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

Scan page 17

The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves"-Karl Marx SOCIALIST ACTION SUPPLEMENT 4 By JAMES. P. CANNON The following are major excerpts from a speech given by James P. Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, on Sept. 1, 1957.

I 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 con -fusion by the ruling capitalists of this country and all their agents and apologists, still hangs heavily over all sections of the workers' movement....

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."

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.

The task of the workers 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 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 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

CENTRAL

FOR' AT 4 PUBLIC MEE The Addro explain the Hummed up statement of Marx and Engels that "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves.

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.

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, which screens the exploitation and the rule of the great majority by the few, as real democracy. In order to have real democracy, -*T, LONDON, W.

Tle, London.

Mal be the workers must become 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 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 the 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.