Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky — Kant — John Shaqi
Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
Abandoning the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky
transforms the question of the conquest of power by the proletariat
into a question of the conquest of a majority of votes by the
Social-Democratic Party in one of the electoral campaigns of the
future. Universal suffrage, according to the legal fiction of
parliamentarism, expresses the will of the citizens of all classes in
the nation, and, consequently, gives a possibility of attracting a
majority to the side of Socialism. While the theoretical possibility
has not been realized, the Socialist minority must submit to the
bourgeois majority. This fetishism of the parliamentary majority
represents a brutal repudiation, not only of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, but of Marxism and of the revolution altogether. If, in
principle, we are to subordinate Socialist policy to the parliamentary
mystery of majority and minority, it follows that, in countries where
formal democracy prevails, there is no place at all for the
revolutionary struggle. If the majority elected on the basis of
universal suffrage in Switzerland pass draconian legislation against
strikers, or if the executive elected by the will of a formal majority
in Northern America shoots workers, have the Swiss and American
workers the "right" of protest by organizing a general strike?
Obviously, no. The political strike is a form of extra-parliamentary
pressure on the "national will," as it has expressed itself through
universal suffrage. True, Kautsky himself, apparently, is ashamed to
go as far as the logic of his new position demands. Bound by some sort
of remnant of the past, he is obliged to acknowledge the possibility
of correcting universal suffrage by action. Parliamentary elections,
at all events in principle, never took the place, in the eyes of the
Social-Democrats, of the real class struggle, of its conflicts,
repulses, attacks, revolts; they were considered merely as a
contributory fact in this struggle, playing a greater part at one
period, a smaller at another, and no part at all in the period of
dictatorship.
In 1891, that is, not long before his death, Engels, as we just heard,
obstinately defended the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only
possible form of its control of the State. Kautsky himself more than
once repeated this definition. Hence, by the way, we can see what an
unworthy forgery is Kautsky's present attempt to throw back the
dictatorship of the proletariat at us as a purely Russian invention.
Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be
carried on with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy
of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a
dictatorship--"the sole form in which the proletariat can achieve
control of the State"--it follows that the dictatorship must be
guaranteed at all cost.