(Miliband, 1969: 268). But he conceded that ‘the British political
system does incorporate a number of democratic features which
makes it possible for “ordinary people” to make themselves heard’.
The system of ‘capitalist democracy’ is one of competition between
capital and labour with a strong bias in favour of the former. There is
‘permanent and fundamental contradiction or tension between the
promise of popular power enshrined in universal suffrage, and the
curbing or denying of that promise in practice’ (Miliband, 1984: 1).
Miliband was pessimistic about the potential of social democrats to
empower ordinary people whilst regarding orthodox communists as
too authoritarian. In practice he appears to anticipate a great danger
of a drift from capitalist democracy to ‘capitalist authoritarianism’
(Miliband, 1984: 154).
A radical break with Stalinism is represented by a number of minor
Marxist groups that were influenced by the writings of Leon Trotsky
(born Lev Davidovich Bronstein) [1879–1940]. Trotsky had been a
major colleague of Lenin’s in the revolutionary period – acting as
military Chief of Staff during the revolution and actually espousing
the possibility of an independent Russian revolution before the
Bolshevik Party in the pre-revolutionary era. After his expulsion by
Stalin from the USSR, and before his assassination on Stalin’s orders
in Mexico in 1940, Trotsky denounced the way in which Communist
Party rule had created a new class of exploiters in the Soviet Union –
the party ‘Apparatachiks’ (Trotsky, 1945). This theme was elaborated
by other critics such as Milovan Djilas (1966) who aligned himself
with the revisionist Yugoslav regime. Under Tito the Yugoslavs
attempted to develop a more humane and participative version of
communism in which workplace democracy and multinational
participation played a greater role than in the USSR.
The events in Paris of 1968 are a vivid illustration of the diversity
of the modern left (Seale and McConville, 1968). A student protest
against the Gaullist government’s somewhat inept attempts to ban
politics from university campuses mushroomed into larger demands
for university reform, the end of the Vietnam war and finally
the replacement of the de Gaulle regime by a true ‘participative’
democracy. The occupation of factories by strikers, the erection of
barricades in Paris and a general strike were felt to lay the ground for
a revolution by the student-led Trotskyist and Maoist ‘groupuscules’
who led many of the protests. The orthodox Communist Party,80 IDEOLOGIES