BY GEORGE NOVACK  
Democracy has different meanings to different people—and to different classes. Some scholars contend that the concept is too vague and variegated to be precisely or adequately defined. Their doubts come from the fact that the content and forms of democracy have changed considerably in the course of its development. New historical conditions and social alignments have brought new types of democracy into being and novel aspects of democracy to consider and be realized.

Despite this diversity, the essential features of this mode of rule can be discerned and formulated. In the first chapter, political democracy is discriminated from primitive tribal equality and defined as a special kind of government in class society representing, in reality or in pretension, the supremacy of the many over the few through the mechanism of the territorial state.

The nature of democracy as well as its prospects can best be understood by tracing the main stages of its evolution. Political democracy, like every other social phenomenon, is the child of time. It preconditions were created in the womb of class society. It came to birth among certain Greek city-states of the first millennium B.C…. After being stamped out in antiquity, urban democracy again rose to find an uneasy seat in the medieval communes of Western Europe. Later on, democratic and republican nation-states which marked the accession of bourgeois forces to power were established through popular revolutions against the monarchy. Capitalist democracy acquired a matured parliamentary form during the nineteenth century….

The next American revolution will have to be prepared for by a bold and uncompromising examination of long-established political ideas and institutions, much like that performed by Tom Paine and his associates. In this book I have tried to undertake such a criticism in connection with a review of the evolution of democracy in the Western world.

This survey should show that democracy is not static, uniform or fixed but a dynamic, diversified, changing product of socioeconomic development; that the prevailing form of democracy in the United States is not permanent but transitory and has seen its best days; that the overwhelming political power accruing to the representatives of the wealthy is not only incompatible with genuine democracy but an ever-present threat to the continuance of the existing rights of Americans; and that both capitalism and its bourgeois democracy are destined to be superseded by a higher form of economic and political organization guaranteeing far more freedoms to the people.

These conclusions may infuriate upholders of the status quo. They will be scoffed at by those skeptics who refuse to admit that history and politics have had any logical line of development or that the class conflicts of our time can have any determinate and foreseeable revolutionary outcome.

The realization of the perspectives projected above depends, of course, upon a favorable forward movement by the people of the United States and their victory over the forces of reaction. But the class struggle can take a retrogressive turn here as elsewhere if the monopolists and militarists, threatened and at bay, should succeed in scrapping all existing democratic institutions and destroying the rights of the people, as the bestial fascist palace guards of the German and Italian capitalists felt obliged to do between the First and Second World Wars.

The rulers of this country are certainly capable of such a criminal political course at home. The repressions against Afro-Americans, the restrictions upon democratic and labor rights, the reinforcement of the presidency, the growth of the power of the military and the specter of a fascist mobilization in the future all point in that direction.

The anticapitalist forces have to be aroused against these undemocratic trends in American politics in order to take steps to check and reverse them and resolutely lead the country toward the greater democracy promised by a triumphant socialist movement of the working masses. This book is designed to further such objectives.  
 
 
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