Democracy in Marxist theory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Marxist view is fundamentally opposed to liberal democracy believing that the capitalist state cannot be democratic by its nature, as it represents the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Marxism views liberal democracy as an unrealistic utopia. This is because they believe that in a capitalist state all "independent" media and most political parties are controlled by capitalists and one either needs large financial resources or to be supported by the bourgeoisie to win an election. Marx described parliamentary democracy as "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament"^[1] Thus the Marxists believe that in a capitalist state, the system focusses on resolving disputes within the ruling bourgeosie class and ignores the interests of the proletariat or labour class which are not represented and therefore dependent on the bourgeoisie's good will: "Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty” – supposedly petty – details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.” (Lenin, State and Revolution, Chapter 5)

Moreover, even if representatives of the proletariat class are elected in a capitalist country, Marxists claim they have limited power over the country's affairs as the economic sphere is largely controlled by private capital and therefore the representative's power to act is curtailed. Essentially, minarchists (only a small minority of those supporting liberal democracy) claim that in the ideal liberal state the functions of the elected government should be reduced to the minimum (i.e. the court system and security). Hence Marxists-Leninists see a socialist revolution necessary to bring power into hands of opperrsed classes.

Lenin insisted that bougeous democracy in fact a dictatorship of bougeoisie^[2], while dictatorship of proletariat is a highest possible form of democracy (for those considered the working class) and should use violence against opposing classes.

• Marx: “...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...
• Engels: “...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...
• Engels: “As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....
• Lenn: The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.
• Lenin: A state of the exploited must fundamentally differ from such a state; it must be a democracy for the exploited, ‘and a means of suppressing the exploiters; and the suppression of a class means inequality for that class, its exclusion from “democracy”.[3]

Communist states are widely seen as being de facto dictatorships by bougeious criticists, since the elections they held tended to be heavily rigged. [4]

See also Criticisms of communist regimes and Criticisms of Marxism.

Supporters of liberal democracy point to the Marxists make these claims without any supporting evidence and instead point to many empirical studies:

• Numerous studies using many different kinds of data, definitions, and statistical analyses have found support for the democratic peace theory. The original finding was that liberal democracies have never made war with one another. More recent research has extended the theory and finds that democracies have few Militarized Interstate Disputes causing less than 1000 battle deaths with one another, that those MIDs that have occurred between democracies have caused few deaths, and that democracies have few civil wars.^[3]

• Poor liberal democracies have better education, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, access to drinking water, and better health care than poor dictatorships. This is not due to higher levels of foreign assistance or spending a larger percentage of GDP on health and education. Instead, the available resources are managed better.^[4]

• Several health indicators (life expectancy and infant and maternal mortality) has a stronger and more significant association with liberal democracy than they have with GDP per capita, size of the public sector, or income inequality.^[5]

• In the post-Communist nations, after an initial decline, those most democratic have achieved the greatest gains in life expectancy.^[6]

• A prominent economist, Amartya Sen, has noted that no functioning democracy has ever suffered a large scale famine.^[7] This includes democracies that have not been very prosperous historically, like India, which had its last great famine in 1943 and many other large scale famines before that in the late nineteenth century, all under British rule. However, some others ascribe the Bengal famine of 1943 to the effects of World War II^{[citation needed]}. The government of India had been becoming progressively more democratic for years. Provincial government had been entirely so since the Government of India Act of 1935.

• Refugee crises almost always occur in nondemocracies. Looking at the volume of refugee flows for the last twenty years, the first eighty-seven cases occurred in autocracies.^[8]

• Research shows that the more liberal democratic nations have much less democide or murder by government.^[9] Similarly, they have less genocide and politicide.^[10]

• Liberal democracies are more often associated with a higher average self-reported happiness in a nation.^[11]

• Research by the World Bank suggests that political institutions are extremely important in determining the prevalence of corruption: democracy, parliamentary systems, political stability, and freedom of the press are all associated with lower corruption.^[12] Freedom of information legislation is important for accountability and transparency. The Indian Right to Information Act "has already engendered mass movements in the country that is bringing the lethargic, often corrupt bureaucracy to its knees and changing power equations completely."^[13]

• If leaving out East Asia, then during the last forty-five years poor democracies have grown their economies 50% more rapidly than nondemocracies. Poor democracies such as the Baltic countries, Botswana, Costa Rica, Ghana, and Senegal have grown more rapidly than nondemocracies such as Angola, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.^[14]

• Of the eighty worst financial catastrophes during the last four decades, only five were in democracies. Similarly, poor democracies are half likely as nondemocracies to experience a 10 percent decline in GDP per capita over the course of a single year.^[15]

• Several studies have concluded that terrorism is most common in nations with intermediate political freedom. The nations with the least terrorism are the most democratic nations[5].

[edit] Soviet democracy

A soviet republic is a system of government in which the whole state power belongs to the Soviets - councils of employees^[16]. Although the term usually associated with communist states, it was not initially intended to represent only one political force, but merely a form of democracy and representation. Supporters claim that there were examples of Soviet Republics with multi-party system and even without a communist party. Theoretically, in classical Soviet Republic all power belongs to the hierarchy of Councils, with the Supreme Council on the top. It means that the Supreme Council has authority to alter the constitution, resolve trials, sentence people, change the government, confiscate property, reform language and appoint any official by simple majority. Constitution of the USSR of 1977 states "The Supreme Soviet of the USSR is empowered to deal with all matters within the jurisdiction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(...)Laws of the USSR shall be enacted by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR or by a nationwide vote (referendum) held by decision of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR" Decisions of the councils does not require to be ratified or undersigned by any other body or person. In practice the councils do not normally execute all these powers, but rather institute bodies to perform their work. However, when Lenin was still in power, he issued a "temporary" ban on factions within the party. This ban remained until the fall of Communism and according to critics made the democratic procedures an empty formality.^[17]

[edit] Notes