In the year 1922, when the Treaty of Union was signed between the Soviet Republics as a means of mutual support and defence against a hostile world, the following declaration was issued by the Governments concerned:
“Since the formation of the Soviet Republics the world has been divided into two camps—the capitalist and the Socialist.
“In the capitalist camp reigns national hostility and inequality, colonial slavery, chauvinism, national suppression, pogroms, and imperialist brutality.
“Here, in the Socialist camp, is to be found mutual confidence and peace, national freedom and equality, and the tranquil community and fraternal co-operation of peoples. The attempt of the capitalist world through long decades to settle the problem of nationalities by the joint methods of the free development of peoples, and the exploitation of man by man has proved to be fruitless. On the contrary, the skein of nationalist contradictions is becoming more and more entangled, and threatens to overwhelm capitalism itself. The bourgeoisie has proved incapable of bringing about the co-operation of nations.
“Only in the camp of the Soviets, and under the proletarian dictatorship round which is rallied the majority of the population, has it been found possible to root out national persecution, to create conditions for mutual trust, and to lay the foundations of fraternal co-operation.”
These words were written in 1922, but how true they prove to be to-day! The Soviets came to power in Russia in 1917, when it had become clear to the people that this was the only way to peace and democracy. It was the only way to prevent a military dictatorship and the continuation of an imperialist war. “Peace, Bread, and Land,” was the main slogan of the Russian Revolution.
When, at the present time, we survey the world, we find that it is still divided into two camps. But the tremendous growth of the power of the country of Socialism on the one hand, and the seizure of power by Fascist dictatorships representing the most reactionary property interests on the other, has modified the frontier between these camps. Peace and democracy were the main aims of the Soviet Revolution. To-day, in the capitalist world itself, two camps have been formed, for peace and democracy on the one hand and for Fascism and war on the other. In the present world situation all the forces of peace and democracy are centring their attention on an alliance with the U.S.S.R. and Socialism; the forces of Fascism look upon the U.S.S.R. as the maintenance to their continued existence, because its example can never be effectively hidden for long from the people of all countries, and this is a stimulus to renewed activity in the interests of democracy.
The main dividing-line, then, in the present world situation, is between the forces of democracy and those of Fascism. What are the reasons for this change in emphasis which has taken place in the post-war period? The important feature of post-war capitalism, long ago foreseen as inevitable by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, has been the growing power of the great financial and industrial monopolies and the concentration of wealth in the hands of these monopolists. Such a tendency in economic organization causes an ever-increasing number of the small producers, whether or not they employ a few workers, to feel themselves at the mercy of the great trusts, and to desire to use every political means to control these great organizations.
As a result, sections of the middle class that at one time considered themselves superior to the workers, tend to become willing to co-operate with the working people in limiting the power of the great trusts. Thus, the forces of democracy on the one hand are numerically increased, while, on the other, the great trusts and monopolies use every means of increasing their control of the State, if necessary, by even putting an end to every legal form of democratic expression.
Fascism, then, appears as the expression in politics of the growing tendency to monopoly in economics. Those of the employing class who find themselves being impoverished and increasingly insecure as a result of the operations of the great monopolies tend to move in the direction of the working class, both economically and politically. In this way the great monopolies and their fascist tendencies are opposed by the working people and a growing section of the middle class, the main constituents of a Popular Front.
In Spain these forces are to-day in open conflict. The cause of this conflict is that the people, as a result of uniting their forces in the cause of democracy, succeeded in electing a really democratic Government to power, a Government pledged to take a number of democratic measures against the interests of property, and in the interests of the people. The big property-owners, together with the generals in the army drawn from the propertied class, and with the support of foreign Fascism, launched their offensive on the Spanish people in a last desperate attempt to prevent the democratic forces from becoming effective. The result has been the “civil war,” a war of international Fascism against the Spanish people.
When, in relation to Spain, it is claimed that the Government did not really represent the people because it only received a minority of the votes at the last election, this is sheer deception. First, it is untrue that the parties fighting for the Spanish Government against the rebels received a minority of the votes. They received a majority. But General Franco still insists on referring to the Basque Nationalists as a party of the Right, though it has actually consistently supported the Government. But, secondly, even if there had been a minority of votes for the parties of the Right, this does not for one moment , mean that there was a majority for the armed uprising of General Franco and his foreign Fascist supporters.
The second point, however, which is relevant, is the fact that, as in Britain to-day, the last election in Spain took place in a country where the main means of production and propaganda were still privately owned. Therefore the property-owners had all those advantages which we have shown to be inconsistent with really effective democracy. In such conditions the votes for the popular front were bound to understate, not to overstate, the real interests which this group of parties represented. When, in addition, it is realized that the elections took place with considerable pressure from the Government, which then consisted of the parties of the Right, against the Popular Front, we see that all the forces operating in Spain, other than the demands of the people themselves, militated to minimize the Popular Front vote.
The Spanish Popular Front Government was returned in spite of all these disabilities of the people in the elections. If there had been real equality of propaganda, the votes for the Government would have been more, not less. Then came the Franco rebellion, backed by foreign Fascist States, The Spanish Government, though at that time consisting of Liberal republicans, armed the whole people. The fight for democracy in Spain caused a Liberal Government to do what only the Soviets had done in Russia—to take the vitally democratic step of putting arms into the hands of the people themselves. From that moment onwards on Government territory the scales were tipped in favour of real democracy; for, once the people themselves have arms, they can express their will more effectively than ever before. The example of Spain shows that, in the present world situation, the fight to defend democracy is also the fight to extend it. Democracy cannot be defended to-day without being extended. And, in every country, a development is taking place either towards greater democracy and the limitation of the rights of property, or to less democracy and Fascist dictatorship.
In this situation the Soviet Union stands out as a beacon. It shows the logical conclusion of the struggle to make democracy effective. At first, in this struggle, concrete steps had to be taken to limit the rights of the property owners in order to make democracy real for the vast majority of the people. And then the people started to plan production and produce without the mines and land being any longer privately owned. They could, in fact, only introduce a planned system when the land and means of production were already public property. They have established real democracy by completely abolishing class relationships, so that every citizen is a servant of the community, and, as a citizen, also a master.
To-day in the Soviet Union there is work for all, and equality of opportunity for all. Every adult citizen has the same economic and political rights, and no citizen, however much personal property he may own, can regulate the lives and livelihoods of others as a result of this ownership. I may have money in the U.S.S.R. to-day if I have earned it, but I cannot own a factory as a result, and I cannot tell people whether or not they shall have work, and at what wages, and for what hours, because I happen to own some money. My money cannot be used to give me any kind of say in the economic life of the country. And, though I may possess money, I cannot use it for propaganda purposes. I cannot own a newspaper or a meeting-hall, and I cannot even hire a meeting-hall for private political purposes. Therefore my money does not give me any political power whatever. As a result of this, power in the U.S.S.R., economically and politically, is vested in the citizens as such, according only to their abilities, and with no relationship whatever to their material possessions. In this way democracy has become real, and really effective. This is something new in the history of democracy.
It would be absolutely incorrect, however, to assume, because in the U.S.S.R. to-day a degree of democracy has been achieved such as exists nowhere else in the world, that there is no further democratic development possible for the U.S.S.R. For the Soviet Union is continually developing, and there are no limits to the way in which, in the future, Soviet democracy may not be further and further extended. Even to-day, Soviet citizens still receive wages according to their work. There are, therefore, highly and lowly paid workers. Even to-day, workers must to some extent still specialize on particular jobs, so that there are cultural workers, administrative workers, technical workers, and unskilled workers. While there is equal opportunity for all citizens to advance from any of these categories to a higher one, there is still the need for a certain degree of specialization, and for a certain material encouragement to each citizen to work according to his ability, and to develop his abilities to the full.
The present state of Soviet society—Socialism—is not regarded in the U.S.S.R. as any land of Utopia or final achievement. It is considered only as a stage in development towards Communist society, which will be a still more real democracy for the whole people. Writing in the 1870’s, Karl Marx, on whose studies of human society Bolshevik doctrine is based, wrote of the future:
“In a higher phase of Communist society, after the tyrannical subordination of individuals according to the distribution of labour, and therefore also the distinction between manual and intellectual work, have disappeared, after labour has become not only a means to live, but is itself the first necessity of living. after the powers of production have also increased and all the springs of co-operative wealth are gushing more freely together with the all-round development of the individual, then, and then only, can the narrow bourgeois horizon of rights be left far behind, and society will inscribe on its banner ‘From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need’” (Critique of the Gotha Program).
In these words Marx showed that beyond the democracy of Soviet society to-day there is a perspective of still further development and still greater personal freedom, until needs and not work will determine what share every citizen shall receive of the total production. And the process by which such a state of society will be reached includes the emancipation of every worker, not only by making him the equal of his neighbour, but by making work itself so interesting that it is voluntarily undertaken by all, so that no longer the compulsion of law and material want will be necessary in order that every citizen do his share. “Productive labour,” wrote Engels in 1878, “will become a means to their emancipation, by giving each individual the opportunity to develop and exercise all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions; in which, therefore, productive labour will be a pleasure instead of a burden” (Anti-Dühring, p. 328).
Such a system of society will be run like a well-organized household. People will work as producers voluntarily, and they will help themselves from the common product. Shops will take the form of depots, from which people will take what they need, and, when the general poverty. of capitalism no longer exists, and a love of labour has developed, there is no reason to suppose that, under such conditions, anyone would want to appropriate more than was necessary for a reasonable standard of life.
Once such conditions have been established internationally, the State as such—as a means of guaranteeing security to the people who have power against class enemies within the community or warlike enemies outside—will no longer be necessary. For, once the people are governing their own institutions from top to bottom, and there are no enemies of the people trying to destroy such a free self-governing community, there is no need to defend such a system by organized force, by the State. Under such conditions the whole apparatus of the State, with its armed forces, will, as Marx put it, “wither away.”
The Soviet State as it exists to-day is, therefore, by no means the final form which democracy will take when the power of property is once and for all abolished, not only in one great country, but throughout the world. So long as the Soviet State stands alone, and is continually threatened by Fascist States outside and agents of Fascism within—and the Soviet State cannot build such a Chinese Wall of isolation to prevent some of them getting in—it will continue to be a fighting organization of the people, it will be armed, and it will have to use every means of securing its own defence. As a democratic organization that may at any time have to fight for its existence, the Soviet State must be highly disciplined, like a trade union in a strike, and the majority will use every necessary means of enforcing such a discipline.
But as, in the rest of the world, the forces of democracy triumph over the concentrated power of the great owners of property, the danger to Soviet democracy will be reduced and the whole world will move nearer to a State in which real democracy will be freed from the danger of aggression. In such circumstances we may look towards a world democratic community, in which the people who work shall rule, and in which, because all shall do their share of work, all shall do their share of ruling.
In 1919 the workers of Hungary set up a Soviet State which survived for several months in the face of almost overwhelming opposition. But finally, as a result of armed intervention from outside, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was suppressed and Fascist terror took its place. The Republic had lasted for four months. The Hungarian democratic writer, Jaszi, summing up the results of the experience of the Soviet Republic, wrote these words:
“The most important effect of the proletarian dictatorship will certainly be found in the radical change of outlook produced among the proletarian masses. It had the character of a violent moral explosion in the Hungarian social order. It planted in the minds of the great mass of semi-brutalized slaves perhaps the first seeds of faith and hope of liberation. To this day there lives in the hearts of millions the sense of the rights of the workers and of their superiority to the drones and killers. Above all, the dictatorship shook out of their age-long apathy the unhappy helots of Hungarian society, the agricultural workers.
“No less important was the service of the Soviet Revolution to the idea of internationalism, made livid and real in the minds of the people by the memory of hard and bloody conflicts.
“Finally, through the spirit of the Soviet constitution, despite much childish naiveté and many violent outbursts, the Republic did pioneer work for the ideals of more advanced types of democracy and self-government. It did this by its exposure of the defective organization, the shortcomings and hypocrisies of the bourgeois democracies of to-day, and its proclamation for all time of the ideal of the State, in which only those who work and produce shall have the right to control and govern society” (Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Hungary, p. 151).
This epitaph was written of the Hungarian Soviet Republic by one who was a democrat but not a Communist. It was written of the Hungarian Soviet Republic that only lived for four months. How much greater, then, is the significance to democracy of the Soviet State that has lived for twenty years, and in which the democratic rights of the people are constantly being extended. Finally, what a prospect for the world as a whole opens up before us, when the people of every country, as a result of an organized struggle for democratic rights in countries where they are deprived of them to-day, and through the defence and extension of these rights where they are already to some extent enjoyed, have established in every country a society in which all citizens have equal rights as citizens, and economic and political power no longer to the slightest extent depend on the possession of property.
The way to such a society, the world commonwealth of the future, is indicated by the U.S.S.R. And in that society the State itself, and even the word democracy, will become historical terms with no longer any significance. “For,” as Lenin puts it, “when all have learned to manage, and independently are actually managing by themselves, social production, keeping accounts, controlling the idlers, the gentlefolk, the swindlers, and similar ‘guardians of capitalist traditions’ then the escape from this national accounting and control was inevitably become so increasingly difficult, and such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are men of practical life, not sentimental intellectuals, and they will scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that very soon the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of everyday social life in common will have become a habit.
“The door will then be open for the transition from the first phase of Communist society to its higher phase, and along with it to the complete withering away of the State. . . . The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it begins to be unnecessary. The more democratic the ‘State’ consisting of armed workers, which is ‘no longer a State in the proper sense of the word,’ the more rapidly does every State begin to wither away” (State and Revolution).
In these words Lenin outlines the future of Soviet democracy—a community of citizens, governing themselves in every branch of social activity, and using the necessary measures to preserve discipline in the common interest. Democracy and written Constitutions in such a society will probably be as unnecessary as is the ordinary family, and the citizens will run their community peacefully and in the common interest, creating all the necessary means of livelihood with their common labor, and having, ever greater resources available for the arts and sciences, for the complete mastery of nature in the interests of humanity.
“Will this new civilization,” write Sidney and Beatrice Webb, of the U.S.S.R. to-day, “with its abandonment of the incentive of profit-making, its extinction of unemployment, its planned production for community consumption, and the consequent liquidation of the landlord and the capitalist, spread to other countries? Our own reply is: ‘Yes, it will.’ But how, when, where, with what modifications, and whether through violent revolution or by peaceful penetration, or even by conscious imitation, are questions we cannot answer” (Soviet Communism, p. 1143).
But the answer to these final questions is not a difficult one. We have seen that the essential feature of the Soviet system is the abolition of the power of the landlord and capitalist, the owner of property, to rule the productive life of the country and thus to dominate the State. But this is but the extension of democracy so as to wipe out all privileges of the great property-owners as against the ordinary citizen, the small producer, the ordinary working man or woman. The united struggle of all the forces in the world interested in defending democratic liberties against encroachment, and in extending these liberties beyond the limits set by the great property-owners at the present time, is the only way in which democracy and democratic peace can be preserved in face of the growing danger of Fascism and Fascist aggression. The logical process of such a struggle, at a certain point, will necessitate the complete expropriation of the property-owners and the replacement of capitalism by Socialism, the only final guarantee that the anti-democratic forces of property can never again rear their heads. Whether or not, in Britain or France or Spain, such a struggle takes the actual form of the getting up of Soviets, it is in essence the same struggle as that which the Russian people successfully fought in 1917, defending and extending democracy.
“Peace, Bread, and Land” was the slogan of the Russian Revolution; and a really democratic Government was the only way by which these aims could be achieved. The Soviets were, in Russia, the democratic organ of the people. When, in November 1917, the whole of the democratic liberties of the Russian people were threatened with suppression, and with the imposition from above of a military dictatorship, the workers and peasants of Russia seized complete power through their own organizations, the Soviets. Democracy was triumphant, and the military dictators and their foreign allies were driven from the country, he seizure of power by the Russian Soviets was a landmark in the history of democracy, for it has proved for all time the practicability of the principle that only those who work and produce shall have the right to govern society. And it has shown that in a really democratic society it is possible to ensure that every citizen shall work and produce.
We began this book with a few remarks on the nature of democracy and dictatorship. At that stage we were interested in making clear one thing only—that democracy and dictatorship are not mutually, exclusive terms. Any democracy for one group of people may simultaneously be a dictatorship over another. The shareholders’ meeting of a joint-stock company is democratic for the shareholders, but it is a dictatorship over the employees of the firm, who usually vastly outnumber the shareholders. So, too, in the capitalist State, the democratic rights which exist are in practice available to the few owners of property to a great extent as compared with the majority of the people—the people who work. Thus, as in the Greek city-state, though to a lesser degree, we may say that even in Britain to-day the really effective part in the running of the country is played by a “charmed circle of the privileged,” while the rest of the community—the people who do the work—“have no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toil.”
Democracy and dictatorship are not mutually exclusive. They are not absolutes. Therefore, in facing the practical problems of the people of the world as a whole, or of any single country, it is essential in every concrete instance to consider the actual situation, not from the standpoint of law only, but of everyday practice, in order to know to what extent the people are governing themselves, and to what extent they are not. On this basis, every measure which curtails the power of the people must be fought by every means that they can command, and every method of increasing their democratic rights, of making democracy more effective, must be constantly utilized.
The defence of democracy against Fascism means the extension of existing democratic rights against those limitations imposed by the property relationships in existing society. And every extension of democratic rights for the people brings nearer the time when, faced as the Spanish people are to-day, with the alternatives of making democracy real or submitting to military dictatorship, the people will be in a position of such unity and organizational strength that they will be able to defend their democracy and make it ever more real, as the people succeeded in doing in Russia some twenty years ago.
the end