Rosa Luxemburg
The Russian Revolution
The Question of Suffrage
Let’s take another striking example: the right of suffrage
as worked out by the Soviet government. It is not clear what
practical significance is attributed to the right of
suffrage. From the critique of democratic institutions by Lenin
and Trotsky, it appears that popular representation on the basis
of universal suffrage is rejected by them on principle, and that
they want to base themselves only on the soviets. Why, then, any general suffrage system was worked out at all is really not clear. It is also not known to us whether this right of suffrage was put in practice anywhere; nothing has been heard of any elections to any kind of popular representative body on the basis of it. More likely, it is only a theoretical product, so to speak, of diplomacy; but, as it is, it constitutes a remarkable product of the Bolshevist theory of dictatorship.
Every right of suffrage, like any political right in general,
is not to be measured by some sort of abstract scheme of
"justice," or in terms of any other bourgeois-democratic
phrases, but by the social and economic relationships for which it
is designed. The right of suffrage worked out by the Soviet
government is calculated for the transition period from the
bourgeois-capitalist to the socialist form of society, that is, it
is calculated for the period of the proletarian dictatorship. But,
according to the interpretation of this dictatorship which Lenin
and Trotsky represent, the right to vote is granted only to those
who live by their own labor and is denied to everyone else.
Now it is clear that such a right to vote has meaning only in a
society which is in a position to make possible for all who want
to work an adequate civilized life on the basis of one’s own
labor. Is that the case in Russia at present? Under the terrific
difficulties which Russia has to contend with, cut off as she is
from the world market and from her most important source of raw
materials, and under circumstances involving a terrific general
uprooting of economic life and a rude overturn of production
relationships as a result of the transformation of property
relationships in land and industry and trade -- under such
circumstances, it is clear that countless existences are quite
suddenly uprooted, derailed without any objective possibility of
finding any employment for their labor power within the economic
mechanism. This applies not only to the capitalist and land-owing
masses, but to the broad layer of the middle class also, and even
to the working class itself. It is a known fact that the
construction of industry has resulted in a mass-scale return of
the urban proletariat to the open country in search of a place in
rural economy. Under such circumstances, a political right of
suffrage on the basis of a general obligation to labor, is a quite
incomprehensible measure. According to the main trend, only the
exploiters are supposed to be deprived of their political
rights. And, on the other hand, at the same time that productive
labor powers are being uprooted on a mass scale, the Soviet
government is often compelled to hand over national industry to
its former owners, on lease, so to speak. In the same way, the
Soviet government was forced to conclude a compromise with the
bourgeois consumers’ cooperatives also. Further, the use of
bourgeois specialists proved unavoidable. Another consequence of
the same situation is that growing sections of the proletariat,
for whom the economic mechanism provides no means of exercising
the obligation to work, are rendered politically without any
rights.
It makes no sense to regard the right of suffrage as a utopian
product of fantasy, cut loose from social reality. And it is for
this reason that it is not a serious instrument of the proletarian
dictatorship. It is an anachronism, an anticipation of the
juridical situation which is proper on the basis of an already
completed socialist economy, but is not in the transition period
of the proletarian dictatorship.
As the entire middle class, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois
intelligentsia, boycotted the Soviet government for months after
the October Revolution and crippled the railroad, post and
telegraph, and educational and administrative apparatus, and, in
this fashion, opposed the workers government, naturally all
measures of pressure were exerted against it. These included the
deprivation of political rights, of economic means of existence,
etc., in order to break their resistance with an iron fist. It was
precisely in this way that the socialist dictatorship expressed
itself, for it cannot shrink from any use of force to secure or
prevent certain measures involving the interests of the whole. But
when it comes to a suffrage law which provides for the general
disfranchisement of broad sections of society, whom it places
politically outside the framework of society and, at the same
time, is not in a position to make any place for them even
economically within that framework, when it involves a deprivation
of rights not as concrete measures for a concrete purpose but as a
general rule of long-standing effect, then, it is not a necessity
of dictatorship but a makeshift, incapable of being carried out in
life. This applies alike to the soviets as the foundation, and to
the Constituent Assembly and the general suffrage law.[1]
But the Constituent Assembly and the suffrage law do not
exhaust the matter. We did not consider above the destruction of
the most important democratic guarantees of a healthy public life
and of the political activity of the laboring masses: freedom of
the press, the rights of association and assembly, which have been
outlawed for all opponents of the Soviet regime. For these attacks
(on democratic rights), the arguments of Trotsky cited above, on
the cumbersome nature of democratic electoral bodies, are far from
satisfactory. On the other hand, it is a well-known and
indisputable fact that without a free and untrammeled press,
without the unlimited right of association and assemblage, the
rule of the broad masses of the people is entirely
unthinkable.
Footnotes
[1]
The following passage was found crossed out on an unnumbered loose sheet of paper in the manuscript:
The Bolsheviks designated the soviets as reactionary because
their majority consisted of peasants (peasant and soldier
delegates). After the Soviets went over to them, they became
correct representatives of public opinion. But this sudden
change was connected only with peace and land questions.
Next: The Problem of Dictatorship