How democratic is ‘Democracy’? (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell made the following remark about democracy:

‘In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning’.

As Orwell noted 78 years ago, democracy is felt to be a political system that is good, and therefore when people wish to imply that a political system is good, they call it democratic. The question of democracy, however, like all political buzzwords, is in need of detailed and sober scrutiny by socialists, both for its connection with the capitalist society of today, and with the future socialist society to which we aspire.

Democracy in context

In considering democracy, we must be clear not to confuse fact and fiction. The ideas of the age do not represent reality, but are just that: illusions we tell ourselves (or are told about ourselves by others). As Marx and Engels cautioned in The German Ideology, we must not allow the ‘idea’ to become the ‘active force, which controls and determines [our] practices’. In this sense, socialists do not believe in democracy in the same way we do not believe in god.

In speaking of democracy we are thus talking not about a philosophical ideal, a utopian vision towards which we should be constantly striving, but an actual system existing in reality. It is not the job of socialists to perfect ideas, but to critique ruthlessly all that exists.

Democracy is often said to have originated with the Ancient Greeks. Certainly ideas of voting and the consent of the governed have existed throughout history. However, we must remember that for most of its history, democracy in the form of voting has been merely a method of sharing power between members of the ruling class. Ancient Greece was the democracy of slaveholders, and the English Parliament was the democracy of landlords.

It was not until 1832 that the vote in Britain began to be extended – rising from 1 percent of the population to 7 percent. Universal suffrage was not achieved until 1928, after a political conflict lasting over a century to fully extend the vote to working-class men and women. In America, blacks were excluded from voting until the 1960s under Jim Crow laws. Swiss women did not gain the right to vote in federal elections until 1971.

For most of its history, therefore, democratic forms of government have gone hand in hand with highly repressive and authoritarian political systems, in which the majority of the population have been prevented from voting even under republics and parliamentary governments.

How democratic is democracy?

The current form of democracy – liberal democracy – is based upon an idea of a separation between the private sphere and the public sphere. The public sphere is the realm of politics, civil rights, law-making; the private sphere is that of economic transactions between free individuals. At the risk of oversimplifying, we may say that Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine and John Locke saw a free society of individuals based on mutual agreement as the natural state of humanity. To them, the public sphere of states and laws was a necessary mechanism where people surrender some of their natural freedom to join forces and protect themselves and their property by mutually submitting to a central authority, namely a government.

This idea lies at the heart of modern democracy: the bills of rights and written constitutions that exist in almost every country on the planet, limiting (at least in principle) the powers of governments, flow directly from this philosophical idea that Private individualism is good and natural whereas Public collectivism is at best a necessary evil.

What liberal democracy fails to address, however, is the power individuals hold over each other. Individuals do not exist freely in relation to each other on a level playing field; even without the presence of a state, inequality and injustice would still exist in any society where ownership and control over resources is limited to a single class. Under a class-divided system, freedom in practice means the freedom of ‘man to exploit man’. The ‘rights’ to own property and make contracts protected by constitutions mean, in practice, the right of the capitalist class to hold us hostage to their economic power. Marx wrote at length on this dichotomy between liberal democracy’s promise of freedom and its reality of class exploitation, for instance in On the Jewish Question:

‘Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society and shows itself […] as soon as civil society gives complete birth out of itself to the political state. The god of practical need and personal self-interest is money’.

Under capitalism, political democracy provides the fig-leaf of economic dictatorship.

Something worth fighting for?

Socialists look to the ballot as providing a secure way forward for the transformation of society and the dissolution of class distinctions. At the same time, however, we must not shy away from the uncomfortable realisation that democracy does not mean freedom. Far from it, the history of democracy shows that it is not only compatible with, but comfortably well-suited to, sustaining class dictatorship.

As the German Social Democrat legal scholar, Hermann Heller wrote in 1928:

‘Through financial domination of party, press, film, and literature, through social influence over schools and universities, [the rulers] are able, without using direct corruption, to influence the bureaucratic and electoral apparatus in such a consummate fashion that they preserve every democratic form while achieving a dictatorship of content.’

Herman Heller died five years later in exile in Madrid. The Weimar Republic in Germany was overthrown by the Nazis, with the backing of Junker landowners and the big industrial bourgeoisie. Before all else, the Nazis ruthlessly suppressed the leftist SPD and the KPD; arresting their politicians, closing down the left-wing press, and ransacking the offices of trade unions.

Since the invention of universal suffrage, every person has one vote, and each vote is counted once. This does not mean that all votes are equal. The capitalist class own the media, the movie studios, the printing presses, and they sponsor the universities and research institutes. They have far easier access to scholastic qualifications and government jobs, and unlimited publicity through advertising, pop culture, and news media to reinforce the sanctity of the capitalist mode of production. As Marx and Engels outlined in The German Ideology:

‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’.

There are no easy answers to how socialists should navigate past these obstacles. However, in grappling with difficult questions of democracy and class conflict, we must remember what is at stake. On the one hand stands a ruling class which history shows to be violent, amoral, and ruthless. On the other stands the mass of the world’s population, robbed of the value they create by this class, and living in or just above destitution, and ultimately, it is to end this that we fight. Not for the democracy of the ruling class, but for a socialist world free of exploitation and the violence its maintenance necessitates.

Uther Naysmith

SPGB Meetings (2024)

Party News from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To connect to a Zoom meeting, enter https://zoom.us/j/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on the screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

Human rights and human wrongs (2023)

From the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the government considers whether to press on with yet another scheme that rides roughshod over human rights law, we must remind ourselves that rights are not really all they’re cracked up to be.

With the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the government’s plan to deport refugees to Rwanda is unlawful, the attention of the political bubble in Westminster has turned once again to the Tory Party’s favourite bugbear, the Human Rights Act. Once again, the talking heads of British ideological conservatism have been trotted out to denounce the perceived pernicious influence of foreign judges, and call for the repeal of this allegedly unfair and un-British piece of legislation. The debate over the future of the much-maligned Act, which incorporates the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights into British law, has been brought to a boil in recent times by numerous pieces of government legislation which call into question its hallowed principles.

High-profile and divisive environmental protests by groups such as Just Stop Oil, and Britain’s largest wave of strikes since the late 1980s, have both resulted in repressive legislation, in the form of a Public Order Act and a Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act, both given Royal Assent in July this year. Before this, questions of human rights were raised by the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 and the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021, both designed to grant immunity to certain agents of the state for infringements of the ordinary law.

Over in the liberal quadrant of the political spectrum, left-wing voices have reacted to such legislation with horror and dismay. For instance, in a recent interview on its website with Oliver Eagleton, Momentum, the ex-fan club of the ex-Labour leader, referred to this slew of new legislation as the ‘British State’s Authoritarian Turn’. Similarly, in response to the Supreme Court’s Rwanda judgment, Akiko Hart, the Interim Director of civil liberties pressure group, Liberty, accused the government of ‘dismantling the protections that keep us safe and allow us to challenge injustice’ so that ‘only they can win.’ On its website, Liberty hails the Human Rights Act as meaning that ‘you can defend your rights in UK courts’ and compel public bodies to ‘treat everyone equally, with fairness, dignity and respect.’ So the debate goes on.

In the mainstream perception of modern politics, socialists are expected by rote to join the chorus of voices crying out to protect our rights. There is certainly high pedigree in this expectation. After all, high-profile Labour Party figures have been supporting civil liberties as long as the party has existed; Clement Attlee and Harold Laski were founding members of Liberty in 1932, in response to police violence against hunger marchers. But this common conception of socialists as civil liberties crusaders is, ironically, further proof of these so-called socialists’ lack of any real red credentials.

This is not to say that socialists are opposed to the notion that people should be able to protest without being beaten up or arrested, or that individuals should not be dealt with unfairly. Rather, the socialist accepts that to expect such things from the capitalist state is a fairy tale. Human rights law is a noble thing, but under a capitalist economy, nobility is a bourgeois virtue. In reality, human rights rest upon a fundamental – wilful, gleeful – ignorance about the basis of capitalist society.

Bourgeois law, the law of the capitalist state, rests on a fundamental incompatibility between words and deeds, as recognised by all socialists; that the law treats us as free and equal individuals, but the economy treats us as slaves. This contradiction was at the heart of Marx’s thesis in On the Jewish Question. As Marx argued there, the political state is ‘the species life of man in opposition to his material life.’ The political realm is based upon citizenship, egalitarianism, and rights; civil society is based upon egoism, cut-throat dealings, and cold-hearted, calculated egoism. Thus we live in a world where voters starve, and citizens sleep in bus stations. We all have the right (at least on paper) to vote and protest our government, but none of us has the right to eat.

The self-proclaimed socialists of today’s capitalist left, in the Labour Party and outside it, would do well to remember the words of Evgeni Pashukanis, the Soviet judge and jurist whose seminal General Theory of Law and Marxism turns 100 next year:

‘The constitutional state (Rechtstaat) is a mirage, but one which suits the bourgeoisie very well, for it replaces withered religious ideology and conceals the fact of the bourgeoisie’s hegemony from the eyes of the masses’.

Pashukanis points to the ‘ties of mutual dependence’ between, for instance, peasants and landowners, or wage workers and capitalists. To Pashukanis (as to all Marxian socialists), it is these relationships of dependency which form the real basis of the state and its law. These ties are material ties, concerning our relationship to the sources of life, and affecting our ability to provide for ourselves as individuals. The law – law of property, law of contract, criminal law etc – are the state’s ideological reflection of these material ties. These material dependencies are the core from which the bourgeois state grows, and from which its law emanates. But to the legal theory of the state ‘it is as if they did not exist.’ To put the point in a more literary fashion, one need only note the wise words of Anatole France:

‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread’.

Sam Moyn, an American liberal professor, notes in his 2018 critique of human rights law, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, that until the late twentieth century ‘people were overwhelmingly more likely to utter the word socialism than the phrase human rights in every language’. The growth of mainstream human rights politics has coincided with the death of a politics which, though flawed, sought if nothing else to articulate a vision of human freedom which reached beyond the confines of the bourgeois state and its limited rights; one based not upon legalistic idealism and the daydreams of bourgeois academics, but upon a recognition of the realities of a class-divided society.

In reality, we are not free, and no amount of human rights can change that. The Human Rights Act may sometimes allow you to enforce your rights in a British court, to a limited extent. But it does not guarantee fair treatment or dignity. The bills of rights and international treaties of the world cannot ever hope to accomplish such a colossal task when control of the resources and productive machinery of the world, on which we all depend for our day-to-day existence, is centralised in the hands of a tiny minority of individuals and regulated by the anarchy of a global market whose arbitrary spasms can bring down elected governments and throw millions into destitution overnight.

In reality, human freedom cannot be contained in the narrow and self-defeating limitations of human rights. Human rights – severely limited in scope, and enforced by capitalist states through gritted teeth or not at all – are merely a slapstick imitation of the idea that humans should live with dignity, respect, and community.

Socialists believe not in the ‘human right’ of the egoistic individual, but in the human freedom of the entire species. We gain our freedom by abolishing our rights; by abolishing the degrading class-divided economic structure and its authoritarian states which generate rights like a fire generates smoke. So if you wake up every morning to face the daily grind of wage labour, poverty, or the jackboot and the billy club; if you are struggling to be free in a world which has turned its back on you, stand up not for human rights, but for socialism. Forget the insipid and mealy-mouthed lawyer’s justice, and stand for a world where the means of life – the productive machinery of society and the goods it produces – belong not to one class, but to everybody as a community.

‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Uther Naysmith