ABSTRACT
The relationship between democracy and Marxism reveals a sequence of reversals. Sometimes Marxism has projected itself as the full completion of democracy, at other times as one of its harsher critics. Sometimes Marxists dispute one another’s credentials as such based on their commitments to democracy (or lack thereof). At other times Marxists attack democrats as enemies of transitions to socialism or communism (often by attaching adjectives like bourgeois or petty-bourgeois to the democracy they advocate). While there have always been some proponents of all these positions, they oscillate in terms of which has prevailed among Marxists. In the recent words of one Marx scholar, “The world-wide controversy over Marx’s legacy today turns largely on its ambiguous relation to democracy...” (Meister 1990, 99).
