What Democracy Means and What Can be Done in the United States to Advance It

An old socialist once said that American liberals are more sympathetic to socialism as an idea the further it is away from home. The Bush administration and the Republican party, at least verbally, seem to have the same attitude toward democracy as an idea, advocating its expansion abroad while they do everything in their power to restrict it at home.

Marxists of course see democracy in a different way than many liberals and the Bush administration-- as both a process and an ideal to be implemented in many areas, not only in elections.

Politically, democracy means for Marxists and all progressives free and fair elections in which all citizens effectively have the right to participate on an equal basis. Political democracy also means that offices and election districts are drawn fairly so as to represent majorities, and political parties and individuals who wish to run for office are given ballot status and access to media on a fair basis. In the broadest sense, political democracy means a fair and equal process for the election for periods of time of representative governments with the power to implement policies for which the electorate put them in office. These are the principles of political democracy which developed from both the capitalist and socialist revolutions of the last 350 years. Marxist who are both advocates of and products of the socialist movement and revolutions seek to broaden this definition of political democracy by developing democratic participatory forms at the community level, encouraging active participation of citizens in making the decisions on a daily basis which affect their lives in the form of neighborhood councils and committees, regular meetings, holding officeholders responsible for their acts as directly as possible.

The function of Soviets in the early years of the Soviet Union, the contemporary activities of neighborhood groups in Cuba, are both examples of this definition of a democracy of popular participation, important aspects of which were articulated and carried forward by the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

Social Democracy was the term first used by Marxist parties in Europe in the late 19th century (these parties, as is true of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, are often still in existence, although they no longer consider themselves Marxist). Victorious Communist parties in the twentieth century in many parts of the world after World War II often called the states they founded 'Democratic Republics' or 'Peoples Democratic Republics' as against simply Republic (the two Koreas today and the two Vietnams half a century ago are the best examples) because democracy as concept globally was identified with workers rights and socialism.

The socialist and communist definitions of democracy as they have taken shape since the Communist Manifesto have centered on economic and social rights – specifically, the effective rather than formal right of all citizens to employment, housing, education, health care on the one hand and the responsibilities of all citizens given such social benefits and protections to work for the common good rather than using the system to hoard benefits and advance themselves at the expense of others. The socialist-communist definition of democracy is thus fuller, more complete, and more modern than the capitalist definition, which even at its very best, stops at free and fair elections to institute genuinely representative governments.

Political and social-economic democracy are not separate, but inter-related dialectically. In the United States today and increasingly in the nations of the NATO bloc, defenders of capitalism simply ignore both the social economic definitions of democracy and the power of great monopolies and make democracy into a synonym for 'free markets,' 'free competition,' and other grandiose abstractions that have little to do with the way the capitalist system really works.

In the past, many Communists in practice failed to distinguish between formal political democracy under socialism, what existed for the working class on paper in terms of elections, participation, rights, and effective political democracy, the right to challenge authority, even socialist authority, with no fear of reprisal and the right to participate as a dissenter, not merely as a supporter of existing policies. As a result, Communist defenders of socialism pointed to the absence of effective economic and social rights under capitalism as evidence that capitalism was antithetical to democracy and anti-Communist defenders of capitalism pointed to the absence of non Communist political alternatives and anti-Communist media in socialist countries as evidence that socialist countries were dictatorships antithetical to political democracy.

In today’s world, with the Soviet Union and the socialist community of nations it largely forged no longer in existence, defenders of capitalism have proclaimed both the 'end of Communism' (ignoring Cuba, Vietnam, China and the politically powerful mass Communist parties that exist in India and other countries) and the triumph of their socio-economic definition of democracy – globalized 'free market capitalism,' the privatization of public owned industries and the reduction if not wholesale elimination of public price controls, rent controls, and other social subsidies for the masses of people. Today the defenders of capitalism are just as willing to drop the definitions of political democracy associated with the American and French revolutions in supporting brutal dictatorships through the world that do the bidding of the imperialist states as they once accused Communists of dropping such definitions when they supported the Soviet Union.

Today, it is the partisans of socialism who have the task of reviving and defending political democracy, of educating masses of people as to what it is and why it is important not only in itself but as a stepping stone to economic and social rights and the eventual establishment of socialism.

In the United States, perhaps the most media saturated country on earth and in human history, political democracy is not possible unless there are clear restrictions on the use of media. Although they would be revolutionary in US politics, simple things like limiting television campaigning to the last six weeks of an election campaign, having political parties and candidates present their positions in a small number of TV 'infomercials' rather than in Madison Avenue style attack ads, and providing significant TV time for minor parties and candidates would be a beginning. Proportional representation in elections at all levels, thus enabling voters to get away from lesser of two evils politics for once and for all by being able to vote for the candidate or party of their choice without fearing that they will elect the candidates and parties they fear, would also produce fairer and far more representative elections (proportional representation systems are in existence in many West European countries and often produce multiparty coalition governments which are more genuinely pluralistic and representative of diverse constituencies in society).

Political democracy also means safeguarding people’s right to vote. In the US, where there are currently over two million people in jails and prisons, the policy of many states denying the right to vote to those convicted of a felony (which goes against the thinking of most civilized countries, where people in prisons retain their right to vote and no one would dream of denying former convicts their basic citizenship rights, since the whole idea of incarceration is to rehabilitate people who have committed crimes so that they will become good citizens) is both outrageous and deeply racist. Not only does institutional racism create a huge over-representation of minorities in the convicted felon category but the Republican party has in recent years concentrated on purging voter rolls of African American and other minority citizens with felony convictions on the grounds that voters from these groups are most likely to vote against them.

Other simple changes in moving the United States toward modern democratic practices would be to institute a comprehensive national voter registration program in effect registering automatically all eligible citizens. In the US the percentage of eligible voters who do vote is among the lowest in the world, including both rich and poor countries. In practice this means that upper income groups, particularly the top 20 percent of income earners, have disproportionate power in American elections, where between 30-40 percent of eligible voters vote in non presidential elections today and around 50 percent vote in presidential elections. Among those who don’t vote, the overwhelming majority are among the lower 50 percent of income earners. Since a substantial majority of those who are registered do vote and many people are unregistered or deregistered because of address changes, lack of information about registration deadlines, etc., a automatic registration system would in all probability significantly increase voter turnout.

In New Zealand and a few other countries, people who fail to vote (to show up at the polls, even if they wish to abstain) are subjected to minor fines on the principle that participating in voting at some level is an elementary civic duty. While that might be going too far in the United States, a policy of making election day a national holiday, rather than the first Tuesday in November, a work day, would also help make US elections, which are the least working class friendly of elections in developed countries, much more open to working class participation.

In presidential elections, of course, the abolition of the electoral college (which American democrats with a small d have favored since the election of 1876, when Karl Marx was still alive and V.I. Lenin was a baby named Ulyanov) and the establishment of a runoff when no candidate has a majority (which is the present international standard in presidential elections) are necessities if the US is to make its electoral process conform to modern democratic standards.

There are other, more basic and more structural changes in U.S. political practice if the nation is to move in a democratic direction. First, the power of comprehensive judicial review, taken by the Supreme Court in Marberry v. Madison in the administration of Thomas Jefferson and sustained now for two centuries, has no place in a modern democracy. Not only does judicial review not exist in the constitution, but its exercise through most of US history has been to sustain the most conservative political positions by declaring unconstitutional state and federal legislation of a progressive nature.

The decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s are the great exception to this rule, but that was a court which was the outcome of a far-reaching liberalization of the federal judiciary launched by the New Deal in the 1930s and made possible by the victories of the labor movement and other mass peoples movements. Today, the federal judiciary has been 'packed' in such a way that it serves as both a defender of anti-democratic legislation and practices and the last line of defense against any legislation that may develop from revitalized people’s movements.

To a great extent, the present state political structures no longer make much economic sense, and the suburbanization of the last half century has wreaked havoc with local government, which bears the burden of funding public primary and secondary education and, at the city and county level, a good deal of social welfare costs. Merging states deeply interconnected economically into regional governments through the country and creating metropolitan governments to bring together cities and inner suburbs would both save hundreds of billions in expenditures over time and create stronger more representative governmental structures that would be able to tax both corporations and the wealthy much more seriously under the existing system and relieve greatly both the huge burden that personal property taxes currently place on large sections of the population and the burden on future generations created by large deficits. Such regional and metropolitan governments would also be in a much stronger position to demand a redistribution of federal funds away from the present central concentration on military spending and other corporate subsidies toward spending far education, health care, housing, transportation, recreation and other social needs.

People's movements put pressure on the larger system using slogans like 'jobs and justice' and 'tax the rich,' demanding universal health care, funding human needs and other things that the present political system is not set up to give them. While Marxists and communists support and often play a leading role in those movements, it is most important for Marxists and Communists to provide analysis and leadership for basis restructuring of the whole political system, to make it much more effectively democratic, so it will be able to respond seriously to peoples movements and be held accountable when it doesn’t.

In a subsequent online article, I will try to explore what the socialist-communist definitions of economic and social democracy might mean in 21st century America. --Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.