What exactly is the 'democratic republic'?

[Flying Purple People Eater]

title asks all.

[Q]

Opinions on it vary, but it in general is referred to as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Engels spoke about it as such (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm):


If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown [note: The 1871 Paris Commune is meant here - Q].

Of course he was talking about a specific context here: A critique against the draft Erfurt Programme where explicit calls for a democratic republic were not made as to avoid a re-enabling of the 'socialist laws' that oppressed the workers movement in preceding years.

Lenin later on gave another content to the term (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm), making it something that exists within capitalism.

I would go with Engels' content to the term, although left somewhat unexplained. The "Democratic Republic", being made equal to the DotP is somewhat of a catch-all phrase that could mean soviet rule, a demarchy, or something else that expresses working class political hegemony.

[TheRedAnarchist23]

I only know about the Democratic Republic of Congo : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_the_Congo

[jookyle]

I think we need a bit more context here. If you were to look into a political theory text book you'd get two different meanings depending on what you read. One would say it was a republic in which the population chooses the representatives (also called a republic democracy) and the other would be a republic in which the representatives conduct business in a way that would be considered democratic, as in the reps vote amongst themselves. The latter is probably in the minority of definitions as the description is more common to an oligarchy, but still, it gets called that way.

Although, I have a feeling you have a specific application of the word in mind while asking this question.

[Zeus the Moose]

I'd largely agree with Q on this point, with the addition that I think calling for a "democratic republic" as a synonym for the rule of the working class is a useful way of condensing our opposition to the current political order, albeit one that does require the explanation that current states, despite a greater or lesser degree of formal democracy in their functioning, are not in fact democratic states (republics or otherwise.)

Calling for a republic is I think somewhat obvious, as it implies opposition to the permanent subordination of one group of individuals to another that is inherent in a monarchical system. A democratic republic would be a republic that is structured to reflect majority rule in all (or almost all) circumstances, as opposed to having constitutional structures in place which "mediate" the will of the majority through procedures such as requiring supermajorites to get things passed (like in order to modify the US constitution), the existence of executive power beyond the most formal level, and a court system that is effectively above the legislature in terming what laws can be passed. These, to me, all seem like necessary preconditions for the rule of the working class to be effective.

[Aurora]

It's a form of state that is a combination of a republic, where the government is considered a public matter rather than the property of a family or god and a democracy where the majority rules or decides who rules.

So for example Saudi Arabia is neither a democracy nor a republic, Britain is a democracy but not a republic, Turkmenistan isn't a democracy but is a republic and France is a democracy and a republic.

In all these countries the bourgeoisie rule and they are capable of ruling with a wide variety of state forms, monarchies, democracies, military rule etc.

The bourgeois democratic republic is the best form for the proletariat because it allows it to organise itself into a party, propagate it's views, participate in politics and prepare itself for the overthrow of the bourgeois state. But the Paris Commune and Russian Revolution show us that the democratic republic is also the form through which the proletariat exercises it's dictatorship, not the sham democracy of the capitalists but a proletarian democracy, by bringing democracy into every village and city by making all representatives recallable and on a workers wage by making democracy accessible to all by reducing the working day and making available public buildings and press and other such measures.

[commieathighnoon]

The problem is in the mid-19th c. it was taken for granted the rising ebb of workers' struggles under capitalism, and the expansion of the franchise to universal suffrage, would inevitably allow the workers' to contest power through the electoral system and conquer it. Marx and Engels clearly believed that the workers primary struggle in their time would be to struggle for universal suffrage, or the electoral party to take advantage of it. Over a century down the line, with the universal-suffragist republic the nearly uniform guise of the dictatorship of capital, we are obliged to take a more critical and nuanced view.