Marx On Centralization

Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition
Author(s): John H. Kautsky

Source: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 1997), pp. 379-
400
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45302044
Accessed: 03-05-2023 19:05 +00:00
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Communist and Post-Communist Studies
This content downloaded from 91.230.225.160 on Wed, 03 May 2023 19:05:38 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Communist and Post-Communist Studies , Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 379-400, 1997
© 1998 The Regents of the University of California
Pergamon Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. Printed in Great Britain
0967-067X/98 $19.00+0.00
PII: S0967-067X(97)00015-9
Centralization in the Marxist and in the

Leninist Tradition
John H. Kautsky
Department of Political Science, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
The very different positions of Marxists and Leninists on the issue of centralization of
political and economic institutions show that, though using the same terminology, they
were committed to different ideologies. Leninists were modernizing revolutionaries in
underdeveloped countries seeking their rapid industrialization. They relied on
centralized revolutionary movements, which, in power, formed centralized bureauc-
racies that advanced industrialization through mass persuasion, regimentation and
terror as well as central planning.
Marxists, associated with multifarious labor movements in industrialized countries,
hoped to advance and empower the working class. Marx and Engels were vague on the
subject of centralization, but condemned bureaucracy and came to favor the
decentralization identified with the Paris Commune. Karl Kautsky and Otto Bauer
advocated the operation of industry by local governments, cooperatives and trade
unions and only minimal state ownership and sharply attacked bureaucracy. Policies of
centralization were appropriate to the character and goals of Leninist movements but
inappropriate to those of Marxist ones. © 1998 The Regents of the University of
California
To understand an ideology as a political phenomenon, one must grasp the values and interests
it represents and see them as related to the needs of specific groups in a particular environment.
In this light, Marxism and Leninism, even though they employ the same vocabulary, are widely
differing ideologies. Marxism, a product of Western industrial countries in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, represented the needs and interests of intellectuals intent on
improving the status of labor under capitalism and hoping eventually to create a classless
society. Leninism, a product of underdeveloped Russia in the early twentieth century and
subsequently of other underdeveloped countries, represented the needs and interests of
intellectuals desiring the rapid modernization of their countries. The designation by the same
label "Marxist" of European labor movements or social-democratic thinkers and of peasant
guerrilla armies or Afghan and Ethiopian allies of the Soviet Union is not conducive to an
understanding of their political character.
Similarly, the identification of Marxism with the Soviet Union and its institutions and policies
is not to be taken for granted, as it has often been for the past 80 years, ever since Lenin seized
power in the Russian Revolution in the name of Marxism. Thus, it is now frequently asserted
and widely believed that the collapse of the highly centralized Soviet regime and economy has
379
380 Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition : J. H. Kautsky
discredited Marxist reliance on centralized institutions.

Grave doubt is cast on the identification of Marxism with the Soviet Union even by such
simple facts as that the fathers of Marxism, Marx and Engels, had died, respectively, 34 and 22
years before the Russian Revolution; that mass labor movements and parties with Marxist
programs and under Marxist leadership had developed in Europe, notably in Germany and
Austria, decades before the Russian Revolution (the German Social-Democratic Party became
the largest party in the German empire by 1890); and that a huge Marxist literature had been
created by European intellectuals long before 1917, some of which, along with responses by
non-Marxists, remains influential to this day. Obviously, Marxism was well established in the
realms of political theory and political practice long before there was a Soviet Union or anyone,
including Marxists, could imagine such an entity. What is more - and more important here -
Marxism grew out of and was relevant to economic and political conditions very different from
those giving rise to and then evolving in the Soviet Union.
Once Leninism and the historical development of the Soviet Union have been separated and
distinguished from Marxism, it can no longer simply be assumed and asserted that Marxists
favor highly centralized institutions. The position of Karl Marx and those of his followers who,
like Marx himself, were, in their theorizing and their policies, concerned with the development
of capitalist industry and its working class, cannot be established by viewing the Soviet Union
but only by an examination of the writings of these thinkers. I will take at least a quick look at
them here and I will also contrast the Marxist tradition on the subject of centralization to the
Leninist one and will suggest some explanations of the differences between these two
traditions.
That the two traditions are quite different is not surprising in view of the different origins and
historical roles of Marxism and Leninism. Indeed, their difference on the question of
centralization is but one integral aspect of the wide differences between the two ideologies. I
focus on it here to point to these wide differences and thus to advance our understanding of both
Marxism and Leninism by liberating each from confusion with the other.1
Leninism
Modernizing Movements in Underdeveloped Countries

In industrially underdeveloped, agrarian Russia and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth
century, Marxism was largely irrelevant, assuming as it did the existence of highly developed
industry and a rapidly growing mass labor movement as well as shrinking agriculture and a
disappearing peasantry. This rendered faithful Marxists in Russia, like the Mensheviks,
politically ineffective. The successful revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, also spoke only the
language of Marx, but in fact adapted their policies to the underdeveloped environment of
Russia. They thought of their revolution as a proletarian one, which was wholly impossible as
Marxists had envisaged it, but they did make a revolution that was possible in an
underdeveloped country.
Partly because it employed Marxist terminology, partly because Russia is a European country,
and partly because modernizing revolutions were by 1917 not yet recognized as a distinct type
of revolution, the Russian Revolution was and often still is not seen as such a revolution but
rather as similar to the French Revolution or, more often, as the socialist revolution predicted by
1 . I have elaborated and defended the argument that Marxism and Leninism are two distinct ideologies expressed in the
same terminology in my book Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism-Leninism. An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge
(Kautsky, J. H., 1994).
Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition: J. H. Kautsky 381
Marx. It can be much better understood as one of the modernizing revolutions that was merely
most visible to Western eyes because of the location and size of Russia and that turned out to
be the most successful one with respect to its objective of industrialization. It was not unique,
for modernizing movements arose and often came to power in much of the non-industrial world
roughly through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
To explain Leninist policies on centralization and to distinguish them from Marxist ones, it
will be useful to regard the Leninist tradition in the context of the tradition of such modernizing
movements in underdeveloped countries. These movements, whether they could mobilize
millions of peasants or merely a few army companies, can be referred to as modernizing,
because they were typically initiated and led by modernizers, that is, individuals drawn from the
small minority educated and trained by Western standards. They were inspired by the values of
industrial societies, such as the belief in the desirability and possibility of material progress,
greater equality, mass participation in politics, and government representing the masses, all of
which were subversive and revolutionary in the context of areas governed by traditional
aristocracies and/or foreign colonialism.
These modern values could come to a few natives in the form of different Western ideologies
to which they had been exposed. Marxism was but one of these, but a very attractive one
because of its emphasis on and promise of revolution. To be sure, Marx's proletarian, anti-
capitalist revolution was impossible in areas with little or no capitalism or working class. As was
generally true of Western ideologies, a new substance had to be infused into their words, like
Marx's "revolution", to make them relevant in an underdeveloped environment. As a result,
political movements and policies of one type came to be described by a vocabulary that had
earlier been used to describe movements and policies of a wholly different type in a different
environment. This may prove to be politically useful, but has led to immense confusion among
both participants and observers of modernizing movements, revolutions, and regimes.
Modernizers Oppose Localism of Old Regime

Modernizing revolutions led by urban modernizers typically come to power by gaining control
of the central governments of their countries. That control may be handed to them, more or less
voluntarily, by a withdrawing colonial power, as in India and Ghana, it may be yielded by a
collapsing old imperial regime, as in China, Russia, Turkey, and Ethiopia, and it may be seized
in a coup d'etat more or less peacefully, as in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya. More or less protracted
warfare - and hence peasant involvement - can also bring modernizers to power, as in
Indonesia, Algeria, and Cuba, but more often they gain power relatively quickly and smoothly,
for their aristocratic enemies may be ill prepared to confront either revolutionary masses or
revolutionary factions of their army. Sometimes the initial seizure of power consists simply of
the occupation of the presidential or imperial palace and a few key buildings, like army barracks
and radio stations.
Winning control of the capital city and of the top governmental positions is, however, by no
means tantamount to controlling the entire country and society. Traditional and colonial rulers
had relatively limited objectives, chiefly that of gaining wealth through the exploitation of their
subjects and their natural resources. This could be achieved most economically by sharing the
wealth and cooperating with and relying on local rulers, aristocrats and chiefs, landowners and
clergymen, resulting in a highly decentralized system of indirect rule.
Modernizers, like Lenin, have much more far-reaching goals than the regimes they succeed.
They wish to tum their backward societies into modem ones, to affect the lives of all their
members by such processes as industrialization and land reform that threaten the very existence
382 Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition: J. H. Kautsky
of the aristocracy. To carry out the requisite policies, modernizers can thus certainly not rely on
power holders who may well remain entrenched in their local and regional realms after the
modernizers come to control the central government.
Clearly, then, modernizers must seek to use what weak central bureaucracies, civilian and
military, they inherited from the old regime and to restructure and strengthen them or, like the
Bolsheviks, they must build up entirely new, powerful central institutions to overcome the
resistance to their modernizing policies of local power holders and often of the peasantry under
the control and influence of the latter. Modernizers are, then, necessarily centralizers.
Confronting those still in control of local governments as their enemies, they come to identify
decentralization with reaction.
Attempts at Industrialization Produce Centralization

The modernizing leaders of revolutionary movements in underdeveloped countries often refer to
themselves as Marxists and more generally as socialists and, most frequently, as nationalists, all
Western labels quite inappropriate in their original meaning to underdeveloped environments.
Modernizers could be civilians, like Lenin and Nehru, Sun and Mao, Sukarno and Nkrumah, Paz
Estenssoro and Castro, or army officers, like Kemal and Riza Khan, Kassem and Nasser,
Qaddafi and Mengistu, Obregon and Perón. Much as such leaders and many others and their
movements and countries differed and regardless of whether they thought of themselves as
influenced by Karl Marx, they were all committed to modernize and Westernize their countries,
to catch up with and overtake the United States, in the words of a prominent Soviet slogan under
Stalin, the most successful industrializer of them all.
When Stalin said in 1925: "the conversion of our country from an agrarian into an industrial
country able to produce the machinery it needs by its own efforts - that is the essence, the basis
of our general line" (Stalin, 1939, p. 276), he stressed that the principal means to the
modernizers' goal of a modern society was industrialization. It would not only create powerful
positions for people like themselves, often an unemployed intelligentsia, but it would turn
masses of backward peasants into workers with modern attitudes and values and would raise
their standard of living and ability to participate in politics. Last but not least, it would free their
country from economic dependence on foreign colonialism and, where it existed, from colonial
government and it would permit the creation of a modem military to defend that freedom, which
would in tum permit further industrialization and thus progress to modernity.
Centralization is a consequence, intended or not, of modernizers' attempts at industrialization.
To satisfy them, industrialization must proceed at a forced pace and succeed rapidly, in a
generation rather than a century, for, in the light of their modem values and of the model of the
West, conditions of backward agrarianism seem intolerable to them. At the same time,
industrialization has to be accomplished, as far as possible, independently of the West and of
Western capital, for economic dependence is equated with continued colonialism and hence
incompatible with their drive for independence.
Even if there is foreign or native capital invested in industry - there was more of it in Russia
at the tum of the century than in other underdeveloped countries - that can be expropriated or
taken under its control by the modernizing regime, it is far from sufficient to achieve the rapid
industrialization of an overwhelmingly agrarian country. The revolutionary modernizers, once in
power, must then rely on their regime to extract from a mostly very poor population the huge
amounts of capital that are needed. Relatively little can be raised in the form of taxes, most of
it has to be created by the hard work of workers, peasants and what few technicians there may
be.
Only a strong regime with highly centralized institutions, like the Stalinist one, can extract the
requisite taxes and labor from the population. Only such a regime can convert a large segment
of the peasantry into workers and organize them to build the infrastructure of industrialization.
Only it can induce the remaining peasants to give up much of their product to feed the new
workers and perhaps, in the early stages, to provide export food with which to earn foreign
credit.
Only a highly centralized regime, like the Stalinist one, can make workers and peasants,
originally mobilized to support the modernizers with promises of a better life, accept a lower
standard of living and restrictions on their freedom, so that a minimum of what they produce
will be consumed by them and a maximum can be invested in industrialization. Only a strong
regime can develop centralized planning and control the economy in accord with its plans to
concentrate all possible efforts on the task of industrialization, especially by assigning priority
to the production of producer goods and sometimes of weapons over that of consumer goods.
Mass Persuasion, Regimentation and Terror

The problems of mobilizing and organizing great numbers of workers and peasants and also of
various kinds of professionals, technicians and white-collar workers can be solved by the
application of three interrelated methods. One is that of mass persuasion, which by means of
propaganda seeks to inspire people to act as the regime wants them to act and by means of
censorship seeks to eliminate views hostile to the regime's policies. The second method is that
of mass regimentation, ranging from forced labor in prison camps through the use of conscripted
soldiers for economic projects and the assignment of individuals to particular jobs to the more
or less compulsory membership in various youth and women's organizations, trade unions and
professional associations, and social and sports clubs, all of which give the regime control over
manpower and some of which, being attractive to their members, serve also as instruments of
persuasion. The third method is that of mass terror, designed to inspire fear of the regime in all
and especially in any potentially hostile or recalcitrant individuals who are made to feel isolated
and hopelessly weak.
The drafting and execution of a central economic plan and the building and operation of
industry, whether all or only part of it is state-owned, as well as the organization of agriculture
all require large centralized bureaucracies. So do the three methods of controlling the
population, for example, educational bureaucracies, bureaucracies controlling all the media of
information and the arts, parties (or, typically, the single party representing the modernizing
movement or its governing faction), trade-union bureaucracies, police and military forces.
The degree to which the various elements of the three above-mentioned methods are
employed, the way in which various of their elements are combined, the degree of centralization
and the size of the bureaucracies administering them and their success in performing their
functions all vary greatly in countries with modernizing regimes. That is obviously also true of
the degree of success of the industrialization drive itself. Success or failure depends, no doubt,
on many factors, some quite beyond the control of the modernizers, such as the level of
industrialization at the time of the modernizing revolution, the availability of natural resources
and skilled manpower, the support or opposition of foreign governments, the degree of support
and of resistance, active or passive, among native groups, and the degree of unity among the
modernizers themselves.
If success of a modernizing regime in industrialization is defined simply and regardless of the
cost by the degree to which a formerly agrarian society is converted into an industrial one,
regimes inspired by Marxist terminology range as widely as the non-"Marxist" or non-
Communist ones. Indeed, the range from the Soviet Union through China, Vietnam, Albania and
Cuba to Laos, Ethiopia and Mongolia may be wider than that from India, Mexico and Turkey
to Libya and Ghana. Whether the modernizers think of themselves as Marxists and employ the
language of Marxism or not would not, then, seem to be a significant factor affecting their
industrializing success.
Centralization of governmental institutions and the use of the methods of mass persuasion,
mass regimentation and mass terror under modernizing regimes are not necessarily associated
with successful industrialization. They may have evolved in the course of the revolutionary
struggles against native aristocrats and colonial forces that brought the modernizers to power.
They can be employed in efforts by modernizers to maintain themselves in power not only
against their earlier opponents but also against rival factions of modernizers. And they may be
employed in a more or less deliberate effort to imitate Stalinist policies, which, given their
success before most modernizing regimes came to power, could serve as a model to some of
them in their industrialization efforts.
The development of highly centralized governmental and economic institutions is, then,
clearly associated with the Leninist-Stalinist modernizing regime with its successful industrial-
ization drive in the Soviet Union, but also with Leninism and with modernizing regimes
generally whether they were or professed to be inspired by what came to be known as Marxism-
Leninism or not and whether their industrialization drives succeeded or not.
Modernizing Movements Become Centralized Single Parties

Centralization is characteristic of modernizing regimes also because the leaders of the
modernizing revolution tend to be committed to at least some degree of centralization of their
movement. Surely few such leaders were as explicitly and as long before they came to power
insistent on fashioning a highly centralized, disciplined and tightly organized movement as was
Lenin. His Bolsheviks, shaped by their struggle against the autocratic Tsarist regime as well as
their conflicts with rival revolutionary factions, were described by Lenin and seen by others as
a party of a new type. The creation of such a party has often been called Lenin's most distinct
contribution to - or deviation from - Marxism.
Within the social-democratic Second International, to which Lenin's party belonged until the
outbreak of World War I, the Bolsheviks were certainly unique with respect to their organization
(that they differed more broadly from Western socialists with respect to their modernizing rather
than laborite goals was not yet recognized by either the Bolsheviks themselves or the Western
socialists). Compared with subsequent modernizing revolutionary movements, however, the
Bolsheviks appear more as an extreme than as a unique case. Emphasis on secret and tight
organization and on unquestioning obedience to the central leadership seems a likely response
of revolutionary movements without mass support engaged in often literally mortal combat with
the regime in power. One would expect this to be the more true the more repressive the old
regime, more true, then, in Tsarist Russia than, for example, in British India.
Furthermore, modernizing revolutionaries, passionately convinced of the goodness of their
cause and appropriateness of their methods, are not likely to be tolerant of those who disagree
with them, be they linked with the old regime or with rival factions of modernizers. Once in
power, they will seek to outlaw and destroy the organizations of their opponents, which is all the
easier as in underdeveloped countries, where the huge majority of the population knows no
organization other than the village community, there are no mass organizations.
There then emerges the single party system, which may once have seemed uniquely
associated with the Russian Revolution and with Communism, but has in fact been the typical
Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition : J. H. Kautsky 385
outcome of modernizing revolutions. Only fairly exceptionally and often only years after their
revolutions have modernizing movements been unable to maintain their monopoly of power and
to prevent the emergence of other parties, as in India, Turkey and Mexico.
Where and as long as the single party maintains its monopoly of power, the line between it
and the government inevitably becomes blurred. If the party, then, is highly centralized, so is the
government. Here, too, the Soviet Union furnishes the extreme example with its Stalin
Constitution of 1936 providing for an elaborately decentralized federal system of Soviet
republics, autonomous republics and various autonomous regions within them, which was yet,
in fact, highly centralized because all territorial governmental bodies were run by the centralized
Communist Party. The tendency of modernizing movements to be centralized, then, becomes
another major reason for the tendency of modernizing regimes to be centralized.
Internal Conflict and Corruption Lead to Decentralization

Regimes of modernizers, especially if they modernize successfully, cannot remain unchanging,
as the once fashionable concept of totalitarianism used to imply. This is not the place to trace
or explain the changes such regimes are subject to, but some of those affecting centralization
may be briefly noted.
If and as industry grows under a modernizing regime, its various bureaucracies tend to grow.
Though all of them are designed to advance industrialization, they do so by different means.
Thus, some build and run factories, some regiment peasants, some spread propaganda, some
repress internal opposition, some serve to fight foreign enemies or deter foreign threats. In the
course of carrying out their functions and precisely if they carry out these functions faithfully,
they may, to varying degrees, come into conflict with each other. Thus, the technocratic-
managerial elements in industry and also in the armed forces, which are likely to become more
powerful with advancing industrialization, may feel restricted by and resent the regulatory
activities of other bureaucracies and have little sympathy or use for propaganda that holds out
Utopian goals and glorifies workers. Clearly, a government and an economy divided by such
conflicts and tensions loses its cohesiveness and hence its hierarchical centralization is
weakened.
Divisions of this sort as well as the demand for greater wealth and for consumer goods on the
part of bureaucrats growing richer and more corrupt may well be significantly involved in recent
developments in China, India and Mexico with their emphasis on the deregulation and
privatization of industry and attempts to attract foreign capital, all goals diametrically opposed
to the goals of their modernizing revolutions and of surviving modernizers.
That government officials in a position to pass government assets and controls on to private
individuals and corporations will tend to favor those who will reward them with various pay-offs
is, to say the least, not surprising. It is tempting to paraphrase Marx's famous statement in his
"Critique of the Gotha Program" that during the transition from capitalism to communism, the
"state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" to say that during the
transition from communism to capitalism the state, i.e., the bureaucracies, can be nothing but
thoroughly corrupt. In any case, far-reaching corruption, by disrupting old bureaucratic
hierarchies and distributing power, effectively leads to far-reaching decentralization.
Most striking are recent developments in what is now no longer the Soviet Union, where,
given the high degree of industrialization, bureaucracies were huge and highly centralized and
where tensions between and within them finally led to the collapse of the Communist Party
regime. Decentralization of the Soviet Union has created a dozen independent countries as well
as more or less autonomous regions and more or less autonomous bureaucracies, like the police
and the army, within Russia. But while the former centralized bureaucracies may be gone, it is
and can only be many of the old bureaucrats who are the prime beneficiaries of the change from
centralization to decentralization. As more independent administrators and as private
entrepreneurs, they now run factories and industries, collective farms and banks, and also
organized crime enterprises. They influence and even dominate various branches of the
government and, by withholding their taxes from it, further weaken and decentralize the
government.
Marxism
From Karl Marx to Otto Bauer
If Leninism is but one of the earliest and most successful ideologies and movements of
modernizing revolutionaries, the history of the Soviet Union and of Soviet centralization may
well, mutatis mutandis , provide some relevant lessons for other underdeveloped countries with
modernizing regimes. For an understanding of Marxism, however, it is irrelevant. Marxism had
not only developed earlier than and independently of Leninism, but was a response to a quite
different socio-economic and political environment.
If we compare the positions of Leninists and of Marxists on the subject of centralization, it
may be objected that we are comparing what Leninists did about centralization with what
Marxists said about it. After all, while Leninists came to power in some countries and introduced
centralized institutions, Marxists never effectively came to power in any country. The objection
is certainly valid when the thought of Marx and Engels on centralization, to the extent that it can
be clearly established at all, is compared with Leninist practice in the Soviet Union. However,
Lenin's attitude on the centralization of his party before he came to power and before he
expected ever to come to power is also relevant here. On the other hand, Marxists of the two
generations after Marx and Engels expressed themselves on centralization when they did expect,
however wrongly, to come to power and they provided a basis for conclusions as to what they
would have done with respect to centralization had they, in fact, come to power.
Rather than plough through the voluminous writings of numerous Marxist authors in search
of relevant remarks on centralization, I will merely refer to a few representative expressions by
Marx and Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Otto Bauer. To define the Marxist tradition as represented
by Karl Marx seems obviously proper, and it is hardly less proper to add his close collaborator
Friedrich Engels. But it also seems reasonable to see as their successors Engels' disciple Karl
Kautsky and then Kautsky's disciple Otto Bauer.
Kautsky and Bauer were in their time almost universally recognized as the outstanding
Marxist thinkers of, respectively, the second and third Marxist generation and of the two
countries with the most successful parties officially guided by Marxist programs. After Engels'
death in 1895, Kautsky was until 1914 widely accepted as the authoritative guide in matters of
theory in the German Social-Democratic Party, while Bauer was one of the principal Austro-
Marxist theorists and the parliamentary leader of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party in the
first Austrian Republic (1919-1934). Both Kautsky and Bauer proudly and as a matter of course
proclaimed their adherence to Marxism, and, unlike Marx and Engels, came to engage in
concrete planning regarding the centralization and decentralization of industry they expected to
be socialized.
Defined with reference to the German and Austrian Social-Democratic Parties and to their
outstanding Marxist thinkers, the Marxian tradition came to an end in the period of Nazi power
and World War II. The Marx-Engels- Kau tsky-Bauer line ended with the death of the latter two
in 1938. In the new postwar world of Western Europe, the Social-Democrats' devotion to the
achievement and protection of parliamentary democracy proved unnecessary and their
assumption of a growing, increasingly unified industrial working class committed to socialism
proved mistaken. What self-identified Marxist thinkers there have been in the past half-century
could not attain positions of influence and power like those of Kautsky and Bauer. Above all,
socialist parties, including the SPD and the SPÖ, more powerful than ever before but operating
in a different political environment with a different constituency, could no longer be Marxist or
define themselves as Marxist. Whatever policies, including those involving centralization,
Western socialist parties have advocated or adopted since World War II are irrelevant to the
argument about the Marxist tradition presented here.
Marxists Say Little on Future Society
Turning to what Marxists said about centralization, we must first of all note that, like most
dissident intellectuals and opposition politicians, Marxists for long gave far more thought to a
critique of existing society than to predictions of or plans for the future society they expected
to succeed the present one. They did not merely neglect to think about the future, they proudly
refrained from doing so to distinguish what they regarded as their scientific approach from that
of their Utopian predecessors. It was not their proper task to prepare "recipes for the cook-shops
of the future", as Marx put it in his Afterword to the Second German Edition of volume I of
Capital (Tucker, 1978, p. 299) and as Kautsky was fond of quoting, for the future society would
arise out of future conditions that could not be scientifically predicted.
Projecting what they regarded as present trends into the future, Marxists were certain only
that in the future society capitalism would be replaced by socialism. But while they analyzed
and explained capitalism, their conception of socialism remained for long extremely vague. It
often appeared to be simply non-capitalism; whatever they saw as the defects of capitalism
would be taken care of under socialism.
Definitions of socialism with reference to production for use rather than for profit and to the
social ownership of the means of production are so vague as to permit very different images of
a socialist society. Whose use? Who determines the needs of "society"? Who operates the means
of production on behalf of society? How and by whom are these individuals selected, controlled
and influenced? Marx and Engels and, in his early writings, Kautsky gave no answers to such
questions, and so we know little about their views on centralization.
There are, however, some indications of such views held by Marxists of the second and third
generation. While they said little about the distant future socialist society, they became
concerned with the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, especially in the immediate
post- World War I years, when they believed that they were in or about to enter that period. It
is then that Kautsky gives much thought to various forms of socialization and that Otto Bauer
develops detailed schemes and even drafts legislation in this area. Their attitude on
centralization emerges very clearly from these writings and with respect not only to a period of
transition but also to that of the future socialist society they envisaged.
Marx and Engels : Centralization by the Whole Nation

Marx and Engels had little to say on the subject of centralization. One of their clearest
statements on it was made in 1850 in their "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist
League": "The workers... must not only strive for a single and indivisible German republic, but
also within this republic for the most determined centralisation of power in the hands of the state
authority.... As in France in 1793 so today in Germany it is the task of the really revolutionary
party to carry through the strictest centralisation" (Tucker, 1978, pp. 509-510). But in an 1885
edition, Engels added a footnote to this last sentence saying that it was "based on a
misunderstanding". Until Napoleon seized power, "provincial and local self-government,
similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution" (Tucker, 1978, p.
510).
The 1850 statement was concerned with revolutionary strategy in post- 1848 Germany, where
Marx and Engels saw the still numerous more or less sovereign territorial entities as obstacles
to revolutionary activity. More relevant to our concern with centralization under socialism is
what they had written just before the 1848 Revolution in the "Communist Manifesto" of 1847:
"The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to
wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class" (Tucker, 1978, p.
490).
On the same page, we read that "when, in the course of development, class distinctions have
disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the
whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so
called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another" (Tucker, 1978, p.
490). Thus, when classes disappear by definition, because they are defined by ownership or non-
ownership of the means of production, then government and political power, in turn, disappear
by definition. What at first may seem like a clear demand for governmental centralization turns
out to refer to centralization in the hands of a class - or, rather, what had been a class - that was
expected to constitute the great majority of the population or of "a vast association of the whole
nation", a concept of centralization that is at best quite vague and may even be self-contradictory
as it may imply decentralization.
The reasoning in the "Communist Manifesto" is the same as the one underlying Engels'
famous passage in Anti-Dühring written 30 years later. Once there is no longer any need to
repress a class, the state loses its function. "The government of persons is replaced by the
administration of things, and by the direction of the process of production. The state is not
abolished, it withers away" (Tucker, 1978, p. 713). Here government is seen as acting in the
interest of one class, while the execution of decisions in the general interest of society involves
only administration and direction, not government.
But who will carry on this "administration of things" and "the direction of the process of
production" in the general interest? Will administration and direction be centralized? Marx and
Engels were far too vague or unconcerned to tell us, but the absence of government and of the
"state" and of all repression and the replacement "of the old bourgeois society [by] an
association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all" (Tucker, 1978, p. 491), by "a vast association of the whole nation", as the "Communist
Manifesto" projects, though by no means definite, surely seems to suggest a highly decentralized
system of administration.
Marx Denounces Bureaucracy ; Praises Paris Commune

Whether or not centralization is imaginable without a "state", it is difficult to conceive of it
without bureaucracy, especially if our conception is associated with Soviet experience. Marx's
conception of centralization was evidently very different, but, unlike it, his view of bureaucracy
was quite clear and hardly positive. In 1852, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , he
referred to the "enormous bureaucratic and military organization" of France as "this appalling
Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition : J. H. Kautsky 389
parasitic growth, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores"
(Tucker, 1978, p. 606). It originated under absolutism and grew under each subsequent regime.
"All the revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it" (Tucker, 1978, p. 607).
"The state centralisation that modern society requires arises only on the ruins of the military-
bureaucratic governmental machinery which was forged in opposition to feudalism. The
demolition of the state machine will not endanger centralisation. Bureaucracy is only the low
and brutal form of a centralisation that is still afflicted with its opposite, with feudalism"
(Tucker, 1978, p. 614). Here Marx seems to want to smash bureaucracy and demolish the state
machine and yet to have centralization, which again suggests that his concept of centralization
may have been more akin to our conception of decentralization.
Two decades later, in The Civil War in France , Marx again denounced "the centralised State
power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature"
(Tucker, 1978, p. 629). He praised the Paris Commune for turning the police and "the officials
of all other branches of the Administration into the responsible and at all times revocable agents
of the Commune" (Tucker, 1978, p. 632) and for "destroying... the standing army and State
functionarism" and thereby supplying "the Republic with the basis of really democratic
institutions" (Tucker, 1978, p. 634).
Far from calling for - but not defining - "the state centralisation that modern society
requires", Marx now seemed to approve of the high degree of decentralization of French
government that the Paris Communards envisaged. "The old centralized Government would in
the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.... The few but
important functions which still would remain for a central government... were to be discharged
by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents" (Tucker, 1978, pp. 632-633).
Paris Commune Decentralization a Model for Marx

We must recall that Marx and Engels had developed their ideas in the mid-nineteenth century,
when the labor movements of Western Europe were only in their beginnings. On the basis of
what they regarded as the laws of history and specifically of capitalist development, they
predicted - accurately as it turned out - that these labor movements would grow to become
powerful. But they also predicted that labor would inevitably take political power, an event or
development they called the proletarian revolution, and would use that power to convert the
capitalist into a socialist economy in a period of transition they referred to a few times as the
dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx and Engels did not profess to know, however, what form
this revolution and the subsequent regime of the proletariat would take and seemed quite willing
to learn about that from the history they witnessed in later years and to let it correct what faulty
expectations they may have had.
Of course, Marx and Engels never witnessed any proletarian revolution or regime and
certainly no successful ones, because their predictions in these respects were wrong. They did,
however - and not only in retrospect - regard the Paris Commune as a proletarian revolution. A
month after its outbreak, Marx wrote in a letter to Dr. Kugelmann of 17 April 1871: "The
struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new
phase. Whatever the immediate outcome may be, a new point of departure of world-historical
importance has been gained" (Marx and Engels, 1964/66, 33:209). And 5 days before the
collapse of the Commune, Marx stated in his report of 23 May 1871 to the General Council of
the International: "The principles of the Commune were eternal and could not be crushed"; they
would assert themselves again and again until the working classes were emancipated (Marx and
Engels, 1978, p. 555).
A few months later, in a speech made in London on 25 September 1871 at an anniversary

banquet of the International, Marx said that "the Commune was the conquest of the political
power of the working classes" (Marx and Engels, 1978, p. 479) and in a resolution for a
celebration in London of the first anniversary of the Commune on 18 March 1872, he referred
to the Commune as "the dawn of the great social revolution which will for ever free human
beings from class rule" (Marx and Engels, 1964/66, 18:56).
It was from the experience of the Paris Commune with its council elected by universal
suffrage and representing different factions, some opposed to the insurrection, that Marx and
Engels learned what form their vague concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat would assume
in reality. Marx said in The Civil War in France that the Commune "was essentially a working-
class government,... the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic
emancipation of labour" (Tucker, 1978, pp. 634-635). Engels, referring to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, says in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx's Civil War in France : "Do you
want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (Tucker, 1978, p. 629).
It is in this context that the change in Marx's view from a vague and ambiguous advocacy of
centralization to much clearer praise for the decentralization advocated by the Commune, which
he identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be understood.
Kautsky: State Functions Growing , Bureaucracy Indispensable

Karl Kautsky shared Marx's and Engels' dislike of bureaucracy and, much more clearly than
they, favored maximum possible decentralization of the government and the economy. If the
state is defined as an instrument of class rule, as it was by Marx and Engels, then it would,
according to Kautsky, wither away not only under socialism but already under modem
democracy. As he wrote in 1927, summarizing his oft-stated conviction that labor could come
to power and carry out the socialist revolution only through parliamentary democracy:
"Democracy makes it possible to wrest this whole immense state apparatus with its irresistible
power out of the hands of the great exploiters that still hold it today and thus to tum the
apparatus of domination into an apparatus of emancipation" (Kautsky, 1988, p. 387).
Rather than worrying about what was and what was not a state properly so called, Kautsky
preferred to see the state as changing its functions through history and especially in the future
socialist society. He did so already in his commentary on the 1891 Erfurt Program of the German
Social-Democratic Party, which he himself had drafted with Engels' approval. Far from
speaking of the withering away of the state, he concluded there that "among the social
organizations in existence today there is but one that has the requisite dimensions to make it
usable as a framework for the development of the socialist cooperative society, that is the
modem state" (Kautsky, 1971, p. 101). "Only when the working classes have become the ruling
classes... will it become possible to convert it into a socialist cooperative society" (Kautsky,
1971, p. 110;2)
Especially in his later writings, Kautsky emphasized that "this transformation will not at all
look like a withering away of the state apparatus, but rather like an increase in the number of
its functions". Among such functions, he mentioned "education, health services, also the
promotion of art, insofar as these are carried on by the state.... Furthermore... the enormous task
of regulating the gigantic mechanism of production of our era will also devolve upon the state"
(Kautsky, 1988, p. 448).
2. I have modified this quite poor translation of Kautsky ( 1 892) and other translations cited below to correct or improve
them.
Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition: J. H. Kautsky 39 1
Kautsky also recognized that some bureaucracy was indispensable. He added to the above
passage that "all of this [is] to be done in as democratic, as flexible and unbureaucratic a manner
as possible, yet without eliminating all bureaucracy. For no large organization can manage any
longer today without bureaucracy, once it has responsibility for tasks requiring specialized
knowledge and complete dedication..." (Kautsky, 1988, p. 448). "It is a mistake to suppose that
democracy consists in the elimination of bureaucracy" (Kautsky, 1988, p. 387).
Kautsky Favors Many Forms of Socialization

None of this, however, makes Kautsky an advocate of centralization. While he acknowledged -
often with a certain reluctance - a central role of the state in regulating a socialist economy, he
clearly sought to minimize it as much as possible. Time and again he emphasized that
nationalization was not the only form of socialization of the means of production. Thus, in a
lecture he delivered in Holland in April 1902, he stressed that "far-reaching diversity and
flexibility" would prevail under socialism. "The most manifold forms of property in the means
of production - state, municipal, consumer and producer cooperative, private - can exist side by
side in a socialist society. [So can] the most diverse forms of operation - bureaucratic, trade-
unionist, cooperative, individual.... The same diversity in the economic mechanism that exists
today is possible in a socialist society" (Kautsky, 1913, p. 166).
Twenty years later, in 1922, after the fall of the Wilhelminę Empire - and after Kautsky had
served as chairman of the short-lived socialization commission established by the new
revolutionary government - he wrote his substantial book, The Labour Revolution , on the
problems of the transition to socialism, the beginning of which he then considered imminent in
Britain and Germany. Here he devoted long chapters to the various possible forms of
socialization and also the limits and the pace of socialization in both industry and agriculture,
including a discussion of the history and of what he regarded as the strengths and weaknesses
of G. D. H. Cole's anti-statist, anti-centralist and anti-bureaucratic guild socialism. He
concluded that at least with respect to the building trades, "this form of organization has a great
future and will play a notable role in the construction of socialist production. But Guild
Socialism goes too far when it postulates the guild organization as the sole form of socialist
production" (Kautsky, 1925, p. 197), especially in more advanced, mechanized branches of
industry than the building trades.
Writing on the socialization of industry and agriculture in this book, Kautsky repeatedly
stressed the variety of forms in which it can be carried out. New experience, new problems, new
possibilities will "in the course of socialist development... add to the infinite variety of the forms
of production which we can now foresee and which grow out of the far-reaching division of
labor on which industrial capitalism is based. We want to abolish class antagonism, but not to
render production or consumption more uniform. That would be a retrograde step" (Kautsky,
1925, pp. 223-224). Clearly, nationalization is only one among many forms of socialization,
appropriate in such large industries as the railroads and coal mining. "The state is not the
appointed instrument of socialization, although its legislation has to create the foundations and
opportunities for all its manifestations" (Kautsky, 1925, pp. 182-183).
Kautsky Distrusts State Bureaucracy

Kautsky's emphasis on the variety of forms of socialization and his deemphasis on
nationalization was related to and in good part motivated by his distrust of bureaucracy: "The
starting points and forms of socialization will be as infinitely varied as modern social life and
392 Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition : J. H. Kautsky
they will succeed and thrive all the better the less the state bureaucracy needs to intervene, the
more strongly, more insightfully and with more goal orientation the autonomous activity of the
various social strata, above all of the working masses, becomes effective" (Kautsky, 1925, p.
87).
Kautsky went so far as to state bluntly: "One can imagine socialist production in very
different ways but one thing is certain: state bureaucracy, by virtue of its history and its nature,
is the most unsuitable agency for the establishment of socialist production" (Kautsky, 1925, p.
155). Therefore even means of production that must be nationalized should be organized
independently of the state bureaucracy and administered according to business principles and
principles of industrial democracy.
Kautsky explained the character of the state bureaucracy by its origins under royal absolutism
on the Continent and describes state bureaucrats in most unflattering terms - their demand for
unquestioning obedience by the citizen, their own blind obedience to their superiors and
mindless adherence to rules and precedent - and he contrasts these characteristics to the greater
flexibility and personal initiative of bureaucrats employed in capitalist enterprises. He
concluded: "Socialism is to grow out of capitalism. It is to be built on the experience of the
economic organizations brought into existence by the capitalist epoch, the economic
organizations of the wage-earners, trade unions and cooperative societies, and the economic
organizations of capital. Socialism is not to grow out of the apparatus of domination created by
eighteenth-century absolutism..." (Kautsky, 1925, pp. 167-168).
A few years later, Kautsky emphasized again that "the traditional state apparatus is not
appropriate to the development of a mode of production that is superior or even merely equal
to the capitalist one.... Adaptation to the needs of the producers and consumers is alien to it. The
nationalization of industry can mean only that the enterprises of large-scale capitalist industry
to be socialized, insofar as they could not be managed better as cooperative or communally
owned ones, are to be converted into state property. It does not mean, though, that they are to
be administered by the traditional state bureaucracy" (Kautsky, 1988, p. 411).
That Kautsky's negative view of the state and its bureaucracy as agents of socialization and
his hope for a great variety of such agents implied opposition to centralization is obvious. It is
one aspect of his conception of a socialist society as one involving the active participation of
great masses of people, a conception he held all his life and a major factor of his opposition to
the Soviet regime from its beginnings. In his first attack on the Bolsheviks, published in summer
1918, he wrote that the socialist "mode of production means the organization of production by
society. It requires economic self-administration by the entire mass of the people. State
organization of production by a bureaucracy or by the dictatorship of a single stratum of the
people is not socialism. It requires the organizational training of broad masses of the people,
presupposes numerous free economic and political organizations and requires complete freedom
of association. The socialist organization of labor must not be a military barracks organization"
(Kautsky, 1981, p. 51).
Otto Bauer Opposes Nationalization and Bureaucratization

Opposition to the centralized bureaucratic nature of the Soviet regime remained a dominant
theme of Kautsky's anti-Soviet and anti-Communist writings. Quite unlike Kautsky, Otto Bauer
never gave up hope in the eventual evolution of the Soviet regime into a democratic socialist
one, but he, too, saw the centralized Soviet bureaucracy as the principal obstacle to such a
development. Though his view of the Soviet Union and of Stalin was strikingly ambivalent,
there is no question that Bauer regarded the centralized bureaucracy as incompatible with
socialism.
Bauer's disastrous misconception of Stalinism as a step on the road to democratic socialism,
motivated at least in large part by his view of the Soviet Union as the only powerful bulwark
against Fascism, is thus not inconsistent with his thought on socialization expressed in 1919,
while he presided over the socialization commission appointed by the new Austrian parliament.
In a series of newspaper articles, published in numerous editions as the pamphlet The Road to
Socialism , Bauer elaborated the institutions and methods by which capitalist property could be
socialized and by which socialist production could be administered.
Bauer began his discussion of socialization with a very blunt passage, which was,
incidentally, quoted with approval by Kautsky three years later: "Who is to administer socialized
industry? Certainly not the government. If the government controls all possible enterprises, it
would be all too powerful as against the people and its representative assembly; such an increase
in the power of the government would be dangerous to democracy. At the same time, the
government would administer socialized industry badly. No one administers industrial
enterprises more badly than the state. That is why we Social-Democrats have never demanded
the nationalization but always only the socialization of industry" (Bauer, 1976, p. 96; quoted by
Kautsky, 1925, p. 207).
According to Bauer, heavy industry was to be administered by a board composed of
representatives of the organizations of the employees of the industry, of the consumers of its
products, and of the state drawn from the Treasury and from Parliament. The leading officials
of the industry are to be appointed by the board on the recommendation of committees of
technical experts, much as professors are selected. "The bureaucratization of the administrative
organization must be avoided under all circumstances" (Bauer, 1976, p. 98). Other branches of
industry could be leased by the state to consumer cooperatives and agricultural cooperatives and
yet others could be socialized most appropriately by districts and municipalities. "So different
branches of industry will be subject to socialization in different ways" (Bauer, 1976, 2:99).
Bauer Favors Popular Self-Administration

Bauer also proposed the creation of workers' councils in all enterprises, whether socialized or
still privately owned, to be elected by all employees, with far-reaching powers in all areas
affecting them directly. He stresses, however, that in socialized enterprises their technical and
economic management must be vested in the representatives of employees, consumers and the
state, not merely those of workers for "we want not to syndicalize but to socialize industry"
(Bauer, 1976, p. 107). This is worth noting for Bauer had himself, in his preface to his pamphlet
and again in 1923, acknowledged the influence of G. D. H. Cole's guild socialism on his ideas
in opposition to nationalization and to "bureaucratic socialism" (Bauer, 1976, p. 107; p. 712).
In 1920, Bauer presented a highly favorable and, unlike Kautsky 's, wholly uncritical picture
of guild socialism, suggesting that it represented working-class thought corresponding to the
highest level of working-class development. "It rejects state socialism, because the administra-
tion of industry by the state would mean nothing but the subjection of particular groups of
workers to an all-powerful bureaucracy. It declares that the freedom of the workers is as
incompatible with the management of industry by state-appointed officials, even if they are the
officials of a state ruled by the working class, as with the domination of industry by capitalist
entrepreneurs" (Bauer, 1976, p. 329).
"The English proletariat has developed on the soil of a democracy which jealously guards the
freedom of the individual, the self-government of the local communities against any interference
by the state government, be it an ever so democratically formed government. Its socialism is
therefore, above all, intent on protecting the freedom of the workers, the self-government of the
various branches of industry against any encroachment by the state government, even if this
government is dominated by the working class" (Bauer, 1976, p. 331).
Bauer concluded his pamphlet on The Road to Socialism by repeating: "We do not want a
bureaucratic socialism which would mean the domination of the entire people by a small
minority. We want democratic socialism and that means economic self-administration of the
entire people. Through a whole system of democratic organizations, the people shall itself
administer its economic life". He then listed workers' councils, tenants' councils, trade unions,
consumer cooperatives, agricultural cooperatives, urban and rural communes, boards admin-
istering branches of industry, and others. "Such a system of economic self-administration of the
people presumes the active participation, the willing cooperation of broad masses of people. It
cannot be imposed on the people by a small minority..." (Bauer, 1976, pp. 129-130).
The definition of the democratic socialism he worked for in Austria and hoped for elsewhere
in such strikingly anti-bureaucratic and anti-centralist terms was for Bauer an article of faith. He
stated it time and again especially in his writings and speeches in the 2-year period when he and
other Social-Democrats served in the government of the new Austrian republic and in those over
a 20-year period expressing his repeatedly disappointed hope and expectation of a
democratization of the Soviet regime.
Marxism, Leninism and Centralization
Can We Trust Marxist Opposition to State and Bureaucracy?

Marx and Engels, Kautsky and Bauer were not explicitly and specifically very much concerned
with the problem of centralization. The words centralization and decentralization do not appear
with great frequency in their writings. Neither did Marxists explicitly distinguish between
different varieties of centralization, notably the territorial and the hierarchical one. Workers'
councils seem incompatible with both forms of centralization, and the Marxists' demands for
local or regional government ownership or management of socialized enterprises imply rejection
of territorial centralization. Their attacks on bureaucracy expressed their opposition to
hierarchical centralization, as it was strikingly practiced by Leninists in their party and,
especially in the Soviet Union, in their governmental institutions, though these were necessarily
also territorially centralized.
In any case, there is no question that the outstanding thinkers representing the three
generations of the Marxist tradition expressed a strong aversion to the state or national
government and especially strong hostility to its bureaucracy as administrators of industry once
it was socialized. Kautsky and Bauer, who, unlike Marx and Engels, came to think very
concretely about socialization, favored numerous alternatives to state and bureaucratic
administration, all of which involved a high degree of decentralization.
This much is proved by the statements quoted above. But are these statements to be trusted?
After all, it is common for politicians to make promises, which they fail to fulfill once they are
in power. Such promises may be designed to deceive potential supporters, but probably more
often reflect the politicians' own hopes and convictions, which they cannot realize when they
face circumstances and opposition they had not clearly anticipated.
It was, of all people, Lenin who wrote just a few weeks before he seized power: "The
workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to
its very foundations, and raze it to the ground.... Proletarian democracy... will take immediate
steps to cut bureaucracy down to the roots,... to the complete abolition of bureaucracy..." (Lenin,
1964, p. 486).
Lenin could promise this, because he had less appreciation than Marx and Engels, Kautsky
and Bauer of the complexity of the modern industrial economy: "It is quite possible, after the
overthrow of the capitalists and the bureaucrats, to proceed immediately and overnight, to
replace them in the control over production and distribution, in the work of keeping account of
labor and products, by the armed workers, by the whole of the armed population.... The
accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and
reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations - which any literate person can perform - of
supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate
receipts" (Lenin, 1964, p. 478).
Lenin, always the advocate of a tightly organized revolutionary party, could still, just before
coming to power, envisage smashing the state, completely abolishing bureaucracy, and having
the economy run by the "armed workers", thus sounding more like an anarchist than even the
anti-bureaucratic Marxists. If this same Lenin could soon become the founder of a highly
centralized and bureaucratized regime and economy, is it not at least conceivable that the
Marxists, too, could have relied on a centralized bureaucracy if they had come to power, as they
never effectively did in any country?
Of course, one can never state with absolute certainty what might have happened if
circumstances had prevailed that did in fact not prevail. Still, we have enough evidence to give
a clearly negative answer to the question. It can be given with great certainty with reference to
Marx and Engels and overwhelming certainty with reference to Kautsky and Bauer.
Kautsky and Bauer Drafted Plans for Socialization

Conditions in Marx's and Engels' lifetime were such that it was quite impossible and
inconceivable for them or for individuals or parties they favored to come to power in any
country. The two therefore never stated in their writings specifically what they would do if they
or their parties did come to power. For general indications as to approaches they favored with
respect to centralization, we shall therefore have to look at their more general goals. In the cases
of Kautsky and Bauer, however, there are, in addition, other indications.
When the imperial regimes of Germany and Austria-Hungary collapsed in November 1918,
German and Austrian socialists believed that the transition to socialism would now begin. The
revolutionary governments of Germany and the new Austrian republic appointed socialization
commissions chaired, respectively, by Kautsky and Bauer. The German commission's report,
submitted by Kautsky in January 1919, was very cautious, recommending only the socialization
of the coal mines and noted specifically that socialization did not mean nationalization. It
became a dead letter when, in the election to the constituent assembly held 9 days after its
submission, the two Social-Democratic Parties together gained only 45.5 per cent of the vote.
Kautsky assumed that this merely meant a relatively brief postponement of the fulfillment of
his expectations. He wrote his book, The Labour Revolution , published in 1922, from which I
quoted above, hoping that he would thereby lay the bases of a program on which the
Independent Social-Democratic Party could rejoin the Social-Democratic Party, from which it
had split in 1917 in opposition to the SPD's support of the imperial government's war policies.
He further expected that a reunified Social-Democratic Party - he wrote the theoretical section
of its 1925 Heidelberg Program - could gain a parliamentary majority and initiate the transition
to socialism. In fact, the SPD never won a majority in a German national election and only once,
in 1972, barely exceeded the total it had won in 1919.
Otto Bauer was a leading member of the coalitions that governed the Austrian republic in its
first 2 years, in which the Social-Democratic Party held a more powerful position than the SPD
ever occupied in coalition governments in the Weimar Republic. Under Bauer's leadership, the
Austrian socialization commission drafted legislation institutionalizing and granting consider-
able powers to workers' councils in all but the smallest enterprises and laying the juridical bases
for socialization in the form of co-management by workers, consumers and the national or
municipal government, bills that were adopted by the Austrian parliament in 1919. However, the
Social-Democratic program met with increasingly effective opposition both from domestic
conservatives and the victorious World War I allies and, following the election of 1920, the
Social-Democratic Party went into opposition, where, led by Bauer, it remained until it was
outlawed and suppressed in 1934.
Although Kautsky's and Bauer's expectation of an early transition to socialism turned out to
be mistaken, the fact remains that the proposals they drafted in the first few years of the German
and Austrian republics were formulated in the expectation that they would soon be carried out.
Unlike Marx's and Engels' and Kautsky's earlier brief statements on socialization and
centralization, they did not merely express vague hopes and predictions of a far-off future. They
can be taken seriously as evidence of what policies Kautsky and Bauer would have favored and
pursued had they or their parties come into position to carry them out.
The Marxist Eurocentric View of History
In any case, the principal reason why one can feel certain that not only Kautsky and Bauer but
also Marx and Engels would not have favored centralizing policies by a socialist regime is
simply that such policies make no sense as means to realize the goals and hopes of Marxism.
For the achievement of the goals of Leninists and other revolutionary modernizers in
underdeveloped countries, centralizing policies are appropriate, as we have seen, both to defeat
their traditional aristocratic opponents and to advance rapid industrialization. Marxist goals
were necessarily quite different from Leninist ones, for Marxists assumed that they would and
could only come to power in industrialized societies. As a Western ideology, Marxism did not
stand for Westernization; as a child of modernity, Marxism was not concerned with
modernization; as a response to industrialization, Marxism could not have industrialization as its
goal.
The fact that some modernizers, influenced by Western ideas as modernizers are by definition,
think of themselves as Marxists and describe their goals and policies in Marxist terminology, as
the Russian Bolsheviks did, may be regarded as an irony of history. It has caused immense
confusion among both friends and opponents of both Marxism and Leninism, but it cannot prove
that Marx and Engels could foresee, let alone favor, policies appropriate to a historical process
quite unknown to them. The Marxian view of history with its progression of stages from
agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism to future industrial socialism was derived from the
experience of Western European history until the mid-nineteenth century. Marx and Engels,
living in the center of the British empire, had some interest in underdeveloped countries,
particularly India and China, and offered some insightful remarks about their history, even
predicting anti-colonial revolutions. But as these revolutions did not occur in their lifetime, they
did not integrate their insights into their Eurocentric view of history and seemed to assume that
underdeveloped countries, including Russia, would have to pass through a capitalist stage to
become industrialized.
Kautsky and Bauer, though living later than Marx and Engels, but caught up more in Central
European politics, had even less interest in and knowledge of the history and politics of
underdeveloped societies. While both were passionately concerned with Russian affairs in the
last two decades of their lives, they could view them only in the light of the Marxist Western-
Eurocentric conception of history, from the confines of which they never freed themselves.
In that conception of history, there is no room for what has turned out to be one of the major
historical processes of the twentieth century, that of anti-traditional and anti-colonial revolutions
in underdeveloped countries, led by modernizing intellectuals who seek through their control of
their government to bring about the rapid modernization and especially the industrialization of
their societies. These revolutions cannot be adequately understood through the Marxian
concepts of either the bourgeois or the proletarian revolution. They may share some
characteristics of these revolutions, but they are different from both of them.
Marxists See Socialism Growing Out of Capitalism

Modernizers like Lenin are full of resentment and contempt for the backwardness of their
societies and see their revolution as an abrupt and far-reaching break with the past. Marxists
regarded their capitalist societies as advanced and see their revolutions as growing out of them.
Marx and Engels, Kautsky and Bauer expressed admiration for many changes the bourgeoisie
had introduced in their societies and wanted to build on them.
In the Marxian view of history, industry is introduced and expanded not by a modernizing
intelligentsia employing the powers of government and thereby breaking with the past, but by
an evolving bourgeoisie through free-enterprise capitalism. The growth of industry would
inevitably result in the growth of an industrial working class, which would necessarily become
organizationally and hence politically powerful as well as class-conscious and therefore
socialist. The socialist revolution would inevitably occur when - but could not occur until - the
class-conscious working class constituted the great majority of the population.
The difference between the Marxists' and the Leninists' view of historical development and
their conception of socialism becomes very clear in a passage in Engels' essay "On Social
Relations in Russia". Here he replied to an open letter of 1874 by Pyotr Tkachov, a Russian
predecessor of Lenin and many other intellectuals in twentieth-century underdeveloped
countries who thought they could introduce socialism in their industrially backward societies:
"The revolution which modern socialism strives to achieve is, briefly, the victory of the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and the establishment of a new organization of society by the
destruction of all class distinctions. This requires not only a proletariat that carries out this
revolution, but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the productive forces of society have
developed so far that they allow of the final destruction of class distinctions.... Only at a certain
level of development of the productive forces of society, an even very high level for our modern
conditions, does it become possible to raise production to such an extent.... But the productive
forces have reached this level of development only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie, therefore, in this respect also is just as necessary a precondition of the socialist
revolution as the proletariat itself. Hence a man who will say that this revolution can be more
easily carried out in a country, because, although it has no proletariat, it has no bourgeoisie
either, only proves that he has still to learn the ABC of socialism" (Tucker, 1978, pp.
665-666).
Workers Central in Marxist , Not Leninist View of History
For some time now, it has been clear that in advanced industrial countries the development of
industry and of capitalism in recent decades has tended not to raise but to reduce class-
consciousness and, indeed, to reduce the size of the industrial blue-collar working class. It will
398 Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition: J . H. Kautsky
never, as Marxists thought it would, achieve majority status and political power as a class. The
question here, however, is how this Marxian prediction and view of history, whether it was valid,
as it could appear to be for a few decades, or invalid, as it has turned out to be more recently,
affected the goals and hopes of Marxists, which in turn would affect their attitude on
centralization.
As believers in industrial progress and its potential benefits, Marxists, no doubt, expected
industrial development to continue under socialism, perhaps even more rapidly than under
capitalism, once it was freed of capitalist restraints. But this is barely mentioned in Marxist
writings, it was not a principal Marxist goal, it did not inspire Marxist political movements
intellectually or emotionally, as the goal of rapid modernization inspired the movements of
modernizers. What did inspire Marxist movements and made them quite successful politically
for some time was the principal goal of Marxism to change the position of the working class in
industrial society.
The central role in the historical drama of modern industrial societies is, undeniably, assigned
by Marxists to their working class. It would grow from weakness to strength numerically,
organizationally, and ideologically, and it would eventually create a better, more just society. No
other class or group could be substituted for the working class to play its central creative role.
Such a conception made no sense in underdeveloped countries where there were no or
virtually no industrial workers and where the prospects of the development of a powerful
working class were remote. Modernizers in such countries, wanting to come to power in their
own lifetime and to create a modern society in a generation or two, could not look to workers
as the agents of their hopes. If they sought mass support at all, they might employ the language
of Marxism focusing on workers, as Lenin did, but they were in fact, as they had to be, much
more concerned with the far more numerous peasants, as was also true of Lenin, not to mention
Mao.
In the Europe of Marx and Engels, but also still in the Europe of Kautsky and Bauer, industrial
workers were a severely disadvantaged class subject to economic exploitation and deprivation,
to political persecution and repression, to social discrimination and exclusion. It was to this
situation that Marxists responded, seeking in their own time and in their political movements
and in their hopes for the future to change the position of workers from one of poverty, weakness
and degradation to one of prosperity, power and dignity. More broadly, responding to deeply
class-divided societies, Marxists hoped to do away with classes altogether to create a far-
reaching, though never clearly defined, equality.
Centralization Inappropriate to Marxist Goals

These were the principal goals and hopes of Marxists, necessarily quite different from those of
modernizers in underdeveloped countries, like Lenin, who in 1920 could say that "Communism
is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country" (Lenin, 1965, p. 151). In the
pursuit of that goal of industrialization, the Bolsheviks built dams and steel mills, keeping low
the living and housing standards of the new industrial workers. In contrast and in pursuit of their
different goals responding to different conditions, Marxists in Otto Bauer's "Red Vienna",
where they exercised at least limited power over two million people for a decade and a half, built
massive modern public housing projects for workers. Given their respective goals and
environments, it would have made no sense for the Bolsheviks to spend their limited resources
on excellent housing for workers or for the Social-Democrats to build steel mills in industrial
Vienna. That such policies seem unimaginable indicates how different both the goals and the
environments of Leninists and Marxists were.
The modernizing Leninists' drive for rapid industrialization motivated and produced the
growing centralization and bureaucratization of the Soviet economy and government. But for
Marxists to advocate similar policies to achieve their very different goals would have been self-
defeating. To Bolsheviks, socializing industry meant placing control of industry in the hands of
a central planning bureaucracy in order to coordinate the process of industrialization. To
Marxists, socialization of industry meant transferring control of it from the hands of private
capitalists into the hands of "society" and particularly of workers. However that was to be done,
clearly a centralized bureaucracy was a quite inappropriate instrument for the operation of the
socialized enterprises.
To Marxists, the point of socialization, after all, was to give workers more power and a greater
sense of power. It was not to change their subjection to and direction by an individual capitalist
or, more recently, a corporate bureaucracy to subjection to and direction by a central government
bureaucracy. For the realization of the Marxist hopes for the empowerment of workers and,
more generally, for a society characterized by far-reaching equality, government by a centralized
bureaucracy would obviously be inappropriate. When the Marxist thinkers quoted above
expressed themselves strongly against bureaucratization and, at least by implication, in favor of
maximum decentralization, they merely stated views consistent with their ideology. There is no
reason to believe that they would not have continued to adhere to these views had they come to
power.
Multifarious Labor Movements Decentralized Marxist Parties

A major reason for the adoption of centralizing policies by modernizing regimes was the high
degree of centralization of their modernizing movements, the centralization of the Leninist party
of a new type being the prime example. The Marxist social-democratic labor parties that grew,
notably in Germany and Austria, in the late nineteenth century were then also parties of a new
type, but in some respects the very opposite of the small, disciplined and highly centralized
Leninist party operating underground as a conspiratorial organization. They were mass parties,
the political expression of mass labor movements, closely linked to the major trade-union
federations of their countries and also to the cooperative movement.
In line with both the labor movements' and the Marxists' goal to improve workers' lives and
to strengthen labor economically, politically and socially, social-democratic parties established
and/or were closely associated with a great variety of more or less specialized organizations that
appealed to workers who were and who felt excluded from non- working-class organizations.
Such socialist workers' organizations included not only the considerable variety of trade unions
and co-op societies with their local branches, but also women's and youth organizations,
tenants' associations, workers' educational institutions, such as libraries, evening schools and
study groups, sports and gymnastic clubs, choral and musical societies, hikers' and bicyclists'
clubs, even associations to fight alcoholism and to popularize cremation.
The social-democratic parties and the trade unions did become bureaucratized as they grew,
but all of their affiliated organizations depended on the voluntary participation of their members,
they had to represent their members' interests and they had to function primarily or entirely on
the local level. Nationally centralized and disciplined chess clubs or stamp collectors' clubs are
difficult to imagine. At the same time, the affiliated organizations, most notably the trade unions,
provided opportunities to some of their members for mobility into the leadership of the party at
various levels. On the other hand, the party leaders in their decision-making had to take into
account the various concerns of organizations that were constituent elements of the labor
movement.
The rather multifarious nature of the labor movement with the specialized and localized
interests of its elements necessarily gave a relatively decentralized character to the Marxist
social-democratic parties, certainly as compared with the communist parties built on the
Leninist model, though not as compared with the Marxists' opponents, the bourgeois parties of
local elites.
Two Views of Centralization - Two Ideologies

Had the German and Austrian Social-Democratic Parties come to power, as Kautsky and Bauer
expected, in the early years of the Weimar Republic and the First Austrian Republic, they would,
of course, have done so only with popular and parliamentary majorities and not as single parties.
But even if one could imagine them governing their countries unrestrained by any opposition,
their own decentralized character as well as their Marxist goals were such as to make them favor
decentralized governmental and economic institutions. Indeed, to Marxists like Kautsky and
Bauer, existing elements of the labor movement, especially trade unions and cooperative
societies, could, as agents of socialization, serve to organize the future socialist economy in
decentralized and unbureaucratic fashion.
The demonstration that Marxists and Leninists held sharply different views on the desirability
of centralization in government and in the economy supports my conception of Marxism and
Leninism as two quite different ideologies held by people representing different interests and
pursuing different goals in response to different conditions. Were it not for the confusing fact
that Lenin and Leninists employed the same language as Marx and Marxists to express their
quite different ideology and policies, it would, then, be quite obvious that Leninism is not
Marxism or even one form or variety of Marxism.
References
Bauer, Otto (1976) Werkausgabe , 2, Europa- Verlag, Vienna.

Kautsky, J. H. (1994) Marxism and Leninism, Not Marxism- Leninism. An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge.
Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.
Kautsky, K. (1892) Das Erfurter Programm. J. H. W. Dietz, Stuttgart.
Kautsky, K. (1913) The Social Revolution. Charles H. Kerr, Chicago.
Kautsky, K. (1925) The Labour Revolution. Dial Press, New York.
Kautsky, K. (1971) The Class Struggle ( Erfurt Program). W. W. Norton, New York.
Kautsky, K. (1981) The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT.
Kautsky, K. (1988) The Materialist Conception of History, ed. J. H. Kautsky. Yale University Press, New Haven.
Lenin, V. I. (1964) The State and Revolution. In V. I. Lenin, Collected Works , 25. Progress Publishers, Moscow.
Lenin, V. I. (1965) Report of the Work of the Council of People's Commissars. In V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 30,
Progress Publishers, Moscow.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1964 and 1966). Werke, Dietz Verlag, Berlin.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich (1978) Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), 1-22. Dietz Verlag, Berlin.
Stalin, Joseph (1939) Political Report of the Central Committee to the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union. Quoted in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Bolsheviks ), (Short Course),
International Publishers, New York.
Tucker, Robert C., ed. (1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. W. W. Norton, New York.

Marx On Centralization

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Marx On Centralization

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Marx On Centralization

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Centralization in the Marxist and in the Leninist Tradition

Author(s): John H. Kautsky

Centralization in the Marxist and in the

discredited Marxist reliance on centralized institutions.

Modernizing Movements in Underdeveloped Countries

Modernizers Oppose Localism of Old Regime

Attempts at Industrialization Produce Centralization

Mass Persuasion, Regimentation and Terror

Modernizing Movements Become Centralized Single Parties

Internal Conflict and Corruption Lead to Decentralization

Marxists Say Little on Future Society

Marx and Engels : Centralization by the Whole Nation

Marx Denounces Bureaucracy ; Praises Paris Commune

Paris Commune Decentralization a Model for Marx

A few months later, in a speech made in London on 25 September 1871 at an anniversary

Kautsky: State Functions Growing , Bureaucracy Indispensable

Kautsky Favors Many Forms of Socialization

Kautsky Distrusts State Bureaucracy

Otto Bauer Opposes Nationalization and Bureaucratization

Bauer Favors Popular Self-Administration

Marxism, Leninism and Centralization

Can We Trust Marxist Opposition to State and Bureaucracy?

Kautsky and Bauer Drafted Plans for Socialization

The Marxist Eurocentric View of History

Marxists See Socialism Growing Out of Capitalism

Workers Central in Marxist , Not Leninist View of History

Centralization Inappropriate to Marxist Goals

Multifarious Labor Movements Decentralized Marxist Parties

Two Views of Centralization - Two Ideologies

Bauer, Otto (1976) Werkausgabe , 2, Europa- Verlag, Vienna.

You might also like