ciro wrote:
And it is clear that we we are for democracy. My questions are: 1)how much democracy is in Marx texts? 2)can it be that this party takes its democracy from Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition, so this is a kind of Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition Marxism/Socialism?
Before he became a socialist (communist) Marx had been a political democrat (which was a radical enough position in the 1840s because universal suffrage didn’t exist anywhere then). After he became a socialist he continued to favour political democracy even under capitalism (in exile in England he supported the Chartists demand for universal suffrage and the later Reform League which campaigned for the extension of the vote to more workers).Although he no doubt appreciated living in a country like England where certain political freedoms existed (though not universal suffrage) his conception of what a fully democratic system would be like seems to have been more influenced by events in France. Here’s how he described the Paris Commune of 1871 (in The Civil War in France) which he held up as an example of how the working class should exercise political power once they had won control of it:
Quote:
The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.
Quote:
In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.
The Italian version of this pamphlet can be found here.You’re right that it was Lenin who dishonestly claimed that Marx stood for the sort of dictatorship that he and the Bolsheviks established in Russia (one-party rule by a vanguard), whereas in fact Marx stood for the sort of delegate democracy described above.
