The Democratic Commune and the Revolutionary Dictatorship

Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute a piece of absolute theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition and in the conception of its leading political party – the Blanquists – was the expression of the dictatorship of the revolutionary city over the country. So it was in the great French Revolution; so it would have been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in the first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected on the basis of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more significant fact – namely, that of the military operations carried on by the Commune, one city, against peasant France, that is the whole country. To satisfy the great democrat, Kautsky, the revolutionaries of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have consulted, by means of universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to whether it permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers bands.

Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers’ troops had been evacuated. The bourgeoisie that remained in Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid of the revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the auspices of that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future would have been inevitable – namely, of the Red Terror. But to console oneself with the thought that the Central Committee of the National Guard, under the dictatorship of which – unfortunately a very feeble and formalist dictatorship – the elections to the Commune were held, did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is truly to brush with the shadow of a broom.

Amusing himself by barren analogies, Kautsky benefits by the circumstance that his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, we also elected a Commune (Town Council) on the basis of the most “democratic” voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted by the bourgeoisie parties, gave us a crushing majority. The “democratically” elected Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet – i.e., placed the fact of the dictatorship of the proletariat higher than the “principle” of universal suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved itself altogether by its own act, in favor of one of the sections of the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd Soviet – that true father of the Soviet regime – has upon itself the seal of a formal “democratic” benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune. [It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there participated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917. in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries who had no influence in the capital, there participated 300,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire.]

“At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the Commune. Of these, fifteen were members of the government party (Thiers), and six were bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to the Government, but condemned the rising (of the Paris workers).

“The Soviet Republic,” Kautsky teaches us, “would never have allowed such counter-revolutionary elements to stand as candidates, let alone be elected. The Commune, on the other hand, out of respect for democracy, did not place the least obstacle in the way of the election of its bourgeois opponents.” (Page 74.)

We have already seen above that here Kautsky completely misses the mark. First of all, at a similar stage of development of the Russian Revolution, there did take place democratic elections to the Petrograd Commune, in which the Soviet Government placed no obstacle in the way of the bourgeois parties; and if the Cadets, the SRs and the Mensheviks, who had their press which was openly calling for the overthrow of the Soviet Government, boycotted the elections, it was only because at that time they still hoped soon to make an end of us with the help of armed force. Secondly, no democracy expressing all classes was actually to be found in the Paris Commune. The bourgeois deputies – Conservatives, Liberals, Gambettists – found no place in it.

“Nearly all these individuals,” says Lavrov, “either immediately or very soon, left the Council of the Commune. They might have been representatives of Paris as a free city under the rule of the bourgeoisie, but were quite out of place in the Council of the Commune, which, willy-nilly, consistently or inconsistently, completely or incompletely, did represent the revolution of the proletariat, and an attempt, feeble though it might be, of building up forms of society corresponding to that revolution.” (Pages 111-112) If the Petrograd bourgeoisie had not boycotted the municipal elections, its representatives would have entered the Petrograd Council. They would have remained there up to the first Social Revolutionary and Cadet rising, after which – with the permission or without the permission of Kautsky – they would probably have been arrested if they did not leave the Council in good time, as at a certain moment did the bourgeois members of the Paris Commune. The course of events would have remained the same: only on their surface would certain episodes have worked out differently.

In supporting the democracy of the Commune, and at the same time accusing it of an insufficiently decisive note in its attitude to Versailles, Kautsky does not understand that the Communal elections, carried out with the ambiguous help of the “lawful” mayors and deputies, reflected the hope of a peaceful agreement with Versailles. This is the whole point. The leaders were anxious for a compromise, not for a struggle. The masses had not yet outlived their illusions. Undeserved revolutionary reputations had not yet had time to be exposed. Everything taken together was called democracy.

“We must rise above our enemies by moral force” preached Vermorel. “We must not infringe liberty and individual life ...” Striving to avoid fratricidal war, Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie, whom hitherto he had so mercilessly exposed, to set up “a lawful Government, recognized and respected by the whole population of Paris.” The Journal Officiel, published under the editorship of the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: “The sad misunderstanding, which in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each other, cannot be renewed ... Class antagonism has ceased to exist.” (March 30) And, further: “Now all conflicts will be appeased, because all are inspired with a feeling of solidarity, because never yet was there so little social hatred and social antagonism.” (April 3)

At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourdé, and not without foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had “never yet infringed the principle of private property.” By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to compromise.

“Such a doctrine,” says Lavrov, and rightly, “did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies.” (Page 137) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. “As far as the mass of the population is concerned,” writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, “it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government.” Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat.

The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, “it was no longer a question of voting,” writes Arthur Arnould. “The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections ... All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments ... The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese.” From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine class war with interclass democracy.

“The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly,” wrote in his book, Milliard, one of the best brains of the Commune. “It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation.”

“They could never understand,” Lissagaray accuses the leaders, “that the Commune was a barricade, and not an administration.”

They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky has not understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that he will ever understand it.

The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its development it signified the dictatorship of working class Paris over the peasant country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest. However much the political doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune itself, clung to the appearances of democractic legality, every action of the Commune, though insufficient for victory, was sufficient to reveal its illegal nature. The Commune – that is to say, the Paris City Council – repealed the national law concerning conscription. It called its official organ The Official Journal of the French Republic. Though cautiously, it still laid hands on the State Bank. It proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and abolished the Church Budgets. It entered into relations with various embassies. And so on, and so on. It did all this in virtue of the revolutionary dictatorship. But Clemenceau, young democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue.

At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: “The rising had an unlawful beginning. Soon the Committee will become ridiculous, and its decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not the right to rise against France, and must unconditionally accept the authority of the Assembly.”

The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National Assembly. Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. Today Kautsky seeks to discover for its criminal intentions some mitigating circumstances.

He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent Assembly had against us Socialists, in the persons of the SRs, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the SRs, but forgets our sole serious foe – the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party – i.e., a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the “little great man.” Very soon indeed – long before the October Revolution – Miliukov began to seek his Galifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before.

The Mensheviks and the SRs played no independent role amongst us – just like Kautsky’s party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political confidence of the masses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets – independently of the issue of the elections.

The purely vassal-like dependence of the SRs and Menshevik majority on the Cadet minority itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of “democracy.” But this is not all.

In all districts of the country where the regime of “democracy” lived too long, it inevitably ended in an open coup d’état of the counter-revolution. So it was in the Ukraine, where the democratic Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to German imperialism, found itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky. So it was in the Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of Denikin. So it was – and this was the most important experiment of our “democracy” – in Siberia, where the Constituent Assembly, with the formal supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of the Bolsheviks, and the de facto guidance of the Cadets, led in the end to the dictatorship of the Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was, finally, in the north, where the Constituent Assembly government of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became merely a tinsel decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian and British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States – in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia – where, under the formal banner of “democracy,” there is being consolidated the supremacy of the landlords, the capitalists, and the foreign militarists.