Which path to take torward socialism?
Paul Cockshott 1978
This is a brief summary published by Sosialismi of Paul Cockshott’s presentation on “Which path to take torward socialism?” that was given at the Socialistiskt Forum organized in Stockholm on 27 November 1978. Cockshott deals with the traditional conceptions of democracy on the Western left, and argues that the commonly held aims of western parliamentary republics are inadequate and don’t meet the needs of the working class but argues that on the other hand the soveta republican system is difficult to implement correctly.
Paul Cockshott
History of Socialist Democracy
“If one looks back different path towards a socialist system can be seen. The first and oldest one is that of the social-democrat parties like the German SPD. They tried to work inside a bourgeois parliamentary system and failed to keep their revolutionary edge. The SPD in their zealous quest for “moderation” and their commitment to small step reforms abandoned their revolutionary platform all together in favor of "taming" capitalism. Obviously this is a futile endeavor, but the SPD was far too unwilling to face this uncomfortable truth.
So far the only western style democratic socialist party who didn't fail in this regard were Salvador Allende's Socialist Party in Chile which was overthrown by a right wing military coup. Allende himself was assassinated and the Chilean democracy was replaced by a reactionary dictatorship under Pinochet. In all other cases a radical transformation during a violent revolution or a coup in the case of China were necceary to realize revolutionary goals.
We have of course one good example, one tremendous success of the three socialist nation in the Sovetunio, Germany and to a lesser degree China. However we now seem to reach a point were classic liberal parlamentary and presidental republics are to entreched to topply so easily. In hindsight the Great War may have been a unique not reproducible historic chance that we won't see in such a constellation again. Although recent developments in the Iranian Kingdom may give us a template for a modern revolution. So far despite support to several anti-imperialist revolutionary groups however they still seem oddly resistant to progress. If the imperial powers are can keep on their path to true modernization however the remaining countries of the world may be ossified in a capitalist modus of production in the foresable future. Many years of either naval or star gazing by many Interkom members certainy didn't help our search for solutions.
So far all historic attempts to export the political system into a socialist, sovetoj-republican system outside of the intial Domino (1) states have failed.
We should therefore look at other alternative, less painful ways to achieve our goals. The first thing we have to do in order to find a better alternative is to see what went wrong with the existing transition model. The idea how a socialist democracy and the nature of its leadership might look like was first outlined by Marx in the
Communist manifesto. “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.”
When one reads this passage now, it seems slightly strange in particular the phrase, “the communists don’t set up a separate party”. At first this appears quite contrary to what happened in the 20th century when the real socialist definitely set up separate parties.
I explained that essentially the differences between those who call themselves socialist/communist and those who call themselves social-democrats are a new historical phenomena of the mid-20th century, and that one should take a long historical view of the development of socialist thought which doesn’t stick to the clear boundaries that became relevant at our time. Today socialist or communist define themselves by their “radical” agenda as well as their membership in the Interkom. Indeed some modern socialist avant-garde parties named and renamed themselves “communist party” to distinguish themselves from the social democratic movement.
However the spirit in which the
Communist Manifesto was written was one were the “Left” was still united, at least in their final goals. Now, it’s often said, that the idea of the avant-garde, an avant-garde party came into the socialist movement with Vladmimir Lenin the founder of the Bolshevik, but it’s clearly not the case, because if you read this section of the
Communist Manifesto, it’s quite clear that the idea of socialist forming an avant-garde was already there in 1848. That is definitely a statement of the avant-garde principle. “The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”
If one looks at what was set as the immediate goals of communism, the first is actually the constitution of the working class as a class, the constitution of the proletariat as a class. Now, that is the idea that the proletariat didn’t exist as a class, except through political action. What existed was a large number of people in the same economic and social circumstance, but only becomes the class to the extent that it engages in politics, that it engages in politics with a common interest. A phenomenon that Marx dubbed the "class in itself", which is defined as a category of people having a common relation to the means of production, and a "class for itself" which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests.
In the manifesto Marx is talking about the constitution of the proletariat as a class and thus as a political party, and a political party in the sense of a section of the body politic that contends for power. The first step of the revolution of the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class and to win the battle for democracy. “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. [...]
“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”
The question is what he meant by, “winning the battle for democracy”, and I think there has been a false modern reinterpretation. The language in which Marx and Engels wrote is steeped in classical terminology. One can not understand the way Marx wrote except by realizing that he was a classical scholar. He knew his ancient Greek and Roman sources. The term proletariat is a Latin term, the term democracy is a Greek term, and the meaning that the word democracy has now, in common bourgeois usage, is quite different from the meaning that the word democracy had more than a century ago.
The general view of what democracy meant was that it was mob rule. If one looks at the sources on which this is based, if one looks at the Greek sources, what does Aristotle define democracy as? Democracy is not rule of the majority. Democracy is rule of the poor. Aristotle says it is just a coincidence in one sense that because the poor are everywhere numerous and the rich are few, democracy is also rule of the majority. But the essence of democracy is that it is rule by the poor. And in the original sense of democracy, the sense that the ancient Greeks used, the sense that Marx was familiar with.
The shift of terminology can be seen in the development of the communist parties to the first social-democratic parties. Once again one might look at Germany and their socialist movement for answers. In their Erfurt program of 1891 they define democracy as: “Direct legislation through the people, by means of the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in realm, state, province and parish. Election of magistrates by the people, with responsibility to the people. Annual voting of taxes. (…) Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Decision by the popular representatives on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.”
The key demands in the Erfurt program was, “direct legislation through the people by means of proposal and rejection”. In other words they were not talking about a parliamentary republic, they were talking about a state where the people directly rule themselves by means of all laws being put to the people, being proposed by the people, not by politicians, and being passed by the people in a general vote.
So the idea of democracy that early social-democracy had is still that of ancient Greek democracy, of direct rule by the people, not rule by parliament. The only point where they were saying that parliament and election have a role is elections of magistrates and the settlement of questions of peace and war – emergency questions like that might have to be settled by an elected assembly. Taxes and laws were to be settled by the people as a whole. There are some points where this is less radical than ancient Greek democracy. Ancient Greek democracy restricted election to the election of military officers, and there’s no demand here for the election of military officers.
If we move to Russian social-democracy, we see already a watering-down of the radical ideas in the Erfurt program, although Lenin and Bogdanov presented themselves as a very orthodox follower of the Erfurt program. “The sovereignty of the people, i.e., the concentration of supreme state power entirely in the hands of a legislative assembly, consisting of the representatives of the people and constituting a single chamber."
“Universal, equal, and direct suffrage for all citizens, men and women, who have reached the age of twenty, in the elections to the legislative assembly and to the various bodies of local self-government; secret ballot; the right of every voter to be elected to any representative institution; annual parliaments; salaries to be paid to the people’s representatives.”
The program that the Russian social-democrats RSDLP adopted is essentially a demand for the type of constitutional structure that became general in Europe after the Depression War, of republics with an elected parliament being sovereign. Having a single legislative chamber is a slightly more radical demand, not all places have a single legislative chamber, but it is basically a model of electoral democracy.
Now, that is not the original model of the Erfurt program. In terms Marx understood democracy and in which Aristotle understood democracy it is very questionable whether you could say what the Russian social-democrats were demanding in 1905 was a democratic system. If we look at Sovetoj or people’s councils, these are bodies which certainly at the base level, at the local level, contain mass participation in a way that you don’t get in electoral democracy of the sort that exists in a country like Sweden or Britain. It is certainly arguable that the level of political participation by the general public in a country like the Sovetunio in terms of the number of people who participated in political bodies was higher that in the West but it is still in essence a representative, parliamentary system.
We have to ask: When do sovetoj arise?
Historically they were established when a ruling right wing regime (foreign Vietnam or domestic Russia) were overthrown and the the bourgeois liberal elite was to weak or discredited to co-opt the revolutionary sentiment. Today's picture of the socialist party as the workers’ general staff can be understood in terms of the mindset which was brought on by the Great War. They were in the midst of a titanic conflict, nearly every country in the world was involved – all of Europe, South America, China, Japan, the United States, they all were war. And in that the economies are devoted to the task of destruction and overcoming one another, and they were led by general staffs. Now what that war taught was what has now become a military truism, that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. The Schlieffen plan to envelop Paris was all very well on paper, but in the chaos and turbulence of the real war soon proved to be failed. And a political party that goes into a revolutionary situation with a fixed program like the Schlieffen plan is bound to fail.
It was only because the Bolsheviks were able to come up with concrete answers, economic answers to the problems people faced and understood what the imperial general staffs of Europe took four years to learn: to win in a war you have to encourage initiative and flexibility in a changing situation. They adapted to the changing situation, adapted very rapidly, and adapted more rapidly than any of the other political parties unclear in Russia and ended up the dominant party. Unfortunately this meant some essential ideas developed by Bogdanov and elaborated by other socialist thinker such as Antonio Gramsci about peaceful cultural transformation were relegated to the Ivory Towers of Theoretical Academics.
The Success and Flaw of the soveta model:
There are several levels of elections in the soveta republican system before you get to the government. And this system of indirect election does give an enormous advantage to a well-organized political parties like the Bolshevik, the Socialist Party. Suppose the Bolsheviks made up one in a fifty or one in a hundred of the Russian population. They’re much more likely to put themselves forward as volunteers at this local level. They’re much more likely to get elected at this level. Once they’re in this level, the other Bolsheviks are much more likely to nominate them as the person to go forward. You get what in maths is considered an exponential process, a multiplicative process of probability. So the probability of an ordinary person who is not a member of any political party ever ending up in the council of political commissars runs down to practically zero, whereas the probability of that being dominated by one political party approaches one. Just the maths of it means that it is almost inevitable that one political party was to be completely dominant in the council of people’s commissars.
It’s a matter of chance whether that was going to be the Bolshevik party or the Socialist Revolutionaries, it could have gone either way; as it happened, it was the Bolshevik party. If it had become the Socialist revolutionaries, we would have never heard of Bogdanov, he would have disappeared from history. As it is, it was the Bolsheviks that won. The revolution started off as a Czarist monarchy. In the very early stages of the Russian revolution there was a soveta democracy of the type they are talking about in the RSDLP program. Extremely rapidly, certainly by 1918, it became a Bolshevik aristocracy in the sense of the original Greek use of the word aristocracy. The original Greek root for the word aristocracy meant rule by the best, rule by the wisest and the most conscious. That is essentially what the Bolshevik party took themselves to be, the wisest and the most conscious representatives of the working class. It became a Bolshevik aristocracy and all other parties were banned form elections.
Now we are in a crucial phase. This aristocratic system allowed individuals who are significantly more progressive than the population to enact their revolutionary policy. This can enable the transformation we saw in the Sovetunio or are still seeing in the rural parts of China. After this initial phase the USS managed a gradual democratization of the society. However this was only possible as long as the new aristocrats have a primus inter pares (first among equals) who has the last word but yet respects his fellow revolutionary's opinion. Such was the case with the outstanding personality of Bogdanov.
But as we have seen with some "successfull" socialist leaders they can quickly turn into unpleasent warlords as was the case for the hungarian leader Bela Kun who had to be forecfully removed from office by Interkom intervention. Wihout the intervention of the International Red Army in such cases society degenerates into a revolutionary monarchies, where essentially power is held by one person alone who doesn't allow criticism or the formation of a legitimate opposition. However this can't be done anymore in a world of total nuclear poliferation (1). Thus we need to find a path towards socialism that allows stable, functional states to ascend to a post-exploitative society.
The Failure of Social Democracy:
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New Socialism and the Athenian Democracy
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Notes and Sources
(1) Domino states are those states that were directly inspired, military supported by the Russian Revolutionary in the wake of the Great War. This means, Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Chechozslowakia. China however is seen as a bit of an odd latecomer as can be seen in the text as well.
(2) Since atomic power was discovered in the 1920 by a Beglium state that is/was very interested in exporting their technology/uranium things got out of hand pretty quickly in this timeline. With good and bad consequences.
The text is based on a real interview which can be found here:
http://sosialismi.net/blog/2011/02/07/ideas-of-leadership-and-democracy/