ABSTRACT
I have used the debates over the supposed class character of parliamentary democracy and the possibility of a democratic road to socialism to bring out a major difficulty with marxism as a theory of politics. This difficulty results from what I and my co-authors have argued (Cutler et al} 1977) is an unresolvable problem reconciling a conception of the autonomy of politics, ideology and the state with that of the ultimately determining role of the economy and classes. Notions such as ‘determination in the last instance’ or ‘relative autonomy’ do not resolve the problem. They are, at best, gestures towards its recognition and at worst attempts to cover it over with a neat phrase. I have also suggested that the arguments of Bernstein, Kautsky and Lenin are by no means reducible to their various inadequate resolutions of that problem. They raise serious issues concerning the analysis of relations between parliament and the state apparatuses on the one hand and parliament and the electorate on the other, which I shall take up in the course of this chapter.But discussion of democracy and democratization on the left is by no means hegemonized by those ancient and interminable marxist disputations. For some years now the Labour Party has been the site of often bitter disputes about democracy, in particular, about the relations between parliamentary democracy on the one hand and party democracy on the other. But the desirability of parliamentary democracy has not been at issue in these disputes and they have certainly
not centred around its alleged class character. Democracy is now invoked on the left not only in the course of arguments for the need to improve on present forms of parliamentary control over the machinery of state, but also in relation to other spheres of social organization, notably the organization of work and the internal organization of the major institutions of the left, the Labour Party and the trades unions. This chapter examines how British parliamentary democracy works, its specific determinations and limitations, with a view to developing means of identifying limits on democratic control in Britain and of evaluating proposals for democratization.First, however, it is necessary to say something about ‘democracy’, what is involved in saying where it exists, what its limits are, and so on. ‘Democracy’ is employed along with other concepts as a means of specifying certain of the conditions and characteristics of the mechanisms involved in reaching collective decisions, including the appointment of personnel (MPs, delegates, chairpersons, etc.). To say that a mechanism of collective decision is democratic is to say that it depends on a ‘free’ vote within some relevant constituency or constituencies, otherwise it is not democratic. To talk of democratic control over some set of decisions is to say that those decisions are made by democratic mechanisms. What the consequences of a democratic or non-democratic mechanism are will depend on its scope, how the mechanism is organized and the conditions under which it operates. In the case of a mechanism that is putatively democratic its scope refers to the range of decisions reached through that mechanism rather than in some other way. How it is organized covers such things as: the formation of constituencies, that is, those who may or may not take part in voting or discussion, which always involves some means of inclusion and exclusion; the way votes are aggregated to produce an outcome; conditions for initiating motions and for blocking them; rules governing a quorum; etc. But mechanisms of decision and appointment always operate under conditions that are not fully determined
by their scope and organization. For example, in the case of parliamentary elections these conditions include: the policy and organization of parties and the character of the competition between them; the practices of other agencies affecting the electorate, trades unions, the media, churches, state apparatuses; legal and other constraints on effective freedom of organization and discussion; etc. The consequences of democracy are always dependent on the conditions under which it operates, and they are never reducible to the way the democratic mechanism itself is organized.Now, it may seem that there is nothing unusual in this characterization. But it differs significantly from one that is still influential on the left which characterizes democracy in terms of an actual or potential relation between the supposed natural sovereignty of the individual and the effective sovereignty of the state. This difference is important first for the simple reason that consideration of sovereignty is normally linked to the state whereas, as we shall see below, there are good reasons why questions of democracy and democratization should not be restricted to the sphere of state or government decisions, and second because the notion of sovereignty involves severe difficulties which can significantly obscure political analysis. To talk of the sovereignty of parliament or the state is to conceive of the state as a unitary agency whose actions express the sovereign will. We have seen that an important area of dispute between Kautsky, Bernstein and Lenin effectively concerns the precise location of sovereign power within the state and its representative character. On one side is the view that parliament is or may be sovereign and that it can effectively represent the interests of the mass of the population, and on the other it is argued that, despite appearances, sovereignty rests with the state machine, the military, police and civilian bureaucracies, and that it represents the interests of the capitalist ruling class. In effect, analysis of parliamentary democracy in terms of a relation between the supposed natural sovereignty of the
individual and the sovereignty of the parliamentary state can proceed in one of two possible directions. On the one hand parliamentary democracy may be presented both as a means of combining the natural sovereignty of individuals into the effective sovereignty of parliament and as a means whereby the citizens can control that effective sovereignty. This conception of sovereignty in the parliamentary state is influential in many Labour Party discussions of democracy and in marxist arguments from Kautsky onwards for a parliamentary democratic road to socialism. On the other hand there is the radical democratic critique of parliamentary democracy which sees in the relation between the natural sovereignty of the individual and the effective sovereignty of the state a problem of adequation, the inevitable discrepancy between the representative machinery of parliamentary democracy and the democratic ideal in which the people, or their interests or desires, are truly represented revealing the inadequacy of the machinery in question. Different versions of this approach can be found in Rousseau and in numerous socialist attacks on parliamentary democracy, from Lenin to guild socialism. Unfortunately, the attempt to measure existing ‘democratic’ machinery against such an ideal of democracy is utopian and ultimately destructive, for any system of democratic organization would be open to attack in terms of the problem of adequation. The radical democratic critique is a means of attack only. It provides no basis for concrete proposals concerning the modification of existing machinery or the specification of new democratic machinery to be constructed. We have seen the dangers of this approach in relation to Lenin’s essentialist counterposition of bourgeois and proletarian democracy.But it is the former conception of parliamentary democracy that is by far the more significant in contemporary discussions of democracy and democratization on the left. That conception has been clearly formulated in one of Benn’s recent pamphlets.
