A capitalist republic is a concept of government completely the reverse of Marxist thought. Whereas a socialist republic is a "dictatorship of the proletariat", a capitalist republic is a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". In On New Democracy, Mao Zedong distinguished his vision of a New Democratic Republic from a capitalist republic, which he characterized as an "old European-American form" of government that was "out of date".12
A capitalist republic was the goal of Sean Murray in the Irish Republicanism movement in the 1930s. At a meeting in Rathmines, Murray advocated a capitalist republic for Ireland, taking what commentators have described as a "stages" approach, where national freedom and socialism were treated as distinct stages in the goals that Republicans sought to achieve. Murray advocated first the achievement of national freedom, to form a capitalist republic, followed by a transition from a capitalist republic to a socialist republic. Other Republicans, Gilmore and O'Donnell, sought the same goal but with the stages in the reverse order: uprooting capitalism through struggle and thereby achieving national independence as a consequence. Mike Milotte has noted that although Murray advocated a capitalist republic, "by avoiding the prefix its precise class nature was obscured".34
References
- ^ Wen-shun Chi (1986). Ideological Conflicts in Modern China: Democracy and Authoritarianism. Transaction Publishers, 241. ISBN 1560006080.
- ^ Mao Zedong (1967). On New Democracy II. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 350.
- ^ Richard English (1994). "Schism, Republican Solipsism, and Spain", Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free State, 1925–1937. Oxford University Press, 229. ISBN 019820289X.
- ^ Milotte, Mike (1984). Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers' Republic Since 1916. Gill and Macmillan, Holmes and Meier.
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