Report at General Meeting September 2023

In his Critique of the Gotha Program, written in 1875, Karl Marx targeted what he considered a particularly pathetic trend within the contemporary workers’ movement: a “type of democratism that keeps itself within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not permitted by logic”. Marx saw in the demands of this current “nothing more than the old democratic litany that everyone knows: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, popular militia, etc”. Today, a century and a half later, we are faced with the same litany, which has become even more absurd than in Marx’s time, given that capitalism, often under the guise of bourgeois democracy, which remains its most characteristic political form, has revolutionized the world.

We are referring to the ruins of “democratic socialism”. Those who adhere to this fundamentally petty-bourgeois ideology are often very sensitive to the shortcomings of bourgeois democracy: where it promises freedom and equality, they denounce the absence of freedom and inequality; where it promises the rule of the people, they complain about the rule of a small minority; where it promises the emancipation of minorities, they discover their oppression. In a word, they are disappointed by actually existing, i.e., bourgeois, democracy. Their solution is simple, if banal: more democracy is needed. Instead of asking themselves what democracy actually entails and whether it really is the only panacea for the world’s problems and ills, they simply assume that these problems are due to a lack of democracy. They sometimes go so far as to say that the form of democracy that currently exists is not true democracy.

In his “Notes on Bakunin’s Book”, State and Anarchy, Marx informs us that “Elections are a political form even in the smallest Russian communities and cooperatives (artels). The character of elections does not depend on these names, but on the economic basis, on the economic ties between the voters”.

Lenin takes up the same theme in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, where he castigates the opportunist in the title for his invocation of “pure” democracy: "If one does not want to make a fool of common sense and history, it is clear that it is impossible to speak of ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; one can only speak of class democracy (...) ‘Pure democracy’ is the lying phrase of the liberal who wants to deceive the workers. History knows bourgeois democracy, which took the place of feudalism, and proletarian democracy, which is taking the place of bourgeois democracy".

Currently, the vast majority of countries in the world are governed according to different variants of bourgeois democracy: that is, democratic regimes suited to the needs and interests of the bourgeoisie, the class that enjoys ownership of the means of production. By extending political rights to the entire population and giving voice to the masses, the bourgeoisie ensures the continuation of its class rule. In fact, in a society without a priori political privileges, those who have economic power are inevitably destined to rule. Precisely for this reason, the bourgeoisie, in its great revolutions against the Ancien Régime, swept away the political privileges of the nobility and the king and, in so doing, replaced the feudal subject with the citizen.

The equality of citizens is only the political reflection of the economic relations on which bourgeois society is based. In this society, where private ownership of products intended for exchange prevails, individuals confront each other as owners of commodities. They are “free” in that they ‘voluntarily’ exchange their commodities; and they are “equal” in that they meet as owners of commodities and exchange commodities of equal value. Here, in the commodity exchange relationship, which forms the basis of capitalist production, all distinctions of social rank and traditional privileges have been abolished. There are only owners of commodities.

In Capital, Marx showed that the exploitation and enslavement of wage labor are perfectly compatible with this free exchange of commodities. The worker sells his labor power in exchange for a wage; he and the capitalist exchange their respective commodities on the market, without any extra-economic coercion being necessary. But labor power has a special use value: when it is used, it creates new value, more value than is necessary for its maintenance and reproduction. This is the source of capitalist wealth. At the end of the whole process, once the worker has exchanged his wage for food, clothing, rent, and other essentials, he has nothing left but his ability to work, his labor power. In order to survive, he must try to sell this unique commodity once again. The capitalist, meanwhile, has received the product of the worker’s labor, which, once sold on the market, has not only returned to him the equivalent of the variable capital (wages) he advanced, but also a surplus value that can be used to subjugate other labor power.

This is how the freedom and equality of the owners of commodities are dialectically transformed into their opposite, the exploitation and enslavement of some by others. As Marx says: “The law of appropriation based on the production and circulation of commodities, or the law of private property, is reversed, by its own internal and inevitable dialectic, into its direct opposite”.

It is therefore not surprising that, in constructing the political order most congenial to it, the bourgeoisie did not need to resort to the crude system of political privileges that characterized the feudal state. Freedom and equality are by no means incompatible with bourgeois production; on the contrary, the latter presupposes them as its basis. Therefore, in this abstract designation, devoid of any differentiation of rank, the citizen has gradually replaced the nobility, the serf, and the slave of pre-capitalist social orders. As citizens, individuals of all classes—at least in the classical form of bourgeois politics—are entitled to vote, that is, to participate in determining the government of the bourgeoisie. They select the personnel who will administer the bourgeois state, a state whose fundamental mission, the defense of private property and capital, is never questioned.

Democracy “changes every time the demos changes” (Engels), that is, every time the economic and social situation of the voters changes. The demos, in a typical capitalist society, comprises the entire adult population. But within this population, the dominant economic force, and therefore also the dominant intellectual force, is the bourgeoisie itself. Its command over the means of production also guarantees it command over the means of intellectual production; and therefore, “the ideas of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it as a whole”. And since bourgeois democracy abhors special political privileges, that is, it treats every member of society as an abstract “citizen”, it is natural that those who have economic privileges rise to dominate the positions of government. They have the time, money, and resources to do so, and after all, “the ruling ideas are nothing but the ideal expression of the ruling material relations, they are the ruling material relations thought out as ideas”. Moreover, the state apparatus itself cannot be considered separately from the economic power of the bourgeoisie, since it depends on the accumulation of capital for its power, a power it exercises to safeguard that very accumulation. The state is an organ for the exercise of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, and the democratic forms it takes do not change this fundamental fact.

As Lenin writes: “The Marxist historian Kautsky has never heard that the form of elections, the form of democracy, is one thing, and the class content of a given institution is another”.

Thus, throughout history, the democratic mechanism has been used as an instrument of government by various ruling classes, from the Athenian slave owners to the Roman patricians to the modern bourgeoisie. The mere form of democracy in no way guarantees the rule of any class: its outcome depends “on the economic basis, on the economic ties between the voters” (Marx).

Individuals involved in bourgeois relations see the state as a means to achieve certain ends that the state itself imposes on them, such as the need for private property to satisfy their needs. Meanwhile, its true purpose, to safeguard the conditions for the continued accumulation of capital, remains unchallenged. The state, in reality, is the association of the bourgeoisie against the other classes. The outcry against the corruption of corporate lobbies reveals only a complete ignorance of the class nature of the state. The state is based on maintaining the capitalist economy for its own power and uses democracy as a means to achieve this end. When democracy fails to produce the required docility, however rare, naked force can always be resorted to.

Violence is not a contradiction of democracy, it is its necessary complement; when the scalpel fails, the club is used. Marx thus demonstrated how economic freedom and equality can be transformed into their opposite: non-freedom and inequality. But those who accept this insight in the field of economics often remain curiously reluctant to apply it to politics.

They fail to realize that elections based on free, fair, and universal suffrage can serve as instruments of class domination because of the economic relations in which voters are entangled. They fail to understand that democracy “is worthless as a principle, being merely an organizational mechanism based on a simple and banal arithmetic presumption, that the majority is right and the minority is wrong” (The Democratic Principle, 1921), that its character “does not depend on this name [i.e., democracy], but on the economic basis, on the economic situation of the voters”. This economic situation, determined by the prevailing mode of production, dictates the content of the democracy in question. Therefore, the democratic “mechanism of organization” has proven its compatibility with social formations as diverse as the Athenian slave state, peasant village assemblies, and proletarian trade unions.

Our current wrote in 1920: "Bourgeois electoral democracy seeks the consultation of the masses because it knows that the response of the majority will always be favorable to the privileged class and will readily delegate to this class the right to govern and perpetuate exploitation. It will not be the addition or subtraction of a small minority of bourgeois voters that will change the relationship. The bourgeoisie rules with the majority, not only of all citizens, but also of the workers alone”.

It should be clear, therefore, that a “pure”, “true”, or ‘real’ democracy does not exist and never has existed; rather, the nature of a given democracy is determined by the economic base on which it develops. And this should demonstrate why “more” democracy will not solve the problems created by the capitalist mode of production. On the contrary: it is only by depriving the ruling class of its political rights, after overthrowing it, that the working class, by means of its own political supremacy without any restrictions whatsoever, will bring about the transformation of existing economic relations and remedy its ills.

This does not mean that, within the framework of the methods of organization of the proletariat, democratic mechanisms cannot be used. In the course of the revolutionary struggle, situations may arise that require the democratic consultation of the class or specific sections of the class. But to attribute an innate value to democracy is to tie the hands of the proletariat in advance, to arbitrarily limit it to a particular organizational mechanism, depriving it of the tactical flexibility it will need to prevail in the conquest of power. In the life-and-death struggle with the bourgeoisie, there may be moments when the proletariat must trust its leading organ (i.e., the party) to act without consulting the masses, such as during military emergencies, when the majority of the class is deceived by bourgeois propaganda, etc. To reject, in principle, any deviation from the democratic mechanism of organization means paralyzing the revolution in advance.

There can be no question of extending democratic rights to the bourgeoisie under the dictatorship of the proletariat. We have seen that, on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, the equality of political rights between classes is precisely what reproduces and sustains the present state of affairs; it is the device that corresponds to the interests of the bourgeoisie as the economically dominant class. To overthrow this mode of production, therefore, the proletariat must deprive its enemy of political rights and ensure that only the workers exercise power; it must privilege itself against the bourgeoisie.

The Petty-Bourgeois Enemy

One question remains to be answered: if the demand for “pure” democracy, or for more democracy in the abstract, does not come from the revolutionary proletariat, what is the class basis of this demand? Or, as Lenin would have said: who stands to gain from it?

The petty bourgeoisie occupies a special position within capitalist society. Caught between the ruling class and the class of wage slaves, its individual members are constantly threatened by possible proletarianization. It competes hopelessly against the big bourgeoisie, which, with its greater capital and its hold on state power, is perpetually destined to win and throw the small owners into the ranks of the working class—in short, to expropriate them from above. The bourgeois state, as the most advanced fighting organization of its class, may have an interest in maintaining a layer of small property owners to blunt the antagonistic relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but it can only do so in contrast to the incessant centralization of capital.

On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie is threatened by expropriation from below, that is, by a revolutionary movement of the proletariat against the relations of private property on which the existence of the petty bourgeoisie is based. Too weak to challenge the bourgeoisie on its own, it must constantly seek to deceive the proletariat into supporting its demands. But as soon as the proletariat begins to feel its strength and fight for its demands, the petty bourgeoisie, bound by its interest in the preservation of property, betrays the workers at the decisive moment. This is the kind of vacillation shown by the so-called middle classes throughout history, an attitude that stems from their precarious position between the two great classes of modern society.

Moderation, adherence to an ideal bourgeois society, is therefore what the petty bourgeoisie desires most. The petty bourgeoisie wants private property, but of moderate size; it wants competition, but of moderate intensity; it wants docile workers; in a word, it wants capitalist society without its necessary consequences, consequences that threaten its petty-bourgeois existence. He is therefore not only an arch-reactionary, but an enemy of the working class, because he is an enemy of the socialization and concentration of the productive forces that constitute capitalism’s great contribution to social progress and that form the basis of the future communist society.

It is therefore not surprising that, in the realm of political ideology, the demands of the petty bourgeoisie appeal to a “pure” democratic ideal, a form of democracy that has never existed and never will exist. It condemns actually existing democracy as false, while exalting an ideal and authentic democracy. The ideological reflection of bourgeois society, the image it propagates of itself, is venerated as a refuge from the precarious position that the petty bourgeoisie actually occupies.

“The characteristic feature of social democracy”, writes Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "is that it demands republican democratic institutions, not as a means of eliminating both extremes, capital and wage labor, but as a means of mitigating their conflict and transforming it into harmony. But however different the measures that may be proposed to achieve this end, however much these measures may be adorned with more or less revolutionary representations, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society by democratic means, but a transformation that does not go beyond the framework of the petty bourgeoisie. One must not view things in a narrow way, as if the petty bourgeoisie intended to defend a selfish class interest on principle. It believes the opposite, that the particular conditions of its liberation are the general conditions within which modern society can be saved and class struggle avoided.

Democratic socialism, as the modern heir to the tradition known in Marx’s time as social democracy, fully displays these same tendencies. It seeks more democracy, pure and true, because the particular conditions of the emancipation of the petty bourgeoisie demand it, that is, the contradictory necessity of a capitalist society stripped of its necessary threats and antagonisms. And since the petty bourgeoisie is too weak to obtain significant concessions from the bourgeoisie on its own, it must enlist the proletariat in its cause. Thus, democratic socialists advertise their chimera of a renewed capitalism to the workers, promising that their sufferings are due to a lack of democracy and that “true” democracy will put power in their hands. Instead of organizing on their own class ground for their own demands, workers are encouraged to participate in interclass campaigns for universal health care, higher taxes on the rich, nationalization of industries, abolition of the Senate, universal basic income, etc. All these measures, as Marx points out, aim only to dilute the antagonism between capital and labor, keeping workers docile enough to be exploited productively and the big capitalists too weak to expropriate their smaller cousins. Above all, the petty bourgeoisie is concerned with maintaining its ever-threatened position, by hook or by crook.

Communism and Democracy

If democratic socialism is concerned with weakening the antagonisms inherent in capitalism, and thus with preserving the existence of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeois society itself, communism is concerned with sharpening these antagonisms and bringing them to their historical conclusion: the overthrow of the ruling class by the working class. The proletariat has no interest in bourgeois society, which is based on the ruthless exploitation of its class. On the contrary, it can only free itself by abolishing bourgeois society and its material foundations.

The same cannot be said of the petty bourgeoisie, which wants more than anything else to maintain its position within this society. This is the source of its magnetic attraction to democratic socialism, which promises harmony achieved without the destruction of the existing social relations or of the petty bourgeoisie as a class. This ideology boils down to wishful thinking: a senseless opposition between the ideal expression of bourgeois society and its dirty reality, between “pure” democracy and democracy in its social reality. It is a fantastical attempt to perfect bourgeois society, to reconcile opposites, while the revolutionary proletariat seeks to abolish this society.

The ideology of democratic socialism bursts like a soap bubble at the slightest contact with the real world. Democracy, based on bourgeois relations of production, has given us the world we see today, the very world that democratic socialists condemn as undemocratic.

To change this world, democracy is not enough; no simple “mechanism of organization” can guarantee the success of a revolution in the social relations of humanity. Rather, what is needed is the proletarian revolution, which deprives the bourgeoisie of all participation in political life and uses its dictatorial hold on power to forcibly abolish the foundations of capitalist exploitation.

This will not happen until the proletariat has learned to stand on its own feet and fight for its own class goals; until, in other words, it has freed itself from the misleading influence of the petty bourgeoisie and its ideologues, who only want to enlist workers as deluded foot soldiers. The democratic socialists are the foremost advocates of these erroneous and inconsistent ideological principles, which are therefore harmful to the workers’ movement. The practical experience of the failures of the current workers’ movement will inevitably compel the workers to gain a theoretical and practical understanding of the meaning of democratic deception and to break with the petty bourgeoisie and its organizations. The practical experience of the success of the struggles of the workers’ movement, resulting from the rejection of democratic mystification, will ensure that as long as the proletariat remains the jealous guardian of its class independence and the program of communism, the petty bourgeoisie will never regain control over the workers’ movement.