[Marxism] What form should soviet democracy take?

[Walter Lippmann]

The "one-size-fits-all" or "cookie-cutter" approach to politics is easy
to understand. Dissolving the individual experiences of the different
countries of the planet, each at their own particular developmental
stages in the historical process, there's no need for study of exactly
what takes place in any one set of circumstances. I learned this idea
in the Trotskyist movement back in the sixties and seventies and it's
an idea which continues to be alive and well in Trotskyist tendencies.

Most Trotskyists (not all, but most, if you count the tendencies up)
demand that Cuba adopt a soviet form of government, arguing that
they want to see Cuba returned to soviet democracy as practiced by
the Bolsheviks during their brief period, of rule through the Soviets
after their 1917 revolution. That period ended, let's be generous, in
about 1919. In Cuba, during the process of their struggle for state
power (1957-8), no soviets came into existence. After the triumph,
the working class did not create such workers councils either. Yet
most various Trotskyist trends all argue eloquently that Cuba must
"return to Bolshevik norms of democracy", even it's not possible
to return to something which never existed. 

The cookie-cutter approach to politics has the advantage that it's
not necessary to make a close, specific, nationally-concrete study
of the revolutionary process as it actually unfolds. This method is
a rhetorical or intellectual way of canceling out the national reality
and the nationalist struggles which play so central a part in modern
political life over the past century.

This whole idea of imposing universal, prescriptive models, and of
ones which had existed for rather short periods of time (such as
that of the Bolsheviks, or of the Paris Commune of 1871 has a
somewhat religious, incantatory quality with a single god whose
precise wishes we all must follow, to the letter. If we don't, there
is no doubt that the devil will get us! And while it's boring to have
to repeat these ideas in the twenty-first century, it remains sadly
necessary to do so. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.


Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California

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JON BARANOV DEMANDS AND EXHORTS:
What is the justification for what David Walters has describes as 
the "hierarchical voting structure" in the original Soviet system as
opposed to direct elections for all officials, including those in the
"central executive committee"? Why should the dictatorship of the
proletariat take this form? Is it expediency, i.e. contingent factors
prevent meaningful mass participation (e.g. civil war)? Or does elite
dictatorship unconstrained by legalized mass participation inherently
lead to "true democracy" (as some fascist thinkers have maintained)?

To Mark and Vijaya: Fidel and Bukharin apparently thought that direct
voting was best for a maturing proletarian dictatorship, and even
Stalin was ashamed to disagree with them. I guess these bourgeois
hacks do not deserve our attention, Vijaya.

Obviously measures that may seem "undemocratic" today may lead to
democratic development in retrospect. However Mark Lause's symmetry
between Jacobin and proletarian revolutions is either misleading or
useless. First, two different class struggles are at work. Second,
does Mark think that the proletarian leadership should copy George
Washington in every way? Almost any move in the direction of
authoritarianism could be justified thus. Soviet power need not come
by the bourgeois ballot, but it better remain in the hands of the working 
people who brought it into being. Marx/Lenin did not advocate personal 
dictatorship but the dictatorship of the proletariat, needless to say.