Renzo Llorente critically responds to Gil Schaeffer’s views on democratic rights and socialism. 

At the end of last year, Cosmonaut published my article “The Contradictions and Confusions of ‘Democratic Socialism’.”  Gil Schaeffer recently responded to my article with an essay titled “Democratic Rights and Socialism: The Confusions and Contradictions of Renzo Llorente.” Despite the title, Schaeffer spends more time discussing other authors’ views, and his own intellectual and political biography, than he does discussing the theses that I defended in my essay. Indeed, I am barely mentioned after the fifth paragraph, and the first four paragraphs of the article do not take us beyond the article’s “Introduction.” To the extent that Schaeffer does refer—misleadingly and inaccurately—to my arguments, he presents no serious challenge to any of the substantive points that I made in the original essay. Worse still, Schaeffer displays, as we shall see, the very theoretical confusion and habitual equivocation that I describe and criticize in my original essay. In this sense, Schaeffer’s article is emblematic of the “democratic socialist” muddle that I examined in my earlier article. 

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Schaeffer begins his article by informing readers that he finds it “odd” that my original essay “takes no notice of the political discussion that has been going on within the US socialist movement for the past three years regarding the undemocratic structure of the US Constitution.”¹ One wonders why, exactly, he should find that odd. After all, the main topics of my essay were the misuse of the term “socialism” for left-liberal and social democratic policies and positions; democratic socialists’ confusion and carelessness in employing the term “democracy”; the problems, both conceptual and strategic, that arise when one espouses an uncompromising commitment to capitalists’ liberal-democratic political rights coupled with an equally uncompromising rejection of their (current) economic rights; the error of identifying the political and economic rights that would characterize a truly socialist society with existing liberal-democratic rights; and the Cold War mindset of many a “democratic socialist.” Debates about “the undemocratic structure of the US Constitution” have little bearing on these questions and, in any case, are certainly much less relevant than the democratic socialist literature that I discussed in my essay and which Schaeffer studiously ignores, with the exception of one item, to which I now turn. 

In my article, I had drawn attention to the DSA slogan, prominently featured throughout the organization’s website, which tells us that “working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs.” I then noted that “the word ‘democratically’ cannot mean what it means for liberal-democratic theory, which rejects the view that a particular class, stratum, sector, etc. of society is uniquely entitled to run the economy and society.” According to Schaeffer, my observation, which he cites, amounts to nothing more than “pedantic nitpicking.” Why? “Because ‘the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,’ there is no great difficulty involved in establishing that the rule of the working class is simultaneously a system of universal democratic rights.” As an attempt at rebuttal, this reply is breathtakingly flimsy. First of all, and most importantly, the passage from the Communist Manifesto cited by Schaeffer is in no way germane to an assessment of my claim. Second, “if there is no great difficulty involved in establishing that the rule of the working class is simultaneously a system of universal democratic rights” (emphasis added), why does Schaeffer not show us just how this is done? By doing so, he would render a great service to the socialist movement, considering that lots of people in the world, among them many who wield immense political power or social influence (or both), dispute the idea that “the rule of the working class is simultaneously a system of universal democratic rights.” (A few lines on this topic would certainly have been much more edifying, needless to say, than Schaeffer’s college reminiscences, which seem more suitable for a Princeton alumni organ than a debate on socialism and rights in Cosmonaut, or the rambling discussion of philosophers and social theorists in the latter part of Schaeffer’s article.) I should note here as well that if Schaeffer really believes that the quotation from the Manifesto automatically leads to the conclusion that “the rule of the working class is simultaneously a system of universal democratic rights,” it is because he not only confuses the concept of “majority” with that of “universality” but also tacks on, without any explanation, the phrase “universal democratic rights.” In any case, let me restate my original point, which Schaeffer fails to refute: If liberal democracy is compatible with socialism, then we cannot, and should not, equate the latter with “the rule of the working class,” to use Schaeffer’s language. If, on the other hand, we wish to identify socialism with something like rule of the working class, we shall have to move beyond liberal democracy.

One of the main themes of my original article was that conceptual confusion and terminological equivocation vitiate a great deal of the popular “democratic socialist” literature coming out of North America. Unfortunately, Schaeffer’s article offers us yet another illustration of these very problems. Consider, to begin with, one of Schaefer’s basic claims in his article: “the US is not a democracy.” Why does Schaeffer say this? “Ever since Tom Paine and the French Revolution, democracy has meant sovereignty of the people expressed through universal and equal suffrage in a single representative body: no President, no Senate, and no Supreme Court with the power to overturn legislation.” Both his claim that the US is not a democracy and his claim that democracy can only refer to the political arrangement that he describes are curious. As for the latter claim, while some might think that it is correct from a socialist point of view, at least if Schaeffer has in mind a necessary condition for democracy², C. B. Macpherson, the great theorist of liberal democracy approvingly cited by Schaeffer, thinks otherwise—as he makes clear in The Real World of Democracy—and I would argue that Macpherson is right. (I will return to Macpherson in a moment, as his perspective on the relationship between capitalism and democracy represents the antithesis of Schaeffer’s perspective on this topic.) Of course, if the definition is also intended to cover liberal notions and theories of democracy as well, then it is patently false.

What about the proposition that “the US is not a democracy”? Let me begin by saying that I find this declaration quite sterile; to my mind, it is much more useful, when analyzing and assessing different countries’ political systems and political culture, to adopt the “degrees-of-democracy” approach, as presented by the late Frank Cunningham—one of Macpherson’s most distinguished disciples—in Democratic Theory and Socialism. (Is the United States not more democratic, in most—all?—ways, than, say, Saudia Arabia? Is the US not a more democratic nation than it was two centuries ago? Do these differences in degree not matter?) I will not attempt to summarize the “degrees-of-democracy” approach³ here, but rather simply show that the insistence that “the US is not a democracy” generates a few political conundrums, which Schaeffer prefers to ignore.

Consider, to begin with, the implications of Schaeffer’s position with respect to the question of liberal-democratic rights. If Schaeffer is correct in asserting that “the US is not a democracy,” then it turns out that citizens of an undemocratic country can enjoy a full array of liberal-democratic rights; in short, liberal democratic rights can exist and flourish in the absence of democracy. If this is the case, and what truly matters are liberal-democratic rights—for Schaeffer, “there is nothing more important in the world than understanding and fighting for liberal democratic rights”—one cannot but wonder why Schaeffer thinks it so important to insist that “the US is not a democracy.”⁴ Of course, I am assuming that Schaeffer believes that people in the United States do indeed enjoy liberal-democratic rights—If they do not and, in addition, the US is not a democracy, what we can salvage from the US political system?—but it is possible that he actually holds that no country, or very few counties, have ever really granted their people liberal-democratic rights. If the latter view is Schaeffer’s true, considered view, then perhaps he regards the existence of democracy as a necessary condition for the existence of liberal-democratic rights; and since “it is only in western Europe after WWII that genuine representative democracy gained a foothold, most thoroughly in Scandinavia,” one could, at best, find liberal-democratic rights in post-WWII Scandinavia and parts of Western Europe, and those are the only countries whose political systems should guide us. (I think it is safe to assume that “representative democracy” is what Schaeffer has in mind when he proclaims that “the US is not a democracy,” but given his customary terminological carelessness, one cannot say for sure.) If we adopt the degrees-of-democracy approach, one the other hand, these kinds of questions do not arise: a country need not be “wholly” or “completely” democratic, whatever that might mean, for there to exist liberal-democratic rights, and to speak of liberal-democratic rights in the United States is not at all problematic. 

I have already mentioned one reason that Schaeffer offers for arriving at the conclusion that “the US is not a democracy”: “ever since Tom Paine and the French Revolution, democracy has meant….” But Schaeffer also offers another line of reasoning: “The bourgeoisie has always hated democracy, and it is a conceptual and historical absurdity to think that the words “bourgeois democracy” represent anything in the real world…. Democracy and capitalism have been in open conflict for more than two centuries.” It is more than a little surprising to read such a statement from someone who elsewhere invokes the authority of C. B. Macpherson. Here is Macpherson’s view on the matter: “liberal-democracy and capitalism go together. Liberal-democracy is found only in countries whose economic system is wholly or predominantly that of capitalist enterprise.” So, unless Schaeffer has in mind some form of democracy other than liberal democracy when he asserts that “democracy and capitalism have been in open conflict for more than two centuries,” his view completely contradicts that of Macpherson. If Macpherson is right, moreover, it makes perfect sense to speak of “capitalist (liberal-) democracy” and, indeed, “bourgeois democracy,” despite Schaeffer’s claim to the contrary. But Schaeffer should know as much: the countries “in western Europe” where, according to Schaeffer, “genuine representative democracy gained a foothold” after the Second World War, never abandoned capitalism. So, either capitalism and some forms of democracy are compatible, or those Western European countries did not achieve democracy. Schaeffer could, of course, argue that by “representative democracy” he has in mind a social arrangement that lacks “liberal-democratic” rights, but if that is the case, one wonders why those Western European countries are of much interest, if any, to someone for whom “there is nothing more important in the world than understanding and fighting for liberal democratic rights.”

I should also add that it is doubtful whether it makes much tactical sense, at least in the present juncture, to adopt the “the US is not a democracy” view, however limited, defective, and inadequate American democracy may be today. For one thing, if we deny that the US is a democracy, it certainly becomes far more difficult to discuss “threats” to democracy in the United States—as does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in her recent interview with The New Yorker⁵ —or to argue that the implementation of undemocratic policies makes the US less democratic. (If the US is not a democracy, how does it become—and how do we convince people that it has become, or is becoming—less democratic?) For another, if we deny that the US is a democracy, any justification for socialist and communist participation in the political system inevitably becomes more complicated. On the other hand, if we adhere to the degrees-of-democracy approach, it makes perfect sense to speak of “threats” and policies and tendencies that make the US less “democratic,” just as it makes perfect sense for socialists and communists to participate in the system: we strive to make it much more democratic, to further democratize it, because it is not the democracy at which we aim.

Finally, one might also argue that the question of whether the US is a democracy has relatively little practical importance, for the simple reason that it is perfectly possible for non-democratic institutions, or a non-democratic political arrangement, to approve and enact democratic policies. This is so because “democracy” has—as Macpherson, for one, shows in The Real World of Democracy— a few different, yet equally defensible, meanings. As an example of what I have in mind, imagine that the US congress passed legislation that would implement a DSA-inspired political program: surely Schaeffer would allow that such legislation was “democratic,” even though, on his view, the existence of the Senate disqualifies the US as a democracy. (If it were not possible for non-democratic institutions to pass democratic legislation, then Schaeffer would have to regard all legislation issuing from the US Congress as “non-” or “undemocratic,” given his belief that “the US is not a democracy.”) But to the extent that this is true, the question of whether the United States is a democracy loses some of its importance. Of course, these considerations inevitably lead us back to one of the central theses of my original essay, namely that a large amount of “democratic socialist” literature exhibits carelessness and confusion when discussing democracy. Unfortunately, Schaeffer does not address the points that I make in connection with this issue in “The Contradictions and Confusions of ‘Democratic Socialism’,” opting to offer us instead yet another serving of careless and confused thinking on the topic.

The muddle that characterizes Schaeffer’s wrongheaded views on democracy also characterizes, sad to say, many of his remarks on the subject of rights. Consider, for instance, the following passage: “Dispossessing capitalists of the means of production is not a violation of their democratic rights because they have no such right. Nor is it necessary to deny them normal civil and political rights after they have been dispossessed of their economic resources.” This passage is remarkable for two reasons. To begin with, capitalists do, of course, enjoy the right to own the means of production in countries with liberal-democratic political systems: this much is obvious. If deprived of that right, they will lose, be stripped of, a right—namely, a right deriving from positive law in liberal-democratic political systems.⁶ To say that that there is “no violation of their democratic rights” is either false—assuming that “democratic rights” means, as Schaeffer generally suggests, “liberal-democratic rights”—or, if “democratic rights” means something else altogether, irrelevant, unless Schaefer can demonstrate that this other meaning is the uniquely true meaning, or definition, of “democratic rights.” But the passage is also remarkable because, in discussing possible rights limitations in my original article, I wrote, “I should perhaps reiterate that my remarks…apply to pre-socialist phases of socialist construction. If, in advocating the utmost respect for political rights, proponents of “democratic socialism” have in mind the political rights of the members of a socialist society, their position is certainly the correct one.” I assume that when it is a question of capitalists “dispossessed of their economic resources,” we are talking about a society that has already undertaken the building of socialism. 

Schaeffer’s conceptual carelessness regarding rights is hardly confined to the lines just cited. Take the phrase “universal democratic rights,” which we have already come across and which Schaeffer uses on numerous occasions (e.g., “[H]e [Llorente] wants to establish that working-class rule and socialism require a new conception of political rights that are distinct from theories of universal democratic rights”). Schaeffer never tells us what he means by “universal democratic rights.” If he merely means “liberal-democratic rights,” in what sense are they are “universal”? Or does he mean a subset of current liberal-democratic rights, given that he plainly rejects property rights and, in any event, the content and scope of liberal-democratic rights, such as freedom of expression, varies from one country to another (e.g., some forms of expression that enjoy legal protection in the US lack that protection in Spain)? If, on the other hand, he is referring to something else altogether, such as a body of rights which encompasses but cannot be reduced to liberal-democratic rights, why does he not take the trouble to tell us what he has in mind?

In making his argument, such as it is, for the compatibility of liberal democracy and socialism, Schaeffer notes that the philosopher John Rawls holds, as I had acknowledged in my article, that a “liberal socialist regime” (to use Rawls’s expression) is possible. What Schaeffer does not mention is that I had also pointed out that Rawls rejects “the equal right to participate in the control of the means of production and of natural resources, both of which are to be socially, not privately, owned.” I then added: “it is difficult to see how any consistent socialist…could accept a social arrangement that fails to recognize the right to equality of participation in the control of the major means of production.” At any rate, Schaeffer suggests that I would have understood the socialist potential of liberal-democratic rights better if I had looked not to Rawls, but to the political theorist C. B. Macpherson, to whom I have already referred and whose name I actually cite in the “Introduction” to my article. While I have learned much from reading Macpherson and am a great admirer of his work, I do not believe that his books and essays prove very helpful in delineating a distinctly “liberal-democratic socialism,”⁷ and I do not see how we can equate Macpherson’s socialist commitments with a conception of socialism that holds that “working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs.” 

What about Schaeffer’s claim that Macpherson regards socialism as “necessary for the ultimate fulfillment of liberal democratic rights” (emphasis in the original)? Schaeffer does not furnish a reference for his claim, and I do not know which text(s) he has in mind. In any case, when Macpherson explicitly links liberal democracy to a social arrangement akin to socialism—such as “participatory democracy,” in The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, or the “post-liberal-democracy” that he adumbrates in Democratic Theory—the “right” he has in mind is in fact “the equal right of every man and woman to the full development and use of his or her capabilities.”⁸ This is, according to Macpherson, “the essential ethical principle of liberal democracy.”⁹ If this is what Schaeffer means by “liberal democratic rights,” I have no quarrel with him, since he is referring to a commitment which, as Ellen Meiksins Wood once observed, we may more plausibly identify with Marxism; indeed, to identify this principle with liberal democracy is odd, Meiksins Wood also noted, even within the framework of Macpherson’s own interpretation of liberal-democratic thought.¹⁰ Whether or not one agrees with Meiksins Wood, the generality of this right, or “ethical principle,” is such that we can derive many different, specific rights from it, including rights essential for socialism,¹¹ some of which would be incompatible with existing liberal-democratic rights.

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The problems that I have discussed so far represent just a small sampling of Schaeffer’s muddle. I have not considered, for example, Schaeffer’s proposition that

“the period of the American Civil War and Reconstruction is the most illuminating historical example we have of the interplay between establishing democracy and enforcing new laws of property and political rights against a defeated class of dispossessed property owners engaged in remorseless, illegal resistance.”

There is, Schaeffer adds, “a parallel between the position of ex-capitalists in a democratic polity that has socialized the means of production and the position of ex-slaveholders in the South after the abolition of slavery. The emphasis must be placed on the ‘ex,’ otherwise only confusion will prevail.” Alas, Schaeffer’s confusion prevails here as well. Let me begin by noting two odd aspects of Schaeffer’s “parallel.” First of all, Schaeffer holds, as we have seen, that “the US is not a democracy”; at the same time, however, he tells us that we should look to the Civil War and Reconstruction as “the most illuminating historical example we have of the interplay between establishing democracy and enforcing new laws of property” (emphasis added). In other words, the United States is not a democracy today, but it was, apparently, in the late 1860s and early 1870s—despite the fact the country then had a Senate and Supreme Court, two institutions that are, Schaeffer insists, incompatible with democracy—and that period of American history should serve as our model, it seems, if we wish to establish democracy in our time. Or perhaps by “establishing democracy” Schaeffer means something else altogether, but something which he characteristically refuses to explain. Or perhaps in this passage he accepts the “degrees-of-democracy” approach… The second obvious problem: My remarks on rights restrictions—naturally, I will not speak for the others mentioned by Schaeffer in his article—were meant, as I have already noted, to apply to “to pre-socialist phases of socialist construction”—that is, the process and period of expropriation and socialization. 

These considerations aside, Schaeffer’s parallel, or analogy, remains deeply flawed. To begin with, the parallel will prove truly useful only if the process of expropriating the capitalists and socializing the means of production is viewed as an event analogous to the American Civil War, which was not only an unimaginably bloody conflict but also a period in which the government suspended or restricted rights, including habeas corpus and freedom of expression.¹² Secondly, Schaeffer’s parallel hardly offers us an example of scrupulous respect for “normal civil and political rights”: some Confederate officials lost political rights immediately after the war—recall section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment—and, of course, Southern states were placed under military rule following the Civil War, as a result of the first of the “Reconstruction Acts.”¹³ These are hardly the only problems with Schaeffer’s “parallel,” but they should suffice to demonstrate the inadvisability of using the American Civil War and Reconstruction as a reference, or analogy, when thinking about the status of “ex-capitalists” in either a pre-socialist phase of socialist construction or following the socialization of the means of production.

As I said, the problems that I have discussed constitute but a small selection from the glaring shortcomings of Schaeffer’s article. Indeed, if I were to inventory every instance of woolly reasoning, every specious argument, every misrepresentation of my views in Schaeffer’s article, I would end up drafting an essay at least twice as long as the present one. But I will not try readers’ patience with still more examples of Schaeffer’s intellectual and theoretical sloppiness. Instead, I encourage those people who have both read my original article and waded through “Democratic Rights and Socialism: The Confusions and Contradictions of Renzo Llorente” to glance at the issues that I mention in the second paragraph of the present essay and to ask themselves whether Gif Schaeffer has provided an adequate response to any of the concerns that I raised in connection with those issues. I am confident that they will answer in the negative.

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1. All quotations from Gil Schaeffer come from his article “Democratic Rights and Socialism: The Confusions and Contradictions of Renzo Llorente,” Cosmonaut, February 5, 2022: https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/02/democratic-rights-and-socialism-the-confusions-and-contradictions-of-renzo-llorente/.
2. Notice, for example, that Schaeffer does not say anything about the distribution of wealth and resources.
3. Cunningham’s basic thesis is as follows: “To say that the social unit ‘A’ is more democratic than ‘B’ is to say that: 1. proportionately more people in A have control over their common social environment than do people in B; and/or 2. people in A have control over proportionately more aspects of their social environment than do people in B; and/or 3. the aspects of their social environment over which people in A have control are more important from the point of view of democracy than those over which people in B have control” (Frank Cunningham, Democratic Theory and Socialism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 26-27). Cunningham develops these ideas in Chapter 3 of Democratic Theory and Socialism, which is where the cited passage appears.
4. C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy Real World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 4. In another work, Macpherson remarks, “It cannot be too often recalled that liberal democracy is strictly a capitalist phenomenon” (“Post-Liberal Democracy?” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 173).
5. “AOC Hasn’t Given Up on Her Vision for Social Change”: interview with David Remnick, The New Yorker, February 14, 2022: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/is-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-an-insider-now. Ocasio-Cortez’s comments in the interview make it clear that she considers the US a democracy.
6. The dispossessed capitalists would surely also seek to convince us that the expropriation violated their human rights, since Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes a right to own property.
7. A relatively recent Jacobin review of Frank Cunningham’s book on Macpherson’s thought gives the reader an idea of the indeterminateness of Macpherson’s contribution to the development of a liberal-democratic socialism. See Matt McManus, “C. B. Macpherson Wanted a Socialism That Didn’t Lose Sight of the Individual,” Jacobin, June 26, 2021: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/06/cb-macpherson-political-theory-possessive-individualism-hobbes-locke-socialism-frank-cunningham-review
8. C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 114; cf. 21.
9. C. B. Macpherson, “Liberal-Democracy and Property,” in Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions, ed. by C. B. Macpherson (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 199
10. Macpherson’s “account of the foundation of liberal democracy as a class ideology makes the rest of the argument rather puzzling. If the doctrine is based on class-division, one must question Macpherson’s characterization of its ethical position as a commitment to the free and equal development of all individuals. For that matter, one might wonder why he chooses to single out liberal democracy as the embodiment of this cherished principle when a doctrine opposed to the class-nature of liberal democracy—that is, Marxism—is more centrally and genuinely concerned with this ethical commitment than is liberalism in any of its forms (Ellen Meiksins Wood, “C. B. Macpherson: Liberalism, and the Task of Socialist Political Theory,” in The Socialist Register 1978, ed. by Ralph Miliband and John Saville [London: The Merlin Press, 1978], 220). For another critique of Macpherson’s views from a Marxist socialist perspective, see Andrew Levine, Liberal Democracy: A Critique of Its Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), Chapter 10.
11. Macpherson himself derives “the individual right to equal access to the means of labour and/or the means of life” (“Liberal-Democracy and Property,” 201) from this right/ethical principle.
12. For a brief overview of some of the violations of civil liberties that occurred during the American Civil War, see Michael Linfield, Freedom Under Fire: U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War (Boston: South End Press, 1990), Chapter 3.
13.  Perhaps Schaeffer would reply, “But the officials were not all capitalists.” If we grant this objection, Schaeffer will need to explain why it is permissible to limit some people’s political rights, but not the capitalists’ political rights.