Hans A. Hveem appears to have Googled some critical notes about Rødt’s program and reproduced them in Budstikka on February 25, but the attempt to question Rødt’s understanding of democracy appears somewhat tepid.
It is not reassuring to record that Hafim finds it difficult to point out that the practice of the majority in Asker in deciding political matters in closed rooms is undemocratic.
Ibsen’s words in “An Enemy of the People” about “the most dangerous enemies of truth and liberty among us, the compact majority” should have been clear enough.
But instead of trying to understand why it’s being pointed at, Hveem looks for errors in red.
Had Hveem himself taken the trouble to read the programme, he would hopefully have noticed that we write about our view of democracy and discuss the concept in less than 70 places on the programme.
One of these points states: “For Reid, socialism without democracy is not socialism at all. Such a system presupposes the support of (…) the majority of the people ».
Hveem picks out a few sentences in the program and correctly refers to the page and the paragraph, and one of these sentences is “For workers to have power, a fundamental change in power relations is needed – a socialist revolution.”
Photo: private
If he had read this himself, it is strange that he did not notice the sentence below which states: “We in red want the revolution to be rooted democratically and peacefully.”
Perhaps the anti-democratic point here should come from the fact that it is Hafim who understands that revolutions must be undemocratic and possibly violent, but then we must be reminded that society went through an “industrial revolution” and a “green revolution”.
Both major societal changes, described as revolutions, without there being anything undemocratic or violent in this.
Red has a Marxist approach to understanding society and how class differences might be possible.
Giving according to ability and complying with need is no more undemocratic than was widely accepted in the broad class also in the Social Democratic movement until a few years ago, and even for many it is still a good goal.
The fact that some tyrants and dictators stole Marx’s concept in the last century and developed some of the least democratic countries that we know of is not decisive for us in rejecting Marx’s basic theory.
We believe that the attempt to undermine the will for democracy by referring to the history of the party is based on its illogicality.
Rødt was founded in 2007 and has repeatedly settled with the politics of its predecessors, as our political opponents did not envision the previous settlements.
A similar compromise could be made with bits of history for the Conservatives, for example regarding the party’s position on the coup in Chile in 1973, the coup in Greece in 1967, and the Conservative Secretary of State’s support for American intervention in Central America. In 1984, on the mention of something.
If we want to use history to argue our point, we must use the whole story.
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