The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (26 page)

 
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Any procedure whereby members of some federation vote in blocs proportionate to their size: for example the British Labour Party Conference, in which trade unions have block votes in proportion to their reported numbers of affiliated members; the Electoral College for the US Presidency, where each state has as many votes as it has members of Congress; the European Parliament; and the EU Council of Ministers. Criticism of block voting rules concentrates on the cases where a block-vote rule is combined with a unit rule: that is, where the block first decides how to cast its votes, and all of them are then cast in favour of the largest opinion within the block. This is the case in the Labour Party Conference and usually (for all states except Maine) in the Electoral College. In this case, larger blocks usually have disproportionate power. A square-root rule (each block to have votes in proportion to the square root of its size) has sometimes been proposed to overcome this, but would not work where blocks had the option of dividing themselves into smaller blocks in order to gain votes.

 
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(1529–96)
French philosopher and legal theorist, most famous for the doctrine of sovereignty in his
Six livres de la république
of 1576. Bodin presented a complete system of knowledge divided between religious history (why God had created the universe and what he had established for human guidance), natural history (the physical laws of the universe), and human history (the structure and development of government). The problem faced by Bodin was that although the political order should reflect the divine order, France, during the Wars of Religion (1559–89), embodied disorder and civil war. He proposed that any properly constituted political society (
république
in the ancient sense of
res publica
) must have a sovereign which can make and break the law for the good of the society. Bodin is often seen as a predecessor of
Hobbes
in his view of sovereignty, but his system was based on Christianity, and did not approach what later became the doctrine of
absolutism
. Bodin's sovereign has the right to do anything but only in order to realize the divine plan. This was not an empty limitation (as it may have been for Hobbes) but involved the practical defence and maintenance of the established rights and liberties of individuals and groups, something Bodin saw as superior to heredity as the basis for sovereignty.
CS 

 
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(1678–1751)
Tory member of parliament from 1701 to 1708 and again from 1710 to 1712 before being raised to the House of Lords. He held office as Secretary for War and as Secretary of State for the North. He flirted with
Jacobitism
, and spent two periods in exile after the accession of George I in 1714. Later, however, he became reconciled to the new, near-republican form of the English constitution and was chiefly concerned to move people away from what he regarded as an outdated party division between Whigs and Tories, and to build a broad coalition against the Whig Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole .
A Dissertation upon Parties
(1735) expresses these sentiments and establishes Bolingbroke's place in the evolution of Tory thought.
LA 

 
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Political theory and practice of the Bolshevik Party which, under Lenin, came to power during the
Russian Revolution
of October 1917. The Bolshevik (meaning ‘majority’) radical communist faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour party emerged during the 1903 Party Congress following the split with the more moderate
Mensheviks
(meaning ‘minority’). After a period of intermittent collaboration and schism with the latter, the Bolshevik Party was formally constituted in 1912.
The 1905 Revolution took the Bolsheviks by surprise and there was little formal activity. The ensuing repression forced the party into clandestinity, and contact with the exiles, led by Lenin , was difficult. After the outbreak of the First World War, whilst Lenin proclaimed ‘revolutionary defeatism’, the Bolshevik organization inside Russia was practically moribund. The February Revolution of 1917 found the Bolsheviks unprepared. The majority of the Central Committee and the editorial board of
Pravda
(headed by Stalin ) gave conditional support to the Provisional Government and entered unity discussions with the Mensheviks. Party membership soared, exiles returned, and there were problems of discipline and a loss of direction. On his return to Russia, Lenin's
April Theses
(no support for the Provisional Government; the Revolution was passing from the democratic to the socialist stage; under a Bolshevik majority the
Soviets
must assume state power) were poorly received. He found the Party divided between a left wing which advocated an immediate uprising and a conservative Central Committee which desired a peaceful accretion of power. Lenin appealed to the rank-and-file, arguing that ‘the masses are a hundred times to the left of us’. However, he resisted calls for insurrection in both June and July, declaring that ‘one wrong move on our part can wreck everything’. The Party remained divided right up to the October insurrection; Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed it, and Lenin was forced to threaten resignation unless the uprising took place.
The immediate post-revolutionary situation—the period of war communism—saw the beginning of the transformation of the Communist Party into a bureaucratically organized, top-down apparatus, the eclipse of the soviets and the trade unions, and the suppression of opposition (although socialist and anarchist critics experienced alternate persecution and semi-legality). The Party also continued to be racked by internal divisions. Many objected to the Brest Litovsk treaty in March 1918, which ceded vast tracts of Russia to Germany, and the Left Communists criticized the use of bourgeois ‘experts’ in government and army. The Workers' Opposition (1920–1) declared that the leadership had violated ‘the spirit of the Revolution’ and championed workers' control in industry. Meanwhile rightwing dissidents called for a prolonged period of state capitalism as Russia was not ready for socialism.
The end of the civil war marked the transition from a temporary dictatorship to a peacetime institutionalization of repression. The tenth Party Congress (1921) was a decisive event. The introduction of the New Economic Policy (
NEP
) coincided with the ban on factions and the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt rebels. Before his death in 1924, Lenin criticized the existence of ‘a workers’ state with bureaucratic distortions' and appealed unsuccessfully to Trotsky to work with him to oust Stalin whose role as head of the central Party apparatus gave him enormous power.
Bukharin
and Stalin championed
socialism
in one country (retreat on the world stage, the enrichment of the peasantry, and the permanent retention of the NEP). Trotsky and the Left Opposition (1923–4) argued that this would destroy the socialist character of the Revolution and create a new ruling class. They advocated rapid industrialization to be financed by what Preobrazhensky termed ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ (the unequal exchange of resources between industry and agriculture to the benefit of the former). When Stalin and Bukharin launched the First Five Year Plan in 1928 they adopted much of the left's programme although the latter would not have defended forced collectivization and the horrors this unleashed.
The Left Opposition offered the most trenchant critique of
Stalinism
in its description of the widening gap between party hierarchy and masses and the growing bureaucratization of soviet state and society. However Trotsky refused to break Party discipline and appeal to the rank-and-file. The social profile of the Party had changed qualitatively: the civil war decimated a generation of militants and the ‘Lenin Levy’ of 1924 swamped it with 240,000 career-minded new members. The Left Opposition represented the last serious challenge to Stalin. By 1929 he had removed the Bolshevik Old Guard from power and sent them to exile, prison, show trial, or execution.
Bolshevism would be defined by adherents as a committed revolutionary position in tune with the advanced sections of the working class and by critics as inherently dictatorial. Its chief characteristics are strong organization, a commitment to world revolution and a political practice guided by what Lenin called
democratic centralism
. Whether Bolshevism inevitably transmuted into Stalinism or whether historical circumstances caused the deformation is still in dispute. As Victor Serge remarked ‘the germs of Stalinism may have been present but so were others’. The watershed was that after the civil war finished, the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) did not end authoritarian practices and restore soviet democracy.
GS