March 23, 2015
Book Review: Adam Tooze, “The Deluge”
“Liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization from chaos – from a flood of ultra-radicalism that will swamp the world…” These are the words of Woodrow Wilson aboard the SS George Washington in December 1918, reflecting on the tasks confronted by the United States and her allies after their victory in the First World War. It is also the fundamental thesis of Adam Tooze’s The Deluge, the long-awaited followup to his brilliant discussion of the political economy of Nazi Germany (for a discussion of which, see here and following). Applying his profound talent for combining political economy with international relations, Tooze’s central subject is the aftermath of World War I and the challenge of creating a new world order amidst the ruins of the old European powers. This challenge, as he presents it, was a dual one. On the one hand it involved the recognition by all European powers, victors or vanquished, that the United States was now the pre-eminent economic power in the world, with the potential of translating this tremendous advantage into equivalent military and political power on the world stage; and on the other hand it involved the attempts by Woodrow Wilson as American President to effect this transformation of the world balance of powers while simultaneously disentangling the United States from a war alliance that he had never wanted in the first place, and which threatened to perpetually constrain the freedom of action the Americans needed to make this potential a reality.
The main dynamic through which this contest was fought out, in Tooze’s economic historical telling, is the question of debt and credit. While Tooze emphasizes that the American contribution to the Entente victory in the military sphere was modest at best, the main American contribution lay not in manpower or materiel, but in the financing of the war effort. The Entente victors ended the war owing the United States a vast sum in inter-Allied debts, and the Americans – Democrats and Republicans alike – were intent on making good on these claims and in so doing subjugate the British and French permanently to a world order of American dominance. However, what complicated the picture was the demand for reparations established by the Entente powers against (especially) Germany, which was perpetually unable to actually pay these. The efforts of international diplomacy and politics in the period 1916-1930 therefore became a veritable pyramid scheme with the United States on top, and each debtor below attempting to recoup their own losses before the whole collapsed under its contradictions. In order to forestall such a collapse and to obtain the necessary leverage combined with the equally necessary flexibility, the Entente powers attempted various means of political institutionalization of the debt and credit relations, from the League of Nations to the series of international agreements between Versailles (1919) and the Young Plan (1930).
Tooze’s narrative, while complex and providing a wealth of substantive detail on everything from the Soviet-Polish War to the internal dynamics of Japanese interwar parliaments, can roughly be summarized as follows. Wilson’s politics, Tooze argues, have wrongly been portrayed as a naive or ‘idealist’ internationalism. Instead, what Wilson recognized was that the only possibility to prevent another such political crisis as 1914 was the establishment of a new liberal order. This order must be based on the fact of American hegemony (which naturally Wilson favored), and in order to achieve this, it was necessary to avoid permanent alliances between the US and European powers, instead favoring ‘peace without victory’ in World War I. When this failed, Wilson shifted to a strategy of using the inter-Allied debt leverage to enforce his vision, seeking to use this constraint on the freedom of the victorious European powers to prevent them from any further 19th century style inter-imperialist rivalry. Instead of the old balance and rivalry of powers, there was now to be a world based on the ‘Open Door’, the freedom of the seas, and the liberal international institutions like the League of Nations. This would guarantee a world where liberal-democratic principles could slowly embed themselves in all the major states and where American economic superiority could be peacefully translated into political dominance without the need for further intercontinental entanglement.
Tooze’s tale, however, is not one of success but of failure. The two central theses he develops out of his narrative are the observations that 1) this liberal-democratic new order was the only possibility to prevent the twin radicalisms of Communism and fascism from taking hold in a serious way, and 2) that it failed to come about due to the incompatibility of the demands of the winners and losers of the post-WWI settlement and due to the repeated failure of American diplomacy to effectively cajole the main powers into a ‘peace without victory’. The result was the ‘second Thirty Years War’, as some historians are now describing it, that we are all familiar with. This approach involves a convincing reinterpretation and rehabilitation of many aspects of the period often dismissed in later years: Wilson’s internationalist vision, both less naive and less successful than often portrayed; the Versailles Treaty, a necessary step in institutionalizing the “chain gang” that bound the losing powers to the winning powers and the winning powers to the United States; and even the much-condemned Clemenceau and French foreign policy, whose supposed revanchism against Germany appears very defensible in light of the damaged and exposed position of the postwar French state.
The strength of Tooze’s narrative, besides his admirable command of source materials and the logic of international macroeconomics, is to replace the usual psychologizing narratives of WWI and its aftermath (Clemenceau’s revenge, Lloyd George’s deceit, Wilson’s naivete, Lenin’s devilishness, etc) with a plausible model that explains the diplomatic continuities across parties of the period in terms of economic and political interests. In that sense this work definitely represents the ‘realist’ approach in international relations at its best. But it is not wholly shorn of discussions of ideology and the domestic conflicts of parties and factions either: an important part of Tooze’s discussion of the would-be liberal global dispensation is the domestic opposition between the liberal-internationalist politicians, oriented towards the United States, and the radicals of left and right, seeking to prevent the former from bringing about this order. In this model it therefore makes less difference what individuals or even political ideologies were involved, but mainly what position they took vis-a-vis this “remaking of global order”, as the book’s subtitle puts it – hence the convergence between a bourgeois radical like Clemenceau and a rightwing nationalist like Stresemann. Yet both the oppositionalism of left and right radicals and the opportunism of this expansive ‘center’ meant that those in the “chain gang” failed to come to terms with the new order sufficiently to make its institutions work. The result, Tooze suggests, was the stillbirth of democracy in much of the world and the victory of the radical forces over the liberals, so that another world war became inevitable.
The obvious strengths of this explanation are also its weaknesses. Much more than in his rightly lauded previous work, The Wages of Destruction, the worldview expressed in the book seems that of a contemporary ‘muscular liberalism’. Tooze truly believes in the liberal hierarchy of nations supervised by the United States, and wishes it could have been established earlier. This necessitates some political judgements that are, to say the least, debatable. He does not hide the fundamentally imperialist nature of Britain or France after WWI or their futile efforts to combine the new internationalism with a stronger grip on their colonies. But he never quite reconciles the enduring imperialist adventures he describes – from the colonization of Egypt in 1919 to the Japanese efforts to divide and rule in China or the Franco-British schemes in the Middle East – with his repeated assertion that the new world order was based on the recognition that the ‘old imperialism’ (which Tooze argues only really started in the 1880s anyway) was no longer possible in an era of mass mobilization, and that the era of global competition was over (287). He is therefore unjustifiably sanguine about the “liberal imperialism” and its supposed moral advances over the previous era.
Tooze is honest enough to report the contradictions: “Liberal visions”, he writes in a discussion of the British suppression of Indian national liberation between the wars, “were necessary to sustain empire in the sense that they offered fundamental justifications. But they were always likely to be reduced to painful hypocrisy by the real practices of imperial power…” (391). Very true. But how are we to reconcile this hypocrisy with the seemingly self-evident desirability of the liberal order over that of the ‘radicals’? A similar problem appears in the omission of any discussion of the racial dimension. Again, Tooze honestly reports on Wilson’s white supremacist views, and how the latter’s politics were founded on his hatred of the Reconstruction period. He regularly mentions the usage of racial categories and language by the diplomats of the Entente nations, and the hasty rejection of Japan’s motion for racial equality in the Treaty of Versailles. But the connection between these views of racial hierarchy and the content of what he sometimes calls the “liberal imperial order” – even had it succeeded – is not made explicit.
This stands in strange contradiction to the importance he attaches to the racial-colonial dynamic of Nazi Germany’s war strategy in The Wages of Destruction, where precisely the importance attached to this dimension gives his narrative such an added explanatory power. Japan’s defection from the liberal order towards fascist military adventurism is portrayed as a consequence of the Great Depression, which there as elsewhere robbed the liberals of their main (economic) arguments to hold the revanchists at bay. This is true enough as it goes; but might it not also have something to do with the statement by Victor Wellesley of the Foreign Office on Chinese policy, which was founded on the observation that “the prestige of the European races has been steadily declining in the Far East… and it has suffered a severe blow as a result of the Great War” (406)? Do not the repeated expressions of racial contempt for Slavic peoples, for the ‘Jewish degenerate’ Bolsheviks, and the horror stories about the Senegalese forces in French service, combined with the white supremacist policies of the Americans, perhaps matter more than incidentally for the shape the postwar order took and the inspiration of fascism? In his previous book Tooze was clear about this; in the present it seems much more muddled.
Radicalism, for Tooze’s liberal IR realism, is all of one kind and necessarily leads to war and destruction without clear advantages. The book throughout equates Communists, fascists, anarchists and other radicals in the political sphere, making it a matter of diplomatic indifference whom one is dealing with; he equally applauds Gustav Noske’s repression of the Spartakusbund as the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch. The Soviet Union is treated with nothing but scorn and contempt, and Lenin appears as nothing but a deluded adventurer who destroyed Russian democracy (the Constituent Assembly, which gets a great deal of space) and became a puppet of German interests. (Given Tooze’s main sources on the Russian Revolution and its aftermath appear to be the works of Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes, his lopsided and absurd judgements are perhaps not so surprising.) The repeated repression of the workers’ movement, from the French miners to the revolutionary moment of 1919-1920 all the way to the UK General Strike of 1926, is virtually without fail applauded by Tooze. For him, Noske is a responsible statesman, Clemenceau a “pragmatic reformer” who was “demonised” for repressing the miners’ strikes with armed force by the “doctrinaires” of the French Socialist Party, and the Entente intervention against the October Revolution a defense of democracy. The ‘Red Scare’ and Palmer raids in the US after WWI, often seen as precursors to McCarthyism, are a mere “carnivalesque distraction” (354). The minor welfare programmes and high taxes of the Lib-Lab policies in Western Europe after the war, however, represent “immense new burdens” (250), and the pensions and compensations for war veterans a dubious “new notion of entitlement” (359).
Although Tooze repeatedly admits that the liberal imperial order he favors did not really – beyond the persona of Wilson – have the support of the great majority, he sticks to defending it without fail as “progressive” or the “progressive center”, even putting ‘imperialist’ between scare quotes when applied to its protagonists, despite his own descriptions of the fundamental accuracy of that term. In distinction to this progressivity, the radicals can never be right – that Weimar Germany or Soviet Russia attempted to come to understandings with defeated or colonized powers like China, or indeed each other, is depicted as “self-indulgent nationalist fantasy” (436). Sinn Fein’s independence movement was an expression of “apocalyptic radicalism” (377), and the repeated “political concessions to nationalism” forced upon the British empire (the only one examined in detail) are discussed with more than a hint of regret. One will find little patience with national liberation ideas or radical politics of whatever stripe in Tooze’s book: it’s the American way or the highway as far as the peace of nations is concerned.
This also generates difficulties for him in describing the deflationary policies that have become so notorious in retrospect. Whereas an economic historian like Barry Eichengreen represents mainstream opinion in (probably overly simply) seeing the crisis caused by the deflationary policy and the subsequent dissolution of the liberal-imperialist interwar order as the result of bad economic theory, Tooze is more ambivalent. He explains the virtual universality of the deflationary attachment to the gold standard as the expression of the desire to be part of the new American-led order of ‘Open Door’ international relations, surely a much more plausible explanation than simple error. However, the difficulty is that this deflationary economics undeniably was a major factor in the crisis of 1920-1921 as well as that of 1929; and these crises, in turn, destroyed the world order Tooze so favors. It therefore appears both as the necessary result of liberal internationalism and its destruction, which raises the question whether – just as with the notion of ‘liberal imperialism’ in India and elsewhere – the strategy was not too internally contradictory to have ever been a plausible historical outcome to begin with.
On that note, one final aspect of the work should be noted. It does not escape Tooze, of course, that parallels can be found between the institutionalization of international debt and credit relations between the wars and the construction of the European Economic Community after them; nor the significance of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact and other treaty forms of American-led international pacification for the United Nations of today. Indeed, Tooze emphasizes such continuities, suggesting that he seems to regard the present order and its problems as comparable to those of the internationalist liberalism of the Wilsonian vision. Even the role of (Soviet) Russia is perceived in this way, where German policy is portrayed as a necessary response to its inherent threat after WWII as much as before the Great War: it was the “very real threat of a Soviet takeover”, we are told, “that drove West Germany willy-nilly into the arms of the West and kept it there” (276). (In fact, Stalin repeatedly offered the possibility of a neutral and united Germany, which the West, including West Germans, declined.) For Tooze, the ad hoc alliance between the Entente nations presages NATO and the Marshall Plan, equally defined by the opposition between liberal democratic internationalism and the violent revanchism of radicals. But as the present Eurozone crisis demonstrates, the straitjacket or “chain gang” such ‘internationalism’ of debt and credit represents can do at least as much harm as the radicals, and moreover helps to bring radicalism about – a similar contradiction today to that that frustrated the Wilsonian order.
These political considerations aside, one is unlikely to find a better treatment of the intersection of global economics and diplomacy between the wars than Adam Tooze’s The Deluge. As with his previous work, it certainly helps to have a basic grasp of macroeconomics and international trade, as monetary policy, trade deficits, and budgetary constraints carry a lot of explanatory weight and the author does not pause to explain their basic mechanics. The great virtue of this work is to make reason out of folly: to make sense from the perspectives of the participants of what is often simply portrayed as naive errors of economics and politics. That is to say, at least from the perspectives of the supporters of the Wilsonian order. The tale of the rise and fall of ‘liberal imperialism’ and ‘liberal internationalism’, frustrated by the incompetence of Wilson himself, the opportunism and economic weakness of the postwar European powers, and the opposition of radical political factions, is fundamentally strong and merits a serious reading. However, Tooze’s political perspective does not allow him to tease out the inherent contradictions in these concepts and the reality of what such an order actually did and does entail, not least for those at the bottom end of the “chain gang” hierarchy. And that limits the explanatory scope of the work compared to his deeper perception in his previous book.
January 22, 2014
Luciano Canfora and the Question of Democracy
This is a repost of my review of Luciano Canfora and Amadeo Bordiga’s concepts of democracy, first posted on The North Star.
In The North Star, and the left more widely, the question of democracy is one avidly debated. While many of the classical distinctions within the radical left remain valid, such as about whether or not one should participate in parliamentary elections and what the attitude towards voting should be, this is only part of a larger problem. One of the biggest issues that distinguishes the different ‘strands’ or ‘tendencies’ of the left is precisely the underlying question of what each mode of socialist thought thinks democracy is, and whether this is a good thing — in short, what does it mean for something to be democratic? Are the ‘liberal democracies’ of our time simply stunted democracies, or are they not democratic at all and should they become so? And what of the left communist critique of democracy, as found in the works of Amadeo Bordiga and similar writers?
Luciano Canfora’s book Democracy in Europe1 is essentially a history of the concept of democracy within European political thought and practice, and therefore gives a good opportunity to explore this question a bit further. Written with much wit and a certain historical flair, befitting an iconoclastic scholar of Greek history as Canfora is, the book identifies as the central problem for any left discussion of democracy the question of what is actually meant by that term. Indeed, more often than not socialists tend to proclaim their support for democracy, the need for more democracy in society (especially economic democracy), and criticize the inadequate democracies of our time. Especially since the fall of the Soviet Union, adherence to ‘democratic socialism’ (or sometimes ‘socialism from below’) has become something of a watchword for entry into the ranks of the homines bonae voluntatis. But what does this ‘democratic’ mean, and what should it mean for us?
Canfora approaches this question through a kind of reasoned history, a rough chronology of political forms that, in each case, posited the question of democracy in a new way. One must of course begin with classical antiquity, for it is there that ideologically the notion of democracy began: even now, many ‘Western Civ’ textbooks and the like promote the idea that democracy is a quintessentially Western invention, and that it originates in ancient Greece, more specifically in classical and archaic Athens. This view has been criticized by a good deal of classical historians, and Canfora is of course no exception. As we know, the ‘democracy’ of the Athenians was based on mass slavery (four or five slaves to every freeman) and on the exclusion of foreigners and women citizens from the political process. Moreover, what Canfora does not mention as much, the Athenian community was constituted in religious and tribal terms in the same way that the Roman was and its medieval European heirs, and therefore democracy as a secular sovereignty of the people was wholly absent. The frequent use of sortition by lot for the most important positions, including the executive power, had a strong religious significance. It presupposes the equality of citizens; but for the ancient Athenians it followed that therefore the candidates among them were chosen by the gods, not by men.
More important and useful perhaps than this familiar critique is Canfora’s main approach, which is to examine the uses of the concept of democracy in these times. As Canfora shows, democracy (demokratia) was almost always used negatively, by the opponents of the Athenian system during the period between the Tyrants and the defeat in the Peloponnesian War: a term to describe something akin to our concept of ‘mob rule’. Even some of its defenders, such as the commander Pericles, are hesitant about using the term too readily — for the opposition between democracy and liberty was the argument of the classical aristocracy, and to accept the former appeared to concede the latter. Equally, the concept of democracy in Athens and in the classical world generally was predicated on a narrowness of citizenship, and any attempt to actually extend it — such as in the emergency of the impending defeat by the Macedonians — to slaves, outsiders, and so forth, was immediately rejected by the Athenian assembly precisely in the name of democracy: it could only exist by sustaining a wider elite than the oligarchy, but not by abolishing it.
It is these oppositions and meanings of democracy, Canfora argues, that have structured the concept up to the period of the rise of socialism. Democracy was for most reform-minded philosophers and intellectuals a negative term, so that even as Enlightened a figure as Kant rejects it in his Perpetual Peace, and De Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy is predicated on the concept that the slow victory of democracy is the death of liberty. There is here, as Canfora shows, a kind of double irony. One is the opposition between democracy and liberty, whereas in the modern West these are generally concepts claimed to go together. But there is also the vigorous opposition by aristocracies and elites, Enlightened or reactionary, against the ‘democratic’ movements of their time, when these democratic movements themselves could only be democratic in the Athenian sense: that is to say, democratic in the sense of extending oligarchy to a wider (middle) range of people. Yet often there were also people who sought a democracy in a different sense, one not based on oligarchic rule at all, with a totally new formulation of citizenship — democrats against the democracy. This is the central conflict of Canfora’s history.
The opposition between popular-democratic movements and the aristocratic-oligarchic movements in the early modern period then appears as something like the struggle between the Roman populares and optimates, where both were essentially factions of elites fighting over the control of a captured Roman plebeian clientele. The real secret of the Roman ‘proletariat’ was that it ultimately could play its client role and act due to its reliance on the exploitation of slave labor and the conquered territories abroad (especially Egypt) — and the same is true for the revival of this democracy in the early modern age. The victory of the Parliamentarian party in the English Civil War was a defeat for the old oligarchic faction, but was a victory of the oppressors of Ireland and the gentry class, not a victory of those who took democracy in our modern earnestness, like Diggers or Levellers. The Puritan and Parliamentarian notion of democracy is again one of the Bible, and of the equal but limited citizenship of those in the ‘English nation’ that were not dependent on others for their income — whatever Rainsborough and others tried to argue.
A similar phenomenon holds for the revival of classical democracy and its virtues in the garb of the French Revolution, as Canfora shows. Rightly, he pays much attention to the often too easily overlooked significance of the Jacobin faction’s view of democracy: namely, that despite their adaptation of classical garb, they understood it radically differently from the traditional view of what democracy meant. Indeed, as Canfora suggests, their reading of the classical period was worse compared to their counter-revolutionary colleagues, the more they moved beyond the classical meaning of ‘democracy’ — especially in their firm conviction that liberty and the equality of democracy could and should co-exist.
This is shown by the great events of the 18 Pluviôse, when Danton, Robespierre and others got the Convention to pass a decree abolishing slavery not just on French soil, but in the colonies — something unimaginable in Britain or the United States, the bulwarks of ‘liberty’. For the Jacobin speakers at the Convention, it was impossible that slavery should continue in the colonies, for this would mean they had failed to “raise themselves to the standard of liberty and equality”. For the Jacobins, maintaining slavery was the policy of l’aristocratie. Canfora suggests it was this, more than anything else, that aroused wide hostility towards the Jacobin wing of the revolutionaries and precipitated their downfall.
The Thermidorean counter-revolutionaries, who would eventually culminate in the dictatorship of Napoleon I, were imbued with the classical view of liberty, and therefore saw a democracy that would go beyond its sense of ‘extended oligarchy’ as insupportable. It is equally no coincidence that the revival of the aristocracy after Thermidor also sees a revival of slavery and a revival of the religious basis of citizenship, which the Jacobins had sought to destroy. When the celebrated philosopher Benjamin Constant then inaugurates the modern view of liberalism, its Whiggish history, in his Comparison of the Liberty of the Ancients with that of the Moderns, he praises the liberty and peace that exists in that time — the year 1819, after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, a year before the alliance of absolutist powers in the Congress of Vienna! Such is liberty against democracy.
Of course, the traditional Western view then depicts all these as tragic moments in our distant past, but democracy as a system ‘returning’ in the 19th century, with the extensions of the franchise. However, Canfora gives us much material — if very ambivalently argued — to undermine this depiction. For the victory of democracy in the 19th century is much exaggerated, and has much more in common with the oligarchic notion of democracy than with the positive. The late 19th century certainly sees the rise of mass politics, in particular with the formations of the first political parties in the modern style, integrated organizations with political and electoral strategies inherent in their programme, rather than loose alliances between elite individuals and ‘notables’ following their own sense of liberty or their moral compass. These arise especially there were universal suffrage became a real potential, the first sense of a democracy that would go beyond the classical form: in the German Empire after its founding, with the rise of the social-democratic party (SPD), and briefly in mid-19th century France, around the person of Napoleon III in his use of referenda against the oligarchic, ‘constitutional’ democracy of the 1848 revolution. Of course, in the latter case this false universality did not last, for Napoleon III immediately got rid of it.
But in none of these cases was a form of democracy found that would go beyond the oligarchic structure underlying its historical concept. What’s more, this remained true even into the 20th century. This manifested itself in two ways. One was the restrictions on the basis of wealth or education that prevailed within the widening scope of suffrage, such as in the UK, despite its two Great Reform Acts. When the great imperial powers went to war in WWI, a war Michael Gove assures us was a fight for democracy, the only country among all the combatants with universal male suffrage was Germany. In Italy, France, the USA and the UK, the suffrage was limited by either wealth or race. (In Russia and Japan, there was only a derisory imitation of elections.) Over time, however, these restrictions proved exceedingly vulnerable to attack, because they made explicit the oligarchic restrictions on a now increasingly positively depicted concept of ‘democracy’. They were of course justified in each nation according to the self-evident needs of the national interest, of liberty, or of the Germanic need for leadership, but after the carnage of the war and the revolution in Russia, this proved difficult to maintain.
Therefore, Canfora argues, a different approach was taken in response. The vote and the conception of citizenship was extended much more widely, now finally incorporating also the full half of citizens that are women — although it is no coincidence that this took the most ‘bourgeois republican’ nations and thus defenders of the classical legacy, France and Switzerland, the longest to do. This made ‘mass politics’ an inevitability, and meant the death of the old loose associations of notables constituting the friends of liberty. These mass politics then increasingly incorporated also the socialist parties, whether split into their Communist and social-democratic halves or not.
But, as early critics such as Bordiga noted, this sense of democracy as mass politics was by no means the overcoming of its oligarchic nature in effect. It would never have been possible without revolution if that were the case. Rather, what happened according to Canfora is that the major powers increasingly sought other ways to restrict the meaning of universal suffrage. Here Canfora’s own analysis becomes increasingly superficial, but we can attempt to extend its implications. One was by the genesis of mass media and the usage of it by economic and political oligarchies to influence public opinion, especially in the form of limiting the ‘range of the possible’, known as the ‘Overton window’. More importantly, and often underappreciated by the left (and here I think Canfora is quite right to give it a central role) is the use of electoral systems that are inherently oligarchic in nature. The replacement of proportional representation systems with one or two round majority vote systems guarantees wild distortions of the actual distribution of opinion, generally at the expense of ‘radical’ parties and of political or social minorities widely distributed. Gerrymandering, the reinvention of the ‘rotten borough’, which especially in the United States is a widespread and accepted practice, should be added to this.
The left has traditionally ignored these issues or minimized them, seeing them as minor problems of liberal practice or simply part of the scam that is voting anyway — but they mistake here the real nature of such restrictions. It is no coincidence that the most oligarchic countries, the one with their revolutionary content dating furthest back, are the most wedded to single district systems. The nature of such restrictions is precisely equivalent to those of ‘direct’ restrictions on voting by wealth, race, and so forth. In the United States, white conservative (or liberal) supermajorities are manufactured by aggregating all the black voters into one or two districts. In the UK and other countries with first-past-the-post voting, often a majority of the votes cast never has any effect on the outcome: a result no different than that of the ‘elections’ in the Roman Republic, where the aristocracy had so many votes that there was little point for most of the lower ranked citizens in even showing up. The ever-increasing rates of nonvoting are a clear sign of the nature of such voting systems. Add to this the constant threats of intervention or repression, whether McCarthyism or the American plan of invasion and sabotage if the PCI won the elections, or even De Gaulle’s quasi-coup and the West German ban on the KPD. If the form of democracy cannot be restricted outright, it will be restricted in other ways.
However, is all this to say then that the problem with liberal democracy is that we do not have enough of it? Canfora is unclear on this issue; for him, the legacy of the USSR and Eastern Europe is no more indication of the direction of democracy in the modern age than is the Western experience. But this is in some sense, as I indicated in the beginning, perhaps thecentral question dividing the left organizationally. Indeed, Canfora at least clarifies, through his historical analysis, two things. First, that democracy has always meant an extension of citizenship beyond the elite, but still on the basis of the oppression of others; and that liberalism, in the sense of the defenders of liberty as the highest value, has historically been hostile even to this. (A modern confirmation of this can be found in the hostility of neoliberal thinkers as well as the Austrian School economists to anything but the most superficial democratic forms.) Against both of these options, the third historical strand, the radicalism of ‘substantive democracy’ with a new formula of citizenship, also always makes an appearance wherever it can, but is generally defeated.
How then to solve this riddle? Even for Bordiga, it is clear that the first opposition, between the narrow oligarchs and the equalizers, and the opposition of both these factions to the third one, the radical democracy, cannot be conflated. “In its statements of principle, Marxist communism presents itself as a critique and a negation of democracy; yet communists often defend the democratic character of proletarian organizations… There is certainly no contradiction in this, and no objection can be made to the use of the dilemma, ‘either bourgeois democracy or proletarian democracy” as a perfect equivalent to the formula “bourgeois democracy or proletarian dictatorship’”, says Bordiga in The Democratic Principle. But the confusion between democracy in Canfora’s classical sense, and democracy as a critique of this democracy, has often led the left astray:
In order to avoid creating ambiguities, and dignifying the concept of democracy, so entrenched in the prevailing ideology which we strive relentlessly to demolish, it would be desirable to use a different term in each of the two cases. Even if we do not do this, it is nonetheless useful to look a little further into the very content of the democratic principle, both in general and in its application to homogeneous class organs. This is necessary to eliminate the danger of again raising the democratic principle to an absolute principle of truth and justice. Such a relapse into apriorism would introduce an element foreign to our entire theoretical framework at the very moment when we are trying, by means of our critique, to sweep away the deceptive and arbitrary content of “liberal” theories.
Our task, then, is to defend democracy against The Democracy, including the alliance of liberals and bourgeois Radicals (in the technical sense as referring to people like J.S. Mill or the left of the French Republicans — hence the capital letter) that until 1848 appeared to be willing allies of the democrats in the radical sense. It is in the split of bourgeois Radical liberalism from the socialist movement, as the embodiment of the radical democracy against the classical democracy, that the problem of left politics presents itself. In the West, where this split is complete, Bordiga’s critique is fully applicable — which does not solve more exact questions of electoral participation, etc., which can only be decided in each specific case and conjuncture. Outside the West, this alliance still exists to some extent, insofar as the conquest of democracy in the classical sense is — as both supporters and opponents of the subaltern project agree — itself a project that is either incomplete or has failed to get off the ground entirely.
Completely in conformity with Chibber’s critique of the subalternists, it is true both in the West and outside it that, as Bordiga says, “the socialist critique of democracy was in essence a critique of the democratic critique of the old political philosophies. Marxism denies their alleged universal opposition and demonstrates that in reality they are theoretically similar, just as in practise the proletariat did not have much reason to celebrate when the direction of society passed from the hands of the feudal, monarchical and religious nobility into the hands of the young commercial and industrial bourgeoisie.” However, the form of democracy has changed rapidly since he wrote this in 1922 (just as fascism was coming to power in Italy), and ‘liberal democracy’, as a carefully balanced mixture of real democratic elements and of oligarchic democracy, has become a completely dominant political form in the West where it has not in the rest of the world. Where we have the indirect oligarchy of district systems, Potemkin parties and the buying of votes, much of the world has these as well as the traditional impositions of the opponents of democracy altogether, the narrow oligarchy rather than the wide oligarchy — this changes the nature of their struggle compared to ours.
For us, then, a more ‘left communist’ posture is permissible in our strategy towards democracy than people in much of the world can afford. But ultimately, as Canfora and Bordiga both make clear in their own way, the form of democracy is less important than its content. The use of ‘democracy’ as a single concept has too often historically hidden that — through its many different forms — there have been two kinds of it: democracy as the equality of limited citizenship based on exclusion, and democracy as a radically new foundation of citizenship. Liberalism has been forced to make itself, against its will, compatible with the former, but only socialism is compatible with the latter.
1. Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe: A History (tr. Simon Jones). Oxford 2006: Blackwell.↩
August 3, 2013
On the recent repression of LGBT Russians
Quite rightly, all the progressive minded people of the world are in an uproar over the intensification of the campaigns against the LGBT population of Russia. Although homosexual acts are not as such illegal in that country, Vladimir Putin’s successive governments have done everything they could short of prohibition to make life impossible and miserable for LGBT people in it, especially young and activist-minded ones. (To what degree this extends to trans people in Russia I am not sure; I have not encountered much reliable information about it.) As often with repression against scapegoat minorities, the process of repression has taken place through a series of cumulative harrassments and exclusions. Yuri Luzhkov, longtime right-populist mayor of Moscow, consistently banned any attempt at gay pride celebrations with the active support of the government; then, the government of St. Petersburg passed a law prohibiting ‘propaganda for homosexuality’, meaning effectively any discussion of the subject at all – except of course condemnation; and now this law has been enacted nationally, with a fervent application to any kind of display of LGBT activism or interest whatever where it could catch the public eye. This is applied not just to locals, but to foreigners as well, as a group of gay activists from my hometown of Groningen found out. Of course, the law is officially concerned only with ‘propaganda to minors’, but this means very little – always, everywhere, the condemnation of homosexuality is based on an opportunistic and imaginary concern for ‘the children’, no matter the fact that many of those minors may well be gay or lesbian or bisexual themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
