Against the canonization of democracy

Abstract

In 1977, on the occasion of the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, speaking in Moscow as general secretary of the then Italian Communist Party (PCI), Enrico Berlinguer declared, with emphasis appropriate to the solemnity of the circumstance, that “the Democracy is today not only the terrain on which the class adversary is forced to retreat, but it is also the historically universal value on which to found an original socialist society”. The political impact of this position was considerable. Emphasizing, in contrast to the Soviet hosts, at a time when the power of the USSR seemed intact, that the democratic achievements of the labor movement and its historical allies in European capitalist states (starting with Italy itself) constituted universal rights, he put an end to notorious incoherence of the international communist movement, which demanded, in bourgeois countries, respect for freedoms denied to Soviet citizens and made clear its rejection of the political order in force in the “real socialism” of the time.