In the 19th century,
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels called for the international political unification of the European
working classes in order to achieve a
communist revolution. It also proposed that since the socio-economic organization of
communism was of a higher form than that of
capitalism, a workers'
revolution would first occur in the economically advanced industrialized countries. Marxist
social democracy was strongest in Germany throughout the 19th century, and the
Social Democratic Party of Germany inspired
Vladimir Lenin and other Russian Marxists. During the revolutionary ferment of the
Russian Revolution of 1905 and 1917, there arose working-class grassroots attempts of
direct democracy with
soviets (Russian for
council). According to Lenin and other theorists of the
Soviet Union, the soviets represent the democratic will of the working class and are thus the embodiment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin and the
Bolsheviks saw the soviet as the basic organizing unit of society in a communist system and supported this form of democracy. Thus, the results of the long-awaited
1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election, which Lenin's
Bolshevik Party lost to the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, were nullified when the
All-Russian Constituent Assembly was disbanded in January 1918. Russian historian
Vadim Rogovin attributed the establishment of the
one-party system to the conditions which were "imposed on Bolshevism by hostile political forces". Rogovin highlighted the fact that the Bolsheviks made strenuous efforts to preserve the Soviet parties such as the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the
Mensheviks, and other left-wing parties within the bounds of Soviet legality and their participation in the Soviets on the condition of abandoning armed struggle against the Bolsheviks. Similarly, British historian
E. H. Carr drew attention to the fact "the larger section of the party (the SR party – V.R) had made a coalition with the Bolsheviks, and formally broke from the other section which maintained its bitter feud against the Bolsheviks." Functionally, the Leninist
vanguard party was to provide the working class with the
political consciousness (education and organisation) and revolutionary leadership necessary to depose capitalism in
Imperial Russia. After the
October Revolution of 1917,
Leninism was the dominant version of Marxism in Russia; in establishing
soviet democracy, the Bolshevik régime suppressed socialists who opposed the revolution, such as the Mensheviks and factions of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Leon Trotsky argued that he and Lenin had intended to lift the ban on the
opposition parties such as the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries as soon as the economic and social conditions of
Soviet Russia had improved. In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. In December 1917, Sovnarkom established a
Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade. Adopting a
left-libertarian perspective, both the
left communists and some factions in the Bolshevik Party critiqued the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, some socialists decried Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing
socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of widespread political participation, popular consultation, and
industrial democracy. Following
Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power in the Soviet Union and static centralization of political power, Trotsky condemned the
Soviet government's policies for lacking widespread democratic participation on the part of the population and for suppressing
workers' self-management and democratic participation in the management of the economy. Because these authoritarian political measures were inconsistent with the organizational precepts of socialism, Trotsky characterized the Soviet Union as a
deformed workers' state that would not be able to effectively transition to
Marxist socialism. Ostensibly
socialist states where democracy is lacking, yet the economy is largely in the hands of the state, are termed by
orthodox Trotskyist theories as
degenerated or deformed workers' states and not socialist states. Trotsky and
Trotskyists have associated democracy in this context with
multi-party socialist representation, autonomous union organizations (
economic democracy), internal party democracy, and the mass participation of the working masses. == Communist Party of China ==