AHC All power to the Soviets for real

Soviets were in principle councils of workers peasants and soldiers. They were supposed to send delegates easily recallable to upper levels.

In otl they simply became the instrument of the ruling faction of the Bolshevik party but what if that did not happen.

My guess is that the resulting regime would still be scary to the West.

I think that there would certainly be expropriations and maybe murders of former landlords and capitalists.

Could it happen?

How long would such a regeme last
 

GI Jim

Banned
It would never have worked. It has failed in multiple nations since because someone eventually always centralizes power; a new ruling class simply replaces the old.

So in essence I don't think the regime would have lasted 5 minutes.
 
Without the Bolshevik Coup, Sole soviet power is difficult to imagine; instead, you'd still have parallel Systems with Soviets and a Constitutional assembly. Without Bolshevik takeover (though how would you prevent it?), the parallel system is likely to be transformed into one where the Soviets have a subordinate role (like German Betriebsräte or like cameralist bodies). "All power to the soviets" was not a Slogan of the revolutionary soviet members initially. To make it so and avoid Party rule instead, you'd need several parties advocating the system wholeheartedly beforehand, and remain focused on it throughout the revolution (that would concern both the Mensheviks and the social Revolutionaries of OTL at least, but it would be good to have a Christian socialist and an Anarchist Party standing for the soviet system from before and throughout the revolution too.
 
Soviets were in principle councils of workers peasants and soldiers. They were supposed to send delegates easily recallable to upper levels.

In otl they simply became the instrument of the ruling faction of the Bolshevik party but what if that did not happen.

My guess is that the resulting regime would still be scary to the West.

I think that there would certainly be expropriations and maybe murders of former landlords and capitalists.

Could it happen?

How long would such a regeme last
Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms. If the government/revolutionary movement has enough power to expropriate property and murder "capitalists" without a trial (or a least not prosecute anyone who does), why would the neo-Jacobinist revolutionary leaders magically accept the constraints on the power that would be expected in a liberal democracy?
It's pretty unrealistic to expect a government that emerges through a bloody revolution and civil war to turn around and setup a working parliament with a reasonable degree of human rights.
 
Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms. If the government/revolutionary movement has enough power to expropriate property and murder "capitalists" without a trial (or a least not prosecute anyone who does), why would the neo-Jacobinist revolutionary leaders magically accept the constraints on the power that would be expected in a liberal democracy?
It's pretty unrealistic to expect a government that emerges through a bloody revolution and civil war to turn around and setup a working parliament with a reasonable degree of human rights.
Isn’t that what happened after the American Revolution?
 
Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms. If the government/revolutionary movement has enough power to expropriate property and murder "capitalists" without a trial (or a least not prosecute anyone who does), why would the neo-Jacobinist revolutionary leaders magically accept the constraints on the power that would be expected in a liberal democracy?
It's pretty unrealistic to expect a government that emerges through a bloody revolution and civil war to turn around and setup a working parliament with a reasonable degree of human rights.
The United States did it. Why couldn't the Russians?
 
Democratic Socialism is a contradiction in terms.
This is just you citing a dogma that I suppose you believe in. Many other people can easily conceive a democratic socialism. Indeed if one says one is a socialist not in the sense of demanding that society must immediately conform to all the goals one has as a socialist, right now, but is prepared to compromise for now with existing anti-socialist institutions in the patient faith that over time, in a democracy anyway, the socialist view will prevail as the best, then there are legions of democratic socialists at this very moment. Your claim they cannot exist is not going to be very impressive to them, not to me for instance.

Now then in your argument do you connect this sweeping claim with the question at hand here in this thread, or adduce hard evidence to justify your sweeping claim?
If the government/revolutionary movement has enough power to expropriate property and murder "capitalists" without a trial (or a least not prosecute anyone who does), why would the neo-Jacobinist revolutionary leaders magically accept the constraints on the power that would be expected in a liberal democracy?
It's pretty unrealistic to expect a government that emerges through a bloody revolution and civil war to turn around and setup a working parliament with a reasonable degree of human rights.

So then, would you say the American Revolutionary War was bloodless and had no elements of a civil war? How about the war we call the Civil War, which seems to have been absolutely necessary to establish such principles as race being irrelevant to political rights, and laid the groundwork for most of what we take for granted as Federal guarantees of our human rights today? Note that prior to the Reconstruction Amendments the Bill of Rights itself was deemed to apply solely to restricting the Federal government, leaving adherence to or abrogation of its principles up to the political consciences of the various states. It is only such things as the expansion of the principle of "equal protection under the law" that underlies a lot of the civil rights we take for granted today--and there are people who argue the Federal government has overstepped its bounds and these alleged grounds and even alleged rights should not be honored, or anyway not enforced at a Federal level on all states.

Your use of the word "Jacobin" is quite interesting. Actually, in their radicalism, the Jacobins were the liberals of their day, in an age when a decidedly pre-liberal sentiment ruled their foes. Do you not realize that liberal parliaments, and legislatures in general since we Yanks don't have parliaments, are in fact generally precisely the outcome of some bloody revolution and civil war? That it is quite doubtful the British Parliament as we know it would exist without Cromwell's Commonwealth? Do the French of today doubt that they owe their freedom and their democracy to the risings of 1789 and the subsequent turmoils of the First Republic? (I have reason to think some do; I remember reading an essay in Time or Newsweek back in the appropriate week of Bastille Day, 1989, the 200th anniversary of that event, by some French person purporting to believe the Revolution was some kind of mistake. Indeed we live in an age when anti-democratic reaction is on the rise, which I attribute such views to. To any democrat, and especially a liberal one, the events of the 1790s may hold horrors but they were also clearly the birth of a new France, and a new Europe, and only in this revolutionary Europe does the concept of the Rights of Man hold any sense. The "ultramontane" reactionary faction of Roman Catholic leadership ranted against it for a full century and more, only coming round to accepting the new liberal order in the papacy of John XXIII.

So your conflation of liberal democracy and human rights with abstention from bloody revolution and avoidance of civil war seems incredibly quaint and complacently ignorant of the processes of history. We would not be here talking about human rights without revolution, and indeed every advance of the concept of human rights--and I have seen a lot of progress in my lifetime--comes from people challenging the established order, not meekly complying with it. It may be indeed that when we have a liberal democracy that revolutionary violence is never then in order; take it up with Abraham Lincoln. I think he and I would agree that perhaps my reference to him is moot since he was opposing illiberal anti-democracy.

But your grasp of historic fact seems to have other gaps in it too. Who do you think instituted the soviets the OP is talking about, and when? It was not the Bolsheviks who invented them!

Nope, the first soviets in the sense we are talking about--for it is just a word that means "council" in Russian and various types of "soviets" had existed over centuries of Tsarist rule--were invented by working people in the 1905 uprisings in the wake of the defeat of Tsarist forces by the Japanese, including such incidents as the revolt of the crew of the battleship Potemkin celebrated in the famous Soviet movie. This was 1905, not 1917, and I believe the Bolshevik faction had not even formed in the Russian Social Democratic party yet, or if it had it was quite new. The Bolsheviks had few agents on the ground, the Tsarist police having arrested and exiled or imprisoned most of them. By 1917 there were a lot more because Bolsheviks, being largely recruited from industrial workers, were often sent into artillery units in the Great War and as the defeat of the Russian forces became more and more manifest, they propagandized and recruited large numbers of their fellow soldiers, first in the artillery units and then more broadly. But in Petrograd, they had a limited footprint.

Indeed the Bolsheviks celebrated and admired the formation of soviets again in the wake of the February Revolution. But note the eight month gap between the successive Revolutions of 1917 in Russia. For that long period, the various soviets of Petrograd, Moscow, and other more or less industrialized cities of Russia were very much in the democratic hands of diverse working class Russians. One reason the Bolsheviks admired the soviets was precisely the fact that they did not create them, that the Russian people had invented them spontaneously. I think that spontaneity definitely had something to do with the influence of a generation of would-be revolutionaries propagandizing the masses, but the point is that these were not imposed by some clique of fanatics at the point of a gun; in the context of the common Russian workers' political understanding, forming these councils was the obvious thing to be done. They derived no power from any authority above them; they were the direct and grassroots expression of the democratic spirit of the Russian urban masses.

Another thing they were and did probably relates more cogently to your deploring revolutionary violence--I don't know about your heritage because who can tell what background a person here has except their own say so, but as an American such head shaking seems to denounce my heritage, since my nation was founded precisely on revolutionary violence that included expropriations; I am not sure how many "Tories" were actually killed by American revolutionary Patriot "mobs" but I do know many fled for their lives to avoid being so killed. It is a thing that happens in revolutions.

But I am pretty sure the soviets did not immediately start raiding the homes of their employers and ransacking them. What they did that might, perhaps, seem criminally offensive to some, is organize their councils in their workplaces. This is where most industrial working class people spend most of their waking hours, under the direction of their capitalist bosses. It was their center of power therefore and they took over their shop floors, presuming to claim authority over its operations as well as their share of civil government.

In the context of 1917 Petrograd and other major Russian industrial centers, it was indeed unlikely a suitably liberal regime to your sensibilities would be enacted by will of the people. Not only the common people but the Tsarist-regime-serving intelligentsia (such as what most Mensheviks were, such as what the lawyer Kerensky, who litigated on behalf of the Social Revolutionaries, non-Marxist agrarian radicals, was) were radicalized in some degree; very few people thought a conservative form of liberalism as you might approve was on the agenda in Russia. The ones who rejected revolutionary radicalism of some kind were frank authoritarians and monarchists, there were no liberals of the type you might like, unless you openly would like a limited franchise of the well propertied only, which had some support--among the numbers of well propertied, by some strange coincidence. But even many of them, like the Mensheviks, who were parlor Marxists, or people like Kerensky, felt the wave of the future in Russia was going to be more radical than anything known to the governments of western Europe in the Belle Epoque. It was a question of which radicals, and how radical.

So, the Soviets were the Russian street and shop floor. They were the vast majority of the people in these cities. They organized councils, based in their workplaces, which would presume to control both the workplace and the region of the city around them, and would cooperate with other neighboring councils, and formed a City Soviet, which was composed of delegates sent by the various factory soviets. I do not believe, in the eight months between the February Revolution which swept away Tsarist police power (indeed according to some accounts, the police who did not escape were dead men, despised by all--the public slang for them was "Pharaoh" in reference to the whip-wielding oppressors as Exodus portrayed the hostile new dynasty against the Hebrews). It was militia of the soviets who policed the streets maintaining order, and decisions were, as I understand it, not permitted to happen by spontaneous mob rule but only on order of soviets after due deliberation. The army remained organized, indeed Russia was still at war with Germany (and still losing) but the soldiers would take orders from the self-proclaimed "Provisional Government" only if countersigned by the city Soviet. The soldiers thus clearly accepted the Soviet and not the PG as the basis of what authority the Russian government had. The soviet system, in this inter-revolutionary sense of a federation of local grassroots democratic worker's councils, was that government. It was decisions by the Soviet that determined what Russians would do in the name of their state, except for an elite clique that looked to the PG for direction. But the Provisional Government had no particular basis of authority beyond the general sense of the better off classes in Russia that they needed someone to protect them from the mob, and the fact that their European allies in the Great War were impressed with their appearance of regular legitimacy. But the Russian people had denounced and effectively put the Tsar under house arrest, denying their ongoing allegiance to him. The PG debated and considered trying to instal a new Tsar, discussing several candidates, but the people of the street would have none. Whatever Russia was to become, if the people had their say it would not be a monarchy again, not even a constitutional one.

I believe in the eight months of what Marxist historians such as Trotsky called "Dual Power," the city Soviet guaranteed the kind of order that protected the propertied from gross outrages, and the question of ownership of their assets and their effective control of them remained up in the air. It was only after the Bolsheviks organized a violent coup that took down the last bastions of anti-soviet power and also straightjacketed the soviets into complicity with the Bolshevik line--which did enjoy popular majority support in most soviets by this time, in Petrograd anyway--that the sorts of things the OP thought might happen and that you denounce started happening, under Bolshevik Party direction.

Now was some sort of dictatorial revolutionary takeover inevitable, and if there was an alternative, was it anything but the restoration of authoritarian reaction as had prevailed in Russia before the Tsar did so much to start the Great War that ultimately destroyed him?

I think we'd need a POD well before 1917, establishing the authority of more moderate revolutionaries than the Bolsheviks in the cities, which means someone appealing to the industrial workers in a way that satisfied them.

If we stipulate not the crushing of all popular democracy but a balance of power between the radical factions, I think the soviet system could have simply brushed aside the PG and been established as the republican form of Russian government. It would not be parliamentary or formally follow the American model either. But so what? Why is democracy as such limited to these specific forms? Instead of people voting every two or four or five years for some of their leaders, continual grassroots town meeting style face to face direct democracy would hold and implement power directly on the local level, and above the heads of these councils, they would appoint councils coordinating the local ones composed of delegates sent by the various grassroots ones, and then as many levels as needed would be created to span the entire nation. It would be democratic republicanism in the sense that the local councils would be the center of power, and these would be directly democratic, but protocols of federal cooperation would form via the higher councils, which would have a membership ultimately drawn from the grassroots soviets.

With some important differences to be sure, I think it most resembles the Swiss system. Would you deny Switzerland is possible? There it sits in the Alps. And do you think its history was free of revolutionary violence? Read up on it and get back to us, you might be surprised!
 
@Shevek23,
nicely put. I couldn't agree more.

Ultimately, it was the autocratic iron fsted rule of the Tsarist government pre-1917 who created their own downfall, by censoring and thus preventing broader discussions among the Russian left (they took place elsewhere in Europe, which isn't a good condition for remaining grassroots) and by imprisoning and mistreating its leaders, some of whom were bent on revenge in a way that few of their counterparts in other countries were. It speaks loudly that a centre-left party such as the Social Revolutionaries had seen, for many years, no other viable political means than terrorist attacks to pursue their agenda.
 
One problem is that the workplace soviets weren't the centre of Soviet power. The geographic soviets stuffed with time wasting bourgeois and intelligentsia in their parties were. Add to this that the Bolsheviks captured the old state apparatus intact, and hegemonised the geographic soviets and factory soviets.

It is pushing shit up hill to get a plurality of positions in the workplaces surviving the civil war (Simon Pirani).

On top of that you've got a new proletarian democracy forming, it will make mistakes in governance. It is unlikely to foster a "loyal opposition" concept. Recall and delegation were still born.
 
Do you want to see a real "power of the soviets"? Russia had it in 1917--before October!

***

"In order to give you a sense of the situation in 1917, I am going to read you some excerpts from a book by an American woman Rheta Childe Dorr, correspondent, fighter for women’s rights, a self-proclaimed socialist, although, as we shall see, a peculiar one. The name of the book is Inside the Russian Revolution. In the following passage, she describes her first impression in Russia (10):

"About the first thing I saw on the morning of my arrival in Petrograd … was a group of young men, about twenty in number, I should think, marching through the street in front of my hotel, carrying a scarlet banner with an inscription in large white letters.

"'What does that banner say?' I asked the hotel commissionaire who stood beside me.

"'It says ‘All the Power to the Soviet’,' was the answer.

"'What is the soviet?' I asked, and he replied briefly:

"'It is the only government we have in Russia now.'[2]

"Judging from this passage, when did Dorr arrive in Russia? Most of us would naturally assume it was after the Bolshevik revolution in October, when the soviets overthrow the Provisional Government. But in actuality, Dorr arrived in late May 1917 and stayed in Russia only until the end of August. Her book consists of newspaper columns written in the fall; it was sent to press before the October revolution. Her outlook thus gives us an invaluable look at what was happening in 1917, free of hindsight.

"Dorr’s account brings home an essential fact: 'The soviets, or councils of soldiers’ and workmen’s delegates, which have spread like wildfire throughout the country, are the nearest thing to a government that Russia has known since the very early days of the revolution … Petrograd is not the only city where the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates has assumed control of the destinies of the Russian people. Every town has its council, and there is no question, civil or military, which they do not feel capable of settling' (10, 19). Dorr herself was intensely hostile to what she felt was the tyrannical rule of the mob, partly because of her devotion to the war against Germany. She regarded soviet rule as no better and in some ways worse than the tsars. Take censorship of the press:

"'Even if [the average American traveler] could read all the daily papers, however, he would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid and as tyrannical today as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a different kind of news is suppressed (5).'

"In order to give her American readers an idea of 'the committee mania' that had taken over Russia, she used this analogy:

"'Try to imagine how it would be in Washington, in the office of the secretary of the treasury, let us say, if a committee of the American Federation of Labor should walk in and say: 'We have come to control you. Produce your books and all your confidential papers.' This is what happens to cabinet ministers in Russia, and will continue until they succeed in forming a government responsible only to the electorate, and not a slave to the Council of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Delegates (47-8).'...

"As Dorr truly observes, soviet power was established in February 1917, and not in October..."

https://johnriddell.wordpress.com/2...he-soviets-biography-of-a-slogan-by-lars-lih/

As for what ultimately happened, Lih notes, "A formulation proposed by the Menshevik leader Iulii Martov in 1919 gives a good encapsulation of this outcome. He pointed to the verbal shift from the formula “the power of the soviets” (vlast’ sovetov) to the formula “soviet power” (sovetskaia vlast’). The first version, he stated, meant that the actual, democratic soviets had real sovereignty; the second version pointed to a vlast that was based on the Bolshevik party, with only a historical or sentimental connection to original, independent soviets.[8]"

(Lih does note that the "actual, democratic soviets" were in fact "highly undemocratic in very many ways", as Dorr had also observed.)
 
Even though I disagree with a lot of your ideas, I've gotta say that I appreciate a civil, good-faith discussion. I'm an a American as well, so I'm used to seeing political discussions degenerate into purely partisan sloganeering about our idiot president.
This is just you citing a dogma that I suppose you believe in. Many other people can easily conceive a democratic socialism. Indeed if one says one is a socialist not in the sense of demanding that society must immediately conform to all the goals one has as a socialist, right now, but is prepared to compromise for now with existing anti-socialist institutions in the patient faith that over time, in a democracy anyway, the socialist view will prevail as the best, then there are legions of democratic socialists at this very moment. Your claim they cannot exist is not going to be very impressive to them, not to me for instance.
I'm aware that democratic socialism exists, I'm just skeptical that a combination of a non-market economy and democracy is a viable system or sustainable equilibrium in the long-term.

Now then in your argument do you connect this sweeping claim with the question at hand here in this thread, or adduce hard evidence to justify your sweeping claim?

Your use of the word "Jacobin" is quite interesting. Actually, in their radicalism, the Jacobins were the liberals of their day, in an age when a decidedly pre-liberal sentiment ruled their foes. Do you not realize that liberal parliaments, and legislatures in general since we Yanks don't have parliaments, are in fact generally precisely the outcome of some bloody revolution and civil war?
When I used the word Jacobin, I was referring to the reign of terror under Robespierre during the revolution. I have very low expectations of violent revolution, given the past few centuries of history. Generally violent revolutions seem to be followed intense paranoia that creates purges or a bloody reign of terror, followed by an autocratic leader with near absolute power. The French, Russian, and Cuban revolutions all followed this general pattern.
In recent history, nonviolent resistance has tended to more successful than violence. Foreign policy published an article about a few years ago:
"The truth is that, from 1900 to 2006, major nonviolent resistance campaigns seeking to overthrow dictatorships, throw out foreign occupations, or achieve self-determination were more than twice as successful as violent insurgencies seeking the same goals. The recent past alone suggests as much; even before the Arab Spring, nonviolent campaigns in Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal (2006) succeeded in ousting regimes from power."
However, the question of revolution vs. reformism is a different question from socialism vs capitalism. There have been more cool-headed, reformist socialists like the Fabians who founded the British Labour party. Substantive change is certainly possible in a nonviolent way. While its true that the US went through a civil war to end of slavery decades of work by abolitionist activists in Britain managed to end slavery through an act of parliament.

If we stipulate not the crushing of all popular democracy but a balance of power between the radical factions, I think the soviet system could have simply brushed aside the PG and been established as the republican form of Russian government. It would not be parliamentary or formally follow the American model either. But so what? Why is democracy as such limited to these specific forms? Instead of people voting every two or four or five years for some of their leaders, continual grassroots town meeting style face to face direct democracy would hold and implement power directly on the local level, and above the heads of these councils, they would appoint councils coordinating the local ones composed of delegates sent by the various grassroots ones, and then as many levels as needed would be created to span the entire nation. It would be democratic republicanism in the sense that the local councils would be the center of power, and these would be directly democratic, but protocols of federal cooperation would form via the higher councils, which would have a membership ultimately drawn from the grassroots soviets.

With some important differences to be sure, I think it most resembles the Swiss system. Would you deny Switzerland is possible? There it sits in the Alps. And do you think its history was free of revolutionary violence?
There's nothing inherently wrong with political decentralization, its worked reasonably well in Switzerland's context. However, it seems a bit apples and oranges to conflate Switzerland's political system and capitalist economy with the economic system described above. Would local soviets be in charge of planning their entire city or regions economy? Co-ops already exist, but they're still subject to price signals in a market economy.
Voter turnout in US elections is normally around 60% in US presidential elections, and around 40% for a typical midterm election. If so many Americans can barely be bothered to vote every few years, I don't think they'd be willing to spend hours in town meetings about steel production quotas or research corporate strategy. A direct democracy would require a vast time commitment to learning about civics and economics. I respect your commitment to democracy and human rights, but I don't see how replacing Gosplan bureaucrats with democratically elected administrators solves the problems that a planned economy creates. A democratic socialist system sounds much more humane than a Marxist-Leninist dumpster fire like Romania under Ceausescu, but I don't think its a superior alternative to a capitalist economy.

Read up on it and get back to us, you might be surprised!
I've heard the democratic socialist case, but I don't think its very convincing. I've listened to a civil discussion (youtube link) between a DSA member and a neoliberal, but the socialist's economic points raised more questions than answers (20:07 and 28:00).
 
i am someone who hopes capitalism can be transcended in favor of a democratic communism. But I am pretty patient about when and vague as to how.

Pragmatically speaking I'd distinguish "social democracy" from "socialism" by the former being a political stance in which a pragmatic bunch of populist democrats seek to rein in or counter specific dysfunctions caused by capitalism while the beast remains in operation on the whole.

I am not so dogmatic as to suppose that this might not be sustainable for all time, with a strong and persistent populist majority political regime accepting that leaving the capitalist market mechanisms considerable play if watched and corrected, still basically free to operate and allowing large if watched and checked great fortunes to accumulate, might be the long term destiny of humanity. Given the political will to persist in watching the basket all our eggs are in, with diligence both in arresting trends that are dangerous and in restraint from pushing too far, maybe this is best.

I certainly will not concede that leaving capitalism unchecked and unregulated is good for human interest in general, and add it is even bad for capitalism.

The way to have strong and growing markets that do not stagnate is to have the public democratically insisting it benefits them too; the unregulated tendency is for bastions of great fortunes to build up and its capitalists to regulate and control the machine for their maximal profit, which undercuts the elements of capitalism that makes it responsive to the general good.

So any arguments against the ability of the general public to effectively organize and sustain serious regulation and oversight of capitalism are a formula for a crapsack world of gross plutocracy. These arguments, if proven to be founded in inexorable inability of democratic publics to prevail politically because people are by nature too flighty and easily distracted, are a prophecy of doom for humanity IMHO. If social democracy is indeed a contradiction in terms, barbarism wins. If it is true, it is true and we are screwed but you can see why I don't cheer for that team. I have some hope it can be otherwise, in some sense or other.

Meanwhile the thread is about the soviets. The soviets had as I acknowledged a socialistic component by nature, but it would be possible I think for this to be restricted in practice to social democracy. Instead of asserting total ownership of the productive assets of their shop floors, workplace soviets might correspond more to the role of a labor union, acknowledging ultimate ownership to the capitalist owner, and allowing for capitalist enterprise that yields profits to the owner, but asserting worker rights within that workplace and a voice in management--if not a controlling voice, one that must be acknowledged and recorded and has consequences for the owners.

The soviets then have two dimensions, only one of which is about the capitalism-communism argument, which conceivably could be compromised.

This leaves us with a political dimension to consider. Can a nation in fact be run on a democratic-republican federal model built on a foundation of powerful local direct democratic councils at the base, which form a superstructure of federal cross links that coordinate and mediate between the base units but ultimately must facilitate the democratic consensus of these units, rather than seek generally to override and bypass them in favor of a more central and distant republicanism or dictatorship?

It might help, conceptually, to abstract away from Russia 1917 a bit and consider analogies. Suppose that revolutionary New England, seceding from British rule, were to be dominated by a grassroots democratic movement, the "Many Headed Hydra" of "the mob" gaining political supremacy over the already evolved and pretty strong but minority factions of centralized wealth?

One possible path is that some of these wealthy figures, people like John Hancock, cosmopolitans like Ben Franklin (not a New Englander to be sure) recognize the powerful claims of mass democracy and acknowledge their fortunes are built on a foundation of serviceability to the democratic majority, and thus securing, coopting to a degree if you will, the political support of the majority for acceptance of great fortunes provided these individuals are seen as providing a general public good with a fair amount of the power their wealth brings them.

A political culture of mutualism would not be alien to the spirit of New England town meeting democratic republicanism; privilege was seen as being linked to virtue and to obligations to the community. Concretely in New England the tradition was that effective political power was largely local, and based on the consensus of general meetings of all the population. With a bit of prudence and common law setting certain limits on the otherwise unchecked power of the town meeting, with the meeting including all sectors face to face with each other, might we not see a similar sort of cellular structure, the democratic grass roots bodies reserving ultimate sovereignty to themselves but customarily from time to time specific meetings will bow to larger federal consensus against their immediate will and interest in service of the larger community, membership in which is seen as bringing benefits outweighing the inconvenience of complying with resolutions that are locally unpopular?

Surely we'd expect political memory to keep track and object to systematic overriding of some local interests in favor of others, and demands for balance and fair trades of inconvenient obligations.

If we could imagine New England working as a federated power to be reckoned with on such a basis, perhaps it is not such a stretch to imagine a balance of power between various radical interests in the Russian soviets, arriving at a consensus on a collective program with local variations within watched limits permitted, and such a loose cellular democracy coordinating oversight over basically capitalist development with the capitalists closely watched and subject to republican regulation, but largely free to seek fortunes and also enjoy a certain degree of subsidy and guidance that results in a Russia competitive enough to defend itself, and the peace is kept on the basis of grassroots engagement in governmental power.

There are Marxist critiques against it to be sure, even switching over to a more aggressive socialism with openly stated communist goals prevailing instead!

I believe Rosa Luxemburg for instance argued against Social Democrats in Germany putting their weight behind localism and cultural separatism and devolution of power to more regional bodies, largely on the grounds that actually grassroots working people are more aware of politics at the highest level, and the widespread maxim in at least some liberal societies such as the USA that government is always best at the most local level is quite mistaken.

Everyone in the USA knows who the President is and has some idea what he stands for; somewhat fewer know who their Senators, Congressmembers and Governors are. Still fewer pay attention to their state legislators or their town or county government. Insofar as politics is seen as a grand sport obviously the big leagues will mesmerize attention and have the highest stakes.

Pragmatically then the best road to the sort of social democracy which might over time lead to full socialism on a working basis and then perhaps to withering away of the whole notion of private property in favor of pragmatic sharing on a communist basis might well be to emphasize power at the most central level and concentrate limited abilities of grassroots masses to seize and hold power at the highest rather than lowest levels, and impose solutions top down based on a mass national consensus rather than crafting individual ones face to face in the smallest local bodies.

I suspect the shrewd sense that this is so, that it is elites who are best interested in and capable of mastering petty local politics and that the masses have what political eyes they have on the highest prizes, is precisely why it is an ideological commonplace in America anyway that ideally government is better the more local it is, and why the American Right has tended to rhetorically pine for a past in which the Federal government was relatively weak and limited and the states were the center of action, with deep questions as to their very form being left up to the states as the Constitution intended.

This is a major reason why we cannot decouple the question of soviets as a formal political organizing form of republicanism from the social-politics question of the nature and purpose of the economy.

If we are to maintain a separation between formal state structure and a largely laissez-faire capitalist economy, so that what state interference there is is centralized in the top layer of government so as to apply common principles to all and to muster maximum leverage for coordination, and this quite jealously limited by the prevailing rights of property owners, then grassroots political organization has no place in the workplace at all, with organization for specified worker rights carefully separated from general sovereignty being regarded as a separate sphere. Now perhaps we could have regional councils, inclusive of all classes but with workplace issues handled either privately between specific worker organizations and owners, or a matter of comprehensive and impersonal rules and regulations handed down from the national capital. But lacking power over the place they spend most of their waking lives, and drained from that hard labor, will workers in fact wish to engage, day after day, even week after week, in petty local government? Or will they prefer to elect some representatives and be done with it? Experience suggests the latter of course!

Now if we have a strong social-democratic tinge to the state, with the ideology in ascendency that the capitalist market must be watched and managed to shift it toward common rather then particular good, and that individual workplaces as well as broad national sectors are subject to that regulation, then perhaps the fusion of the narrow range of issues American convention grudgingly allows organized workers with a broader mandate that overlaps communal self-government in general will suffice to draw worker attention to the package of combined power, and if in fact workplace councils see a plain and useful connection between their own resolutions and the delegates they kick upstairs to coordinating regional and central councils, putting their energy into this work of democratic government in these councils can hold their attention and diligence. After all, if the entire workplace is subject to even a limited degree to decisions made by these worker councils, participating in them is part of the work day; they are in effect paid to be democrats as well as workers! As a social occasion, even the deeply disaffected who frankly don't give a damn might be amused enough, and perhaps we could expect a much deeper engagement than general impressions of popular culture right now would give us grounds to expect.

So it is probably key to making this form of republicanism work that the local councils, and thus government in general, has pretty broad power not only over a formal state sector but all forms of power, including those of ownership of productive assets. That is not necessarily the same thing as demanding absolute and final control of it unchecked. But perhaps a soviet form of government must indeed be associated with the left end of the political spectrum and is antagonistic to a more conservative view that holds that the mob is simply not competent to govern really and with that the implication that either republican frachise should be limited to an elite few, or anyway is largely a distracting political circus that obscures the truly aristocratic, or in hostile view oligarchic, forms of real power.

And that is what I think the conventional and conservative view that social democracy is a contradiction in terms is fundamentally centered on; a profoundly anti-democratic world view that might prove to be correct, but if so, woe to humanity!
 
@Shevek23
Wonderful essay!
Oh, and don't fear, social democracy is only still trying to sort out how to tackle post-fordist, asymmetrically globalised economy and society could be social-democratised... it will come back at some point, in some Form or other.
 
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