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| Workers of all lands, unite... Marx's grave in Highgate |
From Plato to Rousseau few ideas provoked greater contempt or even horror than the simple proposal of democratic government. For Plato it forced the naturally unequal in to a false form of equality. Its decadence, he said, made the popular imposition of tyranny inevitable.1
In early modern Europe, the birthplace of bourgeois 'commercial
society', Ellen Meiksins Wood writes, democracy was likely to be "a
word of condemnation, conjuring up the spectre of mob rule and, among
the propertied classes, a threat to their very existence."2
Theories of natural rights and the power invested in the corporate
bodies of society were used to justify worldly power more often than
they were used to question it. Either aristocracy or a legitimately
grounded monarchy were widely preferred. "If there were a nation
of gods it would be governed democratically," the radical modern
Rousseau later argued. "So perfect a government is not suitable
for men."3
The contempt was not wholly unanimous, however. There were subaltern resources, often excavated by slaves, peasant radicals or proletarianised craftsmen from the very texts that ostensibly sought their submission to secular or holy power. Many of those who struggled to articulate these alternatives have been condemned by what the historian E.P. Thompson called "the enormous condescension of posterity." There is little point in attempting to attribute to this oppositional tradition a coherent thread, since it has emerged in a thousand different contexts and is invariably the condensate of particular social and political struggles. To take just the English example of the nineteenth century, radical Jacobinism, apocalyptic chiliasm, and Methodist strictures sat awkwardly alongside nascent, mass working-class consciousness in various combinations and extents as struggles ebbed and flowed. The radical movement combined ancient loyalties to the monarchy, concepts of "natural rights" and the notion of the "free-born Englishman" with new concepts of the right to political representation, individual citizenship, and, as a consequence of the enormous levelling effect of the Industrial Revolution, a new commitment to popular equality. As the parliamentary system sought to protect itself both from revolutionary France and the radicalisation of its own, newly industrialised society, the masses were given a peculiar leading role in the democratic movement. "The twenty-five years after 1795 may be seen as the years of the counter-revolution, and in consequence the Radical movement remained largely working-class in character, with an advanced democratic populism as its theory."4
Democracy leads to either social
breakdown or a centralised tyranny. Substitute the word democracy
with socialism and you have in nuce the powerful conservative
argument for a market society articulated in the twentieth century by
the likes of Friedrich Hayek. The Road to Serfdom,
Hayek's hugely influential war-time political tract, directed against
central planning and the then prevalent notion of the command
economy, embraces the same traditional scepticism about human nature
as the classical economists and many of the early modern
philosophers. The move from the spontaneous order of commercial
society to one consciously constructed by state functionaries would
come at the cost of individual liberty.5
However, Hayek had to ground his objection to socialism in that
conception of individual liberty won in the history of social and
political struggle by popular classes. Hayek's means of objection to
socialism were grounded in a conception of popular participation in
the political - as opposed to simply commercial, 'civil' - sphere
that had been wrested from the dominant classes in the course of
profound struggles. By this point, and despite his scepticism
regarding democracy,6
even conservatives like Hayek could not fully dispense with the
notion of democracy as an indispensable foundation of a legitimate
state.
Democracy
was tried many times before it took root in the intellectual
imaginary of modernity, even then being subjected to major
restrictions related to wealth, gender, age, place of birth, and
multiple other arbitrary determinants. Indeed democracy continues to
be a largely unrealised ideal. It is also deeply contested; a
signifier that is often mobilised in defence of existing conditions
of vast inequality and against more radical notions of popular
sovereignty. Likewise, socialism has been tried in the past and has
radically failed. Like democracy the name socialism is also often
used to defend or to help construct and legitimise regimes of
exploitation and domination. Indeed precisely because of its power to
represent alternative ways of organising and distributing wealth in
modern societies, along with its relative openness to political
interpretation, the name socialism can mask the most egregious
attacks on popular sovereignty and individual liberty. Moreover,
individual liberty and social equality exist in a relation of
profound political tension, though both concepts depend historically
on each other. Though modern history sets this pair of ideals up in
opposition to each other, it is deeply unlikely that either could
have developed independently of the other. Indeed, contemporary
political philosophy, from John Rawls to Jurgen Habermas, can
dispense with neither fully. Modern political philosophy is often
characterised by an attempt to conceptually balance these two terms.
The
political liberty established by liberal democracy, and the formal
equality which it guarantees, are not merely legitimising masks worn
by bourgeois rule. Rather, what we find in all modern societies is a
struggle between social groups over the legal and institutional means
to create liberty and equality. However, do we find that either ideal
is realised in a world dominated by wars of escalating technological
intensity; extreme environmental devastation; and the daily
exploitation of billions? Of course, we do not. But what grants us
the right to imagine, indeed even to pursue,
a world where these political and social ideals become more readily
attainable for all?
To
understand the radical commitment to socialism it is essential first
to understand the socialist critique of capitalism. Anglo-Scottish
Enlightenment philosophers and economists made great strides in
interpreting the 'commercial society' that was coming to prominence
around them. For the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume,
merchants were "one of the most useful races of men, who serve
as agents between... parts of the state."7
The economist Adam Smith believed that commercial society was
dictated by the supply of investment from parsimonious individuals.
"Parsimony, not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase
of capital... whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not
save and store it up, the capital would never be the greater."8
This conception of the self-sacrificing commercial entrepreneur,
saving in order to invest, allowed economists like Smith to conceive
of capitalism as the social expression of the increasing role played
by commercial psychology in the modern world. Free of tributary
demands and artificial protections, capitalism was just an inherent
part of human nature finally unbound from state domination.
In The
Communist Manifesto and in the
1844 Paris Manuscripts Marx
and Engels also largely identified capitalism with 'bourgeois' or
'commercial society.' "All that is solid," they famously wrote, "melts into air." It was only later that, as Gopal Balakrishnan
puts it, Marx "put forth the previously unarticulated concept of
a capitalist mode of production." Before this Marx had tended to
conceive "of bourgeois society as the dissolution phase of the
old regime, and not as a self standing form of society with a long
history of development before it."9
A dissolution phase,
not a self standing form:
perhaps the epistemological limit of the social sciences lies in the
inability to call the difference, since social reality is always
fluid and yet at least potentially conceptually coherent. This ambiguity is likewise present in the social actors vomited up by capitalism itself: of course, on the one hand, the bourgeois is an abolisher melting solids into liquid (and liquidity). Yet the highest stages of capitalist development were also characterised by a rigid middle class conservatism, in which women were subjected to extreme subjugation. This poisonous moralism was the necessary flipside of an earlier form of capitalist adventurer which broke with traditional patriarchy, an ambiguity still present today. While contemporary Germany officially preaches a stern moral abstinence, its banks accumulate vast, destabilising surpluses which are ploughed into the riskiest of investments. The destabilising dynamics of capital come with their own, internal forces of stabilisation.
Marx's
mature economics, the economics of the Grundrisse and
of Capital, lays forth
a unique innovation in the study of political economy. Capitalism,
Marx suggested, was not about the quantitative growth of global trade
but the struggle to qualitatively develop the social division of
labour and the means of production for competition on the market.
True, Smith had talked about the technical
division of labour, but Marx put unprecedented emphasis on the social
division of labour. In the Grundrisse,
the notebooks where Marx first systematises his concept of the
capitalist mode of production, he says, "Thus all the progress
of civilization, or in other words every increase in the power of
social production... in the productive powers of labour itself - such
as results from science, inventions, divisions and combinations of
labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world
market, machinery, etc. - enriches not the worker, but rather
capital... Since
capital is the antithesis of the worker, this merely increases the
objective power standing over labour."10
Marx goes through a great many levels of abstraction to develop his
theory of how, by entering into the production process, the labourer
alienates their productive capacity - the power to create and produce
- for the benefit of capital. Through this alienation, capital is
free to deploy for profit the human potential expressed abstractly as
"the labour power commodity." Crucial here is the
conception of labour and capital not as fluctuating quantities but as
the expression of a relation between, ultimately, two socially
opposed groups.
It
would take Marxist historian-economists like Robert Brenner to
properly embed this theory in a social history, but the rudiments are
there in Marx. Capitalism is a system characterised by a conflictual
social relation between those who need to work to survive and those
who need to engage in commodity exchange for profit, established in
agrarian England after the collapse of feudalism. With the social
struggle on the land resolved in favour of landowning lords, who
managed to return ex-peasants to work but now as freeholders, a
mutual dependence on the market for survival was created. The outcome
was a constant struggle to improve the technical and social division
of labour, as the coercive power of the market dictated that
landowners now had to compete for survival. What was known
historically as agrarian "improvement" in economic activity
is the root of modern capitalist processes of productivity growth.
Capitalism was, then, distinctive in crucial social respects. It
created new market-based dependencies; new social impulses for
exploitation and domination throughout and across whole societies;
totally new class forces and forms of solidarity; and eventually new,
organised political powers and new state forms to represent them.
Capitalism
is not simply the human tendency to 'truck and barter' freed from
feudal fetters. It is a distinctive way of organising economic
activity and, by extension, of administering social order. It
generates novel, dynamic social forces, each carefully balanced
through the power relations of the capitalist state, smoothed into
what the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci called society's "unstable
equilibrium of compromises." Socialism is based on the promise
that, because capitalism is a temporal phenomenon, it must also be a
temporary one. There is no guarantee that what replaces it must be
any better (many Marxists were mistaken about the development of the
means of production leading by definition to a fairer society). But
in the conviction that the present forms of exploitation and
domination must end, socialists believe that it is worth organising
to hasten that end and to secure its replacement by something better.
Capitalism is the outcome of social struggle; it is reproduced by
social domination and compromise; it can be undone by social
cooperation and ultimately by conflict. We are revolutionary not in
the simple sense that we believe the capitalist state must be
overthrown by a violent "war of manoeuvre." Rather, we
believe that capitalism can only be transformed in the long-run by a
strategic "war of position." To be more specific, as the
French-Greek theorist Nicos Poulantzas argued, we must enter into a
struggle to take power over the capitalist state and to break it from
within, whilst the social struggle is mobilised outside of the state.
This is the sense in which we are revolutionary: we believe in a
far-reaching transformation in the balance of class forces; in the
dominant relations of society; in the nature of the state; and in the
end a re-shaping of the fundamental class relations of society.
For as
long as the concept of democracy has existed, it has been denigrated.
Yet today it has achieved near universal acceptance, at least as an
ideal. Socialism has suffered in much the same way. In the struggles
ahead, it may be redeemed in equal measure too.
5Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom, p.24:
"We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which
produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and
anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and 'conscious'
direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals."
6Hayek
famously wrote to the Times that,
in the case of Chile, he preferred "transitional dictatorship",
which might later become a "limited democracy".
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