A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London, 1848
Marx supported the struggle for democratic rights because he believed that a bourgeois republic with political freedoms would make the class struggle between capitalists and workers arising from social inequality more transparent, less disguised by monarchical rule. It would weaken the legitimacy of authority more generally and stimulate working class political development. Without this freedom the working class would not develop the political capacity to become the ruling class.
Bruno Leipold, in his book Citizen Marx, notes that Marx adopted many of the democratic demands of republican revolutionaries that constituted these political freedoms, ensuring that implementation of democratic rights was not restricted by measures from the bourgeois state specifically designed to nullify them. (Citizen Marx p244). He notes that this enthusiasm led to what proved to be over-optimistic expectations of what would follow as a result. So, Marx and Engels appeared to endorse the view in 1846 that the introduction of the Peoples Charter would mean that the working class “will become the ruling class of England” (Marx and Engles Collected Works Vo 6 p 58, ‘Address of German Democratic Communists of Brussels to O’Connor, quoted in Citizen Marx p245)
In The Communists and Karl Heinzen Engels stated that ‘the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 299)
Leipold discusses their optimistic expectations of universal (manhood) suffrage in his book (p 245-249) but he also notes Marx’s view of the experience of the French Second Republic, which originated in a democratic revolution but which was usurped by a coup d’état led by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who later declared himself Emperor. This experience had shown that although “bourgeois rule as the outcome of universal suffrage . . . is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution” their democratic commitment crumbles the “moment that the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule.” On “March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage.” (Citizen Marx p 246 and 247). Marx was therefore wrong when he claimed that “The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage.” (Marx The Class Struggles in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p79)
In country after country, we can see the fraudulent character of bourgeois democracy. In the United States measures to suppress voting are routinely employed while the constitution that is so revered contains significant undemocratic institutions and practices. The political system is dominated by massive amounts of big business money and individual capitalist wealth. The repression unleashed by Trump and the multiple law and order organs of the state has demonstrated its class nature and renders pretence of its hallowed democracy cynical. In Europe, triumvirates of Starmer, Macron. Scholtz or Merz participate in a proxy war that no one voted for and are either deeply unpopular and/or elected on historically low votes but endowed nevertheless with full powers.
The defective features of bourgeois democracy are particular to each country but their universal existence in one form or another is due to the capitalist character of society and the social power this entails for the capitalist class and its retinue of helpers.
Marx was later to learn that a different form of state was required to break the power of these forces and embody real democracy. This was discovered in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the working classes of that city overturned the ruling authorities and imposed their own rule. Marx noted that:
‘The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.’
‘While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society. 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, constituted in Communes . . .’
‘It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.’
‘Except on this last condition, the Communal Constitution would have been an impossibility and a delusion. The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery.’
Republicanism promised the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ but only social emancipation can deliver it.
Part 65 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism
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Sráid Marx 