Lenin’s “On Soviet Socialist Democracy” assembles his key writings on the theory and practice of the form of government created by the Russian working class in 1917, the only time in history that the exploited majority has taken power into its own hands and begun to run society itself.
The book opens with material on the national question before turning to its theoretical foundation on the withering away of the state, which traces Marx’s account of the transition from capitalism through the first and higher phases of communist society. This is the heart of the matter. Lenin shows that the state is not a neutral arbiter standing above society but a machine for the rule of one class over another and that the working class cannot simply take hold of the existing state apparatus. It must be smashed and replaced by organs of workers’ power. From this theoretical starting point the volume moves into the actual record of 1917–1919: addresses to the population, the right of recall of elected deputies, the Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People, and reports to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets, documenting how the new soviet state was constituted and defended in its first years.
At the centre of the collection is Lenin’s sustained polemic against the counterposing of “pure” democracy to soviet power, on bourgeois versus proletarian democracy, whether equality can exist between exploiter and exploited, and why the soviets could not remain adjuncts to a bourgeois state. Lenin’s target was Karl Kautsky, the leading theorist of the Second International who, faced with a real workers’ revolution, chose the “purity” of bourgeois parliamentarianism over the actual power of the working class. The book’s central argument is that soviet democracy was not a departure from democratic principle but its extension to the working class and the oppressed masses.
The later selections of the book shows Lenin grappling with the practical questions of governing: labour discipline, women’s emancipation, the courts, education, and how revolutionaries should relate to existing mass organisations. This collection shows that soviet democracy was a set of institutions and struggles that had to be built, defended and continually developed.
Pages: 223
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) was the founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party and a central figure within the Marxist movement from the end of the 19th century until his death in 1924. In October 1917 he, along with Leon Trotsky, led the Russian Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power and established the first workers’ state.