National 6 (Spotlight Weekly)

Marxism-Leninism and Democracy

By Sarita Giri

Marx developed his ideas on democracy reflecting upon the principles and practices of liberalism and democracy. His thought on democracy is an attempt to present an alternative scheme of social and political organization by addressing the weaknesses and shortcomings of liberal democracy. Marx hypothesized that all forms of evils and exploitation in society spring from economic inequality and personal ownership of property. Thus, in his alternative scheme, as against the civil and political equality in the liberal theory, he puts economic equality at the center. Civil and political rights espoused by liberal thinkers are secondary to him for elimination of exploitation and oppression. Lenin and Mao too did not accord primary significance to the principles of liberty and freedom in their democratic thoughts and practice. Hence, communist regimes in the post world war period have come to be known as undemocratic all over the world. But such developments cannot be said to be unforeseeable or fortuitous. Germs of such development were present in Marx's thought. Marx imagined society to be capable of being solidly monolith, free of conflicting interests once economic equality is achieved and all sources of production are owned by the society as a whole. But experimentation based on his hypothesis has produced results such as collapse of communism in the former USSR and other countries of Eastern Europe and that is severe setback to Marxist democratic theories.

Marx and Marxists after him, nevertheless, have made significant contributions to the development of democratic theories. However, primarily, Marxist theory is a theory of social- economic organization based on the principle of economic determinism. Other essentials of democracy are addressed as peripheral issues. Marx hypothesized that all forms of exploitation and evil springs from economic inequality resulting from private ownership of property and real and genuine freedom and equality will not usher in human relations until and unless the problem of economic inequality is not addressed. Thus he developed his hypothesis on the premise of economic equality and social ownership of means of production.

Marx's vision of an ideal society is shaped by his view of Man's social nature and his potentials to be a species being. Marx differed from liberals in his view of human nature. According to Marx, human beings are not individualistic or atomized beings as liberals claim. They are inherently social beings. He claimed that Men have become alienated and their nature has been deformed and debased under the wrong influences of capitalist system of production, which operates under the division of civil and political sphere. Man cannot again become species being, in Marx's analysis, without dissolution of the distinction between the between the civil and political sphere and abolition of private ownership of property. His vision to overcome the separation between civil and political society involved a concept of harmonious unity: 'the perfect unity of the personal and communal life of every individuals, the internalized identity of each person with the social totality, so as to eliminate tension between his personal aspiration and his social loyalties or obligations.'

Marx criticized liberal position on equality on the ground that it secures equality in political and civil sphere and it does not pertain to economic sphere and thus it works to disguise the existing economic inequality. To him equal political rights in absence of economic equality cannot generate genuine liberty, equality and freedom foe all men. He called political and civil equality as delusive, unsubstantial and abstract. Thus Marx was not an equivocal supporter of civil and political rights as liberals are.

While thinking on democracy, Marx was most concerned about the gap that exists between the ideal and the actual. According to Avineri, what Marx termed as democracy is not fundamentally different from what he will later call Communism. He thought that in true democracy the formal principle should be the material principle. Marx upheld the exercise of suffrage as one of the significant achievements of mankind to practice democracy. But he argued for universal suffrage: "once the universal suffrage is fulfilled, once politics is introduced into everyday life, productive life of each and every citizen, the state becomes redundant as a separate organization standing over the people. So what is ideal (universal political participation) must become actual." His vision of abolishing the distinction between civil and political can best be understood by the following statement:" Only in unlimited voting, active as well as passive, does civil society actually rise to an abstraction of itself, to political existence as its true universal and essential existence. But the realization of this abstraction is also the transcendence of the abstraction. "

Though Marx has not produced coherent work on theory and practice of democracy, but what so ever is available, make it amply clear that Marx preferred some kind of direct and deliberative democracy like Athenian democracy. He vehemently criticized liberal representative democracy as it produces and augments the duality in human psyche and behavior: "Participation confined to the periodic election of deputies is precisely the expression of the separation and merely dualistic unity between the civil and political affairs." Marx was against professionals' bureaucrats, politicians and police in a liberal state and he called them state parasite.

Marx described the Paris commune as the ideal political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor. He states in 'Civil War in France': "Originating from the middle ages there developed in the nineteenth century the centralized state power with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature. With the development of class antagonism between 'capital and labor ' state power assumed more and more the character of a public force for the suppression of the working class, of a machine of class rule…. But Commune was different from the consequences of previous revolutions; it was the specific form of a republic that was not only to remove the monarchical form of class rule but class rule itself…."He saw the commune as the political form in which democracy was introduced "as fully and as consistently as is at all conceivable, is transformed from bourgeoisies into proletarian democracy…"Thus commune was the ideal form of decentralized democracy as "the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the commune. Engels and Lenin, later on, described commune as the model of dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin saw glimpse of both democracy and dictatorship in the commune. 'The commune as depicted by Marx, he says, ' apparently resembles the final 'stateless form of the self determination of the people.' Lenin also insisted that the commune had improvised a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. i.e., a state which would give unprecedented control of all institutions, including the coercive ones, as the commune seem to have done, to the majority of voters (i.e., the workers), a state that would be most suitable for achieving the emancipation of through the establishment of a socialist society.

Lenin's interpretation of the commune 'as an armed and ruling proletariat' was influenced by his own view of state. In Lenin's view, State is"… a special organization of Force and violence for the suppression of some classes." However neither Marx, nor Engels nor Lenin could elaborate on how the dictatorship of the proletariat could be linked with a democratic form of proletarian state in which 'every body governs and no one governs.'

The ways of exercising revolutionary power anticipated by Marx has always been a cause for generating differences and contradictions among Marxists. It is presented both in terms of centralized state power and decentralized democracy. Another aspect that puts Marxist democracy in difficulties from democratic perspective is the socialist mode of production. Because of assumed deterministic influence of socio economic relations of production upon man's consciousness, Marx emphasized the need of creating necessary material conditions for authentic socialism and authentic socialist man. In 1850 in the preface of 'Critique of Political Economy' Marx writes: "In the social relations of production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite form of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, on the contrary, their social being that determine their conscious." This is the much-celebrated formulation of Marx, which specifies his base superstructure theory.

Marx further predicted " the all embracing change that would spring from the single structural change, the replacement of private property by public property, Man would be no more a cog in the system; he would be able to live a free and creative life instead of reified life. In Das Capital he referred to socialist economy in terms of 'production by freely associated men… consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan'. The statement brings forth the need of planning and obviously the need of some planning body as well. Marx vision of participatory democracy thus comes to contradict with his proposal of planning from body other than the workers for economic management.

Alec Nove points out "the fact that the functional logic of centralized planning fits far too easily into the practice of centralized despotism. It was the anarchist Bakunin who first raised the question of how a centralized economy could not be reconciled with political liberty." The term 'Scientific Socialism' which we meet incessantly in the works and speeches of Marxists are sufficient to prove that the so-called people's state will be nothing but a despotism over the masses by a new and quite small aristocracy of real or bogus scientist. The people, being unlearned, will be forced into the herd of those who are governed. A fine sort of emancipation!" The eminent sociologist, Max Weber had also proclaimed that Marxism would lead to the dictatorship of the officials and not that of the workers. This was against what Marx has said, "the liberation of the workers can only be the deed of the working class itself".

Bakunin and Weber's positions have obviously been proved to be true to great extent in cases of revolutionary socialist state. After the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin introduced moderate measure towards nationalization and collectivization of means of production. But when economic performance began to deteriorate, Lenin changed his policies and what he opted for is better known as state capitalism rather than socialism. Lenin acknowledged that it would be entirely stupid and absurdly utopian to assume that transition from capitalism to socialism would be possible without coercion and without dictatorship. "Capitalism can not be defeated and eradicated without the ruthless suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, who cannot at once be deprived of their wealth, of their advantage of organization and knowledge."

Thus, in 'what is to be done', that Lenin wrote after unsuccessful revolution of 1905 in Russia, Lenin placed the role of resolute will against spontaneity for the successful conclusion of any revolution. But Lenin would have derived the idea from Marx himself. Marx has admitted the need of transitional period, which could take the form of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. In a letter written in 1852 Marx had also insisted that the class struggle would necessarily lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat; that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. Thus the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat has been a core idea to Marx's thought. But unfortunately he had not treated it in detail. Engels and Lenin explained it only later on.

Marxists have upheld the authority of revolution above anything and everything. Engels writes, " A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is an act where one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifle, bayonets, and cannon, all of which are highly authoritarian. And the victorious purely must maintain its rules by means of the terror, which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Engels attributed one reason for the early failure of commune that it made too little use of coercive authority.

Marx's appreciation of the Paris commune both as a form of ideal democracy and centralized despotic authority are more than sufficient to create bedlam.

It can not be denied that Marx's idea provided the basics upon which Lenin developed the organizing principle of socialist state in "what is to be done" He argued that a successful socialist revolution is impossible without the decisive and definite role of a vanguard communist party. Unlike Marx, Lenin stated that spontaneous involvement of workers emancipatory movements could not at once bring change in the quality and level of consciousness of proletarian, deformed and debased by capitalism. Proletarians need the guidance of knowledge, the Marxist knowledge which only vanguard in course of time can impart to them. Vanguards are "…a dedicated, incorruptible, and organized group of revolutionaries endowed with the "scientific understanding capable of unlocking the door to liberation: the science of Marxism". Dahl opines, along with this development in Marxist movement, the Marxist Science assumed a new further developed form, the science of 'Marxism- Leninism.'

Conclusion:

Vanguard democracy evolved under the aegis of Lenin in Russia. It was a development rather to suppress the contradictions of Marxist democratic theory than to resolve them. Though it is suggested by many Marxist that Marx himself would not have imagined of any kind of vanguard democracy for proletarian liberation, nevertheless, it is undeniable that Marx had admitted the need of advanced and resolute communists who would impart to the working class a scientific understanding of the historical process and lead the socialist transformation. Though Lenin on various occasions did express his opinion in favor of democratization of the polity and the society, but he banned the opposition political parties when he perceived them to be a threat to socialist revolution. Obviously, he was against the basic principle of competition and choice in an open environment for the purpose of democratization. By institutionalizing the authoritarian rule of communist party in former USSR he established the maxim that the transitional socialist society is to be guided by knowledge of the communists and not by preference and volition of the people. Though Marx had criticized liberal democracy mainly on two accounts; firstly rights in liberal regime have no relations with material conditions, and secondly political freedom is unsubstantial in absence of economic inequality. But in his ideas he could not show how to relate economic equality with equal political participation to bridge the gap between the actual and the ideal. His ideas on economic management are also flawed from democratic viewpoint. Not surprisingly, democracy understood as free and direct participation in political and economic affairs on equal basis had remained a distant dream in Lenin's time.