On Capitalist Democracy

(Quote of the Week)

The press agents of the imperialist bourgeoisies all peddle the supposed intertwining of capitalism and political democracy as if the two had formed as peas in a pod, a myth reinforced by the reformist left. In fact, the capitalist class, for whom democratic forms serve to cover its class rule, can and will resort to the most extreme police-state regimes to crush any working-class assault on the institution of private property. Writing in 1935 in the aftermath of the rise of Hitlerite fascism in Germany, British political philosopher Harold Laski explained the conjunctural and reversible nature of democracy under capitalism. Laski, a Marxist academic, was a left social democrat who wrote incisively on the capitalist state.

The transition from feudal to bourgeois society was only accomplished by heavy fighting. There is no reason to suppose, unless we assume that men are now more rational than at any time in the past, that we can transform the foundations of bourgeois society without heavy fighting also; and the assumption of greater rationality is an illusion born of special historical circumstances and now fading before our eyes....

It was only when the combination of war-weariness and the Russian Revolution began to strip the mask from the tragic drama of war that men began to realize, in any numbers, how accidental was the union of capitalism with democracy. It was the outcome, not of an essential harmony of inner principle, but of that epoch in economic evolution when capitalism was in its phase of expansion. It had conferred political power upon the masses; but it was upon the saving condition that political power should not be utilized to cut at the root of capitalist postulates. It would offer social reforms so long as these did not jeopardize the essential relations of the capitalist system. When they did, as occurred in the post-war years, the contradiction between capitalism and democracy became the essential institutional feature of Western civilization....

What looms before us is a battle for the possession of the state-power. What is now clear is the vital fact that the class-relations of our society have become incompatible with the maintenance of social peace. They have brought to light the contradiction between our power to produce and our power to distribute in a way that makes the great paradox of our time—our poverty in the midst of potential plenty—intolerable to those who have to pay the price for it. Yet in the choice between peaceful transformation, and the maintenance of privilege at the cost of conflict, the owners of property now, as in an earlier day, are prepared rather to fight for their legal privileges than to give way.

—Harold Laski, The State in Theory and Practice (Viking Press, 1935)