Democracy dies in markets
It's popular to worry about the state of US democracy. To address it, we need to talk about capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg, by unknown author - Public Domain.
Last week President Biden convened a two-day “Democracy Summit” that was ignored by virtually everyone, including, hilariously, much of the political press. As the inimitable Kate Aronoff wrote in the New Republic: Biden’s Democracy Summit is Dumb. Aronoff is the country’s leading climate change reporter, and her main argument, which I fully agree with, is that the event reinforced a harmful neo-Cold War mentality that pits the “free world” against Russian and China. Addressing covid and climate change “will require an unprecedented amount of good-faith collaboration, not relying on old twentieth-century rivalries with the same warmed-over scripts about U.S. exceptionalism.”
There is, understandably, significant worry in the United States at the moment as to the state of our democracy. Much of the anxiety is directed at Donald Trump and his Washington Generals-esque squad of would-be election overturners. I share this concern, and I think anybody who doesn’t believe Trump and the entire Republican Party want to implement permanent minoritarian rule in the US is missing a flashing-red warning sign. Beyond Trump, Republicans continue to draw extremely gerrymandered Congressional maps in states they control. Auto-defenestration-enthusiast Democrats in five blue states, meanwhile, have taken the high road and pushed for nonpartisan reforms which could end up costing them 10-15 House seats they could have otherwise captured.
Without downplaying the very real dangers of gerrymandering and Trump, it’s become much more common in the mainstream press to ask deeper questions about the nature of US democracy. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer writes, there’s no honest argument that the US was a democracy before the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Civil Rights Act the year prior, when racist vote suppression was the law of the land for millions of Black people.
The renewed interest in socialism, too, has expanded the mainstream discourse about what democracy means. The resurgence of the labor movement — looking at you Buffalo Starbucks workers — is the most exciting development in the country right now. It’s common now to hear liberals like Elizabeth Warren, an avowed capitalist, talk about extending democracy to the workplace. The more working people get comfortable talking about “the tyranny of the boss” the better, including the middle class professionals that made up so much of Warren’s constituency.
If we’re to take the renewed interest in socialism seriously, though, it’s worth going back to some foundational texts to look at what some of the tradition’s most important thinkers had to say about democracy, specifically under capitalism. In Reform or Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg argues that democracy is impossible until socialism is won. This won’t come through incrementalism — or revisionism, in the Marxist lingo of the time — but only when the working class seizes economic and political power. “The uninterrupted victory of democracy, which to our revisionism as well as to bourgeois liberalism, appears as a great fundamental law of human history and, especially, modern history is shown upon greater examination to be a phantom,” she writes.
Luxemburg argues that democratic institutions like universal suffrage and Republican forms of government were necessary for the unification of small states into larger ones, like Germany and Italy in 1871, but that “Democratic institutions … are no longer indispensable at present.” Luxemburg, writing her second edition in 1908, is offering a chilling preview of the Europe just over the horizon.
For Luxemburg, further development of capitalist bourgeois states led to the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the relatively few who owned the factories and the machines, what Marxists call the means of production. The concentration of workers in cities and on the factory floor, laboring under horrific conditions, drove people to the socialist movement.
There was a struggle within the movement about whether the working class was ready to exercise power, and the speed with which that could be accomplished. On one side were orthodox Marxists like Luxemburg and Lenin, who argued socialism could only be achieved through revolution, and that the time was now. There was also a reformist strain, epitomized by Eduard Bernstein, that believed that the social order could be changed slowly, without massive disruption.
This was preposterous to Luxemburg, who, citing Marx, writes that “the mode of distribution [of social wealth] of a given epoch is a natural consequence of the mode of production of that epoch [capitalism].” Because of that, socialists should not “struggle against distribution in the framework of capitalist production,” but should “struggle instead for the suppression of the capitalist production itself.”
Luxemburg argues it’s only the suppression of capitalism — which is to say a socialist revolution — that can create the conditions necessary for democracy to exist. “We must conclude that the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy but that, on the contrary, the fate of democracy is bound up with the socialist movement.”
These ideas are worth engaging with not just because Luxemburg is a fascinating thinker and writer, although she obviously is, but because they can help illuminate aspects of our current political situation more than a century later.
There are two obvious answers as to why democracy is in short supply in the United States. The first is that the Republicans don’t believe in it, and the second is that the Democrats are too — weak, afraid, corrupt, rich, content — to do anything about it. Whatever word you insert above to explain why the Democrats are so ineffectual requires another question: why are they that way?
I think a persuasive answer, if perhaps not a novel one, is that the party is beholden to and controlled by the donor class — which is to say, capital — but presents itself as the party of the middle class. And most elected Democrats think of themselves on some level as champions of workers, cognitive dissonance be damned. This clearest expression of this dynamic can be found in the party’s courting of suburban voters, code for upper-middle class whites, despite the fact that the party’s base is working class people of color, especially women. This creates obvious tensions in the party between the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas on the one hand and the Squad on the other, but to reduce the party’s incoherence to a fight between progressives and conservatives also fails to answer the question of why this dynamic is so durable. Why did the party choose not to enact major, New Deal-esque legislation during Obama’s first two years? Why is the party barely able to pass legislation now? Why are there always at least a handful of conservative Democrats happy to kill even mild reformist legislation?
For socialists, the answer is found in the underlying material conditions of the United States. Bourgeois liberalism’s commitment to capitalism works to ensure its own perpetuation, which does not mean a furtherance of democracy. It means a furtherance of the supremacy of capital over workers, and all that that entails: ever increasing growth and profits, species-ending natural resource extraction, the reproduction of racist and sexist hierarchies, colonial domination. Even when Democrats talk about expanding democracy, they’re only talking about voting rights. Those rights are obviously crucial, but democracy, in Luxemburg’s estimation, has a much broader definition than what she refers to as bourgeois parliamentarism. Expanding democracy doesn’t simply mean more voting, and it doesn’t even mean greater democracy in the workplace or factory. It means eliminating the social conditions that allow one small class of people to exploit a much larger class of people for their entire lives.
The Trump presidency and post-presidency ushered in an era of crisis for the United States. The attempted coup will almost certainly serve as a template, rather than a high water mark, to paraphrase author and Revolutions podcaster Mike Duncan. If conservatives are looking to constrict democracy, the response on the left to expand — or, arguably, create — democracy cannot just be an expansion of voting rights. The response has to be building real, concrete worker power.
I’m not holding my breath for Biden to start quoting Red Rosa when he talks about restoring the soul of America, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us should accept the narrow, mainstream framing about what democracy means. If we did, we’d only be talking about a phantom.