Marxism and democracy
Grayson Walker
Platypus Review 174 | March 2025
On September 10, 2024, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted the panel “Democracy and the Left” at New York University with panelists Andy Gittlitz (Antifada), Sebastian (Revolutionary Communists of America), George Shulman (NYU), and Grayson Walker (American Communist Party). An edited, expanded version of Grayson Walker’s opening remarks follows, in which he responds to questions posed in the panel’s prompt.[1]
Panel introduction
The 2016 election was understood by many on the Left as a crisis of democracy. In turn, it raised questions about the nature of democracy, society, politics, and their relationship. Eight years later, after a global pandemic and the presidency of Joe Biden, characterized by inertia, inflation, and the emergence of geopolitical relations, these questions have only persisted while seemingly becoming more obscure. Democracy seems to retain an enigmatic character, always slipping any fixed form and content. People under the dynamic of capital keep demanding, at times, “more” and “real” democracy. But democracy can be like Janus: it often expresses both the progressive emancipatory demands, but also their defeat, their hijacking by an elected “Bonaparte.” What does recent history tell us about democracy?
Questions and opening remarks
Is democracy oppressive, or can it be such? How would you judge Lenin’s formulation that “democracy is also a state and that, consequently, democracy will also disappear when the state disappears”?
WHETHER OR NOT democracy is “oppressive” is a moot point for Marxists. Marxism is not a vale of tears accounting for every form of “oppression,” but a language by which the working class articulates the actually existing class struggle.
For Marxists at least historically, the modern state is “an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another”[2] which legally sanctifies this class oppression. The state attains independent existence as a separate entity from society in the emancipation of property from the community; this abstraction of man from the totality of his being, an abstraction given formal recognition by the state, is the institutionalization of the very social dissolution that engenders this abstraction in the first place. Yet the state conceitedly pretends to account for what lies beyond its own formal recognition as a state dealing in law and right; a detached reflexivity that would collapse upon a recognition of the primordial sin of the state itself and exposure of its partial character. This is why Marx says that the modern state exists for the sake of private property, whereas the independence of the state from property is only found in those civilizations that have yet to pass from estate into class (or, relevant to our socialistic age, from those states which have subordinated the logic of capital to a sovereign political authority). According to Marx and Engels, even the democratic republic retains a class character, giving popular legitimation for the rule by capital. This class character of liberal democracy is simply occluded by the universal pretenses of the state and its equality of rights and liberties, but the reality of class dictatorship undergirding it is made apparent and even explicit with monopoly capital.
So all states, to the extent that they are institutions consolidating class rule, are “oppressive.” Yes, the political institutions associated with facilitating democracy — for instance, the bourgeois liberal form — are “oppressive,” but so is the proletarian form. The question is not whether the state is oppressive, but who oppresses whom, i.e., the social character of the oppression.
So I reject this question of “oppressive” and instead want to substitute it with “amicable to the workers’ movement.” Is democracy necessarily amicable to the workers’ movement, and will democracy too disappear with the development of socialism and the withering away of the state?
Lenin specifically talks about the transformation of democracy into socialism: that consistentdemocracy, in fact, “demands” socialism. The “democratic process” of voting is simply a way of accounting for a general people’s will, but if this democratic process can only produce unpopular candidates like Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, then “rule by the people” isn’t really being facilitated. Clearly, the democratic process of voting is not enough to represent a general will — that this “general will” cannot be accounted for by the form of politics alone. For democracy to really be ruled by the people, there must be no oligarchic campaign-financing laws, no big-tech monopolies gatekeeping IP and censoring speech, no indebtedness of the res publica to the interests of BlackRock and Vanguard; there must be class dictatorship exercised over capital so that politics can act freely and sovereignly and so the common property of the people (res publica) is not adulterated by private interest. For democracy to accomplish rule by the people, we must already go beyond the democratic form and establish a socialist authority that secures democracy against the domination by oligarchic finance capital. To the extent that the democratic process of deliberation is redundant for ascertaining the popular will, even the democratic form disappears into the depoliticized “administration of things” of higher-stage socialist production.
This process of disappearance, which Lenin describes in State and Revolution (1917), begins at the outset of the proletarian dictatorship and involves the simplification of the state to operations of control and accounting to the point where “any cook can run the country.”[3] This process involves the streamlining of the state to its minimal functions so that it may oversee the development of the forces of production “as rapidly as possible”[4] and safeguard the rule of the proletarian class, all the while being resolutely against the ossified, institutionalized formalism of “democracy” that strangles authentic forms of association and initiative. This applies as much to the economy as it does for the state (hence the socialism of Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up”[5]). By securing economic sovereignty and freeing politics from the dictatorship by monopoly capital, socialist proletarian dictatorship establishes substantive and not simply aspirational democracy.
This is markedly different from what political pundits often mean by “democracy.” When they talk about “defending democracy,” what they really mean is defending the institutions and mechanisms of the state that mask class dictatorship. They just mean defending the formal integrity of the state; it has nothing to do with the content of the state. “Respecting democracy” in the West just means obeying openly corrupt Democratic Party primaries and the proceduralism that masks personalistic backroom dealings and outright bribery. Or it means ensuring the victory of the prevailing ruling-class narrative against “Russian disinformation,” “CCP infiltration,” and fighting against the ever-present specter of “fascism” invoked every four years to shuffle voters to the Democrats and enforce social conformity. “Democracy” today refers to little more than the consensus of unelected three-letter agencies, Rockefeller-funded think tanks, Murdoch-owned corporate media, and Soros-organized NGOs, which all function as expressions of the same monopoly-capitalist dictatorship and which excuses every violation of democratic liberties all in the name of defending “democracy.” Aristotle noted in his study of the democratic constitutions of Greek polities that the democratic states were often just oligarchies where the hoi polloi[6] were reduced to debt peonage. In a country where finance capital has consolidated politics, the media, and the public square, it is hard to think we are beyond Aristotle’s judgment.
In this sense, “democracy” is oppressive and hostileto working-class politics. And as the liberal democracies lose their veneer of being governed by popular sovereignty and, in their panic over Trump and their hatred for the “deplorables,” are exposed as the cheap masks for the dictatorship of capital, the “democratic” states openly drop their pretenses to “rule by the people” and strip away democratic liberties using the voice of “expert opinion” who, with the help of a banker’s check, can Fact CheckTM whether mankind is really enough to govern itself.
The “democratic” state, which more brazenly bears the fangs of Wall Street as it sinks deeper into the general crisis of capitalism, grows openly hostile even to the institutions of democratic rule and procedure. Just as the oligarchy ruling our “liberal democracy” shamelessly assassinated revolutionaries like Fred Hampton and MLK Jr. in the 60s, today it goes after dissidents like Omali Yeshitela and Edward Snowden or journalists like Gary Webb and Gonzalo Lira. Where the oligarchy cannot kill its challengers, it turns to vicious disinformation campaigns: controlling the algorithms, botting social-media accounts, carefully crafting and controlling a narrative and discourse, and exploiting the herd mentality of netizens to hate what they should love and love what they should hate. The oligarchy abandons its pretense to “self-determination” as it invades Iraq and Afghanistan over lies it is never held accountable for, coups the democratically elected governments of Ukraine and Iran, and imposes mass surveillance on the American public to the detriment of our own Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms. It is the globalized capitalist ruling class, in the name of safeguarding and protecting democracy against “fascism” — which increasingly only means any form of political sovereignty outside the liberal democratic kind — that destroys democracy and institutes genuinely fascist rule (i.e., the “open terroristic dictatorship” of finance capital). In order to preserve democracy, it is necessary to secure power against the rule by capital — to go beyond the democratic struggle and pass into socialism. In this sense, Marxism gives expression to the symptom of democracy’s inadequacy for realizing popular rule.
Democracy, for Lenin and for virtually all Marxists historically, had more to do with what is today referred to as “populism” than it does with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is always inadequate as a vehicle for popular rule, as it gives recognition only to form — but populism, especially as it comes at the expense of the formal integrity of the state-form, is a kind of revenge of content and a reminder of the ends of democracy. Marxists are democrats insofar as that word means rule by the demos, i.e., supporting popular forms of sovereignty that can give expression to the interests of the proletarian class and to the broad masses, but they recognize that such a democracy is only guaranteed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and economic sovereignty. Marxism is, after all, born from a recognition that this demos is itself only the political-formal side of a people which finds itself materially reproduced in the proletariat (a class, living in but not of civil society, which exists in a particular way in spite of universal political equality — and is thus beyond the political recognition of formal, liberal democracy). In this sense, Marxists are defenders of bourgeois freedoms that provide the breathing room for educating, agitating, and organizing, but this should not be confused with a defense of the institutions that have facilitated the destruction of these freedoms under the guise of “defending democracy.” To the extent that Marxists “defend democracy,” they defend popular sovereignty against encroachment by the monstrously bureaucratic, increasingly open class dictatorship of the monopoly bourgeoisie. This puts them on the side of defending the Constitution of the United States against encroachments by the ruling class, defending the basic rights of the people as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, especially as it concerns freedom of speech and expression, against the security state in the form of the DHS, FBI, NSA, IRS, CIA, and other unelected, unaccountable agencies that act as the strong arm of the monopoly bourgeoisie. To summarize it in terms of MAGA Communism: communists are on the side of the people against the deep state. Marxist-Leninists must strive to build a popular front with all forms of resistance against the two-party duopoly to secure an independent people’s pole, within which communists are tasked with proving themselves as the most capable and far-sighted leaders of the working majority.This is the extent to which Marxists support democracy and the necessity of the popular front for Marxism-Leninism.
As for the withering away of the state, this has always also meant the withering away of the proceduralism and formalism of bourgeois democracy. According to Engels, the state-form disappears into the “museum of antiquities” alongside the bronze axe and the spinning wheel.[7] This disappearance coincides with the disappearance of class antagonism: that as the development and socialization of the forces and relations of production expedite the withering away of classes, so too will the state be converted from the governance over people into the “administration of things” and the conductor of production. The disappearance of the state is not a disappearance that is “willed” by any actor; the state only “disappears” in the sense of becoming an inadequate form for the overflowing productive forces that have outstripped the necessity of something as simple as a “state” that must rely on coercive mechanisms (including deliberative mechanisms like “democracy”). The withering away of the state may well be the automation of central accounting and regulatory mechanisms that plan production around its own communistic ESG[8] scores in conjunction with information received through price signals on the market, acting as the simulated form of real-time consumer demand. This simplification and reduction of the state is at the same time a universalization of the logic of the state across socialized production and even the private sphere of consumption, which it is now accountable for. Marx himself says that, in “true democracy the political state disappears.”[9] True rule by the people, now elevating content to the level of form, redresses the wound out of which the state emerges and thus oversees the disappearance of political rule altogether.The state is so total it can be reduced to a grain of sand and grasped by any person; so powerful it has become synonymous with its conditions of existence and ceased to be a state. The state is not abolished; it loses its abstract character and dissipates into the conscious production of history. This is the meaning of “withering away of the state,” which includes the withering away of democracy. The state returns to its strict etymological meaning: the state simply becomes the state of things.
So the process of socialization, which eventually comes at the expense of the state-form in the higher stages in the development of socialism, should not be imagined as a willful or goal-oriented process of abolishing the state. As the productive forces are unleashed at a greater scale and as production grows increasingly socialized, the state loses its political character and isconverted into the administration of production: to oversee production in such a way that is not political, but is beyond politicsbecause the class antagonism upon which the state rests has been overcome. Rather than view this anachronistically as the extension of bourgeois forms of sovereignty to the point of extremity — imagining a utopia where everything is rationally arbitrated, determined by a vote, or otherwise subject to “democratic” procedure — the withering away of the state most readily takes the form of its depoliticization and its assumption of a purely administrative role. It is not the disappearance of accounting and administration, but their depoliticization as the state becomes substantial. But this depoliticization is not the farcical “depoliticization” of EU technocrats and unelected political operatives of the bourgeoisie, who merely conceal the class struggle by suppressing the arena in which it is waged, but the depoliticization of a proletarian authority that has established common ownership of the land and direction over the process of production on that basis, i.e., economic sovereignty. The withering away of the state is not imposedby the victorious proletarian class, but is the natural result of this class rule which now oversees the unleashing of the productive forces and its orientation towards ends that are not alien to and abstracted from it (i.e., capital).
How do you understand the Left’s relationship to democracy historically? Do you consider historical struggles for democracy by workers as the medium by which they are “assimilated” to the system, or the only path to emancipation that they couldn’t avoid trying to take?
The Bolshevik position has been that communist parties should participate in bourgeois electoral politics while simultaneously opposing the narrow form of bourgeois electoral politics. The point is that “rule by the people” comes into conflict with the institutions of formally establishing this rule or translating the popular will into political authority (e.g., in the two-party system). In the name of safeguarding this form, the bourgeoisie casts aside all respect for “rule by the people” and establishes endlessly cascading offices, agencies, unelected bureaucracies, and middle-managers who ensure the “integrity” of democracy, who promote the crux of the democratic struggle to be one of deliberating over trivial bathroom politics, or who endlessly harp on about “human rights” as they carpet bomb the people of Gaza.
For the historical Left, democracy had nothing to do with this. Democracy meant going down to the countryside and uniting the people behind a popular opposition to the increasingly unconstitutional and criminal establishment. To the extent that we are not Mensheviks, who confused “democracy” with the institutions of liberal democracy, but Bolsheviks, for whom democracy still retains its meaning as rule by the people even at the expense of “democratic rule” (e.g., soviets against the Constituent Assembly), democracy’s essenceis the class struggle and its formis the most expressive and communicative avenue of articulating that essence.
In Russia, the most expressive form of exercising the popular willwere the soviets (“councils”) organized by workers, soldiers, and peasants rather than the officially governing Constituent Assembly. Was the elevation of the soviets as the supreme body of governance in Russia, at the expense of the Constituent Assembly, democratic? From the perspective of liberal democracy (which only recognizes form), it was not, but from the perspective of Marxism, it only raised democracy to a higher form of expression otherwise stifled by the formal “democracy” of Bobrisnkys, Milyukovs, and Kerenskys[10] who continued to bleed the people on the frontlines of a world war and at home on the frontlines of the class war. It was only the Bolshevik Party, operating from the recognition that people’s rule is only accomplished when the working majority’s own institutions are empowered, that could elevate soviet democracy to the level of political authority. Those left-SRs and Mensheviks who recognized the new soviet authority over the bourgeois Constituent Assembly joined with the Bolsheviks; those siding with the unpopular but Officially DemocraticTM provisional dictatorship turned against the soviet rule of workers, soldiers, and peasants.
The extent to which there is class struggle in the first place already evinces the fact that bourgeois liberal democracy is not sufficient for expressing the will of the people. If it were, there would be no need for class struggle at all and we would be justified in abandoning it in favor of Bernstein’s revisionism. This class struggle was historically given recognition by the proletarian dictatorship in the form of the party, whereas the separatestate institutions facilitate the governance and administration of the political form wherein class struggle is waged. This political form is not only constituted by the basic rights and dignities safeguarded in bourgeois democracy, but is socialistic in character, with the supplementation of these rights and liberties by proletarian dictatorship exercised by the party. This proletarian dictatorship, in ensuring the bourgeois freedoms are made actual (namely, by preventing the rule by monopoly capital and eliminating usurious rent), is at the same time a fuller realization of democracy. By unfettering political sovereignty from the private interest of monopoly capital, proletarian rule fully realizes the content of the bourgeois-democratic form of politics, marking its passage into the socialist form. But this can only be accomplished through the proletarian dictatorship, i.e., the elevation of the party over the rule by private interest (or more specifically, by capital). In China, this is the duality of the party dictatorship and the state form: the former prevents the subjugation of the latter by private interest and thereby secures the class character of the state.
What is the relationship between democracy and the working class today?
If we understand democracy as the ruling class does, i.e., the midwit way, then democracy is nothing more than the veneer of popular sovereignty over an otherwise open dictatorship of finance capital. This fact is popularly understood by the working class of the United States and, absent the language of Marxism, is articulated in the form of libertarianism, 3-percenters, Constitutionalists, and MAGA. The immediateform of the recognition of democracy as a mask for the ruling class is the reassertion of Constitutional principles meant to safeguard the democratic rights and liberties of the people, who feel increasingly subject to mass surveillance, propaganda, and the futile nature of the two-party system. The people rebel against this façadeof democracy, which is increasingly theatrical, by assuming a whole litany of ideologies and associations from conspiracy theories to reactions, from religious movements to gangs. The duty of Marxists is notto scold the people for their spontaneous forms of consciousness and thereby hand them over to the class enemy. The duty of Marxists is to raise the banner of class struggle in each instance and “show them what they are really fighting for” (Marx),[11] going neither too far ahead nor lagging behind the masses, but establishing communion with them, acting as their greatest clarifiers and champions of their interests.
The working class already confronts the existing “liberal democracy” as inauthentic and farcical. In this respect, they are not wrong, but because the Left has failed to champion these basic democratic freedoms — all in the name of siding with the bourgeois state and its endless progressive NGOs against “fascist” MAGA, or by standing against the “settler-colonialist” Constitutional liberties — they have made themselves enemies of working people and hostile to their popular demands originating from the general crisis of capitalism — a crisis so acute that it has called into question the very foundations of bourgeois democracy and American statehood itself! And because these popular demands are not immediately articulated in a communistic form — that is, a form that clarifies the workers’ struggle for the working class — it instead takes the form of promoting political mascots like Trump who are imagined as gloriously defeating the “deep state” and “restoring” America, making it “Great Again.” But what is actually communicated by “Make America Great Again” is not a return to the past of Jim Crow and white supremacy, but is the Jacobite-like language of a working-class articulating the lossof bourgeois freedoms and the cultural-communal bonds of the “American Dream” coupled with increasingly harsh living conditions for the American working and downwardly-mobile middle classes. MAGA, and independent forms of similarly partisan politics, is an open question.The rational kernel of the MAGA working class, which already articulates a partisan politics beyond the Democratic and Republican establishments, is the proletarian class struggle; it takes the active intervention of communists to develop this kernel into a formidable working-class movement and ally it with other strata of the people outside the articulation of MAGA (e.g., with the ADOS[12] movement). It is only within such a popular-democratic pole that a communist politics can be born.
The American working class, given to its whims, gravitates towards a position that is vaguely popular-democratic but outside the confines of bourgeois liberal democracy, and specifically poised against and even defined by its opposition to the actual institutions of the state, from the DOJ to the Executive. It is partisan and establishes a counter-hegemonic discourse. The MAGA movement, which was subject to all sorts of political hucksters, was a nascent form of working-class political sovereignty outside the media-academia-NGO establishment of bourgeois liberal democracy — and for this sin, MAGA was blindly castigated as “fascist” by much of the Left, which judged it not based on its class character, but based on its ideological impurity. But isn’t it the high point of arrogance to assume, from a standpoint cultivated above and at the expense of the masses, that one’s academia-sanctified intersubjective “revolutionary consciousness” is more advanced than the actually existing working majority? Shouldn’t one first enter dialogue with this working majority, subjecting theory to the test of practice? Or is it easier to simply condemn workers for their “fascism” when your theory is so brittle it shatters against their crude discourse and politics, which dares to express itself beyond the “respectable,” “progressive” institutions elevated by Leftists to the status of social authority? In reality, this social authority is the whip of the bourgeoisie exercising itself through “progressive” institutions against objectively democratic and popular forces. This social authority is objectively the Left-wing of fascism.
Let’s take an example: the 2022 Canadian trucker protests, otherwise known as the Freedom Convoy. What was the Canadian Left’s reaction to this unprecedented form of working-class power in the 21st century? It was to condemn the strike as fascist, effectively siding with Trudeau’s unpopular liberal establishment against spontaneous working-class organization! Rather than going down to the striking truckers and disseminating class consciousness — earning the trust and faith of the people by standing with them against the bourgeois state, against the monopolists, no matter the level of consciousness of striking truckers — “communists” in Canada and the United States sneered at them for flying MAGA flags and articulating, in the only language available to them, the class struggle. This shameless act of cowardice and anti-popular malice not only destroyed what little credibility the “Communist” Party of Canada had left but actively helped drive the working majority into the arms of reaction. Just like the 2018 gilets jaunes of France, the 2022 railroad strike in the U.S., and the 2024 farmer protests across Europe, the Left-sided with the state and betrayed the working class, abusing Marxist phrases and dismissing striking workers as a petty-bourgeois reaction to the policy and narratives imposed by the ruling elite. (certainly, a gift from the ruling class of bankers and technocrats for the working majority). Had Bolsheviks behaved this way, refusing contact with the masses for their embrace of spontaneous forms of consciousness, there would have been no Bolshevik Revolution to speak of.
It is an obvious truth that communists must intervene and that the working class does not arrive at class consciousness spontaneously, but it is equally erroneous to imagine that the working class only achieves class consciousness when it has adopted the institutionalized form of Class StruggleTM as sanctified by academics at state-funded universities and championed by student radicals whose relationship with Marxism is akin to an edgy form of political LARP. Marxists are compelled to enter dialogue with the masses, for theory to be tested in practice and for practice to refine theory. Marxists do not derive their politics from some “social authority” downstream from the Ford dynasty or the Open Society Foundations, but from testing their mettle and intervening at the site of the class struggle as it actually exists.Such is the nature of the dialectic of masses and party and is even the very logic of party democracy. But the Western Left puts ideology before class analysis, and because of this it has become the willing tool for the establishment.
The relationship of democracy to the working class is thus: to raise the democratic form of working-class politics above the institutional form. Communists give recognition to the avenues expressing working class power wherever they spring up, at the town hall or on the internet, and do not side with the bourgeoisie’s constellation of NGOs and unelected social engineers who “safeguard” democracy against “populism,” i.e., the banner of democracy raised outside the anti-democratic institutions of “democratic” liberalism.
A well-meaning but misguided response to this would be to assume the third-period position of establishing a popular front with bourgeois democratic parties against the tide of fascism. In the spirit of the Spanish Republic and the establishment of popular democracies consisting of a coalition with democratic forces, we are told to side with the Democratic Party against the tide of fascism in the form of Trump. But this criticism misses the mark of what the Popular Front was about in the first place.
The Popular Front was, first of all, popular. It did not base itself in the conceit of existing political institutions and forms but safeguarded the gains of democracy against the encroachments by forces that expressly stand to annihilate all forms of popular sovereignty. It was popular and rested its basis not in the sanctity and “integrity” of the institutions of the Spanish Republic, which was not even a decade old, but in the broad masses of the people and their organization in grassroots popular assemblies and neighborhood committees. This is hardly the same as defending the 2024 Democratic Party, which is no less a fascist threat than Trump. It is the Democratic Party, which urges us to “vote against fascism,” that stands for the open terroristic dictatorship of finance capital. The Democratic Party has subdued civil and political society around the consensus of monopoly capital, controlling social and traditional forms of media, marshaling labor and capital to promote its own nihilistic “progressive” ideology, disciplining unions and social groups to the aesthetic and policy-goals of the bourgeoisie, silencing dissenting voices, and fanning the flames of military aggression against Russia and China — all in the name of defending democracy!
If we were to take the third-period policy and resurrect the Popular Front against fascism, it would not look like “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” nor would it look like voting for the Republican-controlled opposition. “Popular front” does not include allying with the CIA, the DOJ, or FBI. Popular front instead means that a communist party allies itself with all political organizations who can be unified on a general anti-establishment and anti-duopoly platform, from the People’s Party to the libertarians and stands against the oligarchy of Wall Street on concrete and not merely imaginative terms. Only by being the best and most capable fighters of the popular democratic opposition will the communists earn their place as the champions of democratic liberties in the United States. But they cannot secure this position as champions if they are perpetually cowed into supporting the fascistic Democratic Party “against the fascist threat.” This can only result from erroneously articulating the language of the workers’ struggle in the language of the institutionalized bourgeois parties; what must be had is a complete severance from the language, culture, and forms of organizing proper to the Democratic Party and the ruling establishment. This is why MAGA, which provided an alternative counter-hegemonic discourse bearing a partisan relation to the establishment, should be looked at as an opening for the re-articulation of communist politics in the 21st century.
Do you consider it necessary to eschew established forms of mass politics in favor of new forms in order to build a democratic movement? Or are current mass forms of politics adequate for a democratic society?
But what mass politics is there to speak of? If we are speaking of a socialist mass politics, we are speaking of nothing. None of the organizations present here have built vehicles of mass political participation. At best, the “Left” has created highly institutionalized academia-to-activism pipelines that direct the energy of students towards feel-good, cookie-cutter sloganeering and traffic disruptions. Still, besides that, there have been no gains made by communists in this country for decades (if ever at all!).
If we are speaking of revisiting the party form, this is an interesting question that warrants a longer and separate panel. In Infrared, this has been discussed internally for many years before joining with Midwestern Marx in launching the American Communist Party (ACP). The influences of Infrared’s view on the party largely come from the lived experiences of the Communist Party of China and the South African Economic Freedom Fighters, both of which have expanded the scope of party activity beyond what has been traditionally associated with party politics on the Left.
If there is one thing both parties share, it is that they are better integrated into the digital and social-media ecosystems of the 21st century. Twitter and Facebook are the newspapers of yesterday, and communists need to wholly adjust to the attention economy and promote their own socialist influencers, their own socialist social media, and their own socialist products and digital ecosystems that help to build new forms of post-capitalist association and organization. ACP, for its part, is realizing this today with its utilization of blockchain technology and its promotion of socialist entrepreneurs.
The reality is that communism, in the context of the attention economy, is a brand. In the same way that Lenin called socialism “state capitalism made to benefit the whole people,” we should regard socialism, in one sense, as a brand that subsumes all other brands. In bringing the socialization of labor and production to its highest conclusion, socialism is nothing but a monopoly or public trust, secured by the communist party, that develops production towards social and common ends rather than abstract and private ends. The particular form of these social ends is a question for socialist culture — which draws from the unique spirit of a historically constituted people and is something that, once discovered, must be both developed and marketed. The superiority of socialist organization cannot rest its laurels on “moral superiority,” but must be actually innovative and at the vanguard of economic, cultural, and political progress.
This is not calling for the aestheticization of politics by reducing socialism to a commodity or lifestyle. It is instead a recognition that socialism must be adapted to and, when possible, pioneer new digital and social infrastructures that provide the basis for new forms of socialist association and the promotion of social welfare (whether in the form of driving the reduction of working hours or the creation of a “People’s RedRock” to overcome the housing crisis). Socialism must fully utilize the unprecedented blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence to develop a form of socialist entrepreneurship that can build a dual power not just politically, but economically, socially, and culturally. Anyone who finds it distasteful that communist politics should utilize the most technologically sophisticated forms of social and economic organization — who think this is just “using capitalism” — is invited to defer to Lenin, who observed that the productive forces even in his day had become so advanced that communism must only win power and “lop off” the banking cartels: “Without big banks socialism would be impossible. The big banks are the ‘state apparatus’ which we need to bring about socialism, and which we take ready-made from capitalism; our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger . . .”[13]
Today, it might be said that the task of communists is not to be a Luddite and reject the technological infrastructure and attention economy developed by finance capital but to take full advantage of it, “lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus” and repurpose it towards socialistic ends. Under the control of a communist party, such a dual power — which I stress must also be economic, social, and cultural, owing to the totalistic nature of the modern state and its absorption of civil society — would directly form the basis of a communist society, just like the soviets of workers, soldiers, and peasant deputies of Russia.
So the question of mass politics is nuanced. Certainly, the mass politics of German Social Democracy is gone forever, while it is clear the Marxist-Leninist, Bolshevik Party form is both alive and thriving in China. This party form has proven itself capable of adapting to the new era of global integration and is leading the way through the new revolutions of the forces and relations of production. But even this party form, having entered a new era of the development of the productive forces, remains in uncharted territory. Lessons should be drawn from the experience of socialism with Chinese characteristics and integrated into the experience of Marxist-Leninists in the West.
How is democracy related to the possibility of overcoming capital?
Democracy is unrelated to the overcoming of capital except by way of its transformation into socialism, which in turn makes the democratic form redundant. Without the authority of proletarian dictatorship — which secures sovereign ownership of the means of production — democracy is little more than the cover for rapacious oligarchy, which drops all pretenses to democratic rule as it exposes itself as the political form of a class dictatorship. On its own, the liberal democracies are exterminating all vestiges of democracy where it still exists. The constitutions of the bourgeois republics are torn up and the rights of the people are abrogated in the name of national security; the life and death of whole generations is at the whim of a globalized monopoly capitalist class and the world is at the precipice of nuclear war. The rights to speech and association, to privacy and publication — even to economic life, which is increasingly mediated by politicized loans and grants — are increasingly stripped away as the financial oligarchy finds itself resisting the burgeoning multipolar world.
In this sense, the overcoming of the dictatorship of capital is related to the struggle for democracy in the communists’ defense and championing of the rights of the people while simultaneously securing those rights in a substantive, i.e., socialistic, way. For there to be any real freedoms at all, or for there to even be a “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the imagined democratic utopia of the Founders, there must be proletarian dictatorship exercised against the monopoly capitalists. Absent this, there can only be the prostitution of the economy and social relations to the plundering and dominance of the globalized ruling class.
Addendum: Marx on democracy
“Democracy is the truth of monarchy, monarchy is not the truth of democracy.”[14] — Democracy can be understood in terms of itself, whereas monarchy cannot — democracy has no “Big Other” — democracy is the generic constitution, the content and form of a people — democracy “starts with man and makes the state objectified man” — In democracy, the political state disappears.
Democracy: the formal principle (people-rule) is the material content (people-rule). Monarchy: appeal to something external to that over which one rules. Democracy is man for-himself. But this democratic form of representation is still mediated — only by the form of the demos, i.e., its civilizational reality. |P
[1] Video of the panel is available at <https://youtu.be/bQxb86UTmCo>.
[2] V. I. Lenin, “Class Society and the State,” in State and Revolution (1917), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/>.
[3] See Lenin, “The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State,” in State and Revolution.
[4] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Proletarians and Communists,” in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm>, quoted by Lenin in “The Experience of 1848–51,” in State and Revolution.
[5] A phrase used to refer to Chinese economic reform in the late-20th century under guidance from Deng Xiaoping.
[6] [Ancient Greek] The many; the people. In modern usage it connotes the masses, the less powerful, etc.
[7] Friedrich Engels, “Barbarism and Civilization,” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/>.
[8] Environmental, social, and governance.
[9] Karl Marx, “The Constitution,” in “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/>.
[10] Aleksei Brobinsky was a monarchist chastised by Lenin in “On the National Pride of the Great Russians” (1914). Pavel Milyukov founded the Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets). Alexander Kerensky, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the SRs), led the Russian Provisional Government and the Russian Republic from July to November 1917.
[11] See Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing” (1844), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 15.
[12] American descendants of slavery.
[13] V. I. Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” (1917), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm>.
[14] Marx, “The Constitution.”
