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Socialist Revolution and Democracy
The defense of a clear and unequivocal program of workers democracy is today an indispensable part of the struggle against the reformist leaderships that seek to inculcate bourgeois-democratic myths and illusions in the working class in the imperialist countries. It is likewise indispensable in the struggle against procapitalist illusions and anti-soviet prejudices among various layers of rebels and oppositionists in the bureaucratized workers states in the process of the unfolding struggle for political revolution in these countries.
The historical experiences of both fascism (and other types of reactionary bourgeois dictatorships) in the West and the Stalin and Mao regimes and their successors in the East have aroused in the proletariat of both the imperialist countries and the bureaucratized workers states a deep distrust of any form of one-party system and of any justification, however sophisticated, for restricting democratic rights after the overthrow of capitalism. This distrust objectively conforms to the basic course of all proletarian revolutions up to now; the direction has always been toward the broadest possible democratic rights and self-activity of the masses. This has been the case from the Paris Commune to the Russian and German revolutions to the experiences of the Spanish revolution of l936-37 to the more recent working-class upsurges in France in 1968, Italy in 1969-70, and Portugal in 1974-75; it has likewise been expressed in the antibureaucratic upsurges in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia since the 1950s.
The ruling class utilizes all the ideological means at its disposal to identify parliamentary institutions with the maintenance of democratic rights. In both Western Europe and North America, for instance, the capitalist rulers seek to appear as champions of the democratic outlook of the working class and plebeian masses, an outlook which has been powerfully strengthened by the negative experiences of fascism and Stalinism.
One of the key components of the struggle for leadership of the masses consists of properly understanding the import of their democratic demands and actions, of expressing them adequately, and thus counteracting the strenuous efforts of the reformists to co-opt the struggle for democratic demands and turn it into the blind alley of bourgeois parliamentary institutions.
The task of wresting leadership from the reformists as representatives of the democratic aspirations of the masses is thus crucial for revolutionary Marxists. Obviously, programmatic clarification and propaganda-important as they are-are insufficient to achieve this objective. The masses learn through their practical daily experience; hence the importance of going through this daily experience with them and drawing the correct lessons from it.
As the class struggle sharpens, the reformist leaders, who trumpet the alleged benefits of the bourgeois parliamentary system, will sound less and less convincing, and the workers will increasingly challenge the authority and prerogatives of the ruling class on all levels, The workers themselves, through their own organizations-from workers committees in the factories to workers councils (soviets)-will begin to assert more and more economic and political decision-making authority, and they will gain confidence in their power to overthrow the bourgeois state. In this same process, in order to carry out their struggles most effectively, with the broadest mass involvement, the workers will see the need for the most democratic forms of organization. Through this experience of struggle and participation in their own democratically run organizations, the masses will experience more freedom of action and more liberty in the broadest sense of the word than they ever exercised under bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and they will learn the irreplaceable value of proletarian democracy. This is an indispensable link in the chain of events leading from capitalist rule to the conquest of power by the proletariat and will be a vital experience to draw upon in establishing the democratic norms of the workers state.
If the revolutionary Marxists leave the slightest impression, either through their propaganda or through their practice, that under the dictatorship of the proletariat the political freedoms of the workers will be narrower than under bourgeois democracy-including the freedom to criticize the government, to have opposition parties and an opposition press-then the struggle to overcome the panderers of parliamentary illusions will be incommensurably more difficult, if not condemned to defeat. Any hesitation or equivocation in this field by the revolutionary vanguard will only help the reformist lackeys of the liberal bourgeoisie to divide the proletariat and divert an important sector of the class into defense of bourgeois state institutions, under the guise of assuring democratic rights.
It has been argued that all the above arguments apply only to those countries in which the wage-earning class already represents a clear majority of the active population, i.e., where they are not faced with a great majority of petty independent producers. It is true that in some semicolonial countries the weakness of the old ruling class led to a very favorable relationship of social forces in which the overthrow of capitalism was accomplished without the flowering of workers democracy (China and Vietnam being two outstanding examples). But it is necessary to underline the exceptional character of these experiences, which will not be repeated in most semicolonial countries and cannot be repeated in imperialist countries. It is necessary, furthermore, to stress that insofar as the overturn of capitalism in several backward countries was not tied to the emergence of direct workers power through democratically elected councils of workers and poor peasants, these workers states were condemned to be bureaucratized from the start. As a result, severe obstructions have been erected to progress on the road toward the building of a socialist classless society, both at home and internationally.
Likewise, inasmuch as a growing number of semicolonial countries are at present undergoing processes of partial industrialization, their proletariat today is often already of much greater weight relative to the active population than was the Russian proletariat in 19l7 or the Chinese proletariat in 1949. This proletariat, through its own experience of struggle, will speedily rise toward levels of consciousness and self-organization that will place the organization of soviet.type state organs on the agenda. In that sense, the Fourth International's program of workers council democracy as a basis for the dictatorship of the proletariat is a universal program for world revolution, which corresponds fundamentally to the social nature, historical needs, End way of thinking of the working class itself. It is in no way a "luxury" reserved for the workers of the "richest countries."
From the Fourth Interntional's 1985 resolution "Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat".
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