The Democrat and the Proletarian
 To criticise democracy by denouncing its « formal » and « bourgeois » character is a mistake of vulgar marxism which disregards a double reality : on the one hand, the association from the start between the workers' movement and the democratic movement, and on the other, the fact that democracy is not just a simple idea which one could denounce as false but a reality at the heart of capitalist social relations. It is itself a social relation, the activity which at the same moment both divides individuals up and also joins them together to make the whole of society function. The histories of modern democracy and of the workers' movement are indissociable. It is with good reason that the author of « The Making of the English Working Class » starts his book with a chapter on the London Corresponding Society which faced with the « hardness of the times » and the « dearness of all the necessaries of life » advanced as its principal programme that « every adult person, in possession of his reason, and not incapacitated by crimes, should have a vote for a Member of Parliament ». [8] Since the dawn of modern times a new characteristic of social movements has affirmed itself. Unlike the millenarian uprisings which from Spartacus to the Peasant Wars, knew only one alternative, « liberty or death », and only one outcome, death, movements in the modern era -- the era of the birth and concomitant development of capitalism and of democracy -- have almost always presented a double nature, both a radical protest against the world order and a demand for a place in its bosom. Since then, every time that the first aspect has prevailed ( from the luddites to the Durrutistes, by way of Krondstadt and the uprisings of the 1920's in Germany ), death was never far off. When the second aspect imposed itself, the movement has spoken the language of right, that is to say it has tended to find a common language with the State, if necessary by trying to obtain a modification to democratic law, though this has never excluded massacres, even when it was only a question of the silk workers of Lyon affirming their right to work or of the Communards defending social and communalist rights. Democracy is the political location of the counter-revolution where the divergent interests in society are certainly recognised, but on condition that their irreducibility is absorbed in the « consultation » that enfolds them into the « general interest ». At its beginning ( the period of « formal domination » ), democracy was purely political, and the democratic state was strictly speaking the bourgeois state, a community of human beings created by universal suffrage; its disconnection from the social life of those same human beings was obvious. The boss got busy buying labour power below its value or increasing the working day without increasing wages. The principal intervention by the State in social life was anti-worker repression. The difficulty of finding a private accommodation with the capitalists dragged workers into « general political action ». By opposing all reform, the bosses placed the worker into a situation where he was tempted to go beyond reformist disputes over the mode of valorization of his labour power toward a revolutionary questioning of valorization as such. A danger which was averted by social democracy and the democratic State, though not without causing them some difficult moments. Under the influence of social democracy, the democratic state learned how to put the interests of capital in general before the interests of those private capitalists who did not understand where the future lay, and more and more it intervened in social life. Thus during the great strikes of 1889 and 1905 it was the bismarckien State which forced the barons of the Ruhr to yield to all the workers demands. « If the bourgeoisie believes that in us it can find lightning conductors, it is mistaken. We must go to meet with the world of work. It is necessary to accept the requirements of the working classes, the eight hour working day, the six hour day for miners and night workers, the pension fund, the funds for disability and old age, the controls on industry. We support these demands because we want to accustom the working class to the capacity to direct the enterprises and also to convince the workers that it is not easy to set in motion an industry or trade. If the syndicalist doctrine maintains that one will be able to extract from the masses leaders capable of assuming the direction of work, we cannot stand in the way of this, especially if this movement takes account of two realities, the realities of production and of the nation ( ... ) » In this 1919 speech, in which he also defended the right of women to vote, Mussolini ( for it was he ! ) set out the programme of social democracy which was to be applied in most of the capitalist countries. This movement accompanied the development of the material community of capital. The rights of the working class are recognised to the extent that it abandons its true class character. The capitalist class always exists but they are no longer the simple representatives of their individual capitals, they are functionaries of social capital which is now autonomised, which is no longer the simple sum of all its constituent parts but which on the contrary determines them. Individual capitalists can be replaced by simple functionaries of capital. The working class also appears as a functionary of the material community. Notes [8] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. The quotes are taken from page 19 of the Penguin edition. |