survive. ForLenin, the revolution is the end of all masters; for Kautsky, it is merelythe arrival of a new master.

I repeat, the Kautsky against whom Lenin directed this polemic wasstill a Marxist, holding firmly to the class conception of the State.His political vision, indeed, had a rigidly ouvrierist cast. As with all theMarxism of the Second International, his class position was, in fact,

so strict that it often turned into a closed corporatism. What Leninwrote in opposition to Plekhanov et al., on Marxs concept of thepeoples revolution, could easily have been extended to Kautsky aswell.

And yet, despite its rigid class standpoint, Kautskys idea of poweralready contained the germ of all his subsequent developments. TheState that must not be destroyed but which can be taken over and turnedto ones own ends, the military-bureaucratic machine that is not to bedismantled but transferred from one hand to another, is already

embryonically a State indifferent in class nature: it is a technical orneutral instrument, a mere means that can do good or ill, according towho controls it and uses it.

Hence the theory of the simple seizure, without at the same time thedestruction-transformation of power, contains the germ of an interclasstheory of the State. Or rather it is a perennial oscillation between twoextreme poles: a reckless subjectivism that sees the essence of therevolution 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-calledRakosi-type rgime: the dictatorship of the proletariat by decree,which can then in due time evolve towards the conception of . . . theState of the whole people. The second pole gives the mandarins ofsocial-democratic bureaucracy: the Scheidemanns, Lon Blums,

6 Ibid., p. 396.

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Mollets, Wilsons, whowhile serving the bourgeois State, andprecisely because they are serving the bourgeois Statebelieve thatthey are thereby serving the interests of the whole society, the generaland common interest.

The aim of our political struggle, wrote Kautsky, is the conquestof State power by winning a majority in parliament, and by converting

parliament into the master of the government.7 Parliamentevidentlyhas existed hitherto, will continue to exist hereafter, indeed mustalways exist. Not only is it independent of classes, but even of historicalepochs. This is the acme of inter-classism. Kautskys formula (and thatof his present-day imitators) does not suggest even as a hypothesis thatthe parliamentary rgime might be linked in some way to the classstructure of bourgeois society. This formula makes tabula rasa of thewhole of Marxs critique of the modern representative State. Further-more, insofar as it is prepared to concede that the parliamentaryrgime has any class character whatsoever, it identifies this not in thergime 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 toinvoke the true parliament, true mirror of the nation, whichTogliatti, too, foretold: the only utopianism which the old foxescan envisage.

To win a parliamentary majority and convert parliament into the

master of the government. The essential question for Kautsky is who isin control in parliament; simply a change, even if a radical one, in thegovernments political personnel. That it is possible and necessary togo further, that the essential point is precisely to destroy the distinctionbetween governors and governedKautsky cannot even imaginesuch a thing. His formula is parliament as master of the government;Lenins is the people as masters of the parliamenti.e. the suppressionof 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 afraud, of political democracy as a fraud, etc. This latter is the critiquethat has prevailed historically in the Communist tradition. It is anelementary critique which, failing to give a class analysis of liberaldemocracy or to grasp the organic way in which its growth is linked tothat of the capitalist socio-economic order, denounces parliament andthe modern representative State in subjectivist terms as if it were an

7 Ibid., p. 397.8 Trasformismo is the process whereby opposition forces, or their leaders, are absorbedinto the ruling elite; the term was first applied to Mazzinis Partito dAzione afterthe Risorgimento. Sottogoverno is the practice, prevalent in Italy, whereby the partyin power bypasses sections of the State administration by setting up parallel bureau-cratic organizations directly dependent upon itself. The best-known example isperhaps the Federconsorzi, a farmers union controlled by the Christian Democratex-minister Bonomi, which is used as the main source of government finance forItalian farming, and as such is a bastion of their political power.

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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 whenwe remember that from it has descended precisely the nihilistic con-tempt for the problem of democracy and of the power structure in a socialistsociety that has permeated the whole experience of Stalinist and post-Stalinist political circles to this day. In State and Revolution, on the

contrary, Lenins critique of parliament succeeds for the first timeand, note, for the first time within Lenins own thought (hence thecrucial importance of this text, which is far and away his greatestcontribution to political theory)in restoring some of the basic lines ofMarxs critique of the modern representative State. So much so that,just as on the level of political practice State and Revolution coincideswith Lenins first real penetration and discovery of the significance ofthe soviet (which had first emerged much earlier, during the 1905Revolution, but which he had long failed to understand), so on thelevel of political theory State and Revolution coincides with his dis-covery that the dictatorship of the proletariat is not the dictatorshipof the party but the Paris Commune, the very same Commune that,even as late as the early months of 1917, Lenin had still regarded asonly a form, though an extreme one, of bourgeois democratism.

The difference between the two view-points is so radical that whereasin the first case the critique of parliament becomes a critique ofdemocracy, 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 infinitelyfuller (and hence qualitatively different) democracy, the democracy ofthe soviets, the only democracy that deserves the name of socialistdemocracy.

Marxist literature since Marx knows nothing that could even remotelycompete with the seriousness of the critique of parliament contained in

State and Revolution; nor, at the same time, anything pervaded with sucha profound democratic inspiration as that which animates Leninstext from beginning to end. The imperative mandate, the permanent

and constant revocability of representatives by those they represent, thedemand for a legislative power which would be a working, not aparliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time andin which, hence, the representatives have to work, have to executetheir own laws, have themselves to test their results in real life, and toaccount directly to their constituents.9 All this is no reform ofparliament (as imagined in the extremist folklore of some tiny sects,prey to party bureaucracy, but implacable in their denunciations ofLenins parliamentarianism!); it is rather the suppression of parliament,and its replacement by representative organs of a council or soviettype: to refer again to Lenins own words, it is a gigantic replacementof certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally differentorder.

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 pro-ducers. Lenins line of thought is so rigorous that he does not hesitateto draw the most extreme conclusions from this: the socialist Stateitselfin so far as socialism (i.e. the first phase of communist society)still has need of a Stateis a remnant of the bourgeois State. TheState 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 safe-guarding of bourgeois right (i.e. of the principle of to each ac-cording to his labour rather than according to his needs) whichconsecrates actual inequality.10 Hence in its first phase, communismcannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free fromtraditions or traces of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenonthat communism in its first phase retains the narrow horizon ofbourgeois right. And since bourgeois right in regard to the distribu-tion of consumption goods inevitably presupposes the existence of thebourgeois State (for right is nothing without an apparatus capable ofenforcing the observance of the standards of right), it followsconcludes Leninthat under communism there remains for a time notonly bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois State without thebourgeoisie!.11

As we see, the level of development of socialism is here measured bythe level of development of democracy. The further the witheringaway of the State has advanced and the self-government of the masseshas been extended, the more progress has been made in the transition

from socialism to communism. Communism is not the Volga-DonCanal plus the State. It is not swathes of forest windbreaks plus thepolice, concentration camps and bureaucratic omnipotence. Lenin has adifferent idea. But precisely because this idea is still today only anidea, we should reject all taboos and speak frankly.

State and Revolution was written in August and September 1917 atthe height of the revolutionary process. None of Lenins writings have acontemplative 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 toinspiration, to the political improvisation of the moment, but aspiredto act with a full consciousness of what he was doing. This was themoment and this the man of whichState and Revolution was born. Andyet we only have to look around today to see that the relation betweenthis idea of socialism and socialism as it exists is not much differentfrom the relationship between the Sermon on the Mount and theVatican.

The answer we must acceptbut which we should give thoughtfully

and calmly, without dramatizationis the answer we all know: thecountries we call socialist are only socialist metaphorically. They arecountries which are no longer capitalist. They are countries where all theprincipal means of production have been nationalized and are state-

10 Ibid., p. 378.11 Ibid., p. 381.

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ownedbut not socialized, which is quite different. They are thoselinks in the world imperialist chain that have broken and so far thischain has broken at its weakest links. This is true of China, of thepeoples democracies, not to speak of the Soviet Union. None ofthese countries is really socialist, nor could they be. Socialism is nota national process but a world process. This tremendous processwhich today is above all the disintegration of the world capitalist

systemis precisely the process we are living and which, simply interms of its totally unprecedented proportions, obviously cannot reachharbour in a single day. The process is visible to everybody. Only thepurblind concreteness of Social-Democracy, convinced that it will bein the saddle for all time, can grant itself the luxury of ignoring it. Thissocial-democratic illusion is the fate of anyone who thinks the idea of

State and Revolution is outdated. There are few writings more timelyor more relevant. Lenin is not outdated. National socialism, theconstruction of socialism in one country, these are outdated. Com-munism, said Marx, cannot exist as a local event: The proletariat canthus only exist on the world-historical plane, just as communism, itsactivity, can only have a world-historical existence.12

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

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Colletti, Lucio - Power and Democracy in Socialist Society

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