Marxist View of Democracy in Political Theory : MPS 001

(B) Marxist View of Democracy

In Marxist theory, a replacement democratic society will arise through the organised actions of a world labor enfranchising the whole population and freeing up humans to act without being bound by the labour market. There would be little, if any, need for a state, the goal of which was to enforce the alienation. Marx and Engels stated within the CommunistManifesto and later works that "the initiative within the revolution by the labor , is to boost the proletariat to the position of upper class , to win the battle for democracy" and universal suffrage, being "one of the primary and most vital tasks of the militant proletariat".

As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program, "between capitalist and communist society there lies the amount of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the opposite . like are often "> this is often also a political transition period during which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat". He allowed for the likelihood of peaceful transition in some countries with strong democratic institutional structures (such as Britain, the US and therefore the Netherlands), but suggested that in other countries during which workers can't "attain their goal by peaceful means" the "lever of our revolution must be force", stating that the working people had the proper to revolt if they were denied political expression.

During the revolutionary ferment of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1917, there arose working-class grassroots attempts of direct democracy with Soviets (Russian for "council"). consistent with Lenin and other theorists of the Soviet Union , the soviets represent the democratic will of the labor and are thus the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin and therefore the Bolsheviks saw the soviet because the basic organizing unit of society during a communist system and supported this type of democracy. Thus, the results of the long-awaited Constituent Assembly election in 1917, which Lenin's Bolshevik Party lost to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, were nullified when the Constituent Assembly was disbanded in January 1918.

marxist theory, marx theory in poltical theory

Marx mentioned democracy because the ideal goal of social dialectics in his earliest writings. He maintained that the overall will cf the "real" people is embodied within the actions of the state. "Democracy is that the solution of the riddle of all constitutions. Here the constitution is... constantly rcduccd to the important men, the important people, and posited as their own work". With the abolition of classes under the proletarian dictatorship, the state ceases to serve class interests. It becomes transformed into an instrument of the "real" people — a Marxian variant of Rousseau's general will, consistent with Alfred Meyer. But as soon as this is often accomplished there's not a requirement for political institutions, because once the interests of the community and therefore the interests of the individual coincide, the necessity for a state, within the role of an arbitrator, disappears. the overall will can express itself directly, without the help of political institutions. Consequently political democracy will vanish along side the vanishing state.

The Marxists envision democracy in a perfect communist society not as a political but as a social order. the belief of communism is amid a simultaneous change in attribute , which with the disappearance of classes becomes depoliticized. Under communism, man becomes truly free and sovereign over himself; only then is he ready to master nature and to cease being its servant.