People\'s democracy

The term of people's democracy was used by the Communist parties to qualify the new appeared political regimes, after the Second world war, in the States of Central and Eastern Europe: GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. Today still, the China, the North Korea, Cuba, the Laos and the Vietnam are defined as “people's democracies”.

The term of “people's democracy” is employed with goal of propaganda by the modes saying “to communist ideal ”, to be distinguished from the liberal democracies, that the people's democracies indicate rather under the term of “middle-class republics” or “capitalist countries”.

Definition

The term “people's democracy” is a etymological Pléonasme , since democracy comes from the Greek demonstrations (people) and kratos (to be able). This pleonasm is explained however within the framework of the Marxist analysis of the democracy.

Indeed, for some, the term even of democracy proposes its internal contradiction: it poses the identity between controlling and controlled (the democracy is “the government of the people by itself”) while being classified in the forms of State, therefore of government of the men. If there is State, it is that there is government of part of the people by another, it is that there are internal contradictions within the people: one joined the analysis of the Class struggle according to which the people are in fact only the report/ratio of the classes. The democracy, since it “is confined within the narrow framework of the capitalist exploitation, always remains as for the bottom a democracy for the minority, for the having classes”, would be for certain only the dictatorship of the dominant class.

It is necessary according to the propaganda of these modes to understand by “people's democracy” a democracy where the capacity would really belong to the people, contrary to the “liberal Démocratie”. The Bolsheviks, whose Trotsky, differentiates it from the “proletarian democracy” insofar as it must relate to not only the proletariat but also the country class with which the proletariat must make alliance to conquer the capacity.

Criticisms

On the one hand, the people's democracy does not correspond to the criteria which make it possible to define a democracy in Western political science, in particular because of the absence of regular free elections and multi-party system, which prevents the constitution of a free opposition. It thus approaches according to its criticisms the dictatorship a sole party, even a social group, and not a democratic regime. The modes known as of “people's democracy” were based on the domination of a sole party and the prohibition of the other parties, and on the popular absence of control of the leaders of the State and the economy.

In addition, the passage to the domination of a sole party imposes the recourse to the force: progressive passage (Tactical of salami) or brutal (Blow of Prague in 1948).

The term of “people's democracy”, that one finds neither at Marx, nor at Lénine, was also highly criticized among the Marxiste S, in particular by thinkers and movements trotskystes: they reproach him for being a vague term, contrary at the end of proletarian democracy or Dictatorship of the proletariat. The design of the “people's democracy” as a political regime in oneself is also shown to take part in the progressive abandonment of the Communisme to the profit of a “socialist State ”.

Anti-Stalinist Marxists denounced a contrary formula with reality: for example, it acted according to Daniel Singer of “a brutal Stalinist capacity acting of as top, disguised with a certain irony in " democracy populaire" ”.

Quotations

“Dictatorship of the proletariat] is a considerable widening of the democracy, become for the first time democracy for the poor, democracy for the people and not for the rich person. ” LÉNINE, the State and the revolution , 1917.

“But in any case, we can right now affirm with certainty that China as well as India will not be able to arrive at a true people's democracy, i.e. working and country, that by means of dictatorship of the proletariat. ” TROTSKY (Leon), the Permanent revolution , 1936.

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