Recovering the Struggle for Equal Rights and Democracy
The first section of a new reader on equal human and political rights and democratic republicanism
This is the first section of a new reader, “Equal Human and Political Rights and Democratic Republicanism,” created by Gil Schaeffer, Lucas De Hart, and Luke Pickrell. The complete reader is here. We hope to create reading groups around this document. If you’re interested in contributing, please email lukepickrell@yahoo.com.
The goal of this reader is to recover the concepts of equal human and political rights codified in The Rights of Man and Citizen during the French Revolution. These rights are essential for understanding the moral foundations of democracy and socialism. More than just a means to get to socialism, freedom and equal rights constitute what it means to be fully human. Freedom is 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.
This reader begins by locating the origins of equal human and political rights in the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Levellers during the English Civil War nearly three centuries later. Next, it introduces Marx and Engels and their relationship to the struggle for democracy. Marx and Engels’ great political innovation was to add the goal of socialism to democracy, not to replace democracy with socialism. We then follow the thread of democratic republicanism through various socialist parties and organizations, culminating in today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). We pay close attention to the struggle for universal and equal rights in the U.S., particularly during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. Included is a discussion of how and why constitutional critique was lost in the U.S. and why that critique has returned.
Schaeffer’s article, “Marxism Is Democratic Republicanism: The History of the Struggle for Equal Human and Political Rights From the Inside Out,” is a postscript to the reader. The article situates our intervention within an ongoing debate on the Left about the importance of equal human and political rights and democratic republicanism in our political agitation and theory.
Section 1: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381
Readings: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, John Ball, John Wycliffe, Lollardy
We are engaged in a two-step recovery of the history of the struggle for equal rights and democracy. The first step has been the recovery of the place of the democratic republic in Marxism; the second involves the recovery of the concepts of equal human and political rights that were codified in The Rights of Man and Citizen during the French Revolution and which are essential for understanding the moral foundations of democracy and socialism.
As migrating German tribes mixed with the remnants of the Roman Empire and Christianity, a distinctive form of civilization began to emerge. Unlike the empires of Rome, Byzantium, Islam, China, and India, Europe was never united under a single ruler. Instead, power and authority were dispersed in multiple and often conflicting political and religious entities. Gradually, a dynamic commercial economy grew within and across this multi-power complex. The eventual result was the consolidation of a relatively small number of contentious capitalist nation-states. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, covers this development to 1760; and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vols. 1 & 2, surveys a wide range of European political thinking from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of the English Civil War.
Two historical events during this period, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the English Civil War, were important sources for the later theory of equal human and political rights and are useful for illustrating how rights claims are asserted and justified.
Here is John Ball’s famous speech during the 1381 peasant uprising:
When Adam delved [plowed], and Eve span [spun cloth]
Who was then a gentleman?
From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of evil men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time has come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if you will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty [by] uprooting the tares [weeds] that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone... harmful to the community….
A right is a justified claim; almost everything about the form and purpose of claims to equal rights is contained in Ball’s speech. Ball used the origin story of Adam and Eve to contrast free from unfree labor. His peasant audience knew they had not submitted to serfdom voluntarily and were held in bondage by force. For them, it was a self-evident truth that freedom was right and bondage wrong, and it was their judgment that mattered. Ball does not appeal to the king, lords, or any other superior earthly authority to grant freedom, equality, and justice but calls on the people to establish freedom, equality, and justice themselves.
Ball was a follower of John Wycliffe, a philosopher and theologian who condemned the corruption of the Church, led the project of translating the Bible into English, and whose writings inspired later Church reformers such as Jan Hus and, through Hus, Martin Luther. So, the revolt challenged not only lord-peasant economic relations but also the legitimacy of the entire cosmology and structure of religious and royal authority.
While expressed partially through Christian theology, the Peasants’ Revolt established two secular goals in popular consciousness that were later included in the theory of universal and equal human rights. One was to secure the land and labor of the peasants and other producers from the predations of the monarchy, church, and nobility, and the second was to win the freedom to read, meet, discuss, publish, and worship without royal or religious censorship. However, there was no demand at this time for popular representation in the state because the state at that point consisted of little more than the person of the King and his retinue. It was not until the conflict between Charles I and Parliament in the English Civil War that it became possible to advance the demand for democratic representation in the state itself.