I hope to convince others about the necessity of a democratic constitution based on one person, one equal vote. I’m confident that the election year will provide plenty of opportunities to make the case, and others will join me. The United States is bursting with discontent. The Democratic Party continues to distort and manipulate the meaning of “democracy” for its own purposes. The Senate, the Electoral College, our two political parties, and now even the Supreme Court are unpopular. A massive amount of frustration — the accumulation of years of war, economic precarity, foreclosures, bank bailouts, police abuse, and an absent social safety net — is bubbling beneath the surface and ready for a political catalyst. People don’t forget past slights and deferred promises made by those with power. A majority of Americans want universal and accessible healthcare, good jobs with unions and decent wages, well-funded education and good schools, gun control, and access to safe abortions.
It’s up to us to plant the flag: we condemn the undemocratic Constitution as the source of our shared domination and the primary obstacle standing between the American people and our desire for a better world. Dissolve the Senate — an “obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth”1 — and vest supreme power in an enlarged House of Representatives. The House’s enactments, in the words of Victor Berger, “shall be the supreme law, and the President shall have no power to veto them, nor shall any court have the power to invalidate them.”2
In his latest article, Steve Bloom says it’s “naive in the extreme” and “idealist” to imagine that people will mobilize in large numbers around the demand for a democratic constitution. I disagree that it’s naive. Millions of people are already struggling in different ways for real democracy in the United States. The struggle is still underdeveloped and unfocused, but it is present. The American Civil War, Chartism, Reconstruction, the Russian Revolution, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam War, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter — the language of democracy and rights permeated and continues to permeate all of these movements, past and present, which inevitably push against barriers formed by the constitutional structure. However, no movement since the Civil War and Reconstruction has fully embraced the Constitution as an object of critique.
Steve must explain why the demand for a democratic constitution is “idealist.” Was the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party expressing a “fundamentally idealist method of thought” by centering its program on a democratic constitution?3 Was Lenin an “idealist” when he described the police murder of a peasant as a “mockery of justice” and an affront to “human dignity” and connected the killing to the ongoing “struggle for liberty”?4 What about when William Lovett and Francis Place drew up the People’s Charter for the London Working Men’s Association in 1838,5 or when Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wrote the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program and declared, “We want freedom”?6 Maybe William Lloyd Garrison was an “idealist” when he called the Constitution an “agreement with Hell” and burned a copy in front of his audience.7 How should one describe Tom Paine’s Common Sense or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? Maybe Steve considers “rights” and “democracy” to be “idealist” because he thinks the Russian Revolution changed Marxism and made the demand for a democratic republic irrelevant.8 Or, maybe this is the “base versus superstructure” argument (I have my suspicions given the assertion that power “ultimately comes from the ownership and control of the means of production”).
According to Steve, something besides the “intellectual” demand for a democratic constitution will move the masses into struggle. (Does Steve think the desire for democracy comes from “intellectuals”?) Steve writes that “…every case study we have where the call for a new constitution has found a meaningful echo among masses of people involves a tangible social crisis stimulated by some other issue — war, economic crash, military or other dictatorship, the struggle of an oppressed people, etc.” Only after a mass movement has developed, he continues, will people “demand a new Constitution.” In other words, the time isn’t right to talk about the Constitution. Talk about something else, or better yet, do something else.
I’ll quote Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail in response: “An unjust law is no law at all,”9 and, “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”10 It’s always the correct time to pronounce the illegitimacy of unjust laws. It’s always the right time to denounce the Constitution because it’s illegitimate twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year. Our votes are being denied right now! Our task is to connect the ongoing struggles for democracy, gather the fighters under the banner of a democratic constitution, and bring those not yet in struggle into battle.
Steve asks what will happen when a movement rises to a level “where it can compel the adoption of a new constitution.” Unlike Steve or Joseph (who said Steve picked up on an “under-theorization” of the revolutionary process), I’m in no hurry to map out what will happen when we have a revolutionary movement. I’m more concerned with what language and ideas will create and unite a movement, and whether our current language and strategy will achieve those aims. Many Marxist Unity Group members think that words like “Communism” will appeal to people and that the existing left within the Democratic Socialists of America will be the most keen to fight for a democratic Constitution. I’m skeptical that we should constrain our audience to the existing left and that Communism as a “maximum demand” will ever appeal to a majority of Americans. I wish Marxist Unity Group would spend more time developing and expanding its agitation around the Constitution (maybe we could give Jacobin a run for its money) and less time creating (and eventually struggling to win Marxists to) a minimum-maximum program. Being the vanguard of the movement to democratize the political system isn’t sectarian because democracy isn’t sectarian. I can’t tell from Steve’s article what language and ideas he thinks will appeal to people, but if I had to guess, they would include “socialism” and “mass strike.”
Democratic values and the goal of a democratic republic are Marxist Unity Group’s most important and unique contributions to the left. There’ve been articles and books about the undemocratic Constitution over the decades. But no group has put out a document like “Winning the Battle for Democracy”11 or published a book like Fight the Constitution. A commitment to democracy and winning a democratic republic as the political expression of democracy doesn’t “blind us to a proper assessment and understanding of whatever real processes might actually unfold in life,” as Steve claims. Instead, the democratic lens expands our field of vision to include not only socialists and anti-Constitutional advocates for democracy but everyone dissatisfied with politics who hasn’t yet concluded that the Constitution must change. Socialists and non-socialists are included in this democratic camp, those inside and outside the Democratic Socialists of America. I disagree with Steve when he says the demand for a democratic republic “misses the mark.” Quite the opposite. The “real processes” of struggle in the U.S. revolve around having a universal and equal say in the decisions that impact our well-being. The struggle is over who makes the laws.
Steve is correct that different “injustices” drive people into action. But I disagree with his assessment of what to do. It’s not our job to “directly address the injustices driving the social crisis itself, whatever they happen to be.” We must have a more holistic and concrete vision. Our job is to draw out the political content of each injustice and connect it to our inability to right these wrongs because of the Constitution. Each injustice derives from a lack of universal and equal suffrage — our inability to make collective, majoritarian decisions because of the minoritarian, unaccountable, and disproportionate power of the president, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.
“The art of any propagandist and agitator,” wrote Lenin, “consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.”12 Ultimately, the differences between Steve and me are the values and goals we think will inspire people in the United States to engage in political struggle. History may or may not be “pregnant with more than one potential road to working-class power,” as Steve says. Either way, Steve can pick his road. I’ll choose mine. Perhaps the only way to resolve this disagreement is to come together in however many years and see what banner — ‘The Democratic Constitution’ or ‘The Socialist Revolution’ — has convinced the most Americans.
In every movement, the questions of naming the system,13 what to do, and how we should live hover in the background. The days are too short and life is only so long. One must decide where one’s energy will be most effective in moving everything else forward. In this case, “The battle to democratize the political system is not just a plank among others in a democratic socialist platform: it is the leading edge of the class political struggle that makes socialism possible.”14 Human freedom is only possible after we’ve done away with the Constitution’s tyranny of a minority.
-Luke Pickrell
- Glass, Andrew. “House member seeks to abolish the Senate, April 27, 1911.” Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/house-member-seeks-to-abolish-the-senate-april-27-1911-222359
- Ibid.
- Lenin, V.I. “Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party.” Marxist.org. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm
- Lenin, V.I. “Casual Notes.” Marxist.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/casual/beat.htm
- “The Chartist Movement.” UK Parliament. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/chartists/overview/chartistmovement/
- “(1966) The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program.” Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/primary-documents-african-american-history/black-panther-party-ten-point-program-1966/
- “American Anti-Slavery Society Declaration of Sentiments (1833).” National Constitution Center. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/american-anti-slavery-society-declaration-of-sentiments-1833#:~:text=The%20most%20radical%20abolitionists%2C%20such,slavery%20in%20the%20Southern%20states.
- Henry DeGroot made a similar claim about the Russian Revolution. I responded in “The Firm Ground of History and the Plateau of Politics.” https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/09/the-firm-ground-of-history-and-the-plateau-of-politics/
- Washington, James M. (ed.). Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. p. 293.
- Ibid. 292
- “Winning the Battle for Democracy.” https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dzTN2IS7Y8x2hG5Vkz37UpG6MZ6T3-_Ex8FVPq3CCs/edit
- Lenin, V.I. “The Slogans and Organisation of Social-Democratic Work Inside and Outside the Duma.” Marxist.org. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1911/dec/08.htm
- At an April 1965 March on Washington, Paul Potter, the former President of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), said, “We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it, and then change it. For it is only when that system is brought under control that there can be any hope for stopping the forces that create a war in Vietnam today or a murder in the South tomorrow or all the incalculable, innumerable more subtle atrocities that are worked on people all over, all of the time.” Potter, Paul. “The Incredible War.” Voices of Democracy. https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/potter-the-incredible-war-speech-text/
- Shaeffer, Gil. “Marxism, the Democratic Republic, and the Undemocratic U.S. Constitution.” New Politics. https://newpol.org/marxism-the-democratic-republic-and-the-undemocratic-u-s-constitution/