Although, as a matter of history, democratic freedoms have been secured by the bourgeoisie fighting feudal oppression, they belong to the permanent achievement of progress, and socialism without democracy would be a parody of its own first principles. For this reason socialism must never be imposed by a revolutionary minority, for it would then contradict itself. It must be the undisputed work of a majority, which should respect the rights of the minority to express and advocate different opinions.
Leszek Kołakowski1
Is it possible to love Marx but hate Lenin? I believe it is, and Karl Kautsky shows us one way to do it. In his book The Dictatorship of the Proletariat [1918]2, Kautsky, a devoted follower of Marx, airs out his anger and alarm at the anti-democratic behavior exhibited by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 coup. As a devout socialist, Kautsky found it exhilarating that, for the first time in human history, a socialist party held the reins of power in a great empire. But Lenin terrified him, and rightfully so. While Kautsky believed that democracy is absolutely central to socialism, Lenin, once in power, made it clear that he saw democracy as a hindrance to achieving socialism. This book, written shortly after the October Revolution, shows Kautsky recoiling in horror at Lenin’s eagerness to undermine democracy in the name of socialism. All the bloodshed, fanaticism, and cynical opportunism of the Bolshevik regime represent, for Kautsky, a gross injustice and (more critically) a wasted opportunity.
Kautsky and Lenin don’t disagree on everything. Both of them were major interpreters of Marx and Engels, both share the same end goal (socialism), and both believe that class interest motivates all human decisions. This devotion to economic determinism creates in the minds of both men an idealistic image of a united working class: a class without disagreements or deviations within the ranks, where all members share the same motivations and long for the same outcomes. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). For Lenin, this idealism made him believe that his “vanguard party” of professional revolutionaries could speak for the entire working class (as if those millions of persons, with all their complexities and contradictory desires, could ever be properly represented by a single party). Since only Lenin’s party can properly speak for the entire proletariat, any who disagree with Lenin must be enemies of the proletariat, and therefore enemies of the revolution. This provides a philosophical justification for the banning of political parties and the violent purging of all dissidents (including those who were members of the working class). For Kautsky, this same idealism led him down a different path. He came to the conclusion that the real ticket to achieving socialism is to spread democracy and universalize suffrage.
In his own way, Kautsky supported bourgeoisie democracy because, in his view, it lays the groundwork for the inevitable proletarian revolution to come. Democracies generally allow freedom of speech, so the workers living in a democracy are better able to voice their grievances and form workers parties. Kautsky believed that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and soon the working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy. When the proletariat eventually becomes the most powerful electorate, they will vote their way into power. Workers will elect fellow workers to positions of power, and once in power the workers will unanimously demand socialism (because humans are driven, above all else, to pursue their class interest). Socialism then will be the child of democracy. Like Marx, Kautsky believes that the transition to socialism will not happen overnight, but will evolve naturally over the course of many generations, just as feudalism took 1,000 years to transform into capitalism.
We can see the idealism at work behind Kautsky’s vision. His theory that the workers, once enfranchised, will automatically and without question choose socialism, ignores completely the pluralistic nature of humanity. The proletariat, like any large and complex group of humans, is composed of millions of unique brains that each see the world in a unique way, and are motivated to act by countless factors that can never be entirely boiled down to “class interest”. To imagine a totally united proletariat that speaks with one voice and shares in common one over-arching political goal, is to imagine a world entirely different from our own, a simple and uniform politics quite unlike the sloppy human politics we see in the real world. But we can see how this idealism leads Kautsky to argue so forcefully in favor of democracy: the workers will democratically choose socialism, and so democracy is the pathway to socialism.
Here is one example of this idealistic thread, in Kautsky’s own words:
The various States of the world are at very different stages of economic and political development. The more a State is capitalistic on the one side and democratic on the other, the nearer it is to Socialism. The more its capitalist industry is developed, the higher is its productive power, the greater its riches, the more socially organised its labour, the more numerous its proletariat; and the more democratic a State is, the better trained and organised is its proletariat. Democracy may sometimes repress its revolutionary thought, but it is the indispensable means for the proletariat to attain that ripeness which it needs for the conquest of political power, and the bringing about of the social revolution. […] Where a proletariat, under such conditions, gains control of the State, it will discover sufficient material and intellectual resources to permit it at once to give the economic development a Socialist direction, and immediately to increase the general well-being. This will then furnish a genuine object lesson to countries which are economically and politically backward. […] Thus, by the example of the progressive countries, the Cause of Socialism will become irresistible in countries which to-day are not so advanced as to allow their proletariat of its own strength to conquer the power of the State, and put Socialism into operation.3
Kautsky appears unable to fathom that many workers, perhaps even a majority of workers, could hold conservative principles, support big business, or vote for policies that don’t directly relate to their “class interest”. Baked into his assumptions (about democracy naturally flowing into socialism) is the belief that the proletariat can act as one body and think with one mind (and that Karl Kautsky is capable of reading that mind). Real workers don’t really behave this way. Acknowledging that is the first step toward creating a more realistic Marxist ideology.
Of course this same idealism holds the reins in Lenin’s head too. His belief that the vanguard party speaks for the entire proletariat is just another outcropping of this same misguided view of social classes, this belief that one’s class interest will always outweigh all other considerations, that all workers want the same thing. But unlike Kautsky, Lenin doesn’t just ignore pluralism; he despises it. He cynically understands that his brand of communism can only function (and his party’s legitimacy as the sole representative of the working class can only be maintained) if pluralism is snuffed out, if citizens are utterly defined by their class status: real proletarians are good communists, the bourgeoisie are villains who must be eliminated, and workers who question the Bolsheviks are class traitors. If the workers are allowed to voice conflicting opinions about life, politics, ethics, and the efficacy of socialist policies, how can the Bolsheviks ever claim to speak for all of them? How can they justify their violent consolidation of power and their repression of “class enemies”, if even proletarians question the Bolshevik ideology?
This is why democracy — which after all is a key way that the pluralism, factionalism, and contradictory viewpoints within social classes is revealed to the world — had to be snuffed out if the Bolshevik experiment was to succeed. If the electorate was allowed to vote, there would most certainly have come a time when the Bolsheviks failed to win a majority of proletarian votes, a time when their policies were voted down, which would have revealed cracks in the united proletarian front. So once in power Lenin actively worked to destroy pluralism and abolish democracy. Opposition political parties were banned, the planned national election was nullified, the workers councils were robbed of their independence (despite Lenin’s pre-revolution “All Power to the Soviets” sloganeering), the press was censored, dissidents were shot or sent to concentration camps, non-Bolshevik socialists were purged.4 Through these methods Lenin could claim that all good proletarians supported the Bolsheviks, since all non-Bolshevik proletarians had been forcibly silenced. Only through repression could Lenin’s idealistic image of the united proletariat, upon which he had built his entire ideology, be maintained. So while Kautsky’s idealism led him to demand democracy, Lenin’s idealism led him to fear it.
Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believeed that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he would later be proven right by Lenin. By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia, and Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) sought to control all facets of government, culture, and society; the masses (including the proletariat) were largely disenfranchised, and all power was concentrated in the hands of party elites.5 The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was most definitely a dictatorship, but not socialism. For Kautsky, this is an almost unfathomable tragedy. The Bolsheviks held in their hands the opportunity to create a true socialist society, if they would only allow democracy to flourish, but instead they squandered the opportunity in order to consolidate power.
So Kautsky was right, at least in this instance, that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. When he looks at the way the Bolshevik dictatorship rejected and dismantled Russian democracy, he sees only “a short-sighted policy of expediency.”6 Optimistically, he asserts in the last paragraph of Dictatorship of the Proletariat that “the essential achievements of the Revolution will be saved, if dictatorship is opportunely replaced by democracy.”7 However Kautsky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. After all, this will only happen if the vast majority of voters demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. In Soviet Russia, Lenin knew all too well that if he allowed the newly formed congress (the Constituent Assembly) to proceed with their planned national election, the Bolsheviks were unlikely to win a majority of votes. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into power, which he knew they would never do. In this light, Kautsky’s claim that socialism will blossom in Russia if democracy is allowed to flourish there seems just as far-fetched as Lenin’s plan to create real socialism by eliminating democracy.8 There was no guarantee, in fact very little chance, that the national electorate would ever agree to inaugurate socialism; they may instead have simply turned Russia into another capitalist democracy like the rest of the West.
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population tend to create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could ever agree that socialism is the correct path, or even agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreement and innovation and challenges to the status quo and contradictory motivations; economic factors alone will never be the sole driver of human behavior, nor will economic factors ever force all humans to accept one single set of policy proposals. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Real democracy would likely only strengthen pluralism, and therefore undermine the socialism Lenin hoped to create, and so he forced the USSR to abandon its blossoming democratic institutions and accept totalitarian rule. Kautsky’s vision for Russia certainly would have been more democratic, but it is unlikely it would have been any more successful at creating socialism.
So if we allow real, pluralistic, messy democracy to flourish, it is unlikely socialism will follow. But snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
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Notes
- Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown, 2nd ed., trans. P. S. Falla (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2005), 394. In this excerpt, Kołakowski is not voicing his own opinion but that of Kautsky. ↩︎
- Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, trans. H. J. Stenning, introduction by John H. Kautsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). The version originally published by The National Labor Press is available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole. ↩︎
- Dictatorship, 96-97. ↩︎
- For an eye-opening overview of how the Bolsheviks consolidated power and built their one party state, see Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), Ch. 12. Though Pipes is a professional (his style is clear and well-paced, and his impeccable research is evident on every page), his white hot anger at Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their unjust actions rages just below the surface. ↩︎
- In Dictatorship, 80-87, Kautsky methodically demonstrates how the Bolsheviks excluded many proletarians from suffrage based on arbitrary distinctions. ↩︎
- Dictatorship, 147. ↩︎
- Dictatorship, 149. ↩︎
- Lenin’s relationship with democracy was (to put it mildly), complicated. His writings on democracy are contradictory and sometimes incoherent, while his actions regarding democracy add a whole other layer of complexity to the puzzle. I do not have space here to present a definitive account of Lenin’s fraught relationship with democracy, but here’s a snapshot:
A) In his writings, parliamentary democracy is a tool of the bourgeoisie, designed to fool the workers into believing they have a say, so that they can be more easily oppressed and exploited by the ruling elite. Democracy in this light is an outmoded relic of late-stage capitalism that must be violently overthrown by the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Lenin confidently stated in 1920, “Parliamentarianism is ‘historically obsolete’ from the standpoint of world history, i.e., the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over, and the era of the proletarian dictatorship has begun. That is incontestable.” (See: Vladimir Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder [1920], Ch. 7, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/).
B) Meanwhile Lenin presents the dictatorship of the proletariat as a more authentic democracy than parliamentary democracy could ever be. For example, in December 1918 (shortly after the Bolshevik coup) he wrote in Pravda, “The dictatorship of the proletariat alone can emancipate humanity from the oppression of capital, from the lies, falsehood and hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy — democracy for the rich — and establish democracy for the poor, that is, make the blessings of democracy really accessible to the workers and poor peasants, whereas now (even in the most democratic — bourgeois — republic) the blessings of democracy are, in fact, inaccessible to the vast majority of working people. […] This means replacing democracy for the rich by democracy for the poor. This means replacing freedom of assembly and the press for the minority, for the exploiters, by freedom of assembly and the press for the majority of the population, for the working people. This means a gigantic, world historic extension of democracy, its transformation from falsehood into truth, the liberation of humanity from the shackles of capital, which distorts and truncates any, even the most ‘democratic’ and republican, bourgeois democracy.” Here is Lenin the champion of democracy! He wishes to overthrow parliamentarism not because he loves authoritarianism, but because he loves democracy and wants to see it expanded and purified. (For an extended version of Lenin’s claim that only a dictatorship can improve democracy, see his 1917 book State and Revolution.
C) So it seems Lenin loved democracy after all. But then, perhaps unsurprisingly, his actions once in power revealed an utter disdain for democracy in all its forms. Haunted by the fear that a democratic movement would sweep him from power, Lenin and his Bolshevik colleagues worked to destroy Russian democracy before it could put down roots. The dictatorial power was wielded not by the masses, as had been promised, but by an elite committee of Bolshevik party bosses (with Lenin at the head) who went to extreme lengths to ban dissent and make democratic organizing impossible. It is therefore tough to reconcile Lenin’s pledged desire to extend democracy from his naked opportunism once in a position to do so. After all, could Lenin have truly believed that the best way to achieve real socialism and advance mankind into a new era was to replace rule by parliaments with rule by Vladimir Lenin? Sure, it’s fine to say that parliamentary democracy is tool of the bourgeoisie, but aren’t dictatorship and single-party rule also tools that elite powerbrokers use to oppress the masses? I personally believe that Lenin never had any real inclination to create a more authentic democracy. Lenin wants us to believe that the dictatorship headed by Lenin somehow represents the will of the people better than parliamentary democracy ever could. He uses this sort of double-talk (“dictatorship” actually means “democracy”) to justify violent authoritarianism. After all, if the Bolsheviks truly speak for the majority, then any who dissent must be part of a tiny minority of exploiters who deserve to be persecuted. But what happens if workers (proletarians) dissent against this dictatorship of the proletariat? Do these workers, these enemies of socialism, deserve to be disenfranchised? This scenario makes me question whether Lenin truly understood what real democracy actually entails. For Lenin, “proletariat” never really meant “workers”, but instead meant “workers who agree with Lenin”. A person with the audacity to disagree with Lenin’s platform became, for Lenin, an enemy, an outsider, an exploiter, regardless of the dissenter’s class status. The opinions of the true proletariat were irrelevant to Lenin; the only voices that mattered to him were those raised in a chorus of agreement. Only those voices could belong to the “majority”; all others must be silenced. This sort of situation could never be called democracy, except for use in propaganda. it is democracy not based on citizenship or even class status, but instead on one’s professed political beliefs and loyalty to the ruling party. Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat, even if controlled by who he saw as the proletariat, still never would have risen above the level of single-party rule. ↩︎