II.3. The Conquest of Political Power

The fate of democracy, as we have seen, is bound up with the fate of the labour movement. But does the development of democracy, even in the best case, make a proletarian revolution, in the sense of the seizure of state power, the conquest of political power, superfluous or impossible?

Bernstein decides this question by a thorough weighing of the good and bad sides of legal reform and of revolution, and with a complacency that recalls the weighing out of cinnamon and pepper in a consumers’ co-operative. In the legal course of development he sees the work of the intellect, in the revolutionary the work of feeling; in reform work a slow method of historical progress, in revolution a rapid one; in legislation a planned force, in upheaval an elemental one (p. 183). Now it is an old story that the petty-bourgeois reformer sees a “good” and a “bad” side in every thing in the world, and that he nibbles from every flower-bed. But it is an equally old story that the real course of things cares very little for petty-bourgeois combinations, and with a single flick blows sky-high the carefully gathered little heap of the “good sides” of every possible thing in the world. In fact we see legal reform and revolution functioning in history for deeper reasons than the advantages or disadvantages of this or that procedure.

In the history of bourgeois society legal reform served the gradual strengthening of the rising class until it felt mature enough to conquer political power and overturn the whole existing legal system in order to build a new one. Bernstein, who thunders against the conquest of political power as a Blanquist theory of violence, has the misfortune to take what for centuries has been the pivot and the driving force of human history for a Blanquist miscalculation. Ever since class societies have existed and the class struggle has formed the essential content of their history, the conquest of political power has always been the aim of all rising classes, as well as the starting-point and the end-point of every historical period. We see this in the long struggles of the peasantry against the money-capitalists and the nobility in ancient Rome, in the struggles of the patricians against the bishops and of the craftsmen against the patricians in the medieval towns, in the struggles of the bourgeoisie against feudalism in modern times.

Legal reform and revolution, then, are not different methods of historical progress that one can pick at will from the counter of history, like hot sausages or cold sausages, but different moments in the development of class society, which condition and complement each other and at the same time exclude each other, as do, for example, the South Pole and the North Pole, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

And indeed every legal constitution is merely a product of revolution. While revolution is the political act of creation of class history, legislation is the political continuation of a society’s vegetative existence. Legal reform work has in itself no driving force of its own, independent of revolution; in every historical period it moves only on the line, and only for as long as, the kick given it by the last upheaval goes on working in it, or, to speak concretely, only within the framework of the social form brought into the world by the last upheaval. That is precisely the core of the question.

It is utterly false and quite unhistorical to imagine legal reform work as merely revolution drawn out in time, and revolution as condensed reform. A social upheaval and a legal reform are distinct moments not by their duration but by their nature. The whole secret of historical upheavals through the use of political power lies precisely in the turning of merely quantitative changes into a new quality; to speak concretely, in the transition from one historical period, from one social order, to another.

Whoever therefore declares in favour of the road of legal reform instead of and in opposition to the conquest of political power and the overturning of society is in fact choosing not a quieter, surer, slower road to the same goal but a different goal as well: namely, instead of bringing about a new social order, merely inessential changes in the old one. Thus from the political views of revisionism one arrives at the same conclusion as from its economic theories: that at bottom they aim not at the realisation of the socialist order but merely at the reform of the capitalist one, not at the abolition of the wage system but at more or less exploitation; in a word, at the removal of the excrescences of capitalism and not of capitalism itself.

But perhaps the propositions above about the function of legal reform and of revolution hold good only for the class struggles of the past? Perhaps from now on, thanks to the development of the bourgeois legal system, legal reform has also been given the task of carrying society over from one historical phase into another, and the seizure of state power by the proletariat has “become an empty phrase”, as Bernstein says on p. 183 of his book?

The exact and direct opposite is the case. What distinguishes bourgeois society from the earlier class societies, the ancient and the medieval? Precisely the circumstance that class rule now rests not on “well-acquired rights” but on actual economic relations, that the wage system is not a legal relation but a purely economic one. Nowhere in our whole legal system will one find a legal formula of the present class rule. If there are traces of one, then they are, like the servants’ ordinances, remnants of feudal relations.

How, then, is wage slavery to be abolished step by step “by legal means” if it is not expressed in the laws at all? Bernstein, who means to set about the work of legal reform in order to put an end to capitalism in this way, finds himself in the position of the Russian policeman in Uspensky who tells of his adventure: … “Quick as a flash I grabbed the fellow by the collar, and what do you think? The damned fellow had no collar!” … There’s the rub.

“All previous society rested on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes” (Communist Manifesto, p. 17). But in the earlier phases of modern society this antagonism was expressed in definite legal relations, and for that very reason could, up to a certain point, still make room for the new relations as they arose within the framework of the old. “The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune.” (Communist Manifesto, p. 17.) How? Through the gradual abolition, within the town precincts, of all those fragmentary rights (corvée services, the lord’s right to the deceased’s chattels, to his best garment and his best beast, head-money, compulsion in marriage, the lord’s share of inheritances and so on and so forth) whose totality made up serfdom.

Likewise “the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism,” worked his way up “into a bourgeois” (ibid., p. 17). By what road? By the partial formal abolition or the actual loosening of the guild fetters, by the gradual reshaping of the administration, of finance and of the military to the extent most necessary.

If, then, one treats the question abstractly instead of historically, a purely legal and reformist transition from feudal to bourgeois society can at least be imagined in the case of the earlier class relations. But what do we see in fact? That there, too, legal reforms served not to make the seizure of political power by the bourgeoisie superfluous but, on the contrary, to prepare it and bring it about. A formal political and social upheaval was indispensable both for the abolition of serfdom and for the abolition of feudalism.

Today, however, things are quite different again. The proletarian is compelled to put himself under the yoke of capital not by any law but by want, by lack of means of production. No law in the world, however, can decree these means to him within the framework of bourgeois society, because he was robbed of them not by law but by economic development.

Further, exploitation within the wage relation likewise does not rest on laws, for the level of wages is determined not by legal means but by economic factors. And the fact of exploitation itself rests not on any legal provision but on the purely economic fact that labour-power appears as a commodity which, among other things, has the agreeable property of producing value, indeed more value than it itself consumes in the worker’s means of subsistence. In a word, none of the fundamental relations of capitalist class rule can be transformed by legal reforms on a bourgeois basis, because they were neither brought about by bourgeois laws nor have they received the form of such laws. Bernstein does not know this when he plans a socialist “reform”; but what he does not know he says when he writes on p. 10 of his book that “the economic motive today appears freely, where formerly it was disguised by relations of domination and ideologies of every kind”.

But there is a second factor besides. It is the other peculiarity of the capitalist order that in it all the elements of the future society, in their development, first take on a form in which they do not approach socialism but move away from it. In production the social character is expressed more and more. But in what form? In the form of the large enterprise, the joint-stock company, the cartel, where the capitalist antagonisms, exploitation and the subjugation of labour-power are raised to the highest pitch.

In the military sphere, development brings about the spread of universal military service and the shortening of the period of service, and so, materially, an approach to the people’s army. But this in the form of modern militarism, where the domination of the people by the military state, the class character of the state, finds its most glaring expression.

In political relations the development of democracy, in so far as it finds favourable ground, leads to the participation of all strata of the people in political life, and so in a sense to the “people’s state”. But this in the form of bourgeois parliamentarism, where class antagonisms and class rule are not abolished but rather unfolded and laid bare. Because the whole of capitalist development thus moves in contradictions, in order to peel the kernel of socialist society out of the capitalist shell that contradicts it, recourse must be had, for this reason too, to the conquest of political power by the proletariat and to the complete abolition of the capitalist system.

Bernstein, of course, draws other conclusions from this. If the development of democracy led to the sharpening and not to the weakening of capitalist contradictions, then “Social Democracy”, he answers us, “would have to strive, if it did not want to make its own work harder, to thwart social reforms and the extension of democratic institutions as far as possible” (p. 71). That, certainly, if Social Democracy took a petty-bourgeois liking to the idle business of picking out all the good sides of history and throwing away the bad ones. Only then it would logically have to “strive to thwart” capitalism as a whole as well, for capitalism is undeniably the chief villain who puts all the obstacles in its path to socialism. In fact capitalism provides, besides and together with the obstacles, the only possibilities of realising the socialist programme. And exactly the same holds for democracy.

If democracy has become partly superfluous, partly a hindrance, to the bourgeoisie, to the working class, on the contrary, it is necessary and indispensable. It is necessary, first, because it creates political forms (self-government, the franchise and the like) which will serve the proletariat as starting-points and points of support in its transformation of bourgeois society. But it is indispensable, secondly, because only in it, in the struggle for democracy, in the exercise of its rights, can the proletariat come to consciousness of its class interests and its historical tasks.

In a word, democracy is indispensable not because it makes the conquest of political power by the proletariat superfluous but, on the contrary, because it makes this seizure of power both necessary and alone possible. When Engels, in his preface to The Class Struggles in France, revised the tactics of the present-day labour movement and set legal struggle against the barricades, he was dealing (as is clear from every line of the preface) not with the question of the final conquest of political power but with that of the present daily struggle; not with the attitude of the proletariat towards the capitalist state at the moment of seizing state power, but with its attitude within the framework of the capitalist state. In a word, Engels gave the guiding line to the proletariat that is ruled, not to the proletariat that is victorious.

Conversely, Marx’s well-known remark about the land question in England, which Bernstein likewise invokes, “we should probably come off cheapest if we bought out the landlords”, refers not to the attitude of the proletariat before its victory but after it. For there can obviously be talk of “buying out” the ruling classes only when the working class is at the helm. What Marx considered possible here, then, is the peaceful exercise of the proletarian dictatorship, not the replacement of the dictatorship by capitalist social reforms.

The necessity itself of the seizure of political power by the proletariat was beyond doubt at all times for Marx as for Engels. And it was left to Bernstein to take the henhouse of bourgeois parliamentarism for the appointed organ by which the mightiest upheaval in world history, the carrying over of society from capitalist into socialist forms, is to be accomplished.

But Bernstein, after all, began his theory with nothing more than the fear and the warning that the proletariat might come to the helm too early! In that case, according to Bernstein, it would have to leave bourgeois conditions exactly as they are, and would itself suffer a terrible defeat. What is evident above all from this fear is that Bernstein’s theory has only one “practical” instruction for the proletariat, should circumstances bring it to the helm: to go to sleep. But with this it passes judgement on itself without more ado, as a conception that condemns the proletariat, in the most important instances of the struggle, to inaction, and so to passive betrayal of its own cause.

In fact our whole programme would be a miserable scrap of paper if it were not able to serve us in all eventualities and at all moments of the struggle, and to serve us by being applied, not by not being applied. If our programme is the formulation of the historical development of society from capitalism to socialism, then it must obviously also formulate all the transitional phases of this development, contain them in outline, and so also be able to show the proletariat at every moment the appropriate conduct in the sense of approaching socialism. It follows that there can be no moment at all for the proletariat in which it would be forced to abandon its programme, or in which it could be abandoned by that programme.

In practice this shows itself in the fact that there can be no moment in which the proletariat, brought to the helm by the course of events, would not be in a position, and also under an obligation, to take certain measures for realising its programme, certain transitional measures in the sense of socialism. Behind the assertion that the socialist programme might fail completely at some moment of the proletariat’s political rule and give no instructions at all for its realisation, there lurks unconsciously the other assertion: that the socialist programme is unrealisable in general and at all times.

And if the transitional measures are premature? This question contains a whole tangle of misunderstandings regarding the real course of social upheavals.

The seizure of state power by the proletariat, that is, by a great popular class, cannot above all be brought about artificially. Leaving aside cases like the Paris Commune, where rule fell into the proletariat’s lap not as the result of its conscious struggle but exceptionally, as ownerless property abandoned by everyone, it presupposes of itself a definite degree of maturity of economic and political relations. Here lies the chief difference between the Blanquist coups d’état of a “resolute minority”, which come at any moment like a shot from a pistol and for that very reason always come at the wrong time, and the conquest of state power by the great, class-conscious mass of the people, which can itself only be the product of a beginning collapse of bourgeois society, and therefore carries within itself the economic and political legitimation of its timely appearance.

If, then, from the standpoint of its social preconditions the conquest of political power by the working class cannot take place “too early” at all, from the standpoint of its political effect, of holding on to power, it must necessarily take place “too early”. The premature revolution that keeps Bernstein awake at night threatens us like the sword of Damocles, and against it no begging and praying, no fearing and trembling, is of any help. And this for two very simple reasons.

First, so mighty an upheaval as the carrying over of society from the capitalist into the socialist order is quite unthinkable at one stroke, by one victorious blow of the proletariat. To assume that it is possible would be once again to display a genuinely Blanquist conception. The socialist upheaval presupposes a long and stubborn struggle in which the proletariat will, in all likelihood, be thrown back more than once, so that the first time, speaking from the standpoint of the final result of the whole struggle, it will necessarily have come to the helm “too early”.

Secondly, however, the “premature” seizure of state power also cannot be avoided, because these “premature” attacks of the proletariat are themselves a factor, and indeed a very important one, that creates the political conditions for the final victory: for only in the course of the political crisis that will accompany its seizure of power, only in the fire of long and stubborn struggles, can the proletariat reach the degree of political maturity that will fit it for the final great upheaval. Thus those “premature” attacks of the proletariat on political state power prove themselves to be important historical moments, which also help to bring about and to determine the moment of the final victory. From this standpoint the idea of a “premature” conquest of political power by the working people appears as a political absurdity, which starts from a mechanical development of society and presupposes a moment for the victory of the class struggle determined outside of and independently of the class struggle.

But since the proletariat is thus quite unable to conquer state power otherwise than “too early”, or in other words, since it must unconditionally conquer it “too early” once or several times in order finally to conquer it lastingly, opposition to the “premature” seizure of power is nothing but opposition to the proletariat’s striving to take possession of state power at all.

So from this side too we arrive logically, as by all roads to Rome, at the result that the revisionist advice to drop the socialist final goal comes down to the other advice: to give up the whole socialist movement as well.