This is how socialism will be (4/4)

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.