Socialist democracy
Socialist democracy is a term of Marxism-Leninism , a form of government called, in which the working class under the leadership of their party in alliance with the other laboring classes and strata of the political power exercised.
meaning
The real socialist states often referred to their society as socialist democracy . The term democracy was justified by the fact that in socialism the representatives of the majority of the people , i.e. the mass of the working class , peasants and working people, exercised power (see also the dictatorship of the proletariat ), and the bourgeoisie , or the capitalists and their representatives the same, and not - as before the system change to socialism - had more rights than the working class.
According to the doctrine and the claim of Marxism, the working class should have all state power , since this is the only way to real popular rule, which should be achieved economically, among other things, by nationalizing all means of production such as factories, fields, forests, mineral resources . Furthermore, the interests of the bourgeoisie had to be subordinate to the interests of this majority of the people, the exploitation of workers, peasants and working people by the bourgeoisie was to be abolished.
The socialist democracy , it was told by their representatives, is in contrast to the "capitalist democracy" the "true democracy." The bourgeois (pluralistic) democracy, on the other hand, is only an “illusion of bourgeois ideology ”. At the same time, since under socialism the majority of the working people ruled over the minority of the still existing bourgeoisie, this fact was characterized in the socialist countries by the term dictatorship of the proletariat .
In the desired communism , thought of as a classless society in which, unlike in socialism, no economic classes existed, the term dictatorship of the proletariat would also lose its validity, because socialism was defined as only a temporary, imperfect transition phase from capitalism / fascism to communism .
Practice in the German Democratic Republic
In the practice of the German Democratic Republic , socialist democracy manifested itself as the absolute rule of the SED , which intervened in all areas of life. The population assumed the role of implementing the decisions of the party leadership. The term was often used in the GDR to legitimize the regime against the Federal Republic of Germany . In the Eastern European countries one spoke of people 's democracy .
literature
- Birgit Wolf: socialist democracy . In: Language in the GDR. A dictionary. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2000, ISBN 3-11-016427-2 , p. 208.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Birgit Wolf: Socialist Democracy , in: Language in the GDR , 2000, ISBN 978-3-110-16427-5 , p. 208 .
- ↑ Rusanna Gaber: Political community in Germany and Poland in the Google book search