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Rosa Luxemburg
The Problem of Nationality and Autonomy
4. Centralization and Autonomy
We have noted the general centralizing tendency of
capitalism in the bourgeois states. But local autonomy also grows
simultaneously out of the objective development and out of the needs of
bourgeois society.
Bourgeois economy requires as great a uniformity as possible in
legislation, the judiciary, administration, the school system, etc., in
the entire area of the state, and as far as possible, even in
international relations. But the same bourgeois economy, in carrying out
all these functions, demands accuracy and efficiency quite as much as
uniformity. The centralism of the modern states is of necessity
connected with a bureaucratic system. In the medieval state, in a serf
economy, public functions were connected with landed property; these
were the “concrete rights,” a kind of land tax. The feudal lord of
estates was at the same time and by the same token a civil and criminal
judge, the head of the police administration, the chief of military
forces in a certain territory, and collector of taxes. These functions
connected with owning real estate were, like the land itself, the object
of transactions, gift, sale, inheritance, and so on. Absolutism, which
increased toward the end of the Middle Ages, paving the way for
capitalism by its struggle against feudal dispersal of state authority,
separated public functions from land ownership and created a new social
category for the execution of these functions, namely crown officials.
With the development of modern capitalistic states, the performance of
public functions passed completely into the hands of paid hirelings.
This social group increased numerically and created the modern state
bureaucracy. On the one hand, the transfer of public functions to hired
personnel – completely devoted to their work and directed by one
powerful political center – corresponds with the spirit of bourgeois
economy, which is based on specialization, division of labor, and a
complete subordination of manpower to the purpose of maintaining the
social mechanism: on the other hand, however, the centralist bureaucracy
has serious drawbacks hampering the economy.
Capitalist production and exchange are characterized by the highest
sensitivity and elasticity, by the capacity, and even the inclination
for constant changes in connection with thousands of social influences
which cause constant fluctuations and undulations in market conditions,
and in the conditions of production themselves. As a result of these
fluctuations, the bourgeois economy requires subtle, perceptive
administration of public services such as the centralized bureaucracy,
with its rigidity and routine, is not able to afford. Hence, already as a
corrective to the centralism of the modern state, there develops, in
bourgeois society, along with legislation by representative assemblies, a
natural tendency toward local autonomy, giving the possibility of a
better adjustment of the state apparatus to social needs. For local
autonomy takes into account the manifold variety of local conditions and
also brings about a direct influence and cooperation of society through
its public functions.
However, more important than the deficiencies inseparable from the
rule of bureaucracy, by which the theory of bourgeois liberalism usually
explains the necessity for autonomy, there is another circumstance. The
capitalist economy brought forth, from the moment of the inception of
mass factory production, a whole series of entirely new social needs
imperiously demanding satisfaction. Above all the penetration of big
capital and the system of hired labor, having undermined and ruined the
entire traditional social structure, created a plague unknown before,
namely mass unemployment and pauperization for the proletariat. Since
capital needs a reserve labor force and since public security must be
preserved, society, in order to hold in check the proletarian masses
deprived of means of livelihood and employment, cannot but take care of
them. In this way, modern public welfare comes into being as a social
function within the framework of capitalistic production.
The agglomeration of big masses of industrial proletarians in the
worst material conditions in the modern industrial centers created for
the adjacent bourgeois classes a threat of infectious diseases and
brought about another urgent social need: public concern for health, and
in connection with this, the whole management of the sewage system and
supply of water as well as public regulation of building construction.
The requirements of capitalist production and of bourgeois society
brought about for the first time the problem of popular education. The
system of schools accessible to broad masses, not only in the big cities
but also in the provinces and among the rural population, brought the
idea that the creation and regulation of schools was a public function.
The movement of goods and persons in the whole area of the state as a
normal phenomenon and a condition of the existence of capitalist
production brought forth the need for constant public concern about
roads and means of communication, not only in the form of trunk–line
railroads and maritime traffic, important from the point of view of
military strategy and world trade, but also of vehicular roads,
highways, bridges, river navigation, and subsidiary railroads. The
creation and maintenance of these indispensable conditions of internal
communication became one of the most urgent economic needs of bourgeois
society.
Finally, public safety of persons and property as a matter of general
concern and social need is also a clearly modern product, connected
with the requirements of capitalist economy. In medieval society, safety
was guaranteed by some special areas of legal protection: for the rural
population, the area of the respective feudal dominion, for the
burghers, the protective walls of the city and the statutes and
“freedoms” of each city separately. The knights were supposed to
guarantee their own safety. Modern society, based on the production of
goods, needs safety of persons and property as a universal social
guarantee for everybody in the entire territory of the state without
discrimination. The central government cannot satisfy all these needs.
There are some the government cannot take care of at all, like the local
affairs in the remote parts of the country; understandably, the
government tends to transmit the expenses of managing such affairs to
the local population.
Local autonomy, therefore, originates in all modern states very
early, above all in the form of transferring the material burden of a
series of social functions to the population itself.
On the other hand, capitalism stratifies and links into one economic
and social organism the biggest state areas, and, to a certain extent,
the entire world. At the same time, however, in order to promote its
interests, to perfect and integrate the bourgeois economy, capitalism
splits the [autonomous] states and creates new centers, new social
organisms, as, for instance, big cities and provincial regions, etc. A
contemporary modern city is tied by numberless economic and political
bonds not only to the state but to the entire world. The accumulation of
people, the development of municipal transportation and economy, turns
the city into a separate small organism; its needs and public functions
are more numerous and varied than were those of a medieval city, which
with its handicraft production, was almost entirely independent both
economically and politically.
The creation of different states and of new urban areas provided the
framework for the modern municipal government – a product of new social
needs. A municipal or provincial government is necessary in order to
comply with the needs of these specific social organisms into which
capitalism, following the economic principle of the contradictory
interests of the city and the village, transformed the city on the one
hand and the village on the other. Within the framework of the special
capitalistic connection between industry and agriculture, that is,
between city and village, within the framework of the close mutual
dependence of their production and exchange, a thousand threads linking
the daily interests of the population of each major city with the
existence of the population of the neighboring villages there goes, in a
natural way, a provincial autonomy as in France – departmental,
cantonal, or communal. Modern autonomy in all these forms is by no means
the abolition of state centralism but only its supplementation;
together they constitute the characteristic form of the bourgeois state.
Besides political unification, state sovereignty, uniform
legislation, and centralized state government, local autonomy became, in
all these countries, one of the basic policy issues both of the
liberals and of the bourgeois democracy. Local autonomy, growing out of
the modern bourgeois system in the manner indicated, has nothing in
common with federalism or particularism handed down from the medieval
past. It is even its exact opposite. While the medieval particularism or
federalism constitutes a separation of the political functions of the
state, modern autonomy constitutes only an adaptation of the
concentrated state functions to local needs and the participation in
them of the people. While, therefore, communal particularism or
federalism in the spirit of
Bakunin’s ideal is a plan for splitting the territory of a big state
into small areas partly or completely independent of each other, modern
autonomy is only a form of democratization of a centralized big state.
The clearest illustration of this point of modern autonomy which grew in
the chief modern states on the grave the former particularism and in
clear opposition to it.
II
State administrative and bureaucratic centralism was initiated in France by absolutism during the ancien régime.
By the suppression of communal independence in the cities, especially
in Paris, by subjugating the largest feudal possessions and
incorporating them into the crownlands, finally by concentrating
administration in the hands of the state council and royal supervisors,
there was created already in the time of Richelieu a powerful apparatus
of state centralism. The former independent feudal fiefs were reduced to
the condition of provinces; some of them were governed by assemblies
whose power, however, was more and more of an illusion.
The Great Revolution undertook its work in two directions. On the one
hand, continuing the tendency toward political centralization, it
completely abolished the territorial remnants of feudalism; on the
other, in place of the provincial administration of bureaucrats assigned
by the government, it created a local administration with
representatives elected by the people. The Constituent Assembly wiped
from the map of France the historical division of the country into
provinces, as well as the medieval division into administratively
diverse cities and villages. On the tabula rasa which was thus
left the Constituent Assembly, following the idea of Siéyès, introduced a
new, simple, geometrical division into square departments. The
departments, in turn, are subdivided into arrondissements,
cantons, and communes, each governed by a body elected by public vote.
The constitution of the Directory of the Year III made certain changes
in details, maintaining however, the foundations of the great reform
effected by the Constituent Assembly; it was this reform which had given
to modern history an epoch–making model of modern autonomy, which grew
up on the grave of feudal decentralization and was imbued with an
entirely new idea, namely, democratic representation by election.
There followed a hundred years of change in the history of autonomy
in France. This history and the whole political fate of democracy in the
country oscillated, in a characteristic manner, between two poles. The
slogan of the aristocratic, monarchical reaction is, throughout this
time, decentralization, in the sense of returning to the independence of
the former historical provinces, while the slogan of liberalism and
democracy is close adherence to political centralism and at the same
time, the rights of representation of the local population, especially
in the commune. The first blow to the work of the Revolution in that
field was dealt by Napoleon, who was crowned by the so–called Statute of
Pluvois 28 of the year VIII (Feb. 17, 1800), his coup d’état
of 18th Brumaire. This statute, taking advantage of the general
confusion and chaos caused especially in the provinces by the
counter–revolution during the time of the Directory, for which the
democratic autonomy was blamed, hastily compressed the work of the
Revolution into the framework of bureaucracy. Maintaining the new
territorial division of France in line with political centralism,
Napoleon abolished, by one stroke of the pen, any participation of the
people in local autonomy and gave over the entire power into the hands
of officials assigned by the central government: prefect, sub–prefect,
and mayor. In the department, the Napoleonic prefect was, in a
considerable measure, a resurrection of the supervisor from the happy
times of the ancien régime. Napoleon expressed this reversion with characteristic frankness when he said, “Avec mes préfets, mes gens d’armes et mes prêtres, je ferai tout ce que je voudrai.” [“With the help of my prefects, police, and priests I will do whatever I like.”]
The Restoration kept the system of its predecessor in general,
according to a current expression. “The Bourbons slept on a bed that had
been made by Napoleon.” However, as soon as the aristocratic emigration
returned home its battle cry was decentralization, a return to the
system of the provinces. The notorious chambre introuvable had
scarcely assembled when one of the extreme Royalists, Barthe Lebastrie,
at a meeting of January 13, 1816, solemnly announced the
indispensability of decentralization. On many later occasions the
leaders of the right, Corbière, De Bonald, La Bourdonnaye, de Villèle,
Duvergier de Hauranne, argued “the impossibility of reconciling the
monarchy with republican uniformity and equality.” Under this standard,
the aristocracy fought simply for a return to its former position in the
provinces from the economic and political point of view. At the same
time, it denounced political centralism as “a gre:nid for revolution, a
hotbed of innovations and agitation.” Here we already hear literally the
same arguments under cover of which the right, half a century later,
tried to mobilize the provincial reaction against the revolutionary
Paris Commune.
Therefore, the first timid attempt at the reform of the local
administration with application of the principle of election, that is,
the project of Martignaque, called forth a storm in the honorable
pre–July assembly and was rejected clearly as the “beginning of
revolution.” The enraged representatives of the landed aristocracy
demanded only the broadening of the competence of the prefect and
sub–prefect and making them dependent on the central authority. However,
the days of the Restoration were already numbered and the defeat of
Martignaque’s project became the prologue of the July Revolution. The
July Monarchy, which was only an improved edition of the Restoration in
the spirit of the rule of the richest bourgeoisie, introduced
insignificant changes in local autonomy; it provided a shadow of the
system of election. The law of 1831 on the communes and the law of 1833
on the departments gave the right of suffrage for municipal and
departmental councils to a small minority of the most highly taxed as
well as to the bureaucracy and bourgeois intelligentsia, without,
however, any broadening of the attributes of these councils.
The revolution of 1848 restored the work of its great predecessor,
introduced universal suffrage for departmental councils, and made the
meetings of the councils public. After the June days, the party of the
aristocratic–clerical right violently demanded the return to
decentralization as a weapon against the hydra of socialism. In
1849–1851, the departmental councils unanimously demanded the extension
of their competence and extraordinary powers in case of civil war, for
use against Paris. Thiers, at that time still a liberal, on the
contrary, insisted on centralism as the most certain preventive means
against socialism. (The very same Thiers, it is true, in 1871, himself
waved the banner of federalism and decentralization to mobilize the
provinces against the Paris Commune.) The Second Republic, in
liquidating the work of the February Revolution, prepared in 1851 a
project for the reform of local administration which restored completely
the system of Napoleon I, with an all–powerful prefect, and in this way
built here, as in general, a bridge on which Napoleon III entered. The
latter undertook an even more thorough revision of the February
achievements, put local administration even further back than the
reforms of Napoleon I, and abolished the openness of the meetings of the
departmental councils and their right to elect their own cabinet; from
then on the government appointed mayors quite arbitrarily, i.e., not
from within the communal council. Finally, Napoleon III expanded the
power of the prefects (by the laws of 1852 and 1861) to such an extent
that he made them completely independent of the government. These
omnipresent departmental satraps, dependent directly on Louis Napoleon,
became, by virtue of their function of “directors” of elections to
Parliament, the main pillars of the Second Empire.
The course of the above history until the beginning of the Second Empire was characterized by Marx in broad strokes in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in the following way:
This executive power with its enormous bureaucratic
and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing
wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides
an army of another half–million, this appalling parasitic body, which
enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores,
sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy, with the decay of the
feudal system, which it helped to hasten. The seignorial privileges of
the landowners and towns became transformed into so many attributes of
the state power, the feudal dignitaries into paid officials, and the
motley pattern of conflicting medieval plenary powers into the regulated
plan of a state authority whose work is divided and centralized as in a
factory. The first French Revolution, with its task of breaking all
separate local, territorial, urban, and provincial powers in order to
create the civil unity of the nation, was bound to develop what the
absolute monarchy had begun: centralization, but at the same time the
extent, the attributes, and the agents of governmental power. Napoleon
perfected this state machinery. The Legitimist Monarchy and the July
Monarchy added nothing but a greater division of labor, growing in the
same measure as the division of labor within bourgeois society created
new groups of interests, and, therefore, new material for state
administration. Every common interest was straightaway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher general
interest, snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves
and made an object of governmental activity, from a bridge, a
schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community to the
railways, the national wealth, and the national university of France.
Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary
republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along with the repressive
measures, the resources and centralization of governmental power. All
revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties
that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this
huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.
But under the absolute monarchy, during the first
Revolution, under Napoleon, bureaucracy was only the means of preparing
the class rule of the bourgeoisie. Under the Restoration, under Louis
Philippe, under the parliamentary republic, it was the instrument of the
ruling class, however much it strove for power of its own.
Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to
have made itself completely independent. As against civil society, the
state machine has consolidated its position so thoroughly that the chief
of the Society of December 10 suffices for its head, an adventurer
blown in from abroad, raised on the shield by a drunken soldiery, which
he has bought with liquor and sausages, and which he must continually
ply with sausage anew.[1]
The bureaucratic system of Napoleon III stirred up,
especially toward the end of his reign, a strong opposition; this
opposition comes through clearly in the statements of certain local
administrations. The most striking example was the famous “Nancy
Manifesto,” which demanded extreme decentralization and under whose
banner there rallied, in 1865, the whole legitimist–clerical opposition
of the last phase of the Empire. In the name of “freedom and order” the
Manifesto demanded the liberation of the Commune from the super–vision
of the prefect, the appointment of the mayor from among the communal
councilors, and the complete elimination of the arrondissement
councils. On the other hand, the Manifesto demanded establishing
cantonal councils and assigning to them the distribution of taxes, and
finally, revising the boundaries between departments in the spirit of
returning to the historical boundaries of the provinces and making the
departments so revised independent concerning budget and the entire
administration. This program, which aimed “to create preventive measures
against revolutions,” to save “freedom compromised by three
revolutions,” was accepted by all liberal conservatives of the Odilon
Barrot type, and its advocates were headed by all the leaders of
legitimism, i.e., the Bourbon party: Béchard, Falioux, Count
Montalembert, and finally, the Pretender to the crown himself, Count
Chambord, who, in his Manifesto of 1871 raised “administrative
decentralization” to the role of a leading programmatic demand on the
banner of the white lilies.
The Nancy program provoked sharp resistance from two sides – from the
Empire and from the extreme Left, Republicans, Democrats, and
Socialists. The latter, condemning the counter–revolutionary tendency of
legitimist “decentralization,” said, in the words of Victor Hugo:
“Gentlemen, you are forging a chain and you say: ‘This is freedom.’”
“Therefore,” they exclaimed, “we do not want your departmental councils
as a legislative authority, nor your permanent departmental commissions
as administrative authority in which a triple feudalism would prevail:
the landed interest, the church, and industry, interested in keeping the
people in ignorance and misery.”[2]
Under the pretext of freedom, France was to be handed over as prey to
bishops, landed aristocracy, and factory owners – this is the opinion of
contemporary democracy and socialists about the 1865 program. Louis
Blanc was an especially inflexible opponent of decentralization, even to
the departments, which he considered an artificial creation, though he
fervently encouraged the widest self–government of the Commune as the
natural historical organization and the foundation of the state.
In the revolutionary camp the advocates of decentralization, who
indeed went further than the legitimists, were only adherents of
Proudhon, such as Desmaret, who distinctly proclaimed the slogan of
federalism both in application to “the United States of Europe” and to
communes and districts within the state, as an ideal solution of the
social question because it was a way of “annihilating power by dividing
it.” That the adherents of this anarchistic manner of disposing of the
bourgeois state have not yet died out in France is proved by the book
which appeared in 1899, Le principe sauveur par un girondin
[Cited by Avalov, p.228], in which the author sharply polemicizes
against the centralism and homogeneity of the modern state, advocating,
instead of departmental autonomy, the complete dissolution of the state
in the spirit of federation. New voices in the same spirit have been
heard even in later years – and enthusiasts for “historical”
decentralization still crop up from the camp of the Royalists, as is
demonstrated by the legitimist pamphlet from the time of the Dreyfus
affair, La decentralization et la monarchie nationale.
The opposition between the views of the contemporary socialists and
the anarchistic Proudhon was formulated as early as 1851 by Louis Blanc
in his pamphlet, La République une et indivisible, in
which in a thunderous voice he warned the republic against the danger of
federalism, opposing to the antagonisms of thirty–seven thousand tiny
parliaments “la grande tradition montagnarde en fait de centralization politique” and “une administration surveillée”. As a matter of fact, France at that moment was less threatened by the danger of federalism than by its opposite: the coup d’etat of Louis Bonaparte and the absolute rule of his prefects.
The same grouping of parties with regard to local administration was
also reflected in the notorious national assembly in Bordeaux after the
fall of the Empire. After the destruction of the Paris Commune the main
question concerning decentralization was whether it could serve as a
preventitive against the revolutionary movements of the proletariat.
First of all, the Third Republic hastened to expand the competence of
the departments, equipping them – in accordance with the leading idea of
reaction since the time of the Restoration – with special powers
against the revolution. The so–called “Loi Tréveneuc” of February 15,
1872, bears the significant title “Loi relative au rêle eventuel des
conseils généraux dans des circonstances exceptionnelles.” On the other
hand, the powers of the communes were, after a temporary expansion,
again restricted: whereas in 1871 the communal councils had received the
power of electing their mayor, after three years they were again
deprived of this right, and the government of the Third Republic
appointed thirty–seven thousand mayors through its prefects, thus
showing itself a faithful exponent of the monarchical traditions.
However, in the foundation of the Third Republic there occurred
certain social changes which, despite all external obstacles, pushed the
matter of local autonomy on to completely new paths. Although the
independence of the urban and rural communes might have been abhorrent
to the bourgeois reaction, intimidated by the great traditions of the
Paris Commune from 1793 to 1871, it eventually became an indispensable
need, especially since the inception of big industry under the wings of
the Second Empire. It was then that railroads began to be built on a
large scale. The artificially fostered and protected big industry not
only flourished in Paris but in the fifties and sixties it spread into
the provinces and suburban areas where capitalism sought cheap factory
sites and cheap labor. Enterprises, industrial centers, financial
fortunes mushroomed in the hothouse temperature of the Empire,
suppressing small industry and introducing mass factory labor of women
and children. The Paris Stock Exchange occupied second place in Europe.
Together with this explosion of “original accumulation,” as yet
unbridled by any protective law – there was still no factory inspection –
or by labor organization and struggle, there took place in France an
unparalleled accumulation of mass poverty, disease, and death. Suffice
it to mention that there were cases when female factory workers were
paid one sou, i.e., five centimes per day, in a period of general
unparalleled high prices of the prime necessities of life.[3]
The short period of this exploiting economy made bourgeois society
painfully aware of the lack of any public activity to prevent glaring
poverty, infectious diseases, danger to life and property on public
roads, etc. As early as 1856, much was written and spoken about the
necessity of an official inquiry concerning pauperism in France. In
1858, such an inquiry “confidentially” ordered by the government
predictably came to naught.
The state of public education corresponded more or less with these
economic conditions. School courses for adults, subsidized by the
government under Louis Philippe by the tiny sum of 478 francs on the
average annually, were, during the Empire, deprived of this subsidy and
neglected. A certain historian described the state of elementary schools
in 1863 as follows:
Thousands of communes are without schools for girls;
villages are deprived of any schools at all; a large number of others
stay briefly in school and do not learn anything useful; there are no
schools for adults and not a single library in the villages; the annual
figures show that there is more than 27 percent illiteracy; that living
conditions of the male and female teachers are miserable; that 5,000
female teachers receive less than 400 francs annual wages, some receive
seventy–five francs per year. Not a single one is entitled to retirement
pay. Not a single male teacher enjoys a retirement pay which would
assure him of one franc daily subsistence.[4]
Among the workers in Paris, the inquiry ordered by the
Chamber of Commerce in 1860 ascertained that fifty thousand, i.e., about
13 percent of the working population, was completely illiterate. The
Third Republic, whose mission it was to build a durable home for the
bourgeoisie and first of all to liquidate the bankrupt estate taken over
from the Empire, found itself faced with a number of new tasks:
military reform, and in connection with this, a health reform; also a
reform, or rather creation of public education; reform of
transportation, completely neglected by the Empire, which was solely
occupied with decorating and reforming Paris to turn it into a model
capital of the Monarchy. Moreover, the Third Republic faced the task of
acquiring means for these reforms. This meant an increase of taxes.
However, these went primarily for military expenditures, for colonial
policy, and especially for the maintenance of the bureaucratic
apparatus. Without the participation of the local population, above all
of the communes, the Third Republic would never have been able to solve
these tasks.
At the same time, big industry’s revolutionizing of conditions under
the Empire completely changed the role of the department. When Louis
Blanc, in the national assembly in 1871, declared that the department is
an artificial product of administrative geometry, this was doubtless an
anachronistic view. Indeed, in their beginning, emerging from the hands
of the constituent assembly, the departments were an entirely “free
improvisation” of the genius of the Revolution, a simple network of
symmetrical figures on the map of France; and it was exactly in this
abolition of all historical boundaries of the provinces that the
powerful innovating thought, that great “tradition montagnarde“
consisted, which, on the ruins of the medieval system, created a
politically unified modern France. For decades, during the Restoration
and later, the departments did not have any life of their own; they were
used by the central government only as branch offices, as the sphere of
action of the clerk–prefect whose only palpable expression was the
obligatory “hêtels de préfecture”. However, in modern France,
new local needs have brought, in the course of time, new institutions
surrounding these fortresses of the central bureaucracy. The new
“departmental interests” which have gained increasing recognition are
centered around shelters, hospitals, schools, local roads, and the
procurement of “additional centimes” necessary to meet the costs.
The originally empty framework of the departments, drawn on the grave
of the medieval particularism of the provinces, became in the course of
time, through the development of bourgeois France, filled with new
social content: the local interests of capitalism. The local
administration of France by all–powerful prefects could suffice in the
second half of the nineteenth century only for the artificial
maintenance of the Empire. The Third Republic was eventually forced, in
its own interests, to admit the local population to participation in
this administration and to change the communes and departments from
exclusive instruments of the central government into organs of
democratic autonomy.
However, this shift could be effected only within the Third Republic.
In the same way that the republican form of government was consolidated
in France ultimately thanks only to circumstances which permitted the
social nucleus of this clearly bourgeois political form to be husked
from its ideological cocoon, from the illusion of “social republic”
created by three revolutions in the course of almost half a century, so
the local self–government had first to be liberated from the traditional
ideology hostile to it. As late as the 1871 National Assembly, some
advocates of liberalism abhorred the “reactionary” idea of autonomy
which they persistently identified with feudal decentralization. The
Monarchist, d’Haussonville, warned his party, reminding it that already
during the Great Revolution the appearance of adhering to federalism was
sufficient to send people to the guillotine, while Duvergier de
Hauranne declared that France was faced with a dilemma: either uniform
administration represented in each department by a prefect, or a
federation of autonomous departments. These were the last reverberations
of an opinion which weighed on people’s minds for three–quarters of a
century. Only when, with the fall of the Second Empire and the triumph
of the Third Republic, the attempts of the aristocratic clerical
reaction were defeated once and for all and the phantom of the
federalism of the “historic provinces” was relegated to the realm of
disembodied spirits did the idea of the relative independence of the
departments cease to give an impression of federalism which frightened
away bourgeois liberalism and democracy. And only when the last flicker
of the Paris Commune revolutionary tradition died out in the cinders of
the 1871 Commune and under the withered lawn of the “Confederates’ Wall”
[“Mur des Fédérés”] at Père Lachaise, where the corpses and half–dead
bodies of the Commune’s heroes were dumped, only then did the idea of
communal self–government cease to be synonymous with social upheaval in
the minds of the bourgeoisie, and the Phrygian cap cease to be the
symbol of the City Hall. In a word, only when both departmental and
communal autonomy were able to demonstrate their proper historical
social value as genuinely modern institutions of the bourgeois state,
growing out of its own needs and serving its interests, did the
progressive development of local autonomy in France become possible. The
organic statute of 1871, supplemented by the law of 1899, at last
authorized representatives of departments chosen by general elections of
the people to participate in the administration with a determining
voice, and the statute of 1884 gave a similar right to the communal
councils, returning to them the power of choosing their own mayor.
Slowly and reluctantly, and only in recent times, the modern autonomy of
France has liberated itself from the iron bonds of bureaucracy.
The history of self–government in England followed entirely different
paths. Instead of the revolutionary change–over from medieval to modern
society, we sec here, on the contrary, an early compromise which has
preserved to this day the old remnants of feudalism. Not so much by the
shattering of old forms as by gradually filling them with new content,
bourgeois England has carved out a place for itself in medieval England.
And perhaps in no other area is this process so typical and interesting
as in the area of local self–government. At first glance, and according
to a commonplace expression, England appears as the country with the
oldest local self–government, nay, as the cradle, the classical homeland
of self–government, on which the liberalism of the continent sought to
model itself. In reality, that age–old self–government of England
belongs to the realm of myths, and the famous old English
self–government has nothing in common with self–government in the modern
sense. Self–government was simply a special system of local
administration which originated at the time of the flowering of
feudalism and bears all the hallmarks of its origin. The centers of that
system are the county, a product of the feudal conditions after the
Norman Conquest, and the parish, a product of medieval, ecclesiastical
conditions; while the main person, the soul of the whole county
administration, is the justice of the peace, an office created in the
fourteenth century along with the three other county offices: the
sheriff, conducting the elections to parliament, administering judgments
in civil lawsuits, etc.; the coroner, conducting inquests in cases of
violent death; and finally, the commander of the county militia. Among
these officials only the secondary figure of the coroner is elective;
all other officers are appointed by the Crown from among the local
landed aristocracy. Only landed proprietors with a specified income
could be appointed to the office of justice of the peace. All these
officers fulfilled their duties without remuneration, and the purely
medieval aspect is further indicated by the fact that in their
competence they combined judicial and executive power. The justice of
the peace did everything in the county as well as in the parish, as we
shall presently see. He ran the courts, assigned taxes, issued
administrative ordinances, in a word, he represented in his person the
whole competence of public authority entirely in accordance with the
feudal attributions of the landed proprietor; the only difference here
was his appointment by the Crown. The justice of the peace, once
appointed, became an omnipotent holder of public power: justices of the
peace were entirely independent of the central government, and in
general, not responsible, because the old system of English
self–government obviously knows nothing of another basic feature of
modern administration: the judicial responsibility of officials and the
supervision by the central authority over local offices. Any
participation of the local population in this administration was out of
the question. If, therefore, the ancient English self–government may be
regarded as a kind of autonomy, this can be done only in the sense that
it was a system of unrestricted autonomy of the landed aristocracy, who
held in their hands the complete public power in the county.
The first undermining of this medieval system of administration
coincides with the reign of Elizabeth, i.e., the period of that
shattering revolution in rural property relations which inaugurated the
capitalistic era in England. Violent expropriations of the peasantry by
the aristocracy on the broadest scale, the supersession of agriculture
by sheep–herding, the secularization of church estates which were
appropriated by the aristocracy, all this suddenly created an immense
rural proletariat, and in consequence, poverty, beggary, and public
robbery. The first triumphal steps of capital shook the foundations of
the whole society and England was forced to face a new threat –
pauperism. There began a crusade against vagrancy, beggary, and looting,
which extends in a bloodstained streak until the middle of the
nineteenth century. Since, however, prisons, branding with hot irons,
and even the gallows proved an entirely insufficient medicine against
the new plague, summary convictions came into being in England and also
“public philanthropy”; next to the gallows at the cross–roads arose the
parish workhouse. The modern phenomenon of mass pauperism was the first
problem transcending the powers and means of the medieval system of
administration as carried out by the self–government of the aristocracy.
The solution adopted was to shift the new burden to new shoulders of
the middle classes, the wealthy bourgeoisie. Now the mold–covered church
parish was called to a new role – care of the poor. In the peculiar
English administration, the parish is not only a rural but also an urban
organization, so that to this day the parish system overlaps the modern
administrative network in the big cities, creating a great chaos of
competences.
At the end of the sixteenth century, a tax for the poor was
introduced in the parish, and this tax gradually became the cornerstone
of the tax system of the commune. The poor rates grew from £900,000
sterling at the end of the seventeenth century to £7,870,801 sterling in
1881. The collection and administration of these funds, the
organization of assistance and workhouses, called forth a new
organization of the communal office: and to it there also fell presently
another important public function which was likewise caused b the needs
of the nascent capitalist economy: supervision of roads. This
organization also comprised, from then on, besides the rector who was at
the head and two church wardens elected by the commune, two overseers
of the poor, designated by the justice of the peace, and one surveyor of
the highways, also designated by the justice of the peace. As we see,
this was still the use of the old self–government apparatus for modern
purposes. The landed aristocracy in the persons of the justices of the
peace preserved power in their hands; only the material burden fell on
the bourgeoisie. The commune had to carry the burden of the poor tax;
however, it didn’t have any voice in the apportionment of the tax. The
latter function was an attribute of the justice of the peace and of the
communal overseers subject to him.
In such a state the local administration survived until the
nineteenth century. A few attempts at admitting the population to
participation in this administration were undertaken at the beginning of
that century but came to nothing.
In the meantime, capitalism in England entered new paths: big machine
industry celebrated its triumphal entry and undertook an assault on the
old fortress of self–government, which the crumbling structure could
not withstand.
The violent growth of factory industry at the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth century caused a complete upheaval
in the conditions of England’s social life. The immense influx of the
rural proletariat to the cities soon brought about such a concentration
of people and such a housing shortage in the industrial cities that the
workers’ districts became abhorrent slums, dark, stinking, filthy,
plague–ridden. Sickness among the population assumed terrifying
proportions. In Scotland and Ireland an outbreak of typhoid took place
regularly after each price increase and each industrial crisis. In
Edinburgh and Glasgow, for instance as stated by Engels in his classic
work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,
in the year 1817, 6,000 persons fell ill; in 1826 and 1837, 10,000
each; in 1842, in Glasgow alone, 32,000, i.e., 12 percent of the entire
population. In Ireland, in 1817, 39,000 persons fell ill with typhoid,
in 1819, 60,000; in the main industrial cities of counties Cork and
Limerick, one–seventh and one–fourth respectively of the entire
population fell victim in those years to the epidemic. In London and
Manchester, malaria was endemic. In the latter city, it was officially
stated that three–quarters of the population needed medical help every
year, and mortality among children up to five reached, in the industrial
city of Leeds in 1832, the terrifying figure of 5,286 out of a
population of 100,000. The lack of hospitals and medical help, housing
shortages, and undernourishment of the proletariat became a public
threat.
In no less a degree, the intellectual neglect of the mass of the
people became a public plague when big industry, having concentrated
immense crowds of the proletariat under its command, made them a prey of
spiritual savages. The textile industry especially, which was the first
to introduce mass labor of women and children at the lowest age and
which made impossible any home education, however rudimentary, made the
filling of this gap, i.e., the creation of elementary schools, a public
need. However, the state performed these tasks to a minimal degree. At
the beginning of the fourth decade [of the century], out of the budget
of England amounting to £55 million, public education is allotted the
ridiculous sum of £40,000. Education was left mainly to private
initiative, especially of the church, and became mostly an instrument of
bigotry and a weapon of sectarian struggle. In Sunday schools, the only
ones accessible to working–class children, the latter were often not
even taught reading and writing, as occupations unworthy of Sunday;
while in the private schools, as was demonstrated by a parliamentary
inquiry, the teachers themselves often did not know how to read or
write. In general, the picture revealed by the famous Children
Employment Commission showed the new capitalistic England as a scene of
ruin and destruction, a wreckage of the entire antiquated, traditional,
social structure. The great social reform was accomplished for the
purpose of establishing tolerable living conditions for the new host,
i.e., for the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The elimination of the most
threatening symptoms of pauperism, the provision of public hygiene,
elementary education, etc. became an urgent task. However, this task
could be achieved only when both in state policy and in the entire
administration the exclusive rule of the landed aristocracy was
abolished and yielded to the rule of the industrial bourgeoisie. The
election reform of 1832, which broke the political power of the Tories,
is also the date from which begins self–government in England in the
modern sense, i.e., self–government based on the participation of the
population in the local administration, and on paid, responsible
officials in the role of executor of its will under the supervision and
control of the central authority. The medieval division of the state
into counties and parishes corresponded to the new grouping of the
population and local needs and interests as little as the medieval
offices of the justice of the peace and parish councils. But while the
revolutionary French liberalism swept from the country the historic
provinces and in their place erected a homogeneous France with new
administrative divisions, the conservative English liberalism created
only a new administrative network – inside, beside, and through the old
divisions, without formally abolishing them. The peculiarity of English
self–government consists in the fact that, unable to utilize the
completely in adequate framework of traditional self–government, it
created a new kind of base: special communal associations of the
population for each of the basic functions of self government.
Thus, the law of 1834 establishes new “poor law unions”, comprising
several parishes whose population jointly elects, on the basis of a
six–class electoral law, in accordance with the taxes paid, a separate
board of guardians for each union. This body decides the whole matter of
welfare, building of workhouses, issuing doles, etc.; it also hires and
pays the officials who carry out its decisions. The old office of the
parish overseer of the poor changed from an honorary to a paid one, and
was reduced to the function of imposing and collecting taxes assigned by
the board.
According to the same model, but quite independently, the law of 1847
created a new, broad organization to take care of public health and
supervision of buildings, cleanliness of streets and houses, water
supply, and food marketing. Also for this purpose new associations of
the local population with representatives elected by it were
established. On the basis of the Public Health Act of 1875, England –
with the exception of the capital – is divided into urban and rural
sanitary districts. The organ of representation is, in the urban
districts, the city council; in the boroughs, special local boards of
health; and in the rural districts health is supervised by the board of
guardians. All these boards decide all matters pertaining to health and
hire salaried officers who carry out the resolutions of the board.
The administration of local transportation also followed the same
lines but independently of the two bodies mentioned above. For this
purpose, highway districts were created, composed of several parishes
whose population elects separate highway boards. In many rural
districts, transportation is the concern of the local board of health,
or the board of guardians which administers both transportation and poor
relief. The highway boards or the boards of guardians decide about
transportation enterprises and hire a paid district–surveyor as the
official carrying out their orders. And so the office of the former
honorary highway surveyor vanished.
Finally, education was also entrusted to a specail self–governing
organization. Individual parishes, cities and the capital form as many
school districts. However, the board of education of the council of
state has the right to combine several urban parishes into one district.
Every district elects a school board entrusted with supervision of
elementary education: it makes decisions concerning tuition–free
schooling and the hiring of officials and teachers.
In this way there came into being, quite independently from the old
organization of self–government, new, multiple, autonomous organizations
which, precisely because they originated not by way of a bold
revolutionary reform but as discrete patchwork, formed an extremely
complex and involved system of often overlapping areas of competence.
However, it is characteristic for the classic country of capitalist
economy that the axis around which this modern self–government was
crystallized – so far clearly on the lowest level in the rural commune –
was the organization of public welfare, the organization for combating
pauperism: the “poor” was, in England, to the middle of the nineteenth
century, the official synonym for the worker, just as in a later time of
orderly and modernized conditions, the sober expression “hands” became
such a synonym. Beside this new organization of self–government, the old
counties with their justices of the peace became a relic. The justice
of the peace fell to the subordinate role of participant in the local
council, and supervision of administration was left him only to a
certain extent in matters of highways. When, however, the local
administration passed from the hands of the justice appointed by the
Crown to the elected representatives of the local population, the
administrative decentralization by no means increased, but on the
contrary, was eliminated. If, in the old days, the justice of the peace
was an all–powerful master in the council, entirely independent of the
central government, at present, the local government is subject on the
one hand to the uniform parliamentary legislation, and on the other to
strict control by the central administrative authorities. The Local
Government Board specially created for this purpose controls the
activity of the local boards of guardians and boards of health through
visiting inspectors, while the school boards are subject to the board of
education of the state council.
Also, urban self–government in England is a product of most recent
times. Only slight traces survived to modern times of the communal
independence of the medieval city. The modern city, an outcome of the
capitalist economy of the nineteenth century, made a new urban
organization indispensable: initiated by the law of 1835, it was not
finally established until 1882.
The history of self–government in Germany and Austria lacks such
distinctive features as that of France or England; however, it generally
followed the same lines. In both countries, the division into cities
and rural communes resulting from the medieval development brought about
a highly developed self–government of the cities and their political
independence, and also created the political split, perhaps the greatest
in Europe, of the state territory into independent feudal areas. After
the sixteenth century, and especially in the eighteenth century, during
the time of enlightened absolutism, the cities completely lost their
independence and fell under the authority of the state. At the same
time, the rural communes lost their traditional self–governing
institutions, having completely fallen, through the growth of serfdom,
under the authority of landowners. Although much later than in France,
absolutism nevertheless, as the creator of a unified state authority and
territory, triumphed in Germany in the eighteenth century. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, bureaucratic centralism is
everywhere victorious.
However, before long, in connection with the rising big–industrial
production and the aspiration of the bourgeoisie to introduce modern
conditions into the state, the development of local self–government on
new principles begins. The first general law of this kind originated in
Austria during the March Revolution. Actually, however, the foundations
of the present self–government were laid in Austria by the statute of
1862; in the respective crownlands, particular communal laws came into
being later through legislation of the Diet.
In Germany, there prevails French law, partly derived from Napoleonic
times, which does not distinguish between the urban and rural commune:
for instance, in the Rhineland, in the Bavarian Palatinate, Hesse,
Thuringia, etc. On the other hind, the Prussian model prevailing in
western and eastern Germany is an independent product. Although the
Prussian urban law dates already from 1808, the actual period of the
development of the present self–government in Prussia fell in the
sixties and the main reforms in the seventies and eighties. Among the
main areas of urban administration – province, district (Kreis),
and commune – only the last has well–developed, self–governing
institutions, i.e., extensive power of the representatives elected by
the population; in the remaining ones, representative bodies (Kreistag, Provinzallandtag)
exist but they are rather modernized, medieval class diets and their
competence is extremely limited by the competence of officials appointed
by the Crown, such as Regierungspräsident in the province, and Landrat in the district.
Local self–government in Russia constitutes one of the most
outstanding attempts of absolutism which, in the famous “liberal
reforms” after the Sebastopol catastrophe, aimed at adjusting the
institutions of oriental despotism to the social needs of modern
capitalist economy. Between the peasant reform and the reform of the
courts at the threshold of the “renewed” Russia of Alexander II, stands
the law which created the territorial institutions. Modeled on the newly
established self–governing institutions of Prussia, the system of the
Russian “zemstvo” is a parody of English self–government; it
entrusts the entire local administration to the wealthy nobility, and at
the same time subjects this self–government of the nobility to strict
police supervision and the decisive authority of tsarist bureaucracy.
The law governing elections to the county and gubernial territorial
councils happily combines, in the tri–curial system and indirect
elections, the class principle with the census principle. It makes the
county marshal of the nobility the ex–officio chairman in the district
council, and securing in it to the nobility curia half of the seats
suspends over all resolutions of the council, like a Damocles sword, the
threatening veto of the governor.
As a result of this peculiarity of Russia’s social development,
which, in the period before 1905 made not the urban bourgeoisie, but
certain strata of the nobility the advocates of “liberal dreams” however
pale, even this parody of self–governing institutions represented by
the Russian zemstvos has become, in the hands of the nobility, a
framework for serious social and cultural activity. However, the sharp
clash that immediately arose between liberalism, nestling in the
territorial administration, on the one hand, and the bureaucracy and
government on the other, glaringly illuminated the genuine contradiction
between modern self–government and the medieval state apparatus of
absolutisni. Beginning a few years after the introduction of the zemstvos,
the collision with the power of the governors extends like a red thread
through the history of self–government in Russia, oscillating between
the deportation of recalcitrant council chairmen to more or less distant
regions; and the boldest dreams of Russian liberals in the form of an
all–Russian Congress of zemstvos which was supposed to be transformed into a constituent assembly that would abolish absolutism in a peaceful manner.
The few years of the action of the [1905] revolution solved this
historical collision, violently moving the Russian nobility to the side
of reaction and depriving the parody of territorial self–government of
any mystifying resemblances to liberalism. Thus was clearly demonstrated
the impossibility of reconciling the democratic self–government
indispensable In a bourgeois society with the rule of absolutism, as
well as the impossibility of grafting modern bourgeois democracy onto
the class action of the territorial nobility and its institutions. Local
self–government in the modern sense in only one of the details of the
general political program whose implementation in the entire state
constitutes the task of the revolution.
In particular, the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania must participate
in this political reform. This Kingdom is at sent a unique example of a
country with a highly developed bourgeois economy which, however, is
deprived of any traces of local self–government.
In ancient Poland, a country of natural economy and gentry rule,
there obviously was no local self–government. Polish district and
provincial councils possessed only functions connected with elections to
the sejm. Although cities possessed their Magdeburg laws, imported from
Germany and standing outside the national law, in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, with the complete decline of cities, the majority
of them fell under the law of serfdom or regressed to the status of
rural settlements and communes, and in consequence urban self–government
disappeared.
The Duchy of Warsaw, which was an experiment of Napoleon, was endowed
with a system of self–government bodily transferred from France, not
the one which was the product of revolution, but a self–government
squeezed in the clamps of the Statute of Pluvois 28. The Duchy was
divided into departments, counties, and communes with “municipal”
self–governments and “prefects” who appointed municipal councillors from
a list of candidates elected at county diets, which was a slavish copy
of the Napoleonic “listes de confiance” in the department.
These bodies, destined mainly to impose state taxes, had only advisory
functions otherwise, and lacked any executive organs.
In the Congress Kingdom, the French apparatus was completely
abolished; only the departments remained, renamed “voyvodship.” However,
they still had no self–governing functions, only a certain influence on
the election of judges and administrative officials. After the November
Insurrection [1830], even this remnant of self–governing forms was
abolished, and with the exception of the short period of Wielopolski’s
experiment in 1861, when provincial and county as well as urban councils
were created on the basis of indirect, multilevel elections and without
any executive organs, the country to this day remains without any form
of self–government. A weak class commune crippled by the government is
the only relic in this field. Consequently, the Kingdom of Poland
represents at present, after a hundred years of the operation of Russian
absolutism, some analogy to that tabula rasa which the Great
Revolution created in France in order to erect on this ground a radical
and democratic reform of self–government unrestricted by any historical
survivals.
III
Karl Kautsky characterizes the basic attitude of Social Democracy to the question of autonomy as follows:
The centralization of the legislative process did not
by any means involve the complete centralization of administration. On
the contrary. The same classes which needed unification of the laws were
obliged thereafter to bring the state power under their control.
However, this took place only incompletely under the parliamentary form
of government, in which the government is dependent on the legislature.
The administration, with the whole bureaucratic apparatus at its
disposal, was nominally subordinate to the central legislature, but the
executive often turned out to be stronger in practice. The
administration influences the voters in the legislature through its
bureaucracy and through its power in local matters; it corrupts the
legislators through its power to do them favors. However, the strongly
centralized bureaucracy shows itself less and less able to cope with the
increasing tasks of the state administration. It is overcome by them.
The results are: fumbling, delays, postponing the most important
matters, complete misunderstanding of the rapidly changing needs of
practical life, massive waste of time and labor in superfluous pencil
work. These are the rapidly increasing shortcomings of bureaucratic
centralism.
Thus there arises, along with the striving for
uniformity of legislation, after the several provincial legislatures
have been superseded by a central parliament, a striving for
decentralization of administration, for local administration of the
provinces and communes. The one and the other are characteristic of the
modern state.
“This self–government does not mean the restoration of
medieval particularism. The commune [Gemeinde] and likewise the
province) does not become a self–sufficient entity as it once was. It
remains a component part of the great whole, the nation, [Here used as
synonymous with “state.” – Kautsky] and has to work for it and
within the limits that it sets. The rights and duties of the individual
communes as against the state are not laid down in special treaties.
They are a product of the general system of laws, determined for all by
the central power of the state; they are determined by the interests of
the whole state or the nation, not by those of the several communes.” –
K. Kautsky, Der Parlamentarismus, die Volksgesetzgebung und die Sozialdemokratie, p.48.
If Comrade Stampfer will keep separate the
centralization of administration and the centralization of the
legislative process, he will find that the paths being followed by
German and Austrian Social Democracy respectively are not diverging at
all, but are going in the same direction as the whole of modern
democracy. Opposition to all special privileges in the country,
strengthening of the central legislature at the expense of the
provincial parliaments as well as of the government administration;
weakening of the central administration both through the strengthening
of the central legislature and through the devolution of
self–administration to the communes and provinces – this latter process
taking, in Austria, in accordance with its own local conditions, the
form of self–administration of the nationalities – but a
self–administration regulated for the whole country by the central
legislature along uniform lines: that is, in spite of all historical and
other social differences, in Germany and Austria the position of Social
Democracy on the question of centralism and particularism.[5]
We have quoted the above extensive argument of Kautsky on
the question we are examining but not because we unreservedly share his
views. The leading idea of this argument: the division of modern state
centralism into administrative and legislative, the rejection of the
former and the absolute reognition of the latter, appears to us somewhat
too formalistic and not quite precise. Local autonomy – provincial,
municipal, and communal – does not at all do away with administrative
centralism: autonomy covers only strictly local matters, while the
administration of the state as a whole –mains in the hands of the
central authority, which, even in such democratic states as Switzerland,
shows a constant tendency to extend its competence.
An outstanding feature of modern administration in contradistinction
to medieval particularism is precisely the strict supervision by central
institutions and the subordination of the local administration to the
uniform direction and control the state authorities. A typical
illustration of this arrangement is the dependence of the modern
self–governing officials in England on the central offices and even the
special creation over them of a central Local Government Board which
eliminates genuine administrative decentralization represented by the
old system in which, it will be recalled, the all–powerful justices of
the peace were entirely independent of the central government. In the
same way, the most recent development of self–government in France paves
anew the way to democratization, and at the same time gradually
eliminates the independence of the prefect from the central ministries, a
system that had characterized the government of the Second Empire.
The above phenomenon also completely corresponds to the general
direction of political development. A strong central government is an
institution peculiar not only to the epoch of absolutism at the dawn of
bourgeois development but also to bourgeois society itself in its
highest stage, flowering, and decline. The more external policy –
commercial, aggressive, colonial – becomes the axis of the life of
capitalism, the more we enter into the period of imperialistic “global”
policy, which is a normal phase of the development of bourgeois economy,
and the more capitalism needs a strong authority, a powerful central
government which concentrates in its hands all the resources of the
state for the protection of its interests outside. Hence, modern
autonomy, even in its widest application, finds definite barriers in all
those attributes of power which are related to the foreign policy of a
state.
On the other hand, autonomy itself puts up barriers to legislative
centralization, because without certain legislative competences, even
narrowly outlined and purely local, no self–government is possible. The
power of issuing within a certain sphere, on its own initiative, laws
binding for the population, and not merely supervising the execution of
laws issued by the central legislative body, constitutes precisely the
soul and core of self–government in the modern democratic sense – it
forms the basic function of municipal and communal councils as well as
of provincial diets or departmental councils. Only when the latter in
France acquired the right of deciding in the last instance about their
problems instead of submitting their opinions in a consultative
capacity, and particularly when they acquired the right of drafting
their independent budget, only from that time dates the real beginning
of the autonomy of the departments. In the same way, the foundation of
urban self–government in Germany is the right of establishing the budget
of the towns, and in connection with this the independent fixing of
supplements to the state taxes and also the introduction of new communal
taxes (although within limits fixed by state law). Further, when, for
instance, the city council of Berlin or Paris issues binding regulations
concerning the building code, insurance duties for home industry,
employment and unemployment aid, the city sewage–disposal system,
communications, etc., all these are legislative activities. The axis of
the incessant struggle between local representatives and organs of the
central administration is the democratic tendency constantly to expand
the legislative competence of the elected organs and to reduce the
administrative competence of the appointed organs.
The attitude to local autonomy – its legislative and administrative
functions – constitutes the theoretical basis of the political fight
which has been going on for a long time between Social Democracy on the
one hand and the government and the bourgeois parties on the other. The
latter hold a uniform view on the matter in question except for a small
group of extreme–left progressives. While the theory of bourgeois
reaction maintains that local self–government is, by its nature, only a
localization of state administrations, that the commune, district, or
province as a financial unit is called to administer the state property,
Social Democracy defends the view that a commune, district, or province
is a social body called upon to take care – in a local sphere – of a
number of social matters and not only financial ones. The practical
conclusion of these two theories is that the bourgeois parties insist
that electoral rights to self–governing bodies should be limited by a
property qualification, while Social Democracy calls for a universal and
equal electoral right for the whole population. Generally speaking, the
progress of modern self government toward democracy can be measured by
the expansion of the groups of population which participate in
self–government by way of elections, as well as by the degree to which
their representative bodies extend their competence. The transfer of
some activities from the administration to the legislative,
representative bodies is a measure extending the latter’s competence. It
seems therefore that the centralized state apparatus can be separated
from local self–government, and modern self–government from feudal and
petit bourgeois particularism. This can be done, in our opinion, not by a
formalistic approach, whereby the legislative and the administrative
powers are separated, but by separating some spheres of social life –
namely those which constitute the core of a capitalist economy and of a
big bourgeois state – from the sphere of local interests.
In particular, Kautsky’s formula including national autonomy under
the general heading of local self–government would, in view of his
theory about legislative centralization lead Social Democracy to refuse
to recognize regional diets on the ground that they were a manifestation
of legislative decentralization, i.e., medieval particularism.
Kautsky’s arguments are in their essence extremely valuable as an
indication concerning the general tendency in Social Democratic policy,
concerning its basic standpoint toward centralism and big power policy
on the one hand and particularistic tendencies on the other. But
precisely from the same foundations from which, in all capitalistic
states, grows local self–government, there also grows in certain
conditions national autonomy, with local legislation as an independent
manifestation of modern social development, which has as little in
common with medieval particularism as the present–day city council has
with a parliament of the ancient Hanseatic republic.
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1969), pp.121–23.
[2] Quoted in Avalov, Decentralization and Self–government in France, Departmental Councils from the Reform of Bonaparte to Our Days, p.246. Original note by R.L.
[3] This fact is quoted by G. Weill, Histoire du mouvement social en France (1904), p.12. Original note by R.L.
[4] Ibid., p.11. Original note by R.L.
[5] Karl Kautsky, Partikularismus and Sozialdemokratie, in Die Neue Zeit, 1898–1899, Vol.I, pp.505–06.
Next Chapter: The National Question and Autonomy
Last updated on: 16.12.2008
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