Democracy, Socialism, and the Constitution: A Four-Part Series
A compilation of a back-and-forth conversation between Daniel Lazare, Luke Pickrell, Lucas De Hart, and Gil Schaeffer.
The ideas expressed in a recent back-and-forth between Daniel Lazare, Luke Pickrell, Lucas De Hart, and Gil Schaeffer about democracy, socialism, and the Constitution remain relevant. Therefore, we’ve combined the four texts for easier access to the full conversation.
For a Workers’ Democracy
Daniel Lazare, May 10, 2024
For all its strengths, the Democratic Constitution Blog suffers from one significant theoretical weakness, the belief that socialism and democracy are somehow separate and distinct. Luke Pickrell made the point repeatedly in his Apr. 12 essay, “The Youth Lead the Way,” in which he argued:
“Many in DSA imagine a future revolution being waged in the name of socialism; democracy and a new constitution will result from the socialist revolution. That’s backward. We need a democratic revolution to have the possibility of achieving socialism.”
He went on:
“The phrase ‘socialism means the democratization of all of society’ leads us into murky water by making it sound like a socialist and democratic revolution will happen simultaneously...But I don’t think the constituent assembly (let alone the mass movement needed to get us to that point) will be convened in the name of socialism. Hence, this blog’s raison d'être: we must discuss the Constitution and develop strategies for winning a democracy without getting sidetracked by discussions of what we’d like to do with that democracy.”
First democracy, in short, then socialism if at all. Gil Schaeffer made much the same point on Apr. 17:
“Socialism by itself is too narrow a foundation on which to build a political movement of the Left. The political theory of democratic republicanism beginning with the Levelers and running through the work of Tom Paine, the French Revolution, Chartism, the early Marx and Engels, the US Civil War and Reconstruction, the Marxism of the First and Second Internationals, and the US Civil Rights Movement is just as important as the economic theory of socialism for the formation of a Left party. DSA does recognize the essential importance of democracy to the socialist movement, but its understanding of this relationship is underdeveloped....”
Socialism is thus merely a new addition to a string of democratic developments going back centuries. But both views are seriously mistaken. Yes, political democracy precedes modern socialism. The first has its origins in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 16th and 17th century and after, while the second followed on the heels of the industrial-capitalist breakthrough of the early 19th. Historically, therefore, they are very different. But what this linear view fails to take into account is their growing merger from the Chartist movement of 1838-57 onward. Thereafter, the only conceivable democratic force was increasingly the working class. The more the democratic struggle grew, the clearer it became that it would necessarily be a struggle for a workers’ democracy in which political and social movements were combined into one. Rather than walling such concerns off in different compartments, the goal was henceforth to combine them in a single great movement.
A quick dip into democratic socialist theory might help clarify the whys and wherefores. Liberals prefer a checklist approach in which Freedom House or other such organizations examine the state of free speech, a free press, regular elections, etc., to determine whether a given society qualifies as democratic or not. The better the report card, the more democratic it supposedly turns out to be. But without denigrating free speech and the like, socialists argue that such an approach leaves out an all-important ingredient. This is popular sovereignty, the ability of “we the people” to do whatever we think is necessary to improve our condition regardless of external legal constraints. Where liberals rely on constitutional guardrails to prevent democracy from veering off in a direction they don’t like, socialists believe it should be free to roam wherever it wants.
Without popular sovereignty, democracy is lifeless, a simulacrum, a pale version of the real thing. But not that popular sovereignty is simple or self-evident. To the contrary, it has developed in stages from its origins in the thinking of Jean Bodin (1530-1596) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). The 18th-century legal authority William Blackstone defined sovereignty as supreme, irresistible, absolute, uncontrolled authority, which is to say authority answerable to nothing other than its own good judgment. Still, he thought of it in terms of parliamentary supremacy rather than the supremacy of the people in general. The Jacobins placed it on a broader footing by establishing it as a full-fledged revolutionary force capable of remaking society as a whole from top to bottom. But except for a radical fringe, they still thought of it in national terms in which the people and the nation are essentially the same.
It was left to Marx and Engels to expand it in two unexpected directions, from the individual nation-state to humanity at large and from the realm of politics and law to existence in toto. “Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward,” Marx wrote in “On the Jewish Question” in 1844. “True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.” Changing the existing world order would thus raise political emancipation to an entirely new level. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx zeroed in on the one force capable of effecting such change. It was the working class – not the working class of any one nation, however, but of the entire globe.
Marx’s richest and most eloquent expression of this idea is to be found in an earlier work known as Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, written in 1843. Critique contains the famous phrase about religion as the “opium of the people.” But the passage in which it appears contains a great deal more. Two sentences in particular stand out:
“The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
Popular sovereignty thus reaches its final expression when humankind collectively places itself at the center not just of economics and production, but of all experience. The idea of humanity revolving around itself may seem solipsistic, but it is a solipsism so vast and all-encompassing as to incorporate the entire universe, humanity included. Human sovereignty is “totalitarian” in the sense that it implicitly sets out to transform the totality of existence.
This has a number of implications large and small. One is that socialism is not merely an add-on, a Johnny-come-lately, but a reconceptualization that is so sweeping and revolutionary as to make all earlier forms seem narrow and inadequate.
A second is to render the “stageism” that Pickrell and Schaeffer seem to advocate entirely impractical. Luke, in particular, argues more or less that we should content ourselves with the 1793 version of democracy before moving on to something more advanced. We should learn to crawl, in other words, before trying to walk. This might seem to make sense. But how do we limit ourselves in an age of globalization teeming with questions, issues, and controversies that are complex, advanced, and unavoidable? How can people fight for democracy for themselves without concerning themselves with democracy for others? How can they deal with national problems without grappling with those of the world at large? Luke seems to think of democracy as an empty vessel that voters can fill with substances such as liberalism or socialism once it’s in place. But how can a revolutionary democratic movement not deal with social demands from the outset? After all, democracy does not develop in a vacuum. To the contrary, it arises out of a society rife with injustice and abuse, social as well as political. So how can the masses address one without addressing the other? How can workers think of democracy other than in terms of a workers’ democracy structured so as to meet their needs as opposed to those of the top one percent?
Obviously, history unfolds in stages. But “stageism” means something different, i.e. the fetishization of stages so as to impose a preconceived model or scheme on a historical process that is necessarily fluid and dynamic. Society must move from A to B to C without veering off in between, or so stageism seems to suggest. But the problem with history is that it takes such categories and jumbles them up. Instead of a socialist revolution erupting in an advanced society like Britain, France, or Germany, it rearranges the playing field so that it bursts through in a backward one like Czarist Russia. Our best-laid plans almost always go awry.
The avant-garde filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once quipped that every movie should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order. If so, a revolutionary program should call for a constituent assembly, a general strike, and a repudiation of imperialism, but not necessarily in that order either. Precisely how the process will unfold is unknown. The chemistry will be complex, hence unpredictable. The only certainty is that events will not unfold according to some pre-ordained sequence. They will instead be chockful of surprises. Indeed, the real surprise would be if there were no surprises at all.
Socialism is not a narrow foundation. Rather, it is a broad reconceptualization that takes earlier movements like the Levelers and Chartists and raises them to an entirely new level. The movement for a new constitution must both reflect and reinforce the same broad process.
The Age of the Democratic Revolution
Luke Pickrell, May 17, 2024
Lucas and I sincerely appreciate Daniel Lazare’s engagement with the Democratic Constitution Blog, including his recent response to “The Youth Lead the Way.” In responding to Lazare, we’d like to clarify our position on the democratic republic and its relationship to socialism based on our interpretation of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. We suspect that Lazare is familiar with the following history. Ultimately, much of this discussion comes down to what parts of Marxism and history we consider most relevant to the current moment.
Based on our reading of primary and secondary (i) sources, Lucas and I think that democracy is the core of Marxism and that the institutional form of democracy is a democratic republic defined by a universal and equal voting system for delegates to a single national assembly. Because democracy is central and the U.S. is not a democracy, the classic Marxist strategy of achieving a democratic republic to realize a socialized economy is still relevant to the U.S. The democratic demands put forward in the French Republic’s constitution of 1793, the Russian Social Democratic Party’s platform of 1903, and the Socialist Party of America’s platform of 1912 — not to mention the ideals of Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens (ii) — have yet to be realized in the United States. In other words, the U.S. is still in the age of the democratic revolution.
Lazare is correct that the struggle for democracy predated Marx, Engels, and the Industrial Revolution in England that birthed a mass working class. During the 17th century, the Levellers argued that “the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee,” and, “Equal in birth, born in the image of god, the people in general are the original sole legislaters, and the true fountain, and earthly well-spring of all just power.” Building an intellectual foundation later used by Tom Paine (iii) and Thomas Jefferson (iv), the Levellers argued that just as a person can change her way of life, so should an entire nation be able to change in order to maximize its inhabitants' safety and freedom.
The ideas of democracy, universal and equal rights, and a democratically elected unicameral legislature spread from the Levellers to the North American colonies. Tom Paine worked to give these ideas as complete a material expression as possible in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 to 1790 (v). From Paine, the ideas traveled to France and influenced the Declaration of Rights of Man, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the abortive 1793 constitution. Having been suppressed in England for over a century, they reemerged in the political thought of Chartism. Like the Levellers, the Chartists used every means at their disposal in an unsuccessful attempt to create a genuinely democratic state.
Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England that the democratic working-class Chartist movement would soon adopt socialist principles. Until it did, he believed it was the intellectual/ideological job of political socialists to merge socialist theory and policy with Chartism. However, this merger did not mean that the Chartist’s political goal of democracy had been superseded. Four years later, Engels wrote in Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, “The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of a community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.” Marx and Engels intervened in the Chartist movement by emphasizing the complete socialization of property and adding their theory of human history; they did not change Chartism’s political goal of democracy.
Marx quickly adopted Engel’s democratic ideology and included it in the Communist Manifesto, writing, “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” From that position of power, the proletariat would “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie…” Just one month later, Marx put aside the vision outlined in the Manifesto and returned to the far less romantic reality of contemporary politics, demanding that Germany “be declared a united, indivisible republic” and “Every German who is Twenty-one years old shall be a voter and be eligible for election, assuming he has not been sentenced for a criminal offence.” I don’t think it’s “stageist,” as Dan claims, to talk about first steps. Every political movement needs to start somewhere. Every vanguard organization must present a clear and understandable strategy to the public. Until the Russian Revolution, social democracy had a clear strategy for achieving socialism: obtain universal and equal suffrage and a unicameral parliament.
Marx soon realized that only the working class organized into a political party would see the struggle for democracy through to the end. However, he and Engels did not then “combine” “political and social movements” in the name of realizing a “workers’ democracy” (a term I don’t think Marx or Engels ever used; they talked about democracy and felt no need to add ‘worker’ to it. That would be redundant; electoral democracy simply means that the working class, the majority in society, possesses universal and equal voting rights). Despite moments of confusion (vi) and contradiction (vii), Marx and Engels never dropped the demand for a democratic republic in order to win the battle for democracy and ensure working-class control over the state. Three years before his death, Engels explained how “Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”
In his article “Hiding in Plain Sight,” Lazare describes the Constitution as shaping our “political playing field” and “politico-legal arena.” This playing field or arena was designed to divide political power to ensure that no “factious spirit” would endanger property (including property in enslaved people). To retain Lazare’s helpful metaphor, a democratic constitution — and through it, a democratic legislature — would create a playing field far more congenial to realizing the will of the majority. Karl Kautky put it another way in 1909: “The only form of the state in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a thoroughly democratic republic at that.” Socialism will come about as an economic policy enacted by a democratic legislature and overseen and implemented by the organized working class.
The age of the democratic revolution has yet to be completed in the United States. The U.S. has its own rich history of democratic struggle, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the New Left and anti-war movement. Given this history, there’s every reason to think another mass democratic struggle is possible. Lucas and I contend that socialists can play a role in developing this movement by adopting Lenin’s theory of political agitation and connecting each social abuse back to the need for a democratic republic. Revolutionaries are rule makers; we think the existing rules are harmful and unjust, and we want to change them. As the Levellers first understood in the 17th century, the only way the democratic majority can make the rules is through a single national assembly and universal and equal voting rights.
Marxist theory has a strong (though self-contradictory) current that describes a future classless society without the need for any laws, political structures, or morals (viii). I don’t think this current is helpful. Political agitation that focuses on the need for a democratic republic in the United States is possible without considering the transcendence of the entire known universe. Talking about a total reconceptualization of social and political existence simply isn’t effective political agitation — and it’s certainly not Lenin’s theory of political agitation as presented in What Is To Be Done?
The U.S. is not a democracy, and there is no way to transcend the necessity of politics and structures. We need a constitution that establishes majority rule and declares universal and equal rights for all as its goal. This is the political playing field that the working class needs if it is going to realize a socialist economy. Having identified the Constitution as the loadstone of the existing state and concluded what is needed, Lucas and I plan and carry out our political agitation accordingly.
Splitting contemporary left discourse about democracy and the Constitution into three distinct camps — electoralist or electoral reformist, socialist, and democratic republican — is my attempt to describe an actual phenomenon within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the broader milieu of self-described socialists. As I explained, the first two camps have little interest in discussing democracy and the Constitution. If anything, socialists are less interested in talking about democracy than electoralists. Lazare is unique; I don’t know anyone else, including people in Marxist Unity Group, who talks about transforming the “totality of existence” in some future society and says socialists should agitate for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. Most socialists think that political agitation means talking about the good news of socialism. Almost no one who calls themselves a socialist — again, including most members of Marxist Unity Group — engages in political agitation that centers the demand for a democratic constitution.
I have no interest in prescribing a path for how the democratic struggle in the United States will play out. However, I do have an opinion about what activists should be talking about. Democratic republicans and socialists differ in the kind of political agitation they think has the best chance of building a political constituency in the United States. Democratic republicans believe that the question of universal and equal rights is the state’s weakest point precisely because that is what the existing Constitution so flagrantly denies. The left should be hammering away at the question of democracy because a growing number of people realize that the existing state is so flagrantly illegitimate on those grounds and are understandably upset. Democratic republicans think the battle to democratize our political system is the leading edge of the class political struggle that makes socialism possible. Socialists should lean into that fight.
i. Primary sources not listed in this article include Karl Kautsky, “The Republic and Social Democracy in France” (1904); Rosa Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” (1911); Lenin, “Political Agitation and the ‘Class Point of View’” (1902) and “What Is To Be Done?” (1902). Secondary sources include Hal Draper, “Marx on the Democratic Forms of Government” (1974), “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Marx and Engels,” (1987), and “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party’” (1990); Neil Harding, “Lenin’s Political Thought,” two volumes (1997); Richard N. Hunt, “The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels,” two volumes (1974); August Nimtz, The Ballot, the Street - or Both? (2011).
ii. Lazare knows all about Stevens, who called the constitution a “piece of parchment” and declared that “the whole sovereignty rests with the people, and is exercised through their representatives in Congress assembled…No other branch of the Government…possesses one single particle of the sovereignty of the nation.” In Fawn McKay Browdie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, New York: W.W. Norton, 1959.
iii. Paine: “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.”
iv. Jefferson: “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
v. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995, 152.
vi. Marx called the U.S. a democracy in 1844 in “On the Jewish Question.” He was wrong. The Constitution violated (and still violates) the principle of universal and equal suffrage. Also, the country was full of enslaved Africans.
vii. After Engels calls for the establishment of a democratic constitution in England, France, and Germany, he goes on to say in Principle 25 that “in America, where a democratic constitution has already been established...” Like Marx, Engels was wrong.
viii. Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Democratic Political Movements, Democratic Electoral Rules, and Socialism: A Reply to Daniel Lazare
Gil Shaeffer, May 29, 2024
Thanks to Daniel Lazare for his letter to the Democratic Constitution Blog. No one has done more over the last thirty years to raise awareness of the undemocratic structure of the US Constitution. I hope my reply will clarify why the positive goal of a democratic constitution is the best strategy to secure the power necessary for the transition to a socialist economy and the further extension of democracy to all areas of social and economic life.
Lazare’s main criticism of Luke Pickrell and myself is that we hold “the belief that socialism and democracy are somehow separate and distinct” and think “Socialism is thus merely a new addition to a string of democratic developments going back centuries.” In contrast to what he calls our “linear,” “add-on” view of the relationship between democracy and socialism, Lazare believes Marx and Engels combined the ideas of democracy and socialism into a new formulation that raised the concept of human emancipation to an entirely new level, “a reconceptualization that is so sweeping and revolutionary as to make all earlier forms seem narrow and inadequate.”
Lazare is right that Marx and Engels did create a new theory of historical change in the late 1840s that envisioned a new level of human emancipation in a communist society in the far distant future, but it is not true that the creation of this theory led them to downgrade in any way the centrality of the struggle for a democratic republic in the present. (Pickrell and Lucas De Hart in their reply to Lazare compare the sweeping historical vision presented in the Communist Manifesto to the Demands of the Communist Party of Germany written only one month later to illustrate this difference.) Pickrell and De Hart then go on to say, “We suspect that Lazare is familiar with [this] history;” but it appears he is not. Lazare writes that as the industrial working class grew from the Chartist movement onward:
Thereafter, the only conceivable democratic force was increasingly the working class. The more the democratic struggle grew, the clearer it became that it would necessarily be a struggle for a workers’ democracy in which political and social movements were combined into one. Rather than walling such concerns off in different compartments, the goal was henceforth to combine them in a single great movement.
The problem with this account is that the demand for a democratic republic remained the primary political demand of all Marxist parties until 1917. The growth in size of the industrial working class was not a reason to alter this goal but a confirmation of Marx and Engels’ original theory and program laid out in the Manifesto. There certainly was an expectation that the growing social, economic, and political struggles of the working class would eventually merge into one great movement, but the principal object of that movement was always to “win the battle of democracy.” Holding consistently to the primary goal of a democratic republic was not a “walling off” of political, economic, and social issues in different compartments but a defense of the standard Marxist position on the institutional form of working class rule against the alternative theories of Utopian socialists, Blanquists, Proudhonists, anarchists, Lassalleans, revisionists, and other liberal reformists.
The relationship between the democratic republic and socialism in classical Marxist thinking was that the working class would “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie.” In this conceptual framework, socialism meant the extension of democratic legislative and mass working class power into the domain of capitalist property relations in order to transform them into the common property of society as a whole. In this period of transition, the democratic state would continue to exist and the state and economy would remain distinct yet interrelated parts of society. It was only in Marx’s imagined higher phase of communism that the division of society into different economic, political, social, and moral “compartments” would finally come to an end.
So, to answer Lazare’s main criticism that Pickrell and I treat democracy and socialism as separate and distinct and socialism as an add-on, my position is that democracy and socialism are distinct yet interconnected and that the democratic republicanism of the French Revolution and Chartist movement that Marx and Engels assimilated was flexible enough to absorb and integrate socialist ideas and policies into a new ideological and political formulation that eventually came to call itself Social Democracy. The clearest later statements that Marxist politics were a combination of democratic republican and socialist ideas are Engels, Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891; Lenin: The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats (marxists.org) (1897); Kautsky, Republic and Social Democracy in France (1904-5); and Rosa Luxemburg: Theory and Practice (1910) (marxists.org). The best secondary studies are Richard. N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, 2 vols. (1974, 1981); Hal Draper, Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1962) and many of his other writings; and Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 2 vols. (1977, 1981). (And I don’t agree with Engels and Lenin that Communist would have been a better, “scientific“ name for the Social Democratic parties of the Second International because the idea of the “overcoming” or “abolition of democracy” and the “withering away of the state” in the higher stage of communism is a crippling mental and political fantasy. Engels’ and Lenin’s views on this point can be found on pp. 55-6, State and Revolution.)
Whatever his current political views may be, I don’t know why Lazare doesn’t acknowledge the joint democratic republican and socialist components of pre-1917 Marxism. I harp on the importance of the democratic component in Marxism because running across it in the course of reading Lenin on democratic political consciousness is what prompted me to look at the US political system from the same angle. I believe Lazare arrived at his critique of the Constitution from a different route. I can only speculate, but it seems his lack of recognition of the distinct democratic republican component of classical Marxism leads him to make additional mistakes in several related areas of democratic theory and the history and social character of democratic mass movements.
For Lazare, the most serious practical consequence of adhering to an ideology and strategy of democratic republican “stageism” is that it limits our ability to confront the challenges and complexities of globalization: “How can people fight for democracy for themselves without concerning themselves with democracy for others? How can they deal with national problems without grappling with those of the world at large?” Lazare thinks the French “1793 version of democracy” is not up to this task because he says its focus was national rather than international, but he overlooks how Marx and Engels themselves dealt with the problem of the nation-state. Marx already knew in 1848 that capitalism was a global system that would eventually require global control by the international working class, yet he concluded in the Manifesto:
Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.
(This “not in substance, yet in form” distinction also applies to the “1793 version of democracy” as well, because the Jacobins considered The Rights of Man and Citizen to be universal principles encompassing all humanity and hoped their struggle would aid others in their fight for their own liberation. Marx and the Jacobins were more alike than different on this score.)
Lazare doesn’t mention this passage when he says the Manifesto identified “not the working class of any one nation, however, but of the entire globe” as the one force capable of effecting global change. And in 1891 the 1793 version of democracy was still good enough for Engels after industrialization and globalization had developed even further:
If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.
Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891
Of course, Marx, Engels, and their followers who founded the Second International Social Democratic parties lived in the relatively peaceful historical period before WWI, so there is now the additional argument that the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century and the continuing expansion and deepening of imperialism and globalization since then have finally made the national parochialism of classical European Marxism obsolete. I also disagree with that analysis and explain why in Atom Bombs, National Security, and Empire: Year Seventy-Eight of the Cold War, which discusses this issue in relation to the anti-Vietnam War movement and the current Russia-Ukraine war. In short, my position is “democratic republicanism is applied internationalism;” and I believe this position is the same as the one Rosa Luxemburg articulated in her defense of the mass demonstrations demanding a democratic republic in Germany in 1910:
In Germany, the slogan of a republic is thus infinitely more than the expression of a beautiful dream of democratic ‘peoples’ government,’ or political doctrinairism floating in the clouds: it is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule, the Prussianization of Germany; it is a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.
Theory and Practice
That is how the fight for democracy for ourselves can simultaneously be a fight for democracy for others on the receiving end of US militarism.
In a similar vein, Lazare also asks, “How can a revolutionary democratic movement not deal with social demands from the outset?” The answer is, they do. Every mass movement fighting for democracy is simultaneously a social movement in its composition and in the content of the grievances it wants redressed, as the Luxemburg excerpt illustrates. Not seeing that democratic political movements always raise social demands as well, Lazare sets up an opposition between what he calls the lifeless liberal approach of making a checklist to measure whether a political system is democratic and a vibrant popular sovereignty possessing the power to do whatever it wants, apparently free of any checklist of moral or constitutional guidelines at all. That is not my understanding of the meaning of democratic political sovereignty, the clearest statement of which is in the 1903 Programme of the RSDLP:
Therefore, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party takes as its most immediate political task the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic, the constitution of which would ensure:
Sovereignty of the people—that is, concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber.
Universal, equal and direct suffrage, in elections both to the legislative assembly and to all local organs of self-government, for all citizens and citizenesses who have attained the age of 20; secret ballot elections; the right of every voter to be elected to any representative body; biennial parliaments; payment of the people’s representatives.
The Programme then goes on to list many additional civil, political, juridical, economic, trade union, and social goals. I do not understand Lazare’s point of making a distinction between a lifeless list of democratic requirements and a real movement for popular sovereignty. Of course, a mere list on paper is not a political movement; but when the program of a democratic political organization with its list of goals is presented to the masses, the concepts and aims in the program become a material force if the masses take them up as their own. A programmatic list of democratic electoral rules and goals does not stand in opposition to a real movement of popular sovereignty but is a constitutive ideological binding force within it.
I think the ultimate source of our disagreements on the place of democracy in Marxism can be traced back to two fundamental misjudgments Marx made in On the Jewish Question about the relationship between political and human liberation. Lazare himself cites this essay in support of his views, so it would be useful to quote what he says about it in full:
It was left to Marx and Engels to expand it [Jacobin democratic revolutionary nationalism] in two unexpected directions, from the individual nation-state to humanity at large and from the realm of politics and law to existence in toto. ‘Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward,’ Marx wrote in ‘On the Jewish Question’ in 1844. ‘True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order.” Changing the existing world order would thus raise political emancipation to an entirely new level. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx zeroed in on the one force capable of effecting such change. It was the working class—not the working class of any one nation, however, but of the entire globe.
Lazare understands the subject of “On the Jewish Question” is the relationship between political and human emancipation, but Marx’s discussion of this relationship does not include the international and working class dimensions Lazare pulls in from the later Manifesto, so that part of the comment has to be put aside in order to focus on Marx’s expansion of Jacobin democratic theory “from the realm of politics and law to existence in toto.”
Marx made two mistakes in expounding on Jacobin (and US) democratic theory and constitutional structure: 1) the US wasn’t a democracy at the time and never has been, so Marx was wrong to assume it could serve as an illustration of what political liberation looked like or could accomplish, and 2) he was therefore also wrong to extrapolate from US competitive individualism that the natural Rights of Man were intrinsically bourgeois and egoistic. In reply to the predictable objection that the inclusion of property in the original Rights of Man and Citizen proves their bourgeois, egoistic, anti-communal character, G. D. H. Cole got it right in A History of Socialist Thought (vol.1, pp. 13-4), that the revolt of the entire Third Estate in France was originally intended to “right the wrong” of the theft of the people’s property over the centuries by the King, Church, and Nobility. The concept at the time of individually held property being necessary to secure personal independence and freedom from exploitation corresponds to Marx’s observation in the 1880 Programme of the [French] Workers Party that the means of production might be held by the producing class in either an individual or collective form, individual and primarily for personal use or simple commodity production before the development of capitalist industry, and necessarily collective thereafter. Although the Revolution never succeeded in distributing property equally, the original intention of guaranteeing a right to property was to establish a mutually respectful, democratic community of equal producers free of the predations of the past, not to create a new form of inequality and exploitation. That came after the Third Estate split into bourgeoisie and proletariat in the course of the Revolution.
Marx’s mistakes regarding American “democracy” and the essential egoism of rights have had bad lingering effects. Despite recent work “rediscovering” the democratic republican component of classical Marxism, many Marxists still consider the concept of democratic republicanism “bourgeois.” Similarly with the concept of rights. Lazare wants to transcend the traditional categories of rights and democratic republicanism. I believe they are still essential.
Summing Up
Daniel Lazare, May 31, 2024
Important questions yield important debates, a point that I believe the recent exchange in this blog among Gil Schaeffer, Luke Pickrell, Lucas De Hart, and myself amply demonstrates. The exchange began on Apr. 12 when Luke posted an article arguing that a mass movement should “be built in the US under the banner of democracy” and that while “[s]ocialist economic changes might emerge from a democratic state ... I don’t think the constituent assembly ... will be convened in the name of socialism.” As a consequence, he said, “we must discuss the Constitution and develop strategies for winning a democracy without getting sidetracked by discussions of what we’d like to do with that democracy.”
Five days later, Gil weighed in with an argument to the effect that “[s]ocialism by itself is too narrow a foundation on which to build a political movement of the Left” and that “[t]he political theory of democratic republicanism ... is just as important as the economic theory of socialism for the formation of a Left party.
“Marx and Engels’ great political innovation was to add the goal of socialism to democracy,” he said, “not to replace democracy with socialism.”
I then weighed in with a contrary argument on May 10 stating that any distinction between socialism and democracy was artificial from a Marxist standpoint because one grew out of the other. Since the mid-19th century, the working class has been the only consistent and reliable force fighting for democracy. Therefore: “The more the democratic struggle grew, the clearer it became that it would necessarily be a struggle for a workers’ democracy in which political and social movements were combined into one.”
Luke and Lucas followed up on May 17 with a polemic making a number of vital points, i.e.:
That “democracy is the core of Marxism and that the institutional form of democracy is a democratic republic defined by a universal and equal voting system for delegates to a single national assembly.”
That “the US is still in the age of the democratic revolution” since these elementary goals are still unrealized.
That even though “Marx and Engels intervened in the Chartist movement by emphasizing the complete socialization of property and adding their theory of human history[,] they did not change Chartism’s political goal of democracy.”
And that it is not the least bit “stageist” to suggest that a movement should start with a first step and that “obtain[ing] universal and equal suffrage and a unicameral parliament” in the US is it.
Luke posted another article on May 24 inveighing against so-called Marxists who would “reduce democracy and the Constitution to ‘superstructural’ phenomena” on the grounds that “real power lies at the point of production.”
On May 29, finally, Gil issued a rejoinder to my remarks on May 10 arguing that “Marx and Engels did create a new theory of historical change in the late 1840s that envisioned a new level of human emancipation in a communist society in the far distant future, but it is not true that the creation of this theory led them to downgrade in any way the centrality of the struggle for a democratic republic in the present” (all emphases in the original). To the contrary, Gil went on, winning democracy has long been “the principal object of [the socialist] movement.”
Since classic political democracy in the form of unicameralism, a unitary republic, proportional representation, and strictest political equality has always been at the core of the Marxist program, they should remain so, and talk of “workers’ democracy” should be rejected as an anti-parliamentarian deviation.
As I said, clearly a fruitful exchange. Basically, three questions are at stake:
Democracy versus socialism.
Classic political democracy versus workers’ democracy.
How the coming revolution – and there is not the slightest doubt that the US is entering into a revolutionary period – will play out.
Here is my evaluation.
The first issue seems simple enough. Luke, Lucas, and Gil see democracy and socialism as “distinct yet interconnected” (to quote Gil) and, therefore, should not be jumbled up and confused. Hence Luke’s argument that we should first establish democracy before concerning ourselves with what democracy should do. Hence also Gil’s argument that Marx and Engels combined socialism and democracy rather than replacing one with the other.
But what does “distinct yet interconnected” really mean? Isn’t this an attempt to have it both ways? If democracy can exist without socialism, as Luke suggests, can socialism exist without democracy? If so, was Stalin correct in asserting that he was building socialism despite trampling democracy at every turn? I would argue no – that not only is socialism inconceivable without the ability of workers to speak their minds, vote, demonstrate, etc., but that democracy cannot exist without socialism since the working class is the only social force with the unity and strength to push it through. It is not only a case of one person-one vote, unicameralism, and strict PR making it possible for workers to organize politically, but of workers organizing politically so as to institute one person-one vote etc. in order to advance their class interests. Workers will lead the fight for democracy because they are the only force capable of doing so, and they will then use democracy to advance their own class interests. This, in turn, will strengthen democracy, which will strengthen the working class, will strengthen democracy even more, and so on.
The struggle for democracy and socialism are thus dialectically united. While democracy goes back to the ancient Greeks, it is important to bear in mind that the idea has been repeatedly revolutionized. Athenians believed that slavery and democracy were mutually compatible. So did planters in the antebellum American south. Today’s liberals believe that democracy is only possible within an unchangeable constitutional framework dating from the 1780s. The Biden administration believes that democracy is only possible if accompanied by free markets, privatization, the IMF, World Bank, and NATO as well.
But this is not how Marx and Engels saw it. Contrary to Gil’s description of Marxist politics as “a combination of democratic republican and socialist ideas,” Marx and Engels did not merely combine the two like oil and vinegar in a mixing bowl. Instead, they revolutionized both concepts by raising democracy to an entirely new level and also by placing socialism on a firm scientific foundation. Popular sovereignty was their starting point. But where the Jacobins equated the people with the nation, Marx and Engels transferred sovereignty from the people in general to a specific portion, which is to say the proletariat, internationalized it by calling on workers of all nations to unite, and then intensified it by urging workers to take charge not only of the politico-legal sphere but of economics, morality, culture, and society in general.
Whether you call it super-democracy or some other term, the point is that it is democracy transformed. Luke and Lucas are skeptical of the grand sweep of Marx and Engels’s thinking. “Talking about a total reconceptualization of social and political existence simply isn’t effective political agitation,” they say. But not only is the grand sweep dialectically united with practical agitation in the here-and-now, but it is not nearly as pie-in-the-sky as they seem to believe. It is impossible to tackle global warming, to take just one example, without transforming production and consumption on a global basis. This means mobilizing not only factory workers in advanced industrial nations but also African villagers, Indian farmers, and Brazilian favelados, all of whom must be drawn into the struggle for the simple reason that the whole of the proletariat is the only force capable of transforming the whole of society.
This is not the least bit utopian, but practical and down to earth. Since bourgeois solutions are, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, counterproductive, it is the only way out. Democracy must thus be raised to the nth degree, politicized, and given a class direction for perhaps the greatest single problem in the history of humanity to be overcome. Otherwise, democracy will remain limp and lifeless.
Let us pause for a moment to consider what democratic revolution actually means. The US Constitution is not just any old law, but the law of laws, the source of all legal legitimacy. Every last aspect of American society must conform to its precepts – employment law, traffic law, parking regulations, everything. By the same token, everything will be up in the air the instant it is toppled. An immense political vacuum will open up much as it did in France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, only a thousand times greater since society is far more advanced. Since the working class brought this vacuum about by leading the fight for democracy, it is the only force capable of filling it in a democratic fashion. If it hesitates, then someone else will step into the breach, an American Kornilov perhaps. Just as Lenin and Trotsky were ready for the challenge, we must be ready too.
Now on to the second issue – classic political democracy versus workers’ democracy. Gil seems to think that one somehow precludes the other. He takes issue with a comment in my May 10 article:
“The more the democratic struggle grew, the clearer it became that it would necessarily be a struggle for a workers’ democracy in which political and social movements were combined into one. Rather than walling such concerns off in different compartments, the goal was henceforth to combine them in a single great movement.”
To which he replies:
“The problem with this account is that the demand for a democratic republic remained the primary political demand of all Marxist parties until 1917. The growth in the size of the industrial working class was not a reason to alter this goal but a confirmation of Marx and Engels’ original theory and program laid out in the Manifesto. There certainly was an expectation that the growing social, economic, and political struggles of the working class would eventually merge into one great movement, but the principal object of that movement was always to ‘win the battle of democracy.’”
There you have it: somehow I am suggesting that the growth of a revolutionary workers’ movement obviates the need for plain old democracy of the PR-unicameralism variety. But that is not what I am saying at all. Equality, unicameralism, etc. remain as essential as ever. A racist Senate, an undemocratic Electoral College, an unaccountable Supreme Court – all must go before they do any more damage. My point, instead, is that revolution is a self-radicalizing process in which democracy does not remain unchanged, but is pushed to its limits. In creating democracy, the working class will demand ever more extreme forms in order to advance their interests ever more completely.
Although Gil cites a number of classic Marxist texts in support of his argument, they are actually closer to my point of view than his. He cites an 1897 article in which Lenin refers to “the inseparably close connection between socialist and democratic propaganda and agitation, to the complete parallelism of revolutionary activity in both spheres,” and calls for “strengthen[ing] the democratic movement ... by bringing it closer to the real interests of the mass of the people, dragging political issues out of the ‘stuffy studies of the intelligentsia’ into the street, into the midst of the workers and laboring classes....”
What is this other than a call for workers’ democracy? Gil cites Karl Kautsky in the same vein when Kautsky, in fact, goes on at length about how a “parliamentary form of government ... which forms the basis for the emancipation of the proletariat can at the same time become the basis for the class domination of the bourgeoisie.” So parliamentarism is a two-edged sword. Gil likewise thinks Rosa Luxemburg is on his side when she says:
“In Germany, the slogan of a republic is thus infinitely more than the expression of a beautiful dream of democratic ‘peoples’ government,’ or political doctrinairism floating in the clouds: it is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule, the Prussianization of Germany; it is a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction” (Theory and Practice, 1910).
But she is really saying something quite different. Challenging such powerfully reactionary forces as Prussian militarism would be the opening shot of an immense civil war. Yes, a neat and orderly unicameral democracy might emerge as a consequence. But what is more likely is that the struggle would radicalize republicanism to the point that what emerges in the end is a red republicanism that seeks to revolutionize the rest of Europe as well. This was precisely Luxemburg’s goal, which is why an increasingly conservative Kautsky tried to censor her arguments. But the point is that democracy is not static, but is subject to the same revolutionary process.
Gil made a few other points in his May 29 contribution that are worthy of attention. He says that “the US wasn’t a democracy at the time and never has been, so Marx was wrong to assume it could serve as an illustration of what political liberation looked like or could accomplish.” But this is no more than half-correct. Unless one adopts an all-or-nothing view of democracy in which a country does not fit the bill unless it has unicameralism and PR, then it is plain that the United States was otherwise the most democratic society on earth as of the 1840s and 50s even when slavery is taken into account. Not only did Marx look to it for insight into what human liberation might mean, but so did Dickens, Tocqueville, and Frances Trollope, none of whom were the least bit starry-eyed and naïve. The infant American republic offered plenty of insight, for good and for ill.
Gil is under the misapprehension that when Marxists describe democratic republicanism as “bourgeois,” they mean it as a term of abuse. But they don’t – it is merely descriptive. While the French Revolution was bourgeois in that the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man included property among its many “natural and imprescriptible” freedoms, it was still the greatest event in history since the birth of Christ (to quote Les Misérables). It ushered in modernity, and if that’s not great, what is? The same goes for the Civil War. It was bourgeois in that Union forces had little intention of nationalizing the land or dividing up the big estates among ex-slaves and poor whites. But it ushered in US industrial capitalism, a world-transformative event.
Finally, Gil misinterprets my May 10 comment to the effect that “[l]iberals prefer a checklist approach in which Freedom House or other such organizations examine the state of free speech, a free press, regular elections, etc., to determine whether a given society qualifies as democratic or not.” He takes this to mean that I am impatient with individual liberties and therefore seek “to transcend the traditional categories of rights and democratic republicanism.”
This is also incorrect. I regard free speech, free assembly, and a free press as essential. Socialists should fight for them with utmost vigor. But we must also recognize that freedom for the pike is death for the minnow and that a “democratic dictatorship” cannot sit idly by while enemies of democracy take advantage of such liberties to undermine democracy itself. Should Reconstruction forces have sat by while neo-Confederates began organizing nearly the moment the Civil War was over? Should they have called for free speech or free assembly for the Ku Klux Klan? Hardly. The tragedy of Reconstruction was that it failed to enroll free blacks and poor whites in a democratic militia whose purpose would have been to repress the Klan before it got off the ground. History would have been very different if it had.
Revolution’s first duty is to its own survival and growth. This is the “positive freedom” of workers to institute democracy and protect it from its enemies. It is the freedom on which all others depend.
And now to the third point: how the coming revolutionary period will play out.
One problem I have with Luke, Lucas, and Gil’s contributions is that they lack a sense of emergency. They see all the problems with the US constitutional structure and want to fix them as soon as possible, which is commendable. But they make no mention of the crisis bearing down on US society in the form of a Trump juggernaut. If Trump is elected in November – or if he takes office by other means – the effect will be to vindicate the coup d’état he launched on Jan. 6, 2021. When coups overturn elections and mob rule acquires the force of law, then political democracy in even the broken-down US form is lost. Outward appearances may linger, but the essence vanishes. Mussolini, who Trump resembles in certain respects, did not institute a rightwing totalitarian state all at once. Instead, he ruled in conjunction with various centrist parties, he tolerated a noisy and outspoken opposition, and he did not impose anything like a totalitarian state until late 1925, better than three years after the March on Rome. Whether Trump will follow the same route is unknown. But as he vows to crush his enemies, politicize the Department of Justice, and deport 11 million migrants, there is no reason for complacency. Trump represents a process of rightwing radicalization that will likely grow more extreme as the crisis accelerates.
The ultimate cause is constitutional. After decades of gridlock, paralysis, stolen elections, and bitter partisanship, the constitutional order is not only breaking down but “breaking right,” which is to say in an authoritarian direction in which a rightwing strongman must “break heads” in order to make the ancient government machinery work. The more recalcitrant the counts and barons on Capitol Hill grow, the more skulls the strong man will have to crack. Since this will only serve to worsen the structural crisis, Trump’s actions will, therefore, grow more desperate and extreme. The crisis will intensify as America’s antiquated constitutional system enters into its final crisis.
But the constitutional crisis will not take place alone. To the contrary, it will feed into a growing socio-economic crisis – war, crime, poverty, racial conflict, homelessness, you name it – that will, in turn, require an ever more extreme White House response. The result is a multi-dimensional crisis that could well send US society over a cliff. If so, then Europe, Japan, etc. will follow. A takeover by Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, the Sweden Democrats, and Germany’s AfD will not be pretty, but it will be only the start of a general slide downhill.
This is the crisis that socialists, “democratic republicans,” and others should begin preparing for. The Constitution is at the center of it, but much else is too. This is what makes the ongoing debates on the Democratic Constitution Blog so crucial. They are only a beginning. But the questions they raise can only grow more and more important.