ABSTRACT
THE attitude of Marx and Engels toward the political institutions of liberal parliamentary democracy was ambivalent. On the one hand, they saw the democratic republic in bourgeois society as being, like all previous forms of the state, a class dictatorship. The liberal democratic state was a camouflaged “bourgeois dictatorship.”1 Its representative government and universal suffrage meant no more than the opportunity of “deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in parliament.”2 Yet Marx and Engels were not inclined to dismiss democratic political institutions as useless or unimportant. Rather they saw in them a school of political training for the working class in bourgeois society, a stimulus to the growth of revolutionary class consciousness in the proletariat. For the debate by which parliamentary democracy lived necessarily had to spread to the larger society outside: “The parliamentary regime leaves everything to the decision of majorities; how shall the great majorities outside parliament not Want to decide? When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected but that those down below dance?”3
