National Democracy

Structure of the concept

National democracy was a framework in Soviet Marxist-Leninist theory for the revolutions of colonial and semi-colonial countries. The national liberation struggle concerned the establishment of an independent state, the national democratic revolution concerned revolutionaries seizing power in a newly independent state, and the national democratic state concerned the transition from a pre-capitalist or capitalist mode of production to the socialist one. According to the scholar Irina Filatova, the concept described a two-stage process: the national liberation struggle, synonymous at that point with the national democratic revolution, and the initiation of socialist construction. The premise was that an advanced superstructure could be established even where the material base was insufficiently developed, and that this superstructure would then level up the material base and hasten socialist construction.

Class analysis

The framework was tied to a reworking of class relations in Third World societies. Rostislav Ulyanovsky, deputy head of the CPSU International Department, argued that their social structure was pre-capitalist and primarily pre-feudal, with bourgeois relations only superficially developed in commodity production and money circulation. Karen Brutents held that these societies rested on family and tribal ties, caste prejudice and religious affiliation rather than class relations.

Within this framework the national bourgeoisie, unlike the Western bourgeoisie, were not capitalist owners and were not classified as an exploiting class. Mostly petty tradesmen in trade, services, money exchange and lending, they were marginalised by Western ownership of the largest enterprises; foreign capital and the discriminatory colonial state, Brutents argued, drove them towards the liberation struggle rather than the defence of the existing order. The petty bourgeoisie were credited with revolutionary potential while being described as dual in nature because of their ties to private property. The small size of the proletariat was acknowledged by Brutents himself, who warned against overstating the role of the working class on the strength of wage-worker figures borrowed from developed capitalist countries.

Relation to other concepts

National democracy was closely tied to revolutionary democracy and the non-capitalist way of development. The 1960 Moscow meeting defined the national democratic state as the political form of the activity of the revolutionary democracy; Filatova judged that there were no tangible criteria for recognising a revolutionary democracy or a national democratic state. Even so, states described as socialist-oriented emerged from the early 1960s, and aid and diplomatic recognition followed the framework.

National democracy should be distinguished from the Chinese Communist Party's New Democracy. From 1940 Mao Zedong contrasted old democracy, the conservative revolution led by the bourgeoisie, with New Democracy, the genuine democratic revolution led by the proletariat, and argued that every colonial or semi-colonial country would have its own path. After the Second World War, people's democracy was the term used in Eastern Europe and Asia for a comparable alliance-based conception.

Application and diffusion

The longest-lived case of the concept was South Africa. The African National Congress made the national democratic revolution its official programme through the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 and the Morogoro strategy and tactics document of 1969, and the national democratic revolution became a starting point for policy analysis of the country.

In Korea, the term entered political usage in South Korea when the democracy movement of the 1980s split into the National Liberation and People's Democracy currents, each propounding its own version of a national democratic or people's democratic revolution.

Limits

National democracy was a theoretical instrument through which the Soviet Union related to Third World liberation movements during the Cold War. The national liberation struggle and the national democratic revolution were frequently treated as the same thing, and whether aid to socialist-oriented states actually produced the claimed state-building results remains a matter to be assessed case by case. When the Soviet Union abandoned the line in the late 1980s, the associated research and aid structures were wound down with it.