LeninistKing
10th February 2010, 04:09
Spartacist English edition No. 61
Spring 2009
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Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!
Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics
http://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/esp/61/electoral.html
The Fifth Conference of the International Communist League in 2007 adopted the position of opposition to Marxists running for executive office in the capitalist state—e.g., president, mayor, provincial or state governor—as a matter of principle. This position flows from our understanding that the capitalist state is the executive committee of the ruling class. At its core this state consists of bodies of armed men—the military, police, courts and prisons—which function to protect the class rule of the bourgeoisie and its system of production.
Communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve in the U.S. Congress, parliaments and other legislative bodies as revolutionary tribunes of the working class. But assuming executive office or gaining control of a bourgeois legislature or municipal council, either independently or in coalition, requires taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. The ICL had previously held that communists could run for executive offices, provided that we declare in advance that we don’t intend to assume such offices. But in re-examining this question, we concluded that standing for election to executive positions carries the implication that one is ready to accept such responsibility, no matter what disclaimer one makes in advance. For self-proclaimed Marxists to engage in such activity only lends legitimacy to prevailing and reformist conceptions of the state.
As we stated in our 2007 conference document:
“In adopting the position against running for executive office, we are recognizing and codifying what should be seen as a corollary to Lenin’s The State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which are really the founding documents of the Third [Communist] International [CI, or Comintern]. This understanding was attenuated by the time of the Second Congress of the CI, which failed to draw a distinction between parliamentary and executive office in pursuing electoral activity. Thus we are continuing to complete the theoretical and programmatic work of the first four Congresses of the CI. It is easy enough to pledge that you won’t take executive office when the chance of winning is remote. But the question is: what happens when you win?...
“Our earlier practice conformed to that of the Comintern and Fourth International. This does not mean that we acted in an unprincipled way in the past: the principle had never been recognized as such either by our forebears or by ourselves. Programs do evolve, as new issues arise and we critically scrutinize the work of our revolutionary predecessors.”
— “Down With Executive Offices!” Spartacist No. 60, Autumn 2007
Behind the question of running for executive office stands the fundamental counterposition between reformism and Marxism: Can the proletariat use bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois state to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism? Or, rather, must the proletariat smash the old state machinery, and in its place create a new state to impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters?
Since the October Revolution of 1917, social democrats and reformists of various stripes, beginning with the Russian Mensheviks and exemplified most notably at the time by the German Social Democrat and erstwhile Marxist Karl Kautsky, have denounced the October Revolution, arguing that the Bolsheviks should not have led the proletariat to seize power. Instead, the reformists maintained that the Russian proletariat should have given the lead to and supported the liberal bourgeoisie—all in the name of defense of “democracy.” The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October Revolution, and its companion piece, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written a year later, together represent a striking refutation of these views. In these works Lenin rescues Marx and Engels from the distortions and apologias of the opportunists, who selectively quoted, misquoted and, indeed, at times suppressed the views of Marx and Engels in order to justify their own anti-revolutionary course.
The revisionists and reformists are no less active today. Their politics consist of activity completely defined by the framework of bourgeois society. Such a policy was sharply characterized by Trotsky as “the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state” (Trotsky, The Lessons of October, 1924). Such accommodations to capitalist class rule by organizations claiming adherence to Marxism is, if anything, more pronounced today in a world defined by the final undoing of the October Revolution and the widespread acceptance that “communism is dead.”
Having made common cause with “democratic” imperialism against the Soviet degenerated workers state and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, these organizations are now even more shameless in their embrace of bourgeois democracy, by and large dispensing with even lip service to the aim of proletarian revolution. In France, the fake Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), the Lambertist group (now calling itself Parti Ouvrier Indépendant) and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), flagship section of the United Secretariat (USec), regularly stand candidates for the semi-bonapartist presidency. The Lambertist candidate in the 2007 presidential election was a town mayor who ran as the “candidate of the mayors,” while LO and LCR help finance their electoral activity with direct and substantial subsidies from the French capitalist state. In Brazil, a leader of the USec group, Miguel Rossetto, actually served as a minister in the popular-front bourgeois government headed by the social democrat Lula. The French LCR has now transmuted itself into a “New Anti-Capitalist Party” that disavows any reference to communism or revolution. In Britain, Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party (core of the Committee for a Workers’ International), which in an earlier incarnation spent decades trying to reform the old Labour Party from within, now calls for a “mass workers party” defined by “Old Labour” reformism as an alternative to Blair/
Brown’s New Labour Party.
Among the few avowedly Marxist groups that still sometimes speak the language of the October Revolution are the Bolshevik Tendency (BT) and the Internationalist Group (IG). The BT was formed by a handful who quit our organization in the early 1980s in response to the onset of Cold War II and is led by a sociopath named Bill Logan, whom we expelled in 1979 for crimes against communist morality and elementary human decency. The founding cadre of the IG defected from our party in 1996, following the capitalist counterrevolutions in East Europe and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of an opportunist orientation toward various “radical” petty-bourgeois milieus. These political bookends of the Cold War have come together in denouncing our line against running for executive office.
The IG denounced our position as a break in “the continuity of genuine Trotskyism” (“France Turns Hard to the Right,” Internationalist, July 2007), alluding to our 1985 election campaign running Marjorie Stamberg, now an IG supporter, for mayor of New York. In following the practice of our revolutionary forebears, our previous position was not subjectively unprincipled. But the IG’s continuing defense of such campaigns is unprincipled. The IG asserts that communists can run “for whatever post,” including that of imperialist Commander-in-Chief, arguing: “In the unusual case in which a revolutionary candidate had enough influence to be elected, the party would already have begun building workers councils and other organs of a soviet character. And the party would insist that, if elected, its candidates would base themselves on such organs of workers power and not on the institutions of the bourgeois state.” The BT then approvingly quoted this passage and the IG’s description of our position as a “novelty,” adding its own parliamentarist twist: “Perhaps the ICL comrades will eventually conclude that running for parliament is also ‘an obstacle’ because the winning party ends up exercising executive power” (“ICL Rejects ‘Executive Offices’: Of Presidents & Principles,” 1917, 2008).
In allowing that communists should run for executive office, the IG leaves open, and certainly does not disavow, the possibility of taking such office “if elected,” at least in a revolutionary situation. For its part, the BT obliterates any distinction between ministerialism—i.e., serving as a minister in a bourgeois cabinet—and contesting to serve as revolutionary workers deputies in a bourgeois parliament. Behind the BT’s whine lurks the implicit assumption (profoundly false and expressing petty-bourgeois prejudice) that bourgeois parliaments are sovereign bodies expressing the “will of the people.” Clearly what the BT has in mind is Her Royal Majesty’s Mother of Parliaments. The BT intones: “Of course, the only way to ‘abolish’ the institutions of the bourgeois state is through socialist revolution” (ibid.). But this is merely a Sunday sermon for the gullible.
The IG and the BT invoke a “revolutionary situation” as a deus ex machina—a screen for their opportunist position. Had the Bolsheviks, emulating the Mensheviks, entered the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917 in the midst of that revolutionary situation, it would have rendered hollow the Bolsheviks’ call for “All power to the Soviets” and turned them into the left wing of bourgeois democracy. The IG and BT to the contrary, history is littered with “unusual cases” where would-be socialists and communists pleaded special circumstances to get their fingers on the levers of bourgeois state power. Moreover, the IG and the BT willfully ignore the fact that it is historically quite usual for reformist workers parties to get their first experience in administering the bourgeois state through winning electoral control of municipal councils, often in the absence of any hint of a revolutionary situation. Such municipalism, or “municipal socialism,” has served not to further proletarian revolution, but to derail it.
In a very real sense, the question of running for executive office goes right back to an incomplete fight against ministerialism initiated by left-wingers like Rosa Luxemburg in the Second International at the dawn of the 20th century. The arguments raised by the IG and BT in defense of their line on executive office place them to the right of the left wing of the pre-World War I social democracy.
The proletariat finds itself in a deep trough in this post-Soviet period. In these circumstances, it is even more crucial that revolutionaries defend the vital programmatic conquests of the past and, through critical study, debate and application, deepen and extend our understanding of the Marxist program. In doing so, it is necessary to look to the highest expressions of proletarian struggle and consciousness, like the lessons of the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 and of the proletariat’s greatest conquest yet, the October Revolution of 1917, which demonstrated conclusively that taking executive office in a capitalist government is counterposed to the fight for proletarian state power.
Marx and Engels on the State
In the Communist Manifesto, drafted just before the revolutionary upheavals in 1848, Marx and Engels made clear that the proletariat would have to erect its own state as “the first step in the revolution by the working class” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, December 1847-January 1848). They went on, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” As Lenin notes in The State and Revolution, the question of how the bourgeois state was to be replaced by the proletarian state is not addressed in the Manifesto; nor, correspondingly, is the question of a parliamentary road to socialism—universal suffrage barely existed.
By early 1852, Marx had come to the understanding that “in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, the resources and centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). But it was above all the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 that led Marx and Engels to conclude that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (The Civil War in France, 1871). Marx noted in this work that the “State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people. The Commune, which replaced the bourgeois state power, “was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time” (ibid.).
Several times, would-be supporters of Marx and Engels in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) tried to defang or deflect their revolutionary internationalist perspective, centrally on the issue of the state. Marx is scathing in his treatment of the demand for a “free state” raised in the 1875 founding program of a unified SPD. Capturing in passing the essence of the Kaiser’s Germany of the 19th century, Marx excoriated the Gotha Program for resorting to the subterfuge
“of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture and at the same time already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then assuring this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it ‘by legal means.’
“Even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no suspicion that it is precisely in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion—even it towers mountains above this kind of democratism which keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not permitted by logic.”
— Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
Engels was compelled to return to this theme—and, at the same time, to denounce ministerialism—in his critique of the 1891 Erfurt Program. He wrote:
“If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor, as Miquel. It would seem that from a legal point of view it is inadvisable to include the demand for a republic directly in the programme, although this was possible even under Louis Phillippe in France, and is now in Italy. But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy, peaceful way.”
— A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891, June 1891
Johannes Miquel was a member of the Communist League until 1852, after which he deserted to the German bourgeoisie, eventually serving as a leader of the National Liberal Party and as a government minister for a number of years.
The German SPD had grown enormously in size and influence in the last decades of the 19th century, despite the Anti-Socialist Law enacted by Bismarck in 1878, and even more so after the law’s repeal in 1890. A string of electoral successes resulted in the emergence of a huge municipal and parliamentary component. A sizable party treasury and other resources and a ponderous party and trade-union apparatus all combined to exert a conservatizing influence and to provide the material basis for a strong and ever more pronounced opportunist tendency. In his manuscript of an 1891 introduction to Marx’s main work on the Paris Commune, Engels wrote:
“Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
— Introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, March 1891
When the book was published, the SPD editors substituted “German philistine” for “Social-Democratic philistine”!
In the years following Engels’ death in 1895, leading SPDer Eduard Bernstein gave theoretical expression to the growing opportunist tendency by openly renouncing revolutionary Marxism in favor of an “evolutionary socialism” premised on gradual reform of bourgeois society. Bernstein pronounced that for him the “movement” was everything, the final goal of socialism nothing. Already by 1895, the reformist impulses in official German Social Democracy had become so strong that when Engels submitted his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, the SPD Executive objected that the work was excessively revolutionary, and asked Engels to tone it down. He reluctantly tried to oblige.
The SPD Executive did not print the entire redraft, omitting certain passages behind Engels’ back so as to make it appear that he had abandoned his revolutionary views. Most famously, they included his statement that “Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, had become largely outdated” (Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 6 March 1895). But they excised his categorical assertion, “Does that mean that in the future street fighting will no longer play any role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavourable for civilian fighters and far more favourable for the military. In future, street fighting can, therefore, be victorious only if this disadvantageous situation is compensated by other factors” (ibid.). Among these factors, explained Engels earlier in the introduction, was the need for the insurgents to make “the troops yield to moral influences.… If they succeed in this, the troops fail to respond, or the commanding officers lose their heads, and the insurrection wins” (ibid.).
Engels’ point was clearly not, as the reformists would subsequently maintain, that revolution was outdated, but that the proletarian forces had to split the bourgeois army. As early as 1856, acutely aware of the large peasant base at the core of the Prussian army, Marx had bluntly noted: “The whole thing in Germany will depend on whether it is possible to back the Proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasants’ war. In which case the affair should go swimmingly” (“Marx to Engels,” 16 April 1856).
Marx on the Question of a “Peaceful” Road
Social Democratic reformists also seized on isolated statements by Marx and Engels leaving open the possibility of peaceful transitions to socialism in certain countries. In a speech in Amsterdam, reported in the newspaper La Liberté, Marx said:
“We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I might add Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being true we must also admit that in most countries on the Continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers.”
— Marx, “On the Hague Congress,” 8 September 1872
Marx based his argument on the understanding that these particular states lacked militarist cliques or significant bureaucratic apparatuses. But his speculation was in error. Britain and Holland both had vast colonial empires that required large bureaucracies, and attendant military forces to subdue the masses. During Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) Britain waged, in addition to the Crimean War of 1853-56, an almost nonstop series of lesser and not-so-lesser military actions and wars, capped off by the Second Boer War, to extend and maintain its empire.
The United States was then in the midst of its most democratic period, the era of Reconstruction. But the Civil War gave an enormous boost to Northern capital, so that by the time of the Grant administration all the pieces were in place that would blossom into full-blown imperialism over the coming decades. It was in this period that American capital began in earnest its economic subjugation of Mexico (already vastly diminished in territory as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48), grabbing prime agricultural land, rail and mining concessions. The smashing of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and, in that same year, the dismantling of Reconstruction were the unmistakable signposts of this process.
At the time of the 1848 Revolution, Marx had a different appreciation of whether England could undergo a peaceful transition to socialism. Writing of the defeat of the French working class at the hands of the bourgeoisie that year, Marx stressed the need for a successful rising against the English bourgeoisie:
“The liberation of Europe, whether brought about by the struggle of the oppressed nationalities for their independence or by overthrowing feudal absolutism, depends therefore on the successful uprising of the French working class. Every social upheaval in France, however, is bound to be thwarted by the English bourgeoisie, by Great Britain’s industrial and commercial domination of the world. Every partial social reform in France or on the European continent as a whole, if designed to be lasting, is merely a pious wish. And only a world war can overthrow the old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors.”
— “The Revolutionary Movement,” 31 December 1848
Following the failed revolutions of 1848, capitalism grew enormously on the continent. But while the ratios of economic power shifted somewhat, Marx’s observations on Britain retained their essential validity, certainly through to the time of the Commune and later.
Whatever Marx may have speculated in 1872, we are now in a fundamentally different period of world history: the imperialist epoch characterized by the domination of monopoly finance capital, where a handful of great capitalist powers compete for world supremacy. Under such circumstances the idea of a peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism is worse than a pipe dream: it is a reformist program that ties the proletariat to its class enemies.
As if to illustrate this point, in polemicizing against our opposition to running for executive office the misnamed Bolshevik Tendency cites an 1893 letter by Engels. Engels was replying to an émigré socialist (F. Wiesen of Baird, Texas), who argued that the practice of fielding candidates for the U.S. presidency constituted a denial of revolutionary principle. Engels dismissed Wiesen’s request for a principled position as “academic,” observing that the goal of workers revolution in the U.S. was still “a very long way off” and that it was premature to draw a principled line against running for Senate or president. He argued:
“I don’t see why it should necessarily represent an infringement of the Social-Democratic principle if a man puts up candidates for some political office for which election is required and if he votes for those candidates, even if he is engaged in an attempt to abolish that office.
“One might consider that the best way to abolish the Presidency and the Senate in America would be to elect to those posts men who had pledged themselves to bring about their abolition; it would then be logical for one to act accordingly. Others might consider this method to be inexpedient; it’s a debatable point. There could be circumstances in which such a mode of action might also involve a denial of the revolutionary principle; why it should always and invariably be so, I entirely fail to see.”
— “Engels to F. Wiesen,” 14 March 1893
Engels’ central concern was to prod the émigré-dominated Socialist Labor Party (SLP) into helping a political working-class movement get started. To that end he had some years earlier stressed the importance of the 1886 United Labor Party candidacy of single-taxer Henry George for New York mayor, viewing this as a step toward an independent workers party on the model of the social-democratic parties in Europe. In 1893 Engels did not know where principled lines would be drawn in the parliamentary arena when the hour of battle arrived. How could Engels at that point have unraveled the questions of what kind of party the workers needed to take power, of the principles of Bolshevik parliamentarism, of the dynamics of critical support to reformist misleaders? Even so, he knew enough to point the way to civil war.
Not so the BT, whose motivation in citing Engels is to engage in a backhanded defense of ministerialism. As Trotsky wrote in polemicizing against Kautsky in 1920:
“The bourgeois democratic state not only creates more favorable conditions for the political education of the workers, as compared with absolutism, but also sets a limit to that development in the shape of bourgeois legality, which skilfully accumulates and builds on the upper strata of the proletariat opportunist habits and law-abiding prejudices. The school of democracy proved quite insufficient to rouse the German proletariat to revolution when the catastrophe of the war was at hand. The barbarous school of the war, social-imperialist ambitions, colossal military victories, and unparalleled defeats were required. After these events, which made a certain amount of difference in the universe, and even in the Erfurt Programme, to come out with common-places as to the meaning of democratic parliamentarism for the education of the proletariat signifies a fall into political childhood.”
— Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 1920
Perhaps the BT will now change the name of its journal from 1917 (is the reference to February?) to 1893!
The Struggle Against Millerandism, 1900
The question of the nature of executive office in the bourgeois state was posed pointblank in June 1899, when Alexandre Millerand became the first socialist leader to accept a portfolio in a bourgeois government. In an 1894 letter not cited in the BT’s tract, Engels had specifically warned against just such a possibility in the event that the Italian Republicans came to power at the head of a revolutionary movement supported by the Socialists. Writing to Italian Socialist leader Filippo Turati, Engels argued:
“After the common victory we might be offered some seats in the new government, but so that we always remain a minority. That is the greatest danger. After February 1848 the French socialist democrats (of the Réforme, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) made the mistake of accepting such posts. Constituting a minority in the government they voluntarily shared the responsibility for all the infamies and treachery which the majority, composed of pure Republicans, committed against the working class, while their presence in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working class which they claimed they represented.”
— “Engels to Filippo Turati,” 26 January 1894, Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955)
Five years later, Millerand justified serving as Minister of Commerce under Prime Minister René Waldeck-Rousseau by arguing that the French Republic was otherwise in danger of being overthrown by a reactionary alliance of monarchists and aristocrats in league with the officer corps and the Catholic church. Sitting alongside Millerand in this government of “republican defense” was the bloody suppressor of the Paris Commune, General Galliffet.
The background to all this was the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that had thrown France into a profound political crisis. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the General Staff, was convicted by secret court-martial in 1894 of selling military secrets to a foreign power and sentenced to life in prison. Soon it was revealed that Dreyfus had been framed by the army tops to hide the guilt of another officer, a member of the aristocracy. After years of captivity on Devil’s Island, off French Guiana, Dreyfus was retried and again found guilty in September 1899; he was finally given a presidential pardon later that month. Millerand had been brought into the government as a way to defuse the ongoing crisis.
Already polarized over the Dreyfus Affair, the French Socialist movement was split over Millerand’s action. One wing supported Millerand—especially Jean Jaurès, who in 1898 became one of Dreyfus’s most ardent and eloquent defenders, albeit strictly within the bounds of bourgeois liberalism. The other wing, the French Workers Party (POF), led by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, had refused to defend Dreyfus and opposed Millerand joining the government.
Joining in the debate on Millerandism was Rosa Luxemburg, a founder of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania who then became prominent in the left wing of the SPD, particularly through the fight against Bernstein. In her eloquent refutation of Bernstein’s reformism, Luxemburg observed:
“People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”
— Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1898-99, reprinted in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970)
Luxemburg rightly argued that socialists should defend Dreyfus, using the case to indict French capitalism and militarism and to further the class struggle. But she opposed Millerand’s entry into the government and argued:
“The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.”
— “Affaire Dreyfus et cas Millerand” (The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case), 1899, Luxemburg, Le Socialisme en France (1898-1912) (Socialism in France [1898-1912]) (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1971) (our translation)
Once in government the logic of Millerandism came to the fore—preservation of the Waldeck-Rousseau government at any cost. As Rosa Luxemburg commented ironically, “Yesterday, the cabinet must take defensive action in order to save the Republic. Today, the defense of the Republic must be given up in order to save the cabinet” (“Die sozialistische Krise in Frankreich” [The Socialist Crisis in France], 1900-01 [our translation]). Following the resignation of Waldeck-Rousseau, the Jaurès group supported the Radical government of Emile Combes and voted for the ministerial budget, including funding for the army and navy.
Lenin noted the evident link between Bernstein’s revisionism and Millerandism:
“Millerand has furnished an excellent example of practical Bernsteinism; not without reason did Bernstein and Vollmar rush so zealously to defend and laud him. Indeed, if Social-Democracy, in essence, is merely a party of reform and must be bold enough to admit this openly, then not only has a socialist the right to join a bourgeois cabinet, but he must always strive to do so. If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration? Why should he not remain in the cabinet even after the shooting down of workers by gendarmes has exposed, for the hundredth and thousandth time, the real nature of the democratic collaboration of classes?”
— What Is To Be Done? (1902)
The discussion on ministerialism dominated the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900, with Luxemburg, pioneer Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, American SLP leader Daniel De Leon and other leftists pitted against the right wing, exemplified by SPDers Bernstein and Georg von Vollmar, who backed Jaurès and Millerand. Politically in the center, as was increasingly the case in the German party, was SPD theoretician Karl Kautsky, who was still widely deemed to be “the pope of Marxism” in the International. As historian G.D.H. Cole observed: “It was Kautsky’s task to devise a form of words that would satisfy the centre and disarm the extreme Left without driving the right wing out of the International, and without making Jaurès’s position impossible” (Cole, The Second International 1889-1914 [London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1960]).
The compromise resolution cooked up by Kautsky is instructive as to how deeply social-democratic reformism permeated the Second International:
“In a contemporary democratic state the conquest of political power by the proletariat cannot be the work of a mere putschist action but can only constitute the conclusion of a long and laborious work of political and economic organization of the proletariat, of its physical and moral regeneration and of a step-by-step conquest of elective seats in communal representative assemblies and legislative bodies.
“But where governmental power is centralized, its conquest cannot take place piece by piece. The entry of an individual socialist into a bourgeois ministry cannot be regarded as the normal beginning of the conquest of political power but can be only a temporary and exceptional makeshift in a predicament.
“Whether in a given case such a predicament exists is a question of tactics and not of principle. Here the Congress shouldn’t decide. But in any case this dangerous experiment can be advantageous only if it is approved by a united party organization and the socialist minister is and remains the mandate-bearer of his party.”
— Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Paris 1900 (International Socialist Congress in Paris 1900) (Berlin: Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1900) (our translation)
The gratuitous warning against putschism and the arguments in favor of gradual penetration of municipal councils and legislative assemblies were intended to placate the revisionists and were recognized as such by them. The “exceptional makeshift” escape clause was also happily accepted by Millerand and Jaurès, because they shamelessly wielded that argument to support their own ministerialism. In fact, it was the bourgeoisie that embraced this socialist minister in an “exceptional” move to liquidate the political crisis engendered by the Dreyfus Affair.
The minority resolution introduced by Guesde and Italy’s Enrico Ferri reaffirmed that “by conquest of public powers one should understand the political expropriation of the capitalist class, whether this expropriation takes place peacefully or violently.” It continued:
“Therefore it only allows, under a bourgeois regime, for occupying elective positions which the Party can seize through its own forces, i.e., the workers organized as a class party, and it necessarily forbids any socialist participation in bourgeois governments, against which socialists must remain in a state of irreconcilable opposition.”
— Congrès Socialiste International Paris 23-27 Septembre 1900 (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1980) (our translation)
Thus the minority resolution left open the possibility of taking positions in the bourgeois regime that “the Party can seize through its own forces.” Plekhanov went further, accepting the possibility that participation in a bourgeois cabinet might be a valid tactic under certain exceptional circumstances. Thus he initially supported Kautsky’s resolution but tried to amend it to include at least an implicit criticism of Millerand, arguing that if a socialist is forced to join a bourgeois cabinet in extreme cases, he is obliged to leave if it reveals a bias in its relation to the struggle of labor and capital. Plekhanov himself acknowledged that on a theoretical level his amendment “cannot stand up to criticism: what kind of bourgeois government could possibly be unbiased toward the struggle of labor with capital?” (“Neskol’ko slov o poslednem Parizhskom mezhdunarodnom sotsialisticheskom kongresse” [A Few Words About the Latest International Socialist Congress in Paris], April 1901 [our translation]). Jaurès then deftly amended Plekhanov’s amendment to say that a socialist must leave the cabinet if a unified socialist party deems the government biased in the struggle of labor with capital—but France did not have a unified party! Trapped, Plekhanov ended up voting with the minority while complaining that Guesde’s motion was too categorical in its opposition to entering a bourgeois cabinet.
Guesde also introduced a motion opposing socialist participation in class-collaborationist coalitions with bourgeois parties. While asserting that “class struggle forbids any kind of alliance with any fraction whatsoever of the capitalist class,” the motion allowed that “exceptional circumstances make coalitions necessary in some places” (Congrès Socialiste International [our translation]). This loophole was large enough that even the hardened opportunists could vote for the resolution, and it passed unanimously.
Amsterdam 1904: Millerandism Revisited
The Second International returned to the subject of Millerandism at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress. A year before, at the 1903 SPD Congress in Dresden, Kautsky had joined in endorsing a resolution condemning revisionism and, implicitly, Millerandism. American SLP leader Daniel De Leon commented acerbically: “At the Paris Congress an anti-Millerandist attitude was decidedly unpopular; there Kautsky was ‘running with the hares’,” while at Dresden Kautsky was “again to the fore, now ‘barking with the hounds’” (“The Dresden Congress,” Daily People, 3 January 1904).
The Guesdists then introduced the SPD resolution for endorsement at Amsterdam. As passed in 1904, the resolution “condemned in the most decisive way revisionist efforts to alter our previously proven and victorious class-struggle tactics in such a way that a policy of accommodation to the existing order of things takes the place of the conquest of political power through vanquishing our opponents” (Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Amsterdam , [our translation]). It proclaimed itself frankly against any “party which contents itself with reforming bourgeois society” and further declared that “the Social Democracy, in keeping with Kautsky’s resolution at the International Socialist Congress in Paris in the year 1900, cannot [B]strive for a share of governmental power within bourgeois society.” The positive reference to the 1900 Kautsky resolution was a characteristic sop to the right wing. The rebuke of the revisionists did not lead to a parting of ways, as all wings accepted the conception of a “party of the whole class,” i.e., a single, unified party of the working class encompassing all tendencies from Marxism to reformism. Nonetheless, delegates on both the left and the right at Amsterdam saw the 1903 Dresden resolution as a sharp counter to the conciliation of Millerandism in 1900.
De Leon had voted against Kautsky’s resolution at the 1900 Paris Congress. In 1904, De Leon again objected to endorsing Kautsky’s stand in 1900, submitting the following resolution:
“Whereas, At the last International Congress, held in Paris, in 1900, a resolution generally known as the Kautsky Resolution, was adopted, the closing clauses of which contemplate the emergency of the working class accepting office at the hand of such capitalist governments, and also, especially, PRE-SUPPOSES THE POSSIBILITY OF IMPARTIALITY ON THE PART OF THE RULING CLASS GOVERNMENTS IN THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE WORKING CLASS AND THE CAPITALIST CLASS….
“Resolved, First, That the said Kautsky Resolution be and the same is hereby repealed as a principle of general Socialist tactics;
“Second, That, in fully developed capitalist countries like America, the working class cannot, without betrayal of the cause of the proletariat, fill any political office other than such that they conquer for and by themselves.”
— De Leon, “Millerandism Repudiated,” Daily People, 28 August 1904
Failing to get any support for his resolution, De Leon voted for the main resolution.
In allowing for the filling of political offices conquered by the workers “for and by themselves,” De Leon’s resolution again avoided the key issue—the necessity of smashing the machinery of the capitalist state and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. While De Leon took a principled stand against bourgeois ministerialism, he was also committed to electoralism. Founding American Communist and, later, Trotskyist James P. Cannon honored De Leon’s pioneering role in the formative period of the American socialist movement while rightly noting that he “was sectarian in his tactics, and his conception of political action was rigidly formalistic, and rendered sterile by legalistic fetishism” (Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1962]).
As he made clear in a 1905 address originally published as “The Preamble of the I.W.W.,” De Leon left open the possibility that, at least in the U.S., the proletariat could conquer political power peacefully through the ballot box, after which the new socialist government would disband itself and cede power to an administration of “socialist industrial unions” (“The Socialist Reconstruction of Society,” De Leon, Socialist Landmarks [New York: New York Labor News Company, 1952]). According to De Leon, such unions, formed under capitalism, would grow organically, progressively seizing and wielding economic power against the capitalists. Beginning in the 1890s, De Leon’s SLP faithfully, every four years, put up its own candidate for the U.S. presidency. Following De Leon’s death in 1914 and the SLP’s rejection of the lessons of the October Revolution as applicable to the American terrain, the party was transformed into a fossilized shell of its former self.
But in its electoralism, there was little to distinguish the SLP even under De Leon from the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs. From 1900 onwards, Debs was to run five times for the office of president of the United States. Debs intoned: “The workers must be taught to unite and vote together as a class in support of the Socialist Party, the party that represents them as a class, and when they do this the government will pass into their hands and capitalism will fall to rise no more” (“The Growth of Socialism,” 1906, Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs [New York: Hermitage Press, 1948]). Debs ran his last presidential campaign in 1920, winning over 900,000 votes, from a prison cell in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was serving a ten-year sentence (as well as being disenfranchised for life) for his opposition to World War I. Debs’ presidential campaigns as well as his great authority cemented a tradition of socialists running for Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism that was by and large uncritically accepted by all except anti-parliamentary opponents of any electoral activity whatsoever. But where Debs advocated the overthrow of capitalism, many Socialist leaders, such as Morris Hillquit, were virulently anti-Leninist reformists. Another, Victor Berger, was aptly described as a “sewer socialist” for a program of municipal reform that was nearly indistinguishable from that peddled by the bourgeois Progressive movement.
Municipalism and the Second International
Municipalism was not the preserve solely of overt reformists. The deep division between the reformist and revolutionary wings of the Second International over socialists taking responsibility for bourgeois government at the ministerial level did not extend to the municipal level. In fact, the 1900 Paris Congress was unanimous in approving a resolution on municipalism that asserted:
“In consideration that the municipality can become an excellent laboratory of decentralized economic life and at the same time a formidable political bastion to be used by local socialist majorities against the bourgeois majority of the central power, once serious autonomy has been achieved;
“The International Congress of 1900 states:
“That all socialists have a duty, without ignoring the importance of general politics, to explain and appreciate municipal activity, to give to municipal reforms the importance given to them by their role as ‘embryos of the collectivist society’ and to strive to turn communal services—transit, lighting, water supply, electricity, schools, medical services, hospitals, baths, wash houses, municipal stores, municipal bakeries, food service, heating, workers’ housing, clothing, police, municipal works, etc.—into model institutions, from the standpoint both of the public interest as well as of the citizens employed in these operations.”
— Congrès Socialiste International (our translation)
This is perhaps the most graphic example of the dilemma of the parties of the Second International—a real program of minimum reforms, and a maximum program of socialism, all too often to be dragged out for Sunday political sermons, but nothing more. Even those who were most outspoken and consistent in their opposition to Bernsteinism and Millerandism thought socialists could participate in municipal administrations. Thus Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
“The question of participating in a town council is entirely different. It’s true that both the town council and the mayor are tasked, inter alia, with administrative functions that have been transferred to them and with the carrying out of bourgeois laws; historically, however, both constitute entirely counterposed elements....
“For socialist tactics the result is a fundamentally different stance: the central government of the present state is the embodiment of bourgeois class rule, whose elimination is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to the victory of socialism; self-administration is the element of the future, with which the socialist transformation will link up positively.
“Admittedly, the bourgeois parties know how to infuse their class content even into the economic and cultural functions of the municipality. But here socialists will never get into a situation of being untrue to their own politics. As long as they are in the minority in town representative bodies, they will make opposition their guideline in the same way as in parliament. But if they attain a majority, then they will transform the municipality itself into an instrument of struggle against the bourgeois central power.”
— “The Socialist Crisis in France,” 1900-01 (our translation)
This view was in part a holdover from the period of the ascendancy of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, when the commune was a weapon of the urban classes against the feudal monarchical state. In the late Middle Ages, the communes in Italy and France served as bastions in which the mercantile bourgeoisies developed the roots of capitalism within feudal society and against the forces of absolutism. But after the bourgeoisie came to power, it pushed the autonomous communes aside in order to cohere a strong centralized state to defend its class interests at the national level. The adoption of municipalism by the Second International reflected not only theoretical confusion but also the fact that those reforms that were attained through class struggle in the last decades of the 1800s were often dispensed by socialist-controlled local governments.
In fact, Marx and Engels had sought to dispel municipalist illusions on several occasions. Following the revolutions of 1848, they cautioned that the proletarians “must not allow themselves to be misguided by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government, etc.” (“Address of the Central Authority to the League,” March 1850). And in his writing on the Paris Commune, Marx warned against confusing the functions of the medieval commune with the tasks of proletarian socialism:
“It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that very State power.... The antagonism of the Commune against the State power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization.... The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now superseded, State power.”
— The Civil War in France
In a similar vein, in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin denounced the “philistine opportunism” of Menshevik schemes for “municipal socialism”:
“They forget that so long as the bourgeoisie rules as a class it cannot allow any encroachment, even from the ‘municipal’ point of view, upon the real foundations of its rule; that if the bourgeoisie allows, tolerates, ‘municipal socialism,’ it is because the latter does not touch the foundations of its rule, does not interfere with the important sources of its wealth, but extends only to the narrow sphere of local expenditure, which the bourgeoisie itself [I]allows the ‘population’ to manage. It does not need more than a slight acquaintance with ‘municipal socialism’ in the West to know that any attempt on the part of socialist municipalities to go a little beyond the boundaries of their normal, i.e., minor, petty activities, which give no substantial relief to the workers, any attempt to meddle with capital, is invariably vetoed in the most emphatic manner by the central authorities of the bourgeois state.”
Spring 2009
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Down With Executive Offices of the Capitalist State!
Marxist Principles and Electoral Tactics
http://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/esp/61/electoral.html
The Fifth Conference of the International Communist League in 2007 adopted the position of opposition to Marxists running for executive office in the capitalist state—e.g., president, mayor, provincial or state governor—as a matter of principle. This position flows from our understanding that the capitalist state is the executive committee of the ruling class. At its core this state consists of bodies of armed men—the military, police, courts and prisons—which function to protect the class rule of the bourgeoisie and its system of production.
Communist deputies can, as oppositionists, serve in the U.S. Congress, parliaments and other legislative bodies as revolutionary tribunes of the working class. But assuming executive office or gaining control of a bourgeois legislature or municipal council, either independently or in coalition, requires taking responsibility for the administration of the machinery of the capitalist state. The ICL had previously held that communists could run for executive offices, provided that we declare in advance that we don’t intend to assume such offices. But in re-examining this question, we concluded that standing for election to executive positions carries the implication that one is ready to accept such responsibility, no matter what disclaimer one makes in advance. For self-proclaimed Marxists to engage in such activity only lends legitimacy to prevailing and reformist conceptions of the state.
As we stated in our 2007 conference document:
“In adopting the position against running for executive office, we are recognizing and codifying what should be seen as a corollary to Lenin’s The State and Revolution and The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which are really the founding documents of the Third [Communist] International [CI, or Comintern]. This understanding was attenuated by the time of the Second Congress of the CI, which failed to draw a distinction between parliamentary and executive office in pursuing electoral activity. Thus we are continuing to complete the theoretical and programmatic work of the first four Congresses of the CI. It is easy enough to pledge that you won’t take executive office when the chance of winning is remote. But the question is: what happens when you win?...
“Our earlier practice conformed to that of the Comintern and Fourth International. This does not mean that we acted in an unprincipled way in the past: the principle had never been recognized as such either by our forebears or by ourselves. Programs do evolve, as new issues arise and we critically scrutinize the work of our revolutionary predecessors.”
— “Down With Executive Offices!” Spartacist No. 60, Autumn 2007
Behind the question of running for executive office stands the fundamental counterposition between reformism and Marxism: Can the proletariat use bourgeois democracy and the bourgeois state to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism? Or, rather, must the proletariat smash the old state machinery, and in its place create a new state to impose its own class rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat—to suppress and expropriate the capitalist exploiters?
Since the October Revolution of 1917, social democrats and reformists of various stripes, beginning with the Russian Mensheviks and exemplified most notably at the time by the German Social Democrat and erstwhile Marxist Karl Kautsky, have denounced the October Revolution, arguing that the Bolsheviks should not have led the proletariat to seize power. Instead, the reformists maintained that the Russian proletariat should have given the lead to and supported the liberal bourgeoisie—all in the name of defense of “democracy.” The State and Revolution, written on the eve of the October Revolution, and its companion piece, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, written a year later, together represent a striking refutation of these views. In these works Lenin rescues Marx and Engels from the distortions and apologias of the opportunists, who selectively quoted, misquoted and, indeed, at times suppressed the views of Marx and Engels in order to justify their own anti-revolutionary course.
The revisionists and reformists are no less active today. Their politics consist of activity completely defined by the framework of bourgeois society. Such a policy was sharply characterized by Trotsky as “the actual training of the masses to become imbued with the inviolability of the bourgeois state” (Trotsky, The Lessons of October, 1924). Such accommodations to capitalist class rule by organizations claiming adherence to Marxism is, if anything, more pronounced today in a world defined by the final undoing of the October Revolution and the widespread acceptance that “communism is dead.”
Having made common cause with “democratic” imperialism against the Soviet degenerated workers state and the bureaucratically deformed workers states of East Europe, these organizations are now even more shameless in their embrace of bourgeois democracy, by and large dispensing with even lip service to the aim of proletarian revolution. In France, the fake Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière (LO), the Lambertist group (now calling itself Parti Ouvrier Indépendant) and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), flagship section of the United Secretariat (USec), regularly stand candidates for the semi-bonapartist presidency. The Lambertist candidate in the 2007 presidential election was a town mayor who ran as the “candidate of the mayors,” while LO and LCR help finance their electoral activity with direct and substantial subsidies from the French capitalist state. In Brazil, a leader of the USec group, Miguel Rossetto, actually served as a minister in the popular-front bourgeois government headed by the social democrat Lula. The French LCR has now transmuted itself into a “New Anti-Capitalist Party” that disavows any reference to communism or revolution. In Britain, Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party (core of the Committee for a Workers’ International), which in an earlier incarnation spent decades trying to reform the old Labour Party from within, now calls for a “mass workers party” defined by “Old Labour” reformism as an alternative to Blair/
Brown’s New Labour Party.
Among the few avowedly Marxist groups that still sometimes speak the language of the October Revolution are the Bolshevik Tendency (BT) and the Internationalist Group (IG). The BT was formed by a handful who quit our organization in the early 1980s in response to the onset of Cold War II and is led by a sociopath named Bill Logan, whom we expelled in 1979 for crimes against communist morality and elementary human decency. The founding cadre of the IG defected from our party in 1996, following the capitalist counterrevolutions in East Europe and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of an opportunist orientation toward various “radical” petty-bourgeois milieus. These political bookends of the Cold War have come together in denouncing our line against running for executive office.
The IG denounced our position as a break in “the continuity of genuine Trotskyism” (“France Turns Hard to the Right,” Internationalist, July 2007), alluding to our 1985 election campaign running Marjorie Stamberg, now an IG supporter, for mayor of New York. In following the practice of our revolutionary forebears, our previous position was not subjectively unprincipled. But the IG’s continuing defense of such campaigns is unprincipled. The IG asserts that communists can run “for whatever post,” including that of imperialist Commander-in-Chief, arguing: “In the unusual case in which a revolutionary candidate had enough influence to be elected, the party would already have begun building workers councils and other organs of a soviet character. And the party would insist that, if elected, its candidates would base themselves on such organs of workers power and not on the institutions of the bourgeois state.” The BT then approvingly quoted this passage and the IG’s description of our position as a “novelty,” adding its own parliamentarist twist: “Perhaps the ICL comrades will eventually conclude that running for parliament is also ‘an obstacle’ because the winning party ends up exercising executive power” (“ICL Rejects ‘Executive Offices’: Of Presidents & Principles,” 1917, 2008).
In allowing that communists should run for executive office, the IG leaves open, and certainly does not disavow, the possibility of taking such office “if elected,” at least in a revolutionary situation. For its part, the BT obliterates any distinction between ministerialism—i.e., serving as a minister in a bourgeois cabinet—and contesting to serve as revolutionary workers deputies in a bourgeois parliament. Behind the BT’s whine lurks the implicit assumption (profoundly false and expressing petty-bourgeois prejudice) that bourgeois parliaments are sovereign bodies expressing the “will of the people.” Clearly what the BT has in mind is Her Royal Majesty’s Mother of Parliaments. The BT intones: “Of course, the only way to ‘abolish’ the institutions of the bourgeois state is through socialist revolution” (ibid.). But this is merely a Sunday sermon for the gullible.
The IG and the BT invoke a “revolutionary situation” as a deus ex machina—a screen for their opportunist position. Had the Bolsheviks, emulating the Mensheviks, entered the bourgeois Provisional Government in 1917 in the midst of that revolutionary situation, it would have rendered hollow the Bolsheviks’ call for “All power to the Soviets” and turned them into the left wing of bourgeois democracy. The IG and BT to the contrary, history is littered with “unusual cases” where would-be socialists and communists pleaded special circumstances to get their fingers on the levers of bourgeois state power. Moreover, the IG and the BT willfully ignore the fact that it is historically quite usual for reformist workers parties to get their first experience in administering the bourgeois state through winning electoral control of municipal councils, often in the absence of any hint of a revolutionary situation. Such municipalism, or “municipal socialism,” has served not to further proletarian revolution, but to derail it.
In a very real sense, the question of running for executive office goes right back to an incomplete fight against ministerialism initiated by left-wingers like Rosa Luxemburg in the Second International at the dawn of the 20th century. The arguments raised by the IG and BT in defense of their line on executive office place them to the right of the left wing of the pre-World War I social democracy.
The proletariat finds itself in a deep trough in this post-Soviet period. In these circumstances, it is even more crucial that revolutionaries defend the vital programmatic conquests of the past and, through critical study, debate and application, deepen and extend our understanding of the Marxist program. In doing so, it is necessary to look to the highest expressions of proletarian struggle and consciousness, like the lessons of the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 and of the proletariat’s greatest conquest yet, the October Revolution of 1917, which demonstrated conclusively that taking executive office in a capitalist government is counterposed to the fight for proletarian state power.
Marx and Engels on the State
In the Communist Manifesto, drafted just before the revolutionary upheavals in 1848, Marx and Engels made clear that the proletariat would have to erect its own state as “the first step in the revolution by the working class” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, December 1847-January 1848). They went on, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.” As Lenin notes in The State and Revolution, the question of how the bourgeois state was to be replaced by the proletarian state is not addressed in the Manifesto; nor, correspondingly, is the question of a parliamentary road to socialism—universal suffrage barely existed.
By early 1852, Marx had come to the understanding that “in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive measures, the resources and centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of breaking it” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). But it was above all the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871 that led Marx and Engels to conclude that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (The Civil War in France, 1871). Marx noted in this work that the “State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.” The first decree of the Commune, therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people. The Commune, which replaced the bourgeois state power, “was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time” (ibid.).
Several times, would-be supporters of Marx and Engels in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) tried to defang or deflect their revolutionary internationalist perspective, centrally on the issue of the state. Marx is scathing in his treatment of the demand for a “free state” raised in the 1875 founding program of a unified SPD. Capturing in passing the essence of the Kaiser’s Germany of the 19th century, Marx excoriated the Gotha Program for resorting to the subterfuge
“of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture and at the same time already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then assuring this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it ‘by legal means.’
“Even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic republic and has no suspicion that it is precisely in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion—even it towers mountains above this kind of democratism which keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not permitted by logic.”
— Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
Engels was compelled to return to this theme—and, at the same time, to denounce ministerialism—in his critique of the 1891 Erfurt Program. He wrote:
“If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor, as Miquel. It would seem that from a legal point of view it is inadvisable to include the demand for a republic directly in the programme, although this was possible even under Louis Phillippe in France, and is now in Italy. But the fact that in Germany it is not permitted to advance even a republican party programme openly, proves how totally mistaken is the belief that a republic, and not only a republic, but also communist society, can be established in a cosy, peaceful way.”
— A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891, June 1891
Johannes Miquel was a member of the Communist League until 1852, after which he deserted to the German bourgeoisie, eventually serving as a leader of the National Liberal Party and as a government minister for a number of years.
The German SPD had grown enormously in size and influence in the last decades of the 19th century, despite the Anti-Socialist Law enacted by Bismarck in 1878, and even more so after the law’s repeal in 1890. A string of electoral successes resulted in the emergence of a huge municipal and parliamentary component. A sizable party treasury and other resources and a ponderous party and trade-union apparatus all combined to exert a conservatizing influence and to provide the material basis for a strong and ever more pronounced opportunist tendency. In his manuscript of an 1891 introduction to Marx’s main work on the Paris Commune, Engels wrote:
“Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
— Introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, March 1891
When the book was published, the SPD editors substituted “German philistine” for “Social-Democratic philistine”!
In the years following Engels’ death in 1895, leading SPDer Eduard Bernstein gave theoretical expression to the growing opportunist tendency by openly renouncing revolutionary Marxism in favor of an “evolutionary socialism” premised on gradual reform of bourgeois society. Bernstein pronounced that for him the “movement” was everything, the final goal of socialism nothing. Already by 1895, the reformist impulses in official German Social Democracy had become so strong that when Engels submitted his introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, the SPD Executive objected that the work was excessively revolutionary, and asked Engels to tone it down. He reluctantly tried to oblige.
The SPD Executive did not print the entire redraft, omitting certain passages behind Engels’ back so as to make it appear that he had abandoned his revolutionary views. Most famously, they included his statement that “Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, had become largely outdated” (Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, 6 March 1895). But they excised his categorical assertion, “Does that mean that in the future street fighting will no longer play any role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavourable for civilian fighters and far more favourable for the military. In future, street fighting can, therefore, be victorious only if this disadvantageous situation is compensated by other factors” (ibid.). Among these factors, explained Engels earlier in the introduction, was the need for the insurgents to make “the troops yield to moral influences.… If they succeed in this, the troops fail to respond, or the commanding officers lose their heads, and the insurrection wins” (ibid.).
Engels’ point was clearly not, as the reformists would subsequently maintain, that revolution was outdated, but that the proletarian forces had to split the bourgeois army. As early as 1856, acutely aware of the large peasant base at the core of the Prussian army, Marx had bluntly noted: “The whole thing in Germany will depend on whether it is possible to back the Proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasants’ war. In which case the affair should go swimmingly” (“Marx to Engels,” 16 April 1856).
Marx on the Question of a “Peaceful” Road
Social Democratic reformists also seized on isolated statements by Marx and Engels leaving open the possibility of peaceful transitions to socialism in certain countries. In a speech in Amsterdam, reported in the newspaper La Liberté, Marx said:
“We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account; and we do not deny the existence of countries like America, England, and if I knew your institutions better I might add Holland, where the workers may achieve their aims by peaceful means. That being true we must also admit that in most countries on the Continent it is force which must be the lever of our revolution; it is force which will have to be resorted to for a time in order to establish the rule of the workers.”
— Marx, “On the Hague Congress,” 8 September 1872
Marx based his argument on the understanding that these particular states lacked militarist cliques or significant bureaucratic apparatuses. But his speculation was in error. Britain and Holland both had vast colonial empires that required large bureaucracies, and attendant military forces to subdue the masses. During Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) Britain waged, in addition to the Crimean War of 1853-56, an almost nonstop series of lesser and not-so-lesser military actions and wars, capped off by the Second Boer War, to extend and maintain its empire.
The United States was then in the midst of its most democratic period, the era of Reconstruction. But the Civil War gave an enormous boost to Northern capital, so that by the time of the Grant administration all the pieces were in place that would blossom into full-blown imperialism over the coming decades. It was in this period that American capital began in earnest its economic subjugation of Mexico (already vastly diminished in territory as a result of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48), grabbing prime agricultural land, rail and mining concessions. The smashing of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and, in that same year, the dismantling of Reconstruction were the unmistakable signposts of this process.
At the time of the 1848 Revolution, Marx had a different appreciation of whether England could undergo a peaceful transition to socialism. Writing of the defeat of the French working class at the hands of the bourgeoisie that year, Marx stressed the need for a successful rising against the English bourgeoisie:
“The liberation of Europe, whether brought about by the struggle of the oppressed nationalities for their independence or by overthrowing feudal absolutism, depends therefore on the successful uprising of the French working class. Every social upheaval in France, however, is bound to be thwarted by the English bourgeoisie, by Great Britain’s industrial and commercial domination of the world. Every partial social reform in France or on the European continent as a whole, if designed to be lasting, is merely a pious wish. And only a world war can overthrow the old England, as only this can provide the Chartists, the party of the organised English workers, with the conditions for a successful rising against their gigantic oppressors.”
— “The Revolutionary Movement,” 31 December 1848
Following the failed revolutions of 1848, capitalism grew enormously on the continent. But while the ratios of economic power shifted somewhat, Marx’s observations on Britain retained their essential validity, certainly through to the time of the Commune and later.
Whatever Marx may have speculated in 1872, we are now in a fundamentally different period of world history: the imperialist epoch characterized by the domination of monopoly finance capital, where a handful of great capitalist powers compete for world supremacy. Under such circumstances the idea of a peaceful, parliamentary transition to socialism is worse than a pipe dream: it is a reformist program that ties the proletariat to its class enemies.
As if to illustrate this point, in polemicizing against our opposition to running for executive office the misnamed Bolshevik Tendency cites an 1893 letter by Engels. Engels was replying to an émigré socialist (F. Wiesen of Baird, Texas), who argued that the practice of fielding candidates for the U.S. presidency constituted a denial of revolutionary principle. Engels dismissed Wiesen’s request for a principled position as “academic,” observing that the goal of workers revolution in the U.S. was still “a very long way off” and that it was premature to draw a principled line against running for Senate or president. He argued:
“I don’t see why it should necessarily represent an infringement of the Social-Democratic principle if a man puts up candidates for some political office for which election is required and if he votes for those candidates, even if he is engaged in an attempt to abolish that office.
“One might consider that the best way to abolish the Presidency and the Senate in America would be to elect to those posts men who had pledged themselves to bring about their abolition; it would then be logical for one to act accordingly. Others might consider this method to be inexpedient; it’s a debatable point. There could be circumstances in which such a mode of action might also involve a denial of the revolutionary principle; why it should always and invariably be so, I entirely fail to see.”
— “Engels to F. Wiesen,” 14 March 1893
Engels’ central concern was to prod the émigré-dominated Socialist Labor Party (SLP) into helping a political working-class movement get started. To that end he had some years earlier stressed the importance of the 1886 United Labor Party candidacy of single-taxer Henry George for New York mayor, viewing this as a step toward an independent workers party on the model of the social-democratic parties in Europe. In 1893 Engels did not know where principled lines would be drawn in the parliamentary arena when the hour of battle arrived. How could Engels at that point have unraveled the questions of what kind of party the workers needed to take power, of the principles of Bolshevik parliamentarism, of the dynamics of critical support to reformist misleaders? Even so, he knew enough to point the way to civil war.
Not so the BT, whose motivation in citing Engels is to engage in a backhanded defense of ministerialism. As Trotsky wrote in polemicizing against Kautsky in 1920:
“The bourgeois democratic state not only creates more favorable conditions for the political education of the workers, as compared with absolutism, but also sets a limit to that development in the shape of bourgeois legality, which skilfully accumulates and builds on the upper strata of the proletariat opportunist habits and law-abiding prejudices. The school of democracy proved quite insufficient to rouse the German proletariat to revolution when the catastrophe of the war was at hand. The barbarous school of the war, social-imperialist ambitions, colossal military victories, and unparalleled defeats were required. After these events, which made a certain amount of difference in the universe, and even in the Erfurt Programme, to come out with common-places as to the meaning of democratic parliamentarism for the education of the proletariat signifies a fall into political childhood.”
— Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism, 1920
Perhaps the BT will now change the name of its journal from 1917 (is the reference to February?) to 1893!
The Struggle Against Millerandism, 1900
The question of the nature of executive office in the bourgeois state was posed pointblank in June 1899, when Alexandre Millerand became the first socialist leader to accept a portfolio in a bourgeois government. In an 1894 letter not cited in the BT’s tract, Engels had specifically warned against just such a possibility in the event that the Italian Republicans came to power at the head of a revolutionary movement supported by the Socialists. Writing to Italian Socialist leader Filippo Turati, Engels argued:
“After the common victory we might be offered some seats in the new government, but so that we always remain a minority. That is the greatest danger. After February 1848 the French socialist democrats (of the Réforme, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) made the mistake of accepting such posts. Constituting a minority in the government they voluntarily shared the responsibility for all the infamies and treachery which the majority, composed of pure Republicans, committed against the working class, while their presence in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working class which they claimed they represented.”
— “Engels to Filippo Turati,” 26 January 1894, Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1955)
Five years later, Millerand justified serving as Minister of Commerce under Prime Minister René Waldeck-Rousseau by arguing that the French Republic was otherwise in danger of being overthrown by a reactionary alliance of monarchists and aristocrats in league with the officer corps and the Catholic church. Sitting alongside Millerand in this government of “republican defense” was the bloody suppressor of the Paris Commune, General Galliffet.
The background to all this was the Dreyfus Affair, a political scandal that had thrown France into a profound political crisis. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the General Staff, was convicted by secret court-martial in 1894 of selling military secrets to a foreign power and sentenced to life in prison. Soon it was revealed that Dreyfus had been framed by the army tops to hide the guilt of another officer, a member of the aristocracy. After years of captivity on Devil’s Island, off French Guiana, Dreyfus was retried and again found guilty in September 1899; he was finally given a presidential pardon later that month. Millerand had been brought into the government as a way to defuse the ongoing crisis.
Already polarized over the Dreyfus Affair, the French Socialist movement was split over Millerand’s action. One wing supported Millerand—especially Jean Jaurès, who in 1898 became one of Dreyfus’s most ardent and eloquent defenders, albeit strictly within the bounds of bourgeois liberalism. The other wing, the French Workers Party (POF), led by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, had refused to defend Dreyfus and opposed Millerand joining the government.
Joining in the debate on Millerandism was Rosa Luxemburg, a founder of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania who then became prominent in the left wing of the SPD, particularly through the fight against Bernstein. In her eloquent refutation of Bernstein’s reformism, Luxemburg observed:
“People who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modification of the old society.”
— Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1898-99, reprinted in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970)
Luxemburg rightly argued that socialists should defend Dreyfus, using the case to indict French capitalism and militarism and to further the class struggle. But she opposed Millerand’s entry into the government and argued:
“The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.”
— “Affaire Dreyfus et cas Millerand” (The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case), 1899, Luxemburg, Le Socialisme en France (1898-1912) (Socialism in France [1898-1912]) (Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1971) (our translation)
Once in government the logic of Millerandism came to the fore—preservation of the Waldeck-Rousseau government at any cost. As Rosa Luxemburg commented ironically, “Yesterday, the cabinet must take defensive action in order to save the Republic. Today, the defense of the Republic must be given up in order to save the cabinet” (“Die sozialistische Krise in Frankreich” [The Socialist Crisis in France], 1900-01 [our translation]). Following the resignation of Waldeck-Rousseau, the Jaurès group supported the Radical government of Emile Combes and voted for the ministerial budget, including funding for the army and navy.
Lenin noted the evident link between Bernstein’s revisionism and Millerandism:
“Millerand has furnished an excellent example of practical Bernsteinism; not without reason did Bernstein and Vollmar rush so zealously to defend and laud him. Indeed, if Social-Democracy, in essence, is merely a party of reform and must be bold enough to admit this openly, then not only has a socialist the right to join a bourgeois cabinet, but he must always strive to do so. If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration? Why should he not remain in the cabinet even after the shooting down of workers by gendarmes has exposed, for the hundredth and thousandth time, the real nature of the democratic collaboration of classes?”
— What Is To Be Done? (1902)
The discussion on ministerialism dominated the Paris Congress of the Second International in 1900, with Luxemburg, pioneer Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, American SLP leader Daniel De Leon and other leftists pitted against the right wing, exemplified by SPDers Bernstein and Georg von Vollmar, who backed Jaurès and Millerand. Politically in the center, as was increasingly the case in the German party, was SPD theoretician Karl Kautsky, who was still widely deemed to be “the pope of Marxism” in the International. As historian G.D.H. Cole observed: “It was Kautsky’s task to devise a form of words that would satisfy the centre and disarm the extreme Left without driving the right wing out of the International, and without making Jaurès’s position impossible” (Cole, The Second International 1889-1914 [London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1960]).
The compromise resolution cooked up by Kautsky is instructive as to how deeply social-democratic reformism permeated the Second International:
“In a contemporary democratic state the conquest of political power by the proletariat cannot be the work of a mere putschist action but can only constitute the conclusion of a long and laborious work of political and economic organization of the proletariat, of its physical and moral regeneration and of a step-by-step conquest of elective seats in communal representative assemblies and legislative bodies.
“But where governmental power is centralized, its conquest cannot take place piece by piece. The entry of an individual socialist into a bourgeois ministry cannot be regarded as the normal beginning of the conquest of political power but can be only a temporary and exceptional makeshift in a predicament.
“Whether in a given case such a predicament exists is a question of tactics and not of principle. Here the Congress shouldn’t decide. But in any case this dangerous experiment can be advantageous only if it is approved by a united party organization and the socialist minister is and remains the mandate-bearer of his party.”
— Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Paris 1900 (International Socialist Congress in Paris 1900) (Berlin: Expedition der Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1900) (our translation)
The gratuitous warning against putschism and the arguments in favor of gradual penetration of municipal councils and legislative assemblies were intended to placate the revisionists and were recognized as such by them. The “exceptional makeshift” escape clause was also happily accepted by Millerand and Jaurès, because they shamelessly wielded that argument to support their own ministerialism. In fact, it was the bourgeoisie that embraced this socialist minister in an “exceptional” move to liquidate the political crisis engendered by the Dreyfus Affair.
The minority resolution introduced by Guesde and Italy’s Enrico Ferri reaffirmed that “by conquest of public powers one should understand the political expropriation of the capitalist class, whether this expropriation takes place peacefully or violently.” It continued:
“Therefore it only allows, under a bourgeois regime, for occupying elective positions which the Party can seize through its own forces, i.e., the workers organized as a class party, and it necessarily forbids any socialist participation in bourgeois governments, against which socialists must remain in a state of irreconcilable opposition.”
— Congrès Socialiste International Paris 23-27 Septembre 1900 (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1980) (our translation)
Thus the minority resolution left open the possibility of taking positions in the bourgeois regime that “the Party can seize through its own forces.” Plekhanov went further, accepting the possibility that participation in a bourgeois cabinet might be a valid tactic under certain exceptional circumstances. Thus he initially supported Kautsky’s resolution but tried to amend it to include at least an implicit criticism of Millerand, arguing that if a socialist is forced to join a bourgeois cabinet in extreme cases, he is obliged to leave if it reveals a bias in its relation to the struggle of labor and capital. Plekhanov himself acknowledged that on a theoretical level his amendment “cannot stand up to criticism: what kind of bourgeois government could possibly be unbiased toward the struggle of labor with capital?” (“Neskol’ko slov o poslednem Parizhskom mezhdunarodnom sotsialisticheskom kongresse” [A Few Words About the Latest International Socialist Congress in Paris], April 1901 [our translation]). Jaurès then deftly amended Plekhanov’s amendment to say that a socialist must leave the cabinet if a unified socialist party deems the government biased in the struggle of labor with capital—but France did not have a unified party! Trapped, Plekhanov ended up voting with the minority while complaining that Guesde’s motion was too categorical in its opposition to entering a bourgeois cabinet.
Guesde also introduced a motion opposing socialist participation in class-collaborationist coalitions with bourgeois parties. While asserting that “class struggle forbids any kind of alliance with any fraction whatsoever of the capitalist class,” the motion allowed that “exceptional circumstances make coalitions necessary in some places” (Congrès Socialiste International [our translation]). This loophole was large enough that even the hardened opportunists could vote for the resolution, and it passed unanimously.
Amsterdam 1904: Millerandism Revisited
The Second International returned to the subject of Millerandism at its 1904 Amsterdam Congress. A year before, at the 1903 SPD Congress in Dresden, Kautsky had joined in endorsing a resolution condemning revisionism and, implicitly, Millerandism. American SLP leader Daniel De Leon commented acerbically: “At the Paris Congress an anti-Millerandist attitude was decidedly unpopular; there Kautsky was ‘running with the hares’,” while at Dresden Kautsky was “again to the fore, now ‘barking with the hounds’” (“The Dresden Congress,” Daily People, 3 January 1904).
The Guesdists then introduced the SPD resolution for endorsement at Amsterdam. As passed in 1904, the resolution “condemned in the most decisive way revisionist efforts to alter our previously proven and victorious class-struggle tactics in such a way that a policy of accommodation to the existing order of things takes the place of the conquest of political power through vanquishing our opponents” (Internationaler Sozialisten-Kongress zu Amsterdam , [our translation]). It proclaimed itself frankly against any “party which contents itself with reforming bourgeois society” and further declared that “the Social Democracy, in keeping with Kautsky’s resolution at the International Socialist Congress in Paris in the year 1900, cannot [B]strive for a share of governmental power within bourgeois society.” The positive reference to the 1900 Kautsky resolution was a characteristic sop to the right wing. The rebuke of the revisionists did not lead to a parting of ways, as all wings accepted the conception of a “party of the whole class,” i.e., a single, unified party of the working class encompassing all tendencies from Marxism to reformism. Nonetheless, delegates on both the left and the right at Amsterdam saw the 1903 Dresden resolution as a sharp counter to the conciliation of Millerandism in 1900.
De Leon had voted against Kautsky’s resolution at the 1900 Paris Congress. In 1904, De Leon again objected to endorsing Kautsky’s stand in 1900, submitting the following resolution:
“Whereas, At the last International Congress, held in Paris, in 1900, a resolution generally known as the Kautsky Resolution, was adopted, the closing clauses of which contemplate the emergency of the working class accepting office at the hand of such capitalist governments, and also, especially, PRE-SUPPOSES THE POSSIBILITY OF IMPARTIALITY ON THE PART OF THE RULING CLASS GOVERNMENTS IN THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN THE WORKING CLASS AND THE CAPITALIST CLASS….
“Resolved, First, That the said Kautsky Resolution be and the same is hereby repealed as a principle of general Socialist tactics;
“Second, That, in fully developed capitalist countries like America, the working class cannot, without betrayal of the cause of the proletariat, fill any political office other than such that they conquer for and by themselves.”
— De Leon, “Millerandism Repudiated,” Daily People, 28 August 1904
Failing to get any support for his resolution, De Leon voted for the main resolution.
In allowing for the filling of political offices conquered by the workers “for and by themselves,” De Leon’s resolution again avoided the key issue—the necessity of smashing the machinery of the capitalist state and replacing it with the dictatorship of the proletariat. While De Leon took a principled stand against bourgeois ministerialism, he was also committed to electoralism. Founding American Communist and, later, Trotskyist James P. Cannon honored De Leon’s pioneering role in the formative period of the American socialist movement while rightly noting that he “was sectarian in his tactics, and his conception of political action was rigidly formalistic, and rendered sterile by legalistic fetishism” (Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1962]).
As he made clear in a 1905 address originally published as “The Preamble of the I.W.W.,” De Leon left open the possibility that, at least in the U.S., the proletariat could conquer political power peacefully through the ballot box, after which the new socialist government would disband itself and cede power to an administration of “socialist industrial unions” (“The Socialist Reconstruction of Society,” De Leon, Socialist Landmarks [New York: New York Labor News Company, 1952]). According to De Leon, such unions, formed under capitalism, would grow organically, progressively seizing and wielding economic power against the capitalists. Beginning in the 1890s, De Leon’s SLP faithfully, every four years, put up its own candidate for the U.S. presidency. Following De Leon’s death in 1914 and the SLP’s rejection of the lessons of the October Revolution as applicable to the American terrain, the party was transformed into a fossilized shell of its former self.
But in its electoralism, there was little to distinguish the SLP even under De Leon from the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs. From 1900 onwards, Debs was to run five times for the office of president of the United States. Debs intoned: “The workers must be taught to unite and vote together as a class in support of the Socialist Party, the party that represents them as a class, and when they do this the government will pass into their hands and capitalism will fall to rise no more” (“The Growth of Socialism,” 1906, Writings and Speeches of Eugene V. Debs [New York: Hermitage Press, 1948]). Debs ran his last presidential campaign in 1920, winning over 900,000 votes, from a prison cell in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was serving a ten-year sentence (as well as being disenfranchised for life) for his opposition to World War I. Debs’ presidential campaigns as well as his great authority cemented a tradition of socialists running for Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism that was by and large uncritically accepted by all except anti-parliamentary opponents of any electoral activity whatsoever. But where Debs advocated the overthrow of capitalism, many Socialist leaders, such as Morris Hillquit, were virulently anti-Leninist reformists. Another, Victor Berger, was aptly described as a “sewer socialist” for a program of municipal reform that was nearly indistinguishable from that peddled by the bourgeois Progressive movement.
Municipalism and the Second International
Municipalism was not the preserve solely of overt reformists. The deep division between the reformist and revolutionary wings of the Second International over socialists taking responsibility for bourgeois government at the ministerial level did not extend to the municipal level. In fact, the 1900 Paris Congress was unanimous in approving a resolution on municipalism that asserted:
“In consideration that the municipality can become an excellent laboratory of decentralized economic life and at the same time a formidable political bastion to be used by local socialist majorities against the bourgeois majority of the central power, once serious autonomy has been achieved;
“The International Congress of 1900 states:
“That all socialists have a duty, without ignoring the importance of general politics, to explain and appreciate municipal activity, to give to municipal reforms the importance given to them by their role as ‘embryos of the collectivist society’ and to strive to turn communal services—transit, lighting, water supply, electricity, schools, medical services, hospitals, baths, wash houses, municipal stores, municipal bakeries, food service, heating, workers’ housing, clothing, police, municipal works, etc.—into model institutions, from the standpoint both of the public interest as well as of the citizens employed in these operations.”
— Congrès Socialiste International (our translation)
This is perhaps the most graphic example of the dilemma of the parties of the Second International—a real program of minimum reforms, and a maximum program of socialism, all too often to be dragged out for Sunday political sermons, but nothing more. Even those who were most outspoken and consistent in their opposition to Bernsteinism and Millerandism thought socialists could participate in municipal administrations. Thus Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
“The question of participating in a town council is entirely different. It’s true that both the town council and the mayor are tasked, inter alia, with administrative functions that have been transferred to them and with the carrying out of bourgeois laws; historically, however, both constitute entirely counterposed elements....
“For socialist tactics the result is a fundamentally different stance: the central government of the present state is the embodiment of bourgeois class rule, whose elimination is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to the victory of socialism; self-administration is the element of the future, with which the socialist transformation will link up positively.
“Admittedly, the bourgeois parties know how to infuse their class content even into the economic and cultural functions of the municipality. But here socialists will never get into a situation of being untrue to their own politics. As long as they are in the minority in town representative bodies, they will make opposition their guideline in the same way as in parliament. But if they attain a majority, then they will transform the municipality itself into an instrument of struggle against the bourgeois central power.”
— “The Socialist Crisis in France,” 1900-01 (our translation)
This view was in part a holdover from the period of the ascendancy of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, when the commune was a weapon of the urban classes against the feudal monarchical state. In the late Middle Ages, the communes in Italy and France served as bastions in which the mercantile bourgeoisies developed the roots of capitalism within feudal society and against the forces of absolutism. But after the bourgeoisie came to power, it pushed the autonomous communes aside in order to cohere a strong centralized state to defend its class interests at the national level. The adoption of municipalism by the Second International reflected not only theoretical confusion but also the fact that those reforms that were attained through class struggle in the last decades of the 1800s were often dispensed by socialist-controlled local governments.
In fact, Marx and Engels had sought to dispel municipalist illusions on several occasions. Following the revolutions of 1848, they cautioned that the proletarians “must not allow themselves to be misguided by the democratic talk of freedom for the communities, of self-government, etc.” (“Address of the Central Authority to the League,” March 1850). And in his writing on the Paris Commune, Marx warned against confusing the functions of the medieval commune with the tasks of proletarian socialism:
“It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness. Thus, this new Commune, which breaks the modern State power, has been mistaken for a reproduction of the mediaeval Communes, which first preceded, and afterwards became the substratum of, that very State power.... The antagonism of the Commune against the State power has been mistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralization.... The very existence of the Commune involved, as a matter of course, local municipal liberty, but no longer as a check upon the, now superseded, State power.”
— The Civil War in France
In a similar vein, in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian Revolution Lenin denounced the “philistine opportunism” of Menshevik schemes for “municipal socialism”:
“They forget that so long as the bourgeoisie rules as a class it cannot allow any encroachment, even from the ‘municipal’ point of view, upon the real foundations of its rule; that if the bourgeoisie allows, tolerates, ‘municipal socialism,’ it is because the latter does not touch the foundations of its rule, does not interfere with the important sources of its wealth, but extends only to the narrow sphere of local expenditure, which the bourgeoisie itself [I]allows the ‘population’ to manage. It does not need more than a slight acquaintance with ‘municipal socialism’ in the West to know that any attempt on the part of socialist municipalities to go a little beyond the boundaries of their normal, i.e., minor, petty activities, which give no substantial relief to the workers, any attempt to meddle with capital, is invariably vetoed in the most emphatic manner by the central authorities of the bourgeois state.”