index of papers

Democracy and Struggles for Social Justice

Cliff Durand,
Morgan University

Today, almost everyone is in favor of democracy. Nearly every measure undertaken by our government, whether foreign or domestic, is legitimated by invoking the term ‘democracy’—whether it be the invasion of another country or the privatization of social security. Similarly, the economic marketplace is often spoken of as ‘democratic’, with consumers ‘voting’ their preferences with their dollars. Likewise, the expansion of stock ownership through pension systems and IRAs is sometimes claimed to represent the democratization of capitalism. Opportunity for upward social mobility is likewise spoken of as democratic. Even fast food chains that allow you to have your hamburger ‘your way,’ suggest that such ‘free choice’ is democratic. It seems that everything is being marketed as ‘democratic’ these days. In other words, it is a much abused concept.

So what exactly is democracy? The fact of the matter is that democracy is an essentially contested concept. It is a term that contains differing and competing definitions suggesting different constructions of reality. Such a contested concept presupposes implicit assumptions and functions as an ideological concept that legitimates differing social practices and power relations. What I would like to do today is unpack some of the theoretical and political baggage contained in this contested concept.

Specifically, I want to sort out two of the main, competing concepts of democracy now current. One is the concept of popular or participatory democracy; the other is elitist democracy. The first is the classical idea suggested in the original Greek word which referred to the rule or power, cratos, of the people, demos. In this sense, ‘democracy’ means people’s power.

But in the contemporary world, ‘democracy’ has come to mean rule by a political elite so long as it has been elected by popular vote. In presenting this competing definition this way I am not just loading the deck against it. In fact, I am simply reflecting the way advocates of this concept themselves understand it. An elitist theory of democracy has become the canonical idea among US political scientists, politicians, journalists and other opinion-makers. For them, ‘democracy’ means the selection of political decision-makers from among competing elites by means of popular elections. Most accept Joseph Schumpeter’s definition of ‘democracy’ as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” As he put it, the role of the people is simply to produce a government. The people are sovereign only on election day. Once they have done their job, they should go back to their private affairs and leave governing to the elite they have selected.

The 18th century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a very different concept. In fact, anticipating Schumpeter, he attacked this idea in the following words:

“The English nation thinks it is free, but is greatly mistaken, for it is so only during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved and counts for nothing. The use which it makes of the brief moments of freedom renders the loss of liberty well-deserved.” [J.-J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book III, Chapter XV.]

For Rousseau, sovereignty is inalienable. Only those laws ratified by the people themselves are valid. This point, to which we will return later, is at the core of the popular concept of democracy.

Elitist theorists, however, are very suspicious of the capacities of ordinary citizens to rationally participate in decision-making. Schumpeter’s portrait of the ordinary man is singularly unflattering. Here are a few of its key characteristics:

• He is more attentive to his private life than to public affairs, even local ones that touch his life more directly. “Normally, the great political questions take their place in the psychic economy of the typical citizen with those leisure-hour interests that have not attained the rank of hobbies, and with the subjects of irresponsible conversation.” [Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Harper and Row, 1975, p. 261.]

• He is ill informed: “the ordinary citizen’s ignorance and lack of judgment in matters of domestic and foreign policy… [even] in the case of educated people.” [ibid. p. 261.]

• He is not rational in his thinking on political matters. “the typical citizen argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interest.… His thinking becomes associative and effective.”[ibid., p. 262.]

Consequently, Schumpeter sees the popular will as easily manipulated -- a manufactured will, he calls it. “the will of the people is the product and not the motive power of the political process…. Issues and popular will on any issue are… manufactured.” [ibid., p. 263.]

It is because of this dim view of the citizen that he limits their role to producing a government. One might ask, given what he takes to be these weaknesses of ‘human nature’, why he would entrust even this to the citizenry. In any case, the sooner political power can pass to the elite, who are presumably immune to these weaknesses, the better. Democracy is then simply the institutional arrangement to carry that transfer out through a very limited kind of consent.

The elitist theory of democracy draws heavily from the early 20th century Italian social theorists Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto as well as Roberto Michels. Mosca’s massified people were in need of rule by an elite. The most that popular pressures could achieve was a replacement of one elite by another, a ‘circulation of elites’, as Pareto called it. Indeed, Michels argued, even a democratic upsurge from below would only produce new leaders who would, of necessity soon become new rulers. There is an ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that governs all organizational life, he says.

There is much in Schumpeter’s portrait that is descriptively accurate of the United States today. Citizens are absorbed in the concerns of private life, disengaged from politics, and easily manipulated when they do act politically. But what we have to ask is whether this is a natural fact of human nature or itself the product of the political order. One claim that runs through all of these elite theorists is that there is a natural law that necessitates elite rule. Whether it is presented as ‘human nature’ or inherent in the amorphousness of a mass or as a sociological tendency of organization, there is a fatalistic sense of the inevitable that we are asked to accept. To do otherwise would be like trying to reject the law of gravity.

This naturalizing of a social fact is an earmark of an ideology. That is, it is the use of a set of ideas to influence human behaviour, in this case to accept an existing power relation rather than struggle to change it. For example, if we take Schumpeter’s denigrating portrait as accurate, and it often is, we then should ask how did this come about? While he presents it as ‘human nature’, yet he also recognizes that the popular will is manufactured. But he doesn’t ask who is doing the manipulating. Nor does he consider how the citizen might be better protected from such manipulation by elites. He does not consider what it would take to engage the attention of citizens in public affairs or how their capacities for rational discussion and judgment might be more fully developed. Instead he goes on to put the affairs of state in the hands of that very elite that made the citizens so incompetent in the first place, and who consequently have an interest in keeping them that way. In sum, Schumpeter presents as an objective, scientific theory what is actually an ideological justification of domination by elites.

The identification of democracy with a set of institutionalized procedures for selecting leaders has been dubbed ‘polyarchy’ by political scientist Robert Dahl. It is a formal, rather than a participatory concept. Polyarchy is simply the selection in multiparty elections of leaders from among competing elites. Under this concept of democracy, the term simply means, in the words of Schumpeter, “that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.” [ibid., p. 285.] In effect, polyarchy defines democracy in terms of the political system of the United States, thereby annihilating the question of whether the US is democratic or not. Indeed, the US becomes the model of democracy; the US is actually existing democracy. Thus the descriptive concept of polyarchy becomes the prescriptive standard of democracy.

Roberto Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” is often pointed to by those who claim elite rule is inevitable and so ought to by accepted rather than resisted. Yet, in fact, Michels finds only an oligarchical tendency, while also noting a counter democratic tendency. Listen to this closing paragraph of his book:

“The democratic currents of history resemble successive waves. They break ever on the same shoal. They are ever renewed. This enduring spectacle is simultaneously encouraging and depressing. When democracies have gained a certain stage of development, they undergo a gradual transformation, adopting the aristocratic spirit, and in many cases also the aristocratic forms, against which at the outset they struggles so fiercely. Now new accusers arise to denounce the traitors; after an era of glorious combats and of inglorious power, they end by fusing with the old dominant class; whereupon once more they are in their turn attacked by fresh opponents who appeal to the name of democracy. It is probable that this cruel game will continue without end.” [Roberto Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, Crowell-Collier Pub., 1962, p. 371.]

If oligarchy is inevitable, so too are the democratic surges against elite rule. This is cause for pessimism only if one thought democracy was some static, settled political condition that did not need constant participation. In fact, it needs struggle.

We saw such a democratic wave in the US in the 1960s. That decade of heightened political participation, social protest and citizen engagement in public affairs was one of those democratic moments in our history. Social movements made demands on the ruling elites, demands for racial equality, for peace, for social justice, demands that the institutions of government address pressing social problems. The spirit of citizen engagement was articulated in the call for a more participatory democracy. As expressed by the Students for a Democratic Society,

“As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” [SDS, The Port Huron Statement, 1964]

This is a fundamentally different concept of democracy, one that resonates from deeply held American values. Rather than seeing citizens as passive subjects to be ruled by elites, it advocates active participation in all those decisions that affect ones life. This extends not just to government, but also education, the workplace, the family, neighborhoods — all of those spheres, both public and private, in which we live our daily lives. It is a call for all the institutions of society to become more democratically participatory.

Now it is instructive to observe the response of the political elite to this upsurge of popular democracy. Did they welcome the citizenry’s eagerness to take responsibility for their lives? No, they feared it. They called it “a crisis of democracy”, “an excess of democracy”, that was making society “ungovernable” -- i.e., no longer under their control.

I kid you not. These were the very words of an influential 1975 report by a blue ribbon group of social scientists to the Trilateral Commission. It took a hard look at what it considered a growing problem of governability in the major countries of North America, Europe and Japan — the Triad of advanced capitalism. Titled “The Crisis of Democracy” the US was analyzed by Samuel P. Huntington, dean of American political science and frequent consultant to federal government departments. What Huntington saw was a kind of “democratic distemper” as people demanded more of government while at the same time challenged established authority. “People no longer felt the same compulsion to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.” [Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, New York University Press, 1975, p. 75.] Government was “overloaded” by the popular demands placed on it. In a moment of unusual candor, Huntington says, “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” [ibid., p. 114.] When too many people participate too much, there is a “breakdown of democracy.”

Huntington recognizes that a little democracy can be a dangerous thing. With polyarchy the elite grants the people the right to vote. The danger is that that might lead them to think they also should be making the decisions. Huntington attributes the “distemper of democracy” to the periodic “creedal passion” that afflicts the electorate. That occurs when the people get carried away by their democratic values to the extent where they want to actually participate in decision making. Of course, that is a danger only to the elites who have reserved that role to themselves.

What the “breakdown of democracy” actually amounts to is a loss of social control by an elite no longer able to contain popular participation within the safe, controlled limits of electoral politics. The “crisis of democracy” is actually the crisis of polyarchy. As one critical Canadian commentator put it, “the whole discussion of governability… was of concern only to an elite uneasy about its declining position in society!” [ibid., p. 206.]

What Huntington and other defenders of polyarchy worried about as a “breakdown of democracy” was really the breakdown of elite social control. Polyarchy values stability as a fundamental social value, that is, as long as it is stable rule by an elite. As Huntington has put it elsewhere, “The maintenance of democratic politics [i.e. polyarchy] and the reconstruction of the social order [i.e. popular social change] are fundamentally incompatible.” [“The Modest Meaning of Democracy,” in Robert A. Pastor, Democracy in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum, Holmes and Meier, 1989, p. 24.] In other words, democracy is not about a popular will directing the course of their common affairs, it is about containing that will under elite control.

This concern with elite control in American political life goes back to its beginning. It can be seen in James Madison’s fear of a democracy of the common man. Living in a society already divided into propertied classes and those with little or no property, the chief architect of our constitution sought to fashion political institutions 1) through which the interests of the ruling class could be protected and 2) that would not allow the multitude to prevail where that might injure the rights of others, particularly the property rights of the wealthy. Let me quote from his Federalist Paper #10:

“ Democracies have ever been…incompatible with…rights of property…. The interest in a majority…must be prevented…[because it would threaten] the unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society…and divide them into different classes.” [ emphasis added]

The Founding Fathers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were moved by what one delegate called “the excess of democracy” represented in the demands of indebted and heavily taxed yeoman farmers and mechanics. Another complained that things had become “too democratic.” And so this gathering of merchants, slave owners and manufacturers resolved “to create a more perfect union.” Indeed, the Constitutional Convention amounted to a conspiracy of the propertied classes to create a system of federal government strong enough to protect them from those in the popular classes, and yet weak enough not to itself be a danger to their interests. The Constitution was the founding document of our polyarchy.

In such a political system, what is democracy? It is not found in the ordinary workings of the political institutions where the will of the majority is effectively prevented, as Madison put it. That is polyarchy. Rather, it is found in those historical moments when the popular classes break through the barriers to their participation in order to shape public policy in their interests. It is the popular struggles of social movements for social justice that define democracy in class divided societies. Democracy is in the streets, not in the halls of Congress.

In such societies the function of government is to maintain “domestic peace and tranquility.” That is, it is to ensure social stability, which, in a class divided society inevitably means preserving existing class relations of inequality. As the contemporary philosopher Milton Fisk points out, “preeminent among the goals ruling is to promote is that of reproducing the economy …[so] that the socially dominant class retains its dominance.” [Milton Fisk, The State and Justice: An Essay in Political Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.12.]

At the same time, the state must concede to popular demands to some degree in order to win the consent of the governed. The alternative would be to rule by shear coercion. As long ago as Aristotle it was recognized that ruling had to be linked to justice. This is a condition of governability. Ruling must thus adopt the form of justice. But popular demands for justice may well exceed what the rulers find consistent with the basic function of government to reproduce the economy, thereby protecting the existing unequal social order. It is then that the elite have a crisis of governability and complain about an excess of democracy. Radical justice from below always pushes the limits of the official justice from above. How hard it pushes it depends on how active the popular classes are in their struggle. That is, it depends on how much democracy there is at any given moment. The elites cannot stand too much democracy; the people always want more.

But there is more to this relation between the government and society. Political theorists commonly distinguish between the state (or the political sphere) and civil society. Civil society consists of all those consensual social relationships citizens have with one another, from trade unions, political parties and voluntary associations to the family. Since de Tocqueville it has been recognized that a vital associational life is essential to a healthy democracy; it is this civil society that links government to the individual citizens and keeps it accountable. In effect, the state becomes an extension of civil society in the sense that it represents it. Ultimately power rests in civil society. That is what the sovereignty of the people means. That at least is the democratic ideal.

In polyarchy however, civil society becomes an extension of the state. That is, it is through its penetration of civil society that the elite garners the consent of the people to their rule and thereby achieves governability. This idea of the extended state is the key to Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony. Hegemony refers to the consensual domination by an elite whereby its rule is accepted as legitimate. Effective rule cannot be just “from above.” It depends on structuring civil society down below so as to support the state. Polyarchy then involves elite rule through an extension of the state into civil society. Popular democracy, on the other hand, involves an extension of an autonomous civil society into the state. [Cf. Robinson’s formulation, op. cit., p. 58.]

It is this understanding that has guided US efforts to promote democracy around the world. Allying itself with friendly elites and patterning ‘democracy’ after its own political system, what the US has been fostering is actually polyarchy. Over the last two decades a leading feature of US policy in the Third World as well as the former Second World of Eastern Europe and Russia has been aid for political development. This has involved extensive efforts to promote civil society. But this development of civil society has been geared to promoting leaders, organizations and values supportive of US interests. It has sought to forestall social change from popular social movements. As sociologist William Robinson has argued in his insightful book Promoting Polyarchy,

“US ‘democracy promotion,’ as it actually functions, sets about not just to secure and stabilize elite-based polyarchic systems but to have the United States and local elites thoroughly penetrate civil society, and from therein assure control over popular mobilization and mass movements.” [William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 69.]

It is through this elite penetration of civil society that social stability is assured, abroad as well as at home. Polyarchy promotion might more accurately be described as democracy prevention, i.e. prevention of popular democracy.

One of the key things that polyarchic elites seek to protect from popular democracy is economic power. It is not just the political power and privileges of a governing elite that is to be protected; it is the property of the capitalist class whose interests they must serve. Why is this? It’s not just that political figures require large sums from wealthy supporters to acquire elective office, although that too is true. More fundamentally, it is beCause the interests of capital rule in a society where they own the productive resources of society upon which all others are dependent for their livelihood. That’s what it means to be a ruling class. The interests of capital rule and the interests of all other dependent classes can be met only if the interests of capital are met. That’s why governing elites must act to protect and promote the interests of capital if they are to fulfill their function of preserving the social order.

While there is this link between the political and the economic spheres in capitalism, at the same time they are separate spheres. Capitalists qua capitalists do not govern. In this respect capitalism is different from previous social formations like feudalism. In feudalism economic and political power were combined in the same ‘class’, the nobility. In capitalism these are separated.

The separation of the economic sphere from the political sphere in capitalist society has far reaching implications. For one thing it has made possible the legal equality of all citizens regardless of race, gender, class or other social characteristics. This formal levelling individualizes citizens and detaches citizenship from any social or communal identity. That is what is democratic about it. But at the same time, it also disempowers citizens que citizens from any real control over their economic fate and the ability of capital to appropriate surplus value from their labor as workers. In this way democracy is limited by the separation of the political and economic spheres. In feudal society these spheres were united. The political power of the nobility enabled them to extract value from the commoners who were excluded from political participation. By separating the economic sphere, capitalism is able to extend the rights of citizenship to commoners while at the same time denying them economic power. “Capitalism, then, made it possible to conceive of ‘formal democracy’, a form of civic equality which could coexist with social inequality and leave economic relations… in place.” [Cf. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 208-213.]

It is this separation that popular democracy threatens to breech. The interests of popular classes are in conflict with those of capital. Consequently, social movements are likely to use the political power they create against the economic power of capital. Even modest demands for limiting the negative effects of the market on people’s lives in the name of social justice can appear as unacceptably radical to capital and the elites that represent it. It is seen as an excess of democracy.

A current manifestation of popular democracy is the global justice movement. It illustrates the point once again for us. Whether it be Bolivians protesting privatization of water, or Mexican campesinos protesting subsidized corn from the US, or demonstrators against the WTO in Cancun, this social movement is seeking to protect the interests of popular classes and communities against an expanding global capitalism whose transnational corporations are dispossessing them. This weakens the hegemony of governing elites and the transnational capital they represent. This is what democracy looks like — popular democracy.

Yet, popular democracy must be more than this. It must be more than protest against elite policys or disruption of the institutions through which they rule. This is a beginning of the formation of aa autonomous civil society, a counter hegemony from below, but as long as the structure of polyarchy is in place, the power to make the big decisions will remain with the elite. Popular forces may succeed in driving elites to seek more secure locations in which to meet and 15 million people may protest worldwide against their wars, but they still have the power to decide and to impose those decisions on the rest of us. We can only affect their actions at the margins, limiting time and place perhaps, but not altering their course.

Popular democracy must be more than this if it is to realize the values suggested by the original Greek word meaning the rule or power, cratos, of the people, demos. Democracy means people’s power. It means participating in the decisions that affect ones life, as the New Left put it back in the 1960s. It is the vision of popular participation in collective decision making about collective action for a common good. We do not yet have a theory, a programme, or a strategy for realizing this vision. But through the collective action of social movements we have a sense that such a world is possible. We have come to a consciousness of our interconnectedness, not just on the personal level but also on the social and even global levels. This gives us a common interest and the possibility of finding a common good. And as we will see next week, such a common good can be realized only through collective action. The individualized decisions that operate in the market fragment us into powerless consumers. The neoliberal programme massifies us, making us passive objects of the polyarchic elite. The struggles for social justice of todays social movements are the birth pains of a new participatory democracy that will emerge from the womb of our present world.

To leave comments on this paper: click here.

To read comments already contributed: click here.

index of papers