Inventing Reality

The point of that article isn't that Marx believed in reformism over revolution, but that democracy can only truly exist in socialism. The latter half is just slander against Marxism-Leninism, by pretending the Marxist-Leninist point is that the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't democratic. In reality, the DotP is counterposed to bourgeois democracy, and the DotP is proletarian democracy. Extensive studies into the soviet form of democracy exist, such as Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy, which was a well-developed.

Here's revolutionary Statesian reporter, Anna Louise Strong, reporting on democratic processes she observed:

The basic unit for government is the working institution, the factory or office; in rural districts it is the village. Deputies are chosen to the local government, the village or city soviet.[25] The basis of representation and size of the local soviet depends on the size of the community: Gulin village, whose election I visited, has one deputy for every forty voters and a village soviet of thirteen members. Moscow city elects one deputy for fifteen hundred voters and has more than two thousand members in its city soviet. These local deputies meet soon after election to form the new government. They divide among themselves the various departments, which range from the five sections of Gulin village—farming, livestock, culture, roads and finance—to twenty-eight sections, each with over forty deputies, through which Moscow city does business. Besides the more commonly known functions, these local governments own and manage local industry, which in a large city like Moscow includes many municipally owned factories, the street-cars, subway, lights, water, and housing. They receive revenue from public properties, but their budgets may also be augmented by taxes and state loans. Some cities actually bring in revenue—it will be remembered that they get all the house rents; others need help from the higher governments.

On these local governments is built up the whole structure of central government.[26] Local soviets elect deputies to a congress of soviets; the township congress elects to the province, and so on up to the All-Union Congress of Soviets, the highest body in the country. Each of these congresses elects its executive committee and the heads of its various departments; for the highest government these are the great Commissariats of heavy and light industry, finance, health, and so forth. Local departments are both horizontally and vertically controlled, by local governments and by the corresponding department in the higher government. Thus a township health department is responsible both to the township executive committee and to the provincial health department. If orders clash, if a local soviet takes the hospital for some other use, its health department appeals to the provincial health department which brings pressure on the local soviet through the provincial government in the interests of public health.

The greater part of this intricate yet unified system of government is carried on by unpaid work. Elected deputies, whether to village or the All-Union Congress, receive no salaries of office. They draw their usual wages from the factory or institution which sends them and in which they keep on working, except insofar as they may be “released from production” for the needs of government; this varies with the importance of the work they do. There is thus no hard and fast line between the citizen and the man in office. Deputies are a link between the collective life of the factory and the larger collective life of the country. Any worker may approach them conveniently any day in their place of work to ask about the fulfillment of instructions given by the voters. They may be recalled by their constituents at any time simply through a factory meeting.

If voters thus constantly call on their deputies, the deputies are equally entitled to call on the voters for help in carrying out the election program they have voted. A deputy is no substitute for the people, no ruler; he is the representative who organizes them in their own tasks of voluntary government work. Millions of citizens take active part in the sections of the government—housing commissions, school commissions, taxing commissions, labor inspection and so on. Those who develop a taste for running public affairs will be chosen at some election for more continuous and responsible work. Those who specialize in some field, such as health, courts, housing, may be sent on pay for some months or years of study and become full-time civil servants in these departments.

The growth of democracy in the Soviet Union thus depends directly on the extent to which citizens can be interested in taking part in operations of government. This interest is in part assured by the fact that government is so clearly the direct organizing of all aspects of the citizen’s life. In a million matters the citizens give direct instructions during the election. They order the increase of school-houses or sound films, the improvement in the quality of bread, the increase of retail stores, the transport of goods in big cities by night; they demand the breaking-up of housing trusts into smaller co-operatives, or the introduction of a less specialized education in the schools. All of these were part of some 48,000 instructions issued directly by Moscow voters to their city government, which reported within three months on the fulfillment of many hundred demands and on the disposition made of all. When instructions clash, as when some citizens want an odorous industrial plant removed from their neighborhood while others want it to stay, commissions are formed which try to satisfy not merely the majority, but as nearly as possible everybody, not through a showing of hands in opposition, but through various adjustments to the suggestions made by all. Capitalist ownership of private property limits the citizen’s participation, in government to an approval or rejection—expressed in conflict—of general policies. Socialist ownership causes government policies to grow directly and naturally from the correlated demands of millions of people, all of whom are interested in improving the country’s wealth.

• This Soviet World

The real point made by Marxist-Leninists is that the working classes must have full control of the state, and run it democratically. This is a working class dictatorship over capitalists, landlords, fascists, monarchists, and so forth, who are deprived of political power. The DSA smear-piece is utterly unconvincing because its chief point is "socialism has always sucked, but we will do it better," which is horrible rhetoric, not to mention the lies and misanalysis. This is why Marxist-Leninists defend the real achievements of real socialism, not just throwing real socialism under the bus, smearing its legacy, and trying to tell westerners that they are the only ones that can make "true" socialism.

This process of reformist organizations trying to coopt Marx was well-established pre-Lenin, and persists to this day. Lenin's famous introduction to The State and Revolution is ever-applicable today:

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!

If you want to learn about Marxism-Leninism, then I suggest reading this intro reading list I made.