Comrades,
I’ve followed with interest the debate on democracy and socialism between Renzo Llorente and Gil Schaeffer, as well as the letter contributions, in Cosmonaut. I’d like to make some comments on the debate and various arguments because it seems to me there is a lot of conceptual confusion and a lack of clarity on concrete political tasks.
To start with, I found comrade Llorente’s original article ‘The Contradictions and Confusions of Democratic Socialism’ disappointing. If I have read the argument correctly, the central contention is that there is a contradiction within the program of self-described democratic socialists such as Bhaskar Sunkara between their adherence to a program of economic democracy on the one hand, and their valorization of and deference to the norms and institutions of liberal democracy. However, I don’t believe that such a contradiction actually exists and so for me, the argument doesn’t land.
In my reading, the concept of economic democracy that democratic socialists in the Corbyn-Sanders mould have inherited is actually that of the early Fabian society and the revisionist wing of the Second International, where it refers to measures that allow workers a greater share of wealth and decision-making power even within the framework of existing capitalist property relations.* Examples of this kind of economic democracy could include trade unions, co-operative enterprises, credit unions and municipal and state-owned enterprises. Such a vision of socialism is not only not in contradiction with the liberal-democratic constitutional order; it actually presupposes this order and seeks to extend its apparent benefits to the working-class.
Comrade Schaeffer’s reply, if I have understood it correctly, is very unusual, because on the one hand, he stresses that socialism for him is a matter of ethical imperatives which are fundamentally consonant with the liberal-democratic tradition. Unlike Eduard Bernstein and his co-thinkers however, who saw even in the limited democratic mechanisms of the Kaiserreich a realization of liberal principle which could engender a peaceful transition to socialism, he sees everywhere the negation of liberal principle and insists that the US is not a democracy. I don’t want to go into the philosophical basis that comrade Schaeffer draws out to defend his positions, but I do want to note how oddly his beliefs sit with his invocation of Lenin.
I think that comrade Schaeffer is of course correct to reject the view that What is to be Done? justifies the Comintern-era ‘party of a new type’, and right to emphasize the fact that Lenin’s overriding political goal for the greater portion of his political career was the achievement in Russia of a democratic republic. But he is strangely reticent on the fact that Lenin frequently juxtaposes ‘liberal-monarchists’ and ‘revolutionary-democrats’.** ‘Liberalism’ for Lenin is not synonymous with ‘democracy’, it is the ideology of the bourgeoisie which has a fundamentally ambiguous and unreliable attitude towards the democratic revolution. He consistently stresses (In Two Tactics for example) that revolutionary democracy is the policy of the class bloc of the working class and peasantry.
As well as the policy of a specific class bloc, I also read Lenin as seeing democracy as a political program carried out in the interests of that class bloc. For example, in Two Tactics he states that “the transfer of the whole of the land to the peasantry, will signify a complete democratic revolution”. It was precisely on such a conception of democracy as a set of programmatic tasks that Lenin was able to speak without contradiction of ‘democratic dictatorship’ – the dictatorship of a provisional government supported by the armed working-class which would energetically use all means at its disposal to rid Russia of the remnants of Tsarism and carry through the program of the democratic revolution to completion.
I think that by equating liberalism and liberal democracy entirely with the most radical elements of the democratic political tradition (Paine, Jacobinism, Chartism), comrade Schaeffer is making a historical and political error that risks undermining the merits of his admirable enthusiasm for democratic republicanism. It is worth remembering that one of the central points at issue in this discussion – does the achievement of a radical democracy require curtailing the rights of those who oppose democracy – is not a problematic which originates in Marxism, but in the very tradition of radical democracy which Schaeffer invokes. It was not the RSFSR of 1918 but the French Convention of 1792 which pioneered the exercise of revolutionary terror against the enemies of the Republic.
French communism (Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui) inherited the concept of a revolutionary dictatorship and from there it was adopted by Marx and Engels, but in the context of a new problematic – what is the specific political form in which the revolutionary subject, the proletariat, will be able to exercise the power needed to expropriate the capitalist class and bring about socialism? What measures does the revolutionary government need to take in order to carry the revolution to the end and expropriate the expropriators?
This is the way that the question was posed in classical Marxism, and also the best place, in my opinion, to begin to explore the potential of a living relationship between Marxism and the democratic republican tradition. My frustration with Llorente is that he never really outlines such a program or really explains what he means by ‘socialist democracy’ (although I think in his reply, he adequately deals with some of the contradictions in Schaeffer’s position). My frustration with Schaeffer is that he gives us a barebones sketch of a revolutionary government (unicameral chamber combining executive, legislative and judiciary functions elected by universal suffrage), but not much beyond that and gets too caught up in trying to square the circle of justifying his politics within the conceptual universe of universal rights inherited from liberalism.
Comradely,
Le Père Duchesne
*See for example this passage from Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism: “The trade unions are the democratic element in industry. Their tendency is to destroy the absolutism of capital, and to procure for the worker a direct influence in the management of an industry.” (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/ch03-2.htm#c)
**See for example point 4 of Lenin’s Tactical Platform for the 4th congress of the RSDLP: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/tactplat/atbp.htm
