Marxism Is Democratic Republicanism: The History of the Struggle for Equal Human and Political Rights From the Inside Out
An introduction to an upcoming reading list. By Gil Shaeffer
When the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) put forward its Winning the Battle for Democracy Resolution for the 2023 DSA Convention, I thought the group was making a firm commitment to the formula contained in the 2021 DSA Political Platform, “Democracy is necessary to win a socialist society. Socialism is the complete realization of democracy,” a formula that Parker McQueeney, a primary author of MUG’s 2023 Resolution, also had a hand in writing. I also thought this formula and the Resolution were derived directly from the strategy of the Marxist parties of the Second International, a strategy best expressed in the following three statements:
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. (Friedrich Engels, “A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891”)
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 universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat. (Friedrich Engels, “Reply to the Honorable Giovanni Bovio,” 1892)
Therefore, the Russian Social Democratic Labor 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:
1. Sovereignty of the people—that is, concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly of the people and forming a single chamber.
2. 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 at all elections; the right of every voter to be elected to any representative body; biennial parliaments; payment of the people’s representatives. (“Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party,” 1903)
It turned out I had misread the MUG majority’s understanding of classical Marxism’s ideology and strategy of democratic republicanism. Instead of defining a democratic republic as an electoral system in which representatives to a supreme national legislative body are chosen by universal and equal suffrage, it became clear that most MUG members believed the concept of a democratic republic also had to be explicitly socialist and include as minimum requirements both the immediate enactment of socialist economic measures and the establishment of a people’s army. It is true that MUG’s Points of Unity had always called for a democratic socialist republic rather than a democratic republic. Even so, I thought there had been a change in thinking because the “Winning the Battle for Democracy” Resolution held that the establishment of a democratic republic would consolidate the power necessary for the transition to socialism but did not specifically argue that this transition would be immediate and simultaneous with the establishment of democracy.
From my perspective, the “democratic socialist republic” standpoint suffers from a fixation on the speculative problem of consolidating socialist power in a revolutionary situation. Hence, its almost exclusive focus on the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 to illustrate what it conceives are the most important ideological and strategic problems facing the U.S. Left today. (See the three articles summing up this debate in Cosmonaut.) Since I do not believe a similar revolutionary situation is likely in the U.S., I think speculations based on such expectations serve little useful purpose and, more importantly, detract from our central political task of campaigning for the basic democratic principle of one person, one equal vote.
I’m familiar with the standard “Marxist” objections to a democracy first strategy —that it is reformist, not revolutionary; that it aims only for a liberal or bourgeois democracy, not a socialist or proletarian democracy; and that it foolishly imagines a constitutional convention will be able to establish its authority and power peacefully without first defeating the capitalist state militarily. The readings will address these objections in detail, but I’ll outline the main argument here.
First, regarding what is and what is not revolutionary, here is a passage from an article Karl Kautsky wrote in 1893 that he chose to repeat in The Road to Power (1909):
We are revolutionaries, and are such not merely in the sense in which the steam engine is revolutionary. The social revolution that we are striving for can only be achieved by means of a political revolution, through the conquest of political power by the militant proletariat. And the particular form of government in which alone socialism can be realized, is the republic, and by that I mean ‘republic’ in the most common meaning of the term, namely the democratic republic. (Kautsky, The Road to Power, p. 41)
Kautsky considered the strategic goal of a democratic republic revolutionary independent of the tactics by which it might be achieved, and this orthodox Marxist Social Democratic conception of the revolutionary character of the struggle for democracy was accepted by Lenin and Luxemburg without reservation.
At the same time, the word revolution was also used to refer to the tactics involved in the violent seizure of power. Lenin explains the relationship between the general strategic aim of winning political power and the specific tactical means that might be required to achieve this aim in “A Retrograde Trend in Russian Social-Democracy” (1899):
The working class would, of course, prefer to take power peacefully (we have already stated that this seizure of power can be carried out only by the organized working class which has passed through the school of the class struggle), but to renounce the revolutionary seizure of power would be madness on the part of the proletariat, both from the theoretical and the practical-political points of view; it would mean nothing but a disgraceful retreat in the face of the bourgeoisie and all other propertied classes. It is very probable—even most probable—that the bourgeoisie will not make peaceful concessions to the proletariat and at the decisive moment will resort to violence for the defense of its privileges. In that case, no other way will be left to the proletariat for the achievement of its aims but that of revolution. This is the reason the programme of ‘working class socialism’ speaks of winning political power in general without defining the method, for the choice of method depends on a future which we can not precisely determine. But, we repeat, to limit the activities of the proletariat under any circumstances to peaceful ‘democratization’ alone is arbitrarily to narrow and vulgarize the concept of working-class socialism. (Italics in original)
In this formulation, the word revolution has both a general strategic meaning, revolution-S, and a tactical meaning, revolution-T. The strategic meaning is the same as Kautsky’s and refers to the general goal of seizure of power and establishing a democratic republic without specifying the tactics. The tactical meaning refers specifically to the seizure of power by violent rather than peaceful means. (However, this terminology is not actually accurate and consistent. If the general strategic goal of conquering state power is revolutionary, then the seizure of power by peaceful means would be just as revolutionary as seizing power by violent means. An accurate and consistent specification of these different tactical possibilities would then be revolution-VT, meaning violent tactics, or revolution-PT, meaning peaceful tactics. This inconsistency could also be eliminated by abandoning the use of the word revolution altogether, but that option has to be put aside for now. Here, we are just trying to understand how the classical Marxists used the vocabulary of revolution.)
There is also a third meaning of revolution, revolution-A, which refers to the skill and practice of political agitation, both in the (relatively) normal years before any “decisive moment” of political and possibly violent confrontation and in the intense months preceding a decisive moment itself. Lenin touches on this in “A Retrograde Trend” but only developed it fully with the publication of Iskra and its justification in What Is to Be Done?
Rather than seeing the classical Marxist goal of a democratic republic as revolutionary, many, if not most, Marxists today see it as reformist, stagist, liberal, or bourgeois. They are also convinced the struggle for socialism will be violent and often advocate the formation of militias long before any “decisive moment” is imminent to avoid Allende's fate in Chile. Both of these convictions seem to have their source in Lenin's arguments in State and Revolution that “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism” (p. 12), and a peaceful seizure of power is no longer possible because all capitalist countries have become militarist and bureaucratic. (p. 28)
Lenin’s full argument about the democratic republic in State and Revolution is actually very different, but this larger picture is hard to see because State and Revolution was patched together hurriedly amid a violent revolutionary upheaval and is not consistent in its use of political terms. First, despite all its references to contemporary democratic republics, no democratic republic (as defined by the 1903 RSDLP Program) existed in either Europe or North America in 1917, with the possible exception of Norway. Near the end, Lenin seems to recognize he has been a little loose in his use of terms and writes:
We, however, shall break with the opportunists; and the entire class-conscious proletariat will be with us in the fight—not to ‘shift the balance of forces’, but to overthrow the bourgeoisie, to destroy parliamentarism, for a democratic republic after the type of the Commune, or a republic of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. (p. 82)
The main target of the State and Revolution is not the democratic republic but the anti-egalitarian bourgeois parliamentary republic.
Second, despite saying, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism,” Lenin nevertheless continued to agree with Engels that “If one thing is certain, it is that our party and the working class can only come to power in the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lenin explains:
Engels realized here in a particularly striking form the fundamental idea which runs through all of Marx’s works, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic, without in the least abolishing the rule of capital, and, therefore, the oppression of the masses and the class struggle, inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding, and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as it becomes possible to meet the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the leadership of those masses by the proletariat (p. 49);
and:
The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ bodies. ‘The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time.’ (p. 33-4)
Of course, a few quotations can’t answer all the questions raised in the history of Marxism about the relationship between the democratic republic, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the transition to socialism; but they can answer the question of whether Lenin in State and Revolution rejected the democratic republic as historically obsolete, reformist, stagist, liberal, or bourgeois, and the answer is he did not. Those kinds of denunciations came later and were the product of the degeneration of Marxist thinking after Lenin died. However, some of Lenin’s words and actions could be used for that purpose, as Rosa Luxemburg warned in The Russian Revolution (1918).
In addition, although it should not need saying, I want to stress that looking at Lenin’s thinking anew and correcting distortions introduced by later Marxists does not mean Lenin’s words should be taken as gospel. All that historical reconstruction can do is awaken us to political possibilities we may not have previously imagined. For me, the study of Lenin and the history of classical Marxism in general has revealed a commitment to democratic values, rights, institutions, and political strategy that had been neglected for decades and has only been recovered relatively recently through the work of Draper, Draper, Hunt, Hunt, Harding, Nimtz, and Lih. I identify with those democratic values and strategic objectives but understand they need to be justified by reasoned argument, not by appeals to authority.
Third, regarding the question of violence, the most sensible and productive standpoint is the one outlined in Lenin’s “Retrograde Trend” article: “the programme of ‘working class socialism’ speaks of winning political power in general without defining the method, for the choice of method depends on a future which we can not precisely determine,” even if it is “most probable” the bourgeoisie will not surrender peacefully. Lenin’s point is that the primary form of struggle in the years prior to a decisive contest for power is overwhelmingly ideological and political rather than military, and that the main way to prepare for any possible future revolutionary confrontation is to organize a party and mass movement for democracy beforehand.
This is where political agitation, revolution-A, comes in. Lenin wrote “A Retrograde Trend” in late 1899, a little over five years before Bloody Sunday set off the 1905 Revolution. The St. Petersburg Bolsheviks were suspicious of Father Gapon and expressed doubts about his faith in the Tsar’s benevolence. Still, the workers followed Gapon’s lead and not the Bolsheviks’ (yet the Bolsheviks and other Social Democrats succeeded in adding the demand for a Constituent Assembly to the “Petition to the Tsar” and joined the procession). We may wish mass politics operated differently and the workers had joined with the Bolsheviks to form militias rather than walk into a slaughter; but, as Lenin argued in WITBD, it was not enough to explain to the workers that the Tsar was not their fatherly protector: the workers had to learn that for themselves by their own direct participation in political events. Because the political and organizational ground had been prepared beforehand by the formation of Iskra and then the RSDLP and then their own faction, the Bolsheviks were in a better position than others to provide leadership in the aftermath of the massacre. Our situation in the U.S. is no different ideologically and strategically than that of the Social Democrats in Russia in 1899. Like theirs, our primary political task is to begin the struggle to win the battle for democracy.
That’s my answer to some fundamental questions regarding the meaning and place of the democratic republic in the history and theory of classical Marxism, but that is not the end of the story. Reading Lenin on democratic republicanism not only prompted me to look at the U.S. political system from a democratic republican point of view; it also led me to look back into the origins of democratic republican ideas themselves. Engels and Marx did not invent democratic republicanism. They adopted its form essentially unchanged from its original incarnation in the French Revolution and 1793 Constitution, as Engels’ quote above indicates: “This [the democratic republic] is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.” However, although they took over the form and strategic goal of the democratic republic from earlier democrats, Marx, in particular, sought to separate democratic republicanism from its connection to the theory of universal and equal rights outlined in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” (1789).
I think something important was lost in that effort. In his first attempt to deal with these issues in On the Jewish Question (1843), Marx mistakenly assumed the U.S. was already a democratic republic and drew the conclusion that the rights of the democratic citizen had so far only served as a means to secure the egoistic competitive rights of economic man. This led Marx to split what he thought were the individualist, egoistic Rights of Man from the communitarian promise of the Rights of the Citizen. He then argued that the original communitarian impulse behind the demand for citizenship rights had to be revived but separated from the egoism of the Rights of Man to property. Real human emancipation could then be achieved by the abolition of private property.
The flaw in Marx’s analysis is that he equated the Rights of Man, especially the right to property, with egoism, competition, and selfishness. However, that is not how the claim to security of property was understood in 1789. Instead, it was seen as establishing essential protection for the vast majority of peasant and urban small property producers against the plunder inflicted over the centuries by the monarchy, aristocracy, and church. Ending such exploitation and abuse was seen as necessary for creating a self-governing egalitarian social and political community. Only later in the revolution did a rising bourgeoisie consolidate itself politically and assert a right to the unlimited accumulation of property, but democrats like Gracchus Babeuf, Tom Paine, and Thomas Spence declared in response that this excess accumulation of private property was a new form of tyranny and a threat to the freedom, independence, and livelihood of the majority.
That was the origin of the modern socialist idea that the majority had the right to take control of these new forms of concentrated wealth and make them the property of society as a whole (G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, 1789-1850). The majority still had a right to ownership and control of society's productive resources, but the form of that property was changing from individual to collective. Unfortunately, the bourgeoisie had the upper hand, Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals was suppressed, the right to an equal vote was removed from the French Constitution, and the bourgeoisie has opposed universal and equal suffrage ever since.
As a result of the rise of the anti-slavery movement in the U.S. in the early 1850s, Marx eventually understood the U.S. was not really a democratic republic. Still, he never overcame his original aversion to the language of rights, justice, and morality (“Letter to Engels,” Critique of the Gotha Programme). Yet he was nevertheless forced to use this language in his popular writings during the First International because that was the language workers used and understood. The same was true of the parties of the Second International. Their programs combined a “maximum” section outlining Marx’s theory of the development of capitalism, the proletariat, and socialism with a “minimum” section prioritizing civil and political rights and goals taken over from pre-Marxist democratic republicanism. This passage from the 1891 Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic Party is an example of how socialism, economic exploitation, and equal rights concepts were routinely mixed together:
The German Social Democratic Party therefore does not fight for new class privileges and class rights, but for the abolition of class rule and of classes themselves, for equal rights and equal obligations for all, without distinction of sex or birth. Starting from these views, it fights not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners in society today, but every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race.
Notice that equal rights and opposition to every form of exploitation and oppression stand on their own as values and commitments in this statement and are not derived from an analysis of the exploitation of wage earners under capitalism. Wage earner exploitation is treated only as one kind of oppression among others, and socialism is not set against the concept of equal rights but is seen instead as part of their fulfillment. Recognizing that equal rights theory had a strong following within the Social Democratic movement matters because Social Democratic activists had to sift through the mix of analyses, values, and aims in their party programs to find the best ones to communicate to workers in the hope they would take them up as their own.
That is the challenge of political agitation, revolution-A: to develop the issues, language, and arguments with the most potential to propel the entire movement forward. And that was the focus of the most important political debates within the Second International, starting with the Revisionist controversy in Germany, followed by the Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case in France, the Economist/Iskraist and Menshevik/Bolshevik disputes in Russia, and the later mass strike and democratic republic debates in Germany. Of these, Lenin’s writings on democratic political consciousness and agitation are the most important.
Lenin did not invent anything new; he just arranged the standard inventory of Social Democratic ideas in a unique way and acted on them with extraordinary consistency and determination. Specifically, he placed the principle stated in the Erfurt Program that Social Democrats fight “not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners in society today, but every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race,” at the center of his thinking and activity and built out from there. That is what Lenin’s concept of Social Democratic political consciousness in WITBD is all about, as everyone now knows, thanks to Harding and Lih. Lih sums up Lenin’s distinctive political approach in two sentences in Lenin Rediscovered, pp. 8-9:
If you were willing to fight for political freedom, you were Lenin’s ally, even if you were hostile to socialism. If you downgraded the goal of political freedom in any way, you were Lenin’s foe, even if you were a committed socialist.
The distinction between the fight for political freedom [meaning a democratic republic with full civil and political rights] and socialism [of any kind that did not prioritize the struggle for freedom] is important because it identifies the emotion Lenin was seeking to awaken with his political agitation:
Why do the Russian workers still manifest little revolutionary activity in response to the brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of the religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc.? Is it because the ‘economic struggle’ does not ‘stimulate’ them to this, because such activity does not ‘promise palpable results’, because it produces little that is ‘positive '? To adopt such an opinion, we repeat, is merely to direct the charge where it does not belong, to blame the working masses for one’s own philistinism (or Bernsteinism). We must blame ourselves, our lagging behind the mass movement, for still being unable to organize sufficiently wide, striking, and rapid exposures of all the shameful outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it) the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. Feeling that, he himself will be filled with an irresistible desire to react, and he will know how to hoot the censors one day, on another day to demonstrate outside the house of a governor who has brutally suppressed a peasant uprising, on still another day to teach a lesson to the gendarmes in surplices who are doing the work of the Holy Inquisition, etc. (WITBD, Lenin, CW vol. 5, pp. 413-4, italics in original)
And Lih quotes from a Russian workers’ newspaper from 1897:
The Russian worker movement is still tightly held in the iron grip of governmental oppression. As a living being needs air, so we need political freedom. Without achieving freedom of strikes, assembly, unions, speech and press, without achieving the right to take part in the administration of the country or in making its laws, we will never cast off the chains of economic slavery that oppress us. That is why the struggle for political freedom is the most urgent task of the Russian worker movement. (Lenin Rediscovered, p. 90, italics in original)
The purpose of these quotes is to illustrate the emotions that fueled the demand for freedom, equal rights, and democracy by both workers and Social Democratic leaders and activists during the Second International. More than just a means to get to socialism, for activists and workers, freedom and equal rights constituted what they needed to be fully human. Freedom was like air: a living being suffocates without it. That is the standpoint from which we will tell the story of the struggle for equal human and political rights, from the perspective of the unfree struggling to be free and from the standpoint of the fight for freedom from the inside out.