According to Eduard Bernstein, the "father of Social Democracy", the democratic state, while it had at times been wielded as a tool of the ruling-class, was not a construction of ruling-class power. In fact for Bernstein, liberal democracy was "an absence of class government . . . though it is not yet the actual suppression of classes" ( see: "Evolutionary Socialism"; Bernstein, 1961, 142-4). The state was class neutral. For Bernstein as for the social democratic parties, only a change of the management of capitalism was needed to make it serve the fundamental needs of society.
Bernstein claimed that this change would come about when the working class grew big enough so that in a mixed-class partnership with enlightened folk of the ruling class, it would win an unbeatable majority in elections.
Who on the left believes in this foundational premise of social democracy is tenable today? We live in a crisis-moment of disillusionment with mere reformism when it has become clear that either socialism comes to birth in a revolutionary breakthrough or the working class and the planet perish.
Class society is not 'evolving' to a victory over the dark forces that threaten the life of the world. Even if a roadmap to socialism through parliamentarianism were a realistic road to working-class power - given the present balance of class forces and global crisis there is no time for an exclusively electoral line of struggle . We live in a non-revolutionary situation in Canada where mass consciousness is loaded with despair and mass consciousness lags behind the demands of the global crisis.
The times demand the class-conscious youth, women and workers organize alongside and in The Canada's Party of Socialism - in a battle of ideas and action to invigorate and re-create a new generation of communist revolutionaries within the world that is yet to be. Marxism is ever new in the movement of the people!
No comments:
Post a Comment