p The pluralistic views of the political structure of bourgeois society and of the mechanisms of its function* Ing are naturally based on the conception of the social structure of modern capitalism as an aggregate of freely competing heterogeneous communities, groups or organizations—economic, professional, political, cultural, religious, etc. However, the champions of political pluralism focus their attention mainly on politics as a sphere of competitive struggle, not only between political parties but also between all social organizations and groups.

p It is with good reason that V.E. Guliev points out that the theory of pluralist democracy made its appearance at the transition of capitalism to its imperialist stage and constitutes a liberal-democratic attempt to find a way out of the crisis into which classical bourgeois democracy has fallen.

p With the development of state* monopoly capitalism, in accordance with monopolism in the economic sphere, the reactionary trends in politics also become stronger: the authoritarian, fascist features in government increase, and the already limited bourgeois democracy is still further curtailed. The state apparatus joins up with the biggest monopolies, and the regulative functions of the modern bourgeois state are widened in favour of monopoly capital. AIL this still further reduces the rights and liberties of the working people, subordinating them to the interests and diktat of big monopoly.

p On the other hand, however, the revolutionary impact of the world socialist system and the scientific and technological revolution—two exceedingly important factors—act in the reverse direction, towards the preservation and further expansion of the 85 democratic rights and liberties of the working people ir the capitalist countries.

p The impact of the world socialist system on capitalist society in this direction is easy to understand. In the socialist countries, parallel with the rise in material well-being and in the cultural level of the working class and the other working people, their social gains also keep increasing, as well as their participation in the management of production, and in the local and central bodies of power and government. The ruling monopoly top crusts in the capitalist countries cannot disregard this fact, especially as the working people carry on a stubborn fight in defence of the democratic rights they have already won, and strive to expand them still further.

p The scientific and technological revolution also creates certain objective prerequisites for a further widening of the rights and-liberties of the working people. The application of its achievements to production, transport, communications, etc., i.e. the use of automation, chemicals and cybernetics in the labour processes calls for a qualitatively new technical and cultural level in the working people who manipulate the machines. The personal responsibility of each worker in the programming, elaboration, control and repair of the new machines also increases severalfold. The situation of the highly specialized worker who has attained a high technical and cultural level also increases his selfesteem. This renders necessary a new attitude of the owner of the means of production, or of the managment representing his interests, towards the worker.

p In fact, the new machinery still more urgently demands the replacement of private ownership production relations by socialist ones, under which alone the worker’s increased self-esteem as an actual owner and manager of the new complex machinery is able fully to manifest itself. However, as the capitalist class does all within its power to avoid being expropriated, it looks for palliative measures which will enable it to take the new conditions into account while at the same time preserving its domination.

p Through the conception of political pluralism, bourgeois political scientists also in practice wish to answer the new contradictory demands made upon them as defenders of the social system by monopoly capitalism. Under the general trends of increased bureaucratization, integration and centralization, they also strive to develop certain elements of bourgeois democracy.

p In his voluminous work ’Plutalist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent’, Robert A.Dahl sets himself the task of defending formal bourgeois democracy in the USA from the standpoint of pluralism. In the very first pages of his book he formulates as ‘self-evident’ a premise which MarxistLeninist science has long since refuted, and puts forward as insoluble a problem which has already in the main found its scientific solution in Marxist-Leninist theory and in the practice of socialist construction.

p Dahl say that”. . . however strongly human beings are driven to seek the company of one another, and despite millennia of practice, they have never discovered a way in which they can live without conflict. . .” ”. . . Conflict seems to be an inescapable aspect of community and hence of being human.” (99, p. 5). If here the word ‘seems’ may give rise to the thought that the author is nevertheless not fully convinced of the truth of his assertion, he later formulates it in a categorical form: man ’is unable to live with others without conflict’, (p. 7). Elsewhere Dahl agrees with Madison’s assertion that conflict ’is sown in the nature of man’ (p. 14).

p After the categorical statement that social conflicts are eternal, R.Dahl asks: ’Who ought to govern?’ And hastens to declare this question insoluble, "as long as men continue to ask questions" (p. 7).

p The assertion that ’people cannot live without conflicts’ is in fact a premise for the whole social and political conception of pluralism and above all of ’pluralist democracy’.

p People unite in organizations, parties or unions, in order to defend their interests. Since the interests and aspirations of the different social groups and their 87 exponents, the organizations, are contradictory, the only possibleland reasonableoutcome of the situation is, according to the pluralists, to look constantly for temporary, partial compromises, in order partially and temporarily to conciliate the contradictory interests. This is precisely what pluralistic bourgeois democracy is doing. The multi-party, or at least the two-party system of government is considered as its natural form. And this system is proclaimed as ‘eternal’, because the contradictory interests and conflicts among people are also eternal.

p All this logical construction collapses, because, contrary to Dahl’s assertion, people have already discovered ’a way of communal life without conflicts’. It has been discovered by Marxist-Leninist science. Its name is communism.

p Robert Dahl and his followers are ready to object: Well, do you assert that in the Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries all social, international and inter-state conflicts have already been overcome? Are there no people there, too, who are dissatisfied and opposed to the regime? What about the developments in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968)? Or the conflicts with Yugoslavia in 1948/49, and with China after 1956? And does not the dialectics which you acknowledge maintain that contradiction is the source of all development? Etc.

p As in most cases so also in this case, the false thesis is built on the foundation of a number of more or less valid facts and standpoints.

p Let us begin with dialectics. Dialectical and historical materialism does indeed show that both in nature and in society there are and always will be contradictions of one kind or another. However, there are no immutable contradictions. Social and class contradictions are not immutable either.

p Marxism distinguishes two kinds of social contradictions: antagonistic and non-antagonistic. Antagonistic contradictions are typical only of the class societies, and they are connected with the private ownership of the means of production, with the 88 exploitation and enslavement of man.by man. The socialist revolution does away with their foundation. In the construction of the communist society, all national, racial and social conflicts gradually die dut. It is true, on the other hand, that this is a long, complex and difficult process, in the course of whose implementation deviations and mistakes will inevitably occur.

p And how do matters stand with the non-antagonistic contradictions? At the present stage of development these include, in particular, the contradictions between workers and peasants, between town and country, between intellectual and manual workers in socialist society. The resolution of the non-antagonistic contradictions in the new society takes place not by way of competition and conflicts, and not by temporary, partial compromises, as is recommended by the theoreticians of pluralism, but by way of cooperation and mutual assistance, in the name of the interests of society as a whole and in the name of the individual groups and persons. Favourable conditions for this are created by the new social structure of society.

p Marxism-Leninism has also given a scientific answer in principle to the ‘insoluble’, according to Dahl, question as to who is to rule? This question is truly insoluble in class societies, as long as there are exploiters and exploited, because power is in the hands of the handful of exploiters, a fact which cannot be officially acknowledged. However, the situation is not the same after the overthrow of the domination of the capitalist top crust and the setting up of the government of the working class and the remaining working people, headed by their conscious political vanguard—the MarxistLeninist Party. A new type of democracy is established then—socialist democracy, real and not formal democracy, which actually secures for the people the possibility to take part in the government, a democracy which is subject to constant improvement. It does not find itself faced with the insoluble problems which torment the sincere champions of democracy in bourgeois society, because under socialism there are no classes or strata with contradictory interests. Its development is 89 connected with a continued rise in the material political and cultural standards of the working people and with their increasingly active participation in the government of society at all levels—beginning from the enterprise, institution or municipality and rising up to the state as a whole, to science, art and culture.

p The science of social management, which develops in the socialist countries on the general basis of Marxism-Leninism and is linked with the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution, elaborates the mechanisms for the optimum solution of the specific problems arising at every step of socialist construction. It is on this basis that the process of ironing out the differences between the governing and the governed will also be speeded up. Then, with the final triumph of social self-management, all divisions of people into governing and governed will disappear.

p Thoughts concerning the necessity of a peaceful settlement of conflicts run like a red thread through the whole work of Dahl. In principle, Marxists are also in favour of peaceful ways of settling all social conflicts. They are also in favour of a peaceful form for carrying out the socialist revolution. Marxist theory even admits the purchasing and not confiscation of the enterprises of the capitalists, if this is possible in the general course of the revolution. Non-peaceful forms for solving the basic social conflicts in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are made necessary by the exploiting ruling class, which pits forces against the will of the working people, against their endeavour to replace the outdated and unjust capitalist system by the socialist system by peaceful means.

p The limitedness, from which the pluralistic defence of bourgeois democracy suffers, has also been pointed out by a number of theoreticians of state monopoly capitalism. The authors of the collective work ’The Bias of Pluralism’, published under the editorship of William E.Connolly in New York in 1969, think that ’democratic pluralism’ is the predominant conception in the political theory of the contemporary capitalist states with 90 competing party systems. But according to their own confession, pluralism is a theory, which is one- dimensional and not so much wrong as it is systematically misleading’. (97, p. 1, 2). This is a confession that political pluralism is only a form of bourgeois democracy. J.Freund writes in the same spirit:’liberal democracy is a social system which favours pluralism and the institutionalization of parties, unlike the Jacobinic democracy which strives to achieve unanimity. . . ’ (112, p. 385).

p Some bourgeois authors go so far as to equate political pluralism with bourgeois democracy. Thus, Manfred Welan writes: ’According to pluralist democracy, the party and unions are not an inevitable evil, but prerequisites and consequences of a democracy in action. Pluralism in the sense of coordination, of a parallel organizing of contradictory interests inside the state community, is typical of a democracy, resting on human dignity, personal freedom, equal possibilities, freedom of association and competition.’ (173, S. 22).

p What is true here is that bourgeois democracy is based on one of the most important principles of the capitalist social system—competition. It cannot be otherwise. What is false, though, is the assertions of Welan and all other champions of bourgeois democracy that it rests on ’human dignity, personal freedom, equal possibilities and freedom of association’. These great ideas were sincerely espoused by’progressive bourgeois ideologists in the epoch when the capitalist system itself was still a progressive social system and the bourgeoisie was fighting against the obscurantism of the Middle Ages. In actual fact, however, especially under late capitalism, they have taken on a mainly formal character.

p Let us make a summary. The political superstructure in capitalist society in one or another form reflects the heterogeneous and diverse, not pluralistic but hierarchical socio-economic structure, based on domination and subordination, because the different classes are by no means equal and do not enjoy equal opportunities to defend their interests. The dominating 91 class, the bourgeoisie, also secures its dominating position in the superstructure, first of all through the organization of the state, and then through its political, cultural, educational, information and propaganda institutions and organizations for which it safeguards a leading position under all circumstances.

The working people and above all the working class, in spite of the overt and covert resistance of the bourgeoisie, also sets up its own political parties, trade unions and other mass organizations to defend its interests. However, there is no capitalist country in which the organizations of the working people enjoy truly equal conditions with the organizations of the dominating class, as pluralism maintains.