For a Workers’ Democracy
Daniel Lazare argues that socialism and democracy are not separate and distinct categories.
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.