Paul Blackledge
“Apparently the chief question of the revolution both in Germany and Austria now is: Constituent Assembly or Soviet government? … The [social democrats] speak about “pure democracy” and “democracy” in general for the purpose of deceiving the people and concealing from them the bourgeois character of present-day democracy. Let the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, let a handful of exploiters continue to use the former, bourgeois, state machine! Elections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie, for very good reasons, as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question. … It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, … This is tantamount to trampling on the basic truths of Marxism which has taught the workers: you must take advantage of bourgeois democracy which, compared with feudalism, represents a great historical advance, but not for one minute must you forget the bourgeois character of this “democracy”, it’s historical conditional and limited character. … The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe as “popular government”, democracy in general, or pure democracy, the (bourgeois) democratic republic which is, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the working people. … But Marxists, Communists, expose this hypocrisy, and tell the workers and the working people in general this frank and straightforward truth: the democratic republic, the Constituent Assembly, general elections, etc., are, in practice, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for the emancipation of labour from the yoke of capital there is no other way but to replace this dictatorship with the dictatorship of the proletariat. … and establish democracy for the poor” Lenin “’Democracy’ and Dictatorship” December 1918
So much has the term democracy been reduced to its liberal democratic form within contemporary theory that the phrase “Marxist democracy” is all too often dismissed as an “oxymoron”.[1] As we shall see below, this critique of Marxism not only involves a fundamental misreading both of Marx’s and Lenin’s politics, it also obscures the power of the Marxist critique of the tendency, initiated by the American Federalists, to posit Washington rather than Athens as the classical seat of democratic deliberation.[2]
Central to the attempt to conflate democracy with liberal democracy is the claim that Marx’s critique of capitalism culminated in Stalin’s dictatorship. Interestingly, despite the hostility between liberals and Communists during the Cold War, both sides could agree on at least one thing: Stalin’s regime marked the authentic realisation of Marx’s and Lenin’s politics. And this assumption served to legitimise Stalin as the heir to the October Revolution, while simultaneously justifying liberal democracy as the free Western alternative to “totalitarian” Marxism.
But the claim that Marxism entails Stalinism involves a very significant elision over Leon Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism. Trotsky, who had organised both the October Revolution and its successful military defence during the ensuing civil war, became, from the 1920s until his murder by a Stalinist agent in 1940, Stalin’s sternest critic from the democratic Marxist left. Indeed, it was from this perspective that, in 1937, he wrote that just as a socialist revolution was essential for the triumph of freedom in the West, socialism in Russian could only be realised through a new “revolution” against the Stalinist “bureaucracy”. Moreover, he insisted that this new Russian Revolution should aim not merely to substitute “one ruling clique for another”, but rather to change “the very methods of administering the economy and guiding the culture of the country. Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country”.[3]
This argument suggests not merely to a radical critique of the common-sense conception of the relationship between Marxism and democracy, but more profoundly a radically anti-Stalinist conception of socialism which is intrinsically and necessarily democratic. The true oxymoron from this perspective, is the concept of “liberal democracy”, against which “Marxist democracy” is conceived as the really revolutionary alternative that, mutatis mutandis, harks back to Athens rather than Washington as its precursor.
Richard Hunt has argued that though Marx rejected nostalgic dreams of returning to a classical golden age, “Periclean Athens served [him] as a general model for the political functioning of an ideal society”.[4] Specifically, Marx’s “discovery” of the proletariat in the 1840s coincided with his profound philosophical critique of state theory: for Marx, the state was a form of alienation in its various constitutional guises, whereas the proletariat offered the potential to overcome alienation through, in part, the reabsorption of the functions of the state into society in a way that both harked back to, but was profoundly deeper than, the Athenian democratic form. What is more, Marx’s mature conception of communism, far from being a totalitarian negation of democracy, actually emerged out of and deepened his youthful vision of what he called “true democracy”.
Communism in this sense marks the Aufhebung (simultaneously the abolition, transcendence and preservation) of the state and civil society in a new framework in which socialist revolution and democracy are conceived not as radical alternatives but as two sides of the same coin.[5] If this point tends to be obscured by superficial and usually anachronistic interpretations of Marx’s deployment of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, once we recognise that this concept was intended to illuminate the class content of political power rather than its supposed undemocratic form we can begin to see how Engels could write that “the democratic republic … is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat”.[6]
To understand how Marx and Engels came to this conclusion it is essential to trace their critique of political theory as it was mediated through their experience of nineteenth-century revolutions.[7] In 1859, Marx suggested that it was through his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State that he first articulated his belief that “legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in material conditions of life”.[8] In this youthful essay, which Shlomo Avineri describes as Marx’s “most systematic” study of political theory,[9] Marx extended Feuerbach’s critique of religion to a critique of Hegel’s analysis of the state form. He argued that just as Feuerbach had shown Christianity to be the essence of religion that, by its historical appearance, pointed to the possibility and indeed necessity of overcoming religion, so democracy, that is socialised humanity (our very nature), was the essence of all political constitutions and this social content pointed to the potential transcendence of these constitutions; that is to the transcendence of the state as an alien power over people.[10]
According to Marx, whereas the social nature of humanity had, up to this point in history, been realised as an alien (state) power over our forebears, democracy, or rather “true democracy”, potentially realises our essence in such a way that “the political state disappears”.[11] Avineri and Hunt both argue that this claim illuminates the myth of a break between Marx’s youthful democratic politics and his mature communism. They suggest that Marx’s mature politics is best understood as a concrete deepening of the insights about the nature of the state he articulated in 1843. The political implications of this new perspective was tantalisingly suggested in On the Jewish Question. Here he argued that it is “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”.[12]
Almost three decades later he described the Paris Commune in very similar terms: the Commune represented, or so he claimed, “the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living force instead of a force controlling and subduing it”.[13] He thus conceived the Commune as a concrete historical realisation of the “true democracy” he had has he first analysed in 1843 when he argued that, though all forms of state are in fact founded on the democracy (the common people), it is only through true democracy that the state can become the “self-determination of the people”.[14] Consequently, it is through true democracy or communism that the state is simultaneously preserved, abolished and transcended.
This perspective underpins Marx’s claim that American democracy was a “swindle”. He argued that the Federalists intended to, and largely succeeded in, maintaining the liberal primacy of property relations in a context of burgeoning revolutionary democracy – they “utilised democratic forms to frustrate genuine democratic control from below”.[15] They did so by creating something radically new: a liberal democracy in which the people relinquished all but nominal control over their representatives.[16] Thus in liberal democracies, formal democratic control over the political levers of power coexist with the reality of the “alienation of political power which was so foreign to the Greek conception of democracy”. By contrast with the Greeks, the Federalists created a constitution in which “primary producers are subject to economic compulsions which are independent of their political status”.[17] This was anathema to Greek democracy in which, or so Aristotle had argued, “the free born and poor control the government … as distinct from oligarchy, in which, the rich and better born” are in the driving seat.[18] The modern democratic swindle is a swindle precisely because the rich maintain real control while the poor merely hold to the semblance of power. It was in recognition of the class content of ancient democracy – as the rule of the poor – that Aristotle argued for giving the “propertied class extra weight” so as to avoid what Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, knowingly and playfully calls, “the dictatorship of the proletariat”.[19]
This is not to say that Marx believed, as John Keane would have it, “that democracy was just a bourgeois plot … to ensure that bankers could protect their assets from wolfish governments”.[20] On the contrary, Marx insisted that bourgeois democracy was “a major step forward for humankind” as compared with feudal and absolutist states.[21] Indeed, in 1848 he sternly criticised those sections of the workers’ movement who dismissed the struggle for bourgeois democracy.[22] He insisted that the benefits of bourgeois democracy did not fall merely to the bourgeoisie, and subsequent Marxists made much of defending what Trotsky called the “elements of proletarian democracy within” bourgeois democratic regimes when these came under attack from fascists in the 1930s.[23]
Nonetheless, while defending bourgeois democracy against the fascists, Trotsky recognised that fascism grew in large part as a response to the crisis of capitalism – a crisis against which liberal democratic states, and the reformist socialists who oriented to these states as agencies of progressive reform, were unable to articulate a coherent and systematic response. They were unable to do so because these states were tied to capitalist class relations and thus to the requirement to make workers’ pay for the crisis of capitalism.[24] This weakness was rooted in the fundamental nature of bourgeois democratic regimes: though parliamentary republics appear as neutral state forms they are “structurally interdependent” with capital while simultaneously having a social basis in an atomised population.[25] If the bourgeois state’s structural interdependence with capital sets the parameters of the politically possible within bourgeois democracies, the atomisation of voters in the ballot box reproduces those forms of general alienation and powerlessness that ensure that these parameters are seldom challenged by the demos.[26]
So whereas the Athenian democratic form ensured the people exercised real power,[27] bourgeois democracies combine de jure formal equality with de facto “domination of the capitalist exploiters”.[28] Against this political form, Lenin compared the soviet or workers’ council that emerged in Russia in 1905 and again in 1917 as a form that created and developed “universal mass organisations of precisely those classes that are oppressed under capitalism”.[29] The function of soviets, in this model, was to foster real democracy: soviets were the culmination of a process of working class democracy that Marx had first recognised in the 1840s and then championed in 1871. But even the Paris Commune was limited as compared with the soviets, for the Commune was still based upon territorial units.[30] Lenin argued that whereas bourgeois democracy was rooted in territorial electoral units that related to the people as atomised citizens, because soviets were rooted in democratic control at the place of work they could begin to overcome the separation of economics and politics characteristic of the bourgeois democratic swindle: “by making the economic, industrial unit (factory) and not the territorial division the primary electoral unit” soviet democracy was a “higher level of democracy” than the parliamentary form.[31] Far from being the practical realisation of what Joseph Femia calls Marx’s tendency to “collapse the distance between the individual self and the “ensemble of social relations”, this new form of democracy was the concrete actualisation of Marx’s goal of extending “individual right beyond the narrow horizons of bourgeois right”.[32] That is, the concrete form of his communist goal of “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”[33]
Clearly the experience of Stalinism presents a profound problem for the Marxist claim that the soviet model amounted to an “extension of democracy” by contrast with parliamentary systems.[34] One response to this problem has been to reject outright the model of the October Revolution because Leninism supposedly undermined sovietism.[35] The weakness with this critique of Lenin’s politics is that it posits a too one-sided opposition between soviets and revolutionary parties. Of course soviets and revolutionary parties are distinct entities, but they are best understood not as alternatives but as complementary forms. Indeed, the experience of 1917 suggests that it was precisely because the soviets were broad organisations of the oppressed classes as a whole that they were characterised by intense debates about what to do with the de facto power they held after the February Revolution. Over the next few months the Bolsheviks won a majority within the soviets by proving themselves to be the most consistent defenders of soviet power. Conversely, while the October Revolution was predicated upon this democratic movement, where soviets emerged in countries without established revolutionary parties they invariably failed to wrest power from the old state. As Donny Gluckstein argues, “no revolutionary party can be successful without a perspective centred on achieving power through the workers’ councils, just as no workers’ council can succeed unless it is led by revolutionaries in a mass party”.[36]
If the October Revolution was won through soviets led by Bolsheviks, this victory was itself predicated upon mass collective action on the part of the working class. As Lenin put it: “For the first time in world history, the revolutionary struggle attained such a high stage of development and such an impetus that an armed uprising was combined with that specifically proletarian weapon—the mass strike”.[37] A decade before the October Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg had argued that the mass strike was the historically specific process through which the working class, ordinarily fragmented within bourgeois society, becomes an increasingly unified subject through struggles that also tend to point to the possibility of workers’ power by overcoming the characteristically bourgeois separation between politics and economics.[38] But if the mass strike is the elemental form of working class power, the emergence of soviets out of strike committees represents the moment when this process moves onto a higher plane. The social base of bourgeois parliaments, by contrast, is an atomised and largely powerless population.
The opposition between these two forms illuminates a fundamental contradiction in Bolshevik policy in 1917. Though the Bolsheviks, alongside the rest of the Russian left, had since the end of the nineteenth century demanded the election of a Constituent Assembly, and though they continued to make this demand throughout 1917, after April 1917 they did so while simultaneously demanding “all power to the soviets”. Apparently Lenin and Bolsheviks saw no contradiction in this obviously contradictory position.[39] The consequences of this contradiction became apparent immediate upon the elections to the Constituent Assembly: whereas the Bolsheviks were a majority in the All Russian Congress of Soviets, they held only 25% of the seats in the Constituent Assembly – which was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary Party. There were conjunctural problems with this result – most importantly the election was held prior to a split between Left and Right SRs which meant that the Right SRs were over-represented in the Assembly while the Left SRs, who were then the Bolshevik’s coalition partners, were massively under-represented. But in essence the election reflected the fact that while the Bolsheviks were a majority amongst the urban proletariat, they remained a minority amongst the peasantry. The question facing the Bolsheviks in January 1918 was should they succumb to this new power? To have done so would not merely have meant surrendering the gains of the revolution, it would have also meant bowing before a less democratic form of representation. As Lenin argued, “In relation to the provisional government the Constituent Assembly represented, or might have represented, progress; in relation to the regime of the Soviets, and with the existing electoral lists, it will inevitably mean retrogression”.[40] The logic of this argument is simple: when posed with a choice between soviets and Constituent Assembly, the Bolshevik should choose soviets – and they did so, as we have tried to intimate above, on the basis of Marx’s critique of the limitations of parliamentary democracy.[41]
The Constituent Assembly became the beacon for counter-revolution in the ensuing civil war. Though triumphant militarily, the civil war constituted a social catastrophe for Bolshevik Russia. The problems facing the Bolsheviks were of almost unheard of severity. Russia was a relatively backward country at the outbreak of the First World War, and war and then civil war made matters much worse. By 1920 the value of industrial production had declined to about 13 percent of its 1913 level, while from 1913 to 1921-2 the number of waged workers had dropped from 11 million to 6.5 million while the number of industrial workers more than halved.[42] This incredibly harsh context meant that sheer physical survival was the primary goal both for ordinary Russians and for the new revolutionary regime. Far from Russian totalitarianism being a consequence of Lenin’s anti-democratic project, “the ‘objective’ social circumstances of Russia’s revolution and civil war contain”, as Peter Sedgwick argues, “sufficient conditions for the collapse of the mass revolutionary wave, without recourse to causal factors stemming from the ‘subjective’ deficiencies of Lenin’s early formulations”.[43] What all this meant was that the objective basis for soviet power – an organised and militant working class – largely disappeared in the years immediately following the Revolution. If soviets were the “universal mass organisations of precisely those classes that are oppressed under capitalism”, with the decimation of the proletariat the soviets became empty shells. If this process was the precondition of Stalin’s rise to power, his victory was consummated through the liquidation of the last vestiges of Lenin’s Bolsheviks.[44]
This context suggests that it is
absurd to conflate soviet democracy with Stalin’s dictatorship. But the fact
that this claim is so prevalent is no mere mistake; it fits the ideological need
to limit democracy to its castrated bourgeois democratic form. Against this
project, Marxist democracy stands in the tradition of, first, Marx’s critique
of the parliamentary form, second, his celebration of the Paris Commune as a
deepening of the parameters of democracy and, finally, Lenin’s and Trotsky’s
analysis of the experience of the soviets or workers councils. For a brief moment
in 1917 the victory of the soviets against the Provisional Government meant
that the Russians were the “freest
people in the world”.[45] It
was precisely because the soviet state expanded democracy thus to become, as
Lenin put it, “for the first time … democracy for the poor, democracy for the
people, and not democracy for the money-bags” that it has met with such violent
objections from apologists for capitalism.[46] Soviet
Russia in 1917, like the Commune half-a-century before it, had a radical
democratic form whose social content was “the rule of labour over capital”. It
was to this social content that Marx and Lenin referred when they spoke of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and because this content was the flip side to
soviet democracy the concepts of democracy and dictatorship are best understood
in this context not as alternatives but as two sides of the democratic revolutionary
process.[47]
[1] Joseph Femia, Marxism and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 1.
[2] Anthony Arblaster, Democracy (Buckingham: Open University Press), p. 39
[3] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder, 1972), pp. 288-9
[4] Richard Hunt, The Politics of Marx and Engels Volume 1 (London: MacMillan, 1974), p. 255; Richard Hunt, The Politics of Marx and Engels Volume 2 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), p. 84
[5] Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 37
[6] Hal Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), pp. 11-41; 37.
[7] Vladimir Lenin, “A Contribution to the History of the Question of the Dictatorship”, in Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 31, pp. 340-361, p. 340
[8] Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970), p. 20; Avineri, Marx, p. 39.
[9] Avineri, Marx, p.41; Hunt, Marx Vol. 1, p. 50
[10] Avineri, Marx, p. 35-6
[11] Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State”, in Karl Marx Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 88
[12] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question”, in Karl Marx Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 234; Hunt, Marx Vol. 1, p. 74
[13] Karl Marx, “The First draft of The Civil War in France” in Karl Marx The First International and After (London: Penguin, 1974, p. 246; Fine, Democracy, p. 127.
[14] Marx, “Critique of Hegel”, p. 89
[15] Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), p. 306.
[16] Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 213
[17] Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, pp. 217; 201
[18] Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, p. 220
[19] Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, The Class struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 75
[20] John Keane, The Life and Death of Democracy (London: Simon & Schuster, 2009), p. 86
[21] Brian Roper, The History of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2013), p. 217
[22] See Alan Gilbert, Marx’s Politics (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981), pp. 159-199
[23] Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), p. 144
[24] Trotsky, Fascism, p. 143
[25] Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010), p. 10; Roper, Democracy, p. 239
[26] Paul Blackledge, “Left Reformism, The State and the Problem of Socialist Politics Today, International Socialism 2/139, pp. 25-56
[27] CLR James, The Future in the Present (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), pp. 160-175
[28] Vladimir Lenin, “Draft Programme of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)”, in Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 29, pp. 99-140, p. 107
[29] Lenin, “Draft Programme”, p. 106. Lenin famously analysed the soviets through the lens of a profound rereading of Marx and Engels’s critique of the state and parliamentary democracy in his most important theoretical work The State and Revolution (1917). He first articulated the implications of his new approach in his 1917 Letters on Tactics: “I am deeply convinced that the Soviets will make the independent activity of the masses a reality more quickly and effectively than will a parliamentary republic” (Collected Works Vol. 24, p. 53).
[30] Alberto Bonnet, “The Political From at Last Discovered: Workers’ Councils Against the Capitalist State”, in Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (eds.) Ours to Master and to Own (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), pp. 66-81, p. 71
[31] Lenin, “Draft Programme of the Russian Communist Party”, p. 108; cf Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 111; Donny Gluckstein, The Western Soviets (London: Bookmarks, 1985), p. 229. On the tendency towards soviets in more recent struggles see Colin Barker ed. Revolutionary Rehearsals (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008)
[32] Femia, Democracy, p. 3; Fine, Democracy, p. 129
[33] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Marx The Revolutions of 1848 (London: Penguin, 1973), pp. 62-98, p. 87
[34] Alex Callinicos, “Socialism and Democracy” in David Held (ed.), Prospects for Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 200-212, p. 201
[35] Bonnet, Political Form, pp. 74-5
[36] Gluckstein, Western Soviets, p. 235
[37] Lenin, “Question of the Dictatorship”, p. 341
[38] Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike (London: Bookmarks, 1986), p. 73
[39] Marcel Liebman, The Russian Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 314
[40] Lenin quoted in Tony Cliff, Lenin: The Revolution Besieged (London: Bookmarks, 1986), p. 31
[41] And so did Rosa Luxemburg. A few months after criticising the Bolsheviks for suppressing the Constituent Assembly, she wrote that anyone defending bourgeois democratic forms against soviet democracy “consciously or unconsciously” acts “to turn the revolution back to the historical stage of the bourgeois revolution”. The question of the day, she wrote echoing Lenin, is not democracy or dictatorship but rather “bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy” (Rosa Luxemburg 1918, “The National Assembly” in Robert Looker ed. Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Political writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 262-265
[42] Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR: 1917-1991 (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 89-110
[43] Keane, Democracy, p. 576; Peter Sedgwick “Introduction”, Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 13.
[44] Nigel Harris, The Mandate of Heaven (London: Quartet Books, 1978), p. 272
[45] Mike Haynes, Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000 (London: Bookmarks, 2002), p. 21
[46] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, in Lenin Collected Works volume 25, p. 461
[47] Fine, Democracy, p. 131; Gluckstein, Western Soviets, p. 15