International Socialists

Dr Brian S. Roper, Department of Political Studies,

University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand

In opposition to the widespread assumption that Marxism contributes little to our thinking about the past, present and future of democracy, I argue that Marxism makes an indispensable contribution. The theorem, central to historical materialism, that understanding the underlying process of exploitation is the key to understanding the relationship of rulers and ruled, has considerable heuristic power. This is most evident, not at the transhistorical level of abstraction required to apply historical materialism as a general theory of history, but rather in the historically specific analyses heuristically guided by the transhistorical concepts of the general theory. Hence we consider Marxist studies of democracy’s history. This view of democracy’s past establishes that capitalism and representative democracy, like earlier modes of production and state forms, are continuously in motion and can be transformed in a revolutionary manner. Thus Marxism enables us to grasp the dialectics of democracy in a history referring not only to time past but to future time. From this perspective socialism is democracy beyond capitalism.

Introduction

There is an intimate relationship between exploitation, class struggle and democracy in history. We cannot hope to develop an adequate understanding of the past, present and future of democracy without developing a theoretically and methodologically sophisticated historical materialist analysis of this relationship. In this respect, the first key objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the Marxist tradition provides a critically important contribution of enduring value by establishing the theoretical and methodological foundations for research that identifies and explores the exact social and economic infrastructures of democratic state forms. The second objective, which follows from the first, is to highlight the historical brevity and transitory nature of all hitherto and contemporary democratic state forms. Precisely because historical materialism “regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence” (Marx, 1967a, 20), it provides grounds to critique the historical myopia inherent in the widely held assumption of the immutability of capitalism and representative democracy.

The importance and originality of this argument lies, in part, in its unfashionable nature – a large section of the Western left intelligentsia has turned away from Marxism and towards liberalism in the mistaken belief that Marxism has little that is interesting and valuable to contribute to democratic theory and practice.[1] In opposition to this turn towards liberalism, the paper advances the argument that what the Marxist tradition illuminates, and what the liberal tradition obfuscates, is the extent to which the underlying mode of production, characterized by a specific degree of development of the productive forces and social form of exploitation with a distinctive configuration of class relationships, generating identifiable patterns of class struggle, ultimately determines the emergence, characteristics, dynamics and longevity of any particular democratic state form. Of course, whether or not such determination actually characterizes real class societies with democratic state forms, and if so what precise form this determination assumes, can only be established through theoretically informed historical and empirical research. Such research is necessary because each mode of production is uniquely composed of, inter alia, material conditions, social relations and structures (encompassing necessary internal relations buffeted by contingent external relations), complex multiple determinations, tendencies and crises. Thus the paper draws upon critical realist interpretations of Marxian methodology in order to highlight the power and direction of the heuristic impulse of Marx’s general theory of history with respect to explaining and interpreting epoch-making episodes in the history of democracy.

The paper commences with a brief survey of the existing general accounts of the history of democracy – both Marxist and non-Marxist. In Section 1, I then identify and articulate the major respects in which historical materialism provides the theoretical and methodological resources required in order to: first, develop a convincing account of the general history of democracy; second, provide heuristic guidance for the historically specific analysis of democratic state forms; and third, on the basis of the latter, identify the complex determinations and likely future trajectories of these state forms. This lays the theoretical and methodological foundations for the condensed survey of the history of democracy that forms the core of the paper. We consider the origins of democracy in Athens (Section 2), the Roman Republic (Section 3), feudal exploitation and absolutism (Section 4), the emergence, characteristics and dynamics of capitalism and representative democracy (Sections 5-6), and socialist participatory democracy (Section 7). The point is not to provide detailed accounts of Athenian, representative and socialist democracy, but rather to clarify and substantiate the crucial respects in which the Marxist tradition remains indispensable to the task of exploring the past, present and future of democracy. By way of conclusion, I underline the continuing heuristic fruitfulness and political relevance of historical materialist interpretations of democracy, and argue that those left intellectuals who subscribe to the view that “socialist goals can only be achieved acceptably within the liberal democratic framework” (Mouffe, 1993, 57), do so on the basis of an impoverished, misleading and closed interpretation of the history of democracy.

While contemporary political theorists are producing books and articles on democracy at an astonishing rate, the overwhelming bulk of these contributions either are not grounded in a systematic consideration of the actual history of democracy or, if they do consider some historical dimension of democracy, this is typically confined to recent history. In this respect, the common historical touchstone is the collapse of the Stalinist dictatorships in Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991, which subsequently has been widely interpreted by those on both the right and the left as constituting the historical failure of so-called ‘really existing socialism’.[2] While this raises issues that can not be discussed here, it is important to note that this interpretation of the collapse of Stalinism has not only foreclosed serious consideration of socialism and participatory democracy as a feasible and desirable alternative to capitalism and representative democracy in any conceivably possible future; it also has had the effect of narrowing the historical scope of empirical enquiry to the successes and failures of ‘democratization’ since the nineteenth century, and especially the ‘resurgence of democracy’ during the past three decades.[3]

Despite the narrowing of focus evident in the democratization literature, neglect of the broad view of history has been far from universal. So, for example, within the liberal tradition Dahl (1967; 1989; 1998) has consistently retained a broad frame of historical reference and consequently he remains one of the most convincing advocates of representative democracy (also see Huntington, 1996). Writing from an intermediary position between liberalism and socialism, kindred in some respects with that developed earlier by Bobbio (1987a, 1987b), Held (1995; 1996) also adopts a broad historical focus in his critical evaluation of Athenian, representative and socialist democracy, and advocacy of cosmopolitan democracy. The Marxist tradition has generated a number of excellent general histories (Anderson, 1974a, 1974b; Harman, 1999; Hobsbawm, 1962, 1975, 1987, 1994; Wallerstein, 1974, 1980, 1989), but these are not centrally nor specifically focused on the history of democracy. While some of the contributors to Marxist state theory debates, perhaps most notably Poulantzas (1975) and Therborn (1978), refer to the historical emergence of the capitalist state and draw systematic comparisons between state apparatuses and power in feudalism and capitalism, they have tended to focus on the differentia specifica of representative democracy in the capitalist state rather than seeking to identify what is distinctive about each of the democratic state forms to have emerged thus far in human history.[4]

Novack provides a general Marxist account of the history of democracy in his book Democracy and Revolution: From Ancient Greece to Modern Capitalism published in 1971. This remains an important work, which has been unduly neglected by both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. As the title suggests, the book is magisterial in its historical scope, seeks to demonstrate that “democracy is not static, uniform or fixed but a dynamic, diversified, changing product of socioeconomic development” (1971, 15), and vigorously argues that representative democracy is an inherently limited and ultimately transitory form of democracy. As such it is “destined to be superseded by a higher form of economic and political organization” that will bring about “‘a new birth of freedom’ for [the United States] and the rest of the world” (16, 331). While this formulation can be justifiably subject to criticism for its invocation of a teleological view of history, at least it is a formulation that recognizes the possibility of qualitative societal transformation in the future. Indeed, the book’s greatest strength is the powerful way in which it establishes that there is “an organic link between democracy and revolution” in history (225).

In addition to its apparent adoption of an essentially teleological view of history, the book has a number of other weaknesses. It was written at the beginning of the renaissance of Marxism that generated a tremendously rich and broad range of Marxist writing. Consequently, the book lacks a degree of sophistication in a number of areas where Marxist scholarship has made substantial advances during the past three decades. These include social scientific and historical research methodology, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, historical interpretation of ancient Greece and Rome and also the English, French and American revolutions, the sociology of class in advanced capitalism, and state theory. As a result the historical narrative is often sketchy at best, lacking both the rich empirical detail and the explanatory depth of more recent Marxist interpretations. Further, while the book provides a surprisingly strong account of the ideological legitimation of capitalism, few are likely to be convinced by the arguments that: “the decisive force in making up and maintaining a liberal democracy is the petty bourgeois masses” (173); “a representative democracy is alien to the economic tendencies of corporate capitalism” (177); “parliamentarism has been – and remains – an instrument of capitalist control which shares both the merits and faults of this phase of class society” (151). Nonetheless, despite its many weaknesses, the book successfully provides a preliminary sketch of the broad outlines of a vitally important project that needs urgently to be reactivated.

Wood (1988, 1991, 1995, 1999) has developed a body of work that is highly suggestive in this regard. A central theme in this work is the advocacy of a critical historical materialism:

…in which the origin of capitalism – or any other mode of production – is something that needs to be explained, not presupposed, and which looks for explanations not in some transhistorical law but in historically specific social relations, contradictions and struggles (1995, 6).

In order to accurately identify what is genuinely unique in capitalism and representative democracy it is necessary to recognise the unique qualities of pre-capitalist societies and the fundamental differences between these societies and capitalism. A failure to do this results in flawed and misleading conceptual interpretations of both capitalist and pre-capitalist societies. So, for example, the liberal conceptual separation of the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres, “while it reflects a reality specific to capitalism, not only fails to comprehend the very different realities of pre- or non-capitalist societies but also disguises the new forms of power and domination created by capitalism” (1995, 11). In opposition to the “teleological tendency to see capitalism in all its historical predecessors” (14), Wood has developed a sophisticated interpretation of the history of democracy in which systematic comparisons are drawn between Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, feudal absolutism and representative democracy. These comparisons enable Wood to identify the specific characteristics of representative democracy and subject this particular form of democracy to a persuasive and powerful critique.

In emphasizing the specificity of capitalism, Wood is drawing upon a crucially important distinction within Marxian methodology. At various points in their writings, Marx and Engels define clearly the different methodological functions of theoretical concepts deployed at distinctively transhistorical and historical levels of abstraction.[5] Within the materialist conception of history, transhistorical concepts such as the forces and relations of production, are used, firstly, to identify and distinguish the various forms of society that have emerged in the broad sweep of human history and, secondly, to act has an initial heuristic guide for the historically specific analyses of particular societies that Marx considered necessary in order to discover the “historical laws which are valid only for a particular historical development” (1975b, 34). In other words, it is only ever possible to develop a systematic Marxist understanding of a particular society, characterized by a specific mode of production, through an empirically grounded analysis of the “real, transitory, historic social relations” (34). This is necessary because “events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historical contexts” can lead to “totally different results” (294). As Marx observes:

By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by using as one’s master key a general historic-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical (294).[6]

The heuristic role of transhistorical concepts within the materialist conception of history is thus both crucially important, providing preliminary conceptual guidance for historical research, and strictly limited since historical explanation requires that one brings out “empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production” (Marx and Engels, 1976, 41).[7]

In this respect, Marx’s (1967b, 791) theorem that understanding the underlying process of exploitation “in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers” is the key to understanding “the relationship of rulers and ruled” in a particular society combines a transhistorical definition of exploitation as the appropriation of surplus product by a non-producing class from a producing class, with a powerful methodological injunction to engage in historically specific analyses of particular social forms of exploitation. This is exemplified by Marx’s own critical analysis of capitalist exploitation in Volume One of Capital, and de Ste Croix’s (1983) unsurpassed analysis of the forms of exploitation in the ancient Greek world. The point is that the potential fruitfulness of historical materialism is most clearly evident, not at the transhistorical level of abstraction required to apply it as a general theory of history, but rather in the historically specific analyses heuristically guided, in the first instance, by the transhistorical concepts of the general theory.[8]

This raises a further question – even if we accept that every form of democracy to have emerged thus far in history has been inextricably linked to an underlying process of exploitation, precisely how should we analyse this relationship? In other words, what method of analysis should we use? Despite the considerable and ongoing controversy concerning central features of Marx’s method, particularly with respect to the question of the relationship of this method with that of Hegel, few would deny that the process of abstraction is absolutely central to it. In this respect, Ollman (1990, 71) has argued that “using the force of abstraction … is Marx’s way of putting dialectics to work.” The process of abstraction, centrally involving “boundary setting and bringing into focus”, operates simultaneously in three different but closely related modes in Marx’s method: extension, level of generality, and vantage point (41). Put simply, extension refers to the process of defining the temporal and/or spatial scope of analysis.

In abstracting boundaries in space, limits are set in the mutual interaction that occurs at a given point in time. While in abstracting boundaries in time, limits are set in the distinctive history and potential development of any part, in what it once was and is yet to become (41).

Second, every abstraction not only defines the scope of analysis through extension, it also “sets a boundary around and brings into focus a particular level of generality for treating not only the part but the whole system to which it belongs” (41). Third, establishing an extension and level of generality then sets up a vantage point “for comprehending the larger system of which it is part, providing both a beginning for research and analysis and a perspective in which to carry it out” (42).

If Ollman is correct, then Marx uses the process of abstraction to constantly focus and re-focus his enquiry. This involves, for example, zooming in to examine a particular aspect of capitalism such as the commodity form analyzed with respect to use-value, exchange-value and value, and then zooming out in order to show how the distinction between use-value and exchange-value corresponds to the distinction between the transhistorical qualities of things, and the historical social relations that govern their production in any particular context, and zooming out still further to demonstrate how the production of use-values can be used to measure the relative wealth of the different societies that have existed in history (“[use-values] constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth” 1967a,36), while simultaneously demonstrating that “the value-form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character” (1967a,81). Hence the level of abstraction that is being employed always delimits the scope of Marx’s enquiry, and he uses many different levels of abstraction when investigating relationships, processes and events. Finally, and this is where the zoom lens metaphor inadequately conveys the full richness of Marx’s method, he also uses the process of abstraction to view relationships and processes from different angles, viewing one relationship from the perspective of another, or viewing a single relationship from the vantage point of one and then the other side of that relationship.

The relevance of this brief reflection upon the process of abstraction in Marx’s method to our consideration of the history of democracy becomes particularly clear when we seek to understand state forms by “putting states in their place” (Jessop, 1990, 365-367). The history of democracy is, in part, the history of those state forms generally held to be in some significant respects ‘democratic’. In the considerable body of Marxist writing on ‘the state’, the full significance of the distinction between transhistorical and historically specific theoretical concepts in Marx’s method is not widely recognized. Nor is Marx’s methodological injunction that any particular mode of production and “corresponding specific form of the state… can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances” (1967b, 791-92). Empirical and historical research is essential because political institutions, practices and principles assume widely varying concrete forms in different societies.

The point of this research is not, however, merely to describe these concrete forms but to use the process of abstraction to identify the underlying structural mechanisms and resulting class struggles that generate and shape them. If the critical realist interpretation of Marx’s method is correct, this necessitates a conception of ontological depth in which reality is stratified and differentiated. Accordingly, Bhaskar (1989, 3) argues that “social phenomena … are the product of a plurality of structures. But such structures may be hierarchically ranked in terms of their explanatory importance” (see also Archer, 1998, xi-xiii;Collier, 1989, 43-72). As this suggests, a related heuristic impulse of historical materialism is the drive to analytically penetrate the surface appearances of social reality in order to identify the underlying causes that generate these phenomenal forms and this centrally involves a complex process of retroduction – of working back from phenomenal forms to unobservable causal mechanisms (Bhaskar, 1989, 19; Sayer, 1983, 115-135). It is this process of the “working-up of observation and conception into concepts” – analyzing necessary relations, underlying structures and generative mechanisms – that enables us to accurately depict the concrete as “a rich totality of many … relations” and “the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” (Marx, 1973, 100-101).[9]

As this interpretation of Marx’s method implies, there are very few convincing generalizations that can be made about ‘the state’ at the level of abstraction of the materialist conception of history. Within classical Marxism one of the more significant attempts to do so is Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he argues that:

the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it arose in the midst of the conflict of these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which, through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class (1968a, 577-78).

In Marx and Engels’ general theory of history the state is, as Miliband (1977, 67) puts it, “an essential means of class domination”. But as with the transhistorical definition of exploitation, this amounts to little more than a preliminary hypothesis containing a heuristic injunction to engage in historical specific analysis of “the empirically given circumstances” in which any particular state is embedded. In this respect there is, of course, no such thing as ‘the state’ anymore than there is any such thing as ‘the class’. ‘The state’ is always a particular institutional ensemble (state form) located in a specific historical context just as class is always a particular class defined in relation to other classes within a specific social formation. It is, therefore, fundamentally inconsistent with Marx’s method to suggest that the relative autonomy of any particular state can be identified independently of a systematic historically specific analysis of that state.

The relevance of this to our consideration of the history of democracy is clear: precisely how “the specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labor is pumped out of direct producers”, and which generates recurrent struggles between classes, “determines the relationship of rulers and ruled”, is something that can only ever be ascertained by remaining “constantly on the real ground of history” (Marx and Engels, 1976, 61). In so far as any state form may be considered ‘democratic’ it exists within a totality in which the state “reacts upon [the specific economic form] as a determining element” (1967b, 791). This does not entail either a crude economic determinism or simplistic class reductionism, because societies are conceived of as complex historical totalities (Rees, 1998, 78-118). As Marx and Engels’ put it in the German Ideology, a society which encompasses, inter alia, a mode of production, “theoretical products and forms of consciousness”, class struggle, politics and the state, should always “be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)” (Marx and Engels, 1976, 61).

In the historical sections that follow, I seek to give at least some sense of the extent to which a sophisticated historical materialism, of the kind outlined here, has generated valuable interpretations of the history of democracy – commencing with the interpretations of the origins of democracy by Anderson, de Ste Croix and Wood.

The Greek city-states of classical antiquity, dotted around the Aegean Sea because marine transportation was relatively fast and cheap whereas land transport was slow and prohibitively expensive, were essentially “residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners” with proximate rural hinterlands (Anderson, 1974a, 29). The “classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions” (1974a, 19) and this has important implications for class relations because it meant that “wealth in the Greek world, in the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods, as in the Roman empire throughout its history, was always essentially wealth in land” (Ste Croix, 1983, 120). Therefore “the ownership of land and the power to exact unfree labor, largely united in the hands of the same class, together constitute … the main keys to the class structure of the ancient Greek communities” (Ste Croix, 1983, 112).

The antecedents of Athenian democracy lie in the increasingly turbulent period from the mid-seventh to the late-sixth century. At the beginning of this period Greek society was dominated by a privileged hereditary landowning nobility, which accumulated its wealth through the exploitation of peasants (by means of a range of tributary relations including tenancy, serfdom, debt bondage) and the slaves who were the principle laborers on the estates of the wealthy throughout antiquity. By the late sixth century this nobility was essentially besieged, both by upwardly mobile and increasingly wealthy landowners who did not belong to the ruling families, and by an increasingly disgruntled, angry and militant demos consisting of middling and poor peasants, as well as free laborers, artisans and traders. In sum, during this period society became increasingly divided between “the hereditary ruling aristocrats, who were by and large the principal landowners and who entirely monopolized political power” and, at least initially, “all other social classes sometimes together called the demos” (Ste Croix, 1983, 280).

This period became known as the ‘age of tyrants’. The tyrants were generally upwardly mobile and wealthy members of the ruling class who were not members of the nobility and therefore were excluded from any significant political influence. The emergence of tyrannical rule throughout the ancient Greek world during this time was centrally, though not exclusively, generated by the intensified intra- and inter-class struggles of the period. They challenged the traditional political dominance of the aristocracy, and would often draw on the popular backing of the demos in their factional feuds with the ruling aristocratic families. When the rule of the Greek tyrants ended, in Athens the last being Peisistratos and his son Hippias, “hereditary aristocratic dominance had disappeared, except in a few places, and had been succeeded by a much more ‘open’ society: political power no longer rested on decent, on blue blood, but was mainly dependent upon the possession of property (this now became the standard form of Greek oligarchy)…” (Ste Croix, 1983, 281).

In this turbulent context democracy was introduced through two distinct but related waves of reform: the first set of reforms initiated by Solon around 594/3BC introduced limited elements of a democratic constitution; the other more extensive set of reforms by Cleisthenes, which built upon those of Solon, laid the constitutional foundations of a fully developed system of democratic governance around 508/7. There is not the space to discuss either programme of reform at length here – suffice to make four key observations. First, the democratic constitution was not introduced through a smooth and harmonious process of gradual evolution. It is generally recognized that Solon’s reforms were prompted by, and attempted to meliorate, severe class conflict (Anderson, 1974a, 31-32; Mann, 1986, 208-210; Ste Croix, 1983, 282-283; Thorley, 1996, 10-11; Wood, 1988, 98-99). Cleisthenes was similarly motivated and although he was a member of the aristocratic Alkmeonid family, his initial attempts at reform were met with fierce opposition from other sections of the aristocracy, which attempted to drive him from power. This provoked a popular uprising of the demos that reinstalled Cleisthenes in power. Essentially democracy arose in Athens out of a revolutionary uprising by peasants, artisans, free laborers and traders (Thorley, 1996, 20-21).

This points to the specific social dimension of Athenian democracy. According to Aristotle: “a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state” (1962, 155). And for Plato “democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power” (1977, 605). As Wood (1995, 222) observes, according to these definitions democracy exists only if the political community includes the poor. Putting it bluntly, democracy exists where the poor, being in the majority, rule; in contrast, an oligarchy exists where the rich, being in a minority, rule. More specifically, these definitions highlight that democracy in the Ancient Greek world rested on historically specific social foundations in which the peasant citizen played a central role (Anderson, 1974a, ch.2; Thorley, 1996, 11-17; Ste Croix, 1983, 286-87; Wood, 1988, 1995, 181-203).

The class struggle between the rich landowning aristocracy and the peasantry took place on the political plane because:

If in a Greek polis the demos could create and sustain a democracy that really worked, like the Athenian one, they could hope to protect themselves to a high degree and largely to escape exploitation. When, on the other hand, the propertied class were able to set up an oligarchy, with a franchise dependent on a property qualification, the mass of poor citizens would be deprived of all constitutional power and would be likely to become subject in an increasing degree to exploitation by the wealthy (Ste Croix, 1983, 286).

This highlights the extent to which the struggles of the demos for democracy were closely interwoven with the struggles of the peasantry and other independent producers against relations of exploitation involving tributary exactions in the form of rent, debt repayment, taxes, and/or labor services.[10] The propertied class preferred oligarchy because it could then use the power of the state to facilitate an increase in the exploitation of the subordinate classes; the subordinate classes preferred democracy for the opposite reason. As Wood observes “the growth of democratic institutions removed the last vestiges of political subjection which might have served as a means for privileged classes to extract tribute from the peasantry” (1988, 98). But the success of the struggles of the peasantry in resisting exploitation and achieving a democratic constitution pushed the dominant propertied class into exploiting the slaves, who always remained fully excluded from citizenship, even more intensively (Callinicos, 1988, 125; Ste Croix, 1983, 141). In sum, Athenian democracy was created in the course of class struggles generated by a historically specific configuration of relations of exploitation. This particular ensemble of democratic institutions then served both to modulate and to amplify different aspects of these relations of exploitation and hence remained a contested site of class struggle throughout its existence.

The third aspect of Athenian democracy worth emphasizing is that this was an essentially participatory form of democracy (Held, 1996, ch.1; Roper, 1998). In stark contrast to the peculiarly liberal distinctions between state and society, officials and citizens, representatives and constituents, ‘the people’ and government, the political constitution and philosophical ethos of the Athenian city-state “celebrated the notion of an active, involved citizenry in a process of self-government; the governors were to be governed” (Held, 1996, 18). All citizens met to debate, decide and enact the law. All of the main institutions of Athenian democracy – the local territorial demes, the Assembly (Ecclesia), the Council of 500 (Boule), Committee of 50, the large popular law courts, the ten elected generals who ran the army and navy, the unique public administration performed by 600 magistrates selected by lot, and the practice of ostracism – all acted in order to ensure that the overwhelming bulk of the citizen body actively participated in the process of governance.[11] This direct participation in the process of governance centrally involved free and unrestricted discourse, guaranteed by isegoria, a constitutional right of all citizens to speak in the sovereign assembly.

A particularly remarkable feature of this participatory form of citizenship is the extent to which it assumed and developed generalized competence amongst the citizen body to successfully undertake the legislative, administrative and judicial functions of government. Hence the crucial significance of the widespread practice of selecting citizens for public positions by lot: it is a practice that makes sense only if it is assumed that all citizens are, or at least should be, capable of “ruling and being ruled in turn” (Aristotle, 1962, 236-37).

While there is much disagreement and debate concerning the desirability or otherwise of the central features of Athenian democracy, the major limitations are due to the fact that the citizen body was narrowly circumscribed: slaves, women and immigrants were excluded from citizenship (Held, 1996, 23-4). The citizenry was actively participatory in nature but it encompassed considerably less than half the total adult population. For this reason, among others, it would be unwise to romanticize the virtues of this form of democracy. But, in my view, it is equally erroneous to overlook or understate its major achievements. In this respect, it is particularly important to challenge the extremely widespread propensity to blithely assume that central features of Athenian democracy, such as its social dimension, participatory nature, and egalitarian assumption of generalized political competence amongst the citizen body, could only exist in the limited confines of a relatively small city-state (see Dahl, 1989, 23,217; cf. Mandel, 1986a).

The Roman Republic and Empire constitutes a significant reference point in the history of democracy for a number of reasons. First, Athenian democracy collapsed due to its ultimate inability to ward off foreign invasion and imperial domination, initially Macedonian then later Roman. More specifically the suppression of democracy in Athens coincided with the construction of a new Hellenic Empire through successful military conquest, initially of the other significant Greek city-states, but then of the whole of the Near East, under the leadership of the Macedonian Kings – Phillip II and his son Alexander. After Alexander died in 323 the Athenians led a widespread Greek revolt against Macedonian domination, but they were decisively defeated in 322/1. The Hellenic Empire was, in turn, over-run by the Eastward expansion of Rome from 218 to 128. The Romans intensified and accelerated the tendency for political power to become entirely concentrated in the hands of the propertied class and “by the third century of the Christian era the last remnants of the original democratic institutions of the Greek polis had mostly ceased to exist for all practical purposes” (Ste Croix, 1983, 300).

Second, the Roman Republic, which originated around 509BC, was able to successfully build and govern a territorially expansive empire, not only because of the superiority of its military apparatus (Mann, 1986, 252-255, 272-280), but also because the decisive economic innovation that underpinned the expansion of the empire was large-scale agricultural production by a slave population that was, itself, continually augmented by the capture of new slaves through successful military conquest (Anderson, 1974a, 59).

Third, the fact that the Roman Republic was in no meaningful sense a democracy is generally, but not universally, accepted (for a heterodox view, see Millar, 1998, 11, 197-226). While there were voting assemblies, and in this sense sovereignty lay with the citizenry, “various factors – economic, political, military and religious – ensured that the people deferred to their ‘betters’, the leaders of the nobility who, in fact, controlled all aspects of life and government through the senate and the magistracies” (Shotter, 1994, 2). Ste Croix puts the point more brutally, but no less accurately: “Rome, of course, was never a democracy or anything like it. There were certainly some democratic elements in the Roman constitution, but the oligarchic elements were in practice much stronger, and the overall character of the constitution was strongly oligarchical” (1983, 340). Fourth, the lack of democracy was significant because, as Ste Croix demonstrates in meticulous detail, it ensured that the ruling class could maintain a high degree of exploitation of, not only the massive slave population, but also the peasantry who were free citizens. In sum, the overall rate of exploitation was much higher in oligarchic Rome than in democratic Athens.

The mixed constitution of the early Roman Republic split the functions and powers of government between magistrates (particularly the consuls), the senate, and the plebeians in the voting assemblies (comitia centuriata, comitia tributa, concilium plebis). The democratic elements of the constitution were extremely limited for two major reasons: the widespread practice of patronage or clientage, which was central to Roman politics throughout the history of both the Republic and the Empire, meant that plebeian voters were heavily constrained to cast their votes in accord with the expressed wishes of their noble patrons; the voting institutions themselves were far from being organized according to a principle of equality of influence. Of the 193 centuries that made up the comitia centuriata, Brunt (1971, 46) estimates that 98 were composed of citizens from the wealthy classes. In contrast, “citizens who had virtually no property, the proletarii, formed only a single century, which voted last, if at all” (Brunt, 1971, 46; Heichelheim, Yeo, and Ward, 1984, 53; Sinnigen, and Boak, 1977, 71-2).

The Senate was not an elected assembly. Throughout the Republic membership was determined on the basis heredity (patrician lineage), prestige and wealth (following the ‘conflict of orders’ between 494 and 287BC rich plebeians also could be admitted). Senators generally held their seats for life. Further, throughout the history of the Republic the Senate was able to exert overall control of the popular voting assemblies; being able to determine which proposals should be put before them for voting, and either to sanction or to veto the laws that they passed (Shotter, 1994, 6-9; Sinnigen and Boak, 1977, 67; Ste Croix, 1983, 338). Therefore in the Roman Republic the real power lay with the Senate and the two Consuls elected each year by the comitia centuriata.

The Republic maintained the form but not the substance of democracy, and in this crucial respect anticipated a central aspect of representative democracy. Wood (1995, 214) convincingly argues that the central political task facing the framers of the US Constitution “was to sustain a propertied oligarchy with the electoral support of a popular multitude”. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that they were influenced to a much greater extent by the aristocratic ‘mixed’ constitution of the Roman Republic rather than the relatively egalitarian and participatory constitution of Athenian democracy.

Following the collapse of the Republic and establishment of the Principate with the victory of Octavian (Augustus) at the Battle of Actium in 31BC, the very limited democratic elements in Roman politics diminished greatly. The empire had already expanded to encompass the bulk of territory around the perimeter of the Mediterranean and, by 180AD, most of Western Europe. It has remained a symbolic pole of attraction for imperial rulers ever since. The Western Roman Empire suffered terminal decline and ultimate collapse between 395 and 493 (Rome was sacked by Ostrogoths in 410, the office of Western Emperor effectively ceased when Romulus Augustulus was deposed by Germanic mercenaries in 476). Ste Croix and Anderson convincingly argue that the decline of the Roman Empire was due in no small part to the difficulties of sustaining an ever-expanding state military apparatus once the bulk of the slave population had to be reproduced internally, rather than being continually augmented through external capture (Anderson, 1974a, 76-83; Ste Croix, 1983, 231,453,502-503; Harman, 1999, 84; cf. Mann, 1986, 283-298).

In the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire from 395 to 476AD, Europe became a patchwork of Kingdoms with widely varying forms of agricultural production. Anderson observes in this respect that: “The catastrophic collision of two dissolving anterior modes of production – primitive and ancient – eventually produced the feudal order which spread throughout medieval Europe” (Anderson, 1974a, 128). Throughout its history feudalism was sustained by relations of exploitation centrally involving the production of an agricultural surplus by serfs and/or peasants and the appropriation of this surplus by landowning nobles (Duplessis, 1997, 15). Certain key characteristics of the forms of exploitation specific to feudalism can be identified. First, in so far as rent took the form of labor services on the lord’s manorial demesne, there was a spatio-temporal separation of necessary and surplus labor. As Marx put it “…every serf knows that what [she or] he expends in the service of [her or] his lord, is a definite quantity of [her or] his own labor-power” (1967a, 77). Second, where rents were paid in kind (in the form of physical product), it was also clear to the serf that rent absorbed a high proportion of any surplus product that they produced. Third, the serf or peasant was subject to customary ties, which bound him or her to a particular lord and restricted his or her physical mobility — the serf was tied to the land of a particular lord. Fourth, provided that serfs and peasants were able to pay the rent and/or perform the labor services demanded by the lord, they had (widely varying) customary rights of land tenure. Struggles often broke out concerning these rights of tenure because “the very distribution of ownership of the land between landlord and peasant was continually in question” (Brenner, 1985, 15; see also, Anderson, 1974a, 184).

In the feudal mode of production the major mechanisms of surplus extraction and aristocratic absolutist rule were intrinsically anti-democratic precisely because feudal exploitation required legal and political relations of domination and compulsion.

The peasants who occupied and tilled the land were not its owners. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion. This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of labor services, rents in kind or customary dues owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was exercised both on the manorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip tenancies or virgates cultivated by the peasant. Its necessary result was a juridical amalgamation of economic exploitation with political authority (Anderson, 1974a, 147).

Unlike the peasant citizens of the Athenian democracy, there could be no question of the peasantry sharing in political authority because this authority was directed towards the business of extracting a surplus from it to the maximum extent possible. But this also meant that whereas during the early feudal epoch class struggle was extremely localized, focusing on the immediate extraction of surplus product by the lord, by the late epoch it had become much more generalized, increasingly focusing not merely on the local nobility but upon the extraction of taxes by the absolutist state (and also the political rights of the peasants).

By the thirteenth century feudal development “had produced a united and developed civilization that registered a tremendous advance on the rudimentary, patchwork communities of the Dark Ages” (Anderson, 1974a, 182). In contrast, the fourteenth century (beginning with European famine in 1315-16) was characterized by famine, demographic collapse due to starvation and the plague, and declining agricultural productivity. This general crisis of feudalism persisted until the mid-fifteenth century and was characterized by “a hellish cycle … in which growth of population and output would be succeeded by ecological collapse and mass starvation” (Callinicos, 1987, 165). It is estimated that perhaps as much as half the population of England perished in the Black Death (1987, 165). This generalized crisis soon generated an intensification of class struggle in which the nobility sought to increase their exactions from the peasantry, and in which the peasantry used the resulting shortage of labor to push for lower rents and, where it was in a particularly strong position, freehold title over land. According to Brenner these struggles resulted in a triangular contrast of peasant landholding patterns between: England, where “the rise of the landlord / capitalist tenant / wage-laborer system provided the basis for the transformation of agriculture” and ultimately the emergence of capitalism; Eastern Europe where the peasantry failed to gain freeholding rights and consequently were driven even deeper into serfdom; and Western Europe (particularly France) where peasant struggles for freeholding rights were largely successful (1985, 214-215).

The rise of the absolutist state in Western Europe was propelled by the growing difficulties the landowning aristocracy faced in securing a surplus from the peasantry (Anderson, 1974b, 17-20). Increasingly, surplus extraction took the form of a heavy burden of taxation levied on freeholding peasants by an extensively coercive state apparatus with an absolute monarch at its head. In this respect, Brenner observes that “what appears to lie behind the striking persistence of peasant proprietorship in France is its close interconnection with the particular form of evolution of the French monarchical state” in which “the centralized state appears to have developed (at least in large part) as a class-like phenomenon – that is, as an independent extractor of the surplus, in particular on the basis of its arbitrary power to tax the land” (1985, 55).

The emergence of capitalism in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, and the ensuing global spread of capitalism, laid the economic and social foundations of a new and historically novel form of democracy. It did so because the commodification of labor power, which is central to capitalism as an economic and social system, entails that the producers become wage laborers, that is, gain full legal possession or ownership of their capacity to work (McNally, 1993, 5-42). Hence workers in capitalism, unlike serfs or slaves, are formally and legally free and equal contracting parties with capitalists on the labor market (Cohen, 1978, 63-87). This is a necessary precondition for the emergence of representative democracy because it simultaneously dissolved feudal relations between the nobility and the peasantry in which the latter had no effective citizenship rights and laid the economic foundations for the independent legal and political rights of the bulk of the population.

As we have seen, democracy was suppressed by ruling classes throughout the Roman and feudal eras. Its historical revival from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries did not take place through a process of gradual and peaceful reform. Rather it involved a series of revolutionary upheavals, confrontations, and civil wars ultimately resulting in constitutional and political transformations of the absolutist state to create modern representative democracy. In this regard, there can be little doubt that it is the three ‘classic’ bourgeois revolutions—the English (1640-88), French (1789-95), and American (1776-89, 1861-65)— that were (and have continued to be) the most influential historically, intellectually, and politically.[12] Consequently, these revolutions have been the focus of intense scholarly debate and extensive historical research, generating an immense body of literature. While there is obviously not the space to discuss them here at length, it is worth signposting some key historical reference points.

In the English Revolution these include the elections to the Long Parliament in 1640 and the subsequent role of that body in the struggle against absolutism, the publication of the Grand Remonstrance in 1641, the Civil War and the definitive victory of Cromwell's New Model Army by 1646, the rise and ultimate defeat of the Levellers, the crisis of 1649 culminating in the execution of Charles I, the Restoration of 1660, and the final settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Marxist historians have developed powerful social interpretations of the origins, course, and aftermath of the revolution emphasizing the centrality of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the complex changing class structure of English society during the transition and the unique patterns of class struggle that this variegated class structure generated, the “differing political and religious outlooks of the major sociopolitical actors” (Brenner, 1993, 650), and the “immanently problematic” nature of the new form of state that emerged during the seventeenth century (651). The resulting substantial body of literature successfully established the terms of historical debate for a generation. In this respect Hill (1941, 1980a, 1980b, 1985, 1986a, 1986b) emerged as a pioneering then pre-eminent figure, more recently important contributions have made by Brenner (1989, 1993) and Manning (1992, 1996).

The French Revolution took place on an even grander historical scale encompassing the precipitous economic crisis of 1788, the meeting of the Estates General on May 5 1789, establishment of the National Assembly, the insurrectionary storming of the Bastille, the formal abolition of feudalism, declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizenship, the declaration of war with Austria, Holland and England, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, execution of the King and rise of the Jacobins in 1793, the fall of the Jacobins and beginning of the Thermidor in 1794, and Bonaparte's ascension to power in 1799. As with the English Revolution, sophisticated Marxist social interpretations of the origins, course and aftermath of the French Revolution abound. Prominent Marxist historians of the French Revolution, including Lefebvre (1962), Rude (1985, 1988), Soboul (1974, 1977), have each made contributions of enduring value, as have lesser known figures such as McGarr (1989) and Mooers (1991).

In contrast, and somewhat surprisingly, the Marxist historical literature on the American Revolution is relatively sparse.[13] Major phases in the revolution include the early social, economic and political development of the thirteen colonies (with the emergence of important differences, tensions and hostilities between the North Eastern and Southern regions), the souring of relations with Britain, the outbreak of the War of Independence at Lexington in 1775, the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the protracted development of the constitutional framework for centralized national government through the 1781 Articles of Confederation, 1787 Constitutional Convention, 1789 ratification of the Constitution, and the completion of this bourgeois revolution with the American Civil War from 1861-65.

The feature of representative democracy that most clearly differentiates it from Athenian democracy is the complete absence of the social meaning that citizenship and democracy had in the Greek context. The electoral systems and parliamentary assemblies that emerged out of the English and American revolutions were initially the preserve of white propertied men – women, slaves, and unpropertied laborers were largely excluded from voting or standing for public office (Bonwick, 1991, 172-73,211; Coward, 1994, 349).[14] In this vein Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of the American Constitution, argued that “the idea of actual representation of all classes of the people, by people of each class, is altogether visionary…” (cited in Wood, 1995, 215). Not surprisingly, Hamilton considered that white propertied men were best qualified to act as representatives for others less fortunate. But even when full rights of citizenship were extended to the overwhelming bulk of the adult population, the essential social meaning of representative democracy remained unchanged – no longer “a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state” (Aristotle, 1962, 155), now a state where the rich can (and should) rule, democratically, subject to the electoral constraint of the majority of a citizen body which does not itself participate directly in the process of governance.

The nature of citizenship in a representative democracy is historically unique. It is more extensive and inclusive than either the Roman or Athenian models and it enshrines a range of important civil liberties, but also it tightly circumscribes and effectively prohibits any actual participation in the process of government itself. In this respect Wood observes that this form of citizenship involves “not the exercise of political power by the citizens themselves but its relinquishment, its transfer to others, its alienation from the populace. Representation not only acts as a filtering mechanism, it acts to distance the people from direct involvement in politics and government” (Wood, 1995, 216).

The critique of representative democracy is extensive and highly developed and yet, despite this, many of the most solidly grounded elements of this critique seem to have been forgotten in recent debates.[15] Above all else, the critics of representative democracy stress that it is a form of democracy that strictly limits and channels popular participation because of the nature of the social and economic context in which it is situated. The capitalist economic system, because it is based on an underlying process of exploitation, generates massive inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth that, in turn, ensure that capitalists can exert far more political influence through interest groups, political parties, elections and the media than workers, women, or blacks (Miliband, 1994, 7-34). Furthermore, capitalism systematically undermines substantive democracy because capitalist relations of production, distribution and exchange are inherently, and necessarily, undemocratic and alienating. Therefore the constitutional confinement of democracy to a narrowly defined political sphere is not simply an ‘optional extra’ for capitalism, it is a basic condition of its survival.

The constitutional principles, institutions, and practices of representative democracy inherently limit popular participation in government. In this regard the critics argue that liberal principles of representation are fundamentally flawed because: direct participation is preferable to indirect representation, the alienation of power from the majority of citizens is unnecessary and undesirable, and democracy means little if it is not extended from the political to the social and economic spheres. Civil liberties are worthy, but should be real and substantive. Elections, while regular, are relatively infrequent and electoral constituencies have no right to recall and replace their representatives if they fail to honor promises and implement unpopular policies. The constitutional separation of powers does nothing to democratize key sectors of the state apparatus such as the judiciary, police or armed forces, and within the institutional structure of government itself the executive generally dominates. Finally, women, blacks, workers, gays and lesbians remain heavily underrepresented in the world’s ‘representative’ assemblies.

7) Democracy Beyond Capitalism?

Underlying the contemporary debates concerning the desirability of capitalism, representative democracy, and the relationship between these forms of economy and polity, are very different visions of the internal dynamics and the directionality of capitalist civilization. With respect to the latter, Marx not only developed an analysis of the process of exploitation central to the social structures of capitalist societies, he also provided an analysis of the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist development is characterized by, inter alia: the persistent drive to accumulate capital by maximizing profits in conditions of market competition; competitive pressures which force firms to “constantly revolutionize production techniques and the organization of labor through a form of technical progress whose fundamental thrust is labor-saving, that is substituting machines for labor” (Mandel, 1986b, 14); the increasing capitalization and mechanization of production to produce commodities of equivalent or superior quality at lower cost price than competitors in order to obtain greater market share and therefore mass of profit; resulting in an increasing ratio of constant to variable capital (rising organic composition of capital); over the long run the rising organic composition undermines the average rate of profit because variable capital is the ultimate source of surplus value in the capitalist system; finally, “the decline in the average rate of profit results inevitably in periodic crises of overproduction of commodities and overaccumulation of capitals” (1986b, 15).

The onset of these generalized economic crises, characterized by stagnation, intensified market competition, and mass unemployment, accelerates the tendency for capital to become increasingly concentrated and centralized as larger firms take-over their struggling competitors and, simultaneously, intensifies class conflict as capitalists strive to counter-act falling profits by cutting labor costs.[16]

While the long-term development of capitalism is characterised by recurrent generalised crises, there crises do not automatically generate a shift towards socialism. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialist democracy requires a collective agent with the socio-economic interests, social structural capacity, and revolutionary potential to both eliminate capitalism and build socialism. As Mulhern observes:

The working class is revolutionary, Marxists have maintained, because of its historically constituted nature as the exploited collective producer within the capitalist mode of production. As the exploited class, it is caught in a systematic clash with capital, which cannot generally and permanently satisfy its needs. As the main producing class, it has the power to halt – and within limits redirect – the economic apparatus of capitalism, in pursuit of its goals. And as the collective producer it has the objective capacity to found a new, non-exploitative mode of production. This combination of interest, power and creative capacity distinguishes the working class from every other social or political force in capitalist society, and qualifies it as the indispensable agency of socialism (Mulhern cited in Wood, 1986, 91).

This echoes Marx and Engels' observation in the Communist Manifesto that "not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men [sic] who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians" (1998, 42).

Capitalism also creates the social and economic preconditions for socialism, centrally, but by no means exclusively, through the development of the forces of production. This ensures that there is sufficient social surplus product to sustain an advanced self-governing civilization, and also that the general level of scientific and educational advancement in society is such that laboring citizens become intellectually capable of governing their own affairs. But Marx is not a technological determinist, and he considers the technological advancement facilitated by capitalism’s unceasing drive to boost labor productivity to be a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for the establishment of socialist democracy.

The crucially important point is that for Marx and Engels, as well as the major figures in classical Marxism who followed them, socialism is democracy beyond capitalism. Expressing the point bluntly, socialism is one possible outcome of the multiple and contradictory internal dynamics of capitalist societies. But Marx and Engels were unsure of what the “political form … under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor” might look like until the first major working class uprising in history took place in Paris in 1871 (Marx, 1968,290). From the Paris Commune they were able to discern the central features of a “working-class government” that would enable the proletariat both to overthrow the capitalist system of exploitation and the limited and restricted representative form of democracy, and to establish socialism and a form of direct participatory democracy (for a recent discussion see Tabak, 2000). This transformative process centrally involves the exercise of effective control over the means of production by the associated producers through democratic assemblies. The relations of production that are definitive of Marxian socialism are constituted by democratic working class control of the means of production, which become “mere instruments of free and associated labor” (Marx, 1968, 290-291).[17]

Henceforth in the classical Marxist tradition working-class struggles against capitalist exploitation are viewed as necessarily having a democratic undercurrent – working-class self-emancipation can only be achieved through the thorough democratization of the social and economic, as well as the political, spheres (Roper, 1996). The most significant attempt to establish such a working-class government was to come not in the advanced capitalist West, but in the less developed East. It was in Russia, a country in which feudal relations still prevailed across vast expanses of its geographical and social landscape, that the first successful working-class revolution in history took place in 1917. Soviets (workers’ councils) emerged as the core institutions of an embryonic radically democratic workers’ state. Unfortunately this fledgling state collapsed in the 1920s. But despite the brevity of its existence, the Russian proletariat, with the political guidance of the Bolsheviks, succeeded in establishing socialist participatory democracy as the third great ‘model of democracy’ to have emerged in history (for a detailed defence of this interpretation see Rees, 1991 and Trotsky, 1980).

In socialist participatory democracy the majority is directly involved in the self-governance of society. Democratic control over production and distribution is achieved through the institutional mechanism of a network of councils and assemblies that combines elements of centralization (e.g. with respect to major investment decisions) and decentralization (e.g. decisions within the workplace) (Callinicos, 1991, 110-118, Mandel, 1986a). The right of recall, frequency of elections, regular mass assemblies, the extension of liberal democratic citizenship rights, the democratization of the judiciary, and the establishment of a popular militia (if necessary) to defend the revolution, combine to ensure that elected delegates remain accountable to their immediate constituencies. Such a system of democracy can only be achieved through elimination of all major forms of exploitation, inequality and oppression and this, in turn, necessitates the overthrow of capitalism. This is also necessary in order to reduce the average hours each person needs to spend performing productive labor and in order to ensure that there is adequate provision of, and equal responsibility for, childcare. By creating more ‘free time’ socialism ensures, not only that participatory democracy can work, but also that individual liberty, diversity and self-development is maximized.[18] Conclusion – The Shadows of History

This paper has presented a broad overview of Marxist analyses of some of the major epochs in the history of democracy. The brevity required placed severe restrictions on the narrative. Nonetheless, this broad scope was necessary in order to challenge and rebut the widely held view that the Marxist tradition contributes little that is of interest and value to the task of interpreting the past, present and future of democracy. In this vein, Hirst claims that the intellectual left has “to face the fact of the exhaustion of the radical critiques of representative democracy, like Marxism” (1990, 2). Because the classical Marxist tradition contributes little of value to democratic theory and practice, it is necessary “to raid the storehouse of Western liberalism and democratic theory” (1990, 2). This kind of argument is unconvincing and often amounts to little more than vulgar anti-Marxist prejudice. As this paper has demonstrated, the Marxist tradition already has contributed greatly to our understanding of the history of democracy and it will continue to do so. In this respect, the intellectual and programmatic turn to liberalism by what is, perhaps, the bulk of the Western left intelligentsia, involves not the courageous adoption of realism, but the cowardly acceptance of myopia, not the creation of new wisdom, but the unwarranted discard of hard won historical knowledge.

There are at least six key respects in which the Marxist tradition remains indispensable to making sense of the past, present and future of democracy. The first resides in the continuing vitality of the central heuristic impulse of historical materialism. The inescapable reality is that all forms of democracy rest upon specific social and economic infrastructures and can only be understood adequately in relation to these infrastructures. But what historical materialism contributes that is distinctive and of value is not simply, nor even primarily, a heuristic emphasis on the importance of analyzing this relationship empirically and historically. Rather, sophisticated historical materialists insist that any particular democratic state form can only be properly analyzed as part of a totality that is dynamic, differentiated, mediated and contradictory. Whether or not, and if so, how and why the relationship between rulers and ruled is ultimately determined by an underlying process of exploitation can only ascertained through theoretically informed historically grounded analysis of the specific totality of which any particular form of democracy must necessarily form a part. This facilitates and guides detailed historical research which focuses, among other things, upon the level of development of the forces of production, the relations of production, process of surplus extraction, formation and structural differentiation of social classes and class fractions, class consciousness, the “political forms of class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle” (Engels and Marx, 1975, 394-5), juridical forms, ideologies, religion, political parties, and the ensemble of institutions and practices constituting any particular state form.

A central objective of this paper has been to demonstrate that this is not hollow rhetoric – the heuristic fruitfulness of historical materialism is clearly evident in the writings of, for example, Anderson, de Ste Croix and Wood on Athenian democracy, the British Marxist historians on the English Revolution, Brenner’s path-breaking analysis of the emergence of capitalism, and contemporary Marxist critiques of capitalism and representative democracy.

Second, historical materialism uniquely encourages both breadth and depth of historical focus when thinking about democracy. In this respect there is a stark contrast between the historical sensibility of Marxist considerations of democracy and the largely ahistorical consideration of representative democracy in the work of many contemporary liberal political theorists. As I argued in Section 1, the different roles of the transhistorical concepts of the materialist conception of history and the historically specific concepts required to analyse any particular society are systematically delineated within Marx’s method of rational abstraction. I will not repeat that discussion here. Suffice to reiterate that depth of historical focus is necessary in order to discover, among other things, how any particular democratic state form is buffeted and shaped by an underlying process of exploitation and the recurrent class struggles that this process of exploitation generates. Breadth of historical focus is necessary in order to facilitate the preliminary identification of the major social forms of production and hence the various forms of human society that have existed thus far in human history. This is an important methodological strength because it militates against over or under generalising features of human societies that may be either purely historically specific or genuinely transhistorical.

Third, historical materialism’s breadth of historical focus helps to establish that social reality is in a constant state of flux and that all forms of democracy exist only in fluid movement. With respect to the broad sweep of human history this movement involves the rise, persistence and eventual decline of particular democratic state forms; within a given epoch it can involve the progression, stagnation or retrogression of democracy. Hopefully the historical sections of the paper have gone some way towards demonstrating this. As I argued in Section 1, this change is generated by fundamental contradictions internal to societies understood as complex differentiated historical totalities. The precise ways in which these contradictions generate developmental tendencies and recurrent crises are highly complex because the relationships within totalities are highly interactive and mediated. Nonetheless, the recognition of the “reciprocal action” of forces, relations and processes within historical totalities does not imply indeterminacy because contradictions involve clashes between real forces in society (Bhaskar, 1989, 120-121). The unity of opposites, such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which generates contradictory interaction and conflict between these opposite poles, is characterised by a degree of directionality that can be ascertained through empirically grounded analysis.

Fourth, developing a rigorous critique of capitalism and representative democracy, necessarily involves the deployment of both breadth and depth of historical focus. Depth of historical focus is required in order, among other things, to demonstrate the extent to which capitalism limits and constrains democracy. Breadth of historical focus is necessary in order to appreciate the historical brevity of all hitherto and contemporary modes of production and democratic state forms. It thereby also contributes to our understanding of the possibility and necessity of transforming capitalism in a revolutionary manner in order to establish a more advanced form of democracy. These points are important and require further elaboration.

Adopting a broad view of human history, and of the place of capitalism and representative democracy within it, helps one to remain genuinely open to the realities and potentialities of change, not just small incremental change, but that resulting from qualitative societal transformation. As Korsch (1971, 35) observes:

Bourgeois society may contain the relations of earlier societies in a further developed form. It may contain them as well in degenerate, stunted and travestied forms… It like-wise contains within itself the germs of future developments of present society, though by no means their complete determination. The false idealistic concept of evolution as applied by bourgeois social theorists, is closed on both sides, and in all past and future forms of society rediscovers only itself. The new, critical and materialistic Marxist principle of development is, on the other hand, open on both sides.

In this respect, the currently fashionable idea that capitalism could be radically changed in an emancipatory and egalitarian direction either through, or at least while retaining, liberal representative democracy as the institutional framework for governance rests on a closed view of historical development. Furthermore, the notion that somehow it would be possible to transform, or even radically alter, the capitalist infrastructure while retaining essentially the same state form is fundamentally unrealistic in view of the historical persistence of inextricably close connections between democratic state forms and the underlying social and economic infrastructures which sustain them. In reality what lies beneath this notion is the much more banal bourgeois assumption that there is no conceivably feasible and desirable future beyond capitalism. History ends with capitalism. In this sense Fukuyama’s (1989, 1992) infamous claim essentially sum ups quite well the prevailing mood of the Western intelligentsia – both right and, more surprisingly, the left as well.[19]

This alludes to the fifth respect in which historical materialism remains indispensable for those engaged in the struggle for a more democratic world than that which we currently inhabit. Marx wrote in 1872 that “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits” (Marx, 1967a, 21). This is an inspiring exhortation to engage in rigorous, critical and revolutionary social science, but it also raises the question – what did Marx see from the vantage point of the luminous summits of his historical social science? There is no simple answer to this question because what is so spectacular about the view from the top of a mountain is precisely the breadth of vision – not only can one see for a considerably greater distance than at sea level, but one can also see for a greater distance in every direction. In this respect, Marx had a uniquely broad historical vision in one crucially important respect: Marx could see beyond capitalism. In a famous comment on his relation to Hegel’s dialectical method, Marx wrote that this method was a “scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors … because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement and therefore takes into account its transient nature no less than its momentary existence” (1967a, 20). In other words, “history for Marx refers not only to time past but to future time. Whatever something is becoming – whether we know what that will be or not – is in some important respects part of what it is along with what it once was” (Ollman, 1990, 32). If one views the broad sweep of history, and one must gain altitude in the sense alluded to here in order to establish this field of vision, then the historical terrain occupied by capitalism is no longer all that one can see.

Capitalism’s brief historical existence has been characterised by constant change, rapid development, recurrent crises, class struggle, and revolutionary upheavals. There is no reason to suspect that it will, in terms of historical longevity, persist for an historical period longer than earlier civilizations that were characterised by a considerably greater degree of internal stability (and the evidence actually suggests that its historical life will be considerably shorter). Once it is fully appreciated that what is will not always be, that “those with their heads truly in the sands or the clouds are the hard-nosed realists who behave as though chocolate chip cookies and the International Monetary Fund will be with us in another three thousand years time” (Eagleton, 1999, 33), then we can begin to understand the respects in which the present is a mediating moment between the past and future and see in it “the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition [we] can make the future.” (Lukacs, 1971, 204).

Sixth, Marx, Engels and the major figures in classical Marxism made what remains a profoundly original contribution to the consideration of democracy within Western political thought: a systematic defence not only of the basic principles of direct participatory democracy with a lineage that can be traced back to Athenian democracy, but of the desirability, feasibility and necessity of self-governance by laboring citizens in order to transcend all major forms of exploitation, oppression and alienation. This is no mere utopian dream because the internal contradictions of capitalism undermine it from within – not only driving the capitalist system into crisis, but simultaneously creating the collective agency that has the social structural capacity to transform it. In stark contrast to this vision of the realistically possible transcendence of capitalism and representative democracy through the establishment of a radically democratic socialist society, all of the 'great thinkers' in Western political philosophy, from the Socratic philosophers of classical Antiquity to Nietzsche and the post-structuralist philosophers of the late twentieth century, have denied the feasibility and/or desirability of self-governance by the associated producers.

When viewed historically the positive achievements of capitalism and representative democracy are clear: tremendous development of the forces of production, the extension of citizenship rights and civil liberties to a substantial majority of the adult population, establishing an elective principle in the selection of representatives, and so forth. But these have always been encapsulated in the classical Marxist conception of the transcendence of representative democracy. The concept of transcendence implies, not simple abandonment, but the incorporation of the best elements of the lower form of democracy in a higher more developed form – in this case, socialist participatory democracy. Of course, the concept of transcendence is currently unfashionable. But those who have abandoned Marxism and joined the turn to liberalism have thereby also lost the field of vision which is obtainable only if one retains a sophisticated historical sense of the dynamic and transitive nature of all social and political forms.

One possible objection to this argument is to point out that there are some in the liberal tradition who do recognise that Western civilization may not persist in its current form. For example, Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order observes that “on a worldwide basis Civilization seems in many respects to be yielding to barbarism, generating the image of an unprecedented phenomenon, a global Dark Ages, possibly descending on humanity” (1996, 321). On this we may agree, if on little else. We have then, a closing image of the sun setting, of our luminous summits glowing pink against the backdrop of a blue sky turning black. We may observe that mountains cast shadows which lengthen as the sun sets. We may also observe that as the sun sets on capitalist civilization, the shadows that it casts over the majority of humankind will lengthen. In this sense, the shadows of the past come to point in the direction of an uncertain future. But this much is certain – there is no way that we can hope to collectively build a qualitatively superior civilization in the absence of a clear vision of socialism and democracy beyond capitalism.

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