On the Democratic Question
PDF version (with footnotes).
A note on revisions
On the Democratic Question was originally published, under the title On Democracy, on 13/09/2019, and was subsequently subject to a substantial re-write, published 24/11/2019. A third edit, primarily on stylistic matters like formatting, particularly for citations and the bibliography, as well as some minor alterations throughout to improve the text’s clarity, was made on 26/06/2020. While we fully recognise the relative theoretical immaturity of this text, written as it was during a period of theoretical ambiguity on our part and subject to a level of research below what is to be ideally desired, it is this third version that is produced here and considered definitive.
If we were to address the subject today, we would approach it much more systematically, would give more weight to the distinction between democracy in general, democracy in the state, and democracy in the party, and especially the significance of the difference between the application of democracy in heterogeneous bodies, such as society, and homogenous bodies, such as the party or trade unions. Further, we would strive to better impress upon the reader the orthodoxy of this position, reflecting as it does the correct and authentic analysis of the Marxist movement derived from the work of Marx, Engels and Lenin and retained by the communist left in Italy in the face of the various theoretical deviations seen during the twentieth century. We would also seek to more fully contextualise the discussion historically, such as the nature of Lenin’s extremely qualified support for democracy being ‘in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism’ (25/11/1916 letter to A. Armand), as the movement existed in a precapitalist, prebourgeois society. This is incomparably different to the situation today, which nullifies this qualified support — indeed within a year of him writing those words, the Bolsheviks were to reject democratic organisation and organising, violently seize power, and then disbanded the Constituent Assembly, by some way the most democratic organ in the world (sans the soviets in Russia and elsewhere, if you are so inclined to call monoclass bodies democratic, which would void the claim that class dictatorship is undemocratic!). This, in a society so wholly less capitalistic than any in the world today. A note on antihumanism may also be warranted.
In lieu of correcting the various insufficiencies of this essay with a new work, we direct the reader to a number of Bordiga’s articles, namely “Party and Class,” “Party and Class Action,” “Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party,” and “The Democratic Question,” which together excellently express, though far from exhaust, the communist position on democracy.
What is democracy, and how does the communist movement and its political demands relate to it? This is a key question, one that has been constantly debated since the very earliest days of communism; we scientific socialists, that is, we Marxists, have long been in dispute with the various utopian schools over the question of democracy, of popular participation, of the democratic or otherwise character of socialist society, socialist party, socialist demands. It must be admitted that the scientific position has been gradually watered down and forgotten, part capitulationism, part genuine ideological degeneration, and part retreat in the face of the overwhelming hegemony of the capitalist class and the liberal world order all conspiring to create a situation where utopian party lines on the question of democracy are not just ubiquitous, but wholly dominant, such is the prevalence of this particular trend of revisionism and the wider lack of adequate theoretical leadership internationally.
Let us now attempt to elucidate what the Marxist position must actually be, first, by enquiry into the nature and history of democracy itself, and second, in how it affects — and is affected by — the socialist revolution, and in what relation that revolution and its agents stand to it.
What is Democracy?
“Democracy” is an abstract ideal, lacking proper definition and often proper contextualisation in history, in part because the word is used to describe so many things. Several kinds of political systems have been or would be called democratic, with both similarities and dissimilarities between them. All share, at their core, their being characterised by being “the rule of many,” as opposed to “the rule of few.” Who the many — and indeed the few — actually are is (supposedly) unimportant to the democrat, only that sovereignty lies with “the people”; with the demos, with the electorate, with the legislative assembly and executive branch as voted for by the people, with the workers’ councils, with the unions and with the communities, not with a state enforced upon the people against their will, not with groups and individuals who have won power by nefarious, violent, Machiavellian and immoral means, not with those who seek to rule for their own sake and not the sake of their peers.
The first — earliest — of these democratic forms is antique, classical democracy, which is still the root of our modern word and conception of it. The demos in dēmokratía is usually translated as “people,” but a more accurate rendering would arguably be “citizen,” or “citizenry,” and in a Hellenic polis citizen and politician were practically synonymous terms, so far from being government by the people, democracy in its original form meant government by the political class as a whole, in contrast to that of a small clique of politicians (oligarchy; oligarkhía) — what would today be the equivalent of single-party government — or one individual ruling either as a legitimate sovereign abiding by established laws (monarchy; basíleia) or with absolute, unrestrained power (tyranny; turannía). Ranked in terms of how many people were involved in governing under these systems, democracy was the largest, oligarchy considerably smaller, and monarchy and tyranny obviously very small indeed. (It should be emphasised that none of these systems were considered “good” or “bad” in anything like the same way that that they are today (especially oligarchy and tyranny, which are nothing but pejorative terms used to express emotive disagreement with the subject of discussion); they were all legitimate forms of government with widely acknowledged pros and cons to each.) Democracy functioned through the use of popular assemblies which held legislative, executive, and judicial power alike, where proposals for laws or actions were made by professional speakers (sophistés) on behalf of their wealthy (and to hire a sophist, nevermind a good one, you did indeed need to be wealthy) employers, which would then be voted on by the assembled demos.
To its advocates, democracy offered greater stability than other systems which placed power in the hands of smaller and smaller groups of people who would put their own interests over those of the majority (of the citizens, that is, not of the inhabitants, who would be the vast majority of the population in any scenario). It was a collegiate kind of government, that had brought peace, prosperity and pre-eminence to Athens, the brief but brutal rule of the Thirty Tyrants a much-hated interim between the two periods of extended democratic rule in the city. To its critics, however, democracy reduced the art of politics to a farce of empty rhetoric and sophistry where ambitious individuals would fleece the society as a whole and the political class specifically for their own short-term benefit, without any higher authority to stop them and without a sense that politics was something that had to be learned, that participation in it had to be earned, and that governance was something too important to water down and bestow to all. It was the rule of the least educated, the most wealthy, and above all the most convincing, not the most able. The contempt of much of the Athenian intellectual elite for the sophists that were the bedrock of Athenian democracy is infamous; even today, “sophist” is a well-understood slander of falsity, corruption and immorality. The Romans prized themselves on their political system, a hard-won and long-evolving middle ground, they argued, between the twin excesses of tyranny (the rule of an absolute king) and democracy (the equally absolute rule of the mob), whereby the constitutional, representative structure of the senātus, split between the patricii and the plebs, combined with the direct democratic legislative assemblies, fostered the best and avoided the worst of the two systems. There was an arguably not inconsiderable degree of accuracy in such criticisms, and they were certainly widely held for centuries. Modern equivalents have sprung up since, in part self-consciously developed from the work of ancient authors like Plátōn (who is perhaps the person most singularly responsible for the historical disgrace of the sophists) but which either way all seem to echo — if not directly emulate — the critiques made millennia ago of the first democracies.
What the opinions of the masses were on these questions we cannot possibly know, though it is likely they wished the Spartiate-installed Tyrants ousted just as did the old Athenian élite; whatever the context, the lower classes always pay the highest price in any crisis.
The abandonment of the original definitions of these and other key terms of classical political science is surely a very regrettable thing, as we have nevertheless retained the words themselves; their use in ways that were never originally intended and the resulting confusion thereof loses a huge amount of the precision and utility once, and perhaps still, found in them, democracy being the prime example of this, though dictatorship (to give a Roman example) and especially tyranny have also undergone such a process of degrading from specific terms with specific meanings, in this case simply to an emotive, imprecise idea used to dismiss opponents. The key point, however, is that democracy to the Hellenic world meant nothing like what it means to most people today; if you had told Periklēs, or indeed Thrasyboulos, who had led the democratic struggle to overthrow the Thirty, that their political system was that of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ (Lincoln), certainly in the sense it’s meant today, they would surely have utterly and wholeheartedly disagreed.
By far the most dominant democratic form today, in contrast, is liberal, or representative, democracy, whereby the populace vote under universal suffrage for individuals and/or parties to govern them. Unlike under classical democracy, the citizenry is not directly involved in the affairs of state — a professional political class, dominated by a small handful of parties with only moderately varying party programmes, holds a monopoly on power. This is bourgeois democracy — indeed it is the zenith of bourgeois political development and the ideal, that is, most desirable and most effective, form of state for them as a class (see Bordiga, § 3)— wherein the population as a whole are merely asked for their assent to be ruled by capitalists:
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society […] Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!
(Lenin, The State and Revolution)
This is a completely different kind of political system to the first democracies from which it takes its name, but the end result is arguably the same: the worst excesses of factionalism and intrastate conflict are avoided, as the ruling class as a whole agrees to put its differences aside and compete in such a way that does not threaten their collective power, unlike the much-repeating series of coups and military takeovers that have and still do mark many of the less well established democratic countries today (that is, the weaker, more oppressed nations whose national bourgeoisie has had their development hindered by imperialist interventions and aggression) and the proto-liberal states of the early bourgeois epoch.
This is a completely different kind of political system to the first democracies from which it takes its name, but the end result is arguably the same: the worst excesses of factionalism and intrastate conflict are avoided, as the ruling class as a whole agrees to put its differences aside and compete in such a way that does not threaten their collective power, unlike the much-repeating series of coups and military takeovers that have and still do mark many of the less well established democratic countries today (that is, the weaker, more oppressed nations whose national bourgeoisie has had their development hindered by imperialist interventions and aggression) and the proto-liberal states of the early bourgeois epoch.
Another, third kind of democracy is that which is supposedly betrayed by the “Leninist counterrevolution” (to borrow the phrase of Grigóriy Maksímov, more recently used by the editors of a collection of anarchist, anti-communist essays titled Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution); workers’ democracy. We would here lay out what this democracy is, and how it differs from the two previous kinds we have already addressed, but this is impossible, for this type of democracy is not and never has been a really-existing political system. Instead, it is an empty epithet offered by utopians, reactionaries, ultraleftists and their ilk to describe what apparently would have come to be if it had not been for the red tsars, the red emperors, and red tyrants who destroyed any chance of abolishing capitalism and all the evils of the world in favour of power for themselves and their friends, manipulating, misdirecting and destroying the revolutionary movement for their own benefit.
This imagined people’s democracy is stateless, or otherwise with a state that is the exact image of a liberal republic; it is united, in the exact image of the unity of a liberal electorate; it is revolutionary, in the exact image of a bourgeois counterrevolution; and it is pro-worker, pro-people, in the exact image of bourgeois anti-communism.
The communist programme knows no such illusions, and it says, without hesitation or qualification, knowing the truth of it both historical and theoretical, that democracy is the chief demand of the counterrevolution.
Communism and Democracy
Under the guise of “democracy” and in the interests of this most perplexingly vaunted ideal, genuine class politics is often all but abandoned. The central issue is thus: we seek dictatorship — we seek to deny any and all power to our enemies — and so to seek democracy — to seek to deny the socialist state its monopoly on power and violence and to share power with our enemies — is transparently a demand of those enemies. The foremost sign that this counterrevolutionary position is being held is found wherever appeals to the people are found (see Bordiga). Those who would so decry the dictatorship of the class party, indeed of the class itself, unquestionably count amongst the ‘real enemies of Marxism’ (Stalin). Now there are those who say that they are democrats (using political identifiers such as proletarian democrats, socialist democrats, etc.), but who also say that they are socialists, and in doing so really do support the suppression of the bourgeoisie and their total political and social disenfranchisement, and so do not number among those who would deny class dictatorship. To these people, we can simply say: our dispute is not with you, for you are in no way democrats, and as such, should stop clinging to the ideological rhetoric of liberalism just because it is comforting to your own ethical neuroses. The democracy that strips entire sections of the population of their ability to participate in the political process is not a democracy — this piece of propaganda is constantly levied at the bourgeois democracies, with not totally unsubstantiated reasoning, and yet many of the very same people who do so also wish to call class dictatorship democratic, for their various reasons. Suffice to say, this is an obviously myopic and biased reading of both abstract and applied political economy, justified at times in the interest of agitation and propaganda but never in serious theoretical critique and analysis.
Before we go any further, we should prefix all that follows with the understanding that we Marxists reject nothing on principle, only contingently. The democratic form, whatever that may mean to someone, will be involved in future social organisation, if for no other reason than that the sheer scale of the human species makes diversity of thought and action an inevitability, and more importantly, because if the masses are on our side, democracy has the great potential to strengthen our (that is, the class party’s) power. The risk, of course, is that they may not always be so. The Marxist critique of democracy is precisely contingent: it is saying that democracy is at this stage in history a tool of the bourgeois class and state, that for the period of proletarian class rule democracy cannot be employed, and so on. The idealist rejection of democracy, of all democracy, everywhere and always, is every bit as anti-Marxist as the idealist embracing of it.
The demand made by the anarchists, the “anti-authoritarians,” the left-libertarians, the syndicalists et al., is for “socialist democracy,” for “workers’ democracy,” “class democracy” and other such phrases, all of which amount to just about the same thing: ultraleftist opposition to the rule of the communist party. Why is party rule so crucial? It is because, to quote Bordiga,
The proletarian state can only be “animated” by a single party and it would be senseless to require that this party organise in its ranks a statistical majority and be supported by such a majority in “popular elections” — that old bourgeois trap. One of the historical possibilities is the existence of political parties composed in appearance by proletarians, but in reality influenced by counterrevolutionary traditions or by foreign capitalism’s. This contradiction, the most dangerous of all, cannot be resolved through the recognition of formal rights nor through the process of voting within the framework of an abstract “class democracy.” This too will be a crisis to be liquidated in terms of relationships of force. There is no statistical contrivance which can ensure a satisfactory revolutionary solution; this will depend solely upon the degree of solidity and clarity reached by the revolutionary communist movement throughout the world. A century ago in the West, and fifty years ago in the Czarist Empire, Marxists rightly argued against the simple-minded democrats that the capitalists and proprietors are a minority, and therefore the only true government of the majority is the government of the working class. If the word democracy means power of the majority, the democrats should stand on our class side. But this word both in its literal sense (“power of the people”) as well as in the dirty use that is more and more being made of it, means “power belonging not to one but to all classes.” For this historical reason, just as we reject “bourgeois democracy” and “democracy in general” (as Lenin also did), we must politically and theoretically exclude, as a contradiction in terms, “class democracy” and “workers’ democracy.”
The dictatorship advocated by Marxism is necessary because it cannot be unanimously accepted and furthermore it will not have the naïveté to abdicate for lack of having a majority of votes, if such a thing were ascertainable. Precisely because it declares this it will not run the risk of being confused with a dictatorship of men or groups of men who take control of the government and substitute themselves for the working class. The revolution requires a dictatorship, because it would be ridiculous to subordinate the revolution to a 100% acceptance or a 51% majority. Wherever these figures are displayed, it means that the revolution has been betrayed.
In conclusion the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and of not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degeneration.
(Bordiga, Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party)
The above excerpt is of great theoretical import, and should be studied closely by all communists. Indeed, the entire essence and argument of this essay is surmised masterfully in it; we are here merely expanding upon it, to the best of our limited ability.
The point being: not only is the state itself a dictatorship — is the state itself anti-democratic, that is, opposed to “power belonging not to one but to all classes”; opposed to “power of the people” — but the revolutionary party, too, is not simply subject to the whims of majoritarianism. If the majority opinion is incorrect — if it deviates from the communist programme, or is built upon theoretically bankrupt foundations — then it is to be countered, to be rejected, to be excised.
To understand why centralism is more preferable to the communist movement than whatever notion of party democracy is being given, we recommend Bordiga’s Party and Class and The Democratic Principle, as well as our essay Marxism and the State, particularly the section titled “Marxism and the vanguard party,” which we will quote from here:
The vanguard party consists of only the most class conscious elements of the proletariat. This is because the working class, as is also true of society at large, is consistently reactionary. This is especially true in the imperialist states as a whole, where large sections of the working class have grown fat off the spoils of imperial plunder and thus begun to work not against capital but for it, and especially in settler colonial states such as the USA, where the white working class in its entirety arguably constitutes a kind of labour aristocracy which flocks, due to the racial character of the national proletariat as a whole, to the white supremacist, fascistic, capitalist state and its ruling class. Beyond actively counterrevolutionary sentiment, however, lies simple naïveté, and however hard the party may work to raise the consciousness of the wider class (which it absolutely should) it will never be able to raise, to a sufficient degree, this consciousness in all the members of the working class or even, it must be said, in a majority of it in such countries as those of western and northern Europe and north America until after the revolutionary crisis has arisen and been met in open, physical struggle by the class party.
Because of these above mentioned things, the vanguard party directs class action, it does not follow it, for if it did, not only would it be, as Bordiga wrote, committed to “a verdict that would almost certainly be favourable to the bourgeoisie,” a verdict “less enlightened, less advanced, less revolutionary, and above all less dictated by a consciousness of the really collective interest of the workers,” but it would also be effectually pointless, simply echoing the calls and actions already made by the unorganised class as a whole. It would be, in effect, a bourgeois parliamentary party.
[…] [T]he party organises itself as a centralist party, what is far more commonly yet regrettably called democratic centralism (for the ‘democratic’ element of the system is not inherent to it and we must be careful not to elevate it to the level of principle where it is in fact merely effective within specific material conditions in which the vanguard parties have formed and operated historically; it is only the centralism that is inherent, inseparable from the party structure and class character). Centralism can be surmised as “freedom of discussion, unity of action.” What does this mean? It means that the party membership engages in thorough discussion and criticism but, once a motion has been passed and a decision taken at the party level, all party members and all party organs are bound to its resolution and to actively work towards it. If genuine concern still exists over the issue then instead of splitting the party or forming a dissenting faction, a motion to discuss the issue again should be tabled. Centralism also, on a less individual level, commits lower bodies within the party or state system to decisions made by higher bodies.
The vanguard party, therefore, is a militant, revolutionary party consisting of the most class conscious sections of the national proletariat as professional revolutionary cadres, holding close links and constantly working alongside the working class as a whole in all things of importance as well as agitating and educating among them in order to raise the class consciousness of the collective, operating under a centralist principle, and working towards the violent seizure of state power through any means available. Unity, discipline and ideological integrity are the hallmarks of the revolutionary Marxist party.
The above excerpt contains a crucial point: the party cannot simply be a representative organ; it must lead the class, not follow it, if for no other reason than that ‘[t]he ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx/Engels). Tailism is not a revolutionary policy. Whether the socialist state is formed as the result of a putsch or a popular revolution has no bearing on the fact that the majority will hold a false consciousness, and they only organise against the bourgeoisie out of desperation, if they do at all:
It is […] erroneous to establish the following progression of determinisms with respect to the famous problem of consciousness: influence of economic factors, class consciousness, class action. The progression instead is the reverse: influence of economic factors, class action, class consciousness. Consciousness comes at the end and, in general, after the decisive victory. Economic necessity unites and focuses the pressure and energy of all those who are oppressed and suffocated by the forms of a given productive system. The oppressed react, they fight, they hurl themselves against these forms. In the course of this clash and this battle they increasingly develop an understanding of the general conditions of the struggle as well as its laws and principles, and a clear comprehension of the programme of the class struggle develops.
(Bordiga, Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle)
The simple fact of the matter is that to demand majority rule when the majority is reactionary is itself a reactionary demand; correct communist policies are never going to result from anti-communist sources, however pluralist their nature. Communism is not “a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself”; it is the programmatic movement “which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx/Engels), and democracy, especially of the form practised in the imperialist states, is the greatest single preserver of existing social systems. We seek to fulfil our political programme, not empower the people; if the former can be used to reach the latter, then it should be done, and if it cannot, it should not. Marxism is not an ethical theory; it has absolutely nothing to say as to which system is right, is moral; only which system will best fulfil the historic role of the proletariat as a ruling class. Marx put this point across incredibly succinctly and eloquently on several occasions, the crux of which being that “[r]ight can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby” (Marx); “[w]hat you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production?” (Marx).
Class consciousness and a rigorous, continual combating of all reactionary sentiments among the people must be an absolute prerequisite for any democratic system that puts serious power to influence or even decide, nevermind enact, policy, and class consciousness can never reach its pinnacle — can never reach the stage in which it is a fully developed consciousness and not merely fragments of clarity in an otherwise fog of obfuscation and deception — until after the establishment of the proletarian state, the best efforts of the communist party and of the circumstances of the day never alone being able to overcome and smother the forces of bourgeois hegemony and propaganda. For a communist in the imperial core to seek democracy is fundamentally reflective of their position in the world-struggle, and speaks of an underlying chauvinism of thought, as even a “socialist” of the Labour variety can readily see, if they care to look, that European populations are violently and deeply racist, and are so at the very core, not just at the skin, and so to excise the poison one must cut out the entire limb; one must re-make society from the ground up. This is an enormous and laborious task, but it is one that must be done before any meaningful democracy can even be considered permissible in our countries, for if put to “the people” as they now exist, the only socialism they would choose is a national socialism. The lessons of the Second International, wherein large numbers of European delegates were openly pro-imperialist, are forgotten only with great risk. To call for “full,” “true,” “actual” democracy in a country in which the population is known to be racist, sexist, chauvinistic, nationalistic, imperialistic, etc., is, therefore, a transparently backwards piece of rhetoric, making clear that the abstract idea of democracy is valued above and beyond any genuine progress, any genuine bettering of humanity (if we wish to lapse into humanism), any genuine fulfilment of the historical role of the proletariat. Such populations are not going to be voting for internationalism; they are going to be voting for nationalism, for racism, for all the luxuries they have enjoyed as citizens of imperialist states. I say again: democracy is a demand of the enemies of socialism. Any who truly desire to build a socialist, communist society and not merely the utopian fantasy that the “anti-authoritarians,” the anarchists, the neofabians imagine in their heads, will gladly embrace dictatorship of the party and the complete disenfranchisement not just of the bourgeois elements but also of the ubiquitous reactionary strata of the first world proletariat. Only those who can be trusted with power should be given it. This is not a difficult idea to grasp. It is absolutely crucial that it be understood that ‘all power to the working class’ is a false slogan. We seek power to be vested in the organs of the class party, not the class itself, of which only a part and rarely even a majority can possibly be included. Did the Bolsheviks call for “all power to the people,” or even “all power to the class”? No, they called for “all power to the soviets” — for power to be vested in the organs of the proletarian state. This is the essential characteristic of the period of proletarian dictatorship, just as it has been, in their respective class interests, of all previously ruling classes.
The reactionary nature of the metropole (and, if we are honest, much of the peripheral) proletariat requires the class party to govern in the interest of the workers (towards communism and the abolition of economic classes) but not, tailistically, upon the demands of the workers (the restoration of imperialism, whether under a socialist cloak — whether maintaining the domestic socialist economy — or otherwise). Only after a likely prolonged period of agitation following the conquest of the state will such deeply ingrained elements in the superstructure begin to break down and a more participatory, mass-movement approach to socialism be considerable, that is, will the working class begin to truly escape the grasps of ideology. Once again, we are left with the same clear and stark conclusion: dictatorship of party, not dictatorship of the entire class as a body of persons.
As a tangent, it must be said that instituting a truly democratic form is, depending on what specificities of definition you want to use, impossible while the state exists, for a democracy places power in the hands of the people, not the working class, the former including all our class enemies as well as our friends (indeed, the existence of any state at all definitionally precludes the possibility of a democratic organisation of society — on the Bordigist definition of it at least — , the state being the decisive instrument of class dictatorship). Beyond this, even, it must be said that there has never been and can never be such a thing as true, pure, real democracy, as that term is commonly understood and desired to be by utopians (as opposed to what was meant by the term by the Greeks, the Romans, and even, to a lesser degree, the revolutionary bourgeois intellectuals, all of which, especially the ancient peoples, had a far more pragmatic and ultimately realistic, that is, more grounded in the really existing practicalities of politics and human society, definition of democracy than the aforementioned utopian socialists of both previous and current ages), under any socioeconomic system at any point in history and under any material conditions yet know. The very best that can be said is that with the realisation of a fully communist social order and the liquidation of classes which that entails, it will once again be possible for all the members of a society to cooperate without any fundamental differences of objectives and allegiances, and so democracy is perhaps theoretically conceivable at such a stage (though practical implementation still seems fraught with extreme difficulties bordering on the impossible — communism is not anarchism, is not anarchy; the centralisation of power in the hands of the ‘administration of things’ (Engels) cannot be ignored). But communism is not, remember, an ideal, is not a place or a goal, but a process — the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (Marx/Engels)— and so to say it will “bring about genuine democracy” or “finish the struggle for democracy” is false and should be seen as theoretically alien to Marxism and the scientific socialist outlook, at the very least unless such slogans are followed by serious analysis and explanation of just what that means and how it will bring us closer to the destruction of capitalism, which they seemingly never are.
To move towards a conclusion, then: the communist party seeks state power; it then seeks to maintain that power, by any means bar none; it then, over time and always within the constraints of the material circumstances in which it exists, organises the transition of the proletarian-ruled society towards one with no money, no commodity production, no scarcity, no foundational economic stratification (no classes), and no vestiges of the dead world. Nowhere in this process does finishing the political project of liberal democracy by granting power to all (as if that were possible even if desirable) come into play.
As we explained in the qualification at the start of this section, however, we are not opposed to democracy — whatever that actually means, of course — a priori, on principle, always and everywhere. The Cuban model, for example, is an excellent example of a communist interpretation of political democracy and one from which a great many lessons can be taken. But Cuba is a well-established workers’ state, with overwhelming popular support and a highly respected and experienced communist party and which has almost totally destroyed the bourgeoisie as a national class. We are never going to see a situation like this in the Western world, not in our lifetimes. The authority and supremacy of the party in all matters cannot be allowed to be threatened by calls for democracy and the watering down of the integrity of the party and the state — calls that have always been at the forefront of the counterrevolution, either from the left or the right. The slow death of the Eastern Bloc, including the demands of the Czechoslovak liberals and the Polish Solidarity movement, is but the most obvious example of this. Many, many more can be found.
Marxism must necessarily reject idealistic, utopian politics — this is the essence of Marxism; reject all absolute and abstracted principles, and operate instead in terms of relative and identifiable social-material phenomena. The point of this essay is, so understood, to de-sanctify and de-mystify the democratic form and drag it down from its current place of almost divine reverence into the mud and moral greyness of the real world and the real politics that must necessarily govern it. But the demand for “revolutionary totalitarianism” is not an empty threat; the stakes are far too high to allow even the smallest modicum of power to fall into the hands of the domestic and international reaction alike, and as it stands, as it has always stood, as it likely always will stand, “democracy” means exactly that.
To close,
The use of certain terms in the exposition of the problems of communism very often engenders ambiguities because of the different meanings these terms may be given. Such is the case with the words democracy and democratic. In its statements of principle, Marxist communism presents itself as a critique and a negation of democracy; yet communists often defend the democratic character of proletarian organisations (the state system of workers’ councils, trade unions and the party) and the application of democracy within them. There is certainly no contradiction in this, and no objection can be made to the use of the dilemma, “either bourgeois democracy or proletarian democracy” as a perfect equivalent to the formula “bourgeois democracy or proletarian dictatorship.”
The Marxist critique of the postulates of bourgeois democracy is in fact based on the definition of the class character of modern society. It demonstrates the theoretical inconsistency and the practical deception of a system which pretends to reconcile political equality with the division of society into social classes determined by the nature of the mode of production.
Political freedom and equality, which, according to the theory of liberalism, are expressed in the right to vote, have no meaning except on a basis that excludes inequality of fundamental economic conditions. For this reason we communists accept their application within the class organisations of the proletariat and contend that they should function democratically.
In order to avoid creating ambiguities, and dignifying the concept of democracy, so entrenched in the prevailing ideology which we strive relentlessly to demolish, it would be desirable to use a different term in each of the two cases. Even if we do not do this, it is nonetheless useful to look a little further into the very content of the democratic principle, both in general and in its application to homogeneous class organs. This is necessary to eliminate the danger of again raising the democratic principle to an absolute principle of truth and justice. Such a relapse into apriorism would introduce an element foreign to our entire theoretical framework at the very moment when we are trying, by means of our critique, to sweep away the deceptive and arbitrary content of “liberal” theories.
(Bordiga, The Democratic Principle)
The conclusions, then, obvious yet worth stating again, are thus: first, the class struggle, then, class consciousness, then, and only then, upon the final liquidation of social and economic classes both, “democracy” — and even here only if it furthers the movement, never as an absolute principle. Class party before class population, and never the people as a formless mass.
Cited works (in the main text)
Bordiga, Amadeo. “The Democratic Principle.” Rassegena Communista (1922)
Bordiga, Amadeo. “Force, Violence, and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle.” Prometeo (1946–48/1975–79)
Bordiga, Amadeo. “Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party.” Battaglia Comunista (1951/1976)
Engels, Friedrich. Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. (1877/1947)
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. The State and Revolution. (1917/1964)
Lincoln, Abraham. “Gettysburg Address.” (1863)
Marx, Karl Heinrich and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. (1845/1932)
Renaux, Valarie/Marsden, Alexandra Amelia. Marxism and the State. (2019)
Stalin, Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. Anarchism or Socialism? (1907/1954)
Recommended further reading
Bordiga, Amadeo. “Party and Class.” Rassegna Comunista (1921)
Bordiga, Amadeo. “Party and Class Action.” Rassegna Comunista (1921)
Engels, Friedrich. “On Authority.” Almanacco Republicano (1874/1978)
Parenti, Michael. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (1997), especially ch. 3, “Left Anticommunism”
Smidt, Austin Hayden, host. “Is Anti-Stalinism Left Wing Racism? A Conversation w/a Tankie.” Owls at Dawn, episode 98, 2019.
