The Future Belongs to The Proletariat: The Intellectual Origins of the People’s Democracy in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

This paper analyses the intellectual roots of the people’s democracy regime in Czechoslovakia after World War II (1945-1948). Although people’s democracy is traditionally associated with the Stalinist regimes governing Eastern Europe after 1948, its theoretical framework, qualitatively different from the Stalinist version, had been developed by Czechoslovak thinkers long before the involvement of the USSR in World War II. Specifically, the paper focuses on the role of three figures: Czechoslovak founding-father Tomas Masaryk, his disciple Edvard Benes and the intellectual Jan Fischer. Masaryk’s arguments (1925) that genuine democracy must be economic and social as well as political were further elaborated by Benes. Benes argued (1939) that since the end of the nineteenth century, the Proletariat has become the bearer of the struggle for a ‘new, progressive and at the same time deeper and more perfect democracy’. In Benes’ opinion, the Proletariat aimed to preserve political freedoms, but also endeavoured to transform the liberal order into a higher type of democracy of social and economic justice. Fischer, an author of the ideological programme of the wartime Czechoslovak National Resistance (1941), drew from both thinkers and saw both world wars as a gigantic thirty-year-revolution. Unlike Masaryk and Benes, Fischer regarded economic and social democracy as a pre-requisite for political democracy. Such notions had laid the theoretical background of the project of ‘socializing democracy’ that became a synonym for people’s democracy after the end of World War II.