Won't be fooled again

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.