We have to acknowledge that even amongst people who call
themselves socialists, there is a wide variety of understandings and
misunderstandings about the real meaning of the term ‘socialism.’ In the old
days socialism was simply what we called the society of the free and equal men
and women and was defined as the rule of the people. This still rings true.
The confusion of terminology can be illustrated by those who
called state-ownership in the old Soviet Union “socialism”. Was this what Marx
and Engels meant when they talked about socialism? The authentic socialist
movement, as it was conceived by its founders and as it has developed over the
past century, cannot be improved on the classic statement of the Communist Manifesto,
which said:
“All previous
historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of
minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
The authors of 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. The claim—that the task of
reconstructing society on a socialist basis can be farmed out to politicians
and intellectuals, while the workers remain without vote or voice in the
process—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 the
capitalists who exploit them.
This principle is reiterated by Marx and Engels when they
declared that “the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers
themselves”. That is the language of Marx and Engels—“the task of the workers themselves”. That was just another way of
saying—as they said explicitly many times—that the socialist re-organisation of
society requires a workers’ revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable
without the active participation of the majority of the working class, which is
itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic
than that. “The first step”, said the
Communist Manifesto, “in the revolution
by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling
class, to win the battle of democracy.”
That is the way Marx and Engels formulated the first aim of
the revolution—to make the workers the ruling class, to establish democracy,
which, in their view, is the same thing. From this precise formulation it is
clear that Marx and Engels did not consider the limited, formal democracy under
capitalism, which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority
by the few, as real democracy. In order to have real democracy, the workers
must become the “ruling class”. Only the revolution that replaces the class
rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really establish
democracy, not in fiction, but in fact. So said Marx and Engels.
They never taught that the simple nationalisation of the
forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That’s not
stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. Still less did they sanctioned, the idea
that socialism would create a government bureaucracy without freedom and
without equality. Marx and Engels 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 controlled
by its ruthless secret police and gulags. Marx and Engels saw the state as an
instrument of class rule, for which there will be no need and no place in the
classless socialist society. Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist
Manifesto said: “In place of the old
bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an
association.” N.B.: “an association”, not a state—“an association in which the free development of each is the condition
for the free development of all”.
The Socialist Party makes it clear that we stand for
democracy as the only road to socialism. Without freedom of association and
organisation, without the right to form groups and parties of different
tendencies, there is and can be no real democracy anywhere. Capitalism is a system
of minority rule, and the principal beneficiaries of capitalist democracy are
the small minority of exploiting capitalists; scarcely less so than the slave-owners
of ancient times were the actual rulers and the real beneficiaries of the
Athenian democracy. But even so, with all that, a little democracy is better
than none. We socialists have never denied that. We have all the more reason to
value every democratic provision for the protection of human rights and human
dignity; to fight for more democracy, not less. We recognise that the demand
for human rights and democratic guarantees, now and in the future, is in itself
progressive. The socialist task is not to deny democracy, but to expand it and
make it more complete. That is the true socialist tradition. The Marxists,
throughout the century-long history of our movement, have always valued and
defended bourgeois democratic rights, restricted as they were; and have
utilised them for the education and organisation of the workers in the struggle
to establish full democracy by abolishing the capitalist rule altogether. The
right of trade union organisation is a precious, democratic right, but it was
not “given” to the workers. It took a mighty labour struggle to establish in
reality the right of union organisation in mass-production industry. 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 which
consumes their lives. Full control of production in auto and steel and
everywhere is still the exclusive prerogative of “management”, that is, of the
absentee owners, who contribute nothing to the production. What’s democratic
about that? The claim that we have an almost perfect democracy doesn’t stand up
against the fact that the 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.
In the past some would use “industrial democracy” as the
definition of socialism, the extension of democracy to our places of work, the
democratic control of industry by the workers themselves, with private
ownership eliminated. This socialist demand for real democracy was taken for
granted for a time when the socialist movement was still young and uncorrupted.
We seldom hear anything like that today. The defence of “democracy” always
turns out in practice to be a defence of “democratic” capitalism.
And always, in time of crisis, politicians who talk about
democracy excuse and defend all kinds of violations of even this limited
bourgeois democracy. They are far more tolerant of lapses from the formal rules
of democracy by the capitalists than by the workers. They demand that the class
struggle of the workers against their exploiters be conducted by the formal
rules laid down by the legislation enacted by their employers. They say it has
to be strictly “democratic” all the way. When the capitalists cuts corners
around their own professed democratic principles, the media have a habit of looking
the other way, revealing its class bias.
Capitalism does not survive as a social system by its own
strength, but by its influence within the workers’ movement, reflected and
expressed by the votes the pro-capitalist parties receive. So the fight for
workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the
condition for its victory. Workers’ democracy is the only road to socialism.
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