The U.S. Left's Rediscovery of Democratic Republicanism
A recording and edited transcript of Luke Pickrell's presentation to East Bay DSA
[A recording of the presentation is at the end]
This article discusses why the left must fight for a democratic constitution. Discussion about democracy and the Constitution falls under democratic republicanism — the idea that the ideal state is one in which unimpeded lawmaking power lies in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected by universal and equal suffrage.
Marx and Engels did not invent democratic republicanism or the struggle for universal and equal rights. They adopted democratic republicanism before becoming communists and made socialism political by adding the strategy of achieving a democratic republic.
For a long time, the working-class movement's foremost demand was a democratic republic and agitation around it. As Engels said in 1881, it was common knowledge that “democracy means the dominion of the working class, neither more nor less.” Working-class politics was the struggle for political democracy (as seen in the English Chartists).
Marx and Engels spent their political careers struggling for democracy. Toward the end of his life, Engels explained, probably a bit exasperated, “Marx and I have repeated ad nauseam that…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.”
However, the democratic republicanism of classical Marxism was lost after the Russian Revolution. The result was a steep decline in constitutional agitation. Was lost is the key phrase. Times are changing.
The struggle for genuine democracy has been going on for a long time. As a result, this article covers a lot of ground. The first part centers on America in the 1960s. I focus on two movements, the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, personified by two people, Martin Luther King and Tom Hayden, who struggled to change our country’s political structure.
Also, in the 1960s, Hal Draper reintroduced Lenin’s democratic republicanism. From there, the ball kept rolling. The second part of this article follows writers like Draper, who changed a few minds here and a few minds there and are primarily responsible for the present moment.
The transition between these two parts might feel jarring; they include different people, places, times, and sometimes different jargon. However, the people we encounter speak the common language of universal and equal rights. Everyone wants the same thing: a democratic state and self-governance. The connecting thread tying all of these struggles together, including our own, is the struggle for political freedom.
Part One
Martin Luther King and Tom Hayden were the figureheads of two concurrent movements for democracy in the United States: the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. King was the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), among many other honorifics. Hayden was the President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1962-63 and the author of SDS’s Port Huron Statement, the most influential document to emerge from the New Left.
As a twenty-six-year-old minister, Martin Luther King linked the burgeoning civil rights movement to the supreme law of the land, exclaiming, “[We] are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.” A few years later, King called the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence “great wells of democracy” and later, “promissory [notes] to which every American was to fall heir… the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
However, King never expressed a genuine belief in the legitimacy of the Constitution. Unlike countless presidents, he never praised the “guard rails” created by the Framers. He shared little in common with James Madison, who extolled the United States’ republican form of government as a means to frustrate any “interested and overbearing majority” and to disrupt the power of the “people out of doors.” King sounded nothing like Benjamin Rush, who said, “A simple democracy … is one of the greatest of evils.”
The Constitution is designed to make swift and decisive action as difficult as possible. King, however, famously explained that “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” Freedom and justice were his guiding lights. In his Letter From Birmingham Jail, he repeated Saint Augustine’s warnings that “[a]n unjust law is no law at all” and “[a]ny law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” If the Constitution facilitated the pursuit of freedom and justice, it was good; when it impeded those goals, it was not.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the “peak of optimism” for the Civil Rights movement. King called it a “shining moment” and suggested that the new law might make mass protests unnecessary.
However, the Watts Riots began five days after the Voting Rights Act passed. The Kerner Commission later concluded that the U.S. was moving “toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” King did not need an official report to tell him what was going on: “The quality and quantity of discrimination and deprivation in our nation are so pervasive,” he explained, “that all the changes of a decade have merely initiated preliminary alterations in an edifice of injustice and misery.”
By 1967, King felt he had run out of answers; Coretta told him they would come in time. In this context of frustration and increasing despair, King, for the first time, explicitly questioned the Constitution in what would be his last book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? He wrote: “We have had constitutional backing for most of our demands for change, and this has made our work easier since we could be sure of legal support from the federal courts. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear.” The movement had “left the realm of constitutional rights” and entered “the area of human rights.”
The civil rights movement changed the U.S. from a system of non-universal and unequal suffrage, in which minoritarian checks such as the Senate existed alongside laws explicitly barring Blacks from voting to one of universal and unequal suffrage, in which the Constitution's minoritarian features coexisted with expanded suffrage. The hardwired elements of the Constitution — the presidential veto, a bicameral legislature, and a powerful Supreme Court — remained intact.
Where Do We Go From Here surprised me when I read it for the first time. I knew about King’s policy proposals, such as an economic bill of rights. However, I was unaware that King began questioning the possibility of those proposals being realized through the existing Constitution. King identified the boundaries of action within the limits of the existing Constitution and voiced his feelings out loud in the context of a mass political movement. No one else in the 1960s did that.
Tom Hayden first met King in Los Angeles in 1960. Two years later, Hayden wrote the Port Huron Statement, the most famous text to emerge from the New Left. The Port Huron Statement was the political manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), whose student-dominated membership topped 100,000 in 1968. In the statement, Hayden described the “permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and the “enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb.” America was a country of affluence riddled with racism and greed and ruled by a powerful and unaccountable elite. SDS’s original idea of participatory democracy combined a critique of America’s incomplete democracy with a call to do something about it.
In 1965, SDS organized the largest protest against any war in U.S. history. There, Paul Potter, a founding member of SDS, urged the assembled masses to “name the system” that made the War possible. At another rally, SDS president Carl Oglesby gave one of the period’s most important speeches, criticizing the “corporate liberals” who, unlike the “humanist liberals,” had thrown aside Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson and embraced the “menacing coalition of military and industrial power.”
The iconoclastic academic C. Wright Mills heavily influenced SDS. In his work, The Power Elite, he described the “domination of the military event” over post-war American society. Many people, he said, Black and white, understand that “Congress has again abdicated to a handful of men, decisions clearly related to the issue of war or peace. They know that the bomb was dropped over Japan in the name of the United States of America, although they were at no time consulted about the matter. They feel that they live in a time of big decisions; they know that they are not making any.”
SDS and the Civil Rights Movement understood that the U.S. had a democracy problem. Tom Hayden knew the U.S. was a republic, not a democracy, and commented on the Constitution in a draft of the Port Huron Statement. However, the comment was cut. Some in SDS felt that publicly challenging the Founding Fathers would involve the still fledgling organization in too much controversy. Others emphasized the Constitution's preamble and the Bill of Rights and saw the entire creation as something to strive toward. Others — those with more of an admitted “formal socialist orientation” — found the question of democracy “somewhat superstructural” and far less important than the “relations of production.”
Ultimately, the Civil Rights movement and the New Left failed to cross the conceptual rubicon. Both movements condemned imperialism and economic inequality. Both had a primary focus on the immediate struggle to advance democracy. However, no one connected democratic values and the constitutional structure of the government. No one, save for King at the end, asked if democracy was possible in a country with an undemocratic constitution. This was a missed opportunity, but today’s left can and is connecting the dots.
Part Two
Today, we can look back on the 1960s and recognize a constitutional blindspot. For different reasons, those actors, going about the chaos of their lives, didn’t see something that we now see: democracy cannot be realized through an undemocratic political system. Furthermore, political power can’t be dodged, and in the U.S., to talk about political power is to talk about the Constitution.
The Constitution is like the proverbial elephant in the room; someone might touch a leg or the trunk but can’t understand how all the pieces fit together. Once in a while, someone realizes it’s an elephant but decides to look the other way for whatever reason (maybe thinking it’s too big). (Tom Hayden is an example. He named the Constitution and then cut it from the Port Huron draft; for whatever reason, he decided to drop the topic).
Here’s the silver lining. If we can critique the past, it’s because we now have the ideological tools needed to solve the problem. We see the elephant in the room (we can connect the limbs back to a larger whole) and are ready and willing to face it. But if not from King and Hayden, how is democratic republicanism making a comeback? Why do socialists want democracy? How did the left learn to see the Constitution again?
In the 1960s, Hal Draper wrote The Myth of Lenin’s ‘Concept of the Party,’ presenting Lenin as one of history’s foremost revolutionary democrats. Draper worked contemporaneously with Richard N Hunt, whose 1974 book, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, traced the two men’s relationship with democratic republicanism. Draper and Hunt were contemporaries of Neil Harding, who, in his 1977 book Lenin’s Political Thought, wrote that according to Lenin, workers didn’t have to have come to “socialist consciousness” to acquire “political consciousness.” In other words, Lenin didn’t think someone needed to be a socialist to appreciate the need for democracy. The struggle for democracy was primary.
Draper, Hunt, and Harding did their part in debunking many of the myths of undemocratic Marxism peddled by the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This is an ongoing project. Thanks to them, we know that “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant a state based on universal and equal suffrage, that Lenin had no “model party” outside what was necessitated in Russia, and that only the chaos of civil war and unrealized predictions forced Lenin to create a one-party state.
In 2006, Lars T Lih, who had read Draper and Harding, published Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context. He wrote, “The imperative necessity of political freedom is the central theme of Lenin's political agitation.” He continued: “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.” As we will see, Lenin’s belief — that establishing a democratic republic is the paramount task of the working-class movement — is simply orthodox Marxism.
In 2011, in Jacobin Magazine’s second issue, Seth Ackerman published Burn the Constitution, in which he explained that the Constitution makes it “virtually impossible for the electorate to obtain a concerted change in national policy by a collective act of political will.” In 2018, former SDS member Gil Shaeffer wrote an essay about SDS and Lenin’s democratic republicanism titled, You Can’t Use Weathermen to Show Which Way the Wind Blew. Schaeffer developed his politics by reading Draper, Harding, Lenin’s political agitation in the newspaper Iskra, and general U.S. history.
In 2021, DSA took a small step toward confronting the Constitution by including the demands for a second convention and a call to abolish the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the Electoral College in its Political Platform. “The nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy,” DSA concluded, “is no democracy at all,” and “Democracy is necessary to win a socialist society.”
But as usual, it’s the youth who are leading the way. Last year, YDSA passed Winning the Battle For Democracy, which raised the demand for “a new and radically democratic constitution.” As the “youth of the democratic socialist movement,” YDSA urged all DSA members in and out of elected office to take “concrete actions to advance the struggle for a democratic republic such as agitating against undemocratic Judicial Review, fighting for proportional representation, delegitimizing the anti-democratic U.S. Senate, and advancing the long-term demand for a new democratic Constitution…”
I turn now to some representative statements of Marxism’s classical democratic republic strategy. People like Draper, Hunt, and Harding grappled with this history, and it convinced them of the centrality of democracy. The left is once again grappling with these ideas.
Friedrich Engels wrote The Principles of Communism in 1847 as a draft of the Communist Manifesto. Asked about the course of the communist revolution, he said, “Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution and, through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. And in The Communist Manifesto, Marx explained, “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. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie…”
In 1891, Engels wrote Critique of the Erfurt Program, commenting on the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s (SPD) new program. Engels read through the program's political demands and said they had “one great fault.” The document, he explained, “lacks precisely what should have been said. If all the 10 demands were granted, we should indeed have more diverse means of achieving our main political aim, but the aim itself would in no way have been achieved.” What should the political program’s aim be? Engels continued: “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 [1793] has already shown.”
This next quote is from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s (RSDLP) 1903 program. This is Lenin’s party of Russian Revolution fame. This program was unchanged until 1918. Here, the Russians echoed the standard Marxist demand for a democratic republic. They provide the most precise definition of democracy — one we in the U.S. should aspire towards. If we are curious about a definition of democracy, this is it.
The program's introduction to the political section reads: “Therefore, the RSDLP 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…” Fourteen points follow, many of which are classic liberal demands. The first point reads: “The sovereignty of the people—that is, the concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber.” The second point reads, in part: “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…”
The SPD published critiques of the French Third Republic in the party’s newspapers in the early 1900s. The critiques of this French “bourgeois republic” were so intense that critics called the socialists secret monarchists. Karl Kautsky took up his pen and eviscerated the Third Republic’s undemocratic constitution, which vested King-like power in the President and split the legislature into two houses with a malapportioned upper house (much like the United States).
The French government at the time claimed that all opposition forces should band together to defend the Third Republic from reaction (this was in the context of the Dreyfus Affair). Kautsky said the only way to defeat the right was to advocate democratic republican principles. He explained: “If we want to strengthen the propagandist power of the republican idea in France, then we have to show, above all, that the republic we want – the republic that the fighters of 1793, 1848, and 1871 strove to achieve – is fundamentally different from the republic of today.”
Note the difference: A bourgeois republic is one in which legislative power is split between an upper and lower house with representatives not chosen by universal and equal suffrage. A democratic republic, on the other hand, is a state where power resides in a unicameral legislature elected by universal and equal suffrage.
In The Road to Power, published in 1909, Kautsky repeated the orthodox Marxist understanding that “The only form of the state in which Socialism can be realized is that of a republic, and a thoroughly democratic republic at that.” Still, we should be careful with Kautsky because he dramatically changed his definition of a democratic republic between 1905 and 1919.
In 1910, there were massive demonstrations for voting reform in Prussia, the largest state in the German Empire. Kautsky said the SPD should focus on the upcoming elections to the Reichstag (the lower house). Luxemburg said that now was the perfect time for the SPD to bring back the demand for a democratic republic and expose the undemocratic nature of the Reichstag (just as Engels had argued in 1891). Their argument was not over reforms per se (socialists are for reforms) but the relevance of the demand for a democratic republic. Were meaningful suffrage reforms possible in a political system where the lower house was subordinate to the upper house and the Kaiser? Luxemburg polemicized with Kautsky in a party paper, writing, “In Germany, the slogan of a republic …is a practical war cry against militarism, navalism, colonialism, geopolitics, Junker rule … it is only a consequence and drastic summation of our daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.”
Finally, the Socialist Party of America constantly discussed the political system. The SPA’s Rand School of Social Science featured constitutional history classes taught by Charles Beard, whose An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution was the generally accepted academic view of the founding during the Progressive era (1897-1920). John Wertheimer writes that the SPA’s “rhetorical bashing of courts, constitutions, and judges knew few bounds.” For example, the SPA’s 1912 program included these points.
The abolition of the Senate and the veto power of the President.
The election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote of the people.
The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress.
The calling of a convention for the revision of the Constitution
The SPA’s program, along with Kautsky’s critique of the French bourgeois republic and Engel’s comments to the Germans, shows that classical Marxism pursued the strategy of achieving a democratic republic for all countries that lacked a system of universal and equal suffrage, whether that country was economically advanced, like France, Germany, or the United States, or economically backward, like Poland or Russia.
Also, the SPA’s program clearly states that political power is needed to do everything else in the program. The revolution must be political in order to be social. The program ends with this statement: “Such measures of relief as we may be able to force from capitalism are but a preparation of the workers to seize the whole powers of government, so that they may lay hold of the whole system of socialized industry and thus come to their rightful inheritance.”
Putting the Pieces Together
The classic Marxist strategy was to achieve democracy in countries that weren’t democratic. The state form of democracy was a democratic republic, where unimpeded lawmaking power lay in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected by universal and equal suffrage.
We know the U.S. is not a democracy; the American working class has not yet won, according to Lenin (quoting Marx and Engel), “the certain political rights” it needs to successfully fight for “economic emancipation.” We also know that the U.S. has its own tradition of democratic struggle, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement, and the New Left. All of the history presented leads me to conclude that the strategy of achieving a democratic republic is still relevant because the U.S. is not a democracy.
Our task is to do something with all of this history, and here is where Lenin and his theory of political agitation come in handy. We must connect each societal abuse to the need for political power and self-determination. The desire for democracy should be our primary psychological appeal.
Will a vision of what life could be like in a future socialist society be the primary means by which we seek to persuade people to become politically active? Will a mass movement in the U.S. be built through the language of socialism? Is socialism the first thing we should talk about?
Or should concrete demands for the immediate improvement of people's lives through electoral campaigns and legislation be the primary focus of our work? Is turning out the vote and pushing reforms where we should focus most of our energy?
Or should concrete demands be coupled simultaneously with criticisms of our undemocratic political system to explain the lack of legislative progress and the necessity of democracy? Reforms, yes; socialism, yes; and to realize either, we need democracy. I'm going with this last option: concrete demands should be coupled simultaneously with criticisms of our undemocratic political system to explain the lack of legislative progress and the necessity of democracy.
I conclude with some metacommentary. I've made this pitch to many self-described socialists; some agree, and some don't. My goal is to get us on the same page historically. Once we have a common understanding of history, we can disagree not on whether something happened or whether so and so said something, but if that history is still relevant and if what was said was correct or valuable. For example, some may say” “I acknowledge the history; democratic republicanism used to be the strategy. But things have changed as evidenced by this particular history.” Or, “I acknowledge that Lenin said this, but he also said this.” Or, “I think Luxemburg was wrong, and Kautsky was right.” Or, we might even agree.
Ultimately, each of us has a particular ideological center from which we communicate. My ideological center is democratic republicanism, and I communicate using the language of democracy. I appeal to a desire for democracy and universal and equal rights, and I think Lenin, Martin Luther King, and the best minds of SDS did the same. DSA can only build a mass movement capable of fundamentally changing society if we tap into this ideological center. To do that, we can turn to the democratic republicanism of classical Marxism and the lessons of the Civil Rights movement and the New Left, which, it turns out, has been with us all along.