In his recent letter, Luke Pickrell replies to a reader who questioned how the Marxist Unity Group would prevent a democratic republic from leading to reactionary results. I want to take another look at his answer. I don't think the United States is a democracy worth protecting in any meaning of the word. Pickrell and I are mostly agreed on the American Constitution. We disagree about what is lacking in his definition of democracy, and we disagree about whether a sovereign assembly satisfies the issue that he was posed.

He gets certain things right, and I’ll start with those. The Senate is malapportioned, save for defense. The Electoral College has given us a president who lost the popular vote twice this century. Nine appointees can use judicial review to strike down legislation. War powers have shifted to the presidency, under bipartisan watch. Pickrell is also right that the call for a democratic republic was part of traditional Marxism, and the American left allowed it to expire. In 1891 Engels said that the party and the working class could only come to power in the shape of the democratic republic. MUG has really put a question back on the table.

The problem begins with the definition. Democracy is one sovereign assembly elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage, Pickrell defines. That’s a list of constitutional laws. The United States fails this test, while the Nordic parliaments pass it.

When Pickrell calls “bourgeois democracy” historically deceptive, he is disputing one understanding of the phrase: a democracy that the bourgeoisie fought for. If one uses the word carefully, it denotes something different. The adjective is a form. In bourgeois society the political is separated from the economic. Citizens assemble as formal equals in the assembly because they already assemble as formal equals in the market as owners of commodities, one of which is labor power. Whatever the way in which it is chosen, no assembly puts on its agenda the question of what is produced, how, by whom, and for whom.

Finland has a single chamber and proportional representation, and it has this separation as thoroughly as Ohio does. And Marx himself, in the Critique of the Gotha Program, characterized the democratic republic as the last form of state of bourgeois society. Such is why he laughed at the vulgar Democrats who looked for the millennium from it. It is in such shape that the class war has to be fought out to a finish. Pickrell's comparison demonstrates that the United States is a crude, unbalanced example of the form. It doesn’t leave Helsinki out of the picture.

This ties directly into the question Pickrell’s inquirer asked. Pickrell’s solution to this is that the reaction is caused by the existence of the minoritarian checks; therefore, removing the checks removes the reason. See his own models.

Denmark: In 2019 the Social Democrats recaptured power by co-opting the right’s immigration proposal. In 2021 the unicameral parliament, the Folketing, elected by proportional representation, passed a law allowing asylum claimants to be transported outside Europe for processing.
Sweden: The Sweden Democrats, a party rooted in the white-nationalist movement, became the fulcrum of the government created after the 2022 election.
Finland: The Finnish Party enters government in 2023.

It was never passed by an electoral college or a rotten upper house. Equal suffrage elected sovereign assembly registers the electorate as it finds it. If that electorate is a mass of atomized persons sorted by parties contending for their votes, the assembly reflects that, and one of the things it might reflect is reaction.

The history Pickrell calls up sharpens the point. The revolutions of 1848 to 1851 are among the movements that fought for his definition. The Second Republic of France came very near. The constitution of November 1848 provided for a single legislative assembly, elected by universal male suffrage. Its fatal concession was a president elected directly, and Pickrell can rightly claim that is the same office MUG will do away with.

What followed is still informative:

In May 1850, the party of order in the Assembly cleared the rolls of about three million persons. Marx labeled the law a coup d’état of the capitalists.

Louis Bonaparte then took up the cause of universal suffrage against the Assembly.
With one stroke of his pen, on December 2, 1851, he dissolved the Assembly and reinstated universal suffrage.

The coup was approved by a plebiscite under the restored franchise by more than seven million to less than seven hundred thousand ballots.

As described in the Eighteenth Brumaire. If a class cannot represent itself, it must be represented, and its representative may appear as its master. It helps to get rid of the presidency. But a plebiscitary claim to embody the people does not need an office designed for it. It takes a mass of unorganized citizens as a class and a figure willing to talk over their heads. On that very claim, the executive that now rules this country is establishing a personal, patrimonial apparatus. Take away the Senate and the courts, and the claim still holds. It might even find a cleaner floor.

Pickrell counters the argument of the majoritarian with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. “Liberty,” he states, “is the freedom to do anything that harms no one else. Strange text for a Marxist to lean on. This same article was torn apart by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” He took it as the liberty of man as an isolated monad, a right based upon the detachment of one person from another. The line between them is drawn as a border post dividing two fields. That critique does not render rights meaningless, and Marx never stated it did. But it does mean the Declaration cannot be simply hoisted into the foundation of working-class rule.

His retreat betrays him away. He writes that if a majority breaks the law in violation of rights and democratic remedies fail, people would be ethically justified in breaking the law. I agree. But that reintroduces a check on the sovereign assembly; outside it, in individuals, deciding for themselves when the majority has gone too far. It is the structure of the liberal constitutionalism he opposes for the rest of the letter, transplanted from the bench to the street.

His "first step" quotation suffers from a similar flaw. In the Manifesto, the first step is to raise the proletariat to the position of governing class, to win the struggle of democracy. The class has won its war and become the ruling class. A constitution may follow, but it is not mentioned in the text.

The statement that most bothers me in Pickrell’s letter is the practical one: “The left has a responsibility to educate the working class about the Constitution.” From this perspective, the working class is a class of individuals who experience their own impotence and need to be taught by a left that already knows what its cause is. Hal Draper had a name for that, and it was not socialism from below.

It implies there is a left to teach the left too. I don’t think there’s one. Caucuses, periodicals, and sects each have a program, but none has a class behind it. Pickrell’s final paragraph is based on “a political party with a winning track record." That party is the one to be explained. A democratic-republican program without the class structure to carry it is a debating stance between people like Pickrell and me.

I don’t have a constitutional solution to the question his reader posed, and I doubt one exists. Where reaction had been kept at bay, a working class had created its own institutions, press, and habits of debate before it faced the question of state form. We don’t know yet. I'm working with others today to build that in a place where it barely exists. I would rather keep it open than pretend a superior constitution seals it.

Anthony P. Teso Camas, Wash.