International Association

Scan page 10

CENTRAL

FOl' The Addror explain the. summed up crimelate.

The authentic socialist movement, as it was conceived by its founders and as it has developed over the past century, has been the most democratic movement in all history. No formulation of this question can improve on the classic statement of the Communist Manifesto, with which modern scientific socialism was proclaimed to the world in 1848. The Communist Manifesto said:

"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."

The task of the workers themselves The authors of the Communist Manifesto linked socialism and democracy together as end and means. The "self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority" cannot be anything else but democratic, if we understand by "democracy" the rule of the people, the majority.

The Stalinist claim that the task of reconstructing society on a socialist basis can be farmed out to a privileged and uncontrolled bureaucracy, while the TET, LONDON, W.

AT Tele, Lo al fully That was another way of saying-as they said explicitly many times-that the socialist reorganization of society requires a workers' revolution. Such a revolution is unthinkable without the active participation of the majority of the working class, which is itself the big majority of the population. Nothing could be more democratic than that.

Workers must become ruling class Moreover, the great teachers did not limit the democratic action of the working class to the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy. They defined democracy as the form of governmental rule in the transition period between capitalism and socialism. It is explicitly stated in the Communist Manifesto-and I wonder how many people have forgotten this in recent years: "The first step, said the Manifesto, 'in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy."

That is the way Marx and Engels formulated the first aim of the revolution-to make the workers the ruling class, to establish democracy, which, in their view, is the same thing. From this precise formulation it is clear that Marx and Engels did not consider the limited formal democracy under capitalism, privileged minority.

Workers' democracy

The Soviet Union today is a transitional order of society in which the bureaucratic dictatorship of a privileged minority, far from serving as the agency to bridge the transition to socialism stands as an obstacle to harmonious development in that direction. In the view of Marx and Engels, and of Lenin and Trotsky who came after them, the transition from capitalism to the classless society of socialism could only be carried out by an ever-expanding democracy, involving the masses of the workers more and more in all phases of social life, by direct participation and control.

And, in the course of further progressive development in all fields, as Lenin expressed it, even this democracy, this workers' democracy, as a form of class rule, will outlive itself. Lenin said: "Democracy will gradually change and become a habit, and finally wither away, since democracy itself, properly understood, is a form of state, that is, an instrument of class rule, for which there will be no need and no place in the classless socialist society.

Forecasting the socialist future, the Communist Manifesto said: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association."

Mark that, "an association, not a state— "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Trotsky said the same thing in other words when he spoke of socialism as "a pure and limpid system which is accommodated to the self-government of the toilers... and uninterrupted growth of universal equality-all-sided flowering of human personality... unselfish honest and human relations between human beings."

And I say we will not put the socialist movement of this country on the right track, and restore its rightful appeal to the best sentiments of the working class of this country, and above all to the young, until we begin to call socialism by its right name as the great teachers did. Until we make it clear that we stand for an ever-expanding workers' democracy, as the only road to socialism. Until we root out every vestige of Stalinist perversion and corruption of the meaning of socialism and democracy, and restate the thoughts and formulations of the authentic Marxist teachers....