56 citations into Luke Pickrell’s article Marxism and the Democratic Republic and I am still scratching my head. MUG has done a fantastic job of raising the political dimension of socialism over the past year, but its line on the democratic republic enters the territory of absurdity. Or call it petty-bourgeois revisionism.
No socialist I have met has ever argued in defense of the constitution. Anyone familiar with the Federalist Papers – not to mention the ABCs of Marxism – knows that the founding fathers explicitly designed the constitution as a tool of bourgeois class rule (and originally denied the right to vote to a majority of the population). But the question is not whether we need a new constitution (and a new social order), the question is how do we get there, and more specifically, what key demands orient our struggle in the best direction. Pickrell does not make a convincing argument.
Pickrell introduces the metaphor of a three-headed hydra to explain domination within class society:
‘the political domination of the workers effected by the state, the objective domination or despotism to which workers are subjected in production, and the impersonal domination experienced by all commodity producers.’
Where do we strike this three-headed hydra so that it stops growing new heads?
Pickrell then goes on to dismiss the economic struggle as the key fight.
The domination of the working class at the point of production will be a constant source of conflict – sometimes higher, sometimes lower – so long as classes exist. But focusing our attention on labor struggles to the detriment of political struggles – as some critique the Rank and File Strategy for doing – concealed the fact that the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
Only one head remains: the political domination of the workers by the state. A massive shift takes place in the class struggle when the working class recognizes the government is a far worse enemy than their employer. At that point, the class moves one step closer to realizing its historic mission of liberating all of humanity because it moves one step closer to contesting state power.
This division between economic and political terrain is a total failure to apply basic dialectics – the contradiction and unity between the economic and political struggles – and an abandonment of the basic Marxist strategy that has been accepted practice for more than a century: help build the labor movement, win it to socialist politics, and bring that unified force into a direct confrontation with the capitalist class. Of course, all the while we can be running and winning socialist candidates, but history has shown that a bourgeois democratic system will sooner eat itself alive than allow socialists to peacefully gain a majority through elections, not to mention allow them to change its fundamental rules. In correcting the error of an economistic rank and file strategy which fails to raise a clear socialist policy in the labor movement, the author has gone too far in dislocating the trade union struggle as the key organizing terrain of the socialist party.
Fighting on the economic terrain empowers the fight on the political terrain, setting out achievable objectives which give us the resources to win on the political terrain. If we professionalize our work and commit to the correct strategy – not an economist rank and file strategy, but a political, Bolshevik one – we can win control of at least a plurality of the labor movement in the next 5 or 10 years. We can then use those resources to increase our political power, and ultimately use the strike weapon to come into confrontation with the capitalist class as a whole. The only limiting factor is our own commitment.
What strategies and tactics does taking up the slogan “for a democratic republic” lead us towards? While Pickrell does not mention it, others have pointed to calling for a constitutional convention as their organizing strategy. And they call this Marxism.
Hidden in this article, and the larger discourse and tendency it represents, is an attack on the legacy of the Russian Revolution and the soviet as a form of government. The line is that it was wrong for the Bolsheviks to dissolve the constituent assembly and take on power to the soviets. The soviets were profoundly more democratic, participatory, and representative than even the commune. Pointing to the commune is a step backwards.
This line also represents a middle-class aversion to the tough realities of revolution. Cite the democratic participation of the Paris Commune, but remember that some 10,000-20,000 Communards were shot dead when that revolution was defeated for failing to employ the tough measures of class terror which have nothing in common with democratic rights.
A revolution is a mass mobilization that turns into an insurrection and then into a civil war. It is not a constitutional convention, but rather a military camp. As Engels wrote,
Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Ultimately, Hercules did not slay the hydra by going on strike, and certainly not by calling out “I demand a democratic republic.” He used a sword, tainted with the hydra’s own poison, to burn each severed neck so that it could not grow back. The socialist, hand in hand with the proletariat which has been created by the capitalist class itself, cuts down the capitalist class not by calling a constitutional convention but in a violent confrontation.
These debates on democracy, the soviets, Marx, and the Paris Commune have played out before. I highly recommend all socialists interested in the question read Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism.
-Henry De Groot
