My recent critique of Bordiga’s stance on democracy prompted a reader to rightly ask— if the vacuous form of liberal electoral democratic politics amounts to less than the full possibility of democracy, what does a vision of radical democracy look like in the struggle both against and after capitalism? Shea is right to point out that one can conceive of democracy (or any other organizing principle) as a vehicle for both making demands and also a method of political action. This dichotomy is more fully understood in the means-ends question of human affairs—-What demands or actions do we take and to what ends? This becomes the central question, whether we’re talking about democracy, centralism, or fascism. And in doing so, we engage in a praxis of reasoning and utilizing justifications for both means and ends. They cannot be considered wholly independent of each other, and possess a dialectical tension.
I hope to begin laying out some of that framework here, to give some solidity to that structure (maybe not as precisely defined as some might like, but so goes critical theory), but also to try to resolve some of the contradictions that the term has taken on, as pointed out in Renzo Llorente’s sharp critique found here in Cosmonaut. While it is ultimately a greater deviation from Bordiga’s critique of democracy, it is my attempt at further building on the democratic principle where he saw only folly. But it is also my sincere hope that someone will write a full-throated defense of Bordiga’s centralism, something he ultimately did not do in his own text on democracy. I find Lorento’s general categories of liberal democracy/social democracy versus democratic socialism to be helpful in parsing a definition of what post- or even anti-bourgeoise democratic ideal might look like. In doing so I aim to also structure a materialist notion of what democracy might be, free of the contradictions Lorento notes between the two—often conflated—types.
I draw heavily on Forst’s conception of justification, which requires us to see the humans that make-up society as ends in themselves. And while this may appear facially bourgeois-adjacent, it actually takes into account the moral thread that grounds much our analysis of capitalism, including Marx’s critique. Put a different way, why is capitalism a problem at all? While Bordiga is not present to give or defend an answer, he, like most of us, would be hard-pressed to ignore the reality that a critique of the exploitation of the working class through the commodity form and the lack of control over the means is problematic because it is unjust. One could argue other telos—that it holds back full human development, that history will march beyond it, that we can do better—but these too look to a notion of what might through the lens of what exists now and sees it as wanting. This incompleteness, with all of its now-global harms, carries importance because we socially determine it to be so, even as the moral framework we possess arises from those same conditions. Whether one argues for or against capitalism, the moral threads cannot be stripped from the cloth of political economy.
With this in mind, we come to the means-end question latent in the democratic principle, which, as Shea pointed out in response to my article, is a vehicle for both making demands and also a method of political action. The central question becomes—whether we’re talking about democracy, centralism, or fascism—what demands or actions do we take, and to what ends? In doing so, we engage in a praxis of reasoning and utilizing justifications for both means and ends. Bordiga takes this approach up in his critique—he rightly rejects liberal democracy as a means of overcoming capitalism—it pretends to give individuals political equality that is wholly devoid of emancipatory potential because it preserves the status quo of the relations of production. But, as Lorento points out, a democratic socialist position actually stands opposed to the liberal democratic form because it necessarily violates the property rights established under the latter in order to guarantee full democratic power in the former. In other words, the radical vision of democracy requires an ability for the collective to throw its arms around the full spectrum of social relationships, both political and economic. Democracy, then, is is the ability of the working class to keep those relationships and the material conditions that create them, consistently under collective control. This conception, necessarily loosely defined (and imperfect) would be—democracy is the collective ability to work out and justify of relationships of power between individuals and the collective.
This in part implicates the state and its role in a democratic overthrow of capitalism and the development of socialism. As Mike Macnair argues in his article Control the bureaucrats, Lenin’s State and Revolution and the Russian revolution have something to teach us about a moment of democracy. His points resound with Lorento’s, in that social democracy would have the proletariat “take hold of and use the existing state” where Lenin instead argued that the it needed to be smashed. We come to an understanding of what the relationship between the state and democracy in part by recognizing that force is indeed the “midwife of history” and that in order to, as MacNair points out, overthrow the capitalist state, we have to tackle its “two essential institutions: the bureaucracy and the standing army.”
The Russian revolution reveals much, not just in the failure of a pure centralist approach, but ultimately the necessity of democracy in tackling this institution. Lenin argued that apart from abolishing the standing army in favor of a militia, the proletarian state required a fundamentally democratic approach—that all elected officials are subject to recall; in essence, that cabinet to army to judges can be stripped of any power by the people. While Lenin saw the necessity of some sort of parliamentary body to make decisions, as Macnair notes, “we overcome the problem of the anti-democratic potential of that situation by providing for the ‘immediate introduction of control and supervision by all’” a world where everyone is a bureaucrat for a time.
As Macnair further elucidates though, Lenin’s idea of the state struggled against material conditions; namely, that the Revolution required something more than militia to advance. Outside invasions, internal conflict, and dealing with natural disasters required a state function of a regular army and a dictatorship of the party, which cascaded a series of problems including better pay for the army bureaucracy than the average worker, a dynamic of corruption, and the massive growth of bureaucrats untethered to the proletariat. The Revolution failed at harmonizing the centralist principle that a dictatorship of the proletariat was the same as a dictatorship of the Party. Macnair points to one of the fatal flaws of the ‘commune state’–”that it actually presupposed the immediate end to the social division of labour.” The bourgeoise state actively resists the rise of new ruling classes and against the idea of social democracy, cannot be reformed to the ultimate control of the proletariat. Therefore, smashing the state simultaneously requires a new structural form that would tie it to the proletariat (something the Russian Revolution ultimately failed to do), but will still require a rebuilt structure. MacNair rightly asks that if certain structures like a standing army and bureaucracy remain, “how do we make these dependent on the proletariat, and create the conditions for them to wither away in the long run? Here, election and recallability of officials, the worker’s wage and the end of separation of powers are certainly starting points.” He goes on to point out, however, that a political force, like a party, capable of carrying through the destruction of the old state will remain essential to a post-capitalist project.
He returns then, to the core democratic notion I defined above—”The consequence is that the workers’ movement needs to work out the institutional forms which will make a professional bureaucracy answerable to the lay members . . . . and create a state which is actually answerable to to the working class, rather than one which becomes a state for itself, like the Stalinist regime. “ (emphasis mine).
This is, as Bordiga rightly notes, not a guarantee of justifiable and principled outcomes, any more than the seizure of economic power by the working class is a guarantee of sustained socialism. Nor is centralism, for that matter. In that sense, all methods of political organizing and decision-making do not necessarily carry inherent value outside of how they are deployed. But undertaking the above-definition and contrasting it against the tired electoral form, it is clear that there is a substantial gap between the two. Radical democracy examines and decides all rights, including the right to certain legal and political protections (like property) as requiring mutually justifiable reasons for their maintenance; something that electoral politics will not and can not deliver.
This would also seek to reconcile Lorento’s polemic of the gap between democratic socialism and social democracy, specifically when it comes to the capitalist right to property. To amplify the point I made in the first piece, in a radically democratic approach, capitalists would be stripped—by force if necessary—of entitlement to the means of production (and potentially several other liberal rights co-extensive with them) because the right to continue extracting surplus value from the working class is an unjustifiable one in the move towards socialism. Thus, the politics—collective decisionmaking and action about how to approach a group of individuals and their relationship to the whole—dictates a fundamental reorganizing of the economic—how we reproduce ourselves.
While it would take a great deal more writing to explore the intricacies of how decisions might be made in this context; worker councils, federated groups, majority versus consensus decision-making, etc.; the fundamental thing about this vision of democracy is not just how the body-politic engages with governance, but to Macnair’s point—that the question of governance is never structurally ouf of reach of the collective. Which is why, even if we accept this notion of democracy as worth implementing, Bordiga’s critique remains prescient, even with its shortcomings. It is all to easy for this power to be relegated to its most bland—vote-casting to swap leadership who then makes unilateral decisions outside of the interest of those they purportedly represent, likely in the interest of preserving their own power (as we now have in many Western nations). Bordiga’s centralism, one that can both disconnect and disregard the proletarian base has already lost sight of the revolutionary aim of overcoming capitalism (at least, with a meaningful alternative). In some senses, Bordiga’s centralism is not wholly incompatible with democracy, to the extent that the structure of centralism itself is never outside of collective power to reconfigure. If the masses of workers permitted a central authority to organize the political economy in their interests, so be it, so long as that power does not become an end in itself.
– Daniel Melo
