Marxisms in the 21st Century. John Saul
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critique, globalisation, historical lessons and questions of agency, as well as lineages of thought from a range of anti-capitalist traditions, must feature in our engagements with Marxism for the complex age in which we live.
Note
1 Like all political parties, the SACP has varying factions vying for power. The shifts in ideological focus partly reflect which faction has come to the fore at any given time.
References
Callinicos, A. 1999. Social Theory: A Historical Introduction. New York: New York University Press.
Glaser, D. and Walker, D. 2010. Twentieth Century Marxism: A Global Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
Hobsbawm, E. 2011. How to Change the World: Tales in Marx and Marxism. London: Little, Brown and Company.
Renton, D. 2004. Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times. London and New York: Zed Books.
SACP (South African Communist Party). 2012. ‘Political Report to the 13th Congress’. Report presented to the 13th Congress of the South African Communist Party, 11–15 July.
Therborn, G. 2008. From Marxism to Post-Marxism. London: Verso.
Chapter 1
Marxism and Democracy: Liberal, Vanguard or Direct?
Michelle Williams
One of the most contentious and neglected issues in Marxism is the content, role and place of democracy in transformative visions and practices. For some, Marxism is antithetical to democracy; for others, vanguard democracy represents the pinnacle of Marxism, and still others pay little attention to democracy at all. Marxism has gone through different phases, each phase with its unique social base and foundational ideas. At the time of the Second and Third Internationals, Marxism’s social base was largely in working-class movements and parties, but shifted from the 1950s onwards to intellectuals overwhelmingly located in universities. This growth of and engagement with Marxism among intellectuals was in part due to the phenomenal growth and influence of university education (Hobsbawm 2011: 360). After reaching the peak of its influence in the academy during the 1970s, Marxism weakened through the course of the 1990s. In the late 1990s, however, a renewed interest in Marxism emerged among multi-class movements, middle-and working-class activists and intellectuals. These diverse social strata do not necessarily converge in their understandings of history, or their views of the causes and consequences of the dynamics of capitalism, but rather, share in their belief that ‘another world is possible’.
This is the context within which I focus this chapter on literature – both liberal and Marxist – that has explicitly engaged the issue of democracy.1 Because Marxist influence over the last half-century has largely emanated from intellectuals located within universities, I focus on the various ways in which liberal and Marxist scholars have placed democracy against and within Marxism. While democracy is a contested concept that often incorporates very different notions of social change and control, with various actors and processes, twentieth-century liberals and Marxists tended to focus on representative and vanguard democracy respectively, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy.2 Bertrand Russell (1946: 14) pithily captured the central distinction: the Western understanding of democracy ‘is that it consists in the rule of the majority; the Russian view is that it consists in the interests of the majority’. Neither tradition emphasised government by the people. The bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy severely limited the debate on democracy in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, political movements are attempting to transcend this dichotomous view of democracy and have placed direct and participatory democracy at the centre of alternative, emancipatory visions of the future through meaningful deliberation and participation in political and economic life by ordinary citizens.3
Liberal Critiques of Marxist-Inspired Soviet Communism
In this section, the focus is on scholarship that has equated Marxism with twentieth-century ‘communism’ as this literature problematises the role of democracy in the communist movement and juxtaposes authoritarianism with representative democracy. Historically, Marxists did not focus their gaze on the importance of direct democracy,4 content with either vanguard notions of democracy led by the Party together with the advanced working class or with the representative democracy of the Eurocommunists and social democrats. This neglect of the importance of direct democracy and its relation to representative democracy was exacerbated by the liberal tradition’s collapsing of Marxism with authoritarianism and juxtaposing this with representative democracy as the only viable alternative.
There is a vast literature on Marxism that has been dominated by studies delving into the totalitarian and undemocratic nature of communism (for example, the work of Gabriel A. Almond, Hannah Arendt, Fernando Claudin, Joseph Schumpeter, Philip Selznick and Jacob Talmon). This image of Marxism as totalitarian, influenced by the larger political milieu of cold-war politics, was uniform in liberal literature on communism, which was concerned with demonstrating the Party’s absolute control over the ‘masses’ (see, for example, the work of Almond, Selznick and Talmon) and continues to influence scholarship, as is evident in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) which posits market capitalism and representative democracy as the pinnacle of human history. Similarly, Stéphane Courtois et al.’s Black Book of Communism (1999) concludes that communism is morally similar to Nazism, implicitly positing representative democracy as the only morally acceptable alternative. This anti-Marxist position also influenced the apartheid state, which framed the liberation struggle as part of the ‘rooi gevaar’ (red danger) coming out of the Soviet Union and influencing the South African liberation movement. The roots of this cold-war tradition hark back to the 1950s.
Many scholars in the mid-twentieth century were heavily informed by the liberal political tradition, taking representative democracy to be the one and only alternative to totalitarian communism (for example, Almond, Schumpeter, Selznick and Talmon). This tradition referred to vanguard democracy as totalitarian because of the way in which the Party (ostensibly made up of the advanced working class and revolutionary activists) enjoyed absolute power in the name of working class majoritarianism (see for example, Selznick 1952). This link between vanguard democracy and authoritarianism had merit, as Joseph Femia’s Marxism and Democracy (1993) shows how vanguard notions of democracy ultimately lead to absolute elite control in which individual voices are silenced.
Underpinning this allegiance to the liberal tradition was a critique of the dangers inherent in popular participation in politics. With the rise of fascism and the post-World War I establishment of totalitarian regimes (ostensibly based on mass participation), there was a tendency to link ‘participation’ with the concept of totalitarianism (Pateman [1970] 1999: 2). Thus the liberal tradition conflated totalitarianism with communism, participatory democracy and authoritarianism. In response, by the middle of the century, scholars in the liberal political tradition had cast grave doubts on popular participation in politics. In South Africa this resonated with apartheid policies that sought to exclude the majority from politics and embrace a narrow representative democracy for the white minority. In effect, what the ascendance of the liberal political tradition represented was a shift from a democratic theory centred on participation of ‘the people’ to a democratic theory based on the participation of an elite minority (104).
For many liberal scholars the intellectual roots of this shift could be traced back to Schumpeter’s