On the question of parliamentarianism Pt. 3

Il Soviet, May 16, 1920

VI.

Even more difficult than the relations between the parliamentary fraction and the Party are those between the former and the Workers’ council (Soviet). The difficulty of a straightforward approach to this problem again throws clear light on the problematic nature of parliamentarianism in the class struggle of the proletariat. The Workers’ councils as organisations of the entire proletariat (conscious as well as unconscious) by the mere fact of their existence surpass bourgeois society. By their very nature they are revolutionary organisations of the expansion, capacity for action and power of the proletariat, and as such true thermometers of the development of the revolution. Since everything that is done and achieved in Workers’ councils is wrested from the resistance of the bourgeoisie, it is therefore of great value not only as a result, but primarily as an educational means of conscious class action. It therefore appears as the height of ‘parliamentary cretinism’ to make attempts (such as those of the U.S.P.D. [Independent Socialist Party of Germany] to ‘anchor the Workers’ councils in the constitution’, to assign them a certain legal activity. Legality kills the Workers’ council. The Workers’ council exists as an offensive organisation of the revolutionary proletariat only insofar as it threatens the existence of bourgeois society and fights step by step to prepare the destruction of this and the construction of proletarian society. Any legalisation, i.e. inclusion of it in bourgeois society with certain limits on its powers, turns it into a shadow of the Workers’ council; it becomes a mess of a political chattering club, a rejection and caricature of parliament.

Therefore, in general, the Workers’ council and the parliamentary fraction can co-exist side by side as tactical weapons of the proletariat. It would be easy to deduce, from the offensive character of the former and defensive character of the latter, the theory that they complement each other. (Max Adler’s proposal to make the Workers’ council a second chamber). Such attempts at reconciliation overlook, however, that the offensive and defensive in the class struggle are dialectical concepts, each of which contains a whole mode of action (and thus, in both cases, individual offensive and defensive actions), and can only be used in a certain phase of the class struggle, but then one excludes the other. The difference between the two phases can thus be defined briefly, but also clearly as far as the question under discussion here is concerned: the proletariat is on the defensive until the process of the dissolution of capitalism has begun. When this phase of economic evolution has begun, the proletariat is forced onto the offensive, and it makes no difference whether this attitude has been consciously determined or not, and whether or not it appears to be approvable and ‘scientifically’ founded.

But since the evolutionary process of ideology certainly does not coincide with that of the economy, and never runs parallel with it, the objective possibility and necessity of the offensive phase of the class struggle rarely finds the proletariat prepared. As a result of the economic situation, the action of the masses does indeed spontaneously take a revolutionary direction, but by the ruling class, which is neither willing nor able to free itself from the habits of the defensive stage, it is always conducted along false paths, or sabotaged at all. Consequently, in the offensive phase of the class struggle, not only the bourgeoisie and the strata headed by it stand against the proletariat, but also its earlier leaders. Therefore the object, against which criticism must be directed, is no longer in the first place the bourgeoisie, already judged by history, but the right and the centre of the proletarian movement, social democracy, without whose help capitalism in no country would have the slightest hope of overcoming, even temporarily, its present crisis. FIN QUI

But the criticism of the proletariat is at the same time an active criticism, an educational work of revolutionary action, an objective teaching. To this end, Workers’ councils are the best instrument one can think of. For more important than any single advantage they can gain for the proletariat is their educational function. The Workers’ council is the death of social democracy. While in parliament it is always possible to cover up real opportunism with revolutionary phrases, the Workers Council is forced into action, or it ceases to exist. This action, whose conscious leader must be the communist party, achieves the dissolution of opportunism, i.e. the kind of criticism needed today. No wonder social democracy feels terror of self-criticism, to which it is forced by the Workers’ councils. The development of the Workers’ councils in Russia from the first to the second revolution clearly shows where this development must lead.

With this, the reciprocal position of the Workers’ council and parliament would remain theoretically and tactically defined. Where a Workers’ council is possible (albeit in a very limited space), there parliamentarianism is superfluous. Indeed this is dangerous, for it is in the nature of it that within it only the criticism of the bourgeoisie is possible, not the self-criticism of the proletariat. But before the proletariat can reach the promised land of emancipation, it must pass through the acid test of this self-criticism, in which it strips itself of the figure of the capitalist age, which manifests itself in its fullest form precisely in social democracy, and thereby attain its own purification.

G. Lukacz

Former People’s Commissar of Hungary

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We have already premised on this interesting study that it only partly corresponded to our views. Indeed, we could not make our own the considerations contained in the last part, for reasons that it would be superfluous to repeat.