As a reader of Cosmonaut for some time now and self-avowed Marxist, albeit an admittedly eclectic one, I was engaged by a recent piece in the magazine by Maxi Nieto, “State, Democracy, and Transition: Is There a “Democratic Road” to Socialism?” Engaging with current trends of Democratic Socialism as the author does is something I feel is vital to the current socialist movement, and I very much enjoyed reading through the article. I agree with a large majority, especially their work in including value-form theory and the unity of circulation and production in explaining the capitalist mode of production. Nonetheless, I did take issue with one part of the article, and it is in regards to the author’s views on republicanism, democracy, and communism.
The relation of Marx to republicanism as Nieto points to is one I wholly agree with, in that Marx takes from a long trend of philosophical and political republicanism in his formulations of what a post-capitalist society must be. Marx’s free association is implicitly influenced by the free city of republican thought, evident by his reference to the ”republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers”1 in his political writings. That Marx saw equality between producers as a presupposition for communist society is evident, but a larger question remains to whether this equality and freedom is simply the freedom of capitalist republicanism but consistently applied, or if the radical wings of republicanism that Marx embodied constitute a break with the liberal thought that has come to dominate the political discourse.
While healthily staying within the discourse of liberal academic consensus, Phillip Pettit introduces a general distinction between the view of liberal freedom and republican freedom that can allow us to take a critical view of the question. Without reaching the limits of this letter, the liberal view of freedom can be provisionally defined as a definition of freedom as non-interference, while the republican view is one of non-domination. A theorist of the relation between radical republicanism and communism, William Clare Roberts uses the example of consent to demonstrate the difference between the two philosophies:
But, in another sense, the expectation that association be voluntary demands far too little. The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick thought he had coined a clever reductio ad absurdum when he claimed that a ‘socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults’, but I think Marxists can reasonably embrace Nozick’s maxim without revealing any dictatorial aspirations. One of the contributions of the feminist movement has been to make plain why the standard of ‘consenting adults’ is inadequate. It is wrong when a boss comes on to an employee, or a professor makes a pass at one of their students, or a cop hits on someone they are questioning, even if they make no threats and use no force. Whether the targets of these advances are ‘consenting adults’ or not is immaterial. Indeed, even if it is the employee, the student or the arrestee who makes the advances, the boss, professor or cop should be forbidden to accept them. The reason is simple: one party has power over the other, power which they could use to harm the other’s interests if they so choose. The consent of those subject to uncontrolled power does not legitimise that power.2
While the liberal may condone individual acts of abuse of people in power, signaling either that any institutional arrangement will inevitably come up with abuse or that an abstract human nature of greed and personal interest will always dominate individuals, a radical republican view assumed by Roberts here takes domination as the uncontrolled power of the institution itself, superseding individual relations of formal equality under the state and market to bring forward questions of the power that separates the formally equal individuals, and how to create an equality of non-dominated people – a question Marx takes in positing a free association of producers.
This is not to say the work of Pettit is perfect – his tendency of defining domination in regard to “arbitrariness” as opposed to uncontrolled power allows him to naturalize the conditions of the market, leaving him to still toil in the liberal discourse of voluntary contractualism – but the basic outline of a republican freedom, one engaged with by Marx as shown above and elaborated on by Roberts,3 allows us to conceptualize the distance of the equality and freedom that can meaningfully define socialism against other trends of enlightenment political thought. In contrast to this, the author seems to compact the two into a generalizable trend of Enlightenment republicanism, saying “modern principles of law (universal freedom and equality, systems of guarantee, unified sovereign authority) have as their very reason for being the requirements imposed by commodity exchange, which therefore constitutes a necessary condition for their effective deployment. It is from precisely such legal principles that the Enlightenment built the modern political model of a democratic republic – a project of civil power based on law, where national sovereignty is expressed.” While the two traditions have similarities in their reference to concepts like equality and freedom, it obscures the liberal problematic by compacting the concept of the democratic republic and the tradition of republicanism into the same tradition of the liberals, Montesquieu, and his theories of the separation of powers, which obscure democracy in granting veto power to various state functionaries which are rarely checked or controlled by the masses – a separation that lends itself perfectly to the political domination of capital. By granting the entire tradition of republicanism as a product of commodity exchange, it undermines the critical potential of the republican alternative against the liberal order – if republicanism as a whole just represents the idealized expressions of the exchange of value through the categories of freedom and equality, as per Marx’s reference to capitalist freedom in the Grundrisse, then it can’t represent the expression of a new and deliberately constructed productive relation, as the values can only be truly enacted with a system of formally free commodity production. History has shown us that the radical republicans, even in non-communist forms, very quickly came up against the limits of the bourgeois order, either being dispatched by the wonderful liberal hero Marquis de Lafayette, or by having their head separated from their body like Babeuf. Against this interpretation, the identification of liberalism as an idealized expression of capital and as a political philosophy of freedom as non-interference identifies the crucial difference between capitalist freedom and a socialist freedom. Marx encapsulates the contradictory nature of this bourgeois ideology, saying “exchange value or, more precisely, the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom, and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to be inequality and unfreedom.”4
In recognizing that there is formal equality under capitalism, the author grants too much to the capitalist order in saying that the capitalist political project is public “through citizen deliberation and decision” and there is “no correspondence between the political and economic spaces.” In reality, the contending politics of republicanism that demanded this sort of complete sovereignty to the people lost out in the French and corresponding bourgeois revolutions, succumbing to the liberal project of a system accommodated to the bourgeois class and capital. Nieto then makes a statement that with the previous considerations can be fully grasped not as an undermining of self-proclaimed republican principles by the system of capital, but the fulfillment of freedom by the liberal conception: “actions of these authorities must systematically submit to the demands of the true sovereign, which is capital – an ungovernable economic process”. This concept of the uncontrolled and dominating logic that is sustained through formal freedom and legal equality between people is a perfect example of why the liberal conception of non-interference cannot be embraced by socialists, and that to collapse all enlightenment ideology into a single republicanism misses the vital difference between the democratic republicanism of the Paris Commune and the constitutional republicanism of the French 3rd Republic. A greater conception of equality is needed, not just as contractual legal subjects, but as non-dominated people.
All this to say that the enlightenment of figures like Spinoza, the Communards, and Marx cannot be the enlightenment of Montesquieu and the following bourgeois liberal tradition. The task of communists is not to extend or fulfill the tasks of the liberal enlightenment, nor is it to revert to uninspiring humanist formulations of a harmonious communitarianism (a point which Nieto convincingly makes in his article), but to pull republican democracy from the dustbin of history as a weapon of the working class. The liberals can never carry democracy forward – we are already living in extent of liberal constitutionalism, the “freedom” of a neutral state to maintain consensual market transaction and maintain capital accumulation. Outside of popular catchphrases, the idea of self-government of the people and control over positions of power have never and will never be at the core of liberalism. At liberalism’s best, we get dominating state functionaries that pretend to listen a bit better to the concerns of the worker, but never enact change, and at its worst military dictatorships to maintain the rule of capital. To quote Lenin, “The very position the proletariat occupies as a class compels it to be consistently democratic. The bourgeoisie looks backward, fearing democratic progress, which threatens to strengthen the proletariat. The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains, but with the aid of democracy it has the whole world to gain.”5
E.Varda.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/08/instructions.htm
- https://www.dropbox.com/s/9kipoye66fxb3e0/HIMA_advance_1870_Roberts.pdf?dl=0
- https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691180816/marxs-inferno
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/tactics/ch06.htm