Democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. National democracy. Revolutionary democracy....

Democracy is a public situation where everyone is equal before the law and enjoys equal voting rights. It is the preferred means of government of most modern states outside Laos, Vietnam,China,Cuba and the North of Korea and some others which fail to meet the criteria of modern societies i.e. those with a measure of public charity and a hospital system and a transport network.

Democracy is also a form of political society or organisation. It is based on argument and debate where dictators are brought to heel and laws are the prevalent form of public guidance for officials and citizens,a society based on a large measure of equality.

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Lenin wrote that the dictatorship of the workers and agricultural toilers was the democracy of the 99%. Communists believe that what they call bourgeois democracy,the egalitarian one mentioned above,is a front for the accumulation of capital at the expense of the working class and rural labourers.

The dictatorship of the proletariat works not just by crushing the avarice of the few but the rights of many. The rights so crushed by dictatorships are the rights enshrined in a Constitution and guaranteed by law. Crushing the rights of any individual or group of individuals leads ultimately to a totalitarian government. Experience shows that a self-perpetuating elite is formed around the revolutionary socialists as it was in Ireland around the national democrats.

A dictatorship is a political organism that cannot perpetuate itself where the population is educated and has a comparative society against which it can contrast its own lack of individual personal and property rights.

Balance is required. All societies go through rapid bursts of economic and social change at various times in their history. Rapid economic change should under modern conditions lead to the consolidation of new political institutions and social reforms. Those changes form a social contract.

In Europe, democracy is being undermined because industry is being hollowed out. In any sort of democracy,the system of social provision rests on economic foundations and where those foundations are undermined or washed away,nothing is certain.

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Revolutionary democracy is a system where the construction of national institutions such as courts and democratic assemblies is underway.

 Revolutionary democracy gave way in our own country to national democracy with an interlude of several decades of theocracy and peaceful social construction.

Let us begin,ever anew and steer a course between this residue of revolutionary democracy and democracy with rights.

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8.7.2025

In our flaked-out (tired and disconsolate) world where hope seems to have evaporated for the cause of change,there can only be solidarity on the left.

Solidarity is that arm to lean on,that stronger force so sought after by worker aspirant and established left winger and worker.

These are times of confusion and despondency and chaos in the public life of nations.

Everywhere in response to cries for peace and the moderation of capitalist excess,the cry of war and "Accumulate, Accumulate, Accumulate!" is put forward. The experienced and naive retreat into Faith and mysticism and they fall into extreme naturalism and superstition, respectively.

Let us while thinking anew about the faded language of Russian socialism and Bolshevik revolution,commit ourselves to democracy and equality.

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In Marxist terms, revolutionary democracy is that state of mind-if you are possessed of its outline ideology-of switching between support for revolution and support for reforms.

Lenin wrote as internationalism faded that Kautsky was one such voluble character at the head of the USPD (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky).

Kautsky's Germany was not the only fluctuating environment throwing up strange or new combinations of destitute and ruined and trade unionist and small shopkeeper. Ireland was another in the 1920's. By 1926-8 the revolutionary challenge had faded in all three domains and politics had settled into more stable forms of revolutionary OR reformist. Both have long been longstanding protagonists of different approaches to change and both have since the parting of the ways in the 1920's condemned and castigated the opposing ideology. Both are irretrievably SEPARATE with only rare instances of mutual support and encouragement.