Rethinking Democracy

Socialist Register 2018

Leo Panitch, Greg Albo

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781583676721
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Comunismo, post-comunismo e socialismo

For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy? While this volume seeks a reappraisal of existing liberal democracy today, its main goal is to help lay the foundation for new visions and practices in developing a real socialist democracy. Amid the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism today, the responsibility to sort out the relationship between socialism and democracy has never been greater. No revival of socialist politics in the twenty-first century can occur without founding new democratic institutions and practices.

ORGANIZED FOR DEMOCRACY? LEFT CHALLENGES INSIDE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

ADAM HILTON

Socialists make their own history, but not under conditions they choose. American socialists were starkly reminded of how the nightmarish weight of the past continues to haunt the present during the 2016 presidential nomination contest between independent, democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On the one hand, Sanders’ decision to forego a third party campaign and run as a Democrat provided him with a national audience, an opportunity to introduce democratic socialism to a new generation, and a mass-based fundraising vehicle that collected millions in small donations. On the other hand, running as a Democrat against the standard bearer of the party establishment seemed almost to guarantee that he would lose. And while he came closer than many expected, the outcome only appeared to confirm that when it comes to the Democratic Party, the left simply cannot win.

Unlike all other advanced capitalist democracies, the United States never produced a labour-based political party. As labour and social democratic parties emerged elsewhere during the late nineteenth century, American trade unionists debated whether or not to launch an independent party or join an existing coalition, ultimately opting for a nonpartisan strategy of ‘pure and simple unionism’ for fear of violent repression, partisan conflict in the union rank and file, and the off-putting sectarianism of many American socialists.¹ Almost a half-century later, amidst the Great Depression, the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal successfully integrated insurgent farmer and labour groups, after which independent third-party vote shares in US elections declined and never recovered.² Since the 1930s, state laws regulating political parties have served to strengthen the two-party duopoly, legislating comparatively high thresholds for third party ballot access.³

The familiar conundrum of the American left in party politics was rehashed in a flurry of post-Sanders assessments. Many on the left were quick to disabuse Sanders supporters of misplacing their hope in a lost cause. While the Sanders campaign had improved the standing of democratic socialism as a legitimate political position in the US, a ‘capitalist party’ like the Democrats was nevertheless beholden to wealthy donors and corporate lobbyists, having moved irretrievably from its New Deal-Great Society traditions to embrace neoliberalism with a human face.⁴

This essay examines the relationship between the left and the Democrats by playing on the double meaning of the term ‘challenges’ employed in its title. It seeks to undertake a strategic assessment of the ‘challenges’ facing left political power in the Democratic Party by drawing insights from the mixed results of various ‘challenges’ the left has presented inside the party historically. That strategic assessment must be based, I argue, on an institutional understanding of the Democratic Party as an organization, requiring the development of more sophisticated analytic tools than those typically employed by Marxists and others on the left. The fundamental point to be drawn from this analysis is that while a robust, well-organized left can conceivably exercise power inside the Democratic Party, that power is unlikely to serve socialist ends of building the collective power of the working class due to the way the party is organized. Past efforts to transform the party organization into a party of different type, culminating in the New Politics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrate the difficultly of overcoming this problem. Coupled with the unlikelihood of producing the labour-based third party that has eluded the American left for well over a century, the analysis presented here suggests that rather than dismissing the Democrats and pinning our hopes on a third party, the American left must rethink which kinds of goals can be accomplished in the realm of American party politics, and which cannot. The first step is to come to terms with the nature of American political parties, and specifically, the Democratic Party.

WHAT KIND OF ORGANIZATION IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY?

A ‘bourgeois’ party?

When Marxists are asked about the nature of the Democratic Party, it is often said that the party is a ‘bourgeois party’. While varying shades of this view are widely held, it is more often used in the pub or at a political meeting than put down and defended in print. And while it makes for good agitprop, its analytic foundations are more problematic.

The concept of ‘bourgeois party’ can be developed in two different ways: one, as an analogy with the bourgeois state; the other, as an analogy with a working-class party – neither of which is very satisfying. On the one hand, stretching from the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin to the 1970s debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas, the state in capitalism is said to be a capitalist state due to its structural dependence on privately controlled capital accumulation for its own reproduction. This structural dependence exerts pressure on state actors to conduct public policy in ways that promote investor confidence. It may well be true that government officeholders hail from the same social class as investors, attended the same elite schools, or were trained by their economics professors to think like homo economicus. But even if these contingent qualities of state actors are assumed away – replaced, say, by leftist members of working-class parties – the state’s structural location in the political economy would still exert pressure on policymakers to govern on behalf of capital.

Just as in the state debate itself, several causal mechanisms have been suggested to be at work in making a party bourgeois. Continuing the power structure approach of C. Wright Mills, G. William Domhoff, for instance, places his emphasis on the qualities of the personnel of the party leadership and its social roots within the capitalist class.⁵ In contrast, Lance Selfa suggests that the connections linking the party to capital ‘are not ideological’ in nature.⁶ Rather, the bourgeois nature of the party is due to the personnel’s concern with ‘the staffing of the government but not with altering the state’.⁷ In addition, Thomas Ferguson’s ‘investment theory of political parties’ sees the major American parties as blocs of wealthy investors rather than coalitions of voters or interest groups.⁸ To secure the funds necessary for electoral success, party officials and candidates must orient their appeals to large donors found among the nation’s corporate elite, who expect to reap returns on their investments in the form of favourable public policy.

These perspectives draw valuable connections between political and corporate elites, who, in the US especially, are often the same people. However, these explanations tend to muddle rather than distinguish what is contingent and therefore changeable from what is structural and enduring. The difference is important to consider, not only because it helps us understand the past, but because it holds implications for strategy in the present. To take Ferguson as an example of a structural perspective, it is at times rather ambiguous if a party’s policy agenda reflects the interests of its major investors in a direct, unmediated sense, or if investors’ preferences themselves reflect their strategic accommodation with competing partisan groups’ interests and demands.⁹ While it is undeniably important how parties raise their resources, investors’ preferences may be shaped as much by the class struggle inside the party, which determines what they can achieve politically, as by their specific position in the political economy alone. Adjudicating this ambiguity requires opening the black box of the bourgeois party and paying adequate attention to the determinants of the intraparty balance of forces, such as its institutional structure, its mechanisms of governance, and the organization of other non-bourgeois forces inside it.

This brings us to the other way of conceiving a bourgeois party, drawn in contrast to a working-class party. For most Marxists, working-class parties are those that ‘transform the proletariat into a class’ by building the collective capacities of working people to think, organize and act as a cohesive social force, and also translate that power into votes, and votes into seats in government. Working-class parties may develop robust subcultures of proletarian community life or link more indirectly to trade union federations. But in any and all cases, working-class parties enjoy solid electoral support from a majority of working-class voters.

From this perspective, the Democratic Party is something less than a working-class party but more than its bourgeois counterpart. Even though, as will be developed below, Democratic Party organs have rarely served as centres of community life, the party apparatus did develop structural links with trade unions in most large industrial states in the 1930s as well as at the national level in the process of presidential nomination and campaigning. In some states, such as Michigan, these institutional linkages of elite brokerage fused into tightly integrated party-union relationships. In other states, through the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ political action committee (CIO-PAC) and, later, the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE), organized labour engaged in voter registration, door-to-door canvassing, literature distribution and get-out-the-vote drives for unionists and non-unionists alike. In terms of the electorate, the Democratic Party had already become home to most low-income and poor voters prior to the New Deal, which only deepened the trend. Contrary to oft-heard claims concerning reactionary white workers voting for Republicans since the time of Nixon, patterns of voting behaviour between low and high-income white voters have continued to diverge since the late 1970s, as those in the bottom third of the income distribution have cast ballots for Democratic presidential candidates at significantly higher rates than affluent whites.¹⁰ Moreover, while never approximating European social democracy, Democratic presidents have a fairly consistent pattern of governance that, on average, has produced less income inequality than during Republican administrations.¹¹

None of this is to suggest that the Democratic Party transforms working-class voters into a class. It does not, and, as I will argue below, it probably cannot. (Nor should it be omitted that more straightforwardly working-class parties experience difficulty doing this too.) But the organized presence of workers in the party, whether through their trade unions or as voters, does have important consequences. Conceptually, then, the notion of a ‘bourgeois party’ fails to bring sufficient analytic clarity to the nature of power in the Democratic Party, leaving its allegedly capitalist foundations underdetermined. If it stems from its personnel, the personnel can be changed. If it is a matter of money, there appear to be conditions under which this can be mitigated. What is most problematic is the concept’s tendency to cut off more probing questions concerning how ruling parties actually work and how the left should strategically orient itself in response. Given the obstacles to a viable third party in the United States, such questions are imperative.

Openness without entry: The puzzle of Democratic Party organization

Going beyond simplistic labels requires a direct engagement with the organizational structure of the Democratic Party and the strategic options it presents. The overall pattern of American party development has been shaped by the institutional environment in which the parties are embedded. US presidentialism, the separation of executive and legislative powers, and the federal division between national and subnational levels of government have all stamped American parties with distinctive and enduring features. This is especially so because political parties in the US have no constitutionally prescribed form or rules. The federal Constitution makes no mention of them, and some of its most important framers denounced the ‘mischief of factions’ thought to act as ‘sores on the body politic’.¹² Nevertheless, sharpening disputes within the fi...