"Socialism is the ever-expanding democracy of the workers"

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The following are major excerpts from a speech given by Cannon at the SWP West Coast Vacation School on Sept. 1, 1957.

Comrades, 1 am glad to be here with you today, and to accept your invitation to speak on socialism and democracy .... Strange as it may seem, an agreement on these two simple, elementary points, as experience has already demonstrated, will not be arrived at easily. The confusion and demoralization created by Stalinism, and the successful exploitation of this confusion by the ruling capitalists of this country, and all their agents and apologists, still hangs heavily over all sections of the workers' The widespread misunderstanding and confusion about socialism and democracy has profound causes.... Socialism, in the old days that I can recall, was often called the society of the free and equal, and democracy was defined as the rule of the people. These simple definitions still ring true to me as they did when I first heard them many years ago.

But in later years we have heard different definitions which are far less attractive. These same people whom I have mentioned-leaders of the Communist Party and fellow-travelers, who have sworn off Stalin without really changing any of the Stalinist ideas they assimilated-still blandly describe the state of affairs in the Soviet Union, with all its most exaggerated social and economic inequality, ruled over by the barbarous dictatorship of a privileged minority, as a form of "socialism."

Stalinism and big-business

Now, of course, the Stalinists and their apologists have not created all the confusion in this country about the meaning of socialism, at least not directly. At every step for 30 years the Stalinist work of befuddlement and demoralization, of debasing words into their opposite meanings, has been supported by reciprocal action of the same kind by the ruling capitalists and their apologists. They have never failed to take the Stalinists at their word, and to point to the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, with all of its horrors, and to say: "That is socialism. The American way of life is better."

It is these people who have given us, as their contribution to sowing confusion in the minds of people, the delightful definition of the capitalist sector of the globe, where the many toil in poverty for the benefit of the few, as "the free world."

And they describe the United States, where the workers have a right to vote every four years, if they don't move around too much, but have no say about the control of the shop and the factory; where all the means of mass information and communication are monopolized by a few-they describe all that as the ideal democracy for which the workers should gladly fight and die.

It is true that Stalinism has been the primary cause of the demoralization of a whole generation of American radical workers. There is no question of that. But the role of Stalinism in prejudicing 10 SOCIALIST ACTIC the great American working class against socialism, and inducing them to accept the counterfeit democracy of American capitalism as the lesser evil, has been mainly indirect. The active role in this miseducation and befuddlement has been played by the American ruling minority, through all their monopolized means of communication and information....

We cannot build a strong socialist movement in this country until we overcome this confusion in the minds of the American workers about the real meaning of socialism.... WORKING MEN'S workers remain without voice or vote in the process, is just as foreign to the thoughts of Marx and Engels, and of all their true disciples, as the reformist idea that socialism can be handed down to the workers by degrees, by the capitalists who exploit them.

All such fantastic conceptions were answered in advance by the reiterated statement of Marx and Engels that "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves."

That is the language of Marx and Engels-"the task of the workers themselves." real democracy. In order to have real democracy, the workers must become the "ruling class."

Only the revolution which replaces the class rule of the capitalists by the class rule of the workers can really "establish democracy,' not in fiction but in fact. So said Marx and Engels.

They never taught that the simple nationalization of the forces of production signified the establishment of socialism. That's not stated by Marx and Engels anywhere. The nationalization only lays the economic foundations for the transition to socialism.

Still less could they have sanctioned, even if they had been able to imagine, the monstrous idea that socialism could be realized without freedom and without equality; that nationalized production and planned economy, controlled by a ruthless police dictatorship, complete with prisons, torture chambers, and forced-labor camps, could be designated as a "socialist" society. That unspeakable perversion and contradiction of terms belongs to the Stalinists and their apologists.

All the great Marxists defined socialism as a classless society-with abundance, freedom, and equality for all: a society in which there would be no state, not even a democratic workers' state, to say nothing of a state in the monstrous form of a bureaucratic dictatorship of a