Definition of Democracy and its Responsibility

The word "Democracy" literally means "government (power) by the people." Usually the
word is employed to designate or to illustrate the parliamentary regimes which developed
in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century on the British ordeal. These regimes
not only were not governments by the entire people or representatives elected through
electoral process and• qualifications generally excluded nine-tenths of the inhabitants
from all exercise of political rights as the citizen but not even direct governments of the
owning upper social classes. They were representative and indirect parliamentary
governments. Their mode of operation was perfectly characterized by Marx when he said
that once every four years, they permitted the mass of electors to designate the members
of the ruling class who were to govern the country.

However, tracing through the historic origin of the parliamentary "democracy" of the
nineteenth century is in fact to be found in a direct democracy: the petty-bourgeois
democracy of the medieval communes. The lessons were observed that this kind of
democracy disintegrated following the rise of capitalist trade and monarchical absolutism.
Under specific condition (certain Swiss cantons and Scandinavian agricultural
communities; pioneer regions in tile Middle West of the U. S. in. the nineteenth century,
etc.) thus this advanced form of democracy was able to subsist and to temporarily
reproduce itself up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The distinctive principle of
direct democracy and representative "democracy" is in the inexistence of an artificial
mental construction.

According to Kal Marx in Maximilien Rubel (1983), democracy refers to government of

the people by the people, and it would only acquire its true meaning in a classless society
freed from all state power and political mediation. Two distinct concepts in Marx,
democracy and communism, designate two stages in a single movement, political and
social revolution. The first stage, the ''conquest of democracy'' by •the working class that
commonly leads to the ''dictatorship of the proletariat." The second, the abolition of social
classes and political power, gives birth to human society. The distinction is essential to
the understanding of Marx's politics. Leaving aside the manifold ramifications of his
political sociology.
In simple words, democracy system is a system where people have their right to draft the
law and the policy that will be implemented to govern a state. Through the theory by Karl
Marx, the extreme democracy can be seen in a communist or anarchy system. According
to him, communism is a last stage of social development in a state that implemented
direct democracy.