From a Province Notes for an unfinished discussion Democracy is not in itself a moral value. It is the capitalist bourgeoisie and their media that treat “democracy” as a moral value. When individuals in the working class, or among those who would take up the cause of the working class, treat democracy as an absolute moral value, they play into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Democracy is a practical necessity, because it is only by democracy that the collective power of the working class can be developed. But it is not a moral imperative in itself. Similarly, the contradistinction of “Representative” with “Participatory” democracy is a (false) dichotomy, and not a dialectical relation. There actually is no such thing as democracy without representation. We could go even further and say that there is no human action (production) without mediation. Therefore the question of democracy resolves itself into the same discussion that exists about Democratic Centralism, with “representative” found to refer to the “Centre”, and “Participatory” to refer to the periphery, or base. Democracy is majority rule. It is the dictatorship of the majority. It is not freedom. There cannot be complete unity of ideology. There can only be unity in action. It is true that in dialogue, we reach a better understanding of common goals, that can help to construct a minimum programme, Broad Front, Popular Front, unity-in-action, or for example, a National Democratic Revolutionary Alliance. It is true that the Alliance of the popular forces is against some other force, but the definition of that other force is not rigid. Its nature is found in practice. The alliance may be effectively broader, or narrower, according to the goal that is being pursued. In all cases, the tactical necessity is to gain the broadest possible alliance, to split the opposing forces, and not to act in such a way as to consolidate the opposing forces, or to self-isolate the working class. We believe in: · Power to the People · Peoples’ Education for Peoples’ Power · “A vast association of the whole nation, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (K Marx, F Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”, 1848) We believe that freedom is the good that contains all other goods (Caudwell). Stalinism was not about Stalin. If Trotsky or Bukharin or Zinoviev or Radek had prevailed over Stalin, the evidence indicates that none of them would have behaved differently from Stalin. After Lenin’s death, none of the Bolsheviks had a perspective for the withering away of the state. Lenin in “The State and Revolution” had said that the withering away of the state was a necessary and current task. But instead, the state was rebuilt in the image of its bourgeois model. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was real, but trapped within the form of a state that could not be transcended, because the philosophical basis was not there, so there could be no conscious programme for such a transformation. There was no vanguard for that. There was only a vanguard for defence, and the defence could only last so long. It lasted for about 70 years. It was to a large extent defeated by the COCOM (Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) Which Vladimir Putin mentioned in his speech of 18 March, 2014, which excluded the USSR from capitalist trade, and which is still largely in place vis-à-vis the Russian Federation, according to Putin. We can say that the problem of Stalinism, or at least the potential for Stalinism, is still with us, because the philosophical basis for the withering away of the state is not developed or generalised in the world today. The vanguard for it still does not exist. All communist parties, and all other revolutionary formations, are either democratic-centralist, or they are even more centralist and relatively less sensitive to the conscience of the masses. In the latter case they are apt to decline. Self-management of society is not held in view by such formations. Hence their revolutionary potential, like that of the Bolsheviks, is limited. They tend to produce stasis, and not to produce the necessary, further revolution. The NDR can produce the potential for further revolution, but there is a possibility that it may not do so, because the vision for such a further revolution is not apparent, and it may never be. In that case, the static “National Democratic Society”, even if achieved, could decline into something like Stalinism. The development of the Professional Revolutionary Vanguard Party proceeded from the moment of the publication of Edward Bernstein’s “Evolutionary Socialism” in 1899, Rosa Luxemburg’s reply - “Reform or Revolution?” – in 1900, and Lenin’s “What is to be Done” in 1902, followed by the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic and Labour Party in 1903, when the RSDLP split into the two factions: Bolshevik and Menshevik. The development can be further followed in Lenin’s “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” and “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”, of 1904, and 1905. Lenin’s greatest work is “The State and Revolution”, written in Russia in 1917 between the February and October Revolutions. In it, Lenin describes the necessity for, and the limitations of, democracy, and urges fast progress towards the withering away of the state, so that the contradictions of democracy can be left behind.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 14:33:16 +0000
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