Basic civil rights and liberties are great achievements of
the past democratic revolutions. They are necessary although not sufficient conditions of free human life in any society. A critique of these rights which rejects or disparages them as merely formal, abstract, or bourgeois is devoid of historical sense and expresses an aggressive obscurantism, particularly when it comes from societies which not only have not overcome this bourgeois level, but have not yet even approached it. These rights are surely limited, and in conditions of a very unequal distribution of wealth and of material and spiritual misery in which great parts of the population are still condemned to live, these rights indeed partly express only abstract possibilities which, for economic reasons, cannot be brought to life. But it is equally true that changes in economic systems without an essential political democratization do not lead to really new and more just forms of society. They tend to keep alive authoritarian institutions analogous to those in feudal society, in the same way as one-sided political democratization, without economic democratization, made the survival of slavery possible in the U.S. during a whole century from Washington to Lincoln. Socialist revolutions in our century rejected imperial and royal autocracies because they were imperial and royal, and not because any autocracy is incompatible with the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Power remained completely concentrated: it was possible to command from one single center not only executives, but also legislators and judges. The individual was called citizen and comrade, but the level of civil rights and of civil consciousness which had already been reached in the eighteenth century remained a distant, almost unattainable goal of political development. Instead of being a civil servant responsible to citizens, the state functionary keeps demanding proofs of political loyalty from them. The power fully controls people instead of being controlled by them. Instead of reaching the maximum of personal 1
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security when they behave in accordance with the constitution of
their country, citizens end up in jail when they interpret literally those articles of the constitution which guarantee to them freedom of speech, freedom of public manifestation and demonstration, freedom of political organization. It is true that bourgeois representative democracy can no longer be considered the optimal form for the political organization of society. It is, however, the necessary initial level of a democratic society. The presupposition of democracy is the recognition that demos (the people), is mature, able to make basic decisions, able, among other things, to elect its representatives. With nineteenth century political parties, powerful mediators between citizens and their representatives appeared on the historical stage. As a consequence of this mediation, the influence of the voters over elected representatives was diminished, the power of political parties and theirfactions in parliament was increased and alienated. This alienation reaches its maximum when a single, monolithic, authoritarian party monopolizes all political power. Under such conditions, elections no longer express the peoples will but its loyalty; they are no longer a right but an obligation. The purpose of the principle of limitation of re-election was to prevent a permanent alienation of the elected representatives from the electorate, and in some bourgeois societies it has been strictly respected for the last two centuries. By contrast, the institution of ruling cadres who can be removed only by the action of biological laws or as a consequence of disloyalty to the sovereign leader is much closer to a feudal than to a new socialist society. The present struggle for the practical realization of civil and human rights is a new dimension of contemporary emancipatory aspirations. To the extent that it stops being a mere phase of confrontation between governments and ideological camps, and achieves the character of a mass movement, it will contribute essentially to the abolition of present-day barriers to human freedom and social justice.
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To be sure, in different societies it will assume different
forms and priorities. In the countries of developed capitalism it is possible to use the level of political liberties already achieved in order to abolish present-day forms of economic exploitation and social oppression. In the countries of state socialism, an obvious prior need is the overcoming of state absolutism and a thoroughgoing political democratization. In the countries of the Third World it is essential that the basic material and cultural preconditions for the implementation of human rights be created, the growth of oppressive institutions and mechanisms adopted from modern industrial society be avoided, and the attempt be made to preserve still existing pre-industrial forms of human solidarity and autonomy. In none of these different situations will a higher level of human rights and liberties emerge spontaneously, nor will it be granted to a society by its government: it will be achieved only by the resolute struggle of various emancipatory movements. Even in the most difficult conditions, even without any political organization, strong, fearless individuals and groups may keep alive great emancipatory ideas of the past, and by their own example may contribute to the awakening of an elementary civil conscience.