Joel A Lewis Youth Against Fascism.pdf

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DEMOCRACY:
FROM DENUNCIATION TO DEFENCE
It is because the victory of fascism would set back the struggle for Socialism that they
unite in defense of Democracy, limited as it is under capitalism.
-Joe Cohen, 1936 1
At present the struggle for Communism, for us, means the struggle for democracy, because
that means the struggle and unity of the people against the most reactionary section
of finance capital – Fascism. Without this struggle there can be no social progress
of any kind. Therefore there are not two roads, one road to Communism and one to Democracy,
with two signposts pointing two ways. Socialism will not be possible unless
this fight is waged for democracy.
-Mick Bennett, 1938 2
"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary
transformation… in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of
the proletariat." 3 In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx contested that a specific
form of dictatorship would establish a new "social democracy." To many, such a notion
appears paradoxical. How can a dictatorship give birth to democracy What do Marxists
mean when they use terms like "dictatorship" and "democracy" As the citations from
Cohen and Bennett suggest, by the mid 1930s young communists redefined their conceptions
of democracy based off from a new understanding of fascism. This chapter explores
the divergent positions taken by the Leninist and Popular Front Generations on
these contentious issues.
As already noted, traditional Marxist-Leninist ideology appears paradoxical on the
issue of democracy. Marxist writings extensively interchange the use of the terms
"democracy" and "dictatorship." This phenomenon stems from Marx's critique of the
limitations of political democracy in class societies. In order to establish a "true democracy,"
Marx maintained state power had to be utilized by the working class to establish a
socialist system that would extend political notions of equality into social and economic
life. 4 Leninism further blurred the lines between democracy and dictatorship. 5 Lenin
contended that "the state," no matter how democratic, was simply an instrument of
violence to maintain class rule. "Bourgeois democracy" in reality represented a "Dictatorship
of the Bourgeoisie." The Bolshevik Revolution established a new type of "prole-
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