(c) Workers’ Wages as Ministers’ Salaries.

Lenin himself cannot deny that Marx emphasized the democratic character of that “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Paris Commune. Lenin is the less concerned to do so, as in the summer of 1917 he had by no means forsworn democracy for the period of dictatorship, although it had already commenced to be inconvenient for him. He merely draws a distinction between bourgeois and proletarian democracy. It was the latter and not the former which Marx had prescribed for the period of transition. Because I did not myself make this distinction, Lenin reproached me with opportunism and treason to proletarian principles.

But wherein consisted the specific proletarian element in the democracy of the Paris Commune? It did not substitute class franchise for universal suffrage; it did not restrict political power to a special class – according to the accepted use of language that does not signify democracy but its opposite. Democracy means the abolition of all political privileges attaching to an estate or a class.

No, in 1917 Lenin sought elsewhere for the distinction between bourgeois and proletarian democracy:

“Kautsky has not in the least understood the difference between a middle class parliament combining democracy (not for the people), and proletarian democracy, which will take immediate steps to cut bureaucracy down at the roots, and which will be able to carry out measures to their logical conclusion, to the complete destruction of bureaucracy and the final establishment of democracy for the people. Kautsky reveals here again the same old “superstitious respect” for the State, and “superstitious faith” in bureaucracy.” (The State and Revolution, p.113)

If proletarian democracy consists in the immediate and complete extirpation of bureaucracy, then no State is further removed from “proletarian democracy” than the State that was governed by Lenin.

But wherein consists my superstitious faith in bureaucracy?

It lies in the fact that I have unwittingly ignored three conditions which Marx in his Civil War in France prescribed as conditions of the Commune, and which seem of fundamental importance to Lenin. In them he perceives the basic elements of proletarian democracy.

It is true that I have hitherto ignored these conditions. Not out of a superstitious faith in bureaucracy, but because I did not attach great importance to them. And it would appear that Marx and Engels were of the same opinion, as, apart from the few sentences in the Civil War which Marx devotes to these conditions, and the explanation thereof which Engels gives in his 1891 preface, neither of them have, according to my recollection, made any further reference to the matter, whereas they have frequently and in detail referred to the other democratic institutions which were either introduced or made use of by the Commune: the transformation of the standing army into a militia, universal suffrage, municipal government, and so on.

The conditions which seem to Lenin so noteworthy are contained in the following passage of the Civil War:

“The Council of the Commune consisted of municipal representatives elected by universal suffrage in the various districts of Paris. They were responsible, and could be recalled at any time. The majority were, naturally, working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was not supposed to be a parliamentary, but a working association, executive and administrative at the same time. The police, until then merely an instrument of the Government, was immediately stripped of all of its political functions, and turned into the responsible and at any time replaceable organ of the Commune. The same was applied to the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Council of the Commune down to the humblest worker, everybody in the public services was paid at the same rates as ordinary working men.”

These conditions are supposed to mark the fundamental difference between bourgeois and proletarian democracy, and to impart to the latter its special character.

Let us consider the last-named condition, the payment of workers’ wages for public service. Lenin comments as follows:

“Here is shown, more clearly than anywhere else, the break from a bourgeois democracy to a proletarian democracy; from the democracy of the oppressors to the democracy of the oppressed; from the domination of a “special force” for the suppression of a given class to the suppression of the oppressors by the whole force of the majority of the nation – the proletariat and the peasants. And it is precisely on this most obvious point, perhaps the most important so far as the problem of the State is concerned, that the teachings of Marx have been forgotten.” (p.45)

Most ominously, even in Soviet Russia, after a temporary revival.

Why does the peasant suddenly turn up here? Since when has the peasant democracy been, not a bourgeois, but a proletarian democracy? Yet Lenin is right to refer to the peasant in this connection. Cheap government is desired, not merely by the working class, but by the lower middle class and the peasants. The latter advocate it even more than the workers, who have large demands to make upon the State. Nowhere in Europe at the time of the Paris Commune were the salaries of the higher officials lower than in Switzerland, which nobody would take for a proletarian democracy. Thus the practice of the Paris Commune is certainly not something which characterizes proletarian democracy, nor did Marx in any way put it forward as a specifically proletarian demand.

It goes without saying that a Labour republic, like a peasant or lower middle class republic, will abolish all the privileges of higher officialdom. That the members of the Commune only drew workers’ wages was a very creditable act, in contrast with the corruption of the Empire.

But after the experiences we have since encountered, and especially after the experiences of Russia, it may well be doubted whether in the period of transition to Socialism it will be possible to staff all the offices of the State with the requisite intellectual forces, if they are to be offered merely a worker’s wages.

It is admitted that the tendency of economic development is towards a narrowing of the difference between the reward of intellectual and of manual labour. Yet the importance of many phenomena which have appeared during and since the war should not be exaggerated. Frequently during and after the war the wages of many simple manual workers soared beyond the remuneration of particular scientific workers. If we look at the matter more closely, we shall find that this does not represent a general tendency, but a phenomenon which is confined to the countries with a rapidly falling exchange, as well as to the class with fixed salaries, which at a time of shrinkage in the purchasing power of money cannot secure advances in salary as quickly as the workers can secure increases in wages.

This is not to be confused with the general tendency, which was becoming apparent before the war and the Revolution, towards an over-production of intelligence, causing a multitude of intellectuals to fall into an ever lower economic position, while particular sections of manual labour are in the ascendant. Thus a gradual approximation of the economic position of both classes is taking place. This approximation may be expected to make further progress after the conquest of political power by the workers, no longer through a levelling down of the mass of the intellectuals, but through a levelling up of the entire working population. We may suppose that in a fully developed socialist society the economic as well as the social distinction between manual and brain workers will be abolished.

But here we are concerned with a phase of the period of transition. In another connection we will discuss the economic reasons which render it simply impossible to maintain the practice of the Commune quoted by Marx, with which we have always been sympathetic.

We will quote the reasons advanced by Lenin why all public services should immediately be remunerated on the basis of workers’ wages. He says:

“Capitalist civilization has created industry on a large scale in the shape of factories, posts, telephones, railways, and so forth: and on this basis the great majority of functions of “the old State” have become enormously simplified and reduced in practice to very simple operations, such as registration, filing, and checking. Hence they will be quite within the reach of every literate person, and it will be possible to perform them for the usual working man’s wage” (p.46).

“The workers, having conquered political power, will break up the old bureaucratic apparatus, they will shatter it from its foundations up, until not one stone is left standing upon another: and the new machine which they will fashion to take its place will be formed out of these same workers and employees themselves. To guard against their transformation into bureaucrats, measures will be taken at once, which have been analysed in detail by Marx and Engels:

“(1) Not only will they be elected, but they will be subject to recall at any time.

“(2) They will receive payment no higher than that of ordinary workers.

“(3) There will be an immediate preparation for a state of things when all shall fulfil the functions of control and superintendence, so that all shall become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time, and no one shall therefore have the opportunity of becoming ‘bureaucrats’ at all “ (p.113).

Thus immediately before Lenin seized the reins of power, he imagined that the functions of society had been so simplified by capitalist civilization, by the posts and the telephone, that they could be performed by anyone who could read and write. The State officials would have nothing to do but to control and register – whom and what are not stated. Perhaps one would merely have to check the registration of the other, and the other would have to register the result of checking the former. And in this fine business everybody could immediately participate one after the other.

Such was the childish conception of the functioning of the State power entertained by the greatest genius of Bolshevism immediately before his coup d’état. Truly the Russian people have a strong constitution to have been able to stand this regime of brazen ignorance for five years without being completely exterminated.