Let us hear from another leading Bolshevist luminary, Bucharin, who shares with Lenin the heaviest tasks of expounding Bolshevist theories and who is in some respects a rival theologian. In July, 1918, Bucharin published his pamphlet, The Program of the Communists, authorized by the Communist Party, of whose organ, Pravda, he is the editor. A revolutionary organization in this country published the greater part of this pamphlet, and it is significant that it omitted Chapter VII, in which Bucharin reveals precisely the same attitude as Lenin. He goes farther in that he admits the same insincerity of attitude toward equal suffrage and the Constituent Assembly based on the will of the majority. He says:

If we have a dictatorship of the proletariat, the object of which is to stifle the bourgeoisie, to compel it to give up its attempts for the restoration of the bourgeois authority, then it is obvious that there can be no talk of allowing the bourgeoisie electoral rights or of a change from soviet authority to a bourgeois-republican parliament.

The Communist (Bolshevik) party receives from all sides accusations and even threats like the following: “You close newspapers, you arrest people, you forbid meetings, you trample underfoot freedom of speech and of the press, you reconstruct autocracy, you are oppressors and murderers.”

It is necessary to discuss in detail this question of “liberties” in a Soviet republic.

At present the following is clear for the working-men and the peasants. The Communist party not only does not demand any liberty of the press, speech, meetings, unions, etc., for the bourgeois enemies of the people, but, on the contrary, it demands that the government should be always in readiness to close the bourgeois press; to disperse the meetings of the enemies of the people; to forbid them to lie, slander, and spread panic; to crush ruthlessly all attempts at a restoration of the bourgeois régime. This is precisely the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Another question may be put to us: “Why did the Bolsheviki not speak formerly of the abrogation of full liberty for the bourgeoisie? Why did they formerly support the idea of a bourgeois-democratic republic? Why did they support the idea of the Constituent Assembly and did not speak of depriving the bourgeoisie of the right of suffrage? Why have they changed their program so far as these questions are concerned?”

The answer to this question is very simple. The working-class formerly did not have strength enough to storm the bulwarks of the bourgeoisie. It needed preparation, accumulation of strength, enlightenment of the masses, organization. It needed, for example, the freedom of its own labor press. But it could not come to the capitalists and to their governments and demand that they shut down their own newspapers and give full freedom to the labor papers. Everybody would merely laugh at the working-men. Such demands can be made only at the time of a storming attack. And there had never been such a time before. This is why the working-men demanded (and our party, too) “Freedom of the press.” (Of the whole press, including the bourgeois press.)

A more immoral doctrine than that contained in these utterances by the foremost intellectual leaders of Russian Bolshevism can hardly be conceived of. How admirably their attitude and their method is summed up in the well-known words of Frederick II of Prussia: “I understand by the word ‘policy’ that one must make it his study to deceive others; that is the way to get the better of them.” And these are the men and this the policy which have found so many champions among us! When or where in all the history of a hundred years was such a weapon as this placed in the hands of the reactionists? Here are the spokesmen of what purports to be a Socialist republic, and of the political party which claims to present Socialism in its purest and undiluted form, saying to the world, “Socialists do not believe in freedom of the press; they find it convenient to say they do while they are weak, in order to gain protection and aid for their own press, but whenever and wherever they obtain the power to do so they will suppress the press of all who disagree with them or in any way oppose them.” That, and not less than that, is the meaning of these declarations.

The Socialist Party of America has always declared for the fullest freedom of the press, without any expressed qualifications or reservations. Tens of thousands of honest men and women have accepted the party’s declarations upon this subject in good faith, and found satisfaction and joy in upholding them. No doubt of the sincerity of the professions of loyalty to the principle of freedom and equality for all ever entered their minds; no thought or suspicion of sinister secret reservations or understandings ever disturbed their faith. Not once, but hundreds of times, when unjust discrimination by government officials and others seemed to imperil the safety of some Socialist paper, men and women who were not Socialists at all, but who were believers in freedom of the press, rushed to their aid. This hundreds of thousands of Americans have done, because they believed the Socialists were sincere in their professions that they wanted only justice, not domination; that they sought only that measure of freedom they themselves would aid others in securing and maintaining.

If at any time some one had challenged the good faith of the Socialists, and charged that in the event of their obtaining control of the government they would use its powers to cripple and suppress the opposition press, he would have been denounced as a malignant libeler of honest men and women. Yet here come Lenin and Bucharin, and others of the same school, affirming that this has always been a Socialist principle; that the Bolsheviki at least have always said they would act in precisely that manner. What say American Socialists? The Socialist Party has declared its support of the party of Lenin and Trotsky and Bucharin; its national standard-bearer has declared himself to be a Bolshevik; the party has joined the party of the Russian Bolsheviki in the Third International, forsaking for that purpose association with the non-Bolshevist Socialist parties and the Second International.

Unless and until they unequivocally and unreservedly repudiate the vicious doctrine set forth by the leading theorists of Bolshevism, the spokesmen of American Socialism will be properly and justly open to the suspicion that they cherish in their hearts the intention to use the powers of government whensoever, and in whatsoever manner, these shall fall under their control, to abolish the principle of equal freedom for all, and to suppress by force the organs of publicity of all who do not agree with them.

If they are not willing to repudiate this doctrine, and to deny the purpose imputed to them, let them be honest and admit the belief and the purpose. Silence cannot save them in the face of the words of Lenin and Bucharin. Silence is eloquent confession henceforth. Behind every Socialist speaker who seeks to obscure this issue with rhetoric, or to remain silent upon it, every American who believes in and loves Freedom—thousands of Socialists among the number—will see the menacing specter of Bolshevism, nursling of intriguing hate and lying treason. America will laugh such men to scorn when they invoke Freedom’s name. Against the masked spirit of despotism which resides in the Bolshevist propaganda America will set her own traditional ideal, so well expressed in Lincoln’s fine saying, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” and Whitman’s line, so worthy to accompany it—“By God! I want nothing for myself that all others may not have upon equal terms.”

That is the essence of democracy and of liberty; that is the sense in which these great words live in the heart of America. And that, too, be it said, is the sense in which they live in the Socialism of Marx—of which Bolshevism is a grotesque and indecent caricature. That is the central idea of Marx’s vision of a world free from class divisions and class strife—a world where none is master and none is slave; where all good things are accessible to all upon equal terms, and where burdens are shared with the equality that is fraternal.

With the freedom of the press freedom of assemblage and of speech is closely interwoven. The foes of the freedom of the press are always and everywhere equally the foes of the right to assemble for discussion and argument. And the Bolsheviki are no exception to the rule. From the beginning, as soon as they had consolidated their power sufficiently to do so, they have repressed by all the force at their command the meetings, both public and private, of all who were opposed to them, even meetings of Socialists called for no purpose other than to demand government by equal suffrage and meetings of workmen’s unions called for the purpose of explaining their grievances in such matters as wages, hours of labor, and shop management. Hundreds of pages of evidence in support of this statement could be given if that were necessary. Here, for example, is the testimony of V. M. Zenzinov, member of the Central Committee of the Socialists-Revolutionists Party:

The Bolsheviki are the only ones who are able to hold political meetings in present-day Russia; everybody else is deprived of the right to voice his political opinions, for “undesirable” speakers are promptly arrested on the spot by the Bolshevist police. All the Socialist, non-Bolshevist members of the Soviets were ejected by force of arms; many leaders of Socialist parties have been arrested. The delegates to the Moscow Congress of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists scheduled for May, 1918, were arrested by the Bolsheviki, yet nobody will attempt to claim that this party, which has participated in every International Socialist Congress, is not a Socialist Party.

It was during my stay in Petrograd in April, 1918, that a conference of factory and industrial plants employees of Petrograd and vicinity was held, to which 100,000 Petrograd working-men (out of a total of 132,000) sent delegates. The conference adopted a resolution sharply denouncing the Bolshevist régime. Following this conference an attempt was made in May to call together an All-Russian Congress of workmen’s deputies in Moscow, but all the delegates were arrested by the Bolsheviki, and to this day I am ignorant of the fate that befell my comrades. For all I know they may have been put to death, as a number of other Socialists have been.

Here is the testimony of Oupovalov, Social Democrat and trades-unionist, who once more speaks only of matters of which he has personal knowledge:

On June 22, 1918, the Social Democratic Committee at Sormovo called a Provincial Non-Party Labor Conference for the purpose of discussing current events; 350 delegates were present, representing 350,000 workmen. The afternoon meeting passed off safely, but before the opening of the evening meeting a large crowd of local workmen who had gathered in front of the conference premises were fired upon by a Lettish detachment by order of the commissaries. The result was that several peaceful workmen were killed and wounded. The conference was dispersed, and I, being one of the speakers, was arrested. After a fortnight’s confinement in a damp cellar, with daily threats of execution, I was released, owing to energetic protests on the part of my fellow-workmen, but not for long.

A Labor meeting was convoked at Sormovo by a commissar of the People’s Economic Soviet from Moscow for the purpose of discussing the question of food-supply. I was delegated by the Social Democratic Party to speak at this meeting and criticize the Bolsheviks’ food policy. The resolution proposed by me demanded the cessation of civil war, the summoning of the Constituent Assembly, the right for co-operatives to purchase foodstuffs freely. Out of the 18,000 persons present only 350 voted against the resolution.

That same night I was arrested and sentenced to be shot. The workmen declared a strike, demanding my release. The Bolsheviks sent a detachment of Letts, who fired on the unarmed workmen and many were killed. Nevertheless, the workmen would not give in, and the Bolsheviki mitigated their sentence and deported me to the Perm Province.

But what is the use of citing any number of such instances? When a score, a hundred, or a thousand have been cited we shall hear from the truculent defenders of Bolshevism that no testimony offered by Russian revolutionists of the highest standing is worth anything as compared to the testimony of the Ransomes, Goodes, Coppings, Lansburys, et al., the human phonograph records who repeat with such mechanical precision the words which the Bolsheviki desire the world outside of Russia to hear. Against this logic of unreason no amount of testimony can prevail. It is not so easy, however, to dispose of a “decree” of the Soviet Government—for is not a “decree” a thing to be regarded as the Mohammedan regards the Koran? Here, then, is a Bolshevist decree—not, it need hardly be said, to be found included in any of the collections of Bolshevist laws and decrees issued to impress the public of America in favor of the Bolsheviki. Read, mark, and learn, and inwardly digest it, Mr. Oswald Villard, Mr. Norman Thomas, Mr. William Hard, gentlemen of the Civil Liberties Bureau, and you others who find America so reactionary and tyrannical. It is taken from the Severnaya Communa, September 13, 1919, and is signed by Zinoviev:

Decree Regulating Right of Public Associations and Meetings

(1) All societies, unions, and associations—political, economic, artistic, religious, etc.—formed on the territory of the Union of the Commune of the Northern Region must be registered at the corresponding Soviets or Committees of the Village Poor.

(2) The constitution of the union or society, a list of founders and members of the committee, with names and addresses, and a list of all members, with their names and addresses, must be submitted at registration.

(3) All books, minutes, etc., must always be kept at the disposal of representatives of the Soviet Power for purposes of revision.

(4) Three days’ notice must be given to the Soviet or to the Committee of the Village Poor, of all public and private meetings.

(5) All meetings must be open to the representatives of the Soviet Power, viz., the representatives of the Central and District Soviet, the Committee of the Poor, and the Kommandantur of the Revolutionary Secret Police Force.

(6) Unions and societies which do not comply with those regulations will be regarded as counter-revolutionary organizations and prosecuted.

This document, like so many others issued by the Bolsheviki, bears a striking resemblance to the regulations which were issued under Czar Nicholas II. There is not the slightest suggestion of a spirit and purpose more generous in its regard for freedom. Nowhere is there any evidence of a different psychology. Of course, it may be said in defense, or extenuation if not defense, of the remarkable decree just quoted that it was a military measure; that it was due to the conditions of civil warfare prevailing. That defense might be seriously considered but for the fact that similar regulations have been imposed in places far removed from any military activity, where there was no civil warfare, where the Bolsheviki ruled a passive people. More important than this fact, however, is the evidence of the attitude of the Bolsheviki, as revealed by their accredited spokesmen. From this it is quite clear that, regardless of this or that particular decree or proclamation, the Bolsheviki look upon the continuous and permanent suppression of their opponents’ right to hold meetings as a fundamental policy. The decree under consideration, with its stringent provisions requiring registration of all societies and associations of every kind, the list and addresses of all members, and of all who attend the meetings, and the arrangement for the attendance of the “Kommandantur of the Revolutionary Secret-Police Force” at meetings of every kind, trades-union meetings and religious gatherings no less than political meetings, is fully in harmony with the declaration of fundamental policy made by the intellectual leaders of Bolshevism. Pravda, December 7, 1919, quotes Baranov as saying at the seventh All-Russian Congress: “We do not allow meetings of Mensheviki and Cadets, who in these meetings would speak of counter-revolution within the country. The Soviet Power will not allow such meetings, of course, just as it will not allow freedom of the press, as there are appearing sufficient White Guardists’ leaflets.” But let us listen once more to the chief sophist:

7. “Freedom of meeting” may be taken as an example of the demands for “pure democracy.” Any conscious workman who has not broken with his own class will understand immediately that it would be stupid to permit freedom of meetings to exploiters at this period, and under the present circumstances, when the exploiters are resisting their overthrow, and are fighting for their privileges. When the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, in England in 1649, and in France in 1793, it did not give “freedom of meetings” to monarchists and nobles who were calling in foreign troops and who were “meeting” to organize attempts at restoration. If the present bourgeoisie, which has been reactionary for a long time now, demands of the proletariat that the latter guarantee in advance freedom of meetings for exploiters no matter what resistance the capitalists may show to the measures of expropriation directed against them, the workmen will only laugh at the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

On the other hand, the workmen know very well that “freedom of meetings,” even in the most democratic bourgeois republic, is an empty phrase, for the rich have all the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and also sufficient leisure time for meetings and for the protection of these meetings by the bourgeois apparatus of authority. The proletarians of the city and of the village and the poor peasants—that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, have none of these three things. So long as the situation is such, “equality”—that is, “pure democracy”—is sheer fraud. In order to secure genuine equality, in order to realize in fact democracy for the toilers, one must first take away from the exploiters all public and luxurious private dwellings, one must give leisure time to the toilers, one must protect the freedom of their meetings by armed workmen, and not by noble or capitalist officers with browbeaten soldiers.

Only after such a change can one speak of freedom of meetings and of equality, without scoffing at workmen, toilers, and the poor. And no one can bring about this change except the advance-guard of the toilers—that is, the proletariat—by overthrowing the exploiters, the bourgeoisie.

8. “Freedom of press” is also one of the main arguments of “pure democracy,” but again the workmen know that the Socialists of all countries have asserted millions of times that this freedom is a fraud so long as the best printing machinery and the largest supplies of paper have been seized by the capitalists, and so long as the power of capital over the press continues, which power in the whole world is clearly more harsh and more cynical in proportion to the development of democratism and the republican principle, as, for example, in America. In order to secure actual equality and actual democracy for the toilers, for workmen and peasants, one must first take from capitalists the possibility of hiring writers, of buying up publishing houses, of buying up newspapers, and to this end one must overthrow the yoke of capital, overthrow the exploiters, and put down all resistance on their part. The capitalists have always called “freedom” the freedom to make money for the rich and the freedom to die of hunger for workmen. The capitalists call “freedom” the freedom of the rich, freedom to buy up the press, freedom to use wealth, to manufacture and support so-called public opinion. The defenders of “pure democracy” again in actual fact turn out to be the defenders of the most dirty and corrupt system of the rule of the rich over the means of education of the masses. They deceive the people by attractive, fine-sounding, beautiful, but absolutely false phrases, trying to dissuade the masses from the concrete historic task of freeing the press from the capitalists who have gotten control of it. Actual freedom and equality will exist only in the order established by the Communists, in which it will be impossible to become rich at the expense of another, where it will be impossible, either directly or indirectly, to subject the press to the power of money, where there will be no obstacle to prevent any toiler (or any large group of such) from enjoying and actually realizing the equal right to the use of public printing-presses and of the public fund of paper.

These are “theses” from the report of Lenin on “Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracies,” published in Pravda, March 8, 1919. That the very term “proletarian democracy” is an absurd self-contradiction, just as “capitalist democracy” would be, since democracy is inherently incompatible with class domination of any kind, is worthy of remark only in so far as the use of the phrase shows the mentality of the man. Was ever such a farrago of nonsense put forward with such solemnly pretentious pedantry? The unreasoning hatred and shallow ignorance of the most demagogic soap-box Socialist propaganda are covered with the verbiage of scholasticism, and the result is given to the world as profound philosophy. If there is any disposition to question the justice of this summary judgment a candid consideration of the two “theses” just quoted should suffice to settle all doubts.

In the first place, the dominant note is hatred and retaliation: In 1649 the bourgeoisie of England suppressed the right of assemblage, and in 1793 the bourgeoisie of France did likewise. Therefore, if the present bourgeoisie, “which has been reactionary for a long time,” now demands that the workers guarantee freedom of meetings, the workers will only laugh at their hypocrisy. One is reminded of the ignorant pogrom-makers who gave the crucifixion of Jesus as their reason for persecuting Jews in the twentieth century. Upon what higher level is Lenin’s justification than the ignorant feeling of hostility toward England, still found in some dark corners of American life, because of the misgovernment of the Colonies by the England of George the Third? Is there to be no allowance for the advance made, even by the bourgeoisie, since the struggles of 1649 and 1793; no consideration of the fact that the bourgeoisie of England and France in later years have gone far beyond the standards set by their forerunners in 1649 and 1793; that they have granted freedom of assemblage, even to those struggling to overthrow them? Is twentieth-century Socialism to have no higher ideal than capitalism already had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Waiving the greater question of whether or not the claim of any class to succeed to power is worthy of attention unless its ideals are measurably higher than those of the class it would displace, is it not quite clear that Lenin’s appeal to “history” is arrant demagoguery?

Consider the argument further: There is no freedom of meetings, “even in the most democratic bourgeois republic,” we are told, because “the rich” have the halls in which to meet, the leisure for meeting and the “bourgeois apparatus of authority” for the protection of their meetings. This absurd travesty of facts which are well known to all who know life in democratic nations is put forward by a man who is hailed as a philosopher-statesman, though his ponderous “theses” show him to be among the most blatant demagogues of modern history, his greatest mental gift being unscrupulous cunning. The workers lack leisure for meetings, we are told, therefore no freedom of meeting exists—in the bourgeois democracies. Well, what of the Utopia of the Bolsheviki, the Utopia of Lenin’s own fashioning? Is there greater leisure for the worker there? By its own journals we are informed that the Russian worker now works twelve hours a day, but let us not take advantage of that fact, which is admittedly due to a desperate economic condition—for which, however, the Bolsheviki are mainly responsible. But in the very much praised labor laws of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic an eight-hour workday is provided for. Are we to assume that this leaves sufficient leisure to the workers to make freedom of meeting possible for them? Very well. To a very large extent the eight-hour day prevails in this poor despised “bourgeois democracy,” either as a result of legislation or of trades-union organization. Nay, more, the forty-four-hour week is with us, and even the six-hour day, in some trades. The unattained ideal of Sovdepia’s labor legislation is thus actually below what is rapidly coming to be our common practice. Anybody who knows anything at all of the facts knows that the conditions here set forth are true of this country and, to a very large degree, of England.

Is it true that freedom of assemblage is impossible in this poor old “bourgeois democracy,” because, forsooth, the workers lack the halls in which to meet? Is that the condition in England, or in any of the western nations in which the much-despised “bourgeois democracy” prevails? How many communities are there in America where meeting-halls are accessible only to “the rich,” where they cannot be had by the workers upon equal terms with all other people? Over the greater part of America—wherever “bourgeois democracy” exists—our publicly owned auditoriums, the city halls, and school halls, are open to all citizens upon equal terms. Even where private halls have to be hired, and stiff rents paid, it is common for the collections to cover expenses and even leave a profit. In many of the cities the organized workers own their own auditoriums. In England, Belgium, Denmark, and other European countries—“bourgeois democracies” all—a great many of the finest auditoriums are those owned and controlled by the workmen’s organizations, and they are frequently hired by “the rich.” Finally, wherever the government of any city has come under the control of Socialist or Labor movements, auditoriums freely accessible to the workers have been provided, and this obstacle to freedom of assemblage which gives Lenin such concern has been removed. This has been done, moreover, without descending to the level of old oppressors, and it has not been necessary to resort to “armed workmen,” any more than to “browbeaten soldiers” with capitalist officers to protect the freedom of assemblage.

So, too, with the freedom of the press. In the nations where democratic laws prevail the workers’ press is just as strong and powerful as the interest and will of the workers themselves decree. If the Socialist press in our cities is weak and uninfluential, that fact is the natural and inevitable corollary of the weakness of the Socialist movement itself. Was L’Humanité, when it was still a great and powerful newspaper, or were the Berlin Vorwärts, Le Peuple of Brussels, and L’Avanti of Rome, less “free” than other newspapers? Were they less “free” than Pravda, even, to say nothing of the anti-Bolshevist papers opposed to Bolshevism? True, they had not the privilege of looting the public treasuries; they could not force an oppressive, discriminatory, and confiscatory tax upon the other newspapers; they could not utilize the forces of the state to seize and use the plants belonging to their rivals; they could not rely upon the power of the state to compel people against their will to “subscribe” to them. In other words, the freedom they possessed was the freedom to publish their views and to gain as many readers as possible by lawful methods; the only “freedom” they lacked was the freedom of brigandage, the right to despoil and oppress others.

So much, then, for the labored sophistry of the chief Talmudist of Bolshevism and his tiresome “theses” with their demagogic cant and their appeals to the lowest instincts and passions of his followers. The record herein set forth proves beyond shadow of a doubt that neither in the régime Lenin and his co-conspirators have thus far maintained nor in the ideal they set for themselves is there any place for that freedom of speech and thought and conscience without which all other liberties are unavailing. These men prate of freedom, but they are tyrants. If they be not tyrants, “we then extremely wrong Caligula and Nero in calling them tyrants, and they were rebels that conspired against them.” If Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bucharin are not tyrants, but liberators, so were the Grand Inquisitors of Spain.

XII
“THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT”

In a pamphlet entitled Two Tactics, published in Geneva, in 1905, at the time of the first Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote:

Whoever wants to try any path to Socialism other than political democracy will inevitably come to absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in an economic and a political sense. If some workmen ask us, “Why not achieve the maximum program?” we shall answer them by pointing out how alien to Socialism the democratic masses are, how undeveloped are the class contradictions, how unorganized are the proletarians.... The largest possible realization of democratic reform is necessary and requisite for the spreading of socialistic enlightenment and for introducing appropriate organization.

These words are worth remembering. In the light of the tragic results of Bolshevism they seem singularly prophetic, for certainly by attempting to achieve Socialism through other methods than those of political democracy Lenin and his followers have “come to absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in an economic and a political sense.” They profess, for example, to have established in Russia a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In reality they have set up a tyrannical rule over the proletariat, together with the rest of the population, by an almost infinitesimal part of the population of Russia. Lenin and his followers claim to be the logical exemplars of the teachings of Karl Marx, whereas their whole theory is no more than a grotesque travesty of Marx’s teachings.

More than seventy years have elapsed since the publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which he set forth his theory of the historic rôle of the proletariat. Thirty-seven years—more than a full generation—have elapsed since his death in 1883. Even if it were true that during the period spanned by these two dates Karl Marx believed in and advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat in the sense in which that term is used by the Bolsheviki, that fact would possess little more than historical interest. Much has happened since the death of Marx, and still more since the early ’seventies, when his life-work virtually ended, which the political realist needs must take into account. Marx did not utter the last word of human wisdom upon the laws and methods of social progress and so render new and fresh judgments unnecessary and wrong. No one can study the evolution of Marx himself and doubt that if he were alive to-day he would hold very different views from those which he held in 1847 and subsequently. Our only justification for considering the relation of Leninism to Marxism lies in the fact that in this and other countries outside of Russia a considerable element in the Socialist movement, deceived by Lenin’s use of certain Marxian phrases, gives its support to Leninism in the belief that it is identical with Marxism. Nothing could be farther from the teachings of Marx than the oppressive bureaucratic dictatorship by an infinitesimal minority set up by Lenin and his disciples.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx used the term “proletariat” in the sense in which it was used by Barnave and other Intellectuals of the French Revolution, not as it is commonly used to-day, as a synonym for the wage-earning class. The term as used by Marx connoted not merely an absence of property, not merely poverty, but a peculiar state of degradation. Just as in Roman society the term was applied to a large class, including peasants, wage laborers, and others without capital, property, or assured means of support, unfit and unworthy to exercise political rights, so the term was used by Marx, as it had been by his predecessors, to designate a class in modern society similarly denied the rights of citizenship. When Marx wrote in 1847 this was the condition of the wage-earning class in every European country. In no one of these countries did the working-class enjoy the right of suffrage. Marx saw no hope of any amelioration of the lot of this class. On the contrary, he believed that the evolution of society would take the form of a relentless, brutal process, unrestrained by any humane consciousness or legislation, which would culminate in a division of society into two classes, on the one hand a very small ruling and owning class, on the other hand the overwhelming majority of the population. He specifically rejected the idea of minority rule: “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”

Not only does Marx here present the proletarian uprising as the culmination of a historical process which has made proletarians of “the immense majority,” but, what is more significant, perhaps, he presents this movement, not as a conscious ideal, but as an inevitable and inescapable condition. In 1875, in a famous letter criticizing the Gotha program of the German Social Democrats, he wrote: “Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. This requires a political transition stage, which can be nothing less than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” It is mainly upon this single quotation that Lenin and his followers rely in claiming Marxian authority for the régime set up in Russia under the title the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The passage cited cannot honestly and fairly be so interpreted. We are bound to bear in mind that Marx still held to the belief that the revolution from capitalist to communist society could only take place when the proletariat had become “the immense majority.”

Moreover, it is quite clear that he was still thinking, in 1875, of dictatorship by this immense majority as a temporary measure. Of course, the word “dictatorship” is a misnomer when it is so used, but not more so than when used to describe rule by any class. Strictly speaking, dictatorship refers to a rule by a single individual who is bound by no laws, the absolute supremacy of an individual dictator. Friedrich Engels, who collaborated with Marx in writing the Communist Manifesto and in much of his subsequent work, and who became his literary executor and finished Das Kapital, certainly knew the mind of Marx as no other human being did or could. Engels has, fortunately, made quite clear the sense in which Marx used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In his Civil War in France, Marx described the Paris Commune as “essentially a government of the working-class, the result of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form under which the freedom of labor could be attained being at length revealed.” He described with glowing enthusiasm the Commune with its town councilors chosen by universal suffrage, and not by the votes of a single class. As Kautsky remarks, “the dictatorship of the proletariat was for him a condition which necessarily arose in a real democracy, because of the overwhelming numbers of the proletariat.”66 That this is a correct interpretation of Marx’s thought is attested by the fact that in his introduction to the Civil War in France Engels describes the Commune, based on the general suffrage of the whole people, as “the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

Of course, the evolution of modern industrial nations has proceeded upon very different lines from those forecasted by Marx. The middle class has not been exterminated and shows no signs of being submerged in the wage-earning class; the workers are no longer disfranchised and outside the pale of citizenship; on the contrary, they have acquired full political rights and are becoming increasingly powerful in the parliaments. In other words, the wage-earning class is, for the most part, no longer “proletarian” in the narrow sense in which Marx used the term. Quite apart from these considerations, however, it is very obvious that the theory of Lenin and his followers that the whole political power of Russia should be centered in the so-called industrial proletariat, which even the Bolsheviki themselves have not estimated at more than 3 per cent. of the entire population, bears no sort of relation to the process Marx always had in mind when he referred to “proletarian dictatorship.” Not only is there no sanction for the Leninist view in Marxian theory, but the two are irreconcilably opposed.

The Bolshevist régime does not even represent the proletariat, however. The fact is thoroughly well established that the political power rests in the Communist Party, which represents only a minority of the proletariat. What we have before us in Russia is not even a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship over an entire people, including the proletariat, by the Communist Party. The testimony of the Bolsheviki themselves upon this point is abundant and conclusive. If any good purpose were served thereby, pages of statements to this effect by responsible Bolshevist leaders could be cited; for our present purpose, however, the following quotations will suffice:

In a letter to workmen and peasants issued in July, 1918, Lenin said, “The dictatorship of the proletariat is carried out by the party of the Bolsheviki, which, as early as 1905, and earlier, became one with the entire revolutionary proletariat.” In an article entitled, “The Party and the Soviets,” published in Pravda, February 13, 1919, Bucharin, editor-in-chief of that important official organ of the Communist Party, said: “It is no secret for any one that in a country where the working-class and the poorest peasantry are in power, that party is the directing party which expresses the interests of these groups of the population—the Communist Party. All the work in the Soviet goes on under the influence and the political leadership of our party. It is the forms which this leadership should assume that are the subject of disagreement.” In Pravda, November 5, 1919, the leading editorial says of the “adventure of Yudenich” that in the last analysis “this ordeal has strengthened the cause of revolution and has strengthened the hegemony of the Communist Party.” In the Samara Kommuna, April 11, 1919, we read that “The Communist Party as a whole is responsible for the future of the young Soviet Socialist Republic, for the whole course of the world Communist revolution. In the country the highest organ of authority, to which all Soviet institutions and officials are subordinate, is again the Communist Party.”

Not only do we find that the Bolshevist régime rests upon the theory of the hegemony of the Communist Party, but in practice the party functions as a part of the state machinery, as the directing machinery, in point of fact, placing the Soviets in a subordinate position. At times the Communist Party has exercised the entire power of government, as, for example, from July, 1918, to January, 1919. Thus we read in Izvestia, November 6, 1919, “From October, 1917, up to July, 1918, is the first period of Soviet construction; from July, 1918, up to January, 1919, the second period, when the Soviet work was conducted exclusively by the power of the Russian Communist Party; and the third period from January this year, when in the work of Soviet construction broad non-partizan masses participated.”

This condition was, of course, made possible by the predominance of Communist Party members in the Soviet Government, a predominance due to the measures taken to exclude the anti-Bolshevist parties. Thus 88 per cent. of the members of the Executive Committees of the Provincial Soviets were members of the Communist Party, according to Izvestia, November 6, 1919. In the army, while their number was relatively small, not more than 10,000 in the entire army, members of the Communist Party held almost all the responsible posts. Trotsky, as Commander-in-Chief, reported to the seventh Congress, according to the Red Baltic Fleet, December 11, 1919, “our Army consists of peasants and workmen. Workmen represent scarcely more than 15 to 18 per cent., but they maintain the same directing position as throughout Soviet Russia. This is a privilege secured to them because of their greater consciousness, compactness, and revolutionary zeal. The army is the reflection of our whole social order. It is based on the rule of the working-class, in which latter the party of Communists plays the leading rôle.” Trotsky further said: “The number of members of this party in the army is about ten thousand. The responsible posts of commissaries are occupied by them in the overwhelming majority of instances. In each regiment there is a Communist group. The significance of the Communists in the army is shown by the fact that when conditions become unfavorable in a given division the commanding staff appeals to the Revolutionary Military Soviet with a request that a group of Communists be sent down.” Accordingly, it is not surprising to find the party itself exercising the functions of government and issuing orders. In Izvestia and Pravda, during April, 1919, numerous paragraphs were published relating to the mobilization of regiments by the Communist Party.

From figures published by the Bolsheviki themselves it is possible to obtain a tolerably accurate idea of the actual numerical strength of the Communist Party. During the second half of 1918, when, as stated in the paragraph already quoted from Izvestia, “the Soviet work was conducted exclusively by the power of the Russian Communist Party,” there was naturally a considerable increase in the party membership, for very obvious reasons. In Severnaya Communa, February 22, 1919, appeared the following:

At the session of the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party, on February 15, 1919, the following resolutions were carried: Taking into account—(1) That the uninterrupted growth of our party during the year of dictatorship has inevitably meant that there have entered its ranks elements having absolutely nothing in common with Communism, joining in order to use the authority of the Russian Communist Party for their own personal, selfish aims; (2) That these elements, taking cover under the flag of Communism, are by their acts discrediting in the eyes of the people the prestige and glorious name of our Proletarian Party; (3) That the so-called “Communists of our days” by their outrageous behavior are arousing discontent and bitter feeling in the people, thus creating a favorable soil for counter-revolutionary agitation—taking all this into account, the Moscow Committee of the Russian Communist Party declares:

(a) That the party congress about to be held should call on all party organizations to check up in the strictest manner all members of the party and cleanse its ranks of elements foreign to the party; (b) that one must carry on a decisive struggle against those elements whose acts create a counter-revolutionary state of mind; (c) that one must make every effort to raise the moral level of members of the Russian Communist Party and educate them in the spirit of true Proletarian Communism; (d) that one must direct all efforts toward strengthening party discipline and establishing strict control by the party over all its members in all fields of Party-Soviet activity.

Yet, notwithstanding the inflation of party membership here referred to, we find Izvestia reporting in that same month, February, 1919, as follows: “The secretary of the Communist Party of the Moscow Province states that the total number of party members throughout the whole province is 2,881.” At the eighth Congress of the Communist Party, March, 1919, serious attention was given to the inflation of the party membership by the admission of Soviet employees and others who were not Communists at heart, and it was decided to cleanse the party of such elements and, after that was done, to undertake a recruiting campaign for new members. Yet, according to the official minutes of this Congress, “the sum total of the Communist Party throughout Soviet Russia represents about one-half of one per cent. of the entire population.” We find in Izvestia, May 8, 1919, that out of a total of more than two million inhabitants in the Province of Kaluga the membership of the Communist Party amounted to less than one-fifth of one per cent. of the population: “According to the data of the Communist Congress of the Province of Kaluga there are 3,861 registered members of the party throughout the whole province.” On the following day, May 9, 1919, Izvestia reported: “At the Communist Congress of the Riazan Province 181 organizations were represented, numbering 5,994 members.” As the population of the Riazan Province was well over 3,000,000 it will be seen that here again the Communist Party membership was less than one-fifth of one per cent. of the population.

At this time various Bolshevist journals gave the Communist Party membership at 20,000 for the city of Moscow and 12,000 for Petrograd. Then took place the so-called “re-registration,” to “relieve the party of this ballast,” as Pravda said later on, “those careerists of the petty bourgeois groups of the population.” In Petrograd the membership was reduced by nearly one-third and in some provincial towns by from 50 to 75 per cent. The result was that in September, 1919, Pravda reported the number of Communist Party members in Petrograd as 9,000, “with at least 50,000 ardent supporters of the anti-Bolshevist movement.” This official journal did not regard the 9,000 as a united body of genuine and sincere Communists: “Are the 9,000 upholding the cause of Bolshevism acting according to their convictions? No. Most of them are in ignorance of the principles of the Communists, which at heart they do not believe in, but all the employees of the Soviets study these principles much the same as under the rule of the Czar they turned their attention to police rules in order to get ahead.”

On October 1, 1919, Pravda published two significant circular letters from the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the district and local organizations of the party. The first of these called for “a campaign to recruit new members into the party” and to induce old members to rejoin. To make joining the party easier “entry into the party is not to be conditioned by the presentation of two written recommendations as before.” The appeal to the party workers says, “During ‘party-week’ we ought to increase the membership of our party to half a million.” The second circular is of interest because of the following sentences: “The principle of administration by ‘colleges’ must be reduced to a minimum. Discussions and considerations must be given up. The party must be as soon as possible rebuilt on military lines, and there must be created a military revolutionary apparatus which would work solidly and accurately. In this apparatus there must be clearly distributed privileges and duties.”

The frenzied efforts to increase the party membership by “drives” in which every device and every method of persuasion and pressure was used brought into the party many who were not Communists at all. Thus we find Pravda saying, December 12, 1919: “The influx of many members to the collectives (Soviet Management groups) comes not only from the working-class, but also from the middle bourgeoisie which formerly considered Communists as its enemies. One of the new collectives is a collective at the estate of Kurakin (a children’s colony). Here entered the collective not only loyal employees, but also representatives of the teaching staff.” Pravda adds that “this inrush of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie that formerly considered the Communists as its enemies, is not at all to our interest. Of course, there may be honest Soviet officials who have in fact shown their loyalty to the great ideas of Communism, and such can find their place in our ranks.” Other Bolshevist journals wrote in the same spirit deploring the admission of so many “bourgeois” Soviet officials into the party.

In spite of this abnormal and much-feared inflation of the party membership, Pravda reported on March 18, 1920, that with more than 300,000 workmen in Petrograd the total membership of the Communist Party in that city was only 30,000. That is to say, including all the Soviet officials and “bourgeois elements,” the party membership amounted to rather less than 10 per cent. of the industrial proletariat, and that in the principal center of the party, the first of the two great cities. Surely this is proof that the Communist Party really represents only a minority of the industrial proletariat. If even with all its bourgeois elements it amounts in the principal industrial city, its stronghold, to less than 10 per cent. of the number of working-men, we may be quite certain that in the country as a whole the percentage is very much smaller.

Even if we take into account only the militant portion of the organized proletariat, the Communist Party is shown to represent only a minority of it. Economicheskaya Zhizn, October 15, 1919, published an elaborate statistical analysis of the First Trades-Union Conference of the Moscow Government. We learn that in the Union of Textile Workers, the largest union represented, of 131 delegates present only 27, or 20.6 per cent., declared themselves to be Communists; while 94, or 71.7 per cent., declared themselves to be non-party, and 3 declared that they were Mensheviki. Of the 21 delegates of the Union of Compositors 13, or 62.3 per cent., declared themselves to be Mensheviki; 7, or 33 per cent., to be non-party, and only 1 registered as a Communist. The Union of Soviet employees naturally sent a majority of delegates who registered as Communists, 45 out of 67 delegates, or 67 per cent., so registering themselves. The unions were divided into four classes or categories, as follows:

If we take the first two categories as representing the industrial proletariat as a whole we get 1,072,860 proletarians represented by 400 delegates; in the third and fourth categories, representing Soviet officials, Intellectuals, and “petty bourgeois elements,” we get 380 delegates representing 336,900 members. Thus the industrial proletariat secured only about one-third of the representation in proportion to membership secured by the other elements. Representation was upon this basis:

With all this juggling and gerrymandering the Bolsheviki did not manage to get a majority of out-and-out Communists, and only by having a separate classification for “sympathizers” did they manage to attain such a majority, namely, 52 per cent. of all delegates. If we take the delegates of workers engaged in the large industries, the element which Lenin has so often called “the kernel of the proletariat,” we find that only 28 per cent. declared themselves as belonging to the Communist Party. At the All-Russian Conference of Engineering Workers, reported in Economicheskaya Zhizn (No. 219), we find that of the delegates present those declaring themselves to be Communists were 40 per cent., those belonging to no party 46 per cent., and Mensheviki 8 per cent.

In considering these figures we must bear in mind these facts: First, delegates to such bodies are drawn from the most active men in the organizations; second, persecution of all active in opposition to the Bolsheviki inevitably lessened the number of active opponents among the delegates; third, for two years there had been no freedom of press, speech, or assemblage for any but the Communists; fourth, by enrolling as a Communist, or even by declaring himself to be a “sympathizer,” a man could obtain a certain amount of protection and a privileged position in the matter of food distribution. When all these things are duly taken into account the weakness of the hold of the Bolsheviki upon the minds of even the militant part of the proletariat is evident.

What an absurdity it is to call the Bolshevist régime a dictatorship of the proletariat, even if we accept the narrow use of this term upon which the Bolsheviki insist and omit all except about 5 per cent. of the peasantry, a class which comprises 85 per cent. of the entire population. It is a dictatorship by the Communist Party, a political faction which, according to its own figures, had in its membership in March, 1919, about one-half of one per cent. of the population—or, roughly, one and a half per cent. of the adult population entitled to vote under the universal franchise introduced by the Provisional Government; a party which, after a period of confessedly dangerous inflation by the inclusion of non-proletarian elements in exceedingly large numbers, had in March of this year, in the greatest industrial center, a membership amounting to less than 10 per cent. of the number of working-men. To say that Soviet Russia is governed by the proletariat is, in the face of these figures, a grotesque and stupid misstatement.

XIII
STATE COMMUNISM AND LABOR CONSCRIPTION

Many of the most influential critics of modern Socialism have argued that the realization of its program must inevitably require a complete and intolerable subjection of the individual to an all-powerful, bureaucratic state. They have contended that Socialism in practice would require the organization of the labor forces of the nation upon military lines; that the right of the citizen to select his or her own occupation subject only to economic laws, and to leave one job for another at will, would have to be denied and the sole authority of the state established in such matters as the assignment of tasks, the organization and direction of industry.

Writers like Yves Guyot, Eugene Richter, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Goldwin Smith, and many others, have emphasized this criticism and assailed Socialism as the foe of individual freedom. Terrifying pictures have been drawn of the lot of the workers in such a society; their tasks assigned to them by some state authority, their hours of labor, and their remuneration similarly controlled, with no freedom of choice or right of change of occupation. Just as under the adscriptio glebæ of feudalism the worker was bound to the soil, so, these hostile critics of Socialism have argued, must the workers be bound to bureaucratically set tasks under Socialism. Just as, immediately prior to the breaking up of the Roman Empire, workers were thus bound to certain kinds of work and, moreover, to train their children to the same work, so, we have been told a thousand times, it must necessarily be in a Socialist state.

Of course all responsible Socialists have repudiated these fantastic caricatures of Socialism. They have uniformly insisted that Socialism is compatible with the highest individualism; that it affords the basis for a degree of personal freedom not otherwise obtainable. They have laughed to scorn the idea of a system which gave to the state the power to assign each man or woman his or her task. Every Socialist writer has insisted that the selection of occupation, for example, must be personal and free, and has assailed the idea of a regimentation or militarization of labor, pointing out that this would never be tolerated by a free democracy; that it was only possible in a despotic state, undemocratic, and not subject to the will and interest of the people. Many of the most brilliant and convincing pages of the great literature of modern international Socialism are devoted to its exoneration from this charge, particular attention being given to the anti-statist character of the Socialist movement and to the natural antagonism of democracy to centralization and bureaucracy.

It is a significant fact that from the middle of the nineteenth century right down to the present day the extreme radical left wing of the Socialist movement in every country has been bitter in its denunciation of those Socialists who assumed the continued existence of the state, rivaling the most extreme individualists in abuse of “the tyranny of the state.” Without a single noteworthy exception the leaders of the radical left wing of the movement have been identified with those revolts against “statism” which have manifested themselves in the agitations for decentralized autonomy. They have been anti-parliamentarians and direct-actionists almost to a man.

By a strange irony of history it has remained for the self-styled Marxian Socialists of Russia, the Bolsheviki, who are so much more Marxist than Marx himself, to give to the criticism we are discussing the authority of history. They have lifted it from the shadowy regions of fantastic speculation to the almost impregnable and unassailable ground of established law and practice. The Code of Labor Laws of Soviet Russia, recently published in this country by the official bureau of the Russian Soviet Government, can henceforth be pointed to by the enemies of social democracy as evidence of the truth of the charge that Socialism aims to reduce mankind to a position of hopeless servitude. Certainly no freedom-loving man or woman would want to exchange life under capitalism, with all its drawbacks and disadvantages, for the despotic, bureaucratic régime clearly indicated in this most remarkable collection of laws.

As we have seen, Lenin and his followers were anti-statists. Once in the saddle they set up a powerful state machine and began to apotheosize the state. Not only did the term “Soviet State” come into quite general use in place of “Soviet Power”; what is still more significant is the special sanctity with which they endowed the state. In this they go as far as Hegel, though they do not use his spiritual terminology. The German philosopher saw the state as “the Divine Will embodied in the human will,” as “Reason manifested,” and as “the Eternal personified.” Upon that conception the Prussian-German ideal of the state was based. That the state must be absolute, its authority unquestioned, is equally the basic conception upon which the Bolshevist régime rests. In no modern nation, not even the Germany of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, has the authority of the state been so comprehensive, so wholly dependent upon force or more completely independent of the popular will. Notwithstanding the revolutionary ferment of the time, so arrogantly confident have the self-constituted rulers become that we find Zinoviev boasting, “Were we to publish a decree ordering the entire population of Petrograd, under fifty years of age, to present themselves on the field of Mars to receive twenty-five birch rods, we are certain that 75 per cent. would obediently form a queue, and the remaining 25 per cent. would bring medical certificates exempting them from the flogging.”

It is interesting to note in the writings of Lenin the Machiavellian manner in which, even before the coup d’état of November, 1917, he began to prepare the minds of his followers for the abandonment of anti-statism. Shortly before that event he published a leaflet entitled, “Shall the Bolsheviki Remain in Power?” In this leaflet he pointed out that the Bolsheviki had preached the destruction of the state only because, and so long as, the state was in the possession of the master class. He asked why they should continue to do this after they themselves had taken the helm. The state, he argued, is the organized rule of a privileged minority class, and the Bolsheviki must use the enemy’s machinery and substitute their minority. Here we have revealed the same vicious and unscrupulous duplicity, the same systematic, studied deception, as in such matters as freedom of speech and press, equal suffrage, and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly—a fundamental principle so long as the party was in revolt, anti-statism was to be abandoned the moment the power to give it effect was secured. Other Socialists had been derided and bitterly denounced by the Bolsheviki for preaching the “bourgeois doctrine” of controlling and using the machinery of the state; nothing but the complete destruction of the state and its machinery would satisfy their revolutionary minds. But with their first approach to power the tune is changed and possession and use of the machinery of the state are held to be desirable and even essential.

For what is this possession of the power and machinery of the state desired? For no constructive purpose of any sort or kind whatever, if we may believe Lenin, but only for destruction and oppression. In his little book, The State and the Revolution, written in September, 1917, he says: “As the state is only a transitional institution which we must use in the revolutionary struggle in order forcibly to crush our opponents, it is a pure absurdity to speak of a Free People’s State. While the proletariat still needs the state, it does not require it in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of crushing its antagonists.” Here, then, is the brutal doctrine of the state as an instrument of coercion and repression which the arch Bolshevist acknowledges; a doctrine differing from that of Treitschke and other Prussians only in its greater brutality. The much-discussed Code of Labor Laws of the Soviet Government, with its elaborate provisions for a permanent conscription of labor upon an essentially military basis, is the logical outcome of the Bolshevist conception of the state.

The statement has been made by many of the apologists of the Bolsheviki that the conscription of labor, which has been so unfavorably commented upon in the western nations, is a temporary measure only, introduced because of the extraordinary conditions prevailing. It has been stated, by Mr. Lincoln Eyre among others, that it was adopted on the suggestion of Mr. Royal C. Keely, an American engineer who was employed by Lenin to make an expert report upon Russia’s economic position and outlook, and whose report, made in January of this year, is known to have been very unfavorable. A brief summary of the essential facts will show (1) that the Bolsheviki had this system in mind from the very first, and (2) that quite early they began to make tentative efforts to introduce it.

When the Bolsheviki appeared at the convocation of the Constituent Assembly and demanded that that body adopt a document which would virtually amount to a complete abdication of its functions, that document contained a clause—Article II, Paragraph 4—which read as follows: “To enforce general compulsory labor, in order to destroy the class of parasites, and to reorganize the economic life.” In April, 1918, Lenin wrote:

The delay in introducing obligatory labor service is another proof that the most urgent problem is precisely the preparatory organization work which, on one hand, should definitely secure our gains, and which, on the other hand, is necessary to prepare the campaign to “surround capital” and to “compel its surrender.” The introduction of obligatory labor service should be started immediately, but it should be introduced gradually and with great caution, testing every step by practical experience, and, of course, introducing first of all obligatory labor service for the rich. The introduction of a labor record-book and a consumption-budget record-book for every bourgeois, including the village bourgeois, would be a long step forward toward a complete “siege” of the enemy and toward the creation of a really universal accounting and control over production and distribution.67