VI. The Proletarian Regime

The proletariat can attain power only by relying on a national upsurge, on the enthusiasm of the whole people. The proletariat will enter the government as the revolutionary representative of the nation, as the acknowledged leader of the people in the struggle against absolutism and the barbarism of serfdom. But once in power, the proletariat will open a new epoch, an epoch of revolutionary legislation, of positive policy; and here its retention of the role of the acknowledged spokesman of the nation is by no means assured. The first measures of the proletariat, the cleansing of the Augean stables of the old regime and the expulsion of their inmates, will meet with the active support of the whole nation, whatever the liberal eunuchs may say about the strength of certain prejudices among the masses of the people.

This political clearing-up will be supplemented by a democratic reorganisation of all social and state relations. The workers’ government will have to intervene, under the influence of immediate impulses and demands, in absolutely all relations and phenomena…

First of all it will have to throw out of the army and the administration all who have stained themselves with the blood of the people, and to disband or break up the regiments that have most stained themselves with crimes against the people; this work will have to be done in the very first days, that is, long before it becomes possible to introduce a system of elected and responsible officials and to set about organising a people’s militia. But the matter will not stop there. The workers’ democracy will at once be confronted by the question of the length of the working day, the agrarian question and the problem of unemployment…

One thing is beyond doubt. Every new day will deepen the policy of the proletariat in power and define its class character more and more. And at the same time the revolutionary bond between the proletariat and the nation will be broken, the class division of the peasantry will come forward in political form, and the antagonism between the component parts will grow in the measure in which the policy of the workers’ government defines itself and turns from a general democratic policy into a class policy.

If the absence of established bourgeois-individualist traditions and anti-proletarian prejudices among the peasantry and the intelligentsia helps the proletariat to come to power, it must on the other hand be borne in mind that this absence of prejudices rests not on political consciousness but on political barbarism, on social formlessness, primitiveness and lack of character. And all these are properties and features that can in no way create a reliable basis for a consistent, active policy of the proletariat.

The abolition of the serfdom of the estates will meet with the support of the whole peasantry, as the estate that bears the burdens. A progressive income tax will meet with the support of the great majority of the peasantry; but legislative measures for the protection of the agricultural proletariat will not only fail to meet with the same active sympathy from the majority but will run up against the active resistance of a minority.

The proletariat will find itself compelled to carry the class struggle into the village, and thus to break the community of interests that undoubtedly exists in the whole peasantry, but within comparatively narrow limits. In the very first moments of its rule the proletariat will have to seek support by setting the village poor against the village rich, the agricultural proletariat against the agrarian bourgeoisie. But if the heterogeneity of the peasantry presents difficulties and narrows the basis of proletarian policy, the insufficient class differentiation of the peasantry will create obstacles to introducing into the peasantry a developed class struggle on which the urban proletariat could rely. The primitiveness of the peasantry will turn its hostile face towards the proletariat.

But the cooling of the peasantry, its political passivity, and still more the active opposition of its upper strata, cannot fail to influence a part of the intelligentsia and the urban petty bourgeoisie.

Thus the more definite and resolute the policy of the proletariat in power becomes, the narrower will be the base beneath it and the shakier the ground under its feet. All this is extremely probable, even inevitable.

Two main features of proletarian policy will meet with opposition from its allies: collectivism and internationalism.

The petty-bourgeois character and political primitiveness of the peasantry, the narrow horizon of the village, its isolation from the political ties and dependencies of the world, will present terrible difficulties for the consolidation of the revolutionary policy of the proletariat in power.

To imagine that Social-Democracy enters a provisional government, leads it through the period of revolutionary-democratic reforms, fighting for their most radical character and relying for this on the organised proletariat, and then, when the democratic programme has been carried out, Social-Democracy walks out of the building it has erected, giving place to the bourgeois parties, and itself goes into opposition, thus opening an epoch of parliamentary politics: to imagine things in this way would be to compromise the very idea of a workers’ government. And not because it is inadmissible “in principle” (so abstract a way of putting the question has no content), but because it is completely unreal; it is utopianism of the worst kind, a sort of revolutionary-philistine utopianism.

And here is why.

The division of our programme into a minimum and a maximum programme has an enormous and profound significance of principle on condition that power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is precisely this fact, the fact that power belongs to the bourgeoisie, that banishes from our minimum programme all demands that are irreconcilable with private property in the means of production. These latter demands form the content of the socialist revolution, and their premise is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But once power is in the hands of a revolutionary government with a socialist majority, the distinction between the minimum and the maximum programme at once loses both its significance of principle and its immediate practical significance. A proletarian government will in no way be able to keep within the bounds of this distinction. Take the demand for the eight-hour working day. It is well known that it in no way contradicts capitalist relations, and it therefore belongs to the minimum programme of Social-Democracy. But let us imagine the picture of its actual introduction in a revolutionary period, with all social passions at full stretch. The new law would undoubtedly run up against the organised and stubborn resistance of the capitalists, in the form, let us say, of a lockout and the closing of factories and works. Hundreds of thousands of workers would find themselves thrown into the street. What would the government do? A bourgeois government, however radical, would never let matters go so far, for in the face of closed factories and works it would find itself powerless. It would be forced to make concessions; the eight-hour day would not be introduced; the indignation of the proletariat would be suppressed.

Under the political rule of the proletariat, the introduction of the eight-hour day must lead to entirely different consequences. For a government that wants to rely on the proletariat and not on capital, as liberalism does, and that does not want to play the part of the “impartial” mediator of bourgeois democracy, the closing of factories and works by the capitalists cannot, of course, be a reason for lengthening the working day. For a workers’ government there will be only one way out: the expropriation of the closed factories and works and the organisation of production in them on a social basis.

Of course, one might argue thus: suppose that the workers’ government, true to its programme, decrees the eight-hour day; if capital puts up a resistance that cannot be overcome by the means of a democratic programme, which presupposes the preservation of private property, Social-Democracy resigns and appeals to the proletariat. Such a decision would be a decision only from the point of view of the group that made up the personnel of the government; it is no decision from the point of view of the proletariat or from the point of view of the development of the revolution itself. For after the resignation of Social-Democracy the situation would be the same as it was before, the situation that had compelled it to take power. Flight in the face of the organised resistance of capital would be a still greater betrayal of the revolution than the refusal to take power: for truly it is better not to go in at all than to go in only to show one’s impotence and go out again.

Another example. The proletariat in power cannot fail to take the most energetic measures to solve the question of unemployment, for it goes without saying that the workers’ representatives in the government will not be able to answer the demands of the unemployed by pointing to the bourgeois character of the revolution.

But as soon as the state takes upon itself the maintenance of the unemployed (in what form does not concern us here), an enormous shift of economic power to the side of the proletariat will at once have been accomplished. The capitalists, whose pressure on the proletariat has always rested on the existence of the reserve army, will feel themselves economically powerless, while the revolutionary government will at the same time condemn them to political impotence.

By taking upon itself the support of the unemployed, the state thereby takes upon itself the task of maintaining the strikers. If it does not do this, it will at once and irreparably undermine the foundations of its own existence.

Nothing will be left to the manufacturers but to resort to the lockout, that is, to the closing of the factories. It is quite clear that the manufacturers can hold out against a stoppage of production longer than the workers; and to a mass lockout the workers’ government will have only one answer: the expropriation of the factories and the introduction in them, at least in the largest of them, of state or municipal production.

In agriculture similar problems will arise from the very fact of the expropriation of the land. It is in no way to be supposed that a proletarian government, having expropriated the private estates with large-scale production, will break them up into plots and sell them for exploitation by small producers. The only road for it is the organisation of co-operative production under communal control or directly at the state’s expense. But that is the road of socialism.

All this shows quite clearly that Social-Democracy cannot enter a revolutionary government after having given the proletariat a prior undertaking to yield nothing of the minimum programme, and having promised the bourgeoisie not to step beyond the limits of the minimum programme. Such a two-sided undertaking would be quite impossible to fulfil. In entering the government, not as powerless hostages but as the leading force, the representatives of the proletariat thereby break down the boundary between the minimum and the maximum programme; that is, they put collectivism on the order of the day. At what point the proletariat will be stopped in this direction depends on the relation of forces, and not at all on the original intentions of the party of the proletariat.

That is why there can be no question of some special form of proletarian dictatorship in the bourgeois revolution, namely a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat (or of the proletariat and the peasantry). The working class will not be able to secure the democratic character of its dictatorship without stepping beyond the bounds of its democratic programme. Any illusions on this score would be utterly pernicious. They would compromise Social-Democracy from the very start.

Once the party of the proletariat takes power, it will fight for it to the end. If one means of this struggle for the preservation and consolidation of power will be agitation and organisation, especially in the countryside, another means will be a collectivist policy. Collectivism will become not only the inevitable consequence of the party’s position in power but also a means of preserving this position by relying on the proletariat.

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When the idea of uninterrupted revolution was formulated in the socialist press, a revolution linking the liquidation of absolutism and civil serfdom with a socialist overturn through a series of growing social collisions, risings of new strata of the masses, and unceasing attacks by the proletariat on the political and economic privileges of the ruling classes, our “progressive” press raised a unanimous howl of indignation. Oh, it had put up with a great deal, but this it could not allow. Revolution, it cried, is not a road that can be “legalised”! The use of exceptional means is permissible only in exceptional cases. The aim of the liberation movement is not to perpetuate the revolution but to bring it as soon as possible into the channel of law. And so on, and so forth.

The more radical representatives of the same democracy do not risk coming out against the revolution from the standpoint of the constitutional “conquests” already made: even for them this parliamentary cretinism, which has run ahead of the very appearance of parliamentarism, does not seem a strong weapon in the struggle against the revolution of the proletariat. They choose another road: they take their stand not on the ground of law but on the ground of what seem to them to be facts, on the ground of historical “possibilities”, on the ground of political “realism”, finally even on the ground of “Marxism”. Why not? As Antonio, the pious bourgeois of Venice, very aptly said long ago:

They not only regard the very idea of a workers’ government in Russia as fantastic, but deny the possibility of a socialist revolution in Europe in the coming historical epoch. The necessary “premises” are not yet present. Is this true? The point, of course, is not to fix a date for the socialist revolution, but to place it in its real historical perspective.