The following is partly intended as a letter to the Weekly Worker (www.cpgb.org.uk):

 

Congratulations on publishing a 1906 Rosa Luxemburg article under the heading "Socialism excludes minority rule" (January 22).

 

Minority rule was precisely what happened after the October 1917 revolution in Russia, with "the dictatorship of the proletariat" - rule just by the working class despite the much more numerous peasantry, due to the rigging of the soviets to give workers more say than peasants and the abolition of the Constituent Assembly after the victory of the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs, a party based on the peasantry dominated by large landowners) in elections to it. It is of course much easier with the benefit of hindsight to say what should have happened - the Bolsheviks should have allowed the right-wing SRs to show themselves up in practice and launch a further revolution later (with Trotsky's argument that the Bolsheviks would have been massively repressed undermined by the fact that there had been two revolutions within a year) or even better, the Bolsheviks should have gone into the countryside before the Assembly elections to build a united socialist party with the poor peasants.

 

Marxists generally stick to the mantra that only one class can be in control of society, although some have used the term "dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry". Is there really any objective reason why democtatic rule by both the working and middle classes cannot be achieved?

 

Marxists need to face the fact that those who consider themselves middle class outnumber those who consider themselves working class in many countries in the West - certainly in the USA and possibly in Britain too. Of course, we can argue that many such people really are working class even if they don't know it, but arguments that public sector workers (for example) are being exploited are tenuous to say the least! Continuing to argue for minority rule (or even majority rule where the majority is only say 60% or 80% of the population) is not only undemocratic but would render Marxists irrelevant and unable to take advantage of the massive unfolding capitalist economic crisis. Even if a Marxist-style socialist state was established in the West, it would provoke a massive destabilising civil war from middle class people objecting to not having a say.

 

At the time Rosa Luxemburg was writing, and at the time of the Russian revolutions, the concept of proportional representation hadn't been invented (or if it had, few knew about it). Now, one of the three mainstream parties in Britain, the Liberal Democrats, advocate it - and they surely stand a significant chance of holding the balance of power in a hung parliament after the next general election. They even advocate the fairest form of PR, single transferable vote, which removes the rationale for tactical voting. The fact that the Lib Dems rarely mention this policy nowadays is surely due to them realising that the main beneficiaries would be socialists!

 

Nationalisation from above without democratic control from below would not be true socialism, of course. PR could be combined with a form of soviets (committees and forums open to all, that are preferably not too hierarchical since hierarchies make it easier for non-genuine people to rise to positions of power and stay there) operating in workplaces and local communities. I have raised the issue of democratisation of the banks, many of which are becoming nationalised in desperate acts of capitalist governments faced with an escalating (and probably terminal as far as the UK is concerned) economic crisis, with most control in the hands of savers and borrowers (but small businesses should have a say as well as individuals).