Democratic Political Movements, Democratic Electoral Rules, and Socialism: A Reply to Daniel Lazare
Gil Schaeffer continues the conversation about socialism and democracy
Photo by David De Hart
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.