ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Marxist conception of socialism and the role of institutional forms that specifically mediate the revolutionary process and the process of socialist construction. One of the goals of this chapter is to challenge well-established mainstream and critical views about the socialist constitutional form. To this end, it dialectically approaches the abstract opposition between democracy and bureaucracy that has fuelled attacks on the role of the party and on the Soviet form. The chapter explores themes such as the socialist conception of democracy as it appeared in the 1918 Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic; the tension between the democratic form and the revolutionary interest (‘salus revolutionis’) by focusing on the examples of the Paris Commune and the October Revolution; the role of the party principle as a counterpart to the principle of socialist democracy; and the conception of socialist constitutionalism as a cogwheel mechanism.
