Bourgeois Democracy

Political system established on the basis of capitalist private property in the means of production, with representative system as its core, decentralization, multi-party system, universal suffrage, equality before the law and formally stipulated civil rights as its main content, pretending that all citizens are equal before the law and have democratic rights such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, etc.

The critical analysis of bourgeois democracy is an important part of the Marxist theory of democracy, concretely including the full affirmation of the progressive nature of bourgeois democracy in history, the exposure of the essence, inner contradiction and historical limitations of bourgeois democracy, as well as the elaboration of the tactical principles of proletarian political parties in the struggle against bourgeois democracy.

Bourgeois democracy arose after the bourgeois revolution in Europe and America in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is the most complete democracy under the condition of private property in the means of production, which is opposite to the feudal-despotic system and the feudal system of estates. The replacement of the feudal absolutism with bourgeois democracy has played a positive role in consolidating and developing the rising capitalist relations of production. “Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”

Regarding the class essence of bourgeois democracy, Marx and Engels pointed out that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” No matter what concrete form it takes, whether it is constitutional monarchy or presidential system or cabinet system, bourgeois democracy is a superstructure established on the basis of capitalist relations of production. In essence, it is the political rule of the bourgeoisie, a means by which the bourgeoisie oppresses the proletariat and other working people, serving to maintain and consolidate the ownership of property by the bourgeoisie. When the proletariat gradually awakened to revolt against the bourgeoisie, when the fundamental interests of the bourgeoisie and its rule are threatened, it tends to tear off the robe of democracy and does not hesitate to abandon all its promises to the working people until it nakedly exercises violent repression, hence bourgeois democracy reveals the hideous face of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote: “The defeat of the June insurgents had shown that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of ‘republic or monarchy’. It had revealed that here ‘bourgeois republic’ signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes.” Lenin has also criticized the bourgeois democracy as a legal and formal concept of “democracy”, which serves the bourgeoisie to conceal their domination and deceive the people, and in practice “democracy” sometimes stands for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, sometimes for the impotent reformism of the petty-bourgeoisie who submit to that dictatorship, and so on. Bourgeois democracy is the means by which the bourgeoisie rules, and it is not “democracy in general”, “universal democracy” and “pure democracy”, as they preach. Lenin once exposed: “But not for one minute must [we] forget the bourgeois character of this ‘democracy’, its historically conditional and limited character. [We must] never share the ‘superstitious belief’ in the ‘state’ and never forget that the state even in the most democratic republic, and not only in a monarchy, is simply a machine for the suppression of one class by another. The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as ‘popular government’, democracy in general, or pure democracy, the (bourgeois) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people.”

After hundreds of years of development and evolution, bourgeois democracy has formed a complete and sophisticated system and operational mechanism. Such perfection and development are the result of a long struggle of the proletariat and the masses of the working people and constant adjustment of the tactics of the capitalist system to control society. This gradual perfection of democracy can, to a certain extent, alleviate the class and other contradictions in capitalist society, so that certain demands of the working people may also be met. Through such forms, the bourgeoisie maintained the relative stability of society and fortified the rule of its own class; but under the conditions that the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and holds the state power, democracy, on the whole, can only be enjoyed by the bourgeoisie, while the proletariat and other working people are in the position of being exploited and oppressed, and are not able to have real democratic rights. Therefore, bourgeois democracy is essentially the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which is the dictatorship of a minority over the majority. The bourgeois-democratic franchise is nothing but to decide once every few years which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament. Bourgeois democracy is not eternal. With the development of history and the socialist revolution, capitalist mode of production will be replaced by socialist mode of production, and bourgeois democracy will inevitably be replaced by socialist democracy.