Marx and The Democratic Republic

In my blurb for this presentation, I wrote the following: 

Socialism is the period of workers’ political rule during the transition from a class society (capitalism) to a classless society (communism). A radical republican and keen observer of the labor movement, including the events of the Paris Commune, Marx explained why this necessary period of workers’ political rule would take the form of a social republic. In short, Marx understood socialism as the fullest expression of democracy.

This statement makes more than one claim regarding “what did Marx mean by socialism?” First, that socialism is a transition period between capitalism and communism. I’m not going to talk about this point. Second, this transition period is necessary and involves working-class political power. I’m also not going to talk about this point. What I am going to talk about is the fact that Marx was a radical republic and observer of the Paris Commune, and that these reasons are part of why he understood socialism as an eminently democratic workers' state; specifically, as a social or democratic republic. The fact that Marx also used ‘red’ or ‘workers’ republic to describe the political form of working-class rule, and the fact that all of these terms (social, democratic, workers, red) are synonyms for Marx, will only prove my point about the necessity of democracy to Marx’s concept of socialism. As I’ll explain, what matters is not so much the phrase but the depth (or quantity) that democracy penetrates all aspects of the workers’ state. 

Two caveats before I begin. 

First caveat: If I stick to more or less primary sources, there is no phrase from Marx or any of his contemporaries or direct predecessors that goes something like “the social republic is the political form of working-class rule during the transition to communism.” What does exist, as I’ll show, are many phrases that go something like “the Paris Commune is the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” My point is that the social republic and the Paris Commune are synonymous (the Paris Commune was a social republic) and that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the political form of working-class rule during the transition to communism” are synonymous (the dictatorship of the proletariat is workers’ political rule). 

Second caveat: I feel more comfortable saying Marx’s contribution to the socialist movement is the emphasis on democracy than I do saying Marx’s socialism is democratic. Marx was a populariser of the workers’ struggle and critic of the existing socialist theories; a critic always - and this cannot be stressed enough - for the sake of helping the movement gain clarity and move forward. Marx saw how capitalism creates the material conditions and social relations necessary to destroy itself and give birth to a classless society. He saw that the workers - when organized and guided by theory - were not helpless victims of capitalism but rather its gravediggers. In short, Marx didn’t have “a socialism.” Rather, he identified how the workers’ struggle could be victorious and why it must win if humanity was to actually begin history. 

But back to the topic at hand. I’ll first explain Marx’s radical republicans, then describe the lessons Marx took from the Paris Commune, and then locate the “workers’ political rule means a social republic” idea in Freidrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Rosa Luxemburg. 

Marx as Radical Republican 

Marx began his political career as a radical democrat - a position he would never renounce but only develop to its ultimate end as communism. As a young journalist, he fought for the freedom of speech and decried the beatings of peasants who had collected wood that was previously held in common but was now private property. He championed the English Chartists as the first organized workers’ party and the left Chartists' demand for political power. The Chartists slogan “peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must '' stuck in his mind. He developed a critique of bourgeois political economy and noticed the first workers’ strikes of the 1840s. 

Marx’s growing distrust of the state - he was one of many who observed the 19th-century Prussian monarchy and wondered how anyone might consider it ideal - contributed to his break with the theory of Friedrich Hegel. Marx realized that the state and its bureaucracy tended to dominate society instead of society dominating the state. Later, Marx would clarify his abstractions - “the state” and “society” - by developing an analysis of class relations in different periods of history. 

Marx picked up radical republicanism from sources that included the works of Niccolo Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Paul Marat, as well as various demands made by the Sans Culottes of the French Revolution and sections of the Anti-Federalists of the early United States.

Radical republicanism demanded a specific type of state structure that would include the following: 

 A system of popular deligacy over representative governments: that is, representatives should be elected to short terms by universal direct suffrage (i.e. one person one vote) and should be immediately recallable and by law and accountable to the electorate. 

A unicameral legislature: that is, the legislative and executive as one “active” body, making laws and executing them. 

Popular control of state organs: that is, the standing army must be abolished in favor of a citizens militia, and all public officials to be elected and recallable.

In short, the simpler the government, the easier it is for the people to keep it accountable to their interests. 

The state, if organized in a certain way, can be run by the people, for the people. 

The question, Marx would add, is what class controls the state and to what ends the state is used. 

Gil Shaeffer writes: “Of the three sources and component parts of Marxism, English political economy, German philosophy, and French revolutionary republicanism and socialism, Marx and Engels critique and modified all three save for the democratic republic, retaining its principles unchanged from its origin in the French Revolution as the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat 

The necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the necessity of the workers’ party taking state power, is one of only three unique contributions Marx claimed to have made to the socialist movement. 

Upon initial discussion, Marx didn’t clarify what political form this transitional workers’ state might take. Later, Marx identified the form of the workers' state and why it was so important that this new state emerges from a “breaking up” and “smashing” of the previous “state machinery.” 

Marx, to paraphrase Engels, did not attempt to evolve a readymade scheme out of the human brain (unlike many socialists of an earlier era). Instead, he observed the existing class struggle before him and found an answer in the Paris Commune of 1871. Once he found the answer, that is, once the working class found the answer in struggle, he made sure everyone else knew about it, calling the Commune a “new point of departure of world-historic importance.” Marx must have been particularly excited - though likely not surprised given that the working class always strives for the greatest possible democracy - to see that the workers had formed a rudimentary social republic. 

The Paris Commune: a ‘Tantalizing Sphynx’

The Paris Commune of 1871 is where Marx saw the state form of the dictatorship of the proletariat being born. The essential point (because I don’t have time to explain it all) is that the Parisian workers took charge of the city at the tail-end of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. In power, they formed a provisional government and fashioned a miniature, haphazard, and ultimately imperfect city administration - the Commune Council -  that took the form of a social republic.

The Commune elected officials based on universal (male) suffrage. Officials were to be paid a working person’s wage so as to disincentivize careerism. Officials were to be revocable and accountable to their constituency. The executive and legislative branches were combined, turning the commune into a “working, not a parliamentary body.” The standing army was disbanded and protection was derived from the elected citizens' militia. 

All records of the Commune’s activities were made available to the public. The police were to be placed under the control of the commune and subject to recall, and all judges were to be elected and likewise subject to recall. Finally, every city, village, and town was to have its own commune, and elected representatives from those communes were to be sent to make decisions in higher bodies; in this way, decision-making was to be kept as local as possible while retaining a degree of centralization. 

(The presence of many “to be’s” is a result of the fact that the Commune lasted only two months before it was drowned in blood by the French Army).

The Commune, reflected Marx, was “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor.” With delegates under popular control, “universal suffrage was to serve the people” instead of serving only to elect a “member of the ruling class” once “every three or six years.” Engels agreed: “From the outset, the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again it's only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.” 

The social republic appeared as a slogan during the revolutions of 1848. Now, some two decades later, it appeared in however inadequate and short-lived form as a reality. Marx took this transition from idea to reality - a merger of theory to practice - as a sign that the working class was growing in power both objectively (it was larger and more powerful in size and organization than in 1848) and subjectively (it was learning from past failures and gaining clarity of purpose).  

The Social Republic’s Lasting Influence 

The lessons of the Paris Commune and the understanding that the political rule of the working class is the social republic were assimilated by others. 

“If anything is established,” wrote Engels, “it is that our party and the working class can come to power only under the form of the democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the great French revolution [the Paris Commune] has already shown.” At the time, Engels was criticizing the newly legal German Social Democratic Party (SPD) for not including the demands for a democratic republic in their party program of 1891. At the very least, said Engels, the SPD should call for something equivalent to the democratic republic, such as a “concentration of all political power in the hands of the representation of the people.” 

I’ll quote Engels again, this time in the introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France: “Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the phrase: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Next, Karl Kautsky wrote in his Republic & Social Democracy in France: “The [French] Third Republic, as presently constituted, offers no ground for the emancipation of the proletariat, but only its oppression. It is only when the French state is transformed along the lines of the constitution of the First Republic and the [Paris] Commune that it can become that form of the republic, that form of government, for which the French proletariat has been working, fighting and shedding blood for over one hundred and ten years.” 

Now, Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution of 1917: “Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat….Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished.”

Finally, Lenin in The State and Revolution: “‘The [Paris] Commune, therefore, appears to have replaced the smashed state machine “only” by fuller democracy: abolition of the standing army; all officials to be elected and subject to recall. But as a matter of fact this “only” signifies a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type. This is exactly a case of "quantity being transformed into quality": democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeois into proletarian democracy; from the state (a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.’” 

This last point of Lenin’s, that there is only a difference of degree between so-called ‘bourgeois democracy’ and ‘proletarian democracy’ is, I argue, good Marxism. Democracy is the “light and air” of the workers’ movement: the workers will win by it and rule by it, until the very conception of it seems anachronistic. To quote the Communist Manifesto at various points: “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority,” and, “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” (I’ll only add that the First English translation of the Manifesto appeared in 1850 in the Red Republican, a British socialist paper edited by a former Chartist). 

“Develop Democracy to the Utmost”

The transformations taking place in society during the 19th century clarified to Marx that only the working class can lead the struggle for democracy. As Lenin explained, “To develop democracy to the utmost, to find the forms for this development, to test them by practice, and so forth - all this is one of the component tasks of the struggle for the social revolution.” In doing so, the class strengthens its position in society and launches even broader struggles, all while bringing as much of society as possible under the banner of socialism. The struggle for democracy and the capitalists’ resistance will lead to a rupture and create the conditions for the workers’ party to take political power. Once in power, the party will be compelled to create a social republic. That done, humanity will be able to begin working towards communism - the type of society that capitalism has been wanting to birth for a long time. 

I’ll end with a quote from Marx’s The Civil War in France that reflects many of the ideas I’ve already presented.

“The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree of the people. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances, and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant. In the full consciousness of their historic mission, and with the heroic resolve to act up to it, the working class can afford to smile at the coarse invective of the gentlemen’s gentlemen with pen and inkhorn…”