Letter to the the Politburo, June 6, 1926

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Party Bureaucratism and Party Democracy

To the Politburo:

I call your attention to the following circumstance:

On June 2 Comrade Uglanov gave a report to the enlarged plenum of the party committee of the Zamoskvorechye district [in Moscow]. Without going into any other aspects of this report, and basing my comments on the account in Pravda, I find it necessary to dwell at some length here on the way Comrade Uglanov, the head of the Moscow party organization, conceives of and defines party democracy.

What Is “Democracy”?

Let me cite the relevant passage word for word (from Pravda, no. 127, June 4, 1926): “What is the essence of party democracy? Comrade Uglanov gives a clear and concise answer: It is to present the basic tasks facing the party and the country to the party organization in a correct and timely way so that it can resolve them; to draw the broad mass of party members into the discussion and resolution of these problems; to explain the fundamental problems of socialist construction to the proletariat in a correct and timely way; to check the correctness of our policies against the moods of the working class and its individual detachments; and to rectify our line on the basis of such checking.

It is quite obvious that this definition, which the Pravda account with full justification terms “clear and concise,” has a finished and programmatic quality to it. As a matter of fact, what we have here is a theoretical formulation of party bureaucratism as a system, in which the party per se functions only as raw material in the hands of the apparatus. It is not hard, in fact, to demonstrate that in the sum total of activities and relationships which Comrade Uglanov calls party democracy, the role of initiator of action is relegated exclusively to the party apparatus, which at every given moment decides the forms in which and limits within which it is to “exert its influence” upon the mass of the party as a whole.

Let us analyze this definition point by point.

(a) It is democracy “to present… tasks … to the party … in a timely and correct way.” To the speaker it was totally self-evident and a foregone conclusion that tasks are presented to the party by the apparatus and only by the apparatus, and if it presents them “in a timely and correct way,” the timeliness and correctness being decided by the apparatus itself, that is “party democracy.”

(b) It is democracy, furthermore, “to draw the broad mass of party members into the discussion and resolution of these problems.” The very phrase “draw into” is enough to fully characterize the direction of thinking here. The party is portrayed as an inert mass that tends to resist and must be “drawn into” the discussion of tasks that are presented to it by that very same party apparatus. And so, if the apparatus does its presenting in a timely and correct way and does its drawing in in a timely and correct way, that, then, is ‘'party democracy.”

(c) Going further, we learn that it is democracy “to explain the fundamental problems of socialist construction to the proletariat in a correct and timely way,” i.e., the same questions which the apparatus has presented to the party, and into the discussion of which it has drawn the party. Here the one-sided, bureaucratic relationship between the apparatus and the party is extended to the class.

(d) It is democracy “to check the correctness of our policies against the moods of the working class and its individual detachments.” The same apparatus that presents the tasks, that draws the party into the discussion of them, and that explains these tasks to the proletariat — this same apparatus checks its policies against the “moods” of the working class in order “to rectify the line on the basis of such checking.” Thus, the line is rectified by the very ones who initiate it — the apparatus. It presents the tasks “in a timely and correct way,” that is, those tasks it finds necessary and at such times as it finds necessary. It draws in the ranks of the party to discuss these tasks — within those confines and limits which it finds correct and timely. It explains what it finds necessary through the party to the working class. It, the apparatus, checks the results of this work against the “moods” of the working class. And it, the apparatus, on the basis of such checking, such an estimate of moods, rectifies its own line “in a timely way.”

No other features of party democracy are indicated by Comrade Uglanov. The Pravda account, as we have seen, calls his definition of democracy “clear and concise.” This definition, I repeat, has a finished and programmatic quality. It represents a new word in the development of the party regime and party ideology. Before June 2, 1926, the party many times gave its definition of the kind of regime it meant by the term party democracy. The most outstanding stages in the development of party thought on this question were the resolution of the Tenth Congress (1921) and the unanimous Central Committee resolution of December 5, 1923, subsequently confirmed by the Thirteenth Party Congress. The resolution of the last party congress, the fourteenth, refers only to the necessity of remaining “on the path of consistent party democracy.” The concept of party democracy is not spelled out in the Fourteenth Congress resolution precisely because this had already been done with the necessary thoroughness at previous party congresses. The Fourteenth Congress proceeded on the assumption that there was no question of a new, programmatic definition of party democracy but that the task was to realize the existing one in practice. A different approach is taken by Comrade Uglanov, head of the Moscow organization. He raises the question, “What is the essence of party democracy?” Having posed this programmatic question, Comrade Uglanov fails to refer back to the definitions of democracy given by the party earlier. He gives his own, new definition, the one we have just examined.

In defining the “essence” of democracy, Comrade Uglanov has actually counterposed his programmatic definition to the one which the party has given until now and which was thought to be beyond dispute. Thus the Tenth Congress resolution declared one of the basic features of democracy to be “constant control on the part of the public opinion of the party over the work of the leading bodies.” The unanimous resolution of December 5, 1923, states: “Workers’ democracy means the liberty of frank discussion of the most important questions of party life by all members, and the freedom to have organized discussions on these questions, and the election of all leading party functionaries and commissions from the bottom up” [The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25), p. 408, where the translation used is slightly different]. These three features: (a) free discussion by all party members of all the most important questions, (b) constant control by the party over its leading bodies, and (c) the election of responsible individuals and collective bodies, from the bottom up — all three of these features are left completely out of the Uglanovist definition of the “essence” of party democracy. For Uglanov, the apparatus checks up on the party, but not a word is said about the party’s control over the apparatus. In his version the apparatus presents questions in a timely way and “draws” the party into the discussion of questions it considers timely. Of free discussion by the party on all questions, there is no mention whatsoever. And finally, in his version, the question of responsible and leading individuals being subject to election is totally excluded from the essence of party democracy.

The resolution of December 5,1923, states: “The interests of the party, both for its successful struggle against influences generated by the NEP and to enhance its fighting capacity in all areas of work, demand a serious change in the party’s course in the sense of an active and systematic implementation of the principles of workers’ democracy". The Thirteenth Congress approved this way of posing the question. The Fourteenth Congress again referred to the need to carry out the change in the party’s course unanimously proclaimed by the Central Committee in December 1923. Various leading comrades have acknowledged a number of times that there exists a difference between the resolutions on party democracy and the practical reality, a difference that to some has seemed a crying contradiction and to others a temporary disparity. All, however, have taken as their starling point, at least programmatically, at least in words, at least formally, the assumption that practical reality should gradually draw closer to the definition of democracy existing in principle, that is, a party regime whose essence is defined above all by freedom of discussion on all questions, constant control by the general body of opinion in the party over party institutions, and the election of all responsible individuals and collective bodies.

Comrade Uglanov for the first time has made an open attempt to overcome the contradiction between the programmatic definition of democracy and the actual regime by bringing the program down, drastically, to the level of what has existed in practice. As the essence of democracy he proclaims the unlimited domination of the party apparatus, which presents, draws in, checks, and rectifies. On June 2, 1926, the party was given a fully perfected definition of a regime based on the absolute authority of the apparatus. Attempting to define the essence of democracy, Comrade Uglanov has defined the essence of bureaucracy. To be sure, in Comrade Uglanov’s definition this bureaucracy does not simply command, but presents questions to the masses, draws them in, and rectifies the line. But that only means that Comrade Uglanov has given the definition of “enlightened” bureaucracy. There is not even a hint of democracy here.

Of course, it goes without saying that the party is first of all an action organization. The regime in its entirety should ensure the possibility of timely and single-minded action by the party as a whole. From this there follows both the necessity for genuine party democracy and real limitations upon it in the concrete historical conditions of any given period. We all know this. The party cannot be turned into a discussion club. The party has never lost sight of this fact, not at the Tenth Congress and not since then. But precisely in order to ensure the capacity of the party to carry on with the proletarian dictatorship under new, more complex conditions, the party has constantly, since 1921, advanced and repeated the idea that as the proletarian elements in the party grow stronger, as the cultural and political level of the party as a whole grows higher, the party regime must undergo uninterrupted change in the direction of overcoming bureaucratism and apparatus habits through the methods of free discussion, collective decision-making, control over the apparatus, and the election of the apparatus from the bottom up.

Since the time of the transition from war communism to NEP, from the civil war to economic and cultural construction, more than five years have passed. The announcement of the course toward party democracy followed naturally from the conditions of the transition from the civil war to extensive socialist construction. Since the end of 1923, when the need for “a serious change of the party’s course” was proclaimed by the Central Committee itself, two and a half years have passed. During this five-year period, especially the second half, we have not had to be involved in war. Our economy has grown. The proletariat has been reviving. The party, in its basic composition, has become proletarian. The party has raised its level and grown in experience. It would seem that all these conditions would create a tenfold increase in the need for “a serious change of the party’s course” toward democracy. That change, however, has not taken place. On the contrary, never before has the party regime been so permeated by the practice of appointments from above, habits of command, suspicion, and administrative pressure, i.e., by an all-embracing principle of apparatus rule. The contradiction, and it is a crying one, between the programmatic definition of party democracy, the oft-proclaimed and oft-confirmed need for charting a course toward party democracy, on the one hand, and the actual regime, on the other, is everywhere apparent. This contradiction is becoming increasingly thorny, painful, and simply unendurable for the party’s consciousness. Nothing weighs so heavily upon a revolutionary party as two-facedness, a disparity between word and deed. Beyond certain boundaries such duality passes over into plain and simple falsehood. Yet Comrade Uglanov takes the initiative, on his own authority, of revising the principles of the party’s orientation on the question of the party regime and workers’ democracy in general. Comrade Uglanov boldly raises the question of the “essence” of democracy and reveals this essence to be — the timely and correct functioning of enlightened bureaucracy. If there were no other manifestations, this symptom alone would be grounds enough for saying: “We are standing at a crossroads in the development of the party.” The duality of the present cannot be maintained. Either a serious change in the party regime must begin to be made, in full accordance with the decisions of past congresses’ or the party will have to change its orientation, which means to pass from the Leninist standpoint to that of Uglanov.

The Source of Bureaucratism in the Relations Between Classes

The party regime does not have a self-contained, self-sufficient nature. On the one hand it is dependent on all of its surroundings; on the other, the general trend of politics is expressed through it How could it happen that, despite the favorable change in economic circumstances and the cultural rise of the proletariat, the party regime has steadily shifted in the recent past in the direction of bureaucratization?

To explain this only by the country's lack of culture and by the fact that our party is a ruling party leads nowhere; first, because the uncultured character of the country is on the wane while party bureaucratism is on the rise; second, because if the party’s role as a ruling party inevitably entailed its increased bureaucratization, that would imply the destruction of the party. But there can be no question of such a perspective. Lack of culture in and of itself, in the form of illiteracy and the absence of the simplest necessary skills, leads mostly to bureaucratism in the state apparatus. But the party, after all, counts among its members the most cultured and energetic of the vanguard of the toiling masses, and above all of the industrial proletariat. This vanguard is growing quantitatively and qualitatively. Consequently, as far as the regime within the party is concerned, it ought to be steadily becoming more democratic. But in fact it is growing more bureaucratic. It is clear that mere reference to lack of culture explains nothing and above all fails to take into account the trends or dynamics of historical development. Yet all the while, bureaucratization has gone so far that it seeks to be crowned theoretically. That is the central meaning of Comrade Uglanov’s venture.

The fundamental cause of bureaucratization must be sought in the relations between classes. One cannot close one’s eyes to the fact that, parallel to a certain increase in Soviet democracy in the village, we have had extreme pressure tactics applied in Moscow and Leningrad. Democracy is not a self-sufficing factor. What matters are the policies of the proletarian dictatorship in the arenas of the economy, culture, etc.; these policies should be such that the proletarian vanguard, the vehicle of these policies, can carry them out, to an ever increasing extent, through free discussion, with control over the apparatus, and with the right to elect it. It is plainly evident that if industry, that is, the base on which the socialist dictatorship rests, lags behind the development of the economy as a whole; if value accumulated in the economy is not distributed along lines that will assure the further ascendancy of socialist tendencies over capitalist ones; if the difficulties resulting from this are placed first and foremost on the backs of the working class; if wage increases for the workers are delayed, in the midst of a general advance of the economy; if such exceptional fiscal devices as the vodka monopoly become a growing burden on the workers — under such conditions the party apparatus is less and less able to carry out its policies by means of party democracy. The bureaucratization of the party in this case is an expression of the disrupted social equilibrium, which has been and is being tipped to the disadvantage of the proletariat. This disruption of the equilibrium is transmitted to the party and weighs upon the proletarian vanguard in the party. Hence the increased application of pressure tactics in the most powerful centers of the proletariat, in the main base areas of the party. Having thrown out free discussion, the collective resolution of tasks, control over the apparatus, and the election of it, Comrade Uglanov reduces the problem to one of checking party policies against the “moods” of the proletariat, i.e., feeling and probing by empirical apparatus methods to determine how much administrative pressure the working class and its vanguard is willing and able to endure, pressure resulting from the entire economic and social orientation of the party leadership. From this it also follows that the methods of democracy are replaced by the methods of enlightened bureaucracy.

The Weakening of the Ideological Center as an Additional Cause of the Crackdown Within the Party

Any regime develops its own internal logic, and a bureaucratic regime develops it more rapidly than any other. It is quite natural for the major industrial and cultural centers of the country to become seats of resistance to incorrect economic policies and to the incorrect party regime that supplements those policies. It is natural for this resistance to find expression within the upper layers of the leadership as well. And again, it is quite logical, under conditions of domination by an apparatus regime, that there emerges a tendency for any and all differences to be transformed into a struggle between factional groupings. That a ruling party, under conditions of revolutionary dictatorship, cannot accept a regime of contending factions is absolutely unquestionable. One need only add that it is absolutely inevitable for an apparatus regime to breed factions from its own midst. Moreover, under a closed-off apparatus regime, which only gives orders but permits no control over itself, the formation of groupings is generally the only possible way to make corrections in apparatus policy.

The resolution of December 5, 1923, also spoke very distinctly about this, condemning a bureaucratic regime precisely because it considers “every criticism a manifestation of factionalism.” Since that resolution was adopted unanimously, two and a half years have gone by, during which the apparatus regime has been deepened and intensified, and consequently the tendency for factional groupings to be produced by the apparatus regime has also deepened. The result of this has been the fragmentation of the party cadres, the removal from the party leadership of valuable elements representing a significant portion of its accumulated experience, and the systematic narrowing down and ideological impoverishment of the leadership core. That precisely this process is going on before our eyes, and with growing rapidity, and that it has not yet completed its destructive work — of that no serious Communist can have any doubt. The concentration of the all-powerful party apparatus in the hands of an ever more restricted leadership core gives rise to a new and extremely acute contradiction — between the growing might of the apparatus and the ideological enfeeblement of the leading center. Under these conditions fear of deviations is bound to grow progressively, with inevitable consequences in the form of so-called organizational measures, which narrow down still further the range of those called upon to be part of the leadership and which push them even further down the road of bureaucratization of the party regime.

At every stage in this process of fragmentation of the leading cadres, the apparatus leadership surrounds itself with illusory promises: If we can only deal with this one new obstacle, after that we can again, without interference, “present questions,” “draw in the masses,” “check,” and “rectify.” But in reality, under the conditions of the bureaucratic shift in party leadership, each new apparatus campaign to crush an opposition automatically produces new fissures and new dangers. That the process did not end with the Leningrad group is absolutely and completely clear. The fissures that exist in the central leadership core will not develop openly as long as the apparatus is still involved in its fight against the old (1923) Opposition and the new one of 1925. At a certain stage, and one that is not so far off, a new section of the apparatus will inevitably be thrown into opposition by the course of events — with all the ensuing consequences. Only the blind can fail to see that.

Dictatorship of the Party or Dictatorship of the Class?

At the last plenum a dispute was brought up again — only in passing, to be sure — over the dictatorship of the proletariat versus the dictatorship of the party. Abstractly posed, such a dispute can easily founder in scholasticism. Of course, the foundation of our regime is the dictatorship of the class. But this in turn assumes that it is the class not only “in itself^’ but also “for itself,” that is, that it is a class that hits come to self-consciousness through its vanguard, which is to say, through the party. Without this, the dictatorship could not exist. To present matters as though the party were only the teacher, while the class puts the dictatorship into effect, is to prettify the truth of the matter. Dictatorship is the most highly concentrated function of a class, and therefore the basic instrument of a dictatorship is a party. In the most fundamental respects a class realizes its dictatorship through a party. That is why Lenin spoke not only of the class dictatorship but also of the dictatorship of the party and, in a certain sense, made them identical. Is it correct to make such an identification? That depends on the actual development of the process itself. If the dictatorship develops in such a way as to permit and encourage the advance of democratic methods in the party and working class organizations, with the maintenance of the proper "proportions” between workers’ democracy and peasant democracy, the identification of the dictatorship of the class with that of the party is fully and completely justified historically and politically. But if a disproportion is found between the peasantry, or the private sector of the economy in general, and industry; if this disproportion finds political expression in the development of peasant democracy at the expense, to a certain extent, of workers’ democracy — then the dictatorship inevitably falls into a bureaucratic-apparatus deviation. Under these conditions the apparatus is in a position of command over and above the party and tries, through it, to take command over the class. The above-cited formula of Comrade Uglanov’s gives a finished expression to this kind of regime. Whoever says that the dictatorship of the class is not the dictatorship of the party should, it would seem, first understand that the dictatorship of the class is not the dictatorship of the party apparatus. The dictatorship of the party does not contradict the dictatorship of the class either theoretically or practically, but is the expression of it, if the regime of workers’ democracy is constantly developed more and more. On the other hand, increasing coercion by the apparatus, in itself the result of the pressure of opposing class tendencies, inevitably confronts the party with a growing danger of shifts away from the class line. This danger is disguised by the apparatus regime to the extent that it tries to identify itself with the dictatorship of the class. The party serves the apparatus only as a means of probing the “moods” of the working class, so that, “on the basis of such checking,” it can “rectify the line.” Between Uglanov’s definition of the essence of party democracy and the denial of the dictatorship of the party there is, then, a profound inner connection. The bureaucratic regime aspires to theoretical formulation. Bureaucratic theory has always been known for its poverty. Bureaucratism has always been drawn to the formula “L’état, c’est moi.” “I am the state; I am the party” [says the bureaucrat]. Uglanov’s way of posing the question essentially liquidates the party, dissolves it into the “moods” of the working class and replaces it by the centralized, self-sufficient party apparatus. Stalin’s way of putting the question of the dictatorship of the class, counterposing it to the dictatorship of the party, leads inevitably to the dictatorship of the apparatus, because a class with a disorganized vanguard (and the lack of free discussion, of control over the apparatus, and of election rights means a disorganized vanguard) cannot help but become a mere object in the hands of the leadership of a centralized apparatus, which in turn removes itself further and further from the party and is more and more bound to come under the pressure of hostile class forces.

Conclusions

In sketching out this tendency, we of course do not suppose for a moment that it will become a reality. In the working class, in the party, and in the party apparatus itself there are powerful forces opposing this historical trend, which inevitably flows from bureaucratism. The sooner and more completely the party realizes the threatening trend, and the more openly and daringly the best elements in the party apparatus help the party to become aware of the danger and turn the wheel — the fewer upheavals there will be and the smoother and less injurious the change of the party regime will be. From everything we have said above it is absolutely clear that a change of regime in the direction of workers’ democracy is inseparable from a change in economic policy in the direction of genuine industrialization and a rectification of the line of the party leadership toward genuine internationalism.

The further development of the bureaucratic regime leads fatally toward one-man rule, with an equally fatal reduction in the ideological quality of the leadership. Democratization of the party regime not only permits but requires the reestablishment of collective leadership on a higher political and cultural level. The course toward industrialization, the course toward assuring the proletariat its rightful place in the economy and cultural life of the country, the course toward workers’ democracy and, above all, party democracy, and finally, the course toward collective leadership of the party thus all merge together into a single task.