Councils and Parliaments: The

Problems of Dual Power and Democracy

in Comparative Perspective

CARMEN SIRIANNI

WITH the Russian Revolution and the severe political crises that fol-
lowed in the wake of World War I, the question of the state in revolu-
tionary transformation became a pressing theoretical and practical issue
in the workers’ movements. Prior to the war, Pannekoek engaged
Kautsky with the argument that &dquo;the proletariat in Germany must
struggle not for the conquest of the state, but for the destruction of the
bourgeois state machine.&dquo;I However, Pannekoek did concede that in
fully democratic systems a parliamentary road to power was possible.
Bukharin, during the war, made no concessions; in his analysis of the
imperialist state as a new Leviathan, he decisively rejected the parlia-
2
mentary road. The bourgeois state apparatus would have to be smashed.2
Lenin at first favored the orthodox Kautskyist analysis that the state
was to be captured and transformed. But the impact of Pannekoek and

Bukharin became apparent in Lenin’s notes on the state in late 1916.

With the drafting of State and Revolution and the development of dual
organs of power in Russia in 1917, it was he who became Kautsky’s
major adversary.
Although the lines of cleavage that emerged during these years of
political crisis are still basic theoretical demarcations, the positions of
organized parties have shifted considerably. Most notably, the develop-
ment of Eurocommunism has led in the 1970s to the official rejection
of the Leninist precepts. Despite their differences, the major European
Communist parties have adopted a strategy of structural reformism and

I would like to thank Lew Friedland, Simon Rosenblum, and Andrea Walsh for comment:
on an earlier version of this paper.

Quoted in Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938,
1.
trans.Jon Rothschild (London: NLB, 1979), pp. 155-56.
2. Marian Sawyer, "The Genesis of State and Revolution," in Socialist Register 1977, ed.
Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin, 1971), 213ff.
84

democratic transformation of the existing state apparatuses. Parliamen-

tary democracy is to become the basis for social transformation.
Even so, critics, both within and outside the Leninist’tradition, have
hardly been silenced. Ernest Mandel, for instance, argues that the Lenin-
ist schema &dquo;is much more applicable in the advanced capitalist countries
of Europe than it ever was in Russia. In all likelihood, that strategy,
which was not applied in its entirety or even to a very great extent in
Russia, will be fully applied for the first time now in Western Europe.&dquo;3
While recent debates have not resolved these issues, they have high-
lighted the need for an empirically grounded and practically relevant
theory of democratic forms. Though it by no means stands above the
fray, this essay attempts to contribute to such a theory through a com-
parative historical analysis of dual power.
In the following, I will first examine the theoretical premises of the
critique of parliamentary democracy and then analyze the major cases
of dual power and their possible relevance in the advanced democratic
states of today. The emphasis is on the profound, if not insurmount-
able, problems of legitimation and administration that council forms of
dual power would invariably face. Though this essay cannot provide a
critical analysis of Eurocommunism and contemporary social democ-
racy, the concluding section indicates both the possibilities and
the limitations of current approaches to political and economic
democratization.
KAUTSKY, LENIN, AND THE CRITIQUE OF PARLIAMENTARY FORMS

Lenin’s was clear in its essentials, if not always in its strate-

position
gic implications. The working class could not lay hold of the existing
state apparatus and use it for socialist transformation. Even the most
democratic of parliamentary states were essentially and irremediably
instruments of bourgeois class domination. In fact, the &dquo;democratic
republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism and therefore
capital, once in possession ... of this very best shell, establishes its
power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, of institutions
or of parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.&dquo;4

Parliament was no longer the real locus of political power in any case.
And while revolutionaries must struggle within it, they should do so
only in order to displace it. Only soviet-type institutions could provide
the basis for genuinely democratic emancipation. The struggle for power

3. Ernest Mandel, "A Political Interview," New Left Review, no. 100 (November 1976-
January 1977), p. 99.
4. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1932), p. 14.
 85

must, therefore, take the form of dual power between the old state
apparatus, which must be displaced and smashed, and a new soviet
state-in-embryo. The Russian experience, far from being exceptional,
stood as the paradigm for all workers’ movements.
In the years immediately following the Russian and German revolu-
tions, Kautsky articulated a position that reaffirmed his long-standing
belief in the possibility and necessity for a seizure of power through
parliamentary means. By including a special role for council-type insti-
tutions, he distinguished his position from that of many Right Social
Democrats and continues to provide a point of difference between
Right and Left Euro-Communists.5 According to Kautsky, a socialist
revolution would break up the German bureaucratic-military machine,
replace the standing army with a citizen militia, and extensively devolve
central power to locally elected assemblies. Workers’ councils would
help destroy the old bureaucratic-military organs (which could not be
wielded by the proletariat for its own emancipation), defend the revolu-
tion by force of arms if necessary, participate in the organization of
production (which should be decentralized wherever possible), and
serve as forums for the expression of working-class interests. Yet the

councils were not to unify as the supreme national legislative authority;

nor were they to fuse legislative and executive functions, as in Lenin’s

commune-state. Rather, a fully democratic national parliament based

on universal suffrage was to stand at the pinnacle of the revolutionary

state. The &dquo;dictatorship of the proletariat,&dquo; a term still amenable to the

Kautskyist position of 1918, was to be achieved through a working-
class majority in parliament, not through institutions that excluded
representation according to class criteria. The latter could only lead to a
dictatorship of one part of the proletariat over the rest of the nation,
and to civil war, to economic devastation, and to eventual defeat. The
parliamentary form was not bourgeois in essence, even though capital-
ist domination distorted and debilitated it.66
In their recent polemics against the Leninist dual-power strategy,
Nicos Poulantzas, Geoff Hodgson, and others have reiterated and
developed Kautsky’s basic arguments. According to Poulantzas, the
democratic parliamentary state must be radically transformed, not
totally smashed. Even if contemporary state apparatuses structurally
correspond to the power of the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary rupture
must take place not between these and dual organs of popular power,
but within these state apparatuses. While a frontal and global attack is

5. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky, p. 13.

6. Ibid., chaps. 7, 8.
86

no longer practicable, the transversal of the state by popular struggle

makes the transformation of the state from within, complemented by
dual organs of power from without, a genuine possibility. But such
dual popular organs must not attempt to displace parliament, for this
would result in defeat and the demise of democracy. The essential ques-
tion is: &dquo;how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a
manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the

institutions of representative democracy ... are combined with the

unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-
management bodies
Hodgson has put forth similar arguments. The bureaucratic-military
apparatus must be smashed, though not all bureaucracies fall into this
category. Parliamentary institutions are not sufficient for a socialist
transformation and must be enriched by further democratic measures
(such as direct recall) and must be complemented by grassroots demo-
cratic organization in the workplace and community. But only institu-
tions based on universal suffrage can stand at the head of a socialist
state. The limitations of parliamentary democracy in capitalist society
are not essential to the form as such, but to the structural relation
between political forms and social structures.8
Each side in this debate points to the actual history of workers’
movements, particularly those in Russia and Germany after World War I,
to buttress its general position. Hence an historical analysis is absolutely
essential. Within the context of certain theoretical considerations, the
history of workers’ movements both in that period and later would
seem to bear out the general Kautskyist and Euro-Communist position,
even though a more detailed analysis would find fault with many of the

specific political judgments therein. Of course, to dispose of either posi-

tion with the glib judgment that &dquo;it has never worked&dquo; would be disin-
genuous, since neither strategy has yet been adequate to the task of
creating a socialist democracy. As Perry Anderson noted, &dquo;there can be
no axiomatics of revolutionary change in the strong sense,&dquo; but only
9
arguments of probability based on historical and theoretical analysis.9
Let us, then, examine the weight of evidence against the classical dual-
power strategy.
The dual-power strategy is buttressed by certain tenets about the
political functions or effects of the bourgeois state, even though these

7. Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: NLB,
1978), p. 256.
8. Geoff Hodgson, Socialism and Parliamentary Democracy (Nottingham: Spokesman,
1977), especially chap. 1.
9. Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: NLB, 1980), p. 197.
 87

tenets have also been advanced by theorists who do not fully support
this approach. The state, it is argued, constitutes workers as individual
and atomized citizens, instead of as a class. Its overpowering, if not
completely unilateral, effect is to disorganize the working class. Pou-
lantzas-whose own failure to discard thoroughly the functionalism
of his earlier work has led to some peculiar contradictions with his
later politics-argues that &dquo;the state apparatuses organize-unify the
power bloc by permanently disorganizing-dividing the dominated
classes....,,10 In fact, it is the basic political function of the bour-
geois state to &dquo;transform&dquo; the working class into individual bourgeois
citizens. Mandel, who accepts much of this analysis, adds that there is
a &dquo;tendential, and in the long run irreconcilable, conflict between the

representative institutions of indirectdemocracy and the manifestations

and institutions of direct democracy.&dquo;11 Adam Przeworski argues that
parliamentary forms &dquo;impose&dquo; relations of representation on the work-
ing class so that masses cannot act &dquo;directly&dquo; to secure their interests.
Thus, parliament is &dquo;the mode of organization of the working class
within capitalist institutions. In this manner participation demobilizes
the masses.&dquo;12 Socialist parties have been deceived into believing that
the dominant classes could be &dquo;beaten at their own game&dquo;, whereas
parliamentary elections, in fact, are a basic mechanism for displacing
the fundamental interests of the working class into struggles for imme-
diate interests. 13 For Perry Anderson, not only is the general form of.
parliamentary representation the &dquo;principal ideological lynchpin of
Western capitalism,&dquo; but its &dquo;very existence deprives the working class
of the idea of socialism as a different type of State.... ,,14 Here the
obscuring effect is thorough, if not virtually total.
When accepted in their starkest formulations, these tenets make it
clear why the bourgeois state must be smashed. If the political-organi-
zational and ideological effects of the parliamentary form are so total as
to foreclose a strategic struggle for socialist democracy on this terrain,
such a struggle could only be used for tactical maneuvers and propa-
ganda campaigns; the real struggle for genuine popular democracy must
be waged outside the parliamentary form. Only through separate and
autonomous organs can genuine democracy present itself as a legitimate
and viable alternative to the working class.

10. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, p. 140, my emphasis. See also his earlier work,
Political Power and Social Classes, trans. Timothy O’Hagan (London: NLB, 1973).
11. Ernest Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (London: NLB, 1978), p. 163.
12. Adam Przeworski, "Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon," New Left
Review, no. 122 (July-August 1980), p. 29.
13. Erik Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: NLB, 1978), p. 234.
14. Perry Anderson, "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New Left Review, no. 100
(November 1976-January 1977), p. 28.
 88

This reasoning, however, is seriously flawed. To begin with, parlia-

mentary democracy based on universal suffrage has been the product of
intense working class and popular struggle.l5 While most dual-power
theorists concede this,l6 they downplay the constitutive impact of
popular struggle on the parliamentary state by assuming, in a functional-
ist manner, that the political-organizational and ideological effects of
parliamentary forms are always optimal for, or at least fully compatible
with, the reproduction of capitalist social relations over time. However,
although parliamentary forms have disorganized the working class in
specific ways, they have also helped organize it. Parliaments have been
the major institutional form for the constitution of the working class as
a national political class, since they have been the necessary condition

for the development of mass, national, and stable working-class and

socialist parties. They have been the major national forums for repre-
senting class-wide political and economic interests of workers. The pro-
gressive, if uneven and incomplete, constitution of the working class as
a self-conscious national
political subject has occurred more through
parliamentary forms than it has through any other form of political or
economic organization.
To argue that parliamentary forms simply function to &dquo;atomize&dquo;
the working class is to ignore the organizational and communicative con-
texts within which electoral activity has occurred. To say that parlia-
~ mentary forms impose relations of representation that prevent the work-
ing class from directly securing its interests is simply to beg the question
of the alternative forms that have been historically possible for repre-
senting and securing those interests. There was no pristine proletarian
public prior to parliament, and the working class did not have a prior
existence as a national political class. The claims of imposition and
atomization are thus historically and empirically empty. The norm of
direct action by the masses represents an appeal to a metaphysic of
class and mobilization without organizational mediation.
National parliaments and local government bodies based on univer-
sal suffrage have also been important in securing other forms of
working-class organization, especially the trade unions. Legislation and
governmental coalitions with nonproletarian strata have often proved

15. Other factors have also fostered the development of parliamentary democracy. See
"The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy," New Left Review,
Göran Therborn,
no. 103 (May-June 1977), pp. 3-41.
16. Exceptions seem to be Arghiri Emmanuel, "The State in the Transition Period," New
Left Review, nos. 113-14 (January-April 1979), p. 114, n.3; and Henri Weber, "Eurocommu-
nism, Socialism and Democracy," New Left Review, no. 110 (July-August 1978), p. 8.
 89

crucial in facilitating organization and in winning strikes. Likewise,

major labor gains secured through parliament, such as social-welfare
benefits, have enhanced the capacities of workers to struggle at the
point of production, even though services are provided in ways that
tend to disorganize the recipients.17 Full-employment legislation
achieved by labor parties and coalitions has enhanced the indirect
capacity of labor to resist capitall8 and, as a consequence, labor’s
capacity to strengthen organization on the shop floor. In several coun-
tries, legislation has directly secured the rights of shop-floor organiza-
tions when they were unattainable through extra-parliamentary means.
Parliamentary democratic forms thus have had multiple effects on
working-class organization. They organize and disorganize, mobilize and
demobilize, in a great variety of ways that have yet to be empirically
integrated into Marxist theories of the state. Democracy has developed
out of the contradictions of capitalism and has itself constituted one of

capitalism’s major contradictions. Only an abstract and ahistorical func-

tionalism could hold that the basic function or effect of parliamentary
democracy is to disorganize the working class so that the historical con-
tradictions are continually and neatly recuperated.
Parliament has also been constitutive of the working class’s ability
to forge coalitions with other strata. Such coalitions have been, and will
continue to be, absolutely essential in the long struggle for socialist
hegemony within a national popular bloc of progressive forces. While
Przeworski critiques parliamentary politics because &dquo;the search for
allies is inherent to electoralism,&dquo;19 that search is inherent in the struggle
for socialism itself. In many cases, universal suffrage and democratic
rights were achieved only through alliances with other popular strata,
with the petite bourgeoisie in particular, and through struggles combin-
ing parliamentary and nonparliamentary means. As Gramsci came to
appreciate, pluralism has become an organic part of the working-class
movement, largely because of the historical experience of participa-
tion in parliamentary ’politics.20 The working class has not emerged
from capitalist economic relations or struggles per se as a democratic
force committed to pluralist values and multi-party representation.
Rather, its political formation as democratic and pluralist has been inex-
tricably tied to parliamentary politics on national and local levels.

17. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy (New York: Russell Sage, 1980).
18. Giovanni Arrighi, "The Class Struggle in Twentieth Century Western Europe" (Paper
presented at the Ninth World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala, August 1978), p. 17.
19. Przeworski, "Sodal Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon," p. 41.
20. Biaggio de Giovanni, "Lenin and Gramsci: State, Politics and Party," in Gramsci and
Marxist Theory, ed. Chantal Mouffc (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 285.
90

Although parliamentary forms represent only limited vision of

a

genuine democracy, they do not completely obscure such a vision. To

argue otherwise is to ignore the profound political socialization of the

working class, around issues of democratic and civil rights and around
procedural guarantees, that has occurred through parliamentary forms.
Nor has the consciousness of industrial democracy and local participa-
tion been able to emerge only where parliamentary forms were in severe
crisis, as the recent history of Western democracies shows. In its extreme
form, the opposing view represents a version of political fetishism that
parallels and complements commodity fetishism, and shares the same
basic problem. As Bob Jessop argues, &dquo;insofar as commodity fetishism
is seen to be an automatic effect of the system of generalized commod-
ity production, the fact of capitalist production automatically produces
one of its (ideological) conditions of existence. If the successful consti-

tution of a bourgeois democratic republic automatically generates

political fetishism, then yet another of these conditions of existence
is automatically generated. In such circumstances, how could capitalism
ever disappear-except through some built-in teleological drive?,,21 Or

through a proletarian polis ex machina.

The ideological and political-organizational effects of parliamentary
forms are not automatically produced by the forms themselves. They
are rather determined by a complex matrix of struggles that intersect
with those forms. Parliamentary democratic forms obscure class rela-
tions in specific ways and constitute workers as individual citizens. (To
view workers as mere &dquo;bourgeois individuals&dquo; would, in any case, be
reductionist, as if the &dquo;rich individuality&dquo;22 that Niarx viewed as essen-
tial to socialism could emerge only outside of parliamentary forms.)
But parliamentary forms also permit various forms of class representa-
tion and organization and strategic cross-class coalitions. An argument
for their suitability in the transition to socialism must involve further
historical argument, to be sure. But it is an ahistorical abstractionism
not to recognize the role of parliamentary forms in constituting the
working class as a democratic, pluralistic, industrially organized, and
potentially revolutionary social force. Such thinking short-circuits
analysis, instead of furthering it.

21. Bob Jessop, "Capitalism and Democracy: the Best Possible Shell?" in Power and the
State, ed. Gary Littlejohn, Barry Smart, John Wakcford and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Croom
Helm, 1978), p. 28.
22. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative is Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernback (London: NLB,
1978), p. 409.
 91

THE DYNAMICS OF DUAL POWER

A comparative analysis of dual power and proto-dyarchic crises indi-

cates that a socialist transition from such crises in the advanced capital-
ist countries of the West today is unlikely. The particular conditions for
and dynamics of these crises in the past, and the limited capacities for
legitimation, administration, and repression that they revealed, point to
their limited relevance. Of course, as Henri Weber has argued, contem-
porary crises may have nothing in common with those of the First and
Second World Wars. Yet a convincing argument for dual power must do
more than simply bracket these earlier experiences and postulate &dquo;gen-
eralized explosions in which the entire equilibrium of the systems will
break, allowing the question of economic and state power to be settled
in the heat of struggle.,,23 The past need not be repeated, but its ana-
lytic relevance ought not be ignored.
Historically, dual power or embryonic dyarchy has emerged in
countries that were either defeated in war (such as Russia, Germany,
and the former Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I, and Portu-
gal after years of unsuccessful colonial wars in the 1960s and 19 70s) or
subject to sudden and massive armed attack by fascist forces (such as
Spain in 1936). In addition, in all of these cases parliamentary tradi-
tions were weak, corrupt, or nonexistent. During the serious political
and social crises of World War I, there had never been a real possibil-
ity of dual power in the victorious nations, where the repressive appa-
ratuses remained intact and where the legitimacy of parliamentary
institutions was reaffirmed. Nor did such a possibility seem viable to
significant sectors of the working classes during the most dramatic con-
frontations of the interwar years, such as the French strikes in 1919-
1920 and the British General Strike in 1926, nor during the years imme-
diately following World War II. Even in post-World War I Italy, where
universal male suffrage had only recently been extended, where popu-
lar and direct challenges on the land and in the factories were quite
intense, and where the reliability of the armed foices was uncertain,
the state crisis did not develop in the direction of dual power. Let us
look more closely at some of these cases.
The state crisis in Russia was quite distinctive, though not unique in
every aspect. The disintegration of the.tsarist state apparatuses was sud-
den and massive. The police forces were never generally reconstituted,
and the workers’ Red Guards became the effective police power wher-
ever there were large proletarian concentrations. Under conditions of

continued war and economic breakdown, the Provisional Government

23. Henri Weber, "Eurocommunism, Socialism and Democracy," pp. 12-13.

92

possessed only the most minimal capacities for effective administration.

Bourgeois ministers lacked a reserve of parliamentary legitimacy upon
which to draw, and the continued postponement of Constituent Assem-
bly elections depleted whatever political credit they had been condi-
tionally advanced by the popular classes and the Petrograd Soviet.
From the February revolution onward, the troops in the rear, which
would be decisive in any confrontation, declared their loyalty to the
soviets as the main hope for peace and democracy. And continued war
resulted in the disintegration of the forces at the front and in the
destruction of much of the old officer corps. Because Russia was geo-
graphically distant from the main centers of European military power
and because war continued in the West, military disintegration presented
a less immediate threat to the popular revolution than it would in Ger-

many or other potentially revolutionary situations. Under these condi-

tions, organs of dual power could not only arise in the immediate wake
of popular rebellion and the collapse of the tsarist state but could also
continually extend their reach, since the Provisional Government pos-
sessed very limited legitimacy, administrative capacity, and coercive
power. The weakness of its institutional base of local zemstvos and
dumas reflected long years of tsarist autocracy and repression. Thus the
particular configurations of power and leverage that resulted from the
massive breakdown of the tsarist apparatus under the strain of prolonged
total war made the geographical and functional extension of Soviet
power virtually irreversible in 1917.24
In Germany the political crisis that developed in the last months of
the war suddenly exploded once it became clear that defeat was at hand.
The legitimacy of the Kaiserreich, progressively undermined by the
meager attempts at political reform during the war, evaporated once
defeat had removed its major rationale. The troops mutinied, the old
repressive apparatuses in the rear crumbled, and workers joined soldiers
in establishing councils (Rdte) throughout the country. These councils
controlled the old state bureaus and municipal bodies, maintained food
supplies and general public order, and supervised demobilization.
But dual power did not reveal a dynamic similar to that of Russia.
The old state apparatuses were stunned but did not generally disinte-
grate. Despite their widespread revolutionary democratic legitimacy,
the councils (with some exceptions) did not move to consolidate power
in their own hands and displace or destroy the old organs. Most coun-
cils viewed themselves as interim organs for re-establishing order and
24. Carmen Sirianni, Workert’ Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience
(London: NLB, 1982). chap. 4; Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets, trans. Ruth Hein (New York:
Pantheon, 1974), chap. 3.
 93

democratizing the old apparatuses.~ The soldiers upon whom any

extension of dual power would have had to rely, exercised a decidedly
moderating influence on the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils. Though
embittered, organized, armed, and in some ways further proletarianized
by the-war, these returning troops desired a normal life, security, and
esteem in an idealized home with their mothers and/or wives and chil-
dren. The last thing they wanted was civil war. Nor did the women on
the homefront look forward to still more loss and disruption.26 Pro-
longed war and defeat had generated the conditions for dual organs of
power but simultaneously set limits beyond which large sectors of the
popular classes were unwilling to go in smashing the old apparatuses.
Little more than a month after the revolution, the First National Con-
gress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils voted overwhelmingly for the
early convocation of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage,
as well as for democratization of administrative and military appara-
tuses. In Austria the dynamic was roughly similar, although there were
some differences. The workers’ councils developed coordinating organs
much later and more unevenly than in Germany and were even shorter
in duration. They also had fewer ties to the soldiers’ councils and
remained isolated amidst a vast mass of hostile and organized peasants
ready to starve Vienna to prevent a workers’ council government.27
The dual power that emerged in Spain during the Civil War was also
resolved very rapidly in favor of a unitary state with major Left partici-
pation. Though Spain had a tradition of parliamentary democracy and
early universal manhood suffrage, the state was blatantly corrupt, the
major liberal parties made no effort to integrate the lower classes into
parliamentary politics, and military coups and repression were common.
The weakness of Spanish capitalism provided little opportunity for a
reformist working-class politics. The Republican state thus enjoyed
limited legitimacy, and its lack of preparedness for the Franco attack in
July 1936 undermined this even further. As a result of the fascist
25. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik, 1918-1919 (Düsseldorf:
Droste Verlag, 1962); ReinhardRürup, cd., Arbeiter-und Soldatenräte in rheinisch-westfälischen
Industriegebiet (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1975).
No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I(Cambridge: At the Uni-
26.Eric Leed,
versity Press, 1979), pp. 186ff.; see also Ulrich Kluge, Soldatenräte und Revolution (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975). Although an analysis of state building in the German revo-
lution must focus primarily on pre-existing state structures, on party and union organizations,
and on the specific characteristics of political crises, any dichotomization of structural explana-
tions versus cultural or social-psychological explanations reveals itself as inadequate here. The
crucial role played by the soldiers must be understood in terms of the social psychological
impact of the war on their daily lives, as must the role played by women as well.
27. F. L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918-1919 (Berkeley: California University
Press, 1972), chap. 4.
94

onslaught, the old repressive apparatuses disintegrated, and administra-

tion was paralyzed, particularly in Catalonia.
The national state in Madrid, however, did crumble, and dual
not
organs of power were never a serious challenge there.28 Also, various
revolutionary committees sprang up throughout Catalonia and in
selected cities elsewhere, particularly in the Levant, where the combina-
tion of dual power and the strong presence of the Confederacion
Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) created the conditions for workers’ self-
management of farms, factories, and services. ~ These revolutionary
committees generally had effective control of all legislative, executive,
and police functions and extended their activities into many areas of
social and economic life. They were sometimes established by popular
election, sometimes by the initiative of union activists, sometimes by
simply altering the composition of socialist municipal councils or Popu-
lar Front committees.
Yet the revolutionary committees did not move to consolidate
power, nor did they ever possess even the rudimentary national organi-
zational bases for doing this. In many places they were disbanded within
a few weeks, and everywhere within a few short months, despite calls

from some Leftists (notably Juan Andrade of the quasi-Trotskyist Par-

tido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM) that they transform them-
selves into a Constituent Assembly of Workers, Peasants, Policemen,
and Soldiers.~ Even the factory committees of Catalonia, which might
have served as a basis for state power provincially-but only provin-
cially-were integrated into the Republican state framework within
three months. This was in part due to the relative strength of the central
state apparatuses and the need for Western and Soviet aid. In addition,
even the most revolutionary workers, after the repeated defeats of the

summer, recognized the necessity for unified commands to oppose the

fascists. The Republican state was reconstituted with the support of
most sections of the Left. Even the CNT, with its long tradition of
opposing participation in political institutions, joined the Catalan
government in September and the national government in early Novem-
ber. The very condition for dual power, Franco’s military attack, was
the major condition for reconsolidation around a unified Republican
state.
The Portuguese and Chilean cases, where dual power developed in

28. PierreBroué and Emile Témime, The Revolution and Civil War in Spain, trans. Tony
White (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), chaps. 1-4.
29. See Frank Mintz, L’Autogestion dans l’Espagne Revolutionnaire (Paris: Bclibaste, 1970).
30. The word soviets was not used in the hope of not frightening off the libertarian CNT.
See Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 183-84.
 95

embryo, also reveal the limited relevance of such strategies. The Portu-
guese revolution emerged in the wake of long years of unsuccessful
colonial wars, which killed some ten thousand Portuguese soldiers and
which consumed an enormous share of the national budget. The armed
forces, whose officer corps had been opened to the popular classes after
1958, led the revolution against the half-century-long fascist regime.
And as the revolution radicalized in late 1974, the Armed Forces Move-
ment (MFA) institutionalized itself into a system of assemblies elected
by the ranks and capped by various executive councils that were
designed to remain a power distinct from the Council of State. For a
period, the MFA’s Council of Twenty became the effective center of
power in the country. It intended to supervise politics for a transitional
period of three to five years while a Constituent Assembly, which was
to be elected in April 1975, worked out a new constitution. But the
independent MFA power base could not sustain itself in the face of
opposition by the Socialists and the Popular Democrats, who supported
the forthright establishment of a parliamentary republic. The Socialists
received 38 percent of the vote and the Popular Democrats 26 percent,
while parties further to the left (the Communist party and the Portu-
guese Democratic Movement [MDP] ) received only 17 percent. The
great majority of rank-and-file troops resisted calls for a mass uprising
that would lead to civil war, given the electoral support of the opposi-
tion and the loyalty of important sectors of the armed forces to the
moderates. As in Germany in 1918-1919, broad structural changes that
did not have the legitimacy of a government elected by universal suf-
frage would have provided a convenient pretext for foreign invasion,
which could not have been effectively repulsed. The coup attempt by
some units to the left of Goncalves and the Communist party in Novem-
ber 1975 failed to spread beyond a few strategic military centers. Soon
after the right-wing countercoup, the MFA, whose real power proved
&dquo;limited and ephemeral,&dquo; was dismantled. 31
The worker and peasant committees, established to manage occu-
pied or nationalized factories and farms, also did not constitute an alter-
native or complementary base for effectively centralizing power against
the state. Many neighborhood commissions (comissões de moradores),
which provided a variety of local services, manifested strong autonomist
tendencies. But their organization above the immediate locale was

31. Lawrence Graham, "The Military in Politics : The Politicization of the Portuguese Armed
Forces," in Contemporary Portugal, ed. Lawrence Graham and Harry Mackler (Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press, 1979), p. 251; see also John Hammond, "Electoral Behavior and Political
Militancy," in ibid.; and Rona Fields, The Portuguese Revolution and the Armed Forces Move-
ment (New York: Praeger, 1976).
96

decidedly slow and never particularly effective. It was a full year or

more before they were even nominally formed at the municipal level in
the major cities. And before they had a chance to demonstrate broader
administrative capacities, they were rapidly demobilized after the
November coup. In the larger firms that were nationalized or &dquo;inter-
vened&dquo; by the state at the insistence of the workers, the workers’ com-
missions were quickly integrated into the state system. Even the more
autonomous self-managed firms (empresas em autogestgo), which were

generally small and marginal, were dependent on the coercive, legiti-

mative, and financial resources of the state.32
Nor did dual organs ever constitute an alternative in Chile under
Allende. Grassroots organizations, such as communal councils to main-
tain local services, to defend factories, and to prevent sabotage, mush-
roomed during the Allende years and mobilized the working class for
participation in a socialist transformations Together with the factory
councils, their achievements were enormous. Yet any attempt to dis-
place the legislature and to centralize power through them would have
met with certain and swift defeat. The Chilean army had not disinte-

grated after defeat, as happened in Russia and Germany. Even a more

activist revolutionary strategy to organize within the ranks would not
have prevented a repressive onslaught against any move to centralize
power outside and against popularly elected bodies. Chile’s parliamen-
tary heritage invested these with widespread legitimacy as institutions
among very large sectors of the working class and its mass parties and
within the lower ranks of the military. And, unlike the Russian Provi-
sional Government, the Popular Unity (UP) cabinet of Allende demon-
strated considerable achievements in administration and reform.34
Although the UP should have pursued a more militant campaign within
the army and a more aggressive ideological campaign (around the
threat of fascism, the role of U.S. imperialism, inflation, et cetera),
its biggest political mistake was not to mobilize forces for a plebescite

32. Charles Downs, "Comissões de Moradores and Urban Struggles in Revolutionary Portu-
gal," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 4, no. 2 (June 1980): 267-94. John
Hammond, "Worker Control in Portugal: The Revolution and Today," Economic and Industrial
Democracy 2, no. 4 (November 1981): 413-53. Hammond concludes that the popular move-
ment could have pushed the revolution decisively forward by relying on its own resources, but
his analysis does not indicate organizational resources among the popular movements, including
the workers’ control movement, that would have been sufficient enough to centralize power
against the state.
33. Michel Raptis, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Chile, trans. John Simmonds (Lon-
don : Allison and Bubsy, 1974).
34. See Kyle Steenland’s comparison with Russia in "Two Years of ’Popular Unity’ in Chile:
A Balance Sheet," New Left Review, no. 78 (March-April 1973), pp. 23-24.
 97

on constitutional reform for a single house popular assembly. This

could have been done after the UP won over 50 percent in the munici-
pal elections of spring 1971,~5 and only this could have broken the
obstruction of the conservative majority in the legislature in a way that
would have maintained democratic legitimacy and hence have had the
potential of forestalling military intervention. A strategy that circum-
vented universal suffrage to centralize power up from the working-class
base would have received only limited support from those bases and
would have met with certain defeat by the military.
The Russian Revolution represented a unique dynamic of dual
power that is unlikely to be repeated in the West today. Its relevance
would seem to be confined to national liberation and peasant insurrec-
tionary movements, where rural base areas can provide the institutional
space for alternative centers of power to sustain themselves over a period
of time. In industrialized Soviet-bloc countries, such as Hungary (1956)
and Poland (1980-1981), where dual organs of power have emerged on
a broad scale in response to the political monopoly of Communist par-

ties, Russian military force has effectively checked or repressed any

shift of power toward autonomous workers’ organizations. 36 If defeat
in war has been an important condition for the emergence of dual
power in most other situations, it has also generated counterconditions
unfavorable to maintaining such power. The fascist attack and civil war
in Spain similarly generated counterconditions that undercut what were
in any case very geographically limited dual-power bases. Alternative
revolutionary strategies that enhanced popular democratic control do
seem to have been present in all of these countries, yet none would
have been viable had they sought to permanently displace or to indefi-
nitely postpone representative organs based on universal suffrage.
The Paris Commune itself, which inspired Marx’s conception of an
alternative state and provided the basis for Lenin’s critique of Kautsky,
was created in the wake of military defeat, the siege and occupation of
Paris by Prussian troops, and a power vacuum resulting from the deci-
sion of the conservative national government to withdraw all civil ser-
vants from the city. The state, in short, removed itself, only to fight
from a stronger position. And the fear of renewed Prussian intervention
encouraged the Commune not to attack the seat of the new government
at Versailles. 37

35. Edward Boorstcin, Allende’s Chile (New York: International Publishers, 1977); see also
Ralph Miliband, "The Coup in Chile," in Revolution and Class Struggle, ed Robin Blackburn
(Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 430-31.
36. On the Hungarian Workers’ Councils, see Bill Lomax, Hungary 1956 (London: Allison
and Busby, 1976), chap. 5.
37. Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune 1871 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), pp.158 ff.
98

Given the current military technology, a prolonged period of total

warfare that would shatter the state and its repressive apparatuses is
highly unlikely. Dual organs of power that attempt to centralize power
are likely to provoke a repressive response on terms militarily unfavor-
able to the popular movements, as happened in Portugal. The real pos-
sibility of fascism (which Portugal just barely escaped) makes it even
more urgent to avoid such a confrontation. In Russia mass-based right-

wing movements were never a serious threat to the working class in

1917. The relative ease with which the tsarist and Provisional Govern-
ment apparatuses were displaced was quite unique. As Perry Anderson
has argued, this was largely because the Russian state remained in
feudal absolutism, even though the Russian social formation was dom-
inated by the capitalist mode of production. There was little compar-
ison, even with the Imperial German state. &dquo;The Russian Revolution
was not made against a capitalist state at all. &dquo; 38

PROBLEMS OF LEGITIMATION

Conditions in the advanced capitalist states of the West today

would almost certainly ensure that dual organs of power would suffer
serious deficits in legitimative and administrative capacities and that
these deficits would be mutually reinforcing and extremely difficult to
overcome. For one, parliamentary institutions have had a long history,
have achieved very real gains, and have been extended, defended, and
restored in part through popular struggles. In addition, we have the pro-
found and still unforgettable historical experience of their loss with
fascism and the continued specter of authoritarian socialism. The West-
ern working classes have therefore, on the whole, accepted the general

legitimacy of representative institutions based on universal suffrage.

Even in Germany and Spain, where parliamentary traditions were
much weaker, and in Portugal, where they were virtually nonexistent,
very large sections of the working classes remained committed to such
institutions. Indeed, the flowering of comissões de moradores in Portu-
gal can only be understood in light of the fact that there had never been
popularly elected municipal governments before 1974. In Germany,
where a national system of councils developed, the great majority of
working-class forces (within the Social Democratic party [SPD] and a
good part of the Independent Social Democratic party [USPD], not to
mention the Christian trade unions) remained committed to a parlia-

38. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), p. 359.
 99

ment the highest state body. At best, the convocation of the National
as

Assembly could have been delayed while the apparatuses were further
democratized and certain industries socialized, but a long or indefinite
delay would net have been accepted as legitimate by much of the orga-
nized workers’ movement. In Russia, also, where.the bases of legitimacy
among the proletariat and census society were so different, the workers’
movement accepted the Constituent Assembly as a goal. Had it not been
for the prolongation of the war, that goal might have been realized.
And in practice some soviets, particularly at the neighborhood and city
district level, were not based on class but instead included all inhabitants.
In other major confrontations, such as the British General Strike in
1926, the French factory occupations in 1936, and May-June 1968 in
France, either the legitimacy of parliamentary institutions was not
seriously shaken or elections have been used to re-establish that legiti-
macy. The availability of parliamentary elections in periods of crisis is
virtually always present. Left forces that refuse to participate generally
delegitimate themselves in the eyes of large sections of the working
class. And a failure of the Left to win a majority signals to the popular
classes that militant extraparliamentary activity is &dquo;no longer within the
bounds of political legitimacy.&dquo;39 In addition, political institutions
established on a class-exclusivist basis and claiming supreme authority
would violate the norms of legitimacy that are not only maintained
through political practices per se, but that are sustained through the
social and cultural practices of everyday life. Today these practices are
much less exclusive, segregated, and overtly marked by class distinc-
tions than in Imperial Germany or Republican Spain. It is not at all
uncommon, for example, for extended working-class families to contain
members who have risen even as far as middle and upper management
or who have become small entrepreneurs employing wage labor. It is

inconceivable that class-based rules excluding certain categories of these

people from representation in the basic political organs could be granted
general legitimacy by the working class.
In addition to the widespread and profound legitimacy of universal
suffrage on normative grounds, working-class movements have also
recognized the strategic necessity for coalitions with middle strata, the
sine qua non of which is universal suffrage in the core political institu-
tions. And this is not simply a recent phenomenon of Eurocommunism.
Most Spanish workers recognized the necessity of an alliance on Repub-
lican foundations in the struggle against fascism. Likewise, most German

39. This is Hodgson’s analysis of France in 1968, in Socialism and Parliamentary Democracy,
p. 50.
100

workers believed that the necessary collaboration of the technical strata

in the construction of socialism could not be achieved without univer-
sal suffrage.
Dual-power theorists have generally dismissed these problems of the
middle strata as an &dquo;essentially tactical matter.&dquo;&dquo; They note only the
minor problem of whether the bourgeoisie should enjoy electoral rights.
Yet the real issue is hardly the numerically small bourgeoisie? Rather it
is the large and politically significant middle strata. It is not enough to
allow parliaments to preside over certain undefined &dquo;secondary mat-
ters&dquo; ; a hegemonic bloc capable of sustaining a socialist transition is
hardly conceivable when major allies in that bloc are relegated to formal
representation only in secondary matters. Nor is it conceivable that
politically organized and sophisticated middle strata would accept such
secondary formal status. If anything, this would serve as an impetus to
and an excuse for active and passive sabotage, the possibilities for which
are enormous in societies that are as intricately complex and highly

dependent on technical and administrative expertise as those in the West

today. Furthermore, the struggle against sabotage would be greatly
weakened without the ability to appeal to the legitimacy of universal
representation. The transition to socialism threatens many of the privi-
leges of the middle strata, which will invariably organize to protect
those privileges. A political system without the legitimacy of universal
suffrage, and without claim to a new national popular will, invites nar-
row group interests to run rampant among those excluded. And the less

able it is to contain particularistic demands by appeals to national

democratic legitimacy, the more inevitable is the resort to systematic
repression.
Socialist hegemony is not simply aquestion of instrumental class
alliances, but of the articulation of a hegemonic principle, as Mouffe

40. Mandel, "A Political Interview," p. 121. In From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, p. 169,
Mandel repeats that, after the power of the bourgeoisie is broken, universal suffrage remains "a
conjunctural question, and not a matter of principle." However, the issue of alliances assumes
much less importance as a result of a very broad definition of the working class as "all those
compelled to sell their labor in a continuous manner" (ibid., p. 209). This would include 70-90
percent of the active population in the Western countries. This does not adequately solve the
problems involved, as will be discussed further below. Despite his analysis of universal suffrage,
Mandel is repeatedly compelled to employ its rhetoric in specific assurances that a socialist
revolution should not be carried out against the will of the "clearly expressed majority of citi-
zens" (pp. 165, 171, 174). Since he distinguishes this from the "overwhelming majority of the
proletariat," one wonders through what mechanisms the will of such a majority of citizens is to
be so clearly expressed, if not through parliamentary institutions based on universal suffrage.
And no less does one wonder why the rhetoric is so persistent.
 101

has argued.41 I would restate this in the plural: a fundamental aspect of

the struggle for socialist hegemony is the articulation of the organizing
principles of a new civilization in its moral and cultural, as well as its
political and economic, dimensions. Minimally, these organizing princi-
ples must include: democracy in both its representative and participa-
tory forms; equality of life and work opportunities and hence a radical
transformation of the class division of labor; feminism; peace and dis-
armament ; and an ecological ethic. A socialist class perspective must
first of all be one that points beyond class. As Przeworski has argued in
another context, the political class struggle is a struggle about class
before (in the sense of logical priority) it is a struggle among classes.42
A genuine class perspective is one that develops an &dquo;expansive ideology,&dquo;
one that continually incorporates a broad range of democratic, egali-

tarian, feminist, antimilitarist, and ecological elements that have not

always been primarily linked to working-class movements but that have
the potential to undermine relations of domination across the class sys-
tem. As Mouffe has expressed it, &dquo;ideological struggle in fact consists of
a process of disarticulation-rearticulation of given ideological elements

in a struggle between the two hegemonic principles to appropriate these

elements; it does not consist of the confrontation of two already elabo-
rated, closed world views.&dquo;43
The development of an expansive socialist ideology thus aims to dis-
solve rather than reaffirm certain boundaries between nondominant
classes, particularly those between the traditional working class and the
various middle strata. In such an expansive ideology, it is the principles
of classlessness and not the categories of sharply bounded classes that
are most salient. Only a Marxist metaphysic could assume a priori that
it is the salience of class-particularly of the traditional working class
set off against the middle classes, seen as self-contained and sharply
bounded sociopolitical categories-that could become a firm basis for a
socialist transition.44 Socialist struggle aims to build alliances and simul-
taneously to rupture the systems of privilege enjoyed by the middle
strata. An essential part of this struggle must be to redefine privilege
itself, to redefine the good life, and hence to undermine privileges that
are defended largely because they have been articulated solely within a

4L Chantal
Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Gramsci and Marxist Theory,
pp. 168-204.
42. Adam Przeworski, "The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky’s The Class
Stnsggle to Recent Debates," Politics &Society 7, no. 4 (1977): 28.
43. Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," pp. 193-94.
44. This is the underlying assumption of Przeworski’s analysis in "Social Democracy as a

Historical Phenomenon."
102

bourgeois world view and social practice. Feminist and ecological ethics,
as nonclass elements of a new world view, have been an essential part of
this process of disarticulation and redefinition.
Working-class issues do have a distinctive and prominent role in a
socialist hegemonic bloc, since its role in production and the forms of
its exploitation are in many ways quite distinct. And feminism and
ecology, for instance, can be articulated with the specific concerns of
the working class. But the danger of narrow workerism or groupism
remains a real one. And dual-power schemes that view the workplace
council as the core political institution of the entire system increase the
danger, as critics from Kautsky onward have noted. The problem is not
so much whether a central council would be able to contain such ten-

dencies through its powers of mediation and final decision, as Henri

Weber proposes.45 It is, rather, that people have interests much wider
than those directly related to their role as producers. Little about a par-
ticular workplace makes it the best social space for discussing general
issues and integral human needs. In a dual-power system there would be
a strong tendency for broad general issues to be conflated with those

pertaining to particular workplaces and industries. Competing political

parties and local activists would be drawn into narrow workplace issues
more than would be optimal for creating and maintaining an expansive

hegemonic bloc and ideology.

The broad range of issues and articulated needs that must become
part of an expansive hegemony would seem to require core political
institutions that recognize people as citizens first of all. This should
include representation as productive citizens through a complementary
system of workers’ councils that builds upon, but also recognizes the
limits of, the forms of solidarity and communication of the workplace.
It is important to recall, however, that in recent years many elements
central to an expansive socialist hegemony have been articulated by
groups outside the traditional working class, or by working people not
organized along class lines. Core political structures whose forms of
representation and legitimation were specifically class based would con-
tinually short-circuit, if not completely undermine, the multifarious
struggles for the expansive hegemonic organizing principles of a new
civilization. The fundamental interests of the working class in socialism
are not pregiven as part of its essence, nor can they be postulated simply
on the basis of Marxist science They can only emerge
through spe-

45. Henri Weber, "Eurocommunism, Socialism and Democracy," p. 12.

46. Erik Wright’s discussion of the latter in Class, Crisis and the State, pp. 88ff., is, for
instance, quite misleading.
 103

cific forms of representation and communication, which are constitu-

tive of interests at every stage. 47 The traditional working class has never
been capable by itself of articulating and representing its own funda-
mental interests in a new civilization with radically different organizing
principles. Such interests can only emerge in struggle and in alliances
and only through forms of representation that foster the most dynamic
and wide ranging interaction of democratic and egalitarian, feminist,
antimilitarist, and ecological principles. There is no more suitable form
for this than universal citizenship in the core political institutions.
The relative deficits in the legitimative and hegemonic capacities of
dual power organs also have procedural roots. If workers’ councils were
the core political institutions, what would be the criteria for inclusion
and exclusion? Who is really a part of the working class, and its theoreti-
cally acceptable allies, and how would this be determined? If recent
Marxist debates on the boundaries of class, and the great variety of car-
tographies they have produced, are any indication, we can expect
nothing short of chaos in this regard. And who would serve as the class
cartographers, or would this function simply be left to the vicissitudes
of local struggle? If representation were organized according to func-
tional units, what would be the criteria for classification, and how
would a highly uneven representation of groups be prevented? Would
the factories, schools, barracks, and neighborhood communities that are
typically included in the list of council base units all to be represented
on an equal footing in the national pyramid of councils, or would the

factory-based councils have priority (as Mandel implies when he says

that the Congress of Workers’ Councils would make all decisions on the
use of national resources)?48 How would full-time homemakers, retired
people, and the self-employed be represented, and how could effectively
equal representation for them be organized? Would all such people,
including students, be entitled to equal representation, or only those
whose parents or spouses were wage laborers? Would those performing
so-called &dquo;unproductive labor,&dquo; those performing supervisory functions,
those with incomes greater than the value they produce, those with cre-
dentials, and those performing the ideological functions of capital be
excluded?
Such questions could be pursued ad absurdum, but they represent
exactly the kind of frantic quest for politically meaningful distinctions
that would be unleashed by a system with class-based legitimation in
core representative institutions. And they are the very distinctions that

47. See Jessop, "Capitalism and Democracy," p. 26.

48. Mandel, "A Political Interview," p. 114.
104

Marxists have themselves identified as significant for class analysis.49

Mandel’s broad classification is not universally shared, even by Marxists,
nor is its political significance unambiguous for those people included
within it. Furthermore, it does not attempt to answer the problem of
representation for the 10 to 30 percent of the active population it would
exclude (some of whom are admittedly allies) or the so-called inactive
population. The solution can no more be achieved through such a defi-
nitional sweep than through the meticulous classification schemes of
Marxist sociology. Rather than extending democracy and participation,
the ensuing debates on the criteria of inclusion and exclusion in the
core political institutions of dual power would contribute enormously
to the demoralizing and paralyzing of the democratic forces and to the

undermining of democratic socialist power. The testimony of one

Portuguese militant in the Comite of the Popular Organisms of Setubal
(COPS) is instructive: &dquo;Many sessions were used up discussing statutes.
Who has a vote? Who doesn’t? Do the trade unions vote?
right to Sport-
ing clubs? Who has more votes? How many? Who has fewer? ... No
one ever reached agreement on anything. The problems were so theo-
retical, and at the same time so bureaucratic. &dquo;50
In addition, it is likely that many workers, and some parties with
significant worker support, would voluntarily exclude themselves if
such dual organs of power laid claim to supreme power, or appeared on
the verge of doing so. This would greatly reduce the chances for these
organs achieving widespread legitimation and for a genuine political plu-
ralism, particularly if they were still competing with parliamentary insti-
tutions. That period, as I will argue further below, could not last very
long. And the shorter it is, the greater the degree of irregularity in demo-
cratic procedure-whatever the official criteria of inclusion and exclu-
sion. The improvisational character of hastily established dual organs
of power makes it extremely difficult to regularize democratic proce-
dures, especially in periods of acute social and economic crisis.
This was strikingly clear in Russia, where the soviet system was con-
tinually plagued by problems with credentials, forged mandates,
co-optation of outsiders into executive organs, violation of formal divi-
sions of authority, highly uneven representation due to the lack of con-
sistent formal regulations, and the disproportionate influence of the
more powerful, strategically located, or politically favored factories,

49. Erik Wright provides a useful overview of the various theories in "Varieties of Marxist
Conceptions of Class Structure," Politics &Society 9, no. 3 (1980): 323-70.
50. Downs, "Comissões de Moradores," pp. 287-88.
 105

unions, garrisons, and local soviet bodies.51 The highest soviet institu-
tion, the Central Executive Committee, was plagued with serious organ
nizational problems from the beginning, and, after the Bolshevik seizure
of power, it could not sustain itself as the supreme representative and
legislative body against the myriad of administrative organs. Its basic
function was to grant democratic legitimacy to decisions made else-
where, or to provide a base for reversing these decisions when they did
not suit particular Bolshevik leaders.52 Much of this was due to the gen-
eral disorganization of revolutionary crisis, the difficulties in transporta-
tion and communication, the severe constraints on people’s time, and
the generally low cultural level. But the strong tendency for cadre con-
trol cannot be explained simply by these factors or by the authoritarian
aspects of Bolshevik ideology. Cadre control was pronounced where
other parties dominated the soviets as well. The political immaturity of
the popular classes in regard to democratic procedure may provide a
partial explanation, but the question remains whether these classes
would have invested soviet forms with so much legitimacy had they
possessed a longer tradition of either national or local parliamentary
democracy. Parliamentary democracy was, of course, the major histori-
cal alternative for democratic political socialization and maturation, or
at least the one most likely to have emerged in noncrisis periods had
the autocracy eased up its constraints on other forms of popular
organization.
An explanation of the irregularities in democratic process cannot
ignore the dual-power institutions themselves. These institutions were
hastily improvised, their boundaries continually redrawn, their compe-
tences shifted from one organ to another, their jurisdictions uncertain
and in constant conflict, and their administrative capacities quite lim-
ited. Delay, confusion, and organizational competition provided the
opportunity and the rationale for centralized controls from above and
outside, for the delegation of power based on loyalty to party organs
that had more established lines of authority and that had more devel-
oped organizational traditions. The dual-power form of political transi-
tion not only reproduced old bureaucratic tendencies but also com-
pounded them in specific ways, even as soviet democratization clearly
reduced them in others. Under conditions of crisis, the muddle of state

51. John Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization (New York: Norton,
1976), passim; Marc Ferro, La Révolution de 1917: Octobre, naissance d’une société (Paris:
Aubier Montaigne, 1976), chap. 7; Sirianni, Workers’ Control, chap. 4.
52. T. H. Rigby, Lenin’s Government: Sounarkhom, 1917-1922 (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1979), pp. 162-63. See also Walter Pietsch, Revolution und Staat (Kõln: Verlag
Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969), chap. 7.
106

building and administration with multiple organs of power led to more

convoluted institutional arrangements, to the decline of democratic and
even formal bureaucratic accountability through state mechanisms per

se, and to the eventual ascendancy of the party not merely as political
leader but as the organizational fabric of the entire state system. And it
was in those new apparatuses less directly built on the foundations of
the old that the most abusive chinovnik behavior emerged-a cruel
irony indeed. 5-3
In Germany, the Spartacists used the unsettled existence of the
councils as a pretext for declaring that they would respect only those
elections that were favorable to their party and that they would expel
SPD delegates whom the workers elected.~ The German councils, how-
ever, despite the variation in their manner of formation, did not gener-
ally display the irregularities in democratic procedure witnessed in
Russia.55 This was partly because they were relatively short lived, gener-
ally did not try to extend their powers into all areas of administration
or to displace the old authorities, and were constituted by a strong core

of SPD, USPD, and trade-union functionaries, who tended more to

demarcate the boundaries of competence than to dissolve them.
In the CNT-controlled areas of Spain during the initial stages of the
civil war, however, there were numerous complaints of &dquo;anarchist dic-
tatorship&dquo; in the revolutionary committees, and eventually the higher
CNT organs recoiled from the idea of what could happen if such organs
unilaterally extended their power. Such charges were hardly surprising,
given the often haphazard or thoughtlessly dogmatic procedures of the
committees-even the barbers were forcefully collectivized, individual
pairs of scissors and all!56 But it was the abstentionist movement itself,
which historically had refused to participate in elections, to negotiate
contracts, or to build stable union organizations with regularly elected
staff, that simultaneously provided the only hope of extending autono-
mous power in Catalonia and left a legacy of revolutionary cadre, many
of whom had a conception of democratic process that did not extend

53. Rigby, Lenin’s Government, p. 238.

54. Eberhard Kolb, "Rätewirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von
1918/19," in Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Köln: Kiepenheuer
und Witsch, 1972), p. 176.
55. Reinhard Rürup, Eberhard Kolb, and Gerald Feldman, "Die Massenbewegungen der
Arbcitenchaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1917-1920)," Politische Viertel-
jahresschrift 13, no. 1 (August 1972): 95.
56. Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 233. The Hungarian council government of 1919 was so
notorious for its mindless collectivizations and arbitrary interventions that it delegitimated
itself in the eyes of the working class and was compelled to resign. See Carsten, Revolution in
Central Europe, pp. 240ff.
 107

further than the barrels of the guns wielded by their affinity groups.
To separate analytically these two outcomes of the abstentionist move-
ment would be artificial indeed
None of this is to deny the noteworthy achievements of many of
these council-type organizations under very adverse circumstances,
including their achievements in introducing democratic procedures into
many areas where they had not previously existed.58 This is particularly
true in individual workplaces and municipal services, as the remarkable
and unparalleled example of Barcelona shows. Yet in the larger processes
of state building and political organization, institutional confusion and
irregularities in democratic procedure seem endemic, at least to the
early stages of dual power, the tasks at hand far outstrip any pos-
when
sible institutional preparation for them. Furthermore, given the very
strong tendency toward autonomy in the executive organs of any mod-
em state system, an improvised and at best
partially legitimate council
legislature, without a strong tradition or institutional infrastructure for
processing complex information and mediating competing interests
through democratic discussion, is unlikely to be able to maintain itself
as an independent organ. Perhaps the experience of the Soviet Central

Executive Committee and its congresses was not so exceptional and indi-
cates what would happen to a national council legislature were it to dis-
place parliament and attempt to govern. Although it cannot be answered
definitively, the question of the enormous difficulties of state building
as such must be posed.
In countries with well-established parliamentary institutions and
often hard-won traditions of democratic procedures, the irregularities
of council organs would tend to delegitimate them much more than in
those countries where even gross violations of democratic process were
often perceived as better than what existed previously. This is true in
regard to the administration of law and justice as well. While particular
judges would have to be removed, elective principles more consistently
applied, and the democratization of the jury system maintained or
extended, the irregularities and abuses that would arise from the admin-
istration of justice by those not professionally trained in the law and in
the procedures of due process would profoundly delegitimate a socialist

57. While it avoided the evils of traditional labor bureaucracy, the structure of the CNT was
far from conducive to regular democratic control in the movement as a whole. See Gerald
Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1974).
58. See Sam Dolgoff, cd., The Anarchist Collectives (New York: Free Life, 1974); Gaston
Leval, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press,
1975).
108

government. Formal-legal rationality constitutes one of the basic pillars

of legitimacy in advanced parliamentary democracies and cannot be
reduced to mere bourgeois formalism. Any attempt to displace it
through informal canons of revolutionary justice would be disastrous
for socialist democracy.-59 Because of personal and organizational rival-
ries, because of the competition for scarce resources and power, and
because of the deep and justified, though often quite distorted, anger of
oppressed groups and individuals, a socialist democracy must assume
that popular movements unconstrained by the formal procedures of law
could grossly violate the rights of various groups and individuals, includ-
ing those from the popular classes themselves. Moreover, in advanced
industrial societies, informal justice could hardly be applied to the com-
plexities of social intercourse in economic and administrative affairs
without creating havoc and abuse.
Democratic socialism must stand for the rule of law against arbitrary
authority, as E. P. Thompson has forcefully reminded us. But &dquo;the
trouble about law and justice, as ideal aspirations, is that they must pre-
tend to absolute validity or they do not exist at all.&dquo;60 The pretensions
to universality embodied in procedural guarantees cannot be abrogated
by self-appointed juries, or circumvented by collapsing the distinction
between substantive and procedural issues, without undermining claims
to the rule of law as such and unleashing arbitrariness across society.
Dual forms for the administration of justice have developed where
islands of self-administered justice are tolerated by governments on con-
dition that they do not claim validity outside the community (squatter
settlements in Latin America) or where years of autocracy and repres-
sion had deprived the judiciary of its pretensions to fairness (Russia,
Portugal).61 Dual forms of justice are unlikely to develop in any
advanced parliamentary democracy where the reach of the state is far
more extensive or where there are long traditions of legal democratic

rule, however distorted they may be. Even in societies without such tra-
ditions, the impact of dual forms of justice was, to say the least, highly
problematic.62
59. Mandel, "A Political Interview," p. 131, seems to be suggesting such an immediate
deprofessionalization of justice, with his call for an end to full-time judges.
60. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (New York: Pantheon, 1975), p. 268.
61. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "Popular Justice, Dual Power and Socialist Strategy,"
in Marxism and Law, ed. Piers Beirne and Richard Quinney (New York: Wiley, 1982), pp.
364-75.
62. Even Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who advocates "the creation and extension of
instances of alternative socialist legality," concludes that "it is highly debatable whether the
specific instances of popular justice in the specific conditions of the Portuguese revolution
played a positive or a negative role." Ibid., pp. 365, 272.
 109

In short, our knowledge of the history of democracy and the diffi-

culties and irregularities of state building under conditions of dual
power should not lead us to believe that &dquo;democracy can be codified
perfectly easily&dquo;63 or that its preconditions can be assembled readily
enough in the heat of struggle. The preconditions of democracy, in fact,
seem quite difficult to assemble-and to reassemble.

PROBLEMS OF ADMINISTRATION

The relative administrative deficits of dual-power organs are also

striking, and these would be exacerbated by the legitimative deficits dis-
cussed above. But legitimation is in part based on expediency and on
practical administrative effect, as Max Weber was so keenly aware. While
no general theory can establish the relative importance of these factors

in a specific instance, we can discuss multiple interactive effects. Nor-

mative delegitimation tends to undermine the capacities of states for
legitimation through practical administrative means. Deficits in admin-
istrative capacities can have delegitimative effects in their own right and,
through the mediation of other factors, have normative delegitimating
effects as well. The relative administrative deficiencies of dual-power
organs would impede belief in their ability to manage a complex indus-
trial society, and as a result, limit popular participation and increase
party cadre control. Thus normative claims to a genuinely better form
of democracy would be undermined.
As Mandel correctly argues, dual-power organs would have to prove
their effectiveness and democratic superiority in practice for them to be
accepted by broad masses of contemporary workers. &dquo;The conclusive
demonstration of this can only take place in a fairly long period of dual
power,&dquo; longer than that in Russia and probably extending over several
years. &dquo;A period of six or seven months is much too short for a prole-
tariat like that of Western Europe to progressively abandon the legiti-
macy of bourgeois democracy in favor of the new, higher legitimacy of
proletarian democracy.&dquo;64

63. Henri Weber, interview with Poulantzas, "The State and the Transition to Socialism,"
Socialist Review, no. 38 (March-April 1978), p. 24.
64. Mandel, "A Political Interview," p. 111. In From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, p. 172,
Mandel repeats several times the idea that "the masses must undergo an apprenticeship in new
and higher forms of democracy. They must have the time to assimilate the meaning and value
of the new state organs they are in the process of creating" (original emphasis). Only this will
allow for a decisive shift in legitimacy from parliamentary to council organs. Yet he fails to
even roughly specify duration, as he does in his interview, and he implies that it could not be

very long, since capitalism’s defenses "permit no long lasting assemblies or sieges of long dura-
tion" (ibid., 192-93). If this represents a genuine shift, the criticisms that follow are less rele-
vant, but only because his argument itself is that much weaker. What kind of practical appren-
110

But it is this ability to persist for such a long period with

exactly
any degree of continuous effectiveness that is questionable. The Rus-
sian experience appears exceptional for its length, not for its brevity.
The administrative capacities of the soviets, although not very striking,
proved themselves more capable of dealing with the immediate organiza-
tion of everyday survival than a government with barely any adminis-
trative capacities at all. For workers who had been denied virtually all
forms of self-organization and democratic participation in the past, the
achievements of the soviets were noteworthy. At the local raion level,
besides assisting factory committees and trade unions and organizing
armed defense, the soviets involved themselves in food provisioning and
rationing, housing, care of widows, unemployment aid, communal
kitchens and nurseries, the struggle against alcohol, gambling, and theft,
domestic quarrels (including battered wives), local justice, recreation,
and culture (libraries, theater, lectures, youth groups). Although, under
the conditions prevailing in 1917, their ambitions far outran their
accomplishments, the latter were central to the organization of every-
day life.
However, these local district and neighborhood soviets were rarely
linked organically to the city soviets, whose functions did not effec-
tively penetrate the lives of most workers.6-5 At the national level, and
even in many localities, the soviet framework only began to be adminis-

tratively effective when it received a massive infusion of personnel and

organizational structures from the old state apparatus. Local soviet
administration also have been more effective where the old
seems to
zemstvo and duma personnel absorbed into the new institutions,
were

that is, where at the level of personnel the two poles of dual power
were merged. In fact, the old officials eventually seem to have carried
the burden of administrative work.66 At the higher levels of state admin-
istration, the new regime also had to depend on the old government
ministries, and both structural and staff continuities were marked. The
All-Russian Congress of Soviets became an annual and largely symbolic
affair with no relationship to actual administration. Even the Soviet

ticeship in new forms of democracy capable of canceling parliamentary legitimacy on a broad

scale is possible if, as Perry Anderson argues, dual power "must rapidly and fatally"be resolved?
See Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, p. 195.
65. Rex Wade, "The Rajonnye Sovety of Petrograd: The Role of Local Political Bodies in
the Russian Revolution," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 20 (1972): 226-40; A.
Andreyev, The Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on the Eve of the October Revolu-
tion (Moscow: Progress, 1971), pp. 58-59; Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the Revolu-
tion of 1917 (Princcton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 161ff.
66. Robert Abrams, "The Local Soviets of the RSFSR, 1918-1921" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia
University, 1966), p. 372; Pietsch, Revolution und Staat p.145; Anweiler, The Soviets, p. 220.
 111

Central Executive Committee, conceived by many as the supreme and

permanent legislative organ, could not get its own functions clarified,
could not keep its own administrative departments from being swal-
lowed up into commissariats built upon the old ministries, and could
not even maintain a clear line of authority over local soviets in the face
of encroachment by a myriad of other government organs. 67
In Germany, where administrative apparatuses were much more
effective and did not disintegrate, a similar dynamic did not emerge.
The old apparatuses recovered quickly, and the councils were often
not very effective in overseeing their activities. Those local councils that
did assume power and attempt to administer themselves were often
quite ineffective, especially in comparison to the old administration,
and tended to delegitimate themselves as a result. In cities like Hamburg,
they subsequently transferred formal power back to the government
that maintained real power all along.~ Other councils were more effec-
tive and do seem to have offered the possibility of a middle road
between bolshevism and the repression of the Ebert-Noske govern-
ment.s9 But neither these councils nor the USPD, which most actively
supported them, were able to generate the infrastructure necessary to
form a counterstate on a nationwide basis.
A realistic third way would have been possible only with the politi-
cal and organizational support of the SPD and the unions, and, for pro-
found historical reasons, this could not have been achieved by councils
seeking to displace a national assembly based on universal suffrage.
Repression, of course, cut short the practical achievements of revolu-
tionary councils. But this is an endemic problem of dual power and
would have arisen for those few councils that operated outside of the
framework of national parliamentary legitimacy even if the armed forces
had not been reconstituted on such a reactionary basis. Most councils
had begun to wither within a few short months, even as a supporting
ideology became more pronounced during the militant strikes of the
winter and spring of 1919. By the summer, government financing for
them was discontinued, and they were completely eliminated, never
again to reappear as contenders for political power. 70
During 1919, factory committees were also trimmed of most of
their effective powers, and in early 1920 were made legal. Although

67. Rigby, Lenin’s Government, passim; Pietsch, Revolution und Staat, chap. 7.
68. Richard Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966).
69. Reinhard Rürup, ed., Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in rheinsch-westfälischen industriege-
beit (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1975).
70. Arbeiterräte; "Rätewurklichkeit."
Kolb,
112

some continued to provide a basis for radical activity and an important

organizational base during the inflation crisis of 1923, at no time did
they appear as a viable basis for state power. During the major crisis
that followed the Kapp putsch in March 1920, it was the trade unions
that led the massive and historically unprecedented general strike to
defeat the putsch and that provided the initiative as well as the program-
matic and organizational basis for a possible Left government. The
UPSD rejected the offer, and even the Communist party refused to sup-
port the general strike until it was clear that the vast majority of the
workers were involved. 71 Mandel is thus wrong to present the entire
period of 1918-1923 as one of latent or protoform, if discontinuous,
dual power-and as a significant paradigm for the West today-especially
when his main evidence is that in 1923 German Communists thought
that the factory committees might become the basis for the seizure of
power.
The contemporary democratic state is much more involved in the
administration of economy and society than were those where dual
power arose (with the exception, perhaps, of the wartime Imperial Ger-
man state, whose most far-reaching economic controls were, however,

quickly dismantled after the war). Its activities at national and local
levels are central to maintaining the over-all functioning of the social
system and for the provisioning of services that reach into the everyday
lives of the population. The levels of funding necessary for this have
increased proportionally. A major reason why it is difficult to conceive
how dual organs of power could legitimate themselves on the basis of
their practical administrative achievements is that they would possess
no official taxation powers. Although in Germany a democratic revolu-

tion granted limited official financing powers to the councils, it is

highly improbable that any government would ever grant taxation
powers, or channel its own funds, to popular organs that were not linked
to the existing agencies. Nor would it continue funding such popularly
controlled local organs once it became clear that they intended to dis-
place existing agencies. In none of the other situations of dual or proto-
dyarchic power were the unofficial popular organs ever able to raise
substantial funds. The only option available to such popular organs
today would be to accept some terms of articulation with the state, as
did many of the popular councils in Portugal and Chile most recently,
or to attempt to raise funds on their own. There can be no council
administration without taxation.

7L Albert Lindemann, The "Red Years" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974),
pp. 105-6.
 113

Any attempt by popular organs to raise funds on their own could

have only limited and irregular results. To sustain alternative services on
a regular basis would require increasing the fiscal burden of the working

classes themselves. It would be impossible to organize a sudden, massive,

and completely disciplined withdrawal of the popular classes from the
official tax-collecting mechanisms of the state-without which no signif-
icant segment would be likely to voluntarily assume considerable dual
taxation burdens-both because of the enormous difficulties of coordi-
nation and because of the widespread fears of any interruption of state
services upon which people depend. Indeed, even the threat of such a
withdrawal would immediately pit such groups against those most
dependent on state subsidies and transfer payments (welfare recipients,
retirees, the disabled, veterans).
Organs of dual power, in other words, would face a serious and per-
manent fiscal crisis. And they are unlikely to be rescued from this
enough to be able to demonstrate their superiority in practice by a prior
tax revolution, for that would seem to have as its very precondition an

already demonstrated relative practical superiority. Volunteer labor

might increase the administrative capacities of such organs, but this
would produce limited and uneven results, given the constraints on
people’s time and the demands of their other jobs. Likewise, volunteer
agencies not regulated by the state, particularly those delivering impor-
tant professional services such as schools and health care centers, would
continually face harassment by the state (for example, over licensing).
Lack of official recognition could thus seriously discourage use of their
services.
Even under a Left government, when local popular organs would be
most apt to flourish, there would probably not be a radical break with
state institutions. Most of these local organs would either have to accept
the relative administrative inferiority that would result from chronic fis-
cal crisis in all but the few services that might thrive on volunteer, part-
time, and irregular resources or have to accept funds and other inputs
from the Left government to enable them to improve services, fill
important gaps, and sustain an array of more participatory activities.
The more durable such local organs are and the more important their
functions, the stronger would be the tendency toward institutional
articulation with the existing state.
This is particularly true given how difficult it is for local organs to
independently coordinate and fund their activities. They could not
seriously contend with democratically elected municipal bodies that
controlled an array of services above the neighborhood and local factory
level, that had fiscal reserves from state, regional, and national govern-
114

ments, and that had the institutional potential for further democrati-
zation. In fact, the major functions that newly generated popular
organs could most effectively perform would be democratizing local
and municipal organs, increasing participation in and altering the forms
in the delivery of services, creating pressure to improve needed services,
transforming non-Left local governments, and mobilizing mass support
for a radical transformation of the existing state through legitimate
organs of universal suffrage. Although such institutional articulation
with the existing state is fraught with contradiction, it is difficult to
imagine relatively effective administration without it. And it is virtually
impossible to conceive of how dual administration could ever extend
itself evenly enough and effectively enough above the local level and for
an extended period of time to pose as a viable alternative to the national

state.
Dual organs of power are also unlikely to get the support of state
workers sympathetic to a socialist transition. The reasons for this are
manifold. First, among all the groups within the socialist bloc, state
workers would be least likely to accept class-based legitimacy in the
core political institutions. Their own socio-economic backgrounds are
too varied, and their personal and institutional interconnections within
the democratic-parliamentary state system too many. Second, they are
materially tied to state apparatuses and would understandably be afraid
that unstable and underfinanced dual organs would be unable to provide
continuous and long-term employment. They would support the
democratization of administrative apparatuses, but hardly their
decomposition. Third, even though many populist and socialist civil
servants would support more popular input into their agencies and
more democratic controls among the staff itself (which undoubtedly

would happen only with struggle), they would be unlikely to accept the
upheaval that a change to dual organs would bring in institutional rou-
tines, functional divisions of labor, and personnel practices.~2 Those
who have developed the strongest populist or socialist commitment
through their work in service-oriented state agencies would be most hesi-
tant to risk inefficiency or disruption of services, particularly since they
would receive the burden of the blame from the constituencies most
affected, thus enhancing the prestige of the bureaucratic hierarchy.

72. See Michael Smith, "Barriers to Organizational Democracy in Public Administration,"

Administration and Society 8, no. 3 (November 1976): 275-317. Although it does not deal
with the problem of dual power, Smith’s analysis strongly suggests "the prudence of a strategy
designed to achieve greater democratization by building on existing practices and policies wher-
ever necessary. Such a strategy may diminish fears of change which can trigger formidable struc-
tural and cultural barriers to change" (ibid., p. 313).
 115

Because of the unlikelihood of this break and the necessity for this
cooperation and support, a socialist transition must pass through the
state, as Poulantzas put it.~~ The costs of alienating the potential sup-
port of workers within the state apparatuses, through a strategy that
attempted to displace the very institutions in which they worked,
would be enormous. Some state agencies, of course, would have to be
more thoroughly purged and transformed than others, depending on
the functions they perform, on their resistance to socialist transforma-
tion, and on the permutations in real power during the struggle. A
strategy that passes through the state and aims to transform does not
necessarily exclude changes in specific institutions. The support of
populist and socialist elements within the apparatuses would, however,
be crucial for locating the major points of obstruction, both in terms of
institutional practices and personnel. In penetrating and controlling the
operations of state agencies, outsiders would be at a major disadvantage
without inside support. Policies that failed to develop support within
state would leave the popular movements confronted with a
agencies
more or less solid bloc of state workers hostile to socialist transforma-
tion and capable of the most far-reaching, if not inevitably fatal,
’

sabotage.
In addition, the potential for implementing policies with construc-
tive and reconstructive effects during the crucial early period would
depend on having already in place a nationwide institutional infrastruc-
ture, one that, while in need of continued democratic transformation
and structural modification, would be able to cope with the immediate
tasks of transition in ways that could prevent major social and economic
disorganization and disintegration. This is one reason for the importance
of struggles to increase working class and popular democratic represen-
tation within corporatist political structures of parliamentary democra-
cies. Through such participation, union representatives, as well as elected
consumer and citizen representatives (for example, on labor market
boards or on wage earners’ and citizens’ fund boards), can gain neces-
sary expertise, develop informational sources for planning and running
industry that are progressively less dependent on capitalist managers
and on loyal state supporters, secure relations with potential allies
within the state apparatuses on an increasingly democratic basis, and

73. Mandel, it should be noted, accepts this in principle but argues that it could only be
effective when linked to the struggle for dual organs. It is not clear, however, why only those
committees oriented toward a structural break, as opposed to those aimed at democratizing
existing structures, could prevent the formation of an uncontrollable "left elite." The oligarchic
tendencies within dual organs that have persisted for any period of time would seem to belie
this. See From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, p. 176.
116

use leverage within corporatist political structures for enhancing

their
the participation and mobilization of the popular classes. Such parti-
cipation contains contradictions of its own and should be achieved in
ways that do not undermine the most important bases of autonomy
outside the state. Yet participation in corporatist political structures
can present indispensable opportunities for the progressive implanta-
tion of Left personnel, of democratic networks, and of infrastructures
with the capacity to administer, plan, and contain sabotage in such a
way that permits rank-and-file initiatives to expand within a coordi-
nated framework.
The costs of not having such an institutional infrastructure in place,
and not being able to rely on a significant sector of state workers were
clearly evident in Russia. The delay of even several weeks after the
seizure of power turned out to be disastrous from the point of view of
setting in place economic coordinating structures with even minimal
democratic accountability. The delay took place despite worker initia-
tive and rank-and-file struggle and despite active attempts by factory
committee militants who recognized the importance of having such an
organizational infrastructure ready to function at the time of the trans-
fer of power.74 The Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees
vigorously attempted to establish a democratic infrastructure and devel-
oped the first plans for economic coordination on a national scale. But
it was unable to establish these quickly in a period of acute economic
crisis marked by fierce organizational competition within the embryonic
state structure and given the relative administrative advantages enjoyed
by the old ministries.
Of course, Bolshevik, factory dommittee, and trade-union leaders
had scarce opportunity to penetrate state agencies or to win over impor-
tant groups of civil servants before the October revolution. Nor did the
heritage of the tsarist state leave them with the organizational capacities
to put an adequate institutional infrastructure in place during the short
months of dual power. Furthermore, the dominant Bolshevik ideology
continued to obstruct some of the possibilities that were available. The
result was enormous confusion, delay and sabotage, a lack of effective-
ness at the center, the failure of considerable numbers of civil servants

to support the regime initially, and serious, though temporary, organi-

74. See Sirianni, Workers’ Control, chap. 5; Falk Döring, Organizationsprobleme der russi-
schen Wirtichaft in Revolution und Bürgerkrieg (1918-1920) (Hannover: Verlag für Literatur
und Zeitgeschehen GMBH, 1970); Uwe Brügmann, Die russischen Gewerkschaften in Revolu-
tion und Bürgerkrieg, 1917-1919 (Frankfurt on the Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1972);
M. L Itkin, "Tsentry fabrichno-zavodskikh komitetov Rossii v 1917 godu," Voprosy Istorii,
no. 2 (1974), pp. 21-35.
 117

zational conflicts between factory committees and trade unions and

between old state organs and new ones. As a consequence, the active
struggles of workers to keep production going often took the form of
extremely parochial attempts at sheer survival. This was due less to an
inherently narrow mentality than to insufficient institutional precondi-
tions for more coordinated action. This, in turn, led very quickly to
authoritarian centralization to counter the disorganization. Even just to
ensure the elementary reproduction of a relatively simple economy, the
level of effective coordination remained very low, while the new regime
was forced to rely heavily not only on the old state personnel but on

pre-existing institutional structures, which formed the core of many

commissariats. Thus the radical institutional break-central to the soviet
paradigm of Lenin’s State and Revolution-proved to be not all that
radical, not particularly effective, and not a very viable foundation for
extending democratic control over economy and society.
In Catalonia in 1936, the delay and confusion that resulted from
the sudden rupture of state power also left the self-management organs
without adequate coordinating and financing mechanisms and thus
greatly contributed to parochial and competitive behavior. The CNT as
an organization never possessed the capacity for quickly
generating
such an institutional framework itself and, as a result of both organiza-
tional deficits and of national political realities, had to collaborate with
the Republican government to develop such a framework. Even then,
despite notable exceptions, over-all employment and output in Catalan
industry in the first year declined sharply
Because effective administrative resources are relatively scarce-
given, that is, the enormous complexity of the tasks, and the opportuni-
ties for sabotage, in societies of intricate and often delicately balanced
institutional interdependencies-it is difficult to conceive of a realistic
scenario in which dual organs of power could sustain themselves long
enough and effectively enough to demonstrate their viability as an alter-
native national system of power in the West today. In fact, in all of the
dual-power situations under consideration, the bulk of council adminis-
trative activity outside and above the individual workplace has been con-
cerned with the provisioning of basic necessities (food supply, housing
distribution, fuel deliveries) and with the supervision of official state
agencies. Other services have been provided only on a very limited basis.
None of these councils ever effectively managed complex sociotechnical
systems with highly interactive parts and with a high potential for nega-

75. See in particular the statistics provided in Josep Maria Bricall, Politica economica de la
Generalitat (1936-1939), cited in Fraser, Blood of Spain, p. 235.
118

tive synergistic effects. This is not simply the result of previously low
cultural and educational levels, though the latter certainly had an impact
on the earlier experiences. Rather, it reflects the enormous requirements
of institutional formation and reformation as such.
Thus, while distribution of skills is more favorable for democratic
socialism today than it has ever been before, the question remains
how are they institutionally and organz;zationally situated and how can
they be most effectively mobilized. And &dquo;structural leverage is funda-
mentally superior to other types of power The requisite institu-
tional capacities for socialist transformation cannot be effectively
developed through improvisation. The major pre-existing organizational
resources that would be necessary to develop such capacities-the
unions, the mass Left parties, important sectors of civil servants-would
not be available quickly or massively enough (if at all) to permit dual
organs to compete administratively with state agencies on more than a
localized and erratic basis or around specific services that do not require
large financial resources and tend to be less strategic to the functioning
of the state system. Little in the history of previous dual-power situa-
tions, or in the current orientations of major unions, mass Left parties,
and state workers’ organizations would lead us to believe otherwise.
Other substantial resources for democratic institution-building are
unquestionably available, both latently and in the myriad of already
existing popular organizations and networks. Yet, because of concerns
over relative effectiveness, democratic legitimacy, and possible repres-

sion, the over-all developmental dynamic (even if not the initial impulse)
in the mobilization of such resources would most likely be towards
institutional articulation with the state system.
Under conditions existing in the advanced industrial parliamentary
states of the West, dual-power organs that attempted to administer

against the state would undermine democracy. Not only would they
provoke repression, but the fragmentation of institutional resources
would lead to massive administrative and economic disorganization,
which, once begun, would be very difficult to reverse. Such disorganiza-
tion would undermine confidence in socialist power. It would erode the
support of a crucial swing element in the socialist coalition, presenting
the options of authoritarian methods to preserve power versus a Center-
Left coalition to preserve democracy. It would nourish a mass basis for
fascist reaction or further empower and embolden those that already

76. Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure (New York: Academic Press,
1976), p. 174. See also the discussion of "the liability of newness," especially of new forms
of organization, in Arthur Stinchcombe, "Social Structure and Organizations," in Handbook of
Organizations, ed. James March (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), pp. 148ff.
 119

existed. The massive disruption of the everyday lives of the popular

classes would soon foster more demobilizing than mobilizing, as indi-
viduals and groups frantically attempted to secure the conditions of
their own survival in whatever ways were available. This was clearly the
case in Russia.
Under such conditions the belief in cadre control as the only effec-
tive organizational method to manage the crisis becomes widespread
among many who would otherwise be genuinely democratic militants.
Regular democratic participation and genuine popular control, in con-
trast to sporadic mass interventions, require a certain basic level of

stability in everyday life and continuity in organizational activity.

Even a unified Left government with a highly mobilized base of sup-
port will have a difficult enough time effectively containing the eco-
nomic and administrative disorganization that would ensue from
dislodging capitalist power. The fragmentation of administrative
resources entailed in a break between a Left government and council
forms is a luxury that a movement for socialist democracy and for
expansive popular participation can ill afford. This break represents a
process that the legitimative capacities of democratized popular organs
would not require. A unified Left government based on universal suf-
frage, whose institutional apparatuses are progressively democratized
and progressively articulated with a vast array of participatory popular
organs, presents the greatest possibility, if not the only hope, for insti-
tutionalizing and maintaining democratic socialist power in the West
today.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

The parties that have adopted this general perspective in one form
or another are, to be sure, not without their own problems. Although
Euro-Communist parties use the rhetoric of popular forms of democ-
racy, they have made little attempt to develop these forms, in theory or
in practice, or to show how they can be articulated with parliamentary
democracy. Thus the logic of statism and bureaucratism is not adequately
checked, and the danger of reproducing the worst features of parliamen-
tarism remains substantial Likewise, the stress on rationalization and
the development of productive forces is not placed in a framework that
fundamentally challenges the class division of labor. Nor is the alliance
with various middle strata articulated in a way that furthers a basic

77. Carl Boggs, "The Democratic Road: New Dcpartures and Old Problems," in The Politics
of Eurocommunism, ed. Carl Boggs and David Plotke (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 456,
464.
120

restructuring of productive roles.~8 Workers’ councils do not in and of

themselves solve these problems.~9 As Fred Block has argued, an alter-
native conception of deveionment is necessary for the Euro-Communist
parties, one that stresses humar. bervices, that enhances the capacities of
everyone to learn and hence democratically participate, and that is fun-
damentally linked to feminist and ecological values At present serious
organizational and ideological barriers exist within these parties to
recognizing such values. But without these values the fuller elaboration
of democratic forms will remain inhibited.
Until recently, the social democratic and labor parties have likewise
made little progress in elaborating a conception of democracy that goes
beyond parliamentarism and statism. Indeed, they have been unable to
put an alternative conception of socialist development itself on the
agenda. Yet the conditions for relatively stable growth and for social
democratic rule in postwar Europe are being seriously eroded, and the
possibilities for a more far-reaching democratic socialist advance are
thus more open. As Alan Wolfe has argued, favorable conditions &dquo;almost
miraculously came together in the 1950s and 1960s to make social
democracy viable, but their very success at one period laid the founda-
tion for limits in another.&dquo;81 While imperial domination in the world
system by a single hegemonic power provided the conditions for stable
economic expansion, growth became harder to sustain, trade and cur-
rency wars harder to contain, and the accumulation and legitimation
functions of the state more difficult to reconcile. Keynesian demand
management and social-welfare expenditure can no longer serve as a
viable foundation for social democratic rule.
Under these conditions alternative conceptions of accumulation,
development, and democratic control appear more necessary for parties
that hope to govern, to maintain their traditional bases of support, and
to encompass the concerns of the new social movements. How far such

parties will go in this direction still remains unclear. There are hopeful
signs in the Greek Socialists’ proposals for decentralization, farm

78. Ibid., pp. 447, 456. For an analysis of some of the problems of the latter, see Carmen
Sirianni, "Production and Power in a Classless Society: A Critical Analysis of the Utopian
Dimensions of Marxist Theory," Socialist Review, no. 59 (September-October 1981), pp. 33-82.
79. For an interesting discussion of this see Ellen Turkish Comisso, Workers’ Control under
Plan and Market (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), chaps. 1, 2.
80. Fred Block, "Eurocommunism and the Stalemate of European Capitalism," in The Poli-
tics of Eurocommunism, pp. 282ff. See also Fred Block and Larry Hirschorn, "New Productive
Forces and the Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism," Theory and Society 7 (1979):
363-95.
81. Alan Wolfe, "Has Social Democracy a Future?" Comparative Politics, October 1978,
p. 123.
 121

cooperatives, worker participation in industry, and women’s rights and

in the French Socialists’ commitment to decentralization, women’s
rights, and some form of autogestion, around which there continues a
lively debate. No less encouraging is the concern with workers’ control
in Labor Left and Alternative Economic Strategy debates in Britain.
But the democratic and egalitarian dynamic of social democracy is
perhaps best revealed in Sweden. Here Social Democrats exercised vir-
tually uninterrupted state power, albeit in various coalitions, from 1932
to 1976.82 State power, along with labor participation in a variety of
corporatist political structures, was the crucial ingredient for mobiliz-
ing the working class, for organizing white-collar workers, for developing
coalition potential with blue-collar workers, and for extending demo-
cratic, egalitarian, and quality-of-life demands. Although, initially, the
forming of coalitions necessitated relinquishing claims to control of
production, the effectiveness of full-employment and social-welfare poli-
cies enhanced workers’ capacities for struggle in central bargaining and
on the shop floor. With rising aspirations, with increased schooling, and

with the contradictions of capitalist rationalization, the increased politi-

cal and economic mobilization potential of the working classes was
translated into extensive reforms in production relations beginning in
the early 1970s. The reforms brought greater worker participation in
decision making at higher and lower levels, more union prerogatives in
interpreting collective agreements and health and safety issues, greater
security of employment, and more worker influence on the design of
the work process itself.
In short, a powerful dynamic of industrial democracy developed
with state backing. Rank-and-file dissatisfaction propelled the blue-
collar unions (LO) onto the offensive. The white-collar unions (TCO)
also committed themselves to industrial democracy.83 In this process,
continuous Social Democratic power was crucial,84 and participation in
central organs of state power and corporatist representation in tripartite
Labor Market Boards helped facilitate a dynamic of increased local con-

82. John Stephens, "Impasse and Breakthrough-in Sweden: After the Contradictions of
Social Democratic Policy," Dissent 28, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 310-11.
83. Walker Korpi, The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1978), pp. 140-41, 108, 318, 326, passim; Edmund Dahlström, "Efficiency, Satisfaction
and Democracy in Work: Ideas of Industrial Relations in Post-War Sweden," in Work and Power,
ed. Tom Bums, Lars Erik Karlsson, and Veljko Rus (London: Sage, 1979), pp. 15-47; Anna-
Greta Leijon, "Workplace Democracy in Sweden: Results, Failures and Hopes," in Eurosocial-
ism and America, ed. Nancy Lieber (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), pp. 163-76.
84. Andrew Martin, "Sweden: Industrial Democracy and Social Democratic Strategy," in
Worker Self-Management in Industry: The West European Experience, ed. G. David Garson
(New York: Praeger, 1977), p. 63.
122

LROIS without threatening the institutional autonomy of the unions. By

the mid-seventies, in order to reinforce shop-floor controls and to reduce
the inegalitarian side effects of the unions’ solidaristic wage policies,
the LO and the Social Democratic party put forth a series of proposals
for wage-earner funds that would gradually transfer ownership and con-
trol of industry to workers and to the citizenry in general. The amended
proposals, while realistically addressing the question of new sources
of accumulation, represent substantial elements of a program for the
peaceful development of democratic and decentralized economic
power.
The Swedish case clearly reveals the limits of criticizing participa-
tion in corporatist political structures as simply a form of class domina-
tion that enhances social control over labor and that has little or no
democratizing potential. This criticism has been stated most clearly by
Leo Panitch.85 It fails to recognize that, short of a sudden revolutionary
crisis, major sections of the organized working class will invariably opt
for participation in corporatist political structures whenever this partici-
pation offers relatively significant benefits. Hence any strategy must
include the best possible forms of struggle within as well as outside such
structures and not premise itself on the illusion of effective bases of
struggle for unions and parties that are completely autonomous.
Panitch’s argument that such structures are simply a form of class dom-
ination cum collaboration unjustifiably relies on industrial class struggle
as the only true index of a genuinely socialist politics with progressively

hegemonic potential, as if the relations of particular political conjunc-

tures, and the constraints and options of political coalitions, could be
bracketed. It also ignores the ways in which such participation can help
to strengthen the mobilization capacities of workers as a class and
belittles as progressive but purely integrative the significant gains in
workplace control achieved in part through corporatist structures
The radical and complete break that is postulated between corporatist
and socialist political structures appears much less total when we recog-
nize that industrial class struggle (particularly around wages, which
function as Panitch’s main index) could not serve as the primary indi-

85. Leo Panitch, "Trade Unions and the Corporatist State," New Left Review, no. 125
(January-February 1981), pp. 21-43. Panitch defines corporatism as "a political structure
within advanced capitalism which integrates organized socio-economic producer groups through
a system of representative and cooperative mutual interaction at the leadership level and mobi-
lization and social control at the mass level."
86. As Korpi argues, "the organizational strength of the LO unions and their capacity to act
on the basis of class is higher than ever before." The Working Class in Welfare Capitalism,

p. 334.
 123

cator of a hegemonic politics even under a socialist government. A social-

ist government would have to sustain a broad-based coalition under
enormous inflationary pressures, while facilitating the development of
alternative ways to upgrade skills and education levels in the process of
breaking down the class division of labor. The degree of wage restraint
necessary for this would be very considerable, especially among those
workers whose scarcity and skill most favorably situate them to engage
in industrial struggle. Solidaristic discipline and restraint in the interests
of expanding democratic and egalitarian opportunities for all (for which
participation in corporatist political structures has laid a strong founda-
tion in Sweden) are preconditions for the full flowering of local organs
of popular democracy at all levels. But their achievement could come
only through a long process of participation, corporatist bargaining, and
democratization within existing democratic parliamentary state struc-
tures. A strategy premised on nonparticipation, on unconstrained indus-
trial struggle, and on a radical and complete break in political structures
avoids these very difficult issues and unwittingly undermines the very
possibilities for an extension of democracy to which it is so profoundly
committed.