Light and Air

After 1848, Marx understood the movement of the working class as the only existing force for democracy. The workers, to paraphrase Karl Kautsky, need democracy like any human needs light and air. Why is the working class movement compelled - like a human is compelled to seek air - to champion democracy? First, it is only in a society with basic democratic rights - freedom of speech, of the press, and of association, for example - that the working class can organize itself and win the rest of society to its side. Second, it became clear during the Paris Commune of 1871 that the working class, once it took power, could only maintain that power if it organized society as a social republic. We can say, then, that the working class needs democracy to take power and maintain power during the transition period out of capitalist society. Marx’s democratic republicanism has been lost, and along with it, the memory of the socialist movement as a force not for Stalinism, but as a champion of social democracy that exposes our existing democracies as woefully inadequate.