Welfare State and Democracy in Crisis

Reforming the European Model

Theodore Pelagidis, Louka Katseli, John Milios

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351788397
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

This title was first published in 2001. Investigating the consequences of restrictive austerity policies and the downsizing of the welfare state this edited collection reflects on possible ways out by analyzing economic developments, social conflicts, legal forms and the prevailing directions of economic policy. According to official figures, around 9.5 per cent of the working population of the European Union is unemployed. Fifteen million European citizens are officially looking for work. In other countries such as the US, the increasing wage inequality has marginalized large parts of the population. The precipitous rise in unemployment (mainly in Europe) and income inequality (mainly in the USA) as well as the weakening of democratic and welfare institutions in almost every developed nation have caused huge social and political problems in recent years.

PART B

CONCEPTS AND LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

5 Marxian Theory as a Critique of Democracy

RICHARD D. WOLFF

Marxism and Democracy

The relationship between democracy and Marxism reveals a sequence of reversals. Sometimes Marxism has projected itself as the full completion of democracy, at other times as one of its harsher critics. Sometimes Marxists dispute one another’s credentials as such based on their commitments to democracy (or lack thereof). At other times Marxists attack democrats as enemies of transitions to socialism or communism (often by attaching adjectives like bourgeois or petty-bourgeois to the democracy they advocate). While there have always been some proponents of all these positions, they oscillate in terms of which has prevailed among Marxists. In the recent words of one Marx scholar, “The world-wide controversy over Marx’s legacy today turns largely on its ambiguous relation to democracy…” (Meister 1990, 99).

Marx punctuated his personal passage from radical democrat to communist by strong critiques of the politics of those he often called democrats (Riazanov 1973, 88ff). Later Marxists have differed in their attitudes toward democracy and democrats. Some have embraced democracy theoretically and democrats as political allies. Other Marxists have rejected democracy and democrats as elements of a movement that basically deflects workers from class revolutionary projects. Where Marx changed his position (mostly in one direction) across his lifetime, among Marxists ever since the movement has been more an oscillation between opposing positions as variants of one or the other gain sway over the majority. Most recently, the collapse of Eastern European socialism accelerated the post-1945 shift of Marxists more toward enthusiastic embrace of democracy and democrats – expressed, for example, in the view that insufficient democracy caused that collapse (Kotz 1997).

The particular Marxist position I want to advance here aims to break out of these oscillations on the grounds that both polar positions are inadequate.¹ I thus do not argue for yet another reversal, for Marxists to distance themselves from democracy and democrats as they have done in the past. Rather, Marxists should draw clear lines of demarcation between the kind of democracy they affirm and the very different kinds typically affirmed by most democrats today (as in the past). Such lines entail issues of urgent importance for Marxism’s future, theoretical and practical.

Marxism’s distinctive approach (and, hence, contribution) to democracy focuses on the objects of democratic decision-making: the “what” of democracy’s concerns. This alone distinguishes it from many other approaches to democracy. Many of the latter stress, for example, the “how” of democracy: for example, can it be indirect and representative or must it be direct and immediate? The “how” democrats debate such alternatives and sometimes denounce each other as not genuine democrats because of their positions on them. Other democrats debate the “who” of democracy: must it include all or can only some members of the community participate in a democracy? If it is the latter, debate focuses on what will determine eligibilities: age, gender, race, property, education, and so on. While Marxists have engaged these debates, Marxism’s distinctive contribution to democracy as a concept and as a social movement does not, in my view, lie in propositions regarding the “how” and “who” of democracy.

Marxism focuses primarily on what is to be decided democratically. However, before describing Marxism’s distinctive view on the “what,” I need to acknowledge that Marxism is, of course, not the only approach to democracy concerned with the “what.” Implicitly or explicitly, all approaches take a position on what is to be decided democratically within any community. The reason for this lies in the inescapable limits of human communities confronting the complexity of their own social organizations.

The potential objects of decision-making in any community comprise an infinite list: spatial location, population growth, kinship systems, what to produce, how to distribute products, how to organize political life, class structures, cultural expressions, and so on. Any decision-making system, whether democratic or not (by any definition), always selects from the infinity of potential objects those few that become its actual objects across any particular historical epoch. Marxism’s distinctive contribution to its epochs’ debates over democracy concerns what should be included among the actual objects of democratic decision-making and why.

Democracy and Class

At all times, while some potential objects become actual objects of decision-making in any society, others remain merely potential. For example, contemporary feminists who are also democrats stress that their contribution (and commitment) to democracy prioritizes gender relations as an object of democratic decision. Anti-racists who are also democrats likewise focus on making race relations into actual objects of democratic decision-making. Such feminists and anti-racists link their commitments to democracy (whatever their particular views on the how and who) inextricably to the what of democratic decision making. They refuse to continue to allow gender and race relations to remain potential but not actualized objects of such decision making.

The Marxist position I am arguing for takes a parallel position toward democracy, but its focus is on class. The point is to make class and class change into actual objects of democratic decision making. What Marxism contributes to the debates over democracy is, first and foremost, the demand and argument for placing class structures as such on the list of objects to be decided by democratic decision making. Marxist democrats refuse to embrace democratic movements that keep class structures off that list.

To say that Marxism’s contribution to democracy inserts class on its agenda of objects for decision requires that the meaning of class be specified. This is because Marxism has a long, contentious history of coexisting multiple, different, and often incompatible concepts of class in its theory and its practice. Having documented these in detail elsewhere, so I will be brief here (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987). The concept of class I mean here is one not defined by reference to property ownership, nor to the distribution of power in society, nor to the consciousness of particular groups of people. It is rather defined in terms of surplus labor: more specifically in terms of the three social processes of (i) producing, (ii) appropriating, and (iii) distributing surplus labor or its products.

Property concepts of class define it as persons in any society grouped according to how much wealth each group owns vis-a-vis the wealth of other groups. Rich confront poor, propertied the propertyless, and so on. In contrast, power concepts of class group members of society according to how much authority or power they wield vis-a-vis other groups: powerful vs. powerless, ruling versus ruled, and so on. Consciousness concepts stress that classes arise only if and when a sub-group within a society (e.g. a “class in itself”) becomes conscious of itself as such a distinct sub-group (e.g., a “class for itself”). These different concepts need not be compatible, nor do they reduce to one another. Which class concept an analyst uses to think about society will shape what conclusions he/she reaches. People with wealth may not have power nor consciousness; people wielding power may not have wealth; people with consciousness may lack wealth or power, and so on.²

Class by one definition is not so by another. Moreover, the property, power, and consciousness concepts of class (and the social analyses and political programs based upon them) long predate Marx. For thousands of years in many parts of the world, people have made sense of their social circumstances in terms of class defined as property, power, and/or consciousness. They developed programs for social change focused on altering the distributions of property and/or power and/or changing consciousness. While Marx clearly knew of, sympathized with, and made use of many of those analyses and programs, he also offered a new and different concept of class and a correspondingly unique social analysis and project for class transformation.

Class and Surplus Labor

Marx’s distinctive contribution focused attention on a set of three social processes others had overlooked, namely the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor.³

He argued that all societies display a sub-group of their populations engaged in transforming nature by their labor. Part of the produce of this labor is consumed by these laborers: this is the “necessary product” produced by the portion of their labor that is likewise “necessary.” However, in all societies these laborers also produce more than the necessary product (they do more than the necessary labor). This Marxist “more” has come to be known, in its English translation, as “surplus”.⁴

Thus all societies display the production of some quantity of surplus product, the fruit of surplus labor. Moreover, all societies also display a process of appropriating that surplus product, some mechanism sanctioned by society whereby some members receive the surplus as it is produced. Lastly, all societies display a particular distribution of the surplus product from its appropriators to others in the society, some socially sanctioned apportionment of the surplus. The combination of the three class processes – production, appropriation, and distribution of the surplus – Marx called a class structure.

Marx’s analysis – developed across the three volumes of Capital – argued that any society’s history depended in significant ways on the class structures interacting within it. Capitalism, he showed, was but one particular way to organize a class structure (feudal, communist, slave, and ancient are among the other kinds of class structures he discussed). Since capitalism was, in his mind, the prevalent (but hardly the only) class structure in modern European society, he aimed to show his contemporaries that the social injustices of Europe were products in part of the particularly capitalist class structure (the capitalist organization of surplus labor) prevalent there. In other words, his work aimed to overcome the failure of other analysts – and especially of the social critics and radicals he saw as his allies – to understand the three class processes and to include their explicit transformation on their agendas for social change.

From this perspective, it follows that what Marxists want within a democratic movement now is a commitment to include the class structures of society – in the surplus labor sense – among the actual objects of the democratic decision making which is that movement’s goal. This means that when a proposed democracy’s goals are limited to the distribution of social wealth and/or the distribution of political power and/or the organization of popular consciousness, that does not accommodate the Marxist goal specified above.⁵ For example, democratic movements which commit to making state versus private ownership of productive assets an object of democratic decision making do not thereby become Marxist or include Marxism, since they make no reference to the way in which surplus labor is to be organized. Neither do movements committed to making the social distribution of political power (e.g., suffrage) or the cultural formations of consciousness (e.g., education) into such actual objects. Only insofar as a democratic movement commits to including the class structures of a society – the particular ways in which surplus labor is organized – among the actual objects of democratic decision making does it accept what is here called the distinctive Marxist contribution to the democratic project.

Contradictions

Like feminists and anti-racists, Marxists face the following possible contradiction. A particular democratic movement may focus on the hows and whos of democracy and only upon actual objects of democratic decision-making other than what feminists, anti-racists, and Marxists prioritize as such objects. What then is to be done? If the society in which this democratic movement arises is sexist and racist, it will be understood that feminists and anti-racists will voice strong criticisms of the democracy proposed by such a movement! They may plausibly claim that such a democratic movement secures and even strengthens sexism and racism by deflecting its activists’ thought and action away from those injustices. They may declare such a movement to be among their enemies politically. Yet this would hardly amount to any blanket, totalizing opposition to democracy as an ideal or to its concretization in particular systems of how democracy is organized (direct versus indirect) or who shares democratic activity (all or some) and so on. It would an opposition over the what of democracy, an opposition over what are included versus excluded among the infinite potential objects of democratic decision making.

The Marxist position advanced here is parallel. When Marx denounced petty-bourgeois democratic movements, I think he meant to specify not their notions of direct or inclusive democratic decision making, but rather their complicity in keeping the object of class in its surplus labor sense off the popular agenda for social change (Marx 1933, 45-47). Such movements’ foci on suffrage, empowerment, direct elections, recalls and referenda struck him as crucially inadequate precisely because they colluded in the efforts of exploiting classes to repress alternative organizations of surplus labor as an issue for debate and action for social change. When Marxists focus on class to undo that repression, they face a serious contradiction when confronted by a movement for democracy that is complicit – intentionally or not, knowingly or not – with that repression.

Under those circumstances, Marxists may do what feminists and antiracists have done. Marxists too may criticize such democratic movements and their definitions and visions of democracy even to the point of declaring them to be political enemies.

Marx did that in his time. I think it is appropriate again, adjusted for changed circumstances, in our time.

The USSR, in the early years after 1917, involved masses of people in democratic decision making who had previously been excluded from it. The Bolsheviks altered the how and who of democracy in radical ways stunningly exemplary for their time and ours. They also altered the what of their democratized decision making: property distribution, power distribution, cultural expression and much else were made actual objects of democratic decision making for a while. Moreover, the tragic history of how that democracy was soon narrowed, curtailed, and largely abolished – associated with the name of Stalin – is too well known to need repetition here. But a distinctively Marxist critical history of Soviet democracy constructs a different narrative.

Neither in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution nor later under Stalin (or Khrushchev or Gorbachev or anybody else) did the Soviet leadership make the actual organization of surplus labor in industry into an explicit object of decision making, democratic or otherwise (Resnick and Wolff 1994). A communist class structure would have entailed that the industrial laborers who produce the surplus collectively appropriate and distribute their own surplus. As Marx argued, that would be the end of exploitation, defined as the organization of surplus labor such that those who produce it do not themselves appropriate it.

Especially given the Marxist thinking and commitments of the Soviet leadership and many of its activists, it might have been expected that among the explicit objects of democratic decision making after the revolution there would appear the questions of whether and how to move beyond the capitalist class structures of the industries inherited from Russia.

In surplus labor terms, that would have meant debating and deciding on whether to reorganize factories such that the laborers within them would collectively appropriate and distribute their own surpluses. That was not done. Nor was it done later after Stalin had undermined many of the earlier experiments in democracy. The class issue was never on the democrats’ nor anyone else’s agendas for industrial change in the USSR.⁶

Instead, it was declared that changing industrial property from private to state ownership, subordinating free markets to state economic planning, subordinating state power to a workers’ political party, universalizing access to medical care, education, and housing, developing workers’ culture and consciousness, etc. were all themselves “class changes.” Where Lenin (1961, 696) had had the courage to call the early USSR “state capitalism,” his successors repressed the issue of class in terms of surplus labor by simply declaring that capitalism (and exploitative class relations) had been vanquished and replaced by socialism. That achievement and the progress toward communism were grounds for declaring that discussion or action on the social organization of surplus labor inside the USSR was unnecessary, irrelevant, or evidence of hostility to the USSR. Communism came increasingly to be characterized as the goal of the USSR and defined in terms of production according to ability and distribution according to need. This formulation, too, served further to obscure the issue of the social organization of surplus labor.

Marxism, Class, and Democracy

For class to become an actual object of democratic decision making would mean that the range of alternative social organizations of surplus labor would have to be discussed, debated, and chosen among. The strengths and weaknesses of past and present historical experiences with all of them would have to become matters of historical and theor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• INTRODUCTION
• PART A: GLOBALIZATION AND DEMOCRACY
• PART B: CONCEPTS AND LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY
• PART C: THE MARKET CONFRONTING WELFARE AND DEMOCRATIC POLICIES
• PART D: THE END OF THE WELFARE STATE IN EUROPE?
• PART E: LEGAL AND POLITICAL ASPECTS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: A DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT