Reply To: Labour Party Splits
Just noticed the attack on “delegate democracy” as Leninist in the editorial in today’s Times:
“The alternative notion that officials are mere delegates does have a philosophical lineage. It is to be found in Lenin’s The State and Revolution. This revolutionary blueprint was a guarantee that Russia would become a totalitarian state, for it had no concept of how to mediate between incommensurate values and competing interests [whatever that means].”
Two points here. First, it wasn’t Lenin who thought up this. Second, he might have preached it but he didn’t practice it.
Lenin did indeed write of “all officials, without exception, elected and subject to recall at any time” (his emphasis) but he was expanding on Marx’s description of the Paris Commune of 1871 in his The Civil War in France:
“The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms.”
Marx recommended that this is what the working class should bring about immediately on winning control of political power. The Communards weren’t socialists but radical democrats and what they did was already practised in Switzerland and in some of the states of the USA where the “right of recall” still exists in their constitutions. Indeed, this sort of thing is reflected in the US Constitution which lays down that the House of Representatives shall be re-elected every two years (the British MPs who have betrayed their mandate can sit for a further 3 years; in the US they’d be out in less than 2 years).
It’s a simple, basic radical democratic demand — which of course Lenin never implemented or had any intention of implementing. Power in Bolshevik Russia was in the hands of the unelected Bolshevik Party whose officials were not elected by universal suffrage nor subject to recall (at least not by the electorate though they were by the Party hierarchy as were non-party state officials). And of course one of the first things the Bolsheviks did was to abolish the Constituent Assembly that had been elected by universal suffrage. No attempt was made to organise the state in Russia along the lines of the Paris Commune.
So, whoever wrote the editorial in the Times is either ignorant or dishonest or both.