Gramsci and Lenin on transcending “parliamentarianism” and on direct democracy

Century-old writings and today's politics

I have not read Gramsci until this Summer. This Summer I decided to fix this lacunae in my knowledge.

I have of course read about Gramsci, of Gramsci, and have heard multiple times (especially now in the era of Trump) quotes about “the morbid phenomena” that emerge during the “interregnums”. (That the quote is used today in a way that Gramsci did not intend it, was apparent to me from the beginning. But anyway, it made Gramsci more present in the public debate). Gramsci is one of only three post-Marx thinkers (the other two are Lenin and Lukacs) who meet with a favorable treatment by Leszek Kolakowski in The Main Currents of Marxism and are credited for producing something new and valuable in Marxism. Not a small feat.

To add perhaps to the serendipity which surrounded my estival reading of Gramsci, I had last year reread Lenin’s The State and Revolution. I wrote about it here. Why did I reread it? Because I thought that there were similarities between the way that Trump and alt-Right saw the need to break the stronghold of the liberal establishment over the state and Lenin’s own views. I will not go into that now, but I think that the similarities are few, they are phenomenal (in the sense of being superficial), and the differences substantive.

However, where similarities (I would even say identity) is clear is between Lenin’s and Gramsci’s views on the organization of the new state. Gramsci’s writings in The Gramsci Reader (edited by David Forgacs and with a short introduction by Eric Hobsbawm) that I used are from 1919-1920. He was visibly impressed by the conditions of the Red Biennium in Italy where parliamentary democracy was collapsing and workers in many instances took control of the factories. Lenin’s The state and Revolution was published about two years earlier, on the eve of the October Revolution.

Gramsci’s rejection of representative democracy is based on the same arguments as Lenin’s: representative democracy is only representative of capitalists’ interests. Any democracy under (a) the conditions of capitalist lordship over the productive sphere, and (what later become an iconic term which Gramsci credits to Lenin) (b) “hegemony” of the bourgeoisie over social organizations and public discourse, simply replicates the economic rule of the privileged and powerful into the political sphere. Rather the doing it through authoritarian means, the rich accomplish it through representative democracy, or “democracy.”

The solution is direct democracy, that is rule by the councils. In Russia and later in the world, they became famous through the Russian term of “soviet”. The soviets were spontaneously formed immediately after the February revolution and they showed, both Lenin and Gramsci believe, what would be political form through which democracy would be expressed under socialism: representation for the oppressed classes that is technically carried out not through political parties but through councils that cover the society like a beehive from the lowest levels to the top. The example of the Paris Commune that was politically organized in the same fashion helped provide the idea with a right political pedigree.

Gramsci writes:

The socialist state is not yet communism, that is the establishment of a practice and an economic way of life that are communal; but it is the transitional state whose mission is to suppress competition via the suppression of private property, classes and national economies. This mission cannot be accomplished by parliamentary democracy. So the formula ‘conquest of the state’ should be understood in the following sense: replacement of the democratic parliamentary state by a new type of state, one that is generated by the associative experience of the proletarian class. (pp. 86-7). Ordine Nuovo, 12 July 1919.

Or criticizing the socialists before the break up of the Italian Social-Democratic party into Socialist and Communist:

They [Socialists] have acquired the same mistaken mentality as the liberal economists; they believe in the perpetuity and fundamental perfection of the institution of the democratic state. (page 86). Ordine Nuovo, 12 July 1919.

Lenin writes:

We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism, if criticism of bourgeois society is not mere words for us…The way out of parliamentarism is not..the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies [soviets]. (The State and Revolution.)

Gramsci is also in favor of the “imperative mandate” whereby deputies do not vote according to their opinion, but simply transmit to the higher level the majority view held by their council. This is done in order to prevent the disfiguration of the will of the council by their representatives who may be tempted to do it through moral or financial corruption.

The bourgeoisie counts on the distractions of the surroundings, on hints concerning the possibility of satisfying personal ambitions, to corrupt deputies—even when they are workers—if they are not bound by an imperative mandate. (p 100). Avanti, 5 September 1920.

Interestingly, a form of the imperative mandate may become more viable and implementable with digitalization and thus ability to circumvent intermediation done by members of parliament (MPs) between the will of their constituents and the political vote. Currently, the MP can vote any way he or she likes but must be of course aware that a “wrong” vote may cost them the mandate in the next election. Yet, as Gramsci observes, such freedom makes the MP susceptible to corruption. Take the case of an important vote on an economic matter on which lots of money hinges. The MP might decide—even if he believes that his constituents may because of that vote throw him out of the office in the next election—to vote against their interest and their preferences because he can be either directly bribed or ensured of getting a new, very lucrative job after the vote. This has happened more than once. But with electronic voting (and thus an equivalent of imperative mandate), one could get rid of the MPs and register popular votes on such matters directly.

Gramsci, probably because of the Italian Red Biennium goes further than Lenin. He sees councils not only as a way in which the political sphere would be organized, but also as means of running enterprises and thus organizing the economic sphere. “They [workers’ councils] must be the organs of proletarian power, replacing the capitalist in all his usable functions of management and administration” (ibid). Lenin, as is well known, was never an advocate of worker-management. It never appears on his radar screen or in his writings, because he saw future socialist economic organization in the light of German organization before and during the World War: centralization of enterprises into large, efficient conglomerates managed by the state-appointed CEOs. (In discussions around NEP it became apparent that Lenin was not satisfied with the quality of management provided by the ”red experts” and decided to bring back capitalists who as hired managers by the socialist state would run the companies.)

Gramsci was thus more radical and more consistent. The politically preferred organization of councils needs to spread to the economy as well. Companies should be run by their workers organized in workers’ councils. The only place that ever implemented that idea was Yugoslavia from the mid-1950s to the collapse of the county in 1991. It had certain advantages (workplace democracy) and certain disadvantages (tendency to distribute income into wages rather than investment and slow technological progress). I wrote about it here.

The message for today from this part of Gramsci’s writings seemed to me to deal with the situations when there is a break-down of institutions of representative democracy. Neither Lenin nor Gramsci thought that it was the principal argument against representative democracy but when an institution ceases to function well and when a significant percentage of the population begins to believe that the electoral outcomes are unfair, we necessarily look for alternative arrangements for people’s will to direct “the ship of the state”. Council democracy is one such form.

I do not think that it is necessarily a viable form of governance. It has shown itself in the Soviet Union (i.e. literally in the Union of Councils) to lead to dictatorship. One can, however, argue that it was inevitable under a one-party state. Such a system grafted upon the councils led to the evisceration of councils’ power, made them into a façade behind which all decisions were made by the single party. Some people might then argue that a non-party council system could be a viable alternative. In theory people need not be organized in political parties to exercise a political role. Most often however organization of similarly-minded people into political groups seems to be the rule. Perhaps then a multi-party system could be implemented through councils rather than through parliaments, or circumventing MPs altogether, become, thanks to the Internet, a system of direct democracy? But we have never seen that.