Democracy: The Revolution and the Counterrevolutions

Democratists will have to get used to the idea that communists are counterrevolutionaries. For many years that is what communists have accused us of being. They mean, of course, that we oppose and work against their revolution.

To begin with, their movement is not revolutionary - ours is. Their movement is not revolutionary because Abraham Lincoln has said, "Revolutions do not go backward." What Lincoln meant was that genuine revolutions lead to freedom; they don't drag people back into some form of tyranny. But communism goes backward, dragging people and nations into tyranny while democracy moves forward toward freedom. So according to Abraham Lincoln, communism is not revolutionary.

The real revolution is the democratic revolution - the one that began here in America more than two hundred years ago and which is gradually spreading to every nation on earth.

Democracy has been the driving force of human history for more than two centuries. The changes brought about by the democratic movement attest to the fact that it is truly a genuine and authentic revolutionary movement.

Anti-democratic political movements often pretend to be revolutionary but they offer nothing new or unique to the human race or to the world. "It is all the same old serpent," according to Lincoln.

Since ours is a genuine revolution then all those acting against the growth of democracy in the world are counterrevolutionaries. When we designate persons or groups as counterrevolutionaries we are defining their relationship to our revolution. If you work to oppose the democratic movement and the democratic movement is revolutionary, then you are a counterrevolutionary plain and simple.

Marxist-Leninists the world over have continually opposed and suppressed democracy wherever they found it. In Russia in 1917 after the fall of the Czar, a deliberative assembly, the Duma, had begun functioning. The Reds, in a bid for power, sent armed troops to suppress the Duma and closed it down, preventing it from functioning. That was a counterrevolutionary act. Had they left the Duma alone Russia might well have developed along democratic lines. Suppressing democratic activity is always a counterrevolutionary act.

Next: Democracy: The Various Forms of Counterrevolution »