Socialism is often called the society of the free and equal
while democracy is defined as the rule of the people. These simple definitions
still ring true. But when some say they too call for a socialist democracy it
is incumbent upon us to enquire “Just what do you mean by socialism, and what
do you mean by democracy?” and ask “Do you mean what Marx and Engels said? Or
do you mean what Lenin and Stalin did?” Workers around the world have become
more acutely sensitive than ever before to the value and importance of
democratic rights and there is no doubt that mass media propaganda has
profoundly affected the sentiments of the working class in regard to socialism.
The one-party dictatorship that was in Russia and elsewhere has been identified
with the name of socialism and it is perhaps understandable that workers have
been prejudiced against socialism. The socialist movement will not advance
significantly until it regains the initiative and corrects the
misrepresentations of socialism and the misinterpretations of democracy. Our
strategy, as socialists, is simply to restate what socialism and democracy
meant to the founders and pioneers of our movement and to bring their
formulations up to date and apply them to present conditions. There is no room
for misunderstanding. It requires a clean break with all the perversions and
distortions of the real meaning of socialism and democracy and their relation
to each other, and a return to the original definitions. Nothing short of this
will do. The authentic socialist movement is the most democratic movement in
all history.
All previous historical movements were movements of
minorities, or in the interest of minorities. Marx and Engels in the Communist
Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The
“self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest
of the immense majority” cannot be anything else but democratic, if we
understand by “democracy” the rule of the people, the majority. A society where the people are without voice
or the is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels as the reformist
idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees by those who
exploit them.
Marx and Engels reiterated their position that “the
emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves”. That is
a way of saying that a socialist a revolution is unthinkable without the active
participation of the majority of the working class. Nothing could be more
democratic than that. Only the revolution that replaces the class rule of the
capitalists by the class rule of the workers who constitute the vast majority
of people can really establish democracy.
Marx and Engels never taught that the nationalisation of the
forces of production signified the establishment of socialism, still less could
they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea
that socialism was without freedom and without equality, or that people controlled
by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers and
forced-labour camps, could be designated as a “socialist” society. Marxists
defined socialism as a classless society—with abundance, freedom and equality
for all; a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers’
state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic
dictatorship of a privileged minority. The Communist Manifesto said: “In place
of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association.” NB: “an association”, not a state—“an association in
which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all”
Just as those travesties described as “ peoples democracies”
cannot be passed themselves off genuine workers democracies, nor should those who claim describe capitalist countries
as democratic succeed in duping us. What is termed bourgeois democracy is a
system of minority rule, and the beneficiaries of it are the small minority of
exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slaveowners of ancient times
were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the Athenian democracy.
Within bourgeois democracy people can exercise the right of free speech through
a free media. But this formal right of freedom is outweighed rather heavily by
the inconvenient circumstance that the small capitalist minority happens to
enjoy a complete monopoly of ownership and control of all the big presses, and
of television and radio, and of all other means of communication and information
as right now we witness the endeavours of the authorities to control the
internet and the world wide web.
The right to join or form union organisation is a precious
right, a democratic right, yet workers have neither voice nor vote in the
management of the industry which they have created, nor in regulating the speed
of the assembly line. Full control of production is still the exclusive
prerogative of “management”, that is, of the absentee stock-holders. Workers
have no democratic rights in industry at all, as far as regulating production
is concerned; that these rights are exclusively reserved for the parasitic
owners, who never see the inside of a factory. What’s democratic about that?
Another word to express socialism is “industrial democracy”, the extension of
democracy to industry, the democratic control of industry by the workers
themselves, where private ownership eliminated.
But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better
than none. We socialists have never denied that. Democratic socialists believe
that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet peoples’
needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, the many
structures of economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and
social democracy so that people can participate in the many decisions that
affect our lives. Democracy and socialism go hand in hand. Socialists do not
want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. Socialists do not want
big corporate bureaucracies to control our society. Rather, we believe that
social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect. Resources
are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We
believe that the economic institutions should commonly owned and collectively controlled
by the people themselves. Democracy does not come from the top, it comes from
the bottom.
“Dictatorship of the Proletariat” is perhaps the most
misfortunate of expressions and perhaps one of the most misunderstood phrase
that has been seized upon by followers of Lenin to justify the idea of the
existence of a coercive State after the establishment of “socialism”, that
stage various Bolshevik-type groups
believe that we must go through as a lengthy transition before "real
communism" can be brought about. Marx did believe that a period known as
"the dictatorship of the proletariat" would separate capitalism and socialism/communism.
However, this phrase was consciously and dishonestly distorted by Lenin.
Marx meant by the word dictatorship in an explicit sense to
mean the domination of society by one class through its control over the state
machine. He often, for example, referred to Britain as a "dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie", though he was freely allowed to write and work in the
country. Marx took the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" from
the French revolutionaries he met when he lived in Paris in the mid-1840s.
Only, whereas they saw this as being a minority dictatorship supposedly on
behalf of the working class (or proletariat) Marx gave it a democratic content
and saw it as the unlimited exercise of political power by the working class by
and on its own behalf. What Marx envisaged was a period between the end of
capitalist political rule and the establishment of socialism (or communism, the
same thing) when political power would be exercised by the majority working
class within a democratic context. So, yes, he did envisage democracy and
freedom of speech for all people, even capitalists and former capitalists,
under his interpretation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Engels referred to the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" and, although we can doubt that it
really was a beginning of a transition to socialism, it was an elected council
with competing parties-quite unlike Russia under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Leninism made what can only be construed as a
quite deliberate play on words, using the term dictatorship in its popularly
understood sense, to mean the denial of basic democratic freedoms, the
maintenance of rule by force and the ruthless suppression of political
opponents. Lenin gave special emphasis to the concept of the “dictatorship of
the proletariat” to identify the term with a state ruled by a vanguard party.
It is noticeable however that Lenin's Three Sources of Marxism article
contained no mention of the phrase or Lenin's particular conception of the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
Although, the Socialist Party say that the working class
should still organise to win control of political power and use it in the
course of establishing socialism - and would call this the "dictatorship
of the proletariat" if pressed - we don't envisage this as lasting for any
length of time and think the term "dictatorship of the proletariat"
to be so open to misunderstanding as to be counter-productive. If used by
Socialist Party members it is meant the working class conquest of power, which should
not be confuse with a socialist society. We prefer to speak simply of the (very
short-term democratic) exercise of political power by the working class.
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