Summing Up

Daniel Lazare responds to Luke, Lucas, and Gil on democracy and socialism

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-19^th 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.