| Abstrakt: |
Abstract: This is a paper presented at the international symposium “Socialism and Democracy”, held in Ljubljana between February 26th and 28th 1989 and attended by officials from philosophical and sociological journals from Yugoslavia, Czechoslvakia, Romania and left-wing magazines from Italy, FRG and Great Britain. The papers and debate proceedings at the gathering were reprinted in the Yugoslav magazine “Teorija in praksa“, No. 6/7, 1969. The term democratic socialism was designed to separate a certain ideal or model of socialism from discredited reality of socialist development in Czechoslovakia. A new content of this particular term originated in the late 1960s in the economic, political and philosophical sphere, involving primarily a critique of Stalinism, tying on the democratic traditions as instruments aimed at superseding the political and spiritual crisis rise in the country. Out of Czechoslovakia’s leading philosophers it were Karel Kosík, Robert Kalivoda and Radovan Richta who made the greatest contribution to the clarification of this term. These authors succeeded in profoundly analyzing the causes of the political and spiritual crisis as well as outlining a way out of it, the need of transforming the Stalinist bureaucratic system of political power into a democratic one. The Stalinist model was not only anti-democratic but outright anti-popular. Main stress is placed on direct democracy and socialist self-administration. The structure of the self-administering model of socialism came under the scrutiny of R. Kalivoda, sociologist D. Slejška and economist O. Šik. Of key importance appears to be the necessity of analyzing the question of differentiation and unity of interests. But self-administration is merely one of the features of the development of democratic socialism as a new political system. |
