ABSTRACT
In the early 21st century both sides of the ideological divide define themselves as adherents of democracy. For the ideological defenders of capitalism the social and economic content of democracy is a ‘free’ market and social inequality. For their opponents it means, perhaps more vaguely, social and economic justice and, therefore, the restriction of untrammelled corporate rule. This latter is in the broadest sense socialist, although the exhaustion of the state capitalist and reformist models of socialism means that only a minority of activists claim this label for themselves. Democracy has acquired a new meaning since the end of the
Cold War. For democracy movements fighting authoritarian regimes the end of the Cold War means that their struggles are no longer automatically equated with ‘communism’ by Western governments. Democratic and anti-imperialist struggles may still pose a threat to Western interests but they can no longer be seen as a simple product of ‘Soviet bloc’ manipulation. This does not mean that the democratic aspiration among ordinary people has run its course. In fact democracy as the aim of working people has forced ruling
elites to reformulate their own notion of democracy as the ‘best form of government for capitalism’. Ever since Francis Fukuyama wrote in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall that a capitalist economy and a parliamentary government were the best and only viable society, Western politicians have
increasingly insisted that ‘democratic values’ are the natural counterpart of globalised markets. US and British governments have been at the forefront of
developing a ‘democratic imperialist’ ideology to justify military interventions in Yugoslavia, the Gulf, Afghanistan and Africa. It has become the declared aim of the US administration to try and re-shape the Middle East according to a ‘democratic’ model. The ‘velvet revolutions’ which broke open the Eastern bloc serve as the starting point. The cases to which this model has been applied vary widely: from Lebanon to Uzbekistan. Even old US allies, like President Mubarak of Egypt, find themselves under pressure to make the ‘democratic transition’. Of course pressure is applied to friends and enemies in very different degree – from a gentle diplomatic word to full scale invasion. Yet today’s new ideological definitions cannot disguise the
‘social question’ that arises in all democratic movements. The ‘property question’ as Marx put it comes to the fore in the course of every movement’s development. Since at least the English Revolution of the 17th century there has always been a battle within the democratic camp between those who want to limit democratic rights to the political sphere (compatible with capitalist social relations) and those who want to extend democracy to the social and economic sphere (ultimately incompatible with capitalist rule). Marx identified the same dynamic in the 1848 revolutions and noted that it was given greater force by the emergence of the modern working class. In the early 20th century Russian socialists grappled with a similar question, the relationship between the democratic revolution and the social revolution. In recent years revolutionary movements have repeatedly
challenged the existing order. In 1989 the states of Eastern Europe were demolished, in part by mass movements from below. At about the same time South African apartheid was destroyed by a mass movement led by the African National Congress at the core of which stood the organised working class. At the end of the 1990s the 32 year old dictatorship of General Suharto was over thrown in Indonesia. In the first years
of the new century in Serbia and a string of Central Asian states in new ‘velvet revolutions’ threw out their governments. Democracy has been the aim of these revolutionary upheavals.
Often enough no strong parliamentary democracy has emerged but none has led to a transformation of capitalist social relations. Is this because, as Francis Fukuyama first claimed and George W Bush later echoed, liberal democracy and capitalist economic relations are the natural boundaries of historical change? Or is it that subjective factors, the strength and ideology of the left, are the principal reasons why these movements failed to reach their potential? To answer these questions we must first look at the period
when the revolutionary challenge of the bourgeois revolution did indeed find its limit in the achievement of capitalist economic relations and a parliamentary republic. This is the era which runs from the English Revolution of 1640s, through the American Revolution of 1776 to the French Revolution of 1789. Secondly we will look at the period when the organised working class made its appearance, raising the spectre of revolutionary change that could run beyond these boundaries and establish a socialist society. I will also examine the occasions when defeat has robbed workers of this possibility and the role of political leadership in shaping these outcomes. Under all these circumstances the dynamic of capital accu-
mulation still produces great social crises which result in profound social transformations. The unification of Italy and Germany in the second half of the 19th century and the wave of anti-colonial revolutions in the second half of the 20th century are examples. The role of a key layer of the middle classes in these latter transformations is examined in order to shed light on the conflict between the competing strategies of the socialist revolution and the democratic revolution, as well as their differing relationships to wider class formations and conditions of capital accumulation, in the more recent revolutions. This examination sheds light on the relationship between the Western rulers’ ‘push for democracy’ and the fate of revolutionary movements from below.
