Crisis of Democracy

By Daniel Lazare

The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.

This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes.   This is the real thing.  A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few.  But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating.  For example:

-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role.  In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888.  But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.

-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1]  Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty.  A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.

-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure.  Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas).  Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s.  If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.

-- Federalism is in shambles.  Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio.  This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.

-- Racial imbalances are growing.  More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College.  The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.

-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies.  Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest.  The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.

The upshot is a perfect impasse.  All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it.  But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude.  It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine.  But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless.  Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule.  Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda.  Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.  

Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.

There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.  The difference is crucial.  Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place.  It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy.  If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes.  If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.  

This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists.  Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis.  Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.  

The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other.  The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.

As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.

Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo.  While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change.  She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations.  When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant.  Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.”  They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it.  In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it.  His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.  

For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead.  But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.

[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.

Engels and The Fight for Dialectical Materialism Today

(This August 5th marked the 129th anniversary of Frederick Engels’ death, who together with Karl Marx founded the modern working class movement. For this occasion we are republishing an article originally printed in recognition of the 150th anniversary of his birth.)

BY TIM WOHLFORTH 

… So closely did Marx and Engels collaborate in this work that it is difficult and in many cases impossible to separate out their distinct contributions to Marxist thought. 

Engels in particular wrote on questions of philosophy and for this we must pay special tribute at this time. While this in part reflects his special interests in anthropology and science, it was just as much due to Marx’s preoccupation with Capital. Capital, of course, was for Marx a theoretical task of the highest order and as such a real development of Marxist philosophy. For those who look for a ‘‘textbook’’ by Marx on dialectical materialism could well start with Capital. Particularly important among his philosophical writings was Anti-Duhring with its important section Socialism; Utopian and Scientific, Dialectics of Nature, and Feuerbach. Because Engels took up such a sharp fight for materialism and insisted that dialectical logic was a reflection in the mind of the real contradictory movement of material reality, he has come under increasing fire by idealists. 

ATTACKS

Their essential argument is to contrast the early Marx who had not yet fully developed his materialist and class outlook with the later writings of Engels. These attacks on Engels’ materialism, which have become popular in current academic ‘‘Marxist’’ circles, actually have their origins in this country with the pragmatists of the 1930s. It was Professor Sydney Hook who wrote in 1936: 

“Marx himself never speaks of a NaturDialektik, although he was quite aware that gradual quantitative changes in the fundamental units of physics and chemistry result in qualitative changes. Engels, however, in his Anti-Duhring and in his posthumously published manuscript Dialektik und Natur openly extends the dialectic to natural phenomena. His definition of dialectic, however, indicates that he is unaware of the distinctive character of the dialectic as opposed to the physical concept of ‘change’ and the biological concept of ‘development.’ ‘Dialectic,’ he writes, ‘is nothing more than the science of universal laws of motion and evolution in nature, human society and thought.’” (From Hegel to Marx, Page 75.) 

This attempt to pit the later Engels against Marx is of course a blatant fraud. For instance Marx himself writes in 1873 in the preface to the Second Edition of Capital: 

“(My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘The Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real world, and the real world is only the external phenomenal form of ‘The Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”

These attacks on Engels were continued by James Burnham, leader of the petty bourgeois opposition within the Socialist Workers Party in 1940. Burnham wrote of Engels: 

“I find about 75 percent of what Engels wrote in these latter fields (He is referring to ‘‘philosophy, logic, natural science and scientific method’’—TW) to be confused or outmoded by subsequent scientific investigation - in either case of little value. It seems to me (and as a Marxist I do not find it astonishing) that in them Engels was a true son of his generation, the generation of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley, of the popularizers of Darwin who thought that by a metaphorical extension of the hypothesis of biological evolution they had discovered the ultimate key to the mysteries of the universe.”

PRAGMATISTS

Trotsky is-then accused of serving up “only a stale re-hash of Engels.” 

What these American pragmatists find so reprehensible in Engels is Engels’ insistence that the development of the real world is lawful and that our minds can accurately reflect this development if we can master dialectical thinking. Through dialectics our very forms of thought are developed so as to bring out the real struggle and change in the natural and social world. 

The idealism of Hook and Burnham was actually a reflection of a class position of the middle class intellectual, confronted with the rise of fascism and the needs of its own ruling class to prepare for imperialist war. Thus they sharply rebelled against a philosophical stand which exposed the real class nature of society and their responsibility to take a stand on class issues and fight to change the world through the construction of the party. For them the real world was not lawful and thus they could not really effect it. They could thus only accept it by adapting to the needs of those who ran it - the imperialists.

The thinking of Engels was always in sharp contradiction with American pragmatism. It was Engels who said of this country:

“...From good historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid.’’ (Letter to Sorge in 1886.) 

American pragmatism was to be in the later period a development of such imbecility. 

To Engels the development of dialectics was precisely to make possible revolutionary activity, to prepare for and carry through the socialist revolution. Engels, in his later years, carried on an extensive correspondence to this end with American Marxists. In this way he became thoroughly acquainted with American conditions, the level of the American working class and its historical peculiarities as well as the weaknesses of the American Marxists themselves. It must be remembered that Engels had authored the articles which appeared under Marx’s name in the New York Herald on the German revolution and that he had written extensively on the American Civil War, particularly its military aspects. 

It was in this context that Engels took up the fight to turn the early Marxists in America into the actual organizations of the American working class and urged them to take up the fight for a labor party. He wrote: 

“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering in the move- ment is always the constitution of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party.”

This brought him into collision with a section of the German-American movement about which he stated: 

“The Germans have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way as something that has to be learned by heart, which then will satisfy all requirements forthwith. To them it is a credo and not a guide to action.” 

THEORETICAL

The meaning of Engels’ work and struggle for us today comes out sharply in all this. First, we can see that the first real development of an understanding of the American working class, its theoretical backwardness and its great potential if and only if, the American Marxists learn to penetrate it so as to pit it politically against the capitalists - this understanding came from Engels along with Marx. Thus a perspective for the development of the American working class came out of the international experience and theoretical leadership of the proletariat - and not out of some peculiar American development. 

This perspective, this need to struggle for a labor party in the United States and through this struggle for Marxists to penetrate deep into the working class, can only be carried forward through an understanding of Engels’ theoretical work as a whole - in particular his fight for dialectics as a comrade-in-arms of Marx. American pragmatism comes into collision with Engels’ materialist dialectics and as such reinforces the American bourgeoisie making it impossible for American Marxists to penetrate the working class. 

It is precisely the pragmatism of the present-day Socialist Workers Party which leads it to adapt to middle class movements, abstain from work in the trade unions, and refuse to fight actively for the labor party as Engels urged. It is not surprising that the SWP makes no mention of the 150th birthday of Engels. To the SWP Engels is a figure but not the leader of a theoretical struggle vital to the construction of the party now. 

CP

The Communist Party organ Political Affairs publishes an editorial on Engels’ birthday which does not say a single word about his relationship to the United States and the political and theoretical struggle he waged for a class party here. This is then followed, not by an editorial, but actually a Political Committee Resolution on the 60th birthday of Gus Hall. Engels merits an editorial but Gus gets a resolution (which he no doubt voted for as a member of the Political Committee.) 

What is essential today is that we go to school with.Engels and seek to learn from him what the early Marxists in this country turned a deaf ear to, what the pragmatists of the 1930s sought to deny, and what the contemporary revisionists and opportunists treat with disdain as they go about their essentially liberal business. 

TURN

We must take a sharp turn towards dialectical materialism as we actually go out into the working class and take up the struggle to defend the working class politically against the new attacks of Nixon, Agnew and the whole imperialist ruling class behind them. The solution to the American question requires above all an international perspective and this at heart is a fight for dialectical materialism. 

Resolution on immigration and emigration adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International on August 23, 1907

Resolution on immigration and emigration adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of the Second International on August 23, 1907

The congress declares:

The immigration and emigration of workers are phenomena that are just as inseparable from the essence of capitalism as unemployment, overproduction and workers’ underconsumption. They are often a way of reducing the workers’ participation in the production process and on occasion assume abnormal proportions as a result of political, religious and national persecution.

The congress does not seek a remedy to the potentially impending consequences for the workers from immigration and emigration in any economic or political exclusionary rules, because these are fruitless and reactionary by nature. This is particularly true of a restriction on the movement and the exclusion of foreign nationalities or races.

Instead, the congress declares it to be the duty of organized labor to resist the depression of its living standards that often occurs in the wake of the mass import of unorganized labor. In addition, the congress declares it to be the duty of organized labor to prevent the import and export of strike-breakers. The congress recognizes the difficulties which in many cases fall upon the proletariat in a country that is at a higher stage of capitalist development, as a result of the mass immigration of unorganized workers accustomed to lower living standards and from countries with a predominantly agrarian and agricultural culture, as well as the dangers that arise for it as a result of a specific form of immigration. However, congress does not believe that preventing particular nations or races from immigrating – something that is also reprehensible from the point of view of proletarian solidarity – is a suitable means of fighting these problems. It therefore recommends the following measures:

I. For the country of immigration

1. A ban on the export and import of those workers who have agreed on a contract that deprives them of the free disposal over their labor-power and wages.

2. Statutory protection of workers by shortening the working day, introducing a minimum wage rate, abolishing the sweat system and regulating home working

3. Abolition of all restrictions which prevent certain nationalities or races from staying in a country or which exclude them from the social, political and economic rights of the natives or impede them in exercising those rights. Extensive measures to facilitate naturalization.

4. In so doing, the following principles should generally apply in the trade unions of all countries:

(a) unrestricted access of immigrant workers to the trade unions of all countries

(b) facilitating access by setting reasonable admission fees

(c) the ability to change from the trade union of one country to another for free, upon the fulfilment of all liabilities in the previous union

(d) striving to establish an international trade union cartel, which will make it possible to implement these principles and needs internationally.

5. Support for trade union organizations in those countries from which immigration primarily stems.

II. For the country of origin

1. The liveliest trade union agitation.

2. Education of the workers and the public on the true state of the working conditions in the country of origin.

3. An active agreement of the trade unions with the unions in the country of immigration for the purpose of a common approach towards the matter of immigration and emigration.

4. Since the emigration of labor is often artificially stimulated by railway and steamship companies, by land speculators and other bogus outfits, and by issuing false and scurrilous promises to the workers, the congress demands:

l) The monitoring of the shipping agencies, the emigration bureaus, and potentially legal or administrative measures against them to prevent emigration being abused in the interests of such capitalist enterprises.

III) Reorganization of the transport sector, especially ships; the appointment of inspectors with disciplinary powers, recruited from the ranks of unionized workers in the country of origin and the country of immigration, to oversee regulations; welfare for newly arrived immigrants, so that they do not fall prey to exploitation by the parasites of capital from the outset.

Since the transport of migrants can only be statutorily regulated on an international level, the congress commissions the International Socialist Bureau to develop proposals to reorganize these matters, in which the furnishings and the equipment of ships must be standardized, as well as the minimum amount of airspace for every migrant. Particular emphasis should be placed on individual migrants arranging their passage directly with the company, without the intervention of any intermediate contractor.

These proposals shall be passed on to the party leaderships for the purposes of legislative application and for propaganda.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat within the Party

The existence of class struggle within the movement underscores the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat within the Party. Unchecked, middle-class radicals will take a proletarian movement and drain it of all life, leaving nothing but a husk.

— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) July 26, 2024

It is not necessary to preach a crude workerism excluding all members of other classes from joining the movement.. However, long experience with middle-class factions rising to a dominant position shows the need for organizational measures that ensure the dominance of the workers

— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) July 26, 2024

On United Fronts

The "United Front" tactic was developed in the context of mass reformist workers parties, which long ago transformed into bourgeois parties. Further, right-moving centrists seek 2 integrate in2 bourgeois politics. Only "Struggle Fronts" of proletarian groups offer a way forward.

— ICFI (1953) (@1953Icfi) July 16, 2024