International Socialists

How democratic do you think New Zealand really is today? Your response to this question is likely to be largely negative. Your workplace has an authoritarian management structure in which you have to do what you are told to do by those above you. Your university is governed by a bunch of right-wing academics, business fat cats and ex-politicians and you have no effective influence over what they decide. Your school is modelled on an authoritarian police state. And so it goes on.

 

Everywhere in society the majority are excluded from participating in the processes in which decisions are made about our workplaces, our universities, our schools, our hospitals, our communities. This is what capitalist democracy is about - capitalists manage the firms that make up the economy, a tiny elite of politicians make laws and govern supposedly on our behalf - and the majority are excluded from decision-making in both the economic and political spheres.

 

In contrast, to this extremely limited form of democracy, Hal Draper, an American Marxist, observes that Marx's socialism defines "consistent democracy in socialist terms, and consistent socialism in democratic terms." Further, "Marx's socialism as a political programme may be most quickly definedas the complete democratisation of society, not merely of political forms."

 

 

Origins of democracy: Ancient Athens

But what is democracy? "Democracy" is a very old word. It came into English in the sixteenth century, from a translation of the Greek word demokratia - demos - people, and kratos - rule. It is at once evident from Greek uses that everything depends on the senses given to people and to rule. So, for example, the philosopher Aristotle wrote that: "a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state." 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."

 

As you can see, these definitions of democracy stress that it involves the poor exercising control over government, hardly the situation prevailing in New Zealand today.

 

Democracy was introduced into the city-state of Athens with the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508-7 BC - reaching its height from then until the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in 404. It was soon revived in 403 and persisted in a continued form until 322-1.

 

There were a number of things about the original Athenian form of democracy that are quite remarkable. The deme or village became the basic unit of the new state. This is highly significant because, as Ellen Wood observes, Cleisthenes' system of demes "had the effect of reposing political power in the ordinary people of Athens, the demos, to a degree unprecedented in the known ancient world."

 

It had this effect because citizenship was defined in terms of membership of a particular deme and because it was through the deme that peasant-citizens could exert real political influence.

 

Membership of the deme was not only significant in defining citizenship (and exclusion from citizenship), however, it was also of the utmost importance because 50 representatives were elected from each tribe, at tribal assemblies, as members of the Council of 500.

 

The Council of 500 or Boule was essentially the executive body in the new democratic state. It met daily and assumed responsibility for organising and proposing public decisions.

 

It was aided, in turn, by a more streamlined Committee of 50. This consisted of the fifty Boule members of a particular tribe who took it in turns to act as the standing committee for the Boule for a period of 36 days. This Council had a president at its head, chosen by lot, to preside over the Council and the Boule for one day (so up to 36 of the 50 tribal representatives would act in this capacity at some point).

 

The Boule could not make major decisions on its own, this was the province of the Assembly, but because the Assembly was too large a body to prepare its own agenda, to draft legislation and to be a focal point for the reception of new political initiatives and proposals, these functions were performed by the Council.

 

Once the Assembly had made certain decisions and/or enacted certain laws, it was the Boule's responsibility to ensure that they were implemented. Members of the Boule held office for one year, and could not hold office more than twice during their life time. Consequently the powers of the executive were tightly circumscribed.

 

The citizenry as a whole (consisting of the male population over 20, excluding women, foreigners and slaves) formed the key sovereign body of Athens: the Assembly. The Assembly met 40 times a year and had a quorum of 6,000 citizens (the minimum number of people whose presence was required for the proper or valid transaction of business). All major issues such as the legal framework for the maintenance of public order, finance and direct taxation, ostracism (an annual vote to decide the most unpopular citizen and expel him!), foreign affairs, and so forth, came before the assembled citizens for debate and decision.

 

The Assembly aimed for unanimity and consensus but where this couldn't be achieved issues were put to a formal vote with majority rule. Voting was both a way of making explicit differences of judgement as well as a procedural mechanism to legitimate a solution to pressing problems.

 

Of equal importance to the establishment of these democratic institutions, was Cleisthenes introduction of large popular law courts. Since the time of Solon's reforms in 594 BC citizens from all classes were eligible to serve as jurors or dicasts. Cleisthenes created a system in which 6,000 citizens over thirty years of age were selected each year by lot, 600 from each of the ten tribes, to act as jurors in large public courts.

 

Courts were held on all days except Assembly days and on festival days, that is, approximately 200 days per year. The juries would range in size from 201 dicasts to 501 depending upon the seriousness of the charge. The fact that the law courts were composed of large numbers of citizens drawn from all classes, as opposed to the aristocratic archons who had held a monopoly on juridical power prior to Solon's reforms in 594 BC, is highly significant because it constituted a major protection for the labouring citizens against the domination of the wealthy.

 

 

Rule of labouring citizens

What has any of this got to do with New Zealand in the late 1990s? The Canadian Marxist Ellen Wood highlights the enduring relevance of the ancient Athenian model of democracy to us today in two valuable books - Peasant-Citizen and Slave, and Democracy Against Capitalism. She points out that "The ancient concept of democracy grew out of an historical experience which had conferred a unique civic status on subordinate classes, creating in particular that unprecedented formation, the peasant citizen."

 

The peasant-citizen was a free labourer enjoying the status of citizenship in a stratified society with the juridical and political freedom that this implies. Hence the landmarks along the road to the establishment of democracy in ancient society represent pivotal moments in the elevation of the demos or common people to citizenship. This was highly significant because, to put the point bluntly, it meant that for the first and only sustained period in history the producers or labouring citizens ruled. As Wood points out: "the real distinctiveness of the polis [city-state] itself as a forum of state organisation lies precisely here, in the union of free labour and citizenship."

 

Marx and the Paris Commune 1871

Athenian democracy collapsed in the wake of the suppression of a revolt against Macedonian domination in 322 BC. It was more than two thousand years before the labouring citizens would again, albeit much more briefly, experience real democracy.

 

The revolutionary uprising of workers and brief establishment of the Paris Commune in 1871 had a decisive impact on Marx and Engels' ideas concerning the political form of working class self-emancipation. In The Civil War in France Marx, for the first time, developed a clear conception of a democratic socialist alternative to capitalist democracy.

 

Marx considered that the Paris Commune was: "a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive.  Its true secret was this.  It was essentially a working-class government, the produce of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour."

 

The establishment of the Commune showed that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." Rather the working class had to build a thoroughly democratic "political form" characterised by a number of principles which became central to the classical Marxist vision of socialism.

 

First, the overthrow of the bourgeois parliament and the establishment of directly representative and participatory institutions.

 

Second, the establishment of a new workers' state composed of workplace, district, and regional assemblies with a multi-party national assembly.

 

Third, these assemblies to be held accountable to their constituencies by: (a) the right of recall (delegates to these assemblies were "to be at anytime revocable and bound by the formal instructions" of their constituents); and (b) frequent elections. This meant that "instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people."

 

Fourth, the standing army and other "repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated," and replaced by a popular militia.

 

Finally, the Commune sought the abolition of private property but this did not, for Marx, mean that it would be simply replaced by state ownership:  it involved the exercise of effective control over the means of production by the associated producers through democratic assemblies.

 

Unfortunately, the Paris Commune was drowned in blood by the reactionary forces of the counter-revolution. But it showed that it is possible for workers to take power and to run society far more democratically than happens in any liberal democracy. And it was much more advanced than Athenian democracy because it did not exclude women, slaves and foreigners from participating in politics.

 

 

"All Power to the Soviets!"

Basing themselves on the ideas of Marx and Engels, and the earlier experiences of workers in the Paris Commune and the councils or soviets of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks envisaged socialism as essentially a form of workers' democracy. This democracy was to be far more, not less democratic, than parliamentary democracy.

 

In State and Revolution, written prior to the October Revolution in August and September of 1917, Lenin is critical of the highly restrictive form of democracy in capitalist society.  "In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic.  But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the richin the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life."

 

The establishment of socialism, by contrast, involved "an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags."  In a similar vein, Lenin argues that "democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation," and "the way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into working bodies."

 

These working bodies were the councils or soviets of workers and peasants formed spontaneously from below during the February 1917 revolution. Between February and October of that year a situation of dual power prevailed: neither the workers and peasants, who elected the soviets, nor the capitalists who effectively controlled the Constituent Assembly, were in the position of being able to run the society.

 

Lenin recognized that this situation could not last forever - either the capitalists would smash the workers' democracy of the soviets, or else the workers would have to smash the capitalist parliament. In the event, this is what happened. In October the Bolsheviks raised the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" The capitalist parliament was closed down and for a brief period workers' democracy prevailed. (Unfortunately, this democracy was crushed by Stalin but that is another story).

 

 

We stand for real democracy

What we have in New Zealand today is not real democracy. Real democracy exists only when the majority of labouring citizens, in our society waged workers and their dependents, govern the society themselves. At present, the vast majority are systematically excluded from direct participation in the decision-making processes which have a huge impact on our lives.

 

We do not get to decide whether or not or where a big multi-national company is going to set up a new factory, or conversely, if it is about to close down a factory and throw everyone on the scrap heap of unemployment. Decisions about our workplaces, resource allocation, and the economy are made behind closed doors by greedy capitalists intent only on lining their own pockets with higher profits.

 

Political decisions are made by politicians, whose parties are highly dependent on large donations from big business to fund their election campaigns, largely away from the public view. We have no effective way of controlling the decisions they make, or throwing them out of office if they ignore the wishes of the majority.

 

That is why we reject the current parliamentary system - more than anything else it very cleverly creates the appearance of democracy while denying the vast majority the opportunity to participate in decision-making in the economic, social or political arenas.

 

Our tradition of democracy, a tradition in which the majority of labouring citizens really do run society, was founded in Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, was suppressed by ruling classes everywhere throughout the feudal era until the 19th century AD, and was built by revolutionary workers in Paris 1871, Russia in 1917, and in many other places since then (Germany 1918-23; Turin in Italy 1919; Hungary 1956; Paris in May 1968; Portugal 1976).

 

It is a system of democracy based on workers' councils, in which every area of society is democratised - workplaces, universities, hospitals, schools, the media, and so on. Recallable delegates are elected from these flax roots assemblies to regional assemblies and to a national assembly. Not only are these representatives subject to recall, that is, the constituency which elects them can also throw them out if they don't perform, they are also subject to frequent election.

 

Once we get rid of capitalism, and parliament, we can get on with the business of running society in order to create real equality and freedom. The free development of each then becomes the condition of the free development of all. This is why we are, as Ellen Wood puts it, for democracy against capitalism.