Democracy

Democracy (Gr., demos—people) is rule of the people, people’s government. The break-up of the feudal system and the rise of capitalist economy was accompanied by a series of popular revolts which initiated the modern struggle for democracy. The British revolution of the mid-seventeenth century and the American and French revolutions near the end of the eighteenth century were great bourgeois-democratic upheavals. The emergent capitalist classes in these countries sought to replace feudal institutions and feudal power by a system of political liberty placing state power in the hands of the bourgeoisie and freeing the new capitalist economy from all feudal and monarchical restrictions upon its development. The people who did the actual fighting in these revolutions fought for democratic rights which would give them political freedom and provide for their economic welfare.

The bourgeoisie were never wholehearted champions of democracy. Their conception of democracy has never gone beyond the abolition of the class privileges characteristic of feudal society and the establishment of formal equality before the law, leaving economic and political power in their hands. For this reason the workers and their allies have had to wage stubborn and protracted struggles, such as the right to public education and the right to vote free from property qualifications. It has been the modern working class of the cities that has proved to be the most consistent advocate of and fighter for the preservation and extension of democracy.

In a society split into classes of oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited, and dominated by the exploiters, democracy will always be class democracy, never a people’s government in the fullest sense. This is as true of bourgeois democracy as it was of the “democracy” of some of the city-states of ancient Greece, in which a small percentage of “free men” ruled a large population of slaves.

The bourgeois world adopts a constitution, sets up a congress or parliament and other representative bodies, introduces (under pressure from the masses) “universal suffrage,” and formal political freedom. However, the possibility of utilizing all these political rights and institutional forms, so far as the broad masses of workers and farmers are concerned, is restricted in many ways and requires them to struggle unceasingly, often merely to defend the rights they had previously acquired through struggle. The entire state apparatus of the bourgeois republic is such that it can be easily adapted to paralyzing the political activity of the masses and depriving the masses of working people of effective participation in political affairs. Even when the people have registered important democratic gains, parliamentary discussion serves as a smoke-screen (literally and figuratively) behind which anti-democratic policies can be carried out quietly by professional bourgeois politicians in collaboration with the industrialists and bankers.

And, as the rise of fascism in various countries has indicated, whenever the bourgeoisie find democratic institutions a means through which the masses can challenge their power, they destroy these institutions and continue their rule by unconcealed force. And even where such an extreme is not necessary, bourgeois class rule is maintained through the most rigorous control of all instruments of education and “public opinion,” accompanied by the suppression of any opposing thought.

Thus it is that there is an essential and irreconcilable contradiction between the forms and ideals of democracy and the existence of class society based on the private ownership of the means of production. Democracy can be tolerated by such a society only up to the point when it challenges existing property relations and hence the exploitation of the masses of people.

The rise of democratic forms and institutions is one of the outstanding achievements of the modern bourgeoisie, second only to the vast development of the forces of production. But just as these forces of production have long been in conflict with the capitalist production relations, so have capitalist production relations come into conflict with the forms and concepts of democracy.

Only through the socialization of the means of production, only through the abolition of classes, can the ideals of democracy be realized and fulfilled. For only when the people are in full control of their economy, and can carry on production as well as all the ideological and cultural activities of society solely for their own interest, can there be talk of real democracy, of people’s rule. A precondition of this is the achievement of political power by the proletariat and the abolition of all capitalist economic relations.