Roots of the NDR
With any course, one must decide where to begin. In the case of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), what is immediately crucial is an understanding of class struggle and of class alliances in history.
Such a study could begin as long ago as 367 BC, with the Conflict of the Orders in the Roman Republic, and proceed through the class struggles involving, for example, the Gracchus brothers [Pictured: Gaius Gracchus, Tribune of the People], Julius Caesar and others, that led in 27 BC to the stagnant class truce called the Roman Empire, that after four centuries declined and fell (in its Western half) into a Dark Age. Class struggle is the engine of history. Without it, there is very little movement, or there is "the common ruin of the contending classes" of which Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto.
We could alternatively begin in 1512 with Machiavelli, and the class struggles of Renaissance (i.e. “born again”) Italy, where multiple city-states with populations of 100,000 or more were embroiled in internal and external class conflicts.
Leviathan
We could go to Thomas Hobbes, who published his book Leviathan in 1651, describing the politics of the bigger national states of Northern Europe (Like Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands) which had by his time surpassed the politics of Italy as the main theatre of recorded historical process.
These European machinations could be our workbook and our political sandpit, for the main reason that there is a record of them. There is very little virtue, but there is a literature.
French Revolution
But we might as well rather begin, as Frederick Engels does in the first part of his “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific” (see the link below), with the Great French Revolution that started in 1789. From this point on we can meet, in their developed form, the class protagonists who allied and clashed from that time until now, in all possible permutations: alliances holy and unholy, strategic and tactical, marriages of convenience and marriages made in heaven; and we can have, for the most part, the benefit of Marx and Engels as eyewitnesses or near-eyewitnesses.
These classes were the feudal aristocrats; the peasants; the bourgeoisie; and the proletariat.
Using this work of Engels’ as a starting point has the additional benefit of introducing the rudiments of political philosophy, and leading our thoughts towards the “democratic bourgeois republic”, which is at one and the same time the highest form of political life before socialism, the prerequisite of concerted proletarian action, and a form of the State that has to be transcended.
In other words, our study of the NDR will bring us, as history has already brought us in life, to the kind of crisis that Lenin outlined so sharply in “The State and Revolution,” when majority rule is no longer an adequate substitute for the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all, social self-management, the end of class struggle, the withering away of the state, and the fully classless society called communism.
Further (optional) reading:
1201a, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx (8317 words)
Comments
But how should we envisage such a society?
The cultural forces that have been released by revolutions are immense. Even partial revolutions, revolutions that did not eliminate class distinctions have a vast cultural power. The French revolution was the motor and envy of British writers, artists, philosophers. So was the Mexican revolution. It recast history, turning the "poor benighted Indians" into historical protagonists and heroes. To say nothing of the Russian revolution.
Now this cultural power of revolution is hugely underestimated. In Britain we have a sinecure for the bourgoise and haute bourgoise in art and culture. The cutural life of this country is stifling and controlled by the establishment that uses co-option as its weapon of choice.
I've seen glimmers of what a socialist and communist society might be like and they blew me away. I've seen people's relationships completely transformed. I've seen co-operation and true generosity where before competition and selfishness were encouraged. I saw glimmers of this new world in Cuba and the former Soviet Union where people were transformed.
I think I'd like to share some of these glimmers.
This is a series that will roll out for a while, but I think you have already sussed the main "problematique" of the whole thing. Yes, we must have democracy. We must have it from corner to corner and from bottom to top. But that is not the end of the matter. The NDR is a precondition for socialism. It is the groundwork for the "vast association of the whole nation, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" That is from the end of the second section of the Communist Manifesto of 1848.