The Leninist-Stalinist-Trotskyist view was fatal to any notion of democratic socialism. It was fatal because it identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the Communist Party-and a minority party at that-over the proletariat, and all other groups and classes. The position is explicit in the canonic writings of Lenin and Stalin and in the practices of every regime that has come to power under the aegis of Leninism or of Marxism as Lenin interpreted it. In a long series of writings, I have shown the way in which this identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the Party prepared the way for totalitarianism and the Gulag Archipelagos of the world.

Somewhat to my surprise, I discovered that this identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the Party was shared, and sometimes militantly defended, by the other major factions of the Communist movement. The conception of workers' democracy became the watchword of the American Workers' party alone. The first surprise was supplied by the Trotskyists, who had won considerable sympathy among left-moving intellectuals by their criticisms of the repressive practices of the Stalinist regime. This brings me a little ahead of my story. After the American Workers' Party was launched, the Trotskyist Communist League of America proposed a merger of the two organizations. Burnham, J. B. S. Hardman, and I were on the negotiating committee for the AWP, Max Shachtman, Arne Swabeck, and Martin Abern for the CLA. At our very first meeting, it became clear to us that the Trotskyists could not conceive a situation in which the workers' democratic councils could overrule the Party or indeed one in which there would be plural working class parties. The meeting dissolved in intense disagreement.

On the eve of the merger between the two organizations (the Trotskyists changed their tune completely at subsequent meetings and hypocritically professed agreement with us), I published an article entitled "Workers' Democracy," which argued for a "commonsense democratic way out of the impasse of capitalism" and maintained that the ideals enshrined in the American revolutionary tradition, "equality of opportunity," "the equal rights of all citizens to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," "peace and security for the masses" could best be realized under socialism. Despite this emphasis on democracy, it suffered from the old illusion that the fundamental conflict was between socialism and capitalism rather than between democracy and totalitarianism, but its emphasis on democracy, and the social and economic requirements for its fulfillment, were unmistakable. The article provoked a strong response from Will Herberg, the chief ideologist, after Bertram Wolfe, of the Lovestone Communist Opposition.

Herberg openly expressed the position that the outcome of workers' democracy could not be permitted to take its course if the consequences of that course, in the eyes of the Communist Party or its leadership, did not further the health of the revolution. It now became apparent why, to all Leninists, the spontaneous outcry of the Kronstadt sailors and their supporters, "The Soviets without the dictatorship of the Communist Party," was counterrevolutionary!
Although Muste claimed, after the merger with the CLA, to have been converted to the revolutionary Marxist-Leninist doctrine, I was never persuaded that he truly understood it or was motivated by it. He was first and foremost a moralist, not because he was a preacher or because of his religious training, but because he viewed human actions simply as right or wrong, regardless of context. To his credit he shrugged off expressions like "historically determined" or "organizationally necessary," but to be indifferent to what was possible or probable was something else again. He rarely thought through a position but would adopt one on moral grounds that were rarely affected by the facts in the case. He had been an ardent pacifist. When he became a revolutionary Marxist, he publicly abandoned his pacifism and, among us, his belief in Christianity. He could not have been very well versed in either one or the other, despite his religious training, for when he finally vomited up his hastily swallowed Marxism, he returned to his early beliefs with the passion of someone newly converted. It is very rare that, as individuals develop and abandon one position for another in a continuing series of progressions, they return to an earlier view. But it sometimes occurs. In Muste's case, his early abandonment of pacifism and Christianity could not have been very reflective.