DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE

Basing themselves on the experience of revolutions in the 19th century, the Paris Commune of 1871 in particular, Marx and Engels concluded that: 

1. In order for the working class to abolish capitalism and begin building a classless, socialist society — what they called ``communism'' — it must conquer political power and, by degrees, expropriate capitalist property, centralising the means of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class. 

2. The state institutions of even the most democratic capitalist state serve to uphold the rule, and defend the interests, of the capitalist class, i.e., represent the social dictatorship of the capitalist class, and therefore cannot serve as instruments with which to overthrow that rule and transfer political power to the working class. 

3. The dismantling of the capitalist state, in the first place its repressive apparatus (military forces, police, judicial and penal system) is a necessary prerequisite for the conquest of political power by the working class. 

4. Between capitalist society and socialist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there will be a period of political transition in which the state can be nothing other than the instrument of the revolutionary rule of the working class (what they called ``the dictatorship of the proletariat''). 

5. Unlike all previous forms of class rule, in which the state was an instrument for the forcible suppression of the majority by the minority ruling class, the workers' state represents the interests of the great majority and forcibly suppresses the power of the former minority ruling class, the capitalist class. The state institutions of the dictatorship of the proletariat must therefore be radically different from those of a capitalist state, or any previous state. 

6. The political form that the workers' state would take would be that of a workers' democracy based on elected councils of working people's delegates exercising both legislative and administrative functions, and in which: 

• The standing army with its professional officer corps would be replaced by a workers' militia involving the entire adult population.
• All state officials, judges, and leaders of the workers' militia would be elected and subject to immediate recall by their electors, and their income restricted to that of skilled workers.
• There would be a regular rotation of elected officials and a gradual and continuous reduction in the number of professional functionaries as more and more administrative functions were transferred to bodies elected by or directly involving the working people themselves.

7. Even in the most democratic capitalist regimes, the existence of private property, class exploitation and the consequent social and economic inequality result in a violent restriction of democratic freedoms for the big majority. Law defends private property in the means of production; and the repressive apparatus of the state is aimed at controlling, and when necessary suppressing, the overwhelming majority. Workers' democracy must be superior to capitalist democracy, both in the economic and social sphere — such as the right to work, security of existence, free education, free health care, etc. — as well as in the scope and extent of democratic rights enjoyed by working people. 

8. The workers' state is the instrument of a propertyless class whose liberation from exploitation and oppression can only be realised through the construction of a classless, socialist society. The workers' state is therefore transitional; it will wither away as the socialist society comes into being on a world scale. 

These fundamental conclusions about the necessity and character of the workers' state have been confirmed by the experience of socialist revolutions in the 20th century, beginning with the 1917 Russian Revolution. 

Despite these experiences, there are still those who proclaim that the workers' movement can attain its socialist goals within the framework of the institutions of capitalist democracy, through reliance on parliamentary elections and the gradual conquest of ``positions of power'' within these institutions. This reformist concept must be energetically opposed and denounced for what it is — a cover-up for the abandonment of the struggle for working-class power and a substitute of ever more systematic collaboration with the capitalist class for a policy of consistently fighting for the interests of the working class. 

Far from reducing the costs of ``social transformation'' or ensuring a ``slower but peaceful'' transition to socialism, this reformist policy, if it should determine the political attitude of the working class in a period of unavoidable class confrontation, can only lead to bloody defeats and mass slaughters as the 1965 coup in Indonesia and the 1973 coup in Chile demonstrated. Adherence to such a policy by the German Social Democracy was a major factor in the triumph of fascism in Germany in 1933. Pursuit of a similar policy by the Spanish Communist Party, following Stalin's Popular Front line, also contributed to the victory of fascism in the Spanish Civil War.