NEW JERSEY/NEW YORK CITY, June 4—The Radical Caucus of the MLA (Modern Languages Association) organized a session, “’Democracy’ in a Time of War,” in recognition of the fact that workers worldwide are becoming more aware of the deadly nature of capitalist democracy and open to ideas of communist revolution. Members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) emphasized and supported the most internationalist, pro-working class ideas of this discussion, while putting forward the idea that a workers’ communist party is the only way to advance the cause of workers’ democracy. This session took place as part of the “Keywords project,” which regularly brings MLA people together to critically examine concepts important to antiracist- and anti-capitalist struggle.
break mental vs manual labor—all workers use philosophy
Three progressive scholars briefly analyzed the term from different points of view—how Karl Marx thought about democracy, what W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about “abolition democracy” in Black Reconstruction, and how the term “democracy” is weaponized in U.S. war propaganda today. PLP was there with our MLA Radical Caucus friends as co-organizers and co-questioners. Our base at the event included professors, a K-12 teacher, a group from the PSC/CUNY left, a philosopher of art in Berlin, and a comrade who called this in from the tow-truck he was driving on Route 80: “Most working people I know are totally cynical about democracy. They, in a completely organic way, find it to be a tool of elites.” This was one of the most significant statements made at the entire conference, and it set the stage for PLP to help put forward the call for organizing a party and not leaving these conversations in the realm of the purely academic.
The first presenter said that Marx doesn’t discuss democracy much but does focus on the closely related keywords freedom and equality, “key features of capital’s self-image” and ideology. Marx sees freedom dialectically: more of humanity is formally free under capitalism than in serfdom or slavery—which is why progressives including Marx fought against slavery and for universal suffrage. Liberal democracy does not liberate workers, the speaker continued, because capital first “frees” or separates workers from their own means of production. A “Marxist conception of democracy” must attack the impersonal economic domination of capital, which operates as Marx often said “behind our backs,” behind the appearances of political democracy in the state. But, the speaker concluded, our project of workers’ liberation from capitalism cannot avoid the terms freedom, equality, and democracy: “We must struggle to supersede capital from within capital” and reclaim the promise of democracy from its capitalist distortion and for the immense majority.
Du Bois, for his part, decried the loss of power by workers freed from slavery as Northern capitalists and former enslavers took all political power from them and smashed the Reconstruction of the South. The presenter said that what Du Bois revealed about Northern capital’s racist power grab in the South was the start of U.S. imperialist racism moving to do the same thing to workers globally, across the “Global Color Line.” “Abolition democracy” to Du Bois meant that any real democracy was impossible without the abolition of “property relations,” that is, really, capitalism, though he didn’t join the Communist Party till near the end of his life.
He ascribed the destruction of workers’ power in Reconstruction to bourgeois panic at the idea of the freed enslaved people and the proletariat banding together with real power. So much for democracy when it threatens the right to own and exploit labor. The direct, personal power of the enslaver was replaced “behind our backs'' by the economic domination of the owner of capital.
Workers need democratic centralism
The lively Chat brought up Mao Zedong’s theory of “New Democracy,” or “People’s Democracy,” which PLP sees as one of the roots of revisionism (abandoning communism) in the Chinese Communist Party, combated in the Cultural Revolution by views taken from the 1871 Paris Commune.
Democratic centralism needs to be explained in greater depth. What is the dialectic between mass participation and the local, on the one hand, and synthesizing leadership at the center, on the other? Here’s an excerpt from a key PL document, “For Communist Economics and Communist Power”
For the “democratic” part, one meaning is that there should be full discussion of a proposal before a decision is made. Another meaning is that decisions should be made in the interests of the working class, and in a way that not only will benefit the working class, but also train more and more working-class people to contribute to the running of the society….The word "centralist" means that after a decision is made, everyone should work to carry it out, whether or not they agreed with the decision. all centralism is for the purpose of building a society free of privilege and exploitation, based on "from each according to his ability, to each according to need." and developing the consciousness of the people to be able to implement that.
See www.plp.org for the full version. There is much writing about this which we did not take up here.
We ended by noting that armed imperialist democracy turning the world into its battlefield is a living refutation of the lies and illusions widespread about democracy under capitalism. The presenter on Du Bois spoke for us all, sick of the slaughter in Yemen and Ukraine and Buffalo and Uvalde, when he said: “When people in the Global South hear the word democracy, they shudder, because they know what is about to be dropped on them is not leaflets.” The work of questioning brought us together in a powerful way. It strengthened us for the fights ahead as democracy shades into fascism.
The discussion maybe brought some friends closer to seeing the need to join and build PLP. When campuses return in-person, Radical Caucus members can carry some of these insights into work on campus, such as teach-ins on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, where “democracy” means Javelins and Stingers and heavy artillery. A communist democracy means the working class running society based on need and commitment.