New Democracy - Concept

Concept

The concept of New Democracy aims to overthrow feudalism and achieve independence from colonialism. However, it bypasses the rule of the capitalist class that Marx and Lenin predicted would usually follow such a struggle, claiming instead to seek to enter directly into socialism through a coalition of classes fighting the old ruling order. The coalition is subsumed under the leadership and guidance of the working class and its communist party, working with the communists irrespective of their competing ideologies, in order to achieve the more immediate goal of a "new democratic order" that the Chinese communists hoped would then lead to full-blown socialism and communism, in spite of the competing class interests of the social classes of the "bloc".

The bloc of classes reflecting the principles of New Democracy is symbolized most readily by the stars on the Flag of China. The largest star symbolizes the Communist Party of China's leadership and the surrounding four smaller stars symbolizing the Bloc of Four Classes: proletarian workers, peasants, the petty bourgeoisie (small business owners), and the nationally-based capitalists. This is the coalition of classes for Mao's "New Democratic Revolution" as he described it in his works. Mao's New Democracy explains the Bloc of Four Classes as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of imperialism as described by Lenin.

The classical Marxist understanding of the stages of economic and historical development of the modes of production under which a socialist revolution can take place, is that the socialist revolution occurs only after the capitalist bourgeois-democratic revolution happens first. According to this, the bourgeois-democratic revolution paves the way for the industrial proletarian class to emerge as the majority class in society, after which it then overthrows capitalism and begins constructing socialism. Mao argued that the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the socialist revolution could be combined into a single stage rather than two separate back-to-back stages. He called this stage New Democracy.