19
society. Considering this possibility, Matsushita insisted that it must be the task of
communism to succeed and sustain the “bourgeois legacy” of democracy from the former
philosophy of Enlightenment and from the French Revolution in mass society.
42
Therefore, in the present age of mass society, “the idea of resistance can be realistic
politically only when it is connected not to the socialist revolution directly but to the defense
of liberty and democracy”.
43
“When revolutionary movements, whose core is the working
class, confront a fascist counter-revolution, the former should develop as a common front
sustained by the thought of resistance in order to champion the liberty and democracy of all the
people”.
44
Matsushita asserted that revaluation of formal liberty and the right of resistance
should be the basis for the realization of a common front beyond both social democracy and
the Comintern-type of communism: the former lost the logic of revolution through its willing
acceptance of liberty in the capitalist regime; and the latter, on the contrary, rejected
parliamentary democracy at all as a “bourgeois illusion”.
45
Such Japanese arguments about democracy and socialism would immediately remind
us of the idea of liberal socialism by Norberto Bobbio. Although Bobbio pointed out four
paradoxes that prevent the achievement of democracy in contemporary western societies – the
large scale of modern social life, the increasing bureaucratization of the state apparatus, the
growing technicality of the decisions it is necessary to make, and the trend of civil society
towards becoming a mass society –, he insists that contemporary democracy is at least much
better than fascist or state socialist dictatorship.
46
For Bobbio, a minimal definition of
democracy is “a set of rules (primary or basic) which establish who is authorized to take
collective decision and which procedures are to be applied”,
47
and the only possible socialist
politics is a politics that protects democratic institutions, rather than rejecting it as “bourgeois”
or “formal” democracy. Here, we will examine John Keane’s theory of socialism and
democracy that takes over from Bobbio’s view and further elaborates its idea of civil society,
which should be compared with Matsushita’s conception.
Convention