(f) Dictatorship

Of all the institutions of the Paris Commune upon which Marx laid stress, there is only one to which the Bolshevists now cling: the concentration of legislative and executive powers in one body, although not in a popular assembly, elected by universal suffrage, as was the case with the Paris Commune.

They cling to this unity of powers because it facilitates dictatorship. According to Bolshevism, dictatorship is that State constitution which the workers must establish after the conquest of political power for the period of the transition to Socialism.

What is the essence of dictatorship, not in the transitional sense in which Marx and Engels used the word, but in the narrower sense of Bolshevism?

Dictatorship is a State institution which constitutionally excludes all opposition to the State power, and which raises the possessor of State power, be it a person, a corporation, or a class, above the laws of the State, which, of course, apply to the rest of the population.

Fundamentally this institution is nothing else than a state of siege for all those who do not share in the dictatorship. Certainly a more convenient form of government is hardly conceivable, and Lenin was not the first to discover this fact.

Although dictatorship is extremely convenient and certainly not specifically proletarian, having been mostly employed against the proletariat, even the most brutal coercive regime of the bourgeoisie or of the feudal nobility resorts to dictatorship with great reluctance, and only in times of great political difficulty.

The reasons for this fact need not concern us here. We propose to examine the effects produced by a proletarian regime of dictatorship.

First of all: who is to be dictator? Into whose hands shall be placed this enormous power? Naturally, in those of the proletariat, which must be able to break down any opposition to the transformation of society on these lines.

But even in Russia, where the peasant has only just escaped from the Czarist knout, it proved impossible to give a proletarian minority supreme power over the peasants. The Soviets, the councils, in which the dictatorship would be invested, had to be established as peasants’ as well as workers’ councils.

This might not seem out of place in Russia, because there the peasants were still revolutionary – another sign of the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution. It would be senseless in Western Europe, where the peasants form the strongest conservative force. To take every political liberty from the intellectuals of the towns and give political omnipotence to the peasants would be the height of absurdity.

The dictatorship of the proletariat as a means for the introduction of Socialism must therefore be rejected.

We go further. Suppose the proletariat has dictatorship. What does it mean? That every worker is all-powerful relative to the possessing and cultured classes of the towns, and may plunder and mishandle them as he thinks fit. In short, the dictatorship of a class, conceived as a State institution, signifies investing this class with arbitrary power.

And this was what actually happened in Russia after the coup d’état of Bolshevism (November 1917), which is glorified as the Revolution. Complete anarchy soon reigned within the two classes whose dictatorship was proclaimed at that time.

This Bakunist ideal might be somewhat tolerable in a primitive peasant village, where household industry on a small scale was the rule, but it would be fatal to large-scale industry.

The break-up of large-scale undertakings in agriculture and chaos in industry were the first severe wounds which the Revolution inflicted upon Russia’s economic life, after it had already been fearfully weakened by the war.

To be sure, the Bolshevists were obliged eventually to recognize that matters could not continue in this way. An unorganized class cannot exercise any dictatorship.

The dictatorship of the proletariat soon became untenable. It had led to the most rapid economic collapse of Russia. But the anarchy of this kind of dictatorship formed the soil out of which grew another kind of dictatorship, that of the Communist Party, which is in reality nothing less than the dictatorship of its leaders. The Communist Party was able to survive as the only firm organization in the general chaos, thanks to its unparalleled opportunism, which allowed it to maintain its power by throwing overboard the most important principles for the realization of which it had captured power.

From the loose state of anarchy in town and country Russia passed immediately into the tightest grip of a privileged bureaucracy, police, and standing army, invested with absolute power, whose operations culminated in the bloodiest terrorism.

According to Marx’s conception, which we fully accept, and which Lenin also championed in 1917, the proletariat cannot liberate itself without abolishing the machinery of domination of the bureaucracy, the political police, and of the standing army. If dictatorship cannot be maintained without this machinery, it proves what an unsuitable instrument it is for the political rule and the economic emancipation of the proletariat.

This is all the more obvious when it is realized that dictatorship by its constitution cannot tolerate the slightest opposition. Every attempt at opposition must therefore of necessity aim at overthrowing the constitution and assume the form of civil war.

The faith of Bolshevism reduces itself to the simple belief that it is possible to organize a socialist society in the midst of civil war. To-day the Bolshevists blame this war for the fact that instead of arriving at Socialism, Russia has been overtaken by ruin. They forget that the civil war issued from their dictatorship.

If dictatorship is victorious in the civil war, the inevitable consequence is the paralysis of political and intellectual life in general. Hopeless torpidity seizes the masses, from whose energetic and intelligent activities alone can come Socialism and the democratization of autocratic capitalism.

For this reason dictatorship is an obstacle to socialist progress, quite apart from the fact that a working class which is unable to throw off a dictatorship based on militarism and bureaucracy, thereby proclaims its inadequacy to the task of socialist reconstruction.

All this has already been urged against the Bolshevist methods of achieving Socialism through party dictatorship. To these factors, which make dictatorship an obstacle to socialist progress, must be added a yet more important fact, which in my judgment has not been sufficiently considered.

The process of production requires security, if it is to be continuously renewed and to promote social prosperity. It requires security against unexpected forcible interferences from without, whether from individuals or from the authorities. Nobody will take the trouble to produce if he fears that the product of his labour will be taken from him.

Of course, no worker obtains the whole product of his labour under a mode of production which is based on exploitation. He has to share it with others. But this sharing proceeds according to definite rules which are known to the worker before he commences work. Under the existing social relationships, it is one of the conditions of the process of production, in the absence of which the worker could not produce at all, and therefore could not live. Consequently, production is not impeded by this process of sharing, if sufficient remains to the worker to secure the conservation of his labour power and the maintenance of his offspring.

The case is quite different if the peasant, the handicraftsman, or any other worker is robbed of what remains to him of the product of his labour after the completed process of production, in an irregular and unexpected manner, by a power which is not directly interested in the continuance of his labour. The effect is a strong discouragement to continue producing. Production often becomes quite impossible, if the worker is bereft of tools of production and means of living to maintain his labour power.

Nevertheless, the workers will try to continue working, if it is possible at all, for they have no possibility of existence except through their labour. And under primitive conditions the means of production are simple and can always be created in case of need. Moreover, the income of the individual worker or of the peasant is too scanty to attract much plundering.

Political insecurity affects production far more seriously where it is conducted on capitalist lines. Here production oes not depend upon the worker, but also and in the first place upon the capitalist. If the worker is compelled to produce in order to live, the capitalist is by no means obliged so to do. He puts his money in the process of production or the construction of factory buildings, the purchase of machines and raw materials, the payment of wages, only when he anticipates a considerable profit therefrom, not perhaps in the immediate future, but at least as long as the means of production last in which he has invested his capital. If this security is absent, he prefers not to risk his property. Then he invests it in gold, precious stones, or other extremely valuable articles, which are indestructible, occupy little space, and could be easily hidden; or he embarks it upon businesses where the capital is rapidly turned over, in usury and trade, where the promise of a quick and large profit compensates his risk.

The general insecurity of conditions was one of the reasons why in the East hitherto, and in Europe until the time of the Reformation, a system of industrial capitalism could not develop. This insecurity is one of the reasons why industry has been so long restarting in the vanquished States after the world war, while profiteering has flourished.

This insecurity is carried to its extreme limit, and made permanent by dictatorship. The latter may succeed in checking highway robbery, or preventing pogroms, but its very existence diffuses an atmosphere of insecurity, in the form of the utter arbitrariness and lawlessness of the State power, whose caprices are quite incalculable.

The dictatorship of the Sultan and his Pashas has hitherto imposed an insurmountable obstacle upon the development of any large-scale industry in Turkey, and has even ruined the primitive economy of the Turkish peasant. The economic effects are not different in the case of Russia because the Russian Sultan appeals, not to Mahomet, but to Marx, as the prophet of redemption. Besides, the Russian Pashas in their Asiatic propaganda have contrived to make Mahomet and Marx their twin guiding stars.

The absolutism of the Czars had considerably checked the prosperity of Russia, although latterly it was no longer a purely arbitrary regime, the bureaucracy being subject to definite laws, and an orderly judiciary (apart from many political offences) being in existence. In more recent times there was even a legislative assembly, which controlled the budget.

In arbitrariness, in force, and in the irresponsibility of the State power, the Bolshevist dictatorship goes far beyond Czarism, and therefore exerts a more paralysing effect upon industry than did the latter.

Some forms of government are incompatible with a prosperous capitalist development. One of them is Oriental despotism, and another is its most modern prototype, which masquerades in the garb of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So long as the dictatorship does not collapse, Russia will continue to go downhill, despite all concessions to the capitalists. But the governmental form of dictatorship is not only incompatible with industrial capitalism, but also with democratic Socialism. For the latter can only arise from a fully developed and flourishing, not a crippled, capitalism, and in the period of transition capitalism will continue to exist in many departments of industry, as we shall see.

From whatever angle we may regard dictatorship, it proves to be an unsuitable means to guide the development of Capitalism into Socialism.

Our examination of the political Labour Revolution may be summarized in the following sentences:

The growth of the Labour movement is accompanied by the growth of democracy. Thus the way of democracy is the normal way for the conquest of political power by the workers.

The democratic Republic is the State form for the rule of the workers.

The democratic Republic is the State form for the realization of Socialism.