DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Imperialist capitalism integrates the productive forces of the world economy, centralises the means of production under the command of a few hundred giant corporations, socialises labour on a gigantic scale, polarises the class structure of the advanced capitalist countries between an overwhelming majority of wage earners and a handful of super-rich monopolist families, and thus creates the economic and social prerequisites for the socialist revolution.

The class struggle loses its previous character of isolated actions by small groups of workers, and takes on national and international dimensions. To the struggle of the working people of the advanced countries against the concentrated forces of monopoly capital is added the national liberation struggle of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples against imperialist domination.

In the imperialist epoch, the national liberation movement of the oppressed peoples of the colonial and semi-colonial countries is an integral part of the international movement for socialism. While the objective tasks of the national liberation struggle (political and economic independence and agrarian reform) reflect the needs of capitalist development in these countries, such development is blocked by imperialist domination.

Socialists support the right of oppressed, colonised nations to national self-determination, that is, to choose whatever political relations with the colonial power they believe are necessary to end their national oppression, including the formation of an independent nation-state. However, the mere winning of formal political independence by the oppressed nations cannot end their national oppression since this stems from imperialist control of their economic life.

The indigenous capitalist class, while favouring steps to improve its position in relation to imperialism, is unwilling to lead a consistent struggle against imperialist domination because of its dependence on foreign capital. The economic measures required to promote rounded capitalist development in the Third World (expansion of the domestic market and effective protection of local industry) also conflict with the interests of the semi-colonial capitalist class:

• Expansion of the domestic market requires an end to the burden of excessive debts and taxes on the peasantry and an end to hoarding and squandering by the landlord-usurers of the social surplus product created by the peasantry. This can only be achieved through a radical agrarian reform that abolishes landlordism and hands over land to the tillers. However, due to its close connections with the big landowners (often they are one and the same) the semi-colonial capitalist class is hostile to such agrarian reform.
• Effective protection of domestic industry from the competition of cheaper commodities produced in the imperialist countries requires the creation of a state monopoly of foreign trade. But the nationalisation of foreign trade is not in the interests of those sectors of the indigenous capitalist class that derive their profits from the import-export trade.

Given the failure of the indigenous capitalists to consistently carry through the tasks of the national-democratic revolution, it is not uncommon for elements drawn from the petty bourgeoisie to seize political power in Third World countries. Often this takes the form of a military coup by lower-ranking military officers. Such governments (e.g., Peron in Argentina, Nasser in Egypt, Ne Win in Burma, the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq, etc.) sometimes challenge imperialism quite boldly and carry out some radical reforms (e.g., nationalisation of industry and banking). However, while claiming to represent the masses such regimes fear the independent mobilisation of the workers and peasants, exclude them from any real power, and often suppress their independent class organisations.

These petty-bourgeois nationalist regimes do not dismantle the capitalist state machine, but simply restaff it with new personnel. The management of the nationalised enterprises is placed in the hands of the officers, their relatives and friends, who use their bureaucratic posts to enrich themselves through corruption and to establish private businesses. As a result, the way is paved for the emergence of a new layer of capitalists which, while stronger than the one it suppresses, remains in a semi-colonial relationship to imperialism.

The complete and lasting attainment of the goals of national liberation in the Third World can only be carried out by an anti-imperialist movement based on an alliance of the working class and the peasantry, that transfers power to a revolutionary-democratic government and destroys the capitalist state apparatus.

While bourgeois nationalist forces may be part of such a movement, historical experience has shown that the national liberation movement will not succeed if these forces enjoy political hegemony within it, or if the revolutionary-democratic forces subordinate the mobilisation of the worker-peasant masses to the goal of maintaining bourgeois nationalists within the anti-imperialist alliance.

The creation of a revolutionary-democratic government resting on the mobilised power of the worker-peasant masses can open the possibility of bypassing the ``normal'' process of capitalist development through the growing over of the national-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution. The possibility of pursuing a non-capitalist path of development in a Third World country, and the pace of transition from purely national-democratic tasks to the tasks of socialist construction, is dependent on a number of factors, in particular:

• The level of consciousness, mobilisation and organisation of the working people, particularly the working class and the poor, semi-proletarian majority of the peasantry.
• The level of socio-economic development already attained in the country prior to the coming to power of the workers and peasants' government. The more backward the socio-economic structure, the longer will be the national-democratic stage, the greater will the need be to employ capitalist economic forms (free market for small commodity producers, concessions to foreign capitalist investors, etc.) while developing a state-capitalist sector (private capital operating on state contracts, joint ventures between the workers' state and foreign capital, etc.) and a strictly socialised sector (enterprises owned and operated by the workers' state).
• The amount of technical assistance, economic aid and trade that can be obtained from industrially developed socialist states.

While imperialism continues to dominate the most developed sectors of the world economy the task of constructing socialism in any underdeveloped country will be extremely difficult, being subject to the constant threat (or actuality) of imperialist military intervention, economic blockade, and counter-revolutionary pressure. The ability of a workers' state in an underdeveloped country to advance along the road of constructing socialism therefore depends on advances in the world revolutionary process, above all on victorious socialist revolutions in the more industrially developed countries. On the other hand, revolutionary victories in the underdeveloped countries can provide a powerful impetus to the development of mass anti-capitalist movements and consciously revolutionary forces in the imperialist heartlands.

To defend its domination in the face of the growing strength of the forces arrayed against it, monopoly capital imposes increasing state control on the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. In these conditions, every significant action in the interests of the working class becomes an action against the power of the capitalist state, that is, a political act.

At the same time, monopoly capital seeks to weaken working-class consciousness and organisation by systematically granting privileges to certain sections of the working class (usually to skilled, white, males) while institutionalising discrimination against others (for example, women, non-white and young workers). Because of their position in the world market (greater technical development, the export of capital to countries with a higher rate of profit, etc.) and their plundering of the colonies and semi-colonies, the monopolists of the imperialist countries obtain colonial superprofits, a portion of which they use to grant higher than average wages and more secure conditions of employment for a small section of the working class. This relatively privileged layer of workers (what Engels and Lenin called the ``aristocracy of labour'') is the main social base for liberal and opportunist prejudices within the working class.

The restricted character of democracy under capitalism creates the tendency for the full-time functionaries of mass workers' organisations to become bureaucrats, that is, privileged officials divorced from the mass of working people who identify their interests with the maintenance of the social status quo, and who represent themselves as defenders of the benefits enjoyed by the labour aristocracy. The capitalist state in the imperialist countries actively promotes and seeks to consolidate this tendency by offering political privileges and sops for conservative trade-union officials and their liberal parliamentary collaborators. This systematic bribery has its most striking reflection in the class-collaborationist outlook and practice of the trade union functionaries and parliamentary representatives of the Social-Democratic ``workers'' parties.

Beginning with their support for their ``own'' imperialist governments in World War I and their active opposition to the postwar revolutionary upsurge (including supporting imperialist intervention in Soviet Russia and the murder of revolutionary leaders in Germany), the Social-Democratic parliamentary and trade union leaderships have repeatedly shown themselves to be direct agents of capitalist influence within the organised workers' movement, and stalwart supporters of the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie.

To overthrow the imperialist ruling class it will be necessary for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries to replace the present procapitalist leaders of the labour movement with leaders genuinely committed to defending the interests of working people. How this can be done was first demonstrated by Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks.

The prevalent view in the Social-Democratic movement prior to World War I was that a workers' party should be an all-inclusive formation embracing socialists with diverse views about the party's program and without any requirement to actively participate in its work. As later events showed, this was a formula for an amorphous movement that was susceptible to bureaucratic manipulation by opportunist trade-union and parliamentary leaders, and which was incapable of providing revolutionary leadership to the working class.

By contrast, Lenin counterposed the perspective of building a party of revolutionary activists adhering to Marxist principles, in which policy decisions were made on the democratic basis of majority rule and tested out by the united action of the entire membership. Under Lenin's leadership, the Bolsheviks created a large tested nucleus of worker-cadres that was able, in the revolutionary situation in 1917, to grow into a mass party that led the Russian working class in a successful struggle for political power.