Historically, democratic revolution is the bridge leading from the feudal to the bourgeois order. The English and the French revolutions (mid 17th and late 18th centuries respectively) were classic examples, which abolished serfdom and monarchy and ushered in the parliamentary republic. Being anti-feudal, the democratic revolution has as its main force the broad peasant masses. In England and France it was led by the rising capitalist class.
Socialist revolution, such as the November revolution in Russia (1917), signifies the passage from capitalism to socialism. It abolishes capitalist private property, hands over to the whole people the major means of production, which are managed by the socialist state (see chapter on “the state”). The leading force of the socialist revolution is the working class allied with other working people.
However, as Lenin remarked in Our Revolution, “while the development of world history follows general laws … certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or sequence of this development.” What happened is that with the growing strength of the working class movement, particularly after the Paris Commune (1871), the bourgeoisie took fright, entered into a historic compromise with feudal forces against the toiling people, and abandoned the task of democratic revolution, which therefore had to be taken up by the new revolutionary class, the modern proletariat. This adds a whole new dimension to the character of democratic revolution, for unlike the bourgeoisie, the working class cannot stop with the democratic revolution but carries it uninterruptedly to the socialist stage. Lenin expressed this very succinctly in Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution:
“The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion, allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the autocracy’s resistance by force and paralyse the bourgeoisie’s instability. The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution, allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population, so as to crush the bourgeoisie’s resistance by force and paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.” (emphasis in the original)
Although the above statement pertained in particular to Russia in the early 20th century and summed up the Bolshevik position on the steady advance from democratic (attempted in 1905 and successfully accomplished in February 1917) to socialist (November 1917) revolutions, it opened up new vistas for the progress of revolutionary theory and practice. On this basis Mao Zedong developed his theory of new (or people’s) democratic revolution, which provided broad guidelines for revolutions in the backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the era of imperialism. The Indian revolution today is in the stage of people’s democratic revolution, with agrarian revolution as the axis and feudal remnants, imperialism and big capital as main targets. As the general programme of the CPI(ML) proclaims:
“The primary aim of this democratic revolution will be to sweep away all feudal remnants, abolish imperialist domination, restrain and control big capital by effective taxation, nationalisation and other means, and democratise the entire apparatus and mechanism of governance. Victorious democratic revolution will therefore also mark a bold step towards socialism and strengthen the material basis for an uninterrupted socialist transition.”
