The bourgeoisie want these rights and freedoms to advance their own interests, as against the old ruling-class, and to gain the support of workers, are led to present them as rights and freedoms to be enjoyed by all, but, once it has become ruling-class, it immediately begins to constrain all such rights and freedoms, even outside a revolutionary situation. Its only necessary to look at the restrictions on trades unions, the right to protest, and so on to see that. And, of course, with any real challenge by workers to the interests of capital, the façade of that bourgeois-democracy is swept away, with no second thought. It can only be seen as providing a “breathing space”, by opportunists, whose vision is of workers, remaining passive and constrained within the limits that the ruling class, itself, imposes.
But, its precisely because of all that that Marxists utilise that bourgeois-democracy the better to expose it, to drive these contradictions to breaking point.
“But that is a struggle on the democratic plane. Soviet power signifies the monopoly of the press, of assembly, etc., in the hands of the proletariat.” (p 202)
In a non-revolutionary period, it is only possible to expose the contradictions and sham nature of bourgeois-democracy propagandistically. We can raise demands for the abolition of Monarchy, aristocracy, for proportional representation, and so on, even with little chance of achieving it, so as to expose the claims of equality and democracy; we can oppose anti-union laws, and laws against assembly and protest; we can demand the election of state officials, and creation of militia, and so on. But, doing this creates the groundwork for undermining that sham democracy, and actively seeking to counterpoise proletarian democracy when the conditions change.
“The Communist Party is fighting at present not for power, but to maintain, to consolidate and to develop its contact with the masses for the sake of the struggle for power in the future. The struggle to win the masses is inevitably bound up with the struggle conducted against the violence which the Guomindang bureaucracy practices towards the mass organizations, their meetings, their press, etc. During the period that is to follow immediately, will the Communist Party fight for freedom of the press or will it leave this to be done by a “third party”? Will the Communist Party confine itself to presenting democratic, isolated, partial demands (freedom of the press, of assembly, etc.), which would amount to liberal reformism, or will it put forward the most consistent slogans of democracy? In the political sphere, this signifies popular representation based upon universal suffrage.” (p 202-3)
Again, here, is, then, seen the true nature of the transitional method. It is not the actual demand that is reformist, transitional or revolutionary, but the time and purpose of its use. A demand which, in a revolutionary situation, is transitional, or revolutionary, becomes, at any other time, either meaningless phrase-mongering, or else is simply cover for deceiving and incorporating the workers, as with the demand for workers' control, or for a Workers' Government.
“It is not by devoting oneself to empirical conjectures as to the possibility of realizing some transitional demand or not, that the question relating to it is settled. It is its social and historical character that decides: is it progressive from the point of view of the subsequent development of society? Does it correspond to the historical interests of the proletariat? Does it strengthen the consciousness of the latter? Does it bring it closer to its dictatorship? Thus for example, the demand for the prohibition of trusts is petty-bourgeois and reactionary and, as the experiences of America have shown, it is completely utopian. Under certain conditions, on the contrary, it is entirely progressive and correct to demand workers’ control over the trusts, even though it is more than doubtful that this will ever be realized within the framework of the bourgeois state. The fact that this demand is not satisfied so long as the bourgeoisie rules must push the workers to the revolutionary overthrow of the latter. Thus, the impossibility of realizing a slogan from the political point of view can be no less fruitful than the relative possibility of putting it into practice.” (p 203-4)
And, here, also is the application of the transitional method, in relation to permanent revolution, and the mistaken view of both those concepts by large sections of the “left”. A transitional demand cannot turn a counter-revolutionary, or non-revolutionary period/situation into a revolutionary period/situation. It may have educative power, in those conditions, but it only has power in conditions of rising class struggle, to take the existing reformist/centrist class consciousness of the majority of workers, and to transform it, in the process of struggle, for that demand, into a revolutionary class consciousness.
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