Eric Blanc unwittingly points to the disabling weakness of his article.

“Though the Tsarist empire’s Marxists were quick to charge their factional opponents with “revisionism,” he writes, “readers should keep in mind that this debate on the transformation of the capitalist state was largely irrelevant for the immediate context of Tsarism.”

This is because the bourgeois-democratic revolution lay in the past in Western Europe, whereas it lay in the future in Russia, presenting Western European and Russian Social Democrats with entirely different sets of political problems to solve. For Russian Social Democrats:How to overthrow a non-capitalist state in Russia and establish a capitalist one. For Western European Social Democrats: How to overthrow the capitalist state and establish a socialist one.

In practice comrade Blanc forgets these differences, or misjudges their significance, rendering his intervention analytically incoherent and empirically confused.

The only mention of ‘universal’ in the 1918 Soviet constitution concerns the universal obligation to work (article 1) and universal military training (article 2). Article 4, chapter 13 explicitly bars certain persons from voting:

65. The following persons enjoy neither the right to vote nor the right to be voted for, even though they belong to one of the categories enumerated above, namely:

(a) Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain form it an increase in profits;
(b) Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, etc.;
(c) Private merchants, trade and commercial brokers;
(d) Monks and clergy of all denominations;
(e) Employees and agents of the former police, the gendarme corps, and the Okhrana (Czar’s secret service), also members of the former reigning dynasty;
(f) Persons who have in legal form been declared demented or mentally deficient, and also persons under guardianship;
(g) Persons who have been deprived by a soviet of their rights of citizenship because of selfish or dishonorable offenses, for the period fixed by the sentence.

https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article4.htm

In fact the 1918 Soviet constitution, like Marx’s interpretation of the Commune constitution, proposes self-government of localities (including the workplaces in those localities) through universal-suffrage councils, with the central decision-making government body taking the form of delegates from the local councils. They weren’t purely delegates of workplaces. See the constitution at the Marxist Internet Archive.

Perhaps Eric can write a follow-up blog on applying programme from above to assorted areas:

– Anti-soviet Bolshevik coups d’etat in 1918

– Majority political support vs. majority constitutional support vs. majority electoral support

– Problems of “ministerialism” applied to prefectural / provincial / regional / state levels and also to “municipalism” (which Rosa Luxemburg didn’t object to)

– Electoral strategy in relation to the problems of “ministerialism”

– Elaborating on “standing armies” for today (officer corps vs. basic ideas of hierarchy, political oversight vs. political involvement in military affairs, etc.)

– If universal suffrage shouldn’t be a panacea, then what about equal suffrage? (i.e., the working class in relation to non-capitalist classes, as well as less well-off strata in the working class in relation to other strata)

Eric Blanc presents another interesting piece of history/debate. This time on Kautsky and the state. As always, I agree with 95% of what Eric writes (and that number seems to grow with time).

I agree Eric’s conclusion: “the fact remains that the politics of revolutionary Marxists in and after 1917 reflected far more continuity than rupture with social democratic “orthodoxy.” It is true that Kautsky capitulated to reformism after 1909 and played a reactionary role during the post-war socialist insurgencies. But his early theories trained the Bolsheviks, Finnish Marxists, and other radicals who led the first victorious assaults on capitalist rule.”

However, I would add, and I’m sure he agrees, that

1. there must have been some tendency in Kautsky’s thought that predisposed him to “capitulate” after 1909. What was it? Or, what distinguished him from the revolutionary left (Luxembourg, Lenin, Radek, Rakovsky, Debs, etc.?)

On a subsidiary point, I don’t think “capitulate” is quite the right word… better to say, “became trapped by the logic of his own position and succumb to its internal coherency rather than risk a rupture” or something like that.

I think this is Kautsky’s real problem is that he formed a one-sided attachment to his most cherished path to socialism, which really was the most reasonable and least destructive path (i.e. accumulation of political power which forces bourgeoisie to strike back from weak position and then working class can cast revolution in defensive posture, etc.) to crowd out the other more likely paths given German militarism, imperialism, etc. That is, he became blinded to the unexpected by the power of his vision… As Hegel would say, his thought became objectified and presented itself as a fact instead of a process… that is always a danger, but it’s not betrayal… only later, after 1914… did he really capitulate, with all the implications that word rightfully carries.

2. By 1905, Kautsky no longer represented the real organizational power behind the SPD, as the question of party and trade unions demonstrated, by 1909 he couldn’t even get the Party to publish The Road to Power, etc.). So, we have to account for this in our understanding of “social democratic ‘orthodoxy'” somehow.

To recap: Eric’s assessment is right (or at least points in the right direction for study and debate), just be careful you read the very strict boundaries he sets on his conclusions carefully.

At least that’s how I read it.

Todd Chretien

Kautsky did not oppose the October revolution either actively or passively, he supported it just as he consistently supported the Bolshevik strategy of establishing a provisional revolutionary government and a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry and opposed the Menshevik strategy of allying with the Russian bourgeoisie for more than a decade. Consistent with this ‘Old Bolshevik’ position, Kautsky opposed the Bolsheviks’ decision to make the provisional revolutionary government — the soviet government — the permanent government by refusing to hold new elections for a Constituent Assembly (C.A.) since the August elections for the C.A. occurred before the Socialist Revolutionary party had not yet split into left and right parties and therefore had no democratic mandate from the masses. The supremacy of selective suffrage (soviets) over universal suffrage (C.A.) was something Lenin invented in 1917-1918 and became ‘New Bolshevik’ orthodoxy thereafter.

The story of Kautsky’s political evolution is much more complicated than what has been portrayed in this piece although the fundamental argument that there is far more continuity between early Communist International strategy and revolutionary social-democratic strategy than discontinuity is correct.

(Also, one of my comments here got caught in the blog’s spam filter because it contained hyperlinks. Please approve it.)

“In the first place, proletarian democracy differed from bourgeois democracy because the electorate bodies were actually composed of working people, whereas they critiqued universal suffrage under capitalism for allowing loopholes, informalities and the economic oppression inherent in capitalism to prevent working people from actually participating in universal suffrage.”

The Paris Commune practiced universal and not selective suffrage as the Soviet government did and yet Marx held that the commune was the political form in which the emancipation of labor could be worked out and Engels said it was the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Soviet law never specified who exactly was and was not a working person. As Kautsky wrote in his 1918 book, The Proletarian Revolution:

“The last All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which terminated on July 12, 1918, drafted a constitution of the Russian Soviet Republic. This lays it down that not all the inhabitants of the Russian Empire, but only specified categories have the right to elect deputies to the Soviets. All those may vote ‘who procure their sustenance by useful or productive work’. What is ‘useful and productive work’? This is a very elastic term. Not less elastic is the definition of those who are excluded from the franchise. They include any who employ wage labourers for profit. A home worker or small master, with an apprentice, may live and feel quite like a proletarian, but he has no vote. Even more proletarians may become disfranchised by the definition which aims at depriving private traders and middle men of the vote. The worker who loses his work, and endeavours to get a living by opening a small shop, or selling newspapers, loses his vote.

“Another clause excludes from the franchise everyone who has unearned income, for example, dividends on capital, profits of a business, rent of property. How big the unearned income must be which carries with it loss of the vote is not stated. Does it include the possession of a savings bank-book? Quite a number of workers, especially in the small towns, own a little house, and, to keep themselves above water, let lodgings. Does this bring them into the category of people with unearned income. Not long since there was a strike at the Obuchovist Factory, ‘this hotbed of the Revolution,’ as Trotsky styled it in 1909 (Russia in the Revolution, page 83). I asked a Bolshevist comrade how he explained this protest against the Soviet Government.

“‘That is very simple,’ he said, ‘the workers there are all capitalists who own a little house.’

“One sees how little it takes, according to the Constitution of the Soviet Republic, to be labelled a capitalist, and to lose the vote.”

Workplace-based soviets might sound like a firm foundation upon which to build a working-class socialist government until you realize unemployment from fall of 1917 onward reached 20%, 30%, 40% of the workforce as factories closed due to lack of raw materials, lack of money to pay people, lack of fuel, abandonment by skilled staff and white collar professionals who fled the country, and so on.

So people who lost their jobs became politically disenfranchised in the early soviet system. Small shop owners were also disenfranchised under the soviet system. And that’s not even taking into account how the votes of ‘workers’ were weighted far, far more heavily than the votes of peasants in the soviet system to artificially increase Bolshevik dominance of the government (see Rabinowitch’s “Bolsheviks in Power” for the precise figure which was something like 1 worker vote = 100 or 1,000 peasant votes, if not more).

Kautsky was not the only one to point out how the Bolsheviks broke with Marx on the question of universal versus selective suffrage. Rosa Luxmburg devoted an entire chapter to arguing against enshrining the principle of selective suffrage in Soviet law in her book “The Russian Revolution.” And unlike Kautsky, she can hardly be accused of being a renegade.

Kautsky and Luxemburg both supported universal suffrage in principle before and after 1909 and 1917. It is Lenin and his Russian cothinkers who broke from where Marx and Engels stood on universal suffrage starting in 1917.

The Bolsheviks and other Leninist groups worldwide, after 1917 and especially after the 7th Bolshevik Party Congress which actually initiated the 20th century Communist movement, were very critical of what was called bourgeois-democracy, and argued instead that what was needed was the establishment of proletarian democracy and the formation of a socialist and not a “Democratic” republic.

Many Marxists, understandably trying to distinguish Lenin’s political philosophy from the authoritarian practices of Stalinism, have taken post 1917 Leninist critiques of democratic-republicanism as a criticism of democracy in general, and therefore an approval of authoritarianism. Actually, when distinguishing proletarian democracy, Lenin and his comrades stressed not so much authoritarian might, but instead emphasized two things.

In the first place, proletarian democracy differed from bourgeois democracy because the electorate bodies were actually composed of working people, whereas they critiqued universal suffrage under capitalism for allowing loopholes, informalities and the economic oppression inherent in capitalism to prevent working people from actually participating in universal suffrage.

Second, proletarian democracy decreed all of the basic political liberties stressed by democratic-republicanism (freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, right to bear arms, etc.) but took these rights a step farther by taking affirmative action to make sure that these rights were actually enjoyed by the workers by making access to the press and means of assembly free and unhindered, while also exercising force of law to ensure that the capitalist class could not wield influence in the government through their control of political, economic and cultural resources.

It should also be stressed that Lenin and his comrades argued that proletarian democracy extended in the economic field as well, and guaranteed steady socialization of private banking and industry and organized democratic workers control over business accounting and control. This stands in contrast to most forms of democratic-republicanism such as that advocated by Andrew Jackson, which arose largely as a response against feudalism as well as merchant capitalism and which stressed a society based on private property, and a form of political equality which was blind to any differences in social status and left it up to self-sufficient individuals to acquire the means to participate in the democratic process.

I’m not sure where Kautsky stood on these issues before 1909. I will have to reread this article more thoroughly to come to any conclusion on that matter, but I would be interested to see what others have to say on this matter as it relates to post-1917 Marxist critiques of capitalist democratic-republicanism.