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2.
"Though our modern attitudes make us distrustful of the prestige i absolute monarchy" -- wrote Augustin Thierry in 1828 -- "there are ye other systems against which we should be on our guard, those of legal order and the representative system."41 Bentham42 said almost the same thing. But at that period their warnings went unheard. People there believed in parliamentarism, and replied to those few critics by this argument: "The parliamentary system has not yet said its last word; it should only be judged where it is based on universal suffrage."
Since then, universal suffrage has become part of the pattern of our lives. After having been so long opposed to it, the bourgeoisie have in the end understood that this change will in no way threaten their domination, and they have decided to accept it. In the United States universal suffrage has been functioning in full freedom for nearly a century, and it is making headway in France and Germany. But the representative system has not changed; it remains what it was in the days of Thierry and Bentham; universal suffrage has not ameliorated it, and its faults are no less glaring. That is why today it is not merely the revolutionaries like Proudhon43 who overwhelm it with their criticism; it is also the moderates, like Mill44 and Spencer45 who cry out: "Keep an eye on parliamentarism!" One can also sense this feeling among the broad public. Using facts generally known and recognized, one could at this moment fill whole volumes with explaining the drawbacks of representative government, sure of finding an echo among the vast mass of readers. It has been judged -- and condemned.
Its partisans -- and they include people of good faith if not good judgment -- do not fail to boast of the services that, according to them, this institution had rendered to us. To listen to them, it is to the representative system that we owe the political liberties we possess today, unknown under the former absolute monarchies. But is it not taking cause for effect to argue in this way, or, rather, one of two simultaneous effects for the cause?
In the last resort, it is not the representative system that has given us -- or even guaranteed -- the various freedoms we have conquered in the past century. It is the great movement of liberal thought, emerging from the revolution, that has seized them from government at the same time as it insisted on national representation; and it is still this spirit of liberty, of revolt, that has been able to sustain them despite the constant infringements by government and even by the parliaments themselves. Of its own accord, representative government does not offer real liberties, and it can accommodate itself remarkably well to despotism. Freedoms have to be seized from it, as much as they do from absolute kings; and once they have been gained they must be defended against parliament as much as they were against a king, day by day, inch by inch, without ever letting down one's guard; this succeeds only when there is a leisure class in the country, jealous of its freedoms and always ready to defend them by extra-parliamentary agitation against the least infringement. Where such a class does not exist, and where there is no unity above defending political liberties, they will not exist, no matter whether there is a nation-wide system of representation. Parliament itself becomes the monarch's ante-chamber, as in the Balkans, in Turkey, and in Austria.
The freedoms of England are often cited and thoughtlessly associated with the institution of parliament. It is forgotten by what means -- all of them insurrectional -- each of them was snatched from the very same parliament. Freedom of the press, criticisms of the laws, freedom of meeting and association -- all were extorted from parliament by force, by agitations that threatened to become rebellions. It was by establishing trade unions and practising strike action despite the edicts of Parliament and the hangings of 1813, and by wrecking the factories hardly fifty years ago, that the English workers won the right to associate and to strike. It was by beating with the Hyde Park railings the police who denied them access that the people of London once again recently affirmed its right to demonstrate in the streets and parks of the capital even against a constitutional ministry. It has not been by parliamentary jousting but by extra-parliamentary agitation, by calling out a hundred thousand people to growl and yell before the houses of aristocrats and ministers, that the English middle class has defended its liberties. As for Parliament, it impinges continually on the country's political rights, and is ready to suppress them with a stroke of the pen if it does not find itself faced by a mass of people ready to rebel. But what in fact happens to the inviolability of the home and the secrecy of correspondence, when the bourgeoisie chooses to renounce it in order to obtain from the government a pretence of protection against the revolutionaries?
To attribute to parliaments what is due to general progress, to imagine that having a constitution is sufficient for the enjoyment of freedom, is to sin against the most elementary rules of historic judgment.
Besides, the question does not lie in that direction. It is not a matter of knowing whether the representative system does not offer a few advantages over a pack of flunkeys exploiting for their profit the caprices of an absolute master. If the representative system has taken root in Europe, it is because it has accorded better with the phase of capitalist exploitation which we have gone through during the nineteenth century but which draws towards its end. It certainly offered more security to the industrial operator and the merchant, to whom it transferred the power that had fallen out of the hands of the nobility.
But monarchy also, as well as its formidable inconveniences, could offer certain advantages over the reign of the feudal lords. It also was the necessary product of its age. But for that reason should we remain forever under the authority of a king and his lackeys?
What is important to us, men at the end of the 19th century, is to know whether the faults of representative government are not as glaring and as insupportable as those of absolute power were in the past; whether the obstacles it offers to future development are not just as troublesome, so far as our century is concerned, as the obstacles offered by the monarchy in the last century? Finally, whether a simple "representative" patching up of the political scene will be enough to meet the new economic phase whose outcome we foresee. This is what we have to study, rather than endlessly discussing the historical role of the bourgeois political regime.
Once the question is posed in these terms, there is no longer any doubt of the answer.
Certainly the representative system, that compromise with the old regime which has retained in its government all the prerogatives of absolute power while subordinating them to a more or less fictional popular control, has had its day. Now it has become a hindrance to progress. Its faults no longer depend on men alone, on the individuals in power, they are inherent in the system, and are so profound that no modification can adapt it to the new needs of our epoch. The representative system was organized by the bourgeoisie to ensure their domination, and it will disappear with them. For the new economic phase that is about to begin we must seek a new form of political organization, based on a principle quite different from that of representation. The logic of events imposes it.
Representative government shares all the inherent faults of every kind of government, and, far from mitigating them, it merely accentuates them and creates new faults. One of the most profound sayings of Rousseau on governments in general applies to elective government as much as to all the other kinds: If one is to abdicate one's rights into the hands of an elected assembly, must it not be composed of angels, of superhuman beings? And the claws and horns would be tearing at such ethereal beings, as soon as they tried to govern the human herd!
Like the rule of despots, representative government, whether it is called Parliament, Convention or Council of the Commune, or whether it gives itself any other more or less absurd title, and whether it is nominated by the prefects of a Bonaparte or arch-liberally elected by an insurgent city, will always seek to extend its legislation, to increase its power by meddling with everything, all the time killing the initiative of the individual and the group to supplant them by law. Its natural tendency will inevitably be to take hold of the individual from childhood, and to lead him, law by law, threat leading to punishment, from the cradle to the grave, without ever setting its prey free from its lofty surveillance. Have you ever heard of an elected assembly that declared itself incompetent of dealing with any kind of question? The more revolutionary it claims to be, the more it will seize hold of anything that is outside its competence. To legislate in every aspect of human activity, to meddle in the smallest details of the lives of its "subjects" -- that is the very essence of the State, of government. To create a government, constitutional or otherwise, is to constitute a force that will in the end set out to seize control of everything, to regulate all the functions of society, without recognizing any restraint but that which we are able to oppose to it from time to time by means of agitation or insurrection. Parliamentary government -- as it has amply proved -- is no exception to the rule.
"The mission of the State," we have been told in order to delude us, "is to protect the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the working classes against the privileged classes." We know how governments have fulfilled such missions; they have done the reverse. Faithful to its origin, representative government has always been the protector of privilege against those who set out to free themselves from it. Representative government in particular, with the connivance of the people, has organized the defence of the privileges of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie against the aristocracy on one side and the exploited on the other -- showing itself modest, polite, well mannered to the first, and ferocious towards the others. That is why even the slightest of laws protecting the worker, no matter how harmless it may be, can be wrung from a parliament only by an agitation that goes near to insurrection. Remember merely the struggles it was necessary to wage, the agitations to which people had to devote themselves, in order to obtain from the British Houses of Parliament, the Swiss Federal Council, the French Chambers, a few wretched laws limiting the hours of work! The first legislation of this kind, voted in England, was extorted only by putting barrels of powder under the machines in the factories.
Elsewhere, in countries where the aristocracy has not yet been destroyed by the revolution, the lords and the bourgeois get along marvellously together. "Grant me the right to legislate, milord, and I will mount guards around your castle!" -- and he mounts the guard as long as he does not feel threatened.
It took forty years of agitation, which sometimes carried fire through the countryside, before the English parliament decided to guarantee to the farmer the benefit of improvements he made on land he held by lease. As to the famous "land law" voted for Ireland, it was necessary, as Gladstone himself admitted, for the country to rise in a general insurrection, openly refusing to pay rents and defending themselves against evictions by boycott, fires and the killing of landlords before the bourgeois would vote the wretched law that purported to protect the hungry land against the lords who starved it.
But if it is a matter of protecting the interests of the capitalist, threatened by insurrection or even agitation, then representative government, that organ of capitalist domination, will turn savage. It attacks, and it does so with more confidence and baseness than any despot. The law against socialists in Germany is the equivalent of the edict of Nantes; and not even Catherine II after the peasant rising of Pugachev46 or Louis XVI after the wheat riots displayed such ferocity as the two "National Assemblies" of 1848 and 1871, whose members shouted: "Kill the wolves, the she-wolves and their cubs," and unanimously, without a single opposing voice, rejoiced in their slaughter by soldiers drunken with blood! The anonymous beast with six hundred heads showed himself able to surpass Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and their kind!
It will be the same wherever there is a representative government, whether it is elected in the regular way or is imposed in the lurid light of an insurrection. Either economic equality will prevail in the nation and the free and equal citizens will no longer surrender their rights into anyone else's hands and will seek out instead a new organization that will permit them to manage their own affairs; or, there will still be a minority who will dominate the masses on the economic level, and it is then that the masses must be watchful. Representatives elected by that minority will act appropriately. They will legislate to maintain its privileges and will act with violence and massacre against those who do not submit.
It is impossible for us to analyse at the present moment all the faults of representative government; that would take up whole volumes. In limiting ourselves entirely to what is essential, we can avoid the trap of pedantic classification. Yet there is still one fact that calls for discussion.
It is a strange fact indeed! Representative government had as its aim to put an end to personal government; it set out to place power in the hands of a class, and not of an individual. Yet it has always shown the tendency to revert to personal government and to submit itself to a single man.
The reason for this anomaly is quite simple. In fact, having armed the government with thousands of prerogatives which are still from the past; having confided to it the management of all matters that are important to a country, and given it a budget of billions, was it possible to confide to the mob in parliament the administration of such numberless concerns? Thus it was necessary to nominate an executive power -- the ministry -- which was invested with all these quasi-royal prerogatives. What a miserable authority, in fact, was that of Louis XIV, who boasted of being the State, in comparison with that of a constitutional chief minister in our day!
It is true that the Chamber could overturn such a minister -- but for what reason? To name a successor who would be invested with the same powers and whom it would be forced, if it were consistent, to dismiss in a week? So it prefers to keep the man it has chosen until the country cries out loudly enough, and then it discards him to recall the man it has dismissed two years ago. It becomes a seesaw: Gladstone-Beaconsfield, Beaconsfield-Gladstone. And basically it changes nothing, for the country is always ruled by one man, the head of the cabinet.
But when the choice falls on a clever man who guarantees "order" -- that is to say internal exploitation and external expansion -- then the parliament submits to all his caprices and arms him with ever new powers. However much contempt he may show for the constitution, whatever the scandals of his government, they are accepted, and even if there are quibbles over details, he is given a free hand with everything of importance. Bismarck is a living example of this; Guizot, Pitt and Palmerston were such in preceding generations.
That is understandable: all government has a tendency to become personal since that is its origin and its essence. Whether the parliament is elected by property-owners or by universal suffrage, even if it is named only by workers and consists only of workers, it will always search for the man on whom it can unload the cares of government and to whom in turn it will submit. As long as we confide to a small group all the economic, political, military, financial and industrial prerogatives with which we arm them today, this small group will necessarily be inclined, like a detachment of soldiers on a campaign, to submit to a single chief.
This happens even in undisturbed times. But let a war blaze on the frontier, let a civil struggle start up in the interior, and then the first ambitious newcomer, the first clever adventurer, seizing control of the machine with a thousand ramifications which we call the administration, will be able to impose himself on the nation. The parliament will no more be capable of preventing him than five hundred men picked by chance in the street; on the contrary, it will paralyse the resistance. The two adventurers who carried the name of Bonaparte did not succeed by chance. As to the efficacy of the parliamentary debating society in resisting coups d'Etat, France knows something about this. Even in our day, was it the Chamber that saved France from MacMahon's47 attempted coup? As we now know, it was the extra-parliamentary committees. Perhaps the example of England will be cited. But it should not boast too loudly of having retained its parliamentary institutions intact during the nineteenth century. It is true that it has managed throughout that century to avoid class warfare, but everything leads one to believe that it will break out there too, and that Parliament will not emerge intact from that struggle and will founder in one way or another during the march of the revolution.
If we want, at the time of the coming revolution, to leave the gates wide open to reaction, to monarchy perhaps, we have only to confide our affairs to a representative government, to a ministry armed with all the powers it possesses today. Reactionary dictatorship, first tinged with red, and then turning blue in proportion as it feels itself more securely in the saddle, will not be far behind. It will have at its direction all the instruments of domination; it will find them all at its service.
But even if it is the source of so much evil, does not the representative system at least render some services in the progressive and peaceful development of societies? Has it no perhaps contributed to the decentralization of power which has asserted itself in our century? Has it not perhaps helped to hinder wars? Has it not bowed to the exigencies of the moment and sacrificed to time certain antiquated institutions, so as to prevent civil war? Does it not offer at least certain guarantees, a hope of progress, of amelioration within the nation?
What a bitter irony is to be found in each of these questions and in so many others that nevertheless spring up as soon as one judges the institution! For all the history of our century is there to condemn it.
Faithful to the royalist tradition in its modern guise, which is Jacobinism, parliaments have done nothing other than concentrating powers in the hands of the governments. Bureaucracy carried to an extreme becomes the characteristic of representative government. Since the beginning of this century the talk is all of decentralization, of autonomy, and nothing is done but centralize and kill the last vestiges of autonomy. Even Switzerland is suffering from this influence, and England submits to it. If it had not been for the resistance of manufacturers and merchants, we should today be in the position of having to ask permission in Paris to kill a cow in Brive-la-gaillarde. Everything falls more and more under the high hand of government. All that is left to us is the management of industry and commerce, of production and consumption, and the social democrats -- blinded with authoritarian prejudices -- already dream of the day when in the parliament of Berlin they can regulate manufacturing and consumption over the whole surface of Germany.
Has the representative system, which we are told is so pacific, saved us from wars? Never has there been so much extermination as under the representative system. The bourgeoisie needs to establish its domination over markets, and that domination is gained only at the expense of others, by shot and shell. Lawyers and journalists like to talk of military glory, and there is nobody more warlike than stay-at-home warriors.
But is it not true that parliaments lend themselves to the needs of the moment and are ready to modify institutions that are in decay? As in the days of the Convention it was necessary to put a knife to the throats of the Conventioneers to extort from them nothing more than agreement to faits accomplis, so today we have to stage a full insurrection to tear from the "representatives of the people" the smallest of reforms.
As to the improvement of the elected body, never has there been seen a generation of parliaments like that in our day. Like every institution in its decadence, they carry on while their condition gets worse. People used to talk of the corruption of parliaments in the days of Louis Philippe. Speak today to the few honest men who have wandered into these morasses and they will tell you:" I am sick at heart with it all!" Parliamentarism inspires only disgust in those who see it close at hand.
But is it really impossible to improve it? Would not a new element, the working class element, infuse it with new blood. Very well, let us analyse the constitution of representative assemblies, study their functioning, and we shall see that such dreams are as naive as the thought of marrying a king to a peasant girl in the hope of being given a succession of good little kings!