Soviet democracy vS. parliamentary democracy

Scan page 12

SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1990 11 He was incapacitated, for the most part, until his death in January 1924, and was unable to mount a decisive attack on Stalin and bureaucratism.

Still, before his death, he took the demonstrative step of formally breaking off all personal and political relations with Stalin and writing his "Last Testament." (In this document he urged that Stalin be removed from his position as general secretary of the Communist Party.)

Trotsky, fulfilling his pact with Lenin, went on to become the most intransigent opponent of the bureaucratic caste and its trampling of workers' democracy in the Soviet Union.

Stalin's blood purges

Hundreds of thousands of Lenin and Trotsky's supporters were ultimately imprisoned and murdered by Stalin— including virtually the entire generation of Bolsheviks who had led the Soviet workers to power. This essentially lawless beheading of the revolution's leadership was accompanied by show trials in which virtually every defendant was first tortured, or lives of loved ones threatened, and thus forced to "confess."

Millions of others were terrorized, many suffering abominable conditions of imprisonment in Stalin's gulags. Of those imprisoned, additional hundreds of thousands (according to the most conservative estimates) died from the extreme hardship in these prison camps, or were shot.

Trotsky himself was exiled and relentlessly hounded by Stalin from country to country. He eventually found refuge in Mexico but was assassinated in August 1940 by Stalin's agent.

"The Revolution Betrayed," Trotsky's insightful theoretical analysis of the root causes of the Stalinist degeneration, provides the only consistent basis for understanding today's unfolding political revolution in the bureaucratized workers' states.

The prognosis in this 1936 book was that either the working class will topple the The parliamentary system being put in place in East Europe and the Soviet Union is a sophisticated political mechanism developed during hundreds of years of capitalism to block the workers from power while it provides the ruling class the luxury of democratic resolution of differences among themselves.

While parliamentary electoralism must be utilized as a tool to organize workers, raise their level of consciousness, and as a measure of the revolutionary party's influence, it would be a colossal mistake to believe that a shift of state power from the oppressors to the oppressed can be accomplished through the parliamentary system.

History has shown that the road to a workers' government is through the kind of revolutionary democracy that enabled the Russian workers to take power in October 1917. The soviet-type state, based on workers' councils which are composed of elected delegates coming from every workplace, every fighting class institution, and every political faction of the working class is the most democratic system the world has seen.

Such a system of democracy includes a few other essential conditions. In contrast to the bourgeois parliamentary system now being established in the East, which is based on a division of governmental and state powers, the soviet, or Commune-type statea, combines in one body both legislative and executive functions.

It provides for immediate recall of delegates by its constituencies, and for good measure, it also provides for delegates to be paid workers' wages—-a provision intended to forestall scrambling for official position by selfseeking careerists.

The division of powers, such as the establishment of Gorbachev's position as chairman of the Supreme Soviet, invests this post with independent powers (following the model of most European parliamentary systems) which are intended as a safeguard against a legislative majority won by representatives of the revolutionary proletariat.

Now, the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee plenum has decided to strengthen the Bonapartistb character of the presidency by orienting toward direct election of this most powerful executive agency of the state, a-la American system. This, as some Stalinist spokespersons have explained, gives the chief executive the exclusive power to send troops anywhere; that is, to put down mass protests internally or to make The democratic essentials of the early soviet system were suppressed by Stalin and the bureaucracy he headed. Today, the Gorbachevs and Ligachevs of all Eastern Europe are intent on blocking any expression of soviet or Commune-type democracy, one of whose first acts would be the proscription of a capitalist-style income for bureaucrats.

Footnotes:

a- A reference to the Paris Commune of 1871. For further reading see Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France" (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977).

b- Bonapartism is a regime that appears to stand above the nation and to have gained complete independence of classes. See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Chapter XI. revolutionary proletarian leadership.

This law of revolution was first analyzed in detail by Karl Marx who described it and gave it its name: "The Revolution in Permanence."

Origin of Permanent Revolution Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed the conception of permanent revolution in a speech written by them for the Central Committee of the Communist League (the predecessor to the First International) in March 1850.

This speech drew the lessons of the explosion of revolutionary events in the Europe of 1848-49, primarily in France and Germany. The main lesson, they explained to the vanguard of Europe's workers, was the centrality of maintaining the independent organization and action by the working class. Under no circumstance, they warned, should the proletariat subordinate itself to any temporary middle-class ally.

The speech, "Address of Central Committee to the Communist League," 2 is short but exceptionally rich. The following extract typifies the address as a whole—a lucid generalized description of the laws of permanent revolution in our epoch. [See also the accompanying article on Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.] It outlines the revolutionary dynamic, applicable to the workers' states as well as to the capitalist world. It sounds almost as if it were written just yesterday to guide revolutionary-minded workers toward the overthrow of the privileged castes in the bureaucratized workers' states and toward the overthrow of world capitalism:

"The demands of the petty-bourgeois democracy ... are not put forward by all of its factions at the same time and only a very few members of them consider that these demands constitute definite aims in their entirety.

"The further separate individuals or (continued on page 12)