The Soviet union in the Mirror of the New Constitution
1. Work “according to ability” and personal property

On the 11th of June, 1936, the Central Executive Committee approved the draft of a new Soviet Constitution which, according to Stalin’s declaration, repeated daily by the whole press, will be “the most democratic in the world.” To be sure, the manner in which the constitution was drawn up is enough to cause doubts as to this. Neither in the press nor at any meetings was a word ever spoken about this great reform. Moreover, as early as March 1, 1936, Stalin declared to the American interviewer, Roy Howard: “We will doubtless adopt our new constitution at the end of this year.” Thus Stalin knew with complete accuracy just when this new constitution, about which the people at that moment knew nothing at all, would be adopted. It is impossible not to conclude that “the most democratic constitution in the world” was worked out and introduced in a not quite perfectly democratic manner. To be sure, in June the draft was submitted to the “consideration” of the people of the Soviet union. It would be vain, however, to seek in this whole sixth part of the globe one Communist who would dare to criticize a creation of the Central Committee, or one non-party citizen who would reject a proposal from the ruling party. The discussion reduced itself to sending resolutions of gratitude to Stalin for the “happy life.” The content and style of these greetings had been thoroughly worked out under the old constitution.

The first section, entitled Social Structure, concludes with these words: “In the Soviet union, the principle of socialism is realized: From each according to his abilities to each according to his work.” This inwardly contradictory, not to say nonsensical, formula has entered, believe it or not, from speeches and journalistic articles into the carefully deliberated text of the fundamental state law. It bears witness not only to a complete lowering of theoretical level in the lawgivers, but also to the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued. It is not difficult to guess the origin of the new “principle.” To characterize the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The two parts of this formula are inseparable. “From each according to his abilities,” in the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work. Working “according to their ability” – that is, in accord with their physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves – the members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all “according to their needs,” without humiliating control. This two-sided but indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.

The Soviet state in all its relations is far closer to a backward capitalism than to communism. It cannot yet even think of endowing each “according to his needs.” But for this very reason it cannot permit its citizens to work “according to their abilities.” It finds itself obliged to keep in force the system of piecework payment, the principle of which may be expressed thus: “Get out of everybody as much as you can, and give him in exchange as little as possible.” To be sure, nobody in the Soviet union works above his “abilities” in the absolute sense of the word – that is, above his physical and psychic potential. But this is true also of capitalism. The most brutal as well as the most refined methods of exploitation run into limits set by nature. Even a mule under the whip works “according to his ability,” but from that it does not follow that the whip is a social principle for mules. Wage labor does not cease even under the Soviet regime to wear the humiliating label of slavery. Payment “according to work” – in reality, payment to the advantage of “intellectual” at the expense of physical, and especially unskilled, work – is a source of injustice, oppression and compulsions for the majority, privileges and a “happy life” for the few.

Instead of frankly acknowledging that bourgeois norms of labor and distribution still prevail in the Soviet union, the authors of the constitution have cut this integral Communist principle in two halves, postponed the second half to an indefinite future, declared the first half already realized, mechanically hitched on to it the capitalist norm of piecework payment, named the whole thing “principle of Socialism,” and upon this falsification erected the structure of their constitution!

Of greatest practical significance in the economic sphere is undoubtedly Article X, which in contrast to most of the articles has quite clearly the task of guaranteeing, against invasion from the bureaucracy itself, the personal property of the citizens in their articles of domestic economy, consumption, comfort and daily life. With the exception of “domestic economy”, property of this kind, purged of the psychology of greed and envy which clings to it, will not only be preserved under communism but will receive an unheard of development. It is subject to doubt, to be sure, whether a man of high culture would want to burden himself with a rubbish of luxuries. But he would not renounce any one of the conquests of comfort. The first task of communism is to guarantee the comforts of life to all. In the Soviet union, however, the question of personal property still wears a petty bourgeois and not a communist aspect. The personal property of the peasants and the not well-off city people is the target of outrageous arbitrary acts on the part of the bureaucracy, which on its lower steps frequently assures by such means its own relative comfort. A growth of the prosperity of the country now makes it possible to renounce these seizures of personal property, and even impels the government to protect personal accumulations as a stimulus to increase the productivity of labor. At the same time – and this is of no small importance a protection by law of the hut, cow and home-furnishings of the peasant, worker or clerical worker, also legalizes the town house of the bureaucrat, his summer home, his automobile and all the other “objects of personal consumption and comfort,” appropriated by him on the basis of the “socialist” principle: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work.” The bureaucrat’s automobile will certainly be protected by the new fundamental law more effectively than the peasant’s wagon.
2. The Soviets and Democracy

In the political sphere, the distinction of the new constitution from the old is its return from the Soviet system of election according to class and industrial groups, to the system of bourgeois democracy based upon the so-called “universal, equal and direct” vote of an atomized population. This is a matter, to put it briefly, of juridically liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat. Where there are no capitalists, there is also no proletariat – say the creators of the new constitution – and consequently the state itself from being proletarian becomes national. This argument, with all its superficial lure, is either nineteen years late or many years in advance of its time. In expropriating the capitalists, the proletariat did actually enter upon its own liquidation as a class. But from liquidation in principle to actual dissolution in society is a road more prolonged, the longer the new state is compelled to carry out the rudimentary work of capitalism. The Soviet proletariat still exists as n class deeply distinct from the peasantry, the technical intelligentsia and the bureaucracy – and moreover as the sole class interested right up to the end in the victory of socialism. The new constitution wants to dissolve this class in “the nation” politically, long before it is economically dissolved in society.

To be sure, the reformers decided after some waverings to call the state, as formerly, Soviet. But that is only a crude political ruse dictated by the same considerations out of regard for which Napoleon’s empire continued to be called a republic. Soviets in their essence arc organs of class rule, and cannot be anything else. The democratically elected institutions of local self-administration are municipalities, dumas, zemstvos, anything you will, but not soviets. A general state Legislative Assembly on the basis of democratic formulas is a belated parliament (or rather its caricature), but by no means the highest organ of the Soviets. In trying to cover themselves with the historic authority of the Soviet system, the reformers merely show that the fundamentally new administration which they are giving to the state life dare not as yet come out under its own name.

Of itself, an equalization of the political rights of workers and peasants might not destroy the social nature of the state, if the influence of the proletariat upon the country were sufficiently guaranteed by the general state of economy and culture. The development of socialism certainly ought to proceed in that direction. But if the proletariat, while remaining a minority of the population, is really ceasing to need political ascendancy in order to guarantee a socialist course of social life, that means that the very need of state compulsion is reducing itself to nothing, giving place to cultural discipline.

The abolition of elective inequalities ought in that case to be preceded by a distinct and evident weakening of the compulsive functions of the state. Of this, however, there is not a word said either in the new constitution or, what is more important, in life.

To be sure, the new charter “guarantees” to the citizens the so-called “freedoms” of speech, press, assemblage and street processions. But each of these guarantees has the form either of a heavy muzzle or of shackles upon the hands and feet. Freedom of the press means a continuation of the fierce advance-censorship whose chains are held by the Secretariat of a Central Committee whom nobody has elected. Freedom of Byzantine flattery is thus, of course, fully “guaranteed.” Meanwhile, the innumerable articles, speeches, and letters of Lenin, ending in his “testament”, will continue under the new constitution to be locked up merely because they rub the new leaders the wrong way. That being the case with Lenin, it is unnecessary to speak about other authors. The crude and ignorant command of science, literature and art will be wholly preserved. “Freedom of assemblage” will mean, as formerly, the obligation of certain groups of the population to appear at meetings summoned by the authorities for the adoption of resolutions prepared in advance. Under the new constitution as under the old, hundreds of foreign communists, trusting in the Soviet “right of asylum,” will remain in prisons and concentration camps for crimes against the dogma of infallibility. In the matter of “freedom”, everything will remain as of old. Even the Soviet press does not try to sow any illusions about that. On the contrary, the chief goal of the new constitutional reform is declared to be a “further reinforcement of the dictatorship.” Whose dictatorship, and over whom?

As we have already heard, the ground for political equality was prepared by the abolition of class contradictions. It is no longer to be a class but a “people’s” dictatorship. But when the bearer of dictatorship becomes the people, freed from class contradictions, that can only mean the dissolution of the dictatorship in a socialist society – and, above all, the liquidation of the bureaucracy. Thus teaches the Marxian doctrine. Perhaps it has been mistaken? But the very authors of the constitution refer, although very cautiously, to the program of the party written by Lenin. Here is what the program really says: “ . . . Deprivation of political rights, and all other limitations of freedom whatsoever, are necessary exclusively in the form of temporary measures . . . In proportion as the objective possibility of the exploitation of man by man disappears, the necessity of these temporary measures will also disappear.” Abandonment of the “deprivation of political rights” is thus inseparably bound up with the abolition of “all limitations of freedom whatsoever.” The arrival at a socialist society is characterized not only by the fact that the peasants are put on an equality with the workers, and that political rights are restored to the small percentage of citizens of bourgeois origin, but above all by the fact that real freedom is established for the whole 100 per cent of the population. With the liquidation of classes, not only the bureaucracy dies away, and not only the dictatorship, but the state itself. Let some imprudent person, however, try to utter even a hint in this direction: the GPU will find adequate grounds in the new constitution to send him to one of the innumerable concentration camps. Classes are abolished. Of Soviets there remains only the name. But the bureaucracy is still there. The equality of the rights of workers and peasants means, in reality, an equal lack of rights before the bureaucracy.

No less significant is the introduction of the secret ballot. If you take it on faith that the new political equality corresponds to an achieved social equality, then there remains a puzzling question: In that case why must voting henceforth be protected by secrecy? Whom exactly does the population of a socialist country fear, and from whose attempts must it be defended? The old Soviet constitution saw in open voting, as in the limitation of elective rights, a weapon of the revolutionary class against bourgeois and petty bourgeois enemies. We cannot assume that now the secret ballot is being introduced for the convenience of a counterrevolutionary minority. It is a question, evidently, of defending the rights of the people. But who is feared by a socialist people which has recently thrown off a tzar, a nobility and a bourgeoisie? The sycophants do not even give a thought to this question. Yet there is more in it than in all the writings of the Barbusses, the Louis Fischers, the Durantys, the Webbs, and the like of them.

In a capitalist society, the secret ballot is meant to defend the exploited from the terror of the exploiters. If the bourgeoisie finally adopted such a reform, obviously under pressure from the masses, it was only because it became interested in protec............