The Age of the Democratic Revolution

Luke and Lucas respond to Daniel Lazare's article on democracy and socialism. Luke is an editor and lead writer and Lucas the Founder of the Democratic Constitution Blog.

Photos by David De Hart

Lucas and I sincerely appreciate Daniel Lazare’s engagement with the Democratic Constitution Blog, including his recent response to “The Youth Lead the Way.” In responding to Lazare, we’d like to clarify our position on the democratic republic and its relationship to socialism based on our interpretation of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. We suspect that Lazare is familiar with the following history. Ultimately, much of this discussion comes down to what parts of Marxism and history we consider most relevant to the current moment. 

Based on our reading of primary and secondary (i) sources, Lucas and I think 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. Because democracy is central and the U.S. is not a democracy, the classic Marxist strategy of achieving a democratic republic to realize a socialized economy is still relevant to the U.S. The democratic demands put forward in the French Republic’s constitution of 1793, the Russian Social Democratic Party’s platform of 1903, and the Socialist Party of America’s platform of 1912 — not to mention the ideals of Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens (ii) — have yet to be realized in the United States. In other words, the U.S. is still in the age of the democratic revolution. 

Lazare is correct that the struggle for democracy predated Marx, Engels, and the Industrial Revolution in England that birthed a mass working class. During the 17th century, the Levellers argued that “the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee,” and, “Equal in birth, born in the image of god, the people in general are the original sole legislaters, and the true fountain, and earthly well-spring of all just power.” Building an intellectual foundation later used by Tom Paine (iii) and Thomas Jefferson (iv), the Levellers argued that just as a person can change her way of life, so should an entire nation be able to change in order to maximize its inhabitants' safety and freedom.

The ideas of democracy, universal and equal rights, and a democratically elected unicameral legislature spread from the Levellers to the North American colonies. Tom Paine worked to give these ideas as complete a material expression as possible in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 to 1790 (v). From Paine, the ideas traveled to France and influenced the Declaration of Rights of Man, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the abortive 1793 constitution. Having been suppressed in England for over a century, they reemerged in the political thought of Chartism. Like the Levellers, the Chartists used every means at their disposal in an unsuccessful attempt to create a genuinely democratic state. 

Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England that the democratic working-class Chartist movement would soon adopt socialist principles. Until it did, he believed it was the intellectual/ideological job of political socialists to merge socialist theory and policy with Chartism. However, this merger did not mean that the Chartist’s political goal of democracy had been superseded. Four years later, Engels wrote in Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith, “The first, fundamental condition for the introduction of a community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution.” 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. 

Marx quickly adopted Engel’s democratic ideology and included it in the Communist Manifesto, writing, “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.” From that position of power, the proletariat would “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie…” Just one month later, Marx put aside the vision outlined in the Manifesto and returned to the far less romantic reality of contemporary politics, demanding that Germany “be declared a united, indivisible republic” and “Every German who is Twenty-one years old shall be a voter and be eligible for election, assuming he has not been sentenced for a criminal offence.” I don’t think it’s “stageist,” as Dan claims, to talk about first steps. Every political movement needs to start somewhere. Every vanguard organization must present a clear and understandable strategy to the public. Until the Russian Revolution, social democracy had a clear strategy for achieving socialism: obtain universal and equal suffrage and a unicameral parliament. 

Marx soon realized that only the working class organized into a political party would see the struggle for democracy through to the end. However, he and Engels did not then “combine” “political and social movements” in the name of realizing a “workers’ democracy” (a term I don’t think Marx or Engels ever used; they talked about democracy and felt no need to add ‘worker’ to it. That would be redundant; electoral democracy simply means that the working class, the majority in society, possesses universal and equal voting rights). Despite moments of confusion (vi) and contradiction (vii), Marx and Engels never dropped the demand for a democratic republic in order to win the battle for democracy and ensure working-class control over the state. Three years before his death, Engels explained how “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 universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”

In his article “Hiding in Plain Sight,” Lazare describes the Constitution as shaping our “political playing field” and “politico-legal arena.” This playing field or arena was designed to divide political power to ensure that no “factious spirit” would endanger property (including property in enslaved people). To retain Lazare’s helpful metaphor, a democratic constitution — and through it, a democratic legislature — would create a playing field far more congenial to realizing the will of the majority. Karl Kautky put it another way in 1909: “The only form of the state in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a thoroughly democratic republic at that.” Socialism will come about as an economic policy enacted by a democratic legislature and overseen and implemented by the organized working class.

The age of the democratic revolution has yet to be completed in the United States. The U.S. has its own rich history of democratic struggle, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the New Left and anti-war movement. Given this history, there’s every reason to think another mass democratic struggle is possible. Lucas and I contend that socialists can play a role in developing this movement by adopting Lenin’s theory of political agitation and connecting each social abuse back to the need for a democratic republic. Revolutionaries are rule makers; we think the existing rules are harmful and unjust, and we want to change them. As the Levellers first understood in the 17th century, the only way the democratic majority can make the rules is through a single national assembly and universal and equal voting rights. 

Marxist theory has a strong (though self-contradictory) current that describes a future classless society without the need for any laws, political structures, or morals (viii). I don’t think this current is helpful. Political agitation that focuses on the need for a democratic republic in the United States is possible without considering the transcendence of the entire known universe. Talking about a total reconceptualization of social and political existence simply isn’t effective political agitation — and it’s certainly not Lenin’s theory of political agitation as presented in What Is To Be Done? 

The U.S. is not a democracy, and there is no way to transcend the necessity of politics and structures. We need a constitution that establishes majority rule and declares universal and equal rights for all as its goal. This is the political playing field that the working class needs if it is going to realize a socialist economy. Having identified the Constitution as the loadstone of the existing state and concluded what is needed, Lucas and I plan and carry out our political agitation accordingly. 

Splitting contemporary left discourse about democracy and the Constitution into three distinct camps — electoralist or electoral reformist, socialist, and democratic republican — is my attempt to describe an actual phenomenon within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the broader milieu of self-described socialists. As I explained, the first two camps have little interest in discussing democracy and the Constitution. If anything, socialists are less interested in talking about democracy than electoralists. Lazare is unique; I don’t know anyone else, including people in Marxist Unity Group, who talks about transforming the “totality of existence” in some future society and says socialists should agitate for a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution. Most socialists think that political agitation means talking about the good news of socialism. Almost no one who calls themselves a socialist — again, including most members of Marxist Unity Group — engages in political agitation that centers the demand for a democratic constitution. 

I have no interest in prescribing a path for how the democratic struggle in the United States will play out. However, I do have an opinion about what activists should be talking about. Democratic republicans and socialists differ in the kind of political agitation they think has the best chance of building a political constituency in the United States. Democratic republicans believe that the question of universal and equal rights is the state’s weakest point precisely because that is what the existing Constitution so flagrantly denies. The left should be hammering away at the question of democracy because a growing number of people realize that the existing state is so flagrantly illegitimate on those grounds and are understandably upset. Democratic republicans think the battle to democratize our political system is the leading edge of the class political struggle that makes socialism possible. Socialists should lean into that fight. 

i. Primary sources not listed in this article include Karl Kautsky, “The Republic and Social Democracy in France” (1904); Rosa Luxemburg, “Theory and Practice,” (1911); Lenin, “Political Agitation and the ‘Class Point of View’” (1902) and “What Is To Be Done?” (1902). Secondary sources include Hal Draper, “Marx on the Democratic Forms of Government” (1974), “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Marx and Engels,” (1987), and “The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party’” (1990); Neil Harding, “Lenin’s Political Thought,” two volumes (1997); Richard N. Hunt, “The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels,” two volumes (1974); August Nimtz, The Ballot, the Street - or Both? (2011). 

ii. Lazare knows all about Stevens, who called the constitution a “piece of parchment” and declared that “the whole sovereignty rests with the people, and is exercised through their representatives in Congress assembled…No other branch of the Government…possesses one single particle of the sovereignty of the nation.” In Fawn McKay Browdie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South, New York: W.W. Norton, 1959. 

iii. Paine: “Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated.”

iv. Jefferson: “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” 

v. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995, 152. 

vi. Marx called the U.S. a democracy in 1844 in “On the Jewish Question.” He was wrong. The Constitution violated (and still violates) the principle of universal and equal suffrage. Also, the country was full of enslaved Africans. 

vii. After Engels calls for the establishment of a democratic constitution in England, France, and Germany, he goes on to say in Principle 25 that “in America, where a democratic constitution has already been established...” Like Marx, Engels was wrong. 

viii. Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.