(d) The Recall of Deputies

The second Marxian requisite, which in Lenin’s view proletarian democracy must fulfil, is the election of officials by universal suffrage, and the recall, not merely of officials, but of deputies to the Commune, to the Town Council.

Here we must again inquire where the election of officials by the people on the basis of universal suffrage takes place in Lenin’s Empire, and wherein consists the special proletarian element in this practice, which we have long seen in operation in bourgeois Switzerland. This is certainly an important question, but we have never shut our eyes to it.

When Lenin felt himself obliged to put forward this demand again in 1917, the while he heaped abuse on earlier Socialists who were alleged to have ignored it, he was taking coals to Newcastle.

The recall of deputies is anything but a novel demand, and has been urged by many bourgeois democrats. At the time. of the Paris Commune it was advocated to a far greater extent than it is to-day.

It originated at a time when the electors confronted the deputies as an unorganized mass. At the time of the Paris Commune this was generally the case. Once the deputy was elected, he could do as he liked. His electors lost all control over him. Thus the idea arose that the electors ought to be able to recall a deputy who had deceived them. This would not have been a simple procedure, at least with secret ballot, for how could the opinion o£ the electors be ascertained? It would only be possible through a new election. A minority in a constituency hostile to the deputy would always have it in their power to compel the member to submit to a new election at any moment, even when he was fulfilling the wishes of the majority of his constituents. Nothing is easier than to badger inconvenient deputies in this manner. If I am rightly informed, the recall of deputies in Soviet Russia is only used for the purpose of suppressing any serious opposition in the Soviets.

In the civilized West this provision, which lends itself so readily to abuse, has become quite superfluous through the organization of the masses in great parties, which for the past half century has been proceeding under the auspices of Social Democracy. Since then the responsibility of the deputy towards his constituents has tended to be overshadowed by his responsibility towards his party. It becomes ever rarer for candidates to come forward on their own account. The candidate comes before the electors as the representative of a party. In this capacity and not because of his personal popularity he is elected. This is most strikingly manifested in the system of proportional representation, where the electors are confronted, not with individuals, but with whole parties with a long list of candidates. As a rule neither the parties nor their candidates are new-comers, but are tried and known by long years of public service.

The individual member may no longer do what he likes in Parliament. He is subject to the discipline of his party group, and is constantly controlled by his party – unless the party itself should go out of existence. But even then the elements that have been released gravitate towards new groups, which are controlled by new party organizations outside Parliament.

The demand for the recall of individual deputies by their electors, which was put forward by the Paris Communards of 1877, as well as by many other radical democrats of that time, and endorsed by Marx, is characteristic of a period when the organization of socialist parties and the political organization of the masses had only just begun. During the whole time of its existence the First International was never once a union of socialist parties.

The demand for the recall of deputies was quite in consonance with this primitive degree of popular participation in politics. To raise the same demand after half a century of intensive party labours and the most rapid increase of party membership only reveals an utter lack of comprehension of more highly developed conditions.

What might have seemed both reasonable and revolutionary fifty years ago is now not merely unreasonable, but also reactionary. To-day a deputy who prefers dependence upon an incoherent mass of electors to dependence upon a party inspired by a common idea behaves in a reactionary fashion.

The more party life has developed, the more the demand for the recall of deputies by their electors has fallen into the background. To-day it no longer plays a part in any country with political institutions of long standing.