Should Socialists Try To Govern Cities?

The first English translation of Karl Kautsky's 1901 "Mayors and Ministers"

Given recent debates on Zohran Mamdani’s election and the relevancy of Wisconsin’s “sewer socialists”, I thought it’d be interesting to go back and see what Second International Marxist theoretician Karl Kautsky thought about whether socialists should try to govern cities before a socialist revolution. To my surprise, I found that Kautsky favored this, arguing that “a self-evident demand of our tactics that we must conquer every position we are able to win by our own strength.”

While I don’t think Kautsky’s strategy for Kaiser Germany — a relatively illegitimate, semi-authoritarian state — is automatically applicable to the United States, it is interesting that Kautsky was much more favorable to running to win mayoral elections than has been acknowledged by today’s proponents of a “Kautskyan strategy of patience”. As the DSA’s Marxist Unity Group (MUG) explains, this strategy consists of a decision to “not to take governing positions without the ability (mandate + muscle) to implement our full program. Instead focus on building a party of opposition.” Since this strategy has been cited by some MUG leaders as a reason why they argued it was a mistake for Zohran to run a campaign aiming to winning the mayor’s race, they — and others? — might be interested in revisiting what Kautsky wrote on the question of socialist municipal governance.

Again, I don’t think we should hinge our politics today on what a German Marxist theoretician over a century ago wrote about a very different political context (and I think it’s great that MUG activists ended up volunteering for the Zohran campaign and that some MUG members are already moving away from caucus orthodoxy on this question), but for the sake of historical accuracy and nerdery here is, to my knowledge, the first-ever english translation of Karl Kautsky’s 1901 article “Bürgermeister und Minister,” published in Die Neue Zeit, September 18, 1901, 794–6.

Mayors and Ministers

By Karl Kautsky

Our Frankfurt party organ, in its issue of September 9, discusses the question of whether Social Democracy may and should nominate and elect party comrades as mayors. The Hessian comrades have adopted a resolution to this effect, and Volksstimme defends it against an unnamed opponent within our party. That is the strange thing about it. For I am not aware of anyone who has declared the attempt to elect a Social Democrat as mayor to be incompatible with our principles. It is, after all, a self-evident demand of our tactics that we must conquer every position we are able to win by our own strength.

Our Frankfurt sister paper, however, believes that there are comrades who hold a different opinion. It arrives at this peculiar view by equating the question of mayors with the Millerand question and asserts that whoever is against Millerand’s entry into the ministry must also be against the election of Social Democratic mayors. It explains:

“In essence, for us the question of the mayor is exactly the same as in the Millerand case, that is certain. The question is whether we are allowed to occupy governing posts whose administration still depends in numerous legal and other respects on bourgeois society, is accordingly influenced by it, and which can indeed also be conducted by Socialists in a popular and worker-friendly sense, though only within the narrow framework of bourgeois laws. Whether the scope of authority is as great as that of a minister or as small as that of a mayor is all the same for its evaluation in principle.”

We are quite prepared to concede the latter. But it by no means follows from this that the mayor question and the Millerand case mean exactly the same thing, or that anyone who opposes Millerand’s ministerial office must consequently also oppose the election of Social Democratic mayors.

The fiercest opponent of Millerand’s ministership is the French Workers’ Party, the so-called Guesdists or Marxists. Yet scarcely any other socialist current in France has participated so eagerly and so successfully in municipal council elections, and to our knowledge none has, since 1892, elected as many mayors as precisely this Workers’ Party. Conversely, it has never occurred to any comrade — not even to the most dyed-in-the-wool Marxist — to take exception to the nomination and election of Social Democrats to positions in government in Switzerland where these are filled by popular vote.

These facts are already sufficient to show that the point at issue is not at all whether we may occupy governing positions or not. The real question is rather how we are to occupy such positions. But if one formulates the question in this way, then the decisive difference between the question of mayors and that of ministers immediately emerges.

The mayor is elected by the people; he owes his office to them and is dependent on his voters. The minister of a centralized state, by contrast, receives his office from the prime minister. State power is unified; its bearer is the head of state (monarch or president) and his delegate, the prime minister. The division of labor makes it necessary for the prime minister to take on specialists as assistants for the individual branches of government; but he chooses as such assistants — that is, as ministers — only people who are suited and inclined to represent his overall policy.

That a mayor chosen by the people should oppose his own government is possible and nothing unheard of. A minister, on the other hand, will never publicly confront the prime minister, unless he harbors the treacherous intention of blowing up the ministry. The election of a mayor can be an act of opposition to the government; but it would be sheer nonsense even to imagine that the appointment of a minister could ever take place in opposition to the government as a whole, or to the prime minister. The inclusion of a representative of an opposition minority in a government can only ever be purchased — purchased by the votes of the opposition which places itself at the disposal of the government.

It has of course been argued that ministers too are elected by the people in parliamentary states — not directly, but indirectly, for the people elect the parliament and the majority in parliament determines the ministry. Let us here leave aside the fact that it is not only parliaments that make governments, but governments that make parliaments, by placing the entire immense state apparatus at the service of electoral agitation. We will also concede that the majority in parliament determines the character of the government; but this is true only when that majority is formed by a single, unified party to which a unified government then corresponds.

The situation is different where no party has a majority. There it is not the majority that forms the government; rather, the prime minister appointed by the head of state fashions for himself a majority out of those parties that best suit his purposes, and that he binds to himself through concessions, including ministerial portfolios and other offices. Here one cannot speak of the ministers being elected by the people, even in the most indirect sense. Yet it is precisely this situation from which alone the possibility can arise of a socialist minister entering a bourgeois government.

Where Social Democracy wins a majority, it must claim the right to form the entire government, not merely occupy a single ministerial post. Where one of the bourgeois parties alone has a majority, it will never occur to it to call a socialist into the ministry. The ministerial question can arise only where none of the bourgeois parties has a majority, and one of them can obtain a majority only by joining forces with the socialists.

The assumption that a solitary socialist minister in a bourgeois cabinet represents the majority in parliament presupposes that Social Democrats and bourgeois parties together can form a durable, homogeneous majority. But that is something quite different from an alliance for a specific, temporary purpose — say an electoral alliance; it would mean the abandonment of our party’s independence, the abandonment of its proletarian character — in short, the abandonment of the party itself.

If Social Democrats cannot form a lasting majority together with bourgeois politicians, then a socialist in a bourgeois ministry can only ever be a minister by the grace of the bourgeoisie and its prime minister, and can remain a minister only so long as his socialist convictions do not come into conflict with the bourgeois purposes of the ministry — a conflict that is all too easily evaded at the expense of those socialist convictions.

There can, exceptionally, be situations of constraint that make it necessary temporarily to combine a number of very different parties in the executive power in order to combat a common enemy. In the long run, under normal conditions, however, it is impossible for a party to stand in principled opposition to state power and to the parties that control it, and yet to have one of its members serve as a minister. This must lead to untenable conditions, to contradictions that end in corruption or disorganization.

Even the Lyon congress, which was sympathetic to Millerand, could not avoid declaring that membership in a bourgeois ministry and membership in the Social Democratic party are mutually exclusive. In order to spare Millerand and his friends, it did so in the peculiar form of creating the category of a “comrade on leave” and declaring that during his period in office Millerand would not be subject to the control of his party — that for the duration of his ministry he had ceased to be a party comrade.

There is no longer a single party comrade in France who takes delight in the socialist minister. For some he has become an object of abhorrence, for others a constant and growing source of embarrassment. By contrast, in France it is precisely the socialist mayors who are among our staunchest champions and who in many cases have come to be of greater importance to the party than the deputies in the Chamber. On their usefulness and necessity everyone is agreed.

If the Hessian comrades in some places feel strong enough to follow the example of the French comrades and launch an assault on the mayoral posts, and if — which we cannot judge — the necessary preconditions are present, then every comrade must rejoice at this and sincerely wish them success. But one does them a poor service by lumping their cause together with Millerand’s, with which it has absolutely nothing to do. There are already quite enough differences of opinion in the party today, and it is highly superfluous to construct artificial ones where none exist.