>>> Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/10/00 03:54PM >>>
I don't think the issue of democracy should be separated from the class
nature of the state. At least as I understand Marx, he believed that the
proletariat would be a different kind of ruling class than previous ruling
classes, that its rule would have to be democratic.
____________
CB: I agree that Marx considered the rule of the proletariat as democratic. For in
_The Manifesto_ , Engels and Marx refer to the democracy as the working class as the
ruling class. But let us look a little more closely at what democracy is in Marxism..
Lenin's _The State and Revolution_ is the best precis of these issues.
As Lenin points out, Marx proudly claimed that he had discovered the "dictatorship of
the proletariat". He also assumed that socialism would still have a state, and that a
state is an apparatus for oppression of one class by another. So, "democracy" in
socialism doesn't mean that the bourgeosie who remain have the right to contest for
state power, whether through votes or any of the other mechanisms set out in the
American model. In other words , the democracy of socialism may encompass repression
of some Bill of Rights type rights for some in order to retain a proletarian
dictatorship.
Furthermore, Lenin points out that in the Marxist conception DEMOCRACY itself is
always a form of state, i.e. has an repressive apparatus. So, in communism (after
socialism) there is no democracy either. In other words, democracy is not the highest
form of organization or self-governance in the Marxist conception.
What I say here doesn't contradict Lou and Jim's criticisms and comments about the
failures of democracy and true proletarian class rule in the first efforts to build
socialism. But in measuring those first socialisms against a Marxist standard of
democracy, it is necessary to take into account the above which distinguishes the
Marxist conception of democracy which is significantly different from some of the
conceptions we might hold through our location in American culture and history. And so
the first socialisms may come out a bit differently measured by the Marxist standard
than it would seem without looking at the matter more closely as here. (The Paris
Commune was flawed from Marx's standpoint too. He supported it despite the fact he
knew it was a "folly of despair", and certainly it was not superiorly democratic in
the senses that the Soviet Union et al are criticized here ).
CB
))))))))))
His model -- based in
historical practice rather than in abstract slogans -- was the Paris
Commune. Democracy was needed if progress toward abolishing both classes
and the distinction between the state and society was not to be
side-tracked into the creation of a new class of those wielding state
power. The problem, as I see it, with the places in which "actually
existing socialism" prevailed is that such a new class developed. (NB:
that's not the same thing as saying that a capitalist class developed,
though in Russia a lot of the old CPers used their state power to turn
themselves into full-scale capitalists.)
BTW, on the issue of democracy, it's not just a intra-national
phenomenon. I think that the winning of national independence (by Vietnam
and other countries dominated by imperialism) was a step forward in terms
of democracy. (Sometimes, unfortunately, nationalist revolutions ran
roughshod over ethnic minorities, as with the Nicaraguans vs. the Miskitus.)
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
