Die Neue Zeit
7th July 2009, 04:48
Class-Strugglist Democracy and the Demarchic Commonwealth
“But much more important for Marxist thought is Aristotle's account in Books 3-6 of the Politics where he defines democracy as the rule of the poor over the rich whom they can outnumber in the Assembly. Demokratia is taken to be class rule rather than popular government, and demos is understood in the sense of the common people, not the whole of the people as Perikles, Demosthenes, and other Athenians preferred to believe.” (Mogens Herman Hansen)
The Greek word demokratia is a much more emphatic word than “democracy” in two very personal ways. First, I considered substituting the word “democracy” in the title of this chapter section and in other areas of this work with this Greek word. Second, upon reading the word demokratia for the very first time, I initially regretted not having used it at all, much less commented on it, in my earlier work. Does the word demokratia, unlike “democracy” and its politically correct connotations, actually present its own separate challenge to overcoming the crisis of theory regarding strategy and tactics (thereby meriting a separate chapter in that work)? In 2005, however, the British left-wing reformist Tony Benn noted that demokratia meant merely “people power” (implying the possibility of elites leaning upon it at times) and not “rule by the people” – demarchy. Regardless of the answer to this question, I decided against using that word and especially the –kratia suffix, given the sufficiency of the term “class-strugglist democracy.”
“Class-strugglist democracy” also has the two-fold advantage of expressing the full range of parallelism necessitated by participatory democracy (both in terms of so-called “dual power” and parallelism amongst different organs of participatory democracy) and suggesting the contention for power by more than two classes, including: coordinators, small-businessmen or petit-bourgeoisie, at least one class of semi-workers not developing society’s labour power and overall capabilities (lawyers, judges, and police officers in one corner, and the self-employed in another), and the various underclasses (the proper lumpenproletariat, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lowest class of beggars, chronic drug addicts on the streets, other homeless people, unemployables, and welfare cheats – the lumpen).
On the latter advantage, the contention for power can even be made by more than two class coalitions. The proletariat-led coalition in an imperialist power might include the coordinators (because they too are estranged from owning the means of production) and the proper lumpenproletariat (preferring legal work to illegal work). The bourgeoisie-led coalition might include lawyers, judges, and police officers. Meanwhile, that underrated coalition led by the petit-bourgeoisie, which has formed the socioeconomic base for fascist movements, has included the self-employed, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lumpen.
That aside, I now refer back to the profoundly true and important musings in Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy on the long-lost minimum program of Marx himself, despite the radical republicanism of electing all officials:
This understanding enables us to formulate a core political minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government. The key is to replace the illusory idea of ‘All power to the soviets’ and the empty one of ‘All power to the Communist Party’ with the original Marxist idea of the undiluted democratic republic, or ‘extreme democracy’, as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
[…]
Without commitment to such a minimum platform, communists should not accept governmental responsibility […] To accept governmental responsibility as a minority under conditions of revolutionary crisis is, if anything, worse than doing so in ‘peaceful times’: a crisis demands urgent solutions, and communists can only offer these solutions from opposition.
This merely confirms what Engels wrote in his critique of the Erfurt Program’s lack of any mention of a “democratic republic”:
If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor […]
However, since what is suggested in this work rejects both liberal and radical republicanism, what should replace the “democratic republic” and “soviet power”? Fortunately, Engels himself suggested a term that has the potential to address class-strugglist anarchist criticisms of coordinated “workers’ states”:
We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune.
The minimum program for the emergence of this demarchic “Commonwealth” surpasses broad economism by aiming for multiple struggles:
1) A two-fold political struggle of a minimum-maximum character, with politico-ideological independence for the working class as the immediate aim, and with the demarchic commonwealth fully replacing the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes – the state – as the aim later on;
2) Economic struggles of a minimum-maximum character, with economic struggles promoting politico-ideological independence for the working class as an immediate aim, and with economic struggles directly for social labour later on – since the struggle for this “socialism” is indeed economic and not political; and
3) Peripheral sociocultural struggles of a minimum-maximum character around various issues.
To tie this and the preceding commentary on participatory democracy and class issues together, listed below are demands based on the struggles of politico-ideologically independent worker-class movements in the past (the list of which is more comprehensive than the one provided by Macnair). Taking into account modern developments and critiques, the consistent advocacy of this core of a minimum program for political power – as opposed to the more common and orthodox “minimum program” for continued opposition even after complete fulfillment – emphatically solves the problem of broad economism throughout the class-strugglist left by being much greater than the sum of its political and economic parts. While individual demands could easily be fulfilled without eliminating the bourgeois-capitalist state order, the complete, consistent, and lasting implementation of this minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense (as formulated by Marx himself) would mean that the working class will have captured the full political power of a ruling class, thus establishing the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”:
1) All assemblies of the remaining representative democracy and all councils of an expanding participatory democracy shall become working bodies, not parliamentary talking shops, being legislative and executive-administrative at the same time and not checked and balanced by anything more professional than sovereign commoner juries. The absence of any mention of grassroots mass assemblies is due to their incapability to perform administrative functions on a regular basis. Also, this demand implies simplification of laws and of the legal system as a whole, dispensing entirely with that oligarchic and etymologically monarchic legal position of Judge and at least curtailing that legalese-creating and overly specialized position of Lawyer.
2) All political and related administrative offices shall be assigned by lot as a fundamental basis of the demarchic commonwealth. This is in stark contrast to elections for all such public offices, the central radical-republican demand that completely ignores electoral fatigue. With this demand comes the possibility of finally fulfilling a demarchic variation of that one unfulfilled demand for annual parliaments raised by the first politico-ideologically independent worker-class movement in history, the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom.
3) All political and related administrative offices shall be free of any formal or de facto disqualifications due to non-ownership of non-possessive property or, more generally, of wealth. The Chartists called similarly for “no property qualification for members of Parliament – thus enabling the constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor.” While the struggle against formal property qualifications was most progressive, even freely elected legislatures are almost devoid of the working poor, especially those who are women. Unlike the Chartist demand, by no means does this demand in the grammatically double negative (“disqualifications” and “non-ownership”) preclude the disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie – and other owners of the aforementioned types of property – as one of the political measures of a more obvious worker-class rule. In fact, the original Soviet constitution deprived voting rights from the bourgeoisie and others even on more functional criteria such as hiring labour for personal profit.
4) All political and related administrative offices shall operate on the basis of occupants’ standards of living being at or slightly lower than the median equivalent for professional and other skilled workers. On the one hand, formulations that demand compensation for such public officials to be simply no more than “workman’s wage” fail to take into account the historic worker-class demand for legislators to be paid in the first place, first raised by the worker-class Chartists, “thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country.” On the other hand, even freely elected legislators, many of whom have additional sources of income through businesses, tend to increase their collective level of expense allowances beyond the median equivalent associated with professional work. A combination of appropriate pay levels and expense allowances, mandated loss of regular occupations (since these offices should be full-time positions), and other measures can fulfill this demand.
5) All political and related administrative offices shall be subject to immediate recall in cases of abuse of office. This can be fulfilled effectively under a radical-republican system of indirect elections and hierarchical accountability, as opposed to the current system of direct electoralism (based on mass constituencies) that require significant numbers of constituents to sign recall initatives. However, like the two preceding demands, this demand is best fulfilled not just when all such public offices function with the aforementioned hierarchical accountability, but also when all such public offices are assigned by lot, thereby minimizing interpersonal political connections.
6) There shall be an ecological reduction of the normal workweek – including time for workplace democracy, workers’ self-management, etc. through workplace committees and assemblies – to a participatory-democratic maximum of 32 hours or less without loss of pay or benefits, the minimum provision of double-time pay or salary/contract equivalent for all hours worked over the normal workweek and over 8 hours a day, and the prohibition of compulsory overtime. In addition to the extensive analysis provided in the next chapter, it must be noted that proposals for an eight-hour day were made but not implemented within the Paris Commune, and that the development of capitalist production is such that time for workplace democracy and so on should be part of the normal workweek and not outside of it.
7) There shall be full, lawsuit-enforced freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association for ordinary people, even within the military, free especially from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement. If one particular demand could neatly sum up the struggle for the politico-ideological independence of the working class – before and even just after having captured the full political power of a ruling class – it is this one by far.
8) There shall be an expansion of the right to bear arms and to general self-defense towards enabling the formation of people’s militias based on free training, especially in connection with class-strugglist association, and also free from police interference such as from agents provocateurs. The aggressive advocacy of this demand separates class-strugglists from the most obvious of cross-class coalitionists, even if the likes of Bernstein pushed for this demand in less formal workers’ action programs.
9) There shall be full independence of the mass media from concentrated private ownership and control by first means of workplace democracy over mandated balance of content in news and media production, heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for independent mass media cooperative startups – especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralization – and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property. Although this is an applied combination of more general demands that are in and of themselves not necessary for workers to become the ruling class, a comprehensive solution to the mass media problem of concentrated private ownership and control (not to mention bourgeois cultural hegemony as discussed by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci) is a necessary component of any minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense.
10) All state debts shall be suppressed outright. Unlike the more transformative suppression of all public debts on a transnational scale, the minimum character of this demand was long established by the historical precedent of the 19th-century imperialist powers periodically going into debt to fund their wars and then defaulting upon them on an equally periodic basis.
11) All predatory financial practices towards the working class, legal or otherwise, shall be precluded by first means of establishing, on a permanent and either national or multinational basis, a financial monopoly without any private ownership or private control whatsoever – at purchase prices based especially on the market values of insolvent yet publicly underwritten banks – with such a monopoly inclusive of the general provision of commercial and consumer credit, and with the application of “equity not usury” towards such activity. The usage of the word “multinational” instead of “transnational” signifies the minimum character of this demand, given the multinational structure of the European Union and given that, as mentioned earlier, a single transnational equivalent should put to an end the viability of imperialist wars and conflicts more generally as vehicles for capital accumulation.
12) There shall be an enactment of confiscatory, despotic measures against all capital flight of wealth, whether such wealth belongs to economic rebels on the domestic front or to foreign profiteers. Ultimately, the flight of gold from Parisian banks by those in control over same banks weakened the workers of 1871 Paris and financed the ruthless suppression of the Paris Commune.
[Note: Due consideration must, of course, be given to other political issues crucial to the beginning of worker-class rule, such as local autonomy and the full or partial addressing of certain transformative issues like governmental transparency and genuine freedom of movement.]
REFERENCES:
The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy by Mogens Herman Hansen [http://books.google.ca/books?id=8lPaSAnZg28C&dq]
The Two Souls of Democracy by “Anarcho” [http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=962]
The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]
A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm]
Letter to August Bebel in Zwickau, March 1875 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm]
The People’s Charter by the London Working Men’s Association [http://www.chartists.net/The-six-points.htm]
“But much more important for Marxist thought is Aristotle's account in Books 3-6 of the Politics where he defines democracy as the rule of the poor over the rich whom they can outnumber in the Assembly. Demokratia is taken to be class rule rather than popular government, and demos is understood in the sense of the common people, not the whole of the people as Perikles, Demosthenes, and other Athenians preferred to believe.” (Mogens Herman Hansen)
The Greek word demokratia is a much more emphatic word than “democracy” in two very personal ways. First, I considered substituting the word “democracy” in the title of this chapter section and in other areas of this work with this Greek word. Second, upon reading the word demokratia for the very first time, I initially regretted not having used it at all, much less commented on it, in my earlier work. Does the word demokratia, unlike “democracy” and its politically correct connotations, actually present its own separate challenge to overcoming the crisis of theory regarding strategy and tactics (thereby meriting a separate chapter in that work)? In 2005, however, the British left-wing reformist Tony Benn noted that demokratia meant merely “people power” (implying the possibility of elites leaning upon it at times) and not “rule by the people” – demarchy. Regardless of the answer to this question, I decided against using that word and especially the –kratia suffix, given the sufficiency of the term “class-strugglist democracy.”
“Class-strugglist democracy” also has the two-fold advantage of expressing the full range of parallelism necessitated by participatory democracy (both in terms of so-called “dual power” and parallelism amongst different organs of participatory democracy) and suggesting the contention for power by more than two classes, including: coordinators, small-businessmen or petit-bourgeoisie, at least one class of semi-workers not developing society’s labour power and overall capabilities (lawyers, judges, and police officers in one corner, and the self-employed in another), and the various underclasses (the proper lumpenproletariat, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lowest class of beggars, chronic drug addicts on the streets, other homeless people, unemployables, and welfare cheats – the lumpen).
On the latter advantage, the contention for power can even be made by more than two class coalitions. The proletariat-led coalition in an imperialist power might include the coordinators (because they too are estranged from owning the means of production) and the proper lumpenproletariat (preferring legal work to illegal work). The bourgeoisie-led coalition might include lawyers, judges, and police officers. Meanwhile, that underrated coalition led by the petit-bourgeoisie, which has formed the socioeconomic base for fascist movements, has included the self-employed, the lumpenbourgeoisie, and the lumpen.
That aside, I now refer back to the profoundly true and important musings in Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy on the long-lost minimum program of Marx himself, despite the radical republicanism of electing all officials:
This understanding enables us to formulate a core political minimum platform for the participation of communists in a government. The key is to replace the illusory idea of ‘All power to the soviets’ and the empty one of ‘All power to the Communist Party’ with the original Marxist idea of the undiluted democratic republic, or ‘extreme democracy’, as the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
[…]
Without commitment to such a minimum platform, communists should not accept governmental responsibility […] To accept governmental responsibility as a minority under conditions of revolutionary crisis is, if anything, worse than doing so in ‘peaceful times’: a crisis demands urgent solutions, and communists can only offer these solutions from opposition.
This merely confirms what Engels wrote in his critique of the Erfurt Program’s lack of any mention of a “democratic republic”:
If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown. It would be inconceivable for our best people to become ministers under an emperor […]
However, since what is suggested in this work rejects both liberal and radical republicanism, what should replace the “democratic republic” and “soviet power”? Fortunately, Engels himself suggested a term that has the potential to address class-strugglist anarchist criticisms of coordinated “workers’ states”:
We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French ‘Commune.
The minimum program for the emergence of this demarchic “Commonwealth” surpasses broad economism by aiming for multiple struggles:
1) A two-fold political struggle of a minimum-maximum character, with politico-ideological independence for the working class as the immediate aim, and with the demarchic commonwealth fully replacing the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes – the state – as the aim later on;
2) Economic struggles of a minimum-maximum character, with economic struggles promoting politico-ideological independence for the working class as an immediate aim, and with economic struggles directly for social labour later on – since the struggle for this “socialism” is indeed economic and not political; and
3) Peripheral sociocultural struggles of a minimum-maximum character around various issues.
To tie this and the preceding commentary on participatory democracy and class issues together, listed below are demands based on the struggles of politico-ideologically independent worker-class movements in the past (the list of which is more comprehensive than the one provided by Macnair). Taking into account modern developments and critiques, the consistent advocacy of this core of a minimum program for political power – as opposed to the more common and orthodox “minimum program” for continued opposition even after complete fulfillment – emphatically solves the problem of broad economism throughout the class-strugglist left by being much greater than the sum of its political and economic parts. While individual demands could easily be fulfilled without eliminating the bourgeois-capitalist state order, the complete, consistent, and lasting implementation of this minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense (as formulated by Marx himself) would mean that the working class will have captured the full political power of a ruling class, thus establishing the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”:
1) All assemblies of the remaining representative democracy and all councils of an expanding participatory democracy shall become working bodies, not parliamentary talking shops, being legislative and executive-administrative at the same time and not checked and balanced by anything more professional than sovereign commoner juries. The absence of any mention of grassroots mass assemblies is due to their incapability to perform administrative functions on a regular basis. Also, this demand implies simplification of laws and of the legal system as a whole, dispensing entirely with that oligarchic and etymologically monarchic legal position of Judge and at least curtailing that legalese-creating and overly specialized position of Lawyer.
2) All political and related administrative offices shall be assigned by lot as a fundamental basis of the demarchic commonwealth. This is in stark contrast to elections for all such public offices, the central radical-republican demand that completely ignores electoral fatigue. With this demand comes the possibility of finally fulfilling a demarchic variation of that one unfulfilled demand for annual parliaments raised by the first politico-ideologically independent worker-class movement in history, the Chartist movement in the United Kingdom.
3) All political and related administrative offices shall be free of any formal or de facto disqualifications due to non-ownership of non-possessive property or, more generally, of wealth. The Chartists called similarly for “no property qualification for members of Parliament – thus enabling the constituencies to return the man of their choice, be he rich or poor.” While the struggle against formal property qualifications was most progressive, even freely elected legislatures are almost devoid of the working poor, especially those who are women. Unlike the Chartist demand, by no means does this demand in the grammatically double negative (“disqualifications” and “non-ownership”) preclude the disenfranchisement of the bourgeoisie – and other owners of the aforementioned types of property – as one of the political measures of a more obvious worker-class rule. In fact, the original Soviet constitution deprived voting rights from the bourgeoisie and others even on more functional criteria such as hiring labour for personal profit.
4) All political and related administrative offices shall operate on the basis of occupants’ standards of living being at or slightly lower than the median equivalent for professional and other skilled workers. On the one hand, formulations that demand compensation for such public officials to be simply no more than “workman’s wage” fail to take into account the historic worker-class demand for legislators to be paid in the first place, first raised by the worker-class Chartists, “thus enabling an honest tradesman, working man, or other person, to serve a constituency, when taken from his business to attend to the interests of the country.” On the other hand, even freely elected legislators, many of whom have additional sources of income through businesses, tend to increase their collective level of expense allowances beyond the median equivalent associated with professional work. A combination of appropriate pay levels and expense allowances, mandated loss of regular occupations (since these offices should be full-time positions), and other measures can fulfill this demand.
5) All political and related administrative offices shall be subject to immediate recall in cases of abuse of office. This can be fulfilled effectively under a radical-republican system of indirect elections and hierarchical accountability, as opposed to the current system of direct electoralism (based on mass constituencies) that require significant numbers of constituents to sign recall initatives. However, like the two preceding demands, this demand is best fulfilled not just when all such public offices function with the aforementioned hierarchical accountability, but also when all such public offices are assigned by lot, thereby minimizing interpersonal political connections.
6) There shall be an ecological reduction of the normal workweek – including time for workplace democracy, workers’ self-management, etc. through workplace committees and assemblies – to a participatory-democratic maximum of 32 hours or less without loss of pay or benefits, the minimum provision of double-time pay or salary/contract equivalent for all hours worked over the normal workweek and over 8 hours a day, and the prohibition of compulsory overtime. In addition to the extensive analysis provided in the next chapter, it must be noted that proposals for an eight-hour day were made but not implemented within the Paris Commune, and that the development of capitalist production is such that time for workplace democracy and so on should be part of the normal workweek and not outside of it.
7) There shall be full, lawsuit-enforced freedom of class-strugglist assembly and association for ordinary people, even within the military, free especially from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement. If one particular demand could neatly sum up the struggle for the politico-ideological independence of the working class – before and even just after having captured the full political power of a ruling class – it is this one by far.
8) There shall be an expansion of the right to bear arms and to general self-defense towards enabling the formation of people’s militias based on free training, especially in connection with class-strugglist association, and also free from police interference such as from agents provocateurs. The aggressive advocacy of this demand separates class-strugglists from the most obvious of cross-class coalitionists, even if the likes of Bernstein pushed for this demand in less formal workers’ action programs.
9) There shall be full independence of the mass media from concentrated private ownership and control by first means of workplace democracy over mandated balance of content in news and media production, heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for independent mass media cooperative startups – especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralization – and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property. Although this is an applied combination of more general demands that are in and of themselves not necessary for workers to become the ruling class, a comprehensive solution to the mass media problem of concentrated private ownership and control (not to mention bourgeois cultural hegemony as discussed by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci) is a necessary component of any minimum program in the pre-orthodox sense.
10) All state debts shall be suppressed outright. Unlike the more transformative suppression of all public debts on a transnational scale, the minimum character of this demand was long established by the historical precedent of the 19th-century imperialist powers periodically going into debt to fund their wars and then defaulting upon them on an equally periodic basis.
11) All predatory financial practices towards the working class, legal or otherwise, shall be precluded by first means of establishing, on a permanent and either national or multinational basis, a financial monopoly without any private ownership or private control whatsoever – at purchase prices based especially on the market values of insolvent yet publicly underwritten banks – with such a monopoly inclusive of the general provision of commercial and consumer credit, and with the application of “equity not usury” towards such activity. The usage of the word “multinational” instead of “transnational” signifies the minimum character of this demand, given the multinational structure of the European Union and given that, as mentioned earlier, a single transnational equivalent should put to an end the viability of imperialist wars and conflicts more generally as vehicles for capital accumulation.
12) There shall be an enactment of confiscatory, despotic measures against all capital flight of wealth, whether such wealth belongs to economic rebels on the domestic front or to foreign profiteers. Ultimately, the flight of gold from Parisian banks by those in control over same banks weakened the workers of 1871 Paris and financed the ruthless suppression of the Paris Commune.
[Note: Due consideration must, of course, be given to other political issues crucial to the beginning of worker-class rule, such as local autonomy and the full or partial addressing of certain transformative issues like governmental transparency and genuine freedom of movement.]
REFERENCES:
The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy by Mogens Herman Hansen [http://books.google.ca/books?id=8lPaSAnZg28C&dq]
The Two Souls of Democracy by “Anarcho” [http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=962]
The minimum platform and extreme democracy by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/625/macnair.htm]
A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm]
Letter to August Bebel in Zwickau, March 1875 by Frederick Engels [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm]
The People’s Charter by the London Working Men’s Association [http://www.chartists.net/The-six-points.htm]