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Workers Vanguard No. 933 |
27 March 2009 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
Bourgeois Democracy, Revolution and Counterrevolution (Quote of the Week)
There is no such thing as “classless” democracy. Bourgeois democracy is a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Marxists fight for the dictatorship of the proletariat—the triumph over the capitalist exploiters and the establishment of a workers state based on proletarian democracy. Reformists abandon this perspective in systematic adaptation to bourgeois rule, including by backing capitalist counterrevolution in the deformed workers states in the name of “democracy.” We reprint below an excerpt from a 1957 polemic by Shane Mage, who became one of the founders of the Spartacist tendency before he subsequently abandoned Marxism. Mage’s piece was directed against the right-wing majority of the Young Socialist League (YSL), youth group of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League. The Shachtmanite majority’s advocacy of “general democratic aims” in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was an important step in their liquidation into official American social democracy. The Hungarian Revolution was an attempt by the working class—in a workers state where capitalism had been overthrown but political power was in the hands of a Stalinist bureaucracy—to throw off bureaucratic rule and open the road to socialism.
It is no accident that the key phrase in the analysis of the Polish and Hungarian revolutions is “democracy”—not “bourgeois democracy,” not “workers democracy,” not even “peasant democracy,” but plain, unqualified “democracy,” “democracy” in general. There may be some younger members of the YSL who see nothing wrong with this procedure. I advise all such comrades to study very carefully the writings of Lenin on this subject, notably “State and Revolution” and “Proletarian Revolution and Renegade Kautsky.” The key thought, absolutely basic to the Marxist theory of the state, is that any form of government in a class society, including a democracy, essentially embodies the domination (“dictatorship”) of one class over the others. This is especially true of workers democracy because the proletariat, inherently a propertyless class, cannot rule except directly and politically, i.e., through its own class organizations of the “soviet” type. Any form of “pure” “classless” democracy “in general” can only express the domination of the economically strongest class, i.e., is necessarily bourgeois democracy....
The workers council or soviet represents the indicated form for the establishment of workers power in Hungary and, with slight difference of form, in every other country. In a country like Hungary, the creation of councils of working peasants, peasant soviets, would provide a means whereby the peasant majority could be represented in the government while preserving the state power of the proletariat through its class institutions. In scientific terminology, the state emerging from the revolution would be a workers state; the government would be a workers and farmers government.
—“The YSL Right Wing and the ‘Crisis of World Stalinism’”
by Shane Mage (1957); reprinted in part in the Spartacist pamphlet,
Solidarność: Polish Company Union for CIA and Bankers (1981)
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