Democracy is a trap for consciousness and the class struggle

Letter from a contact

I find it very difficult to accept your point of view on the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Of all forms of society, democracy is, in my opinion, the best, because in a democracy, freedom of expression is respected. It is thanks to our democratic form of society that the ICC can express its criticism of the capitalist system. In a fascist dictatorship, for example, the ICC would not have been able to criticise the capitalist system. If the ICC had indeed expressed its opinion against capitalism, you would probably have disappeared into concentration camps. But in a dictatorship of the proletariat, liberals, for example, cannot criticise communism. If liberals had indeed expressed their criticism of communism, they would probably have disappeared into re-education camps. That is why I am in favour of a democratic society and against any form of dictatorship. Because in a democratic society, all opinions are respected…

Our response

In his letter, the comrade raises an important question that lies at the heart of the mystification around democracy that the ruling class wants to hammer into the heads of the exploited, that, in a true democracy, all individuals would be equal (‘one man, one vote’) and, even if its implementation is not perfect, citizens would have the task of defending the democratic state which is, according to Churchill,  “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

We salute the comrade's sense of responsibility in that he very explicitly expresses a fundamental disagreement, or at least a questioning, of a fundamental position of the ICC and the legacy of marxism in general. However, without wishing to offend the comrade, the vision he expresses in his letter completely ignores the conditions in which bourgeois democracy emerged and developed, foremost among which are the massacres carried out by democratic states against the struggling proletariat and their ferocity targeting revolutionary organisations as soon as they begin to pose the slightest threat to the established order. It was indeed the democratic French Republic that slaughtered the Paris Commune, it was the democratic Weimar Republic that crushed the German revolution of 1918-1919 in blood, it was the ‘great Western democracies’ that hunted down revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, often hand in hand with autocratic, fascist or Stalinist regimes.

So where does this discrepancy come from between the bloody history of bourgeois democracy and the comrade's idea that in a democratic society, all opinions are respected? Very often, the difficulty lies not in the answer, but in how the question is posed. In his letter, the comrade speaks of democracy as an abstract concept, that of ‘democracy in general’ which is taken outside of history and class relations. But in history, there has never been such a thing as ‘democracy in general’. In ancient times, Athenian democracy was the political organisation of slave owners who ruthlessly exercised their domination over the exploited masses. Similarly, today there is no such thing as ‘democracy in general’: there are only bourgeois democracies, which, as we will try to convince our comrade and our readers, are nothing more than machines for oppressing the working class, and the most sophisticated weapon of the bourgeoisie for exercising its dictatorship over the rest of society.

Bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

Indeed, for marxists, today's society is not a collection of equal individuals, a kind of agora where all opinions freely confront each other in the marketplace of ideas. On the contrary, today's society is divided into classes with conflicting interests, a society in which the bourgeoisie dominates and exploits the proletariat. Thus, in the 19th century, the various factions of the ruling class were able to share power in Parliament by seeking to exclude the proletariat (through denying the right to vote, for example). Yet the workers movement was fighting for the establishment of democratic states. So why was this?  Because ‘democracy in general’ is the least bad of all systems? Because marxism had illusions about the possibility of overthrowing capitalism through Parliament? No! The marxist current saw even further ahead. Democracy was then the weapon of the revolutionary bourgeoisie against the old feudal structures that still clung to power, and the working class could still wrest genuine reforms (working hours, wages, end of child labour, etc.) from capitalism in its heyday. In both cases, the aim was to promote the development of the proletariat in order to... better overthrow capitalism and its democratic state. The bourgeoisie systematically and violently suppressed in blood the democratic demands of the working class.

However, with capitalism entering its decadent phase with the First World War, the conditions for exercising power changed. Imperialist competition between nations intensified, forcing the bourgeoisie to exercise greater discipline behind the state. Parliament became a mere rubber-stamp, a chamber for the directives of the executive branch, and capitalism was no longer able to grant real reforms to the working class. Everywhere, the democratic form of the state became an empty shell, a pure ideological mystification intended to hinder the revolutionary perspective that was now on the agenda.

The democratic structure of the state is, like all other forms of the state within capitalism (military dictatorship, fascism, Stalinism, etc.), an instrument designed to ensure and perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie over society. It is even the most sophisticated form of this:

- ‘Universal suffrage’ has proved to be one of the most effective means of concealing the dictatorship of capital behind the illusion of a ‘sovereign people’. It is still one of the preferred instruments for both channelling the discontent of the working class and maintaining the illusion that it is possible to make the capitalist world more just and humane through democracy. For marxists, on the contrary, since capitalism entered its period of decadence (at the time of the First World War), the proletariat has no longer had any truly positive reforms to wrest from the bourgeoisie; capitalism has become an irredeemably reactionary and destructive system. It is no coincidence that the bourgeoisie began to push the proletariat en masse towards the ballot box when capitalism entered its period of decline, particularly in those countries where the working class is highly concentrated and experienced in struggle.

- ‘Freedom of the press’ is perfectly compatible with the monopoly of information by the bourgeoisie and its mainstream media. The role of the latter is to disseminate official state communiqués and to drown (with the help of social media) the truth under a daily deluge of lies, false information and absurdities. The message disseminated ad nauseam by the bourgeois press is that there is no alternative to capitalism. Moreover, ‘restrictions’ can be placed on the freedom of the press at any time the democratic state deems it necessary, as is done by all governments during wars or when the proletariat defends its revolutionary perspective.

- ‘Freedom of expression and association’, like ‘freedom of speech’, are also mystifications ‘tolerated’ ... as long as they do not threaten the power of the bourgeoisie and its imperialist interests. There are numerous examples of flagrant restrictions on these ‘freedoms,’ including against competing bourgeois factions. In the United States, the ‘world champion of democracy’ and ‘home of human rights’, American citizens were persecuted for their left-wing sympathies during the McCarthy era in the 1950s. During the great strike of May 1968 in France, far-left groups were banned and their leaders arrested. Over the past year, the group Palestine Action in Britain has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Since its founding in 1975, and despite its relatively modest size, the ICC has not been spared either: its militants have also been followed, intimidated and subjected to searches.

As Lenin wrote in The State and Revolution (1917), "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession […], it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” In short, bourgeois democracy is a perfect synonym for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

But what about the dictatorship of the proletariat?

Throughout history, no oppressed class has been able to overthrow the old society without going through a revolution and a phase of dictatorship designed to break by force the resistance of the existing ruling class and ready to go to any extremes to maintain its domination. Thus, as in the American and French revolutions, the bourgeoisie had to wrest the state apparatus from the hands of the aristocracy, waging a policy of repression and terror against the counter-revolution in the name of democracy and human rights.

However, as the Paris Commune and the revolutionary experience of 1917-1923 taught us, the working class cannot use the bourgeois state to establish its own domination over society. Indeed, the state is not a neutral instrument that could just as easily be used to defend the privileges of the exploiters as to benefit the exploited class. On the contrary, in all its forms, the state is essentially an instrument of class domination over society. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, demonstrates very well that the state is a specific product of class society, designed to maintain, through coercion (army, police, justice, surveillance, social control, etc.), the cohesion of society for the benefit of the ruling class, an instrument of violence directed against the exploited classes. The task of the proletarian revolution, which entails the elimination of classes and exploitation, is therefore to destroy the bourgeois state from top to bottom[1], and the political weapon used for this destruction is the workers' councils. These councils are not a pipe dream or a utopia, but the “finally discovered form”, as Lenin wrote, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the working class itself that first brought about this form of political organisation during the Russian Revolution of 1905.

For the first time in history, instead of the police and the army, the workers' councils claimed the monopoly of weapons and instead of a handful of professional politicians ‘chosen’ every four or five years to defend bourgeois property and exploitation, power was exercised by the entire working class, with representatives who could be mandated and dismissed at any time. Instead of the dictatorship of the minority over the vast majority, it was the dictatorship of the vast majority over the minority. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletarian freedom of criticism exercising power against capitalist exploitation and the armed resistance of the bourgeoisie.

Depriving the proletariat of its weapons, namely the workers' councils, because they are instruments expressing dictatorship and wanting to dissolve the working class into ‘the people’ in the name of democracy, would only mean demanding it abandons its revolutionary perspective, the only alternative perspective to the continued, inevitable and further descent of capitalism into barbarism, war and widespread misery.

ICC, 31 December 2025

 

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[1]  However, marxism rejects the anarchist idea of the overnight abolition of all forms of the state. As the proletariat is forced to take power before developing new communist relations of production, there will be a whole period of transition between the proletariat's seizure of power and the disappearance of all social classes with the complete socialisation of production. However, as we have seen previously, when we talk about ‘social classes’, we are talking about the state. The revolutionary experience of 1917 showed that during this ‘transition period’, what Lenin called a ‘semi-state’ would emerge to ensure the cohesion of the nascent society. But this semi-state is light years away from the hypertrophied Stalinist state. Like any state, it will remain a conservative body over which the proletariat will have to first exercise its dictatorship and then eventually abolish it.