3429. Dear News Media, Stop Covering the US as If It’s a Democracy

By Rob Wijnberg, The Correspondent, Septermber 16, 2020

[For an audio of this text please visit: https://soundcloud.com/thecorrespondent]

The problem with the fall of a democracy is that it doesn’t simply happen, like a rain shower or a thunderstorm. It unfolds, like the slow and steady warming of the climate.

Liberties aren’t eliminated, they are restricted and violated – until they erode. Rights aren’t abolished, they are undermined and trampled – until they become privileges. Truths aren’t buried, they are mocked and twisted – until everyone has their own.

A democracy doesn’t stumble and fall; it slides into decline.

The problem with daily news is that it obsesses over what’s happening, making it harder to grasp what unfolds. Breaking news, by its nature, is ill-equipped to cover the demise of democracy – just as the weather report never really shows us the climate is changing. 

Breaking news shows the world as a place of sheer madness without rhyme or reason – a non-stop series of unrelated events. It’s like a diary without a memory or a notion of the future: it tells us of today, while it has forgotten all about yesterday, and pretending there’s no tomorrow. It warns and warns and warns, but immediately forgets what it’s warning against – thus never learning from its own wailing sirens.

For four years, US news has been what you get when you combine a North Korean obsession with the head of state with Rupert Murdoch’s business model

For the past four years, ever since Donald J Trump took presidential office, this fundamental flaw in the fabric of news has hit harder than ever before.

For four years, US news has been what you get when you combine a North Korean obsession with the head of state with Rupert Murdoch’s business model. A deranged cult of personality, interrupted only by commercial breaks. A presidential hypnosis, paid for by Procter & Gamble and Amazon. A totalitarian Twitterocracy in which we lurch from incident, to riot, to tweet, to disaster, to lunacy, to lie, to crisis, to disbelief, to attack, to mudslinging, to insult, to conspiracy theory, without facing the consequences of the pattern – the steady slide into decline.

The disturbing story behind all this frenzied chaos of news is that of a country that is a democracy in name only, a kleptocracy 

 in actual practice, and well on its way to becoming an autocracy full stop.

A country that has seen its public sphere crumble into neoliberal rubble over the past 40 years. That has seen its conservative party transform into a fact-free sectarian movement. That has seen the gap between poor and rich, black and white, urban and rural grow into a chasm so wide that it is “United” in name only. That is held together only by worn-out myths – myths about free and fair elections, about social mobility, about being a beacon to the world. About itself.

Or, as the late stand-up comedian George Carlin once said: “It’s called the American Dream for a reason. You have to be asleep to believe it.”

The United States of America, a republic without the ‘public’

It would be a major misconception to assume that the downfall of US democracy started in November 2016, when Trump was elected. In fact, it’s the other way around: the first openly kleptocratic president moving into the White House marked the consummation of its decay, not its initial conception.

Born from theft, built on slavery, held together by self-deception, the United States has grown to become the richest poor country in the history of humankind. It is a country that has violence in its DNA, inequality embedded in its genes, and a completely mythical self-image as its national identity.

It’s a country with the world’s highest GDP, where 40 million people live below the poverty line. 

The only industrialised nation on the planet without universal healthcare, any real social welfare system or decent retirement provisions. The only free nation where 1 in 40 adults are behind bars and which has more guns in circulation than people living within its borders.  The only western economy where the richest three inhabitants hold more wealth than the poorest half of the entire population. 

The US is, in short, a country without a social contract. It’s a republic that has stripped away the “public”. And it’s led by a political party that can no longer be called a party in any real sense.

Because while many journalists still tend to refer to it as such, the Republican party is no longer a political party at all – it’s become a sectarian movement. Its transformation is rooted in an increasingly intimate alliance with the country’s corporate elite, tied to an increasingly radical type of identity politics.

By this point, political scientists Thomas E Mann and Norman J Ornstein conclude, the party has become a “radical insurgency” – “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” In fact, there are almost no moderate Republicans left:

And there’s no need for them, either, because the GOP doesn’t really represent the people. Its power base rests solely on the illusion of a democratic mandate. For the American spectacle that dominates our front-pages every four years has very little to do with “free” or “fair” elections.

It takes millions and millions of dollars to even run for president in the first place, and candidates need at least half a billion dollars to fund their PR campaigns to have a decent shot at winning. That funding is largely solicited from the country’s biggest banks, titans of technology, pharmaceutical firms, oil companies and individual billionaires, whose financial support ensures their political influence.

The victory paid for with these hundreds of millions of lobby dollars can hardly be considered representative of the American people. To be sure, democracies are never perfect – all reflect the structural inequalities in which they exist, and the ways in which the powerful can tug the systems in their favour. But almost nowhere in the world is the gap between the political preferences of ordinary voters and the priorities of the elite as great as it is in the United States. And almost nowhere else do the results of the election differ so dramatically from how people cast their ballots in the voting booth.

For the final result is based not on the popular vote, but on the electoral college: a system that was, by design, heavily biased in favour of the less densely populated Southern states as part of a workaround for the persistence of slavery. 

This system has been made even less representative in every election by means of a process known as gerrymandering. 

No wonder voter turnout in the US is among the lowest in the industrialised world. Nearly half of eligible voters do not take part in the elections. This isn’t just because of political apathy; it is also caused by deliberate voter suppression. 

 Millions of US Americans – most of them living in poverty and black – are systematically blocked from voting. Those who do venture to try usually end up spending hours standing in an excruciatingly long line, only to cast their ballot on a highly unreliable voting machine. 

In other words, the US lacks nearly all the elements of a functioning democracy: a social contract, a representative electoral system, free and fair elections, political parties that follow democratic practices, and universal suffrage. 

Instead, it has an electability threshold starting at hundreds of millions of dollars, a political process completely determined by billionaires and large corporations, an electoral system that is fundamentally skewed, and a discouraged and sabotaged electorate.

Democracy? What democracy?

How the US became a kleptocracy

From that perspective, the ascendance of Donald J Trump to the seat of US power isn’t an astounding deviation from the natural order of things, but rather the completely logical outcome of a development that has been progressing for decades.

A country without any sense of the common good, grown fat on exploitation, held together by fundamental falsehoods will ultimately get a leader who suits that setting perfectly: a leader without a coherent ideology, driven by greed and self-enrichment, owing no fealty to fact.

What is new, however, is how openly kleptocratic the US has become. Behind the inimitable vagaries of Trump’s personality and political agenda, one factor is consistently present: the systematic enrichment of himself, his family and the elite to which they belong – and the shamelessness with which it all takes place.

This shamelessness was apparent from day one. At Trump’s very first press conference as president, he stood behind the lectern and gestured to a table covered in stacks of paper. Those folders, he said, were full of documents describing how he had relinquished control of his business empire.

Those documents, it turned out later, were all blank. 

The empty sheets of paper that represented his first official lie as head of state would be filled by more than 20,000 demonstrable lies in the four years that followed.

In the meantime, Trump rerouted millions of US tax dollars into his own business accounts. In the three-year period from 2015 to 2018 alone, over $16m in campaign funds and taxpayer money went to Trump’s own businesses. The president frequently spent the night in his own hotels, tucking at least a million in public funds into his own pocket. Staying in those selfsame hotels, the US Secret Service paid as much as $650 per room per night to accommodate the president’s security detail, expending hundreds of thousands of additional tax dollars that went to Trump-owned properties.   

Trump also appointed his immediate family members and their spouses to positions of power – on an “unofficial” basis, so as to circumvent the rules against nepotism. His daughter Ivanka Trump became senior adviser to the president, as did her husband Jared Kushner; Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump’s personal attorney, was appointed his “Public Liaison Assistant”. His sons Don Jr and Eric Trump were put in charge of the Trump Organization. Since their father’s inauguration, they made over a hundred million dollars in property deals – some of which required approval from the Trump administration itself. 

Those same family members turned this year’s Republican National Convention, the political party’s main event leading up to the national elections, into a parade of brazen kleptocracy: six of the 12 key speakers (!) shared the president’s last name.

Meanwhile, Trump cut $6bn from the federal budget for subsidised housing – direct competition to his own property empire – and slashed federal taxes by nearly $1.5tn, with over a third of that going to the richest 1% of US citizens – meaning multimillionaires just like him. 70% of the tax cut went directly into the pockets of the top 20% earners in the country. 

As cherry on top of the kleptocratic cake, Trump used his presidential powers to pardon 25 convicted criminals – nearly all of them friends, acquaintances or political supporters, and nearly all unusually early in his presidency, letting his “inner circle” know that they have nothing to fear in terms of legal prosecution.

“No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose,” warned House committee members calling for an investigation. But their warnings fell on deaf ears, since Trump had now single-handedly derailed the safeguards put in place to prevent abuses of power.

Case in point? The US justice department is currently moving to shield the president from prosecution for rape, a level of political intervention in the judicial process that is unprecedented even by US standards. 

Democracy in the dark, concealed behind the curtain of news-as-usual

All of these things, each and every one, story after story, have been in the news.

Even the pattern hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Four weeks after Donald Trump was sworn into office as president of the United States of America, The Washington Post unveiled its new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. It was the first official slogan in the newspaper’s long history, referencing a phrase used by its most famous investigative journalist Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate affair.

The slogan isn’t merely a slogan anymore – it’s basically the theme of most of the reporting. The work being done by the Post’s own David Fahrenthold, as well as his New York Times counterparts David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner, author Andrea Bernstein, journalist Katherine Sullivan and others, 

And while a pandemic rages across the nation unimpeded, the country moves closer to the brink of a deep economic crisis, and tensions in the streets flare higher and higher every day, the president is openly inciting violence, politicising the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement agencies for personal gain, and preemptively questioning the legitimacy of the upcoming national elections, just in case.

All those signals point in only one direction: the US is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.

Those who warn of the impending autocracy can only ever be alarmist. Either we’re proven wrong, or our warnings are already too late. For a democracy doesn’t fall, it slides into decline. Its demise cannot be predicted, only revealed in retrospect.

The fact that people can still sound the warning means that it is not too late. A free press is indeed the light shining in the darkness that keeps a democracy alive. But if a free press is the shining beacon, then some of its most pernicious habits are the curtain concealing its light.

There is a popular theory that divides the American news landscape into two sides: left-wing liberal vs right-wing conservative media.

And indeed, when you switch back and forth between Fox News and CNN, or between Breitbart and the New York Times, it’s like hopping from Mars to Venus and back again; even the gravity is different. Not hard to guess who’s the devil and who’s the messiah on these two disparate planets.

So, yes, there’s a lot of truth to the theory. But because the theory focuses mainly on the differences between news media, it neatly evades their similarities.

Beneath those superficial differences is one fundamental commonality: a shared definition of news. To put it more simply, left-wing and right-wing media are talking differently about the same things. Crazy, sensational, unusual, bad things that happened today. Current affairs plus absurdity times outrage.

That’s one of the reasons that Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on how authoritarian regimes work, argues in Surviving Autocracy that the media should cover “Trumpism not as news, but as a system.”

Many news media outlets are still operating on default settings, covering a democracy rather than reporting on an emergent authoritarian regime. Even now, they’re still attending the daily White House press briefings as if they were normal press conferences rather than a vehicle for systematically disseminating lies and misinformation. Even now, they’re still quoting patent falsehoods in headlines and articles as if they were solid statements by legitimate government sources rather than deliberately misleading propaganda from the mouths of so-called spokespersons. Even now, they conflate impartiality and “false balance”, as if every truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Even now, they are still broadcasting Trump’s campaign rallies live, although they know full well those rallies will contain incitements to violence, showcase conspiracy theories and pose a genuine hazard to public health. (Remember when Trump suggested injecting bleach as a possible response to the coronavirus?) 

Even now, they are still referring to the Republicans as a political party, their gatherings as party conventions, and their lies as campaign promises. Even now, they are still hoping their leader will display “presidential” conduct, as if things might return to “normal” at some point.

Even now, they still talk about “the White House” as if it has the same meaning it once had.

But as journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it, “There is no White House. Not in the way journalists came to use that term. [...] Those words, ‘the White House’ are still used, but there is no clear referent. The metonymy broke.”

An election about democracy itself

The reality is that we can no longer report on US politics, and on these elections in particular, through the lens of news-as-usual. An emergent autocracy demands fundamentally different journalistic standards and practices.

It demands a journalism that leaves no room for “bothsidism” – a feigned semblance of “neutrality” by portraying politics as a conflict between two parties that are similar in nature. A journalism in which lies are not first spread as “quotes”, only to be debunked later by a fact-checker. A journalism in which deliberate propaganda and misleading claims are no longer referred to as a “press conference”, “briefing” or “convention”. 

In short, we need a journalism in which news media are united not in their shared obsession with breaking news, but in their joint defence of democracy.

For on the ballot in the upcoming elections isn’t merely a choice between left or right, progressive or conservative, Trump or Biden. On the ballot this time are the elections themselves.

Translated from Dutch by Joy Phillips.

2437. A New Dimension of Bourgeois Democracy

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times, Septmber 5, 2016

Late last month, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, hosted a private fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in Los Altos, Calif., along with his colleague Lisa Jackson, vice president of Apple’s environmental, policy and social initiatives. The private, off-the-record event required a donation of $2,700 to $50,000.

While Mr. Cook’s role was as a private citizen — it was not an Apple event — the message to employees about whom he is supporting for president is clear.

The influence of chief executives like Mr. Cook over employees’ political leanings and donations, intentional or not, is substantial: It may not be an overstatement to suggest that a chief executive’s politics may be one of the most significant factors in swaying how employees think about elections.

The results of a new academic study looking at the power of chief executives over the politics of their employees is stunning and perhaps unsettling.

Three business professors set out to examine “how the political preferences of C.E.O.s affect their employees’ campaign contributions and electoral choices.” The results of the study, which looked at eight federal election cycles from 1999 to 2014 and over 2,000 companies, showed a statistically significant correlation among campaign contributions made by the chief and his or her employees as well as voter turnout. The study found that “employees direct approximately three times more of their campaign contributions to political candidates supported by their firm’s C.E.O. than to otherwise similar candidates.”

If you’re thinking, “Well, C.E.O.s and employees donate along similar party lines because they share common values and interest,” think again.

The study uncovered patterns that show a chief executive’s influence is profound: “When a new C.E.O. contributes to different political candidates from the ones supported by the prior C.E.O., employees tend to follow his/her lead and redirect their donations as well,” wrote the professors, Ilona Babenko of Arizona State University, Viktar Fedaseyeu of Bocconi University in Italy and Song Zhang of the University of Lugano in Switzerland.

There is nothing inherently wrong, in most cases, with a chief executive or employee raising money for a particular candidate or party. Mr. Cook, it is worth noting, gives to both sides of the aisle, having just hosted a separate fund-raiser for House Speaker Paul Ryan in June.

But the influence of a boss’s political leanings should not be underestimated. “Our evidence indicates that C.E.O.s are a political force, with potentially important implications for firms they manage and for the nature of democracy,” the authors wrote. “The welfare implications depend both on whether C.E.O.s promote their own political agenda or act in the interests of their firms, and on whether the interests of the firm coincide with the interests of its employees.”

Some C.E.O.s don’t just lead by example; they actively solicit donations from their own employees for candidates and company-sponsored political action committees, which can create its own thicket of ethical questions. The Federal Election Commission, for example, investigated the way Robert Murray, chief executive of Murray Energy, had solicited political donations from his employees through emails and internal videos. Some employees told The New Republic that they felt pressured to donate, fearing that not to do so might risk their jobs.The Federal Election Commission, ultimately, found Mr. Murray hadn’t broken any laws.

Still, the risks – and complex set of election laws – make political fund-raising a complicated endeavor for those in the corner office. “The potentially coercive effect of an employer’s solicitation counsels in favor of avoiding the situation altogether,” said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the chief of Kalorama Partners, a Washington consulting firm. “The logical alternative — having a very strong and clear disclaimer — doesn’t really work, since many employees might not believe the disclaimer, no matter how strongly it is worded.”

Tony Fratto, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush who now operates a consulting firm, Hamilton Place, took issue with the idea that C.E.O.s should remain outside the political campaign arena.

“I don’t doubt that some employees feel pressure to align with the C.E.O. politically, but my experience is that in most cases both C.E.O.s and employees are overwhelmingly influenced by a candidate’s views or voting record on industry issues,” he said. “I encourage firms to do more to inform their employees at all levels about what political leaders’ records are on their key policies. I actually think that doesn’t happen enough.”

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a professor at Columbia University, found in his own survey that “a quarter of employees reported that their bosses have tried to engage them in politics,” but reported that “about 7 percent of employees reported clearly coercive kinds of political contact at work – messages that made workers uncomfortable or included threats of plant closures, cuts in hours or layoffs.”

This election cycle, it seems that many C.E.O.s, especially on Wall Street, have chosen to be less public about whom they are supporting in the presidential race. Perhaps because of the lingering negative memories of the financial crisis or perhaps because this presidential election has turned so decidedly nasty, many executives have stayed on the sideline. In June, Brian Krzanich, chief executive of Intel, canceled an event at his home for Donald Trump after it was reported to be causing a firestorm among Intel employees and peers in Silicon Valley that felt Mr. Trump’s policies were damaging to the industry. Mr. Krzanich later said he canceled the event because it had turned into a fund-raiser without his approval. “I do not intend to endorse any presidential candidate. We are interested in engaging both campaigns in open dialogue on issues in technology,” he wrote on Twitter.

When it comes to presidential politics, some executives privately say they worry they could see reprisals against their business or industry if they were to actively campaign for one candidate or another.

“The risk of being on the record publicly against a politician is high, particularly if that politician may take retaliatory action,” said Brian Richter, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

That didn’t stop 150 technology executives from writing an open letter in July opposing Trump’s policies. The list of signatories included the leaders of Silicon Valley darlings like Slack and Box but notably was not signed by the current leaders of Google, Apple or Facebook, which typically face the most regulatory scrutiny.

Clearly the influence of C.E.O.s and other senior executives’ political preferences on the people working for them deserves more scrutiny. In the meantime, while it is hard to know how individuals will ultimately vote when they pull the lever in November, perhaps a new election polling data point should be the preferences of their bosses.

2391. Rosa Luxemburg’s Critique of Bourgeois Democracy

By Michael Löwy, New Politics, Summer 2016

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg’s defense of socialist democracy and her critique of the Bolsheviks in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution (1918) are well known. Less well known and often forgotten is her critique of bourgeois democracy, its limits, its contradictions, and its narrow and partial character. We propose to examine this critical line of thought in some of her political writings without any pretentions to completeness.

We begin this discussion with Reform or Revolution (1898), one of the foundational texts of modern revolutionary socialism, where this problem is taken up in a particularly intense way. This brilliant essay, the work of a young woman almost unknown at the time, is a unique synthesis of revolutionary passion and discursive rationality, filled with sparks of irony and lightning flashes of intuition. It remains, more than a century later, surprisingly contemporary. 

But it is not without its defects, notably in its economic polemic with Eduard Bernstein, where she develops a sort of optimistic fatalism: the belief in the inevitability of the economic collapse (Zusammenbruch) of capitalism. It should be said in passing that this is an opinion that one finds even today among a number of Marxists who have announced that the current financial crisis of capitalism is “the last” and that it will bring about the definitive end of the system. It seems that Walter Benjamin, who knew the Great Crisis of 1929 and its results, formulated the most pertinent conclusion regarding this subject: “The experience of our generation: capitalism will not die a natural death.”

Nevertheless, in her discussion of democracy, Luxemburg dissociates herself from the facile optimism of the religion of democratic Progress (with a capital “P”)—the illusion of increasing democratization of the “civilized” societies—dominant in her era among both liberals and socialists. This is also one of the strong points of her argument. Furthermore, in her analysis of the liberal bourgeoisie, one finds not a trace of economism: One sees here, in all of its force, what Georg Lukács, in “The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,” the opening essay of History and Class Consciousness (1923), designated as the revolutionary principle in the terrain of method: the dialectical category of the totality. Luxemburg discusses the issue of democracy from the perspective of the historical totality in motion, where economy, society, class struggle, state, politics, and ideology are inseparable moments of a concrete process.

Dialectic of the Bourgeois State

Luxemburg’s eminently dialectical approach to the bourgeois state and its democratic forms permits her to avoid both the social-liberal approach (Bernstein!) that denies its bourgeois character, as well as that of a certain vulgar Marxism that does not take into account the importance of democracy. Faithful to the Marxist theory of the capitalist state, Luxemburg insists on its character as a “class state.” But she immediately replies, “This, too, like everything referring to capitalist society, should not be understood in a rigorous absolute manner, but dialectically.” What does that mean? First, it means that the state “without a doubt assumes functions of general interest in terms of social development,” but at the same time it only does so “to the degree that the general interest in terms of social development coincides with the interest of the dominant class.” The state’s universality is thus severely limited and in a large degree negated by its class character.

Another aspect of this dialectic is the contradiction between the democratic form and the class content: “The formally democratic forms are not democratic with regard to their content where class interests dominate.” But she does not limit herself to that finding, which is a classic locus of Marxism; not only does she not disregard the democratic form, but she shows that it can come into conflict with the bourgeois content: “This manifests itself in a tangible fashion in the fact that as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and by its state representatives.” The history of the twentieth century is riddled with examples of this sort of “sacrifice,” from the Civil War in Spain to the coup d’état in Chile; these are not exceptions, but the rule. Already in 1898 Luxemburg foresaw with impressive acuity what would happen throughout the next century.

Luxemburg opposes to the idyllic vision of history as uninterrupted “Progress,” as the necessary evolution of humanity toward democracy, and above all to the myth of an intrinsic link between capitalism and democracy, a sober analysis, without any illusions, of the diversity of political regimes:

The uninterrupted victory of democracy, which to revisionism as well as to bourgeois liberalism appears as a great fundamental law of human history and especially modern history, is shown upon closer examination to be a phantom. No absolute and general relation can be constructed between capitalist development and democracy. The political form of a given country is always the result of the composite of all the existing political factors, domestic as well as foreign. It admits within its limits all variations of scale from absolute monarchy to the democratic republic.

What she could not foresee, of course, were authoritarian state forms even worse than monarchies: the fascist regimes and military dictatorships that would develop in the capitalist countries—in the center as well as in the periphery—throughout the twentieth century. But she has the merit of being one of the few in the workers’ and socialist movements to challenge the ideology of Progress, which was common among bourgeois liberals and among a good part of the left, and demonstrate the complete compatibility of capitalism with radically anti-democratic political forms.

Bernstein, a convinced advocate of the ideology of Progress, believed in an irreversible evolution of modern societies toward more democracy and—why not? —toward socialism. Now, observes Rosa Luxemburg, “the state, that is to say the political organization, and the property relations, that is to say the legal organization of capitalism, become more and more capitalist, and not more and more socialist.” We see again the opposition between the left and the right in German Social Democracy corresponding to the antagonism between faith in ineluctable Progress of the “civilized” countries and the insistence on social revolution.

Not only is there no particular affinity between the bourgeoisie and democracy, but often there is a struggle. Yet it is in the struggle against this class that democratic advances take place: “In Belgium the conquest of universal suffrage by the labor movement was due to the weakness of the local militarism, and consequently to the special geographic and political situation and, above all, this ‘piece of democracy’ was obtained, not by the bourgeoisie, but against it.”

Is this just the case of Belgium, or is it rather a general historical tendency? Luxemburg seems to opt for the second hypothesis, considering that the only guarantee of democracy is the force of the workers’ movement.

The way out of this circle is simple: In view of that fact that bourgeois liberalism has given up the ghost from fear of the growing labor movement and its final aim, we conclude that the socialist labor movement is today the only support for democracy. We must conclude that the socialist movement is not bound to bourgeois democracy but that, on the contrary, the fate of democracy is bound up with the socialist movement. 

Democracy does not acquire greater chances of survival to the extent that the socialist movement renounces the struggle for its emancipation; on the contrary, democracy acquires greater chances of survival as the socialist movement becomes sufficiently strong to struggle against the reactionary consequences of world politics and the bourgeois desertion of democracy. He who would strengthen democracy must also want to strengthen and not weaken the socialist movement. He who renounces the struggle for socialism renounces both the labor movement and democracy.

In other words, democracy, in the eyes of Rosa Luxemburg, is an essential value that the socialist movement must save from its reactionary adversaries, among which one finds the bourgeoisie always ready to betray its democratic proclamations if its interests so demand. We have already seen several examples of this simple fact. What does the reference to the “reactionary consequences of world politics” mean? It is without a doubt a reference to the imperialist and colonial wars that are sure to reduce or eliminate the democratic progress of countries in conflict. We will return to this issue.

The surprising assertion that democracy is linked to the workers’ and socialist movement has also been confirmed by the history of the following decades: the defeat of the socialist left because of its divisions, its mistakes, and its weakness—in Italy, in Germany, in Austria, in Spain—leading to the triumph of fascism, with the backing of the principal forces of the bourgeoisie and the abolition of all forms of democracy during many long years (in Spain for decades). 

The relationship between the workers’ movement and democracy is eminently dialectical: Democracy needs the social movement and vice versa—the proletarian struggle needs democracy in order to develop. 

If democracy has become superfluous or annoying to the bourgeoisie, it is on the contrary necessary and indispensable to the working class. It is necessary to the working class because it creates the political forms (autonomous administration, electoral rights, and so on) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.

Rosa Luxemburg’s formulation is complex. In a first moment, she seems to say that it is thanks to democracy that the working class can struggle to transform society. Would this mean that in the non-democratic countries such a struggle is not possible? On the contrary, insists the Polish revolutionary, it is in the struggle for democracy that class-consciousness develops. She is thinking, no doubt, about a country like czarist Russia—which included Poland—where democracy did not yet exist, and where revolutionary consciousness was awakening precisely in the fight for democracy. This is what one will see a few years later, during the Russian Revolution of 1905. But she may also be thinking, and probably is, about Wilhelmine Germany, where the fight for democracy was far from being won but found in the socialist movement its principal historic subject. In any case, far from neglecting the “democratic forms,” which she distinguishes from their bourgeois exploitation and manipulation, she strictly associates their fate with that of the workers’ movement. 

What then are the important democratic forms? In 1898, she mentions three above all: universal suffrage, the democratic republic, and self-administration; later—for example on the subject of the Russian Revolution of 1918—she will add the democratic freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to organize. What about parliament? Luxemburg doesn’t deny democratic representation as such, but she is wary of parliamentarism in its current form: She considers it “a specific instrument of the bourgeois class state, a way to make capitalist contradictions mature and develop.” She will return to this debate a few years later in polemical articles against Jean Jaurès and the French socialists whom she accuses of wanting to arrive at socialism by way of “the peaceful swamp of senile parliamentarism.” The degradation of this institution is revealed in its submission to the executive power: “The idea, rational in itself, that the government shouldn’t cease being the instrument of the majority of popular representation, is turned into its contrary by the practice of bourgeois parliamentarism: namely the servile dependence of popular representation on the survival of the present government.” She gives credit, in this context, to the French revolutionary socialists who have understood that the legislative action of parliament—useful for extracting some laws favorable to the workers—cannot substitute for the organization of the proletariat for the conquest of political power by revolutionary means.

One finds analogous arguments in an essay of 1904 titled “Social Democracy and Parliamentarism.” With the mordant irony that makes her polemics so electrifying, she takes up the issue of “parliamentary cretinism,” that is, the illusion according to which parliament is the central axis of social life and the motive force of world history. The reality is completely otherwise: The enormous forces of world history, in point of fact, act outside of the bourgeois legislative chambers. Far from being the absolute product of democratic Progress, parliamentarism is a historically determined form of the class rule of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, in a dialectical movement—Luxemburg cites Hegel—with the rise of the socialist movement, parliament must become “one of the most powerful and indispensable instruments of the class struggle” of the workers, serving as a tribune of the popular masses and a locus of agitation for the socialist revolution. But one cannot then effectively defend democracy, and the parliament itself, against reactionary maneuvers except by the extra-parliamentary action of the proletariat. The direct action of the proletarian masses “in the streets”—for example, in the form of a general strike—is the best defense in the face of threats against universal suffrage. In short, the challenge for socialists is to convince “the working masses to count more and more on their own forces and on their autonomous action and not to consider parliamentary struggles as the central axis of political life.” We will return to this.

The Contradictions of the Democratic Bourgeoisie: Militarism, Colonialism

The “really existing bourgeois democracies” are characterized by two profoundly anti-democratic dimensions that are closely linked: militarism and colonialism. In the first case, it is the question of an institution: the army, hierarchical, authoritarian, and reactionary, which constitutes a sort of absolutist state within the democratic state. In the second, it is a question of the imposition, by force of arms, of a dictatorship over the colonized peoples by the Western empires. As Luxemburg recalls in Reform or Revolution?, its class character always obliges the bourgeois state, even a democratic bourgeois state, to accentuate its coercive activity in the domains that serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, “namely militarism and customs and colonial policy.” The denunciation of this “coercive activity,” militarist and imperialist, will be one of the principal axes of Luxemburg’s critique of the bourgeois state. 

From the capitalist point of view, Militarism has become indispensable. First, as a means of struggle for the defense of “national” interests in competition against other “national” groups. Second, as a means of investment of financial and industrial capital. Third, as an instrument of class domination over the laboring population inside the country. In themselves, these interests have nothing in common with the development of the capitalist mode of production.

What demonstrates best the specific character of present-day militarism is the fact that it develops generally in all countries as an effect, so to speak, of its own internal, mechanical motive power, a phenomenon that was completely unknown several decades ago. We recognize this in the fatal character of the impending explosion, which is inevitable in spite of the complete indecisiveness of the objectives and motives of the conflict. From a motor of capitalist development militarism has changed into a capitalist malady.

Luxemburg predicted, in 1898, a world war sparked by competition between national capitalist powers and the uncontrollable dynamics of militarism. This is one of those dazzling intuitions found throughout Reform or Revolution? even if she could not, of course, predict “the circumstances” of the conflict.

Militarism within and colonial expansion without are closely linked and lead to a decline, a degradation, a degeneration of bourgeois democracy:

As a result of the development of the world economy and the aggravation and generalization of competition on the world market, militarism and the policy of big navies have become, as instruments of world politics, a decisive factor in the interior as well as in the exterior life of the great states. If it is true that world politics and militarism represent a rising tendency in the present phase of capitalism, then bourgeois democracy must logically move in a descending line. In Germany the era of great armaments began in 1893, and the policy of world politics, inaugurated with the seizure of Tsingtao [Quingdao], were paid for immediately with the following sacrificial victim: the decomposition of liberalism, the shift of the Centre Party from opposition to government. The recent elections to the Reichstag of 1907, fought under the sign of German colonial policy, were, at the same time, the historical burial of German liberalism.

In the course of the twentieth century, one will see other such sacrifices of democracy demanded by militarism—in Europe (Spain, Greece) as well as in Latin America—much more serious and dramatic than the examples cited here. Nevertheless, Luxemburg’s analysis is broader: She describes the growing weight of the army in the political life of the bourgeois democracies, not only in imperialist competition, but also as an internal factor within bourgeois societies counterpoised to the rising workers’ struggles. In an anti-militarist article of 1914, she shows two underlying tendencies that reinforce the political preponderance of military institutions in the bourgeois state:

These two tendencies are, on the one side, imperialism, which leads to a massive increase in the size of the army, the cult of savage military violence, and a dominating and arbitrary militarism with regard to legislation; on the other side, the workers’ movement that is also undergoing a massive development, emphasizing class antagonisms, and bringing about military intervention more and more frequently by the army against the proletariat in struggle. 

This “savage military violence” is exercised within the framework of imperialist politics, above all against colonial peoples who are subjected to a brutal oppression that has nothing “democratic” about it. Bourgeois democracy produces in its colonial policy autocratic and dictatorial forms of domination. The question of colonialism is touched upon but not very developed in Reform or Revolution? But later, in a 1902 article about Martinique, Luxemburg will denounce the French colonial massacres in Madagascar, the American war of conquest in the Philippines, and England’s in Africa, and finally the aggression against China committed by the French, English, Russians, Germans, Italians, and Americans working together. 

Luxemburg will return to the crimes of colonialism, in particular in The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Picking up the thread of her relentless critique of colonial politics, she turns to the chapter on primitive accumulation in Volume I of Capital, however observing that it is not a question of an “initial” moment, but of a permanent tendency of capital: “Here it is not a question of primitive accumulation, the process continues to our own time. Each colonial expansion is accompanied by an obstinate war against indigenous economic and social conditions, as well as the violent plundering of their means of production and their labor force.” Accumulation leads to the permanent military occupation of the colonies and the brutal repression of their uprising, of which the classic examples are found in English colonialism in India and French colonialism in Algeria. In fact, this permanent primitive accumulation continues today in the twenty-first century, with methods different—but no less ferocious—than those of classical colonialism.

Rosa Luxemburg also mentions in The Accumulation of Capital the case of what could be called internal colonialism in the largest modern bourgeois democracy, the United States: In the course of the conquest of the West, with the help of the railroads, the Native Americans were driven out or exterminated with firearms, with whiskey, and with syphilis and the survivors enclosed in “reservations” like savage beasts—another tragic example of the contradictions of bourgeois democracy.

Democracy and the Conquest of Power: The Hammer Blow of Revolution

Let’s return to Reform or Revolution? now to examine the issue of the relationship between democracy and the conquest of power. Bernstein and his “revisionist” friends believed in the possibility of changing society through gradual reforms within the framework of bourgeois democratic institutions, notably parliament, where Social Democracy might one day become the majority. For reasons that we have already mentioned above, Rosa Luxemburg could only reject this strategy:

There was no doubt for Marx and Engels about the necessity of having the proletariat conquer political power. It is left to Bernstein to consider the chicken coop of bourgeois parliamentarism as the organ by means of which we are to realize the most formidable social transformation of history—the passage from capitalist society to socialism.

This revolutionary conquest of power will be democratic not because it will be realized within the framework of bourgeois democratic institutions, but because it will be the collective action of the great majority of the population: “This the difference between the Blanquist style coups d’état carried out ‘by a militant minority,’ initiated without concern for the moment and, in fact, always at the wrong time, and the conquest of political power by the great conscious mass of the people.” 

Continuing her polemic, she derides Bernstein’s reformist approach and puts forward a powerful argument to justify the need for revolutionary action. 

Fourier’s scheme of changing, by means of a system of phalansteries, the water of all the seas into tasty lemonade was surely a fantastic idea. But Bernstein, proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade, presents an idea that is merely more insipid but no less fantastic.

The production relations of capitalist society approach more and more the production relations of socialist society. But, on the other hand, its political and juridical relations establish between capitalist society and socialist society a steadily rising wall. This wall is not overthrown, but is on the contrary strengthened and consolidated by the development of social reforms and the course of democracy. Only the hammer blow of revolution, that is, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, can break down this wall.

The image of the “hammer blow” makes one think immediately of Marx’s statement in his writings on the Paris Commune (1871) about the necessity, for proletarian revolution, of “smashing” the capitalist state apparatus. The idea is essentially identical, even if Luxemburg doesn’t cite the writings of Marx. This “hammer blow” is even more indispensable if one considers the role of the growing militarism and of the army in the political system. What does this consist of concretely? By what means can this conquest of power be carried out? What revolutionary strategy or tactic does Luxemburg propose? This is a not a theme developed in Reform or Revolution? but here and there she suggests that the “classic” revolutionary methods—insurrection, barricades—are not excluded. Not only the revisionists, but also the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party referred insistently to the Preface written by Friedrich Engels in 1895 at the time of the new edition of Marx’s work The Class Struggles in France (1850); in this text the old leader seems to consider that these methods of struggle have been rendered obsolete by progress in the military arts—canons and modern rifles—giving a strategic advantage to the army.

In fact, Engels’ original wording was much less categorical, the published version being considerably “watered down” by the party leadership (of which Luxemburg was ignorant). Engels was outraged by this manipulation; in a letter to Karl Kautsky on April 1, 1895, he wrote, “To my amazement, I see today in Vorwärts an extract from my introduction, reproduced without my knowledge, and arranged in such a way that I appear to be a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price. Also, I would like the introduction to appear in Neue Zeit without any cuts, so that this shameful impression is cleared up.” Friedrich Engels died a few months later; the complete text never appeared in Neue Zeit, nor, of course, in the re-edition of Marx’s book. It would have to wait for the Russian Revolution of 1917, after which it was finally published in the 1920s. Here is the response of Luxemburg to the “legalistic” argument:

When Engels in the Preface to The Class Struggles in France revised the tactics of the modern workers’ movement, opposing to the barricades the legal struggle, he did not have in mind—as every line of that preface demonstrates—the problem of the definitive conquest of political power, but rather that of the current everyday struggle. He doesn’t analyze the attitude of the proletariat with regard to the capitalist state at the moment of the seizure of power, but its attitude within the framework of the capitalist state. In a word, Engels gives instructions to the oppressed proletariat, and not to the victorious proletariat. 

In fact, her interpretation is disputable. It is not a question, with Engels, of the role of barricades in the “current everyday struggle”! What is interesting in this passage is the attitude of the author of Reform or Revolution? with regard to the question of “armed,” “insurrectional,” and “illegal” methods of struggle—traditional methods from the revolutions of 1789 to 1871—which she refused to exclude from the political arsenal of the proletariat. She was not wrong to do so, since all of the great revolutionary fights of the twentieth century, victorious or defeated—the two Russian revolutions (1905, 1917), the Mexican Revolution (1910-1919), the German Revolution (1918-1919), the Spanish Revolution (1936-1937), and the Cuban Revolution (1959-1961), to cite only some examples—made use of these “illegal” and “extra-parliamentary” methods.

But the revolutionary method that she favored, as we know, is the mass strike, the “natural and spontaneous form of all great revolutionary action of the proletariat.” In fact, this is a method that abounds in a very great variety of initiatives of struggle: economic and political strikes, demonstration or fighting strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, fights at the barricades, “a sea of phenomena, eternally new and ceaselessly moving and changing.” Of course the mass strike “does not replace or render superfluous direct and brutal confrontations in the street.” The experience of Russia in 1905 shows that “combat at the barricades and the head-on confrontation with the forces of the state constitutes the highpoint in the contemporary revolution, a phase in the process of struggle of the proletarian mass.” The confrontation is not eliminated but located at the “climax” of the struggle, which obviously gives it an important role.

Luxemburg will return to Engels’ Preface in the watered-down version of the German Social Democratic Party, the only one known in her period—which definitely annoyed her—in her speech to the founding convention of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD – Spartakusbund) in December 1918. This time around it was not a question of pretending, as in 1898, that it referred to the “current everyday struggle”: “With all the knowledge that specialists in the domain of military science have at their disposal, Engels demonstrates here … that it is completely vain to believe that working people can take their revolution to the streets and come out victorious.” He was wrong, and this document served, she observes, to reduce the party’s activity exclusively to the parliamentary realm. Without excluding the “revolutionary use of the National Assembly” as a tribune, she sees the seizure of power by workers’ and soldiers’ councils, as in Russia in October 1917, as the road to follow.

Rosa Luxemburg gives no recipes; she is betting on the creativity of the revolutionary movement. She limits herself to this simple observation: “Democracy is indispensable, not because it makes the conquest of political power by the proletariat unnecessary, on the contrary, it makes it both necessary and possible to take power.” But this conquest of power comes by way of an institutional rupture, a radical subversion, capable of breaking the legal and political wall of the capitalist state; it comes by the “hammer of the revolution.” 

Socialist Democracy and Bourgeois Democracy (1918)

We are not going to discuss here the question of democracy in a socialist society, which goes beyond the scope of this essay. What interests us here is what Luxemburg writes in her little book on the Russian Revolution, on the subject of bourgeois democracy. It is important to emphasize that the manuscript of 1918 fraternally criticizing the Bolsheviks’ errors in the area of democracy in no way suggests that Luxemburg subscribed to bourgeois democracy. It says explicitly that the historic task of the proletariat is “to create in place of bourgeois democracy, socialist democracy.” Let’s look at her argument in her polemic with Trotsky: 

“As Marxists,” writes Trotsky, “we have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy.” Surely, we have never been idol worshippers of socialism or Marxism either. Does it follow from this that we may throw socialism on the scrap-heap, a la Cunow, Lensch, and Parvus [a faction in the Social Democratic Party], if it becomes uncomfortable for us? Trotsky and Lenin are the living refutation of this answer.

“We have never been idol worshippers of formal democracy.” All that that really means is: We have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality and lack of freedom hidden under the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject the latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell, but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy—not to eliminate democracy altogether.

Rosa Luxemburg returns here to the “classic” distinction, already formulated in Reform or Revolution?, between the democratic form, equality, and formal freedom and the bourgeois content, inequality, and the killing of freedom. But this time she affirms the solution clearly: neither bourgeois democracy nor the dictatorship of a revolutionary elite, but a socialist democracy with a new social content. 

Rosa Luxemburg had foreseen in 1914 “the intervention of the army in struggle against the proletariat.” As we know, in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg herself, Leo Jogisches, Karl Liebknecht, and other Spartakists would be assassinated, victims of this “military savage violence” that she had denounced and which had taken place within the framework of a respectable, constitutional (bourgeois) democracy. What Luxemburg had not foreseen, even in her worst nightmares, was that this political assassination by the counter-revolutionary military officers would take place under the aegis of a government led by the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party.

Translated by Dan La Botz