Parliaments, wealth, and workers’ councils

These words about workers’ council (soviet) democracy — with right of recall, all posts at worker’s wages, and the executive as a function of the legislative rather than standing above it — are taken from a pamphlet by Vladimir Lenin [Ulyanov] in 1918, disputing Karl Kautsky’s condemnation of the workers’ and peasants’ government in Russia. Even as Lenin-Ulyanov wrote, the revolutionary government’s civil war, amidst crushing poverty, against Russian reactionaries and 14 foreign armies was sapping the workers’ democracy. After that civil war, Stalinist counter-revolution would bit-by-bit turn “soviet” forms into tyranny. But the model of a more genuine and flexible democracy remains valid.

Take freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or “equality of all citizens before the law,” and you will see at every turn evidence of the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy with which every honest and class-conscious worker is familiar...

Kautsky shamelessly embellishes bourgeois democracy and omits to mention, for instance, how the most democratic and republican bourgeoisie in America or Switzerland deal with workers on strike...

[Or] the learned Mr. Kautsky could have studied [the] “law” of bourgeois democracy in connection with the Dreyfus case in republican France, with the lynching of Negroes and internationalists in the democratic republic of America, with the case of Ireland and Ulster in democratic Britain....

Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? This does not mean that we must not make use of bourgeois parliaments... But it does mean that only a liberal can forget the historical limitations and conventional nature of the bourgeois parliamentary system as Kautsky does...

The Soviet government is the first in the world (or strictly speaking, the second, because the Paris Commune began to do the same thing) to enlist the people, specifically the exploited people, in the work of administration. The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments (they never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks) by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see and realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the workers by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority.

The Soviets are the direct organisation of the working and exploited people themselves, which help them to organise and administer their own state in every possible way... Freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy, because the printing-plants and stocks of paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie. The same thing applies to the best buildings, the palaces, the mansions and manor houses. Soviet power took thousands upon thousands of these best buildings from the exploiters at one stroke, and in this way made the right of assembly — without which democracy is a fraud — a million times more democratic for the people...

The entire apparatus less costly, more flexible, more accessible to the workers and peasants [who are] able very quickly to recall [their] local deputy or to delegate him to a general congress of Soviets.

Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy;

Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic...