LENIN’S REFUSAL TO accept the either-or alternative between Soviet or party, his claim that the Soviet is the organism immediately instrumental to insurrection while to the party is entrusted the permanent and final ends of the revolutionary movement in a polemic and demystification of the Menshevik program, and the ambiguity of the Soviet we mentioned earlier are all further clarified by his writings of the period of 1906 to 1907, the year of the bourgeois recovery. While during the most acute period of struggle, when the Soviets were directly invested and configured by the workers’ struggle, the risk of their being entrapped in the institutional mechanism of bourgeois democracy could be considered merely theoretical, now, in a phase of the ebb of struggle and of bourgeois recovery, this had become an immediate danger. This process of the sterilization of the Soviet foreshadowed its elimination, not only as the instrument of struggle but also as an instrument of political representation in democracy. To think that there could have been a different development was to yield to the worst constitutional illusions and to conceive once again, in Proudhonian terms, the Soviet as a constitutive moment of pluralist democracy. And this was twice illusory: first of all with respect to Russian capital, which could not even imagine forms of popular self-management functional to democratic development; second, in more general terms, because such constitutionalism, if it were possible, far from changing the power of the bourgeoisie, would have merely strengthened it. The Soviets were, in sum, the products and organs of the workers’ struggle and could not be anything else. Outside this way of understanding them there is only utopianism and the betrayal of the struggle, if not pure and simple opportunism.
The Mensheviks are opposed to electing deputies to the Duma, but wish to elect delegates and electors. What for? Is it in order that they may form a People’s Duma, or a free, illegal, representative assembly, something like an All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ (and also Peasants’) Deputies? To this we reply: if free representatives are needed, why bother with the Duma at all when electing them? Why supply the police with the lists of our delegates? And why set up new Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, and in a new way, when the old Soviets of Workers’ Deputies still exist (e.g., in St. Petersburg)? This would be useless and even harmful, for it would give rise to the false, utopian illusion that the decaying and disintegrating Soviets can be revived by new elections, instead of by making new preparations for insurrection and extending it.1
In November 1905 Lenin had actually hinted at the possibility that the Soviets might assume the function of provisional revolutionary government.2 Insofar as they widened their representation and rooted themselves in the struggle and in the struggle became recognized as leaders of the people’s majority (as was the case), Lenin suggested the possibility of making the Soviets function as a largely representative basis of a provisional government that would replace the Duma, which was itself the result of revolutionary struggle too. Considering the Soviets as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government was well suited to Lenin’s scheme: the ambivalence of the spontaneous character of the emergence of the Soviet and of the mass democratic elements of its current form could in fact be resolved by this newly assumed role. Even better: just as the Soviet assumed the function of a provisional revolutionary government, the ambiguity could be resolved in them.
Anticipating a conclusion about Lenin’s consideration of the Soviet of 1917, we can already say that it is here that Lenin begins to define the Soviets as an instrument of proletarian dictatorship. But we want to mention Lenin’s position on the Soviet of November 1905 also because it confirms, in the way he establishes a flexible parallel between the Soviet and instruments of democratic representation in general, that he conceives of the Soviet as nothing more than an organ of revolutionary struggle. From this point of view, even the Duma, if it is to exist, must paradoxically Sovietize itself since it too cannot escape the laws of revolutionary struggle that give it its function:
The objective cause of the downfall of the Cadet Duma was not that it was unable to express the needs of the people, but that it was unable to cope with the revolutionary task of the struggle for power. The Cadet Duma imagined that it was a constitutional organ, but it was in fact a revolutionary organ (the Cadets abused us for regarding the Duma as a stage or an instrument of the revolution, but experience has fully confirmed our view). The Cadet Duma imagined that it was an organ of struggle against the Cabinet, but it was in fact an organ of struggle for the overthrow of the entire old regime.3
But the Duma was not an instrument of “workers’ power”! In fact, any organization can carry out the revolutionary task when, formed and sustained by the workers’ struggle, it rids itself of the bourgeois democratic content of the revolution. Class struggle and the generality of its revolutionary determination and refusal are primary; everything else is secondary, or at least conditioned. “Workers’ power” is the power of struggle; it is a moment and a stage in the seizure of “state power”: it cannot be conceived separately from the totality of the movement or, even less, institutionalized outside of it. If then the Soviets are preferable to other tools of struggle, it must be because of a pragmatic assessment of their effectiveness.
The ambiguity of the relation between “Soviet as self-government” and “Soviet as organ of struggle” of the proletariat that is established within the relation between democratic struggle and socialist struggle is here fully resolved. In the conclusive remarks of his speech on the Soviets of the first Russian revolution, Lenin can thus, on the one hand, exalt the Soviets for their very spontaneous capability as organizers of struggle and, on the other, warn against their fetishization and the risk of overvaluing them:
The role played by the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies … in the great October and December days surrounded them with something like a halo, so that sometimes they are treated almost as a fetish. People imagine that those organs are “necessary and sufficient” for a mass revolutionary movement at all times and in all circumstances. Hence the uncritical attitude towards the choice of the moment for the creation of such bodies, towards the question of what the real conditions are for the success of their activities. The experience of October-December has provided very instructive guidance on this point. Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are organs of direct mass struggle. They originated as organs of the strike struggle. By force of circumstances they very quickly became the organs of the general revolutionary struggle against the government. The course of events and the transition from a strike to an uprising irresistibly transformed them into organs of an uprising. That this was precisely the role that quite a number of “soviets” and “committees” played in December, is an absolutely indisputable fact. Events have proved in the most striking and convincing manner that the strength and importance of such organs in time of militant action depend entirely upon the strength and success of the uprising. It was not some theory, not appeals on the part of some one, or tactics invented by someone, not party doctrine, but the force of circumstances that led these non-party mass organs to realize the need for an uprising and transformed them into organs of an uprising. At the present time, too, to establish such organs means creating organs of an uprising; to call for their establishment means calling for an uprising. To forget this, or to veil it from the eyes of the broad mass of the people, would be the most unpardonable short-sightedness and the worst of policies. If that is so—and undoubtedly it is—the conclusion to be drawn is also clear: “soviets” and similar mass institutions are in themselves insufficient for organizing an uprising. They are necessary for welding the masses together, for creating unity in the struggle, for handing on the party slogans (or slogans advanced by agreement between parties) of political leadership, for awakening the interest of the masses, for rousing and attracting them. But they are not sufficient for organizing the immediate fighting forces, for organizing an uprising in the narrowest sense of the word.4
Whether the Soviet would be favored over other organs of the revolutionary struggle will simply depend, as we said, on pragmatic considerations. The question is more or less closed here. In the years following 1905, in the process of general strengthening of the Bolshevik tactics and strategy, the Soviets are seldom discussed again: this confirms that the pragmatic criterion tied to the tactical contingencies of the insurrection was sufficient to decide on their value, and such judgment could not be prejudiced in the counterrevolutionary phase. Nonetheless, some premises on the effectiveness of the Soviets were developed on the basis of the most recent experience. First of all, the Soviets were mass organizations that the bourgeois tradition had not yet burned out. In fact, it was possible to rather unscrupulously establish an analogy between the functions of the Soviet and those of the Duma as a basis and organ of the provisional revolutionary government; however, it was impossible not to recognize that, beyond this rather theoretical analogy of their functions, their genesis, organizational nature, and reality were profoundly and irrefutably original, something that could perhaps be newly deployed at the resumption of open struggle.5 Lenin can see this: sometimes he prefers to be silent about this originality of Sovietism, at least insofar as it seems invalidated by “anarcho-syndicalism.”6 On the other hand, on the rare and less official occasions that he confronts the problem during these years, he explicitly wonders, given these facts, whether and how the Soviets could become centers of revolutionary socialist power.
After 1905, however, the problem is not that of further defining the relation between Soviet and party. The problem is now that of keeping the struggle open and relaunching it in a permanent manner. Permanent revolution remains in fact the strategic line of the Bolsheviks: “After the democratic revolution we will fight for the shift to the socialist revolution. We are for the permanent revolution. We will not stop half-way” in the hope, in 1905 and today, that “the revolution in Russia would have given the signal to begin the socialist revolution in Europe.”7 But only the party is suited to this end, and Lenin insists over and over again on the necessity of the “autonomy” and “independence” of the party of the proletariat.
Beyond the practical problems of the relation with the Soviets in the insurrectional phase, however, Lenin’s defense of the Bolshevik view of the party reopened the theoretical problem of this relationship—implicitly, if you like, but continually, as a moment of a broader discussion on the relation between political direction and mass organisms, and on the alliances of the proletariat in the process of the democratic revolution and, beyond this, toward socialism. It was inevitable to reopen this problem because it was the central, most decisive, and ambiguous one, and was always imposed on workers’ theory by the actual reality at that level of capitalist development. Now, the particular form of the debate was determined by the wild number of writings produced on the Russia of 1905 by the Second International. The Soviets were launched on the international scene and debate of the workers’ movement and thus gave rise, perhaps more than within Russian social democracy, to occasions for further thematic investigations and political conflict. Here it is not important to follow the lines of the polemic, particularly its reformist tendencies. It is sufficient to keep in mind two positions, which were similar though somehow antithetical: that of Rosa Luxemburg and that of Leon Trotsky. Lenin’s thought can be clarified by comparing it with these two.
To Luxemburg, the Soviets appear as the living proof of the validity of the theses she proposed earlier around the polemic on the Massenstreik in Belgium. Russia was a “grandiose example” of the fact that “the living, dialectical explanation makes the organization arise as a product of the struggle.”8 The Russian proletariat, even though politically immature and of recent formation, had learned how to impose its own political experience and move to a “comprehensive network of organisational appendages” through struggle. In such a network, all the forces of struggle circulated and were constantly relaunched in a continual interchange; therein the nexus between union struggle and political struggle finds a way to achieve full expression. As for the Soviets, they are represented as propelling elements of this revolutionary procedure: they are rooted in the life of the masses and carry them all to the movement. Organs of insurrection on one hand, and the prefiguring of the uninterrupted development of the workers’ struggle from democratic radicalism to socialism on the other: the Soviets are the real embodiment of Marxism among the masses. In Trotsky, this same emphasis on the spontaneity of the formation of the Soviets and their democratic radicalism in the life of the masses is very present: the Soviets are thus seen as the “typical organization of the revolution” because “the organization itself of the proletariat will be its organ of power.”9 This concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, directly exercised by the Soviets without the mediation of the party, is the corollary of an affirmation of spontaneity and the result of his experience in the Soviet of St. Petersburg, which was an executive organ and centralizer of the revolutionary struggle as well as, at the same time, the instrument of the democratic and socialist self-management of the masses.10
Trotsky’s and Luxemburg’s views share some features and not others; in fact, they are even antithetical in some respects. Among these, we place a special emphasis on Luxemburg’s appreciation of the expansive nature of the Soviets, as opposed to Trotsky’s privileging of the centralizing phase of their revolutionary functions. In the slogan “all power to the Soviets,” he in fact sees prefigured, according to the schema of democratic centralism, the coming revolutionary movement and even its tactical phases, as well as the fundamental structure of the socialist state. But both their analyses exalt the spontaneity in the genesis and development of the Soviets, their radical democratic rootedness in the life of the masses, and, finally and consequently, the theoretical foregrounding of a continuity between democratic struggle and socialist struggle that both the structure and the functions of the Soviets allegedly manifest.
Lenin rejects both their positions. He has the conditions of the movement in Russia in mind, with all the ambiguity presented by revolutionary struggle in the context of backward capitalism. He does not rhapsodize over the forms that the struggle can assume, but rather subordinates such considerations to the concrete determinations that result from it for workers’ science. What can the theory of the organization process mean in the Russian situation? It is simply the return of the movement to generic popular positions, a danger and an obstacle to the irresistible will to create an autonomous revolutionary class organization that now and here cannot be but minoritarian: only such an organization can guarantee, as an institutional end to the organization itself, beyond the conditions determined by the present democratic phase of the movement, the conquest and the destruction of autocratic or democratic bourgeois power. And isn’t there a danger, in the affirmation of the democratic nature of the Soviet, of subordinating the hard work of organizing the party to a simple prefiguring of the future or, worse, of hiding its necessary role as vanguard for the sake of an illusory and utopian revolutionary unanimity? Certainly, neither Luxemburg nor Trotsky would accept, or did accept, these criticisms. In their writings the affirmation of the leadership function of social democracy never seems to vanish. After all, they had good reasons, in the polemic, to accuse Lenin of “ultra-centrism” for his concept of the party, maintaining that because of it, he tended to underestimate, however programmatically, any potentially democratic aspect of the life and the basis of revolutionary organizations; and after 1917 Luxemburg increased the tone of her polemic against him. But Lenin’s argument revealed the substance of the description and the subsequent theory of the Soviet that characterized Luxemburg and Trotsky: his polemic was in this respect extremely pertinent and recognized in the expansive model of the former as well as in the intensive model of the latter both a theoretical overestimation and a fundamental strategic error. For Lenin, the overestimation consisted in entrusting to spontaneity functions that did not belong to it. It might well be that spontaneity plays an eminent role (more than once Lenin the “romantic” and the “anarchist” had acknowledged and celebrated it) but not always and not automatically. If there is a rationality underlining the history of spontaneous struggles, it is that either capital or class determines their most aware or political qualities. And the party is all here: a class-based party that recuperates from the spontaneity of the struggles the workers’ longing for an alternative organization and that structures class autonomy and consciously plans its expressions. This is a vanguard party, always vanguard because it permanently goes beyond the material limits that the capitalist structure imposes on class movement. And here, after the overestimation, however motivated, of spontaneity, lies the frank error of Luxemburg and Trotsky: that of considering the revolutionary process as a continuity that does not find any solutions, and in particular, solutions between economic demands and political demands. Yes, Luxemburg and Trotsky had beaten, in a classical manner, the reformism of the workers’ movement and international social democracy, and they had demystified each one of its characteristics: now, and even more so where the situation and chances of struggle were backward, it was necessary to beat the reformism of class movements. The party was created and functioned to this end. Therefore the dyad class autonomy–class organization could never be broken. By autonomy we mean: negatively, the isolation of class from the people, the need for working-class struggle to keep overcoming the given material limits from the concrete tactical determinations of the movement; positively, the imposition of the problem of its organization. No organization without autonomy: Lenin opposed this statement to any theory of democratic organization. But without organization, class autonomy is always episodic and in danger of being crushed, especially at a backward level of capitalist development, by the reformism of capital and within the wide margins that are conceded to it, and it is thus in danger of becoming defeated as a workers’ struggle. And Lenin opposed this statement to all hypotheses of procedural organization.
What about the Soviets? Only the party can decide how to use them. It is not a matter of underestimating the tool that spontaneity has typically offered to the revolution, but of situating and affirming it in the tactics and strategy of the party.
NOTES
1. Vladimir I. Lenin, Should We Boycott the State Duma? The Platform of the Majority, trans. A. Rothstein, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10:98.
2. Lenin, Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, trans. A. Rothstein, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10:17–28. See also Lenin, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution, trans. J. Fineberg and others, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 23:236–253.
3. Lenin, The Dissolution of the Duma and the Tasks of the Proletariat, trans. C. Dutt, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 11:117.
5. Lenin, “Soviets of Workers’ Deputies,” in A Tactical Platform for the Unity of Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., trans. A. Rothstein, in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 10:156.
6. Lenin, Ueber die parteilosen Arbeiterorganisation im Zusammenbang mit den anarcho-syndakalistiscen Stromunger im Proletariat, in Samtliche Werke (Wien: Verlag für Literatur und Politik, 1929), 10:522ff. On this series of problems, one finds good suggestions in A. G. Meyer, Leninism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
8. Rosa Luxemburg, “Cooperation of Organized and Unorganized Workers Necessary for Victory,” in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Detroit: Marxist Educational Society of Detroit, 1925).
9. Leon Trotsky, “Discorso davanti al tribunale: 19 Settembre 1906” [Courtroom speech: 19 September 1906], in P. Broue, Le parti bolchevique [The Bolshevik Party] (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1963), 74.
10. Leon Trotsky, Der Arbeiterdeputiertenrat und die Revolution, in Die Neue Zeit 2 (1906–1907): 76–86.