1. Political freedom and economic freedom
To many people who have not thought about this question, political freedom and economic freedom mean the same thing. This is particularly true of liberal social philosophy, which proclaims itself in favour of ‘liberty’ in every aspect of social life.
However, although political freedom can easily be defined in such a way that the liberty of some does not imply the enslavement of others, it is not so simple with economic freedom. A moment’s reflection shows that most aspects of this ‘economic freedom’ actually imply inequality, the automatic exclusion of the major part of society from the possibility of enjoying this same liberty.
The freedom to buy or sell slaves implies that society is divided into two groups: the slaves and the slave-masters. The freedom to appropriate the means of production as private property implies the existence of a social class which is obliged to sell its labour power. What would the owner of a factory do if no-one was forced to work for someone else’s benefit?
Applying their own logic in the era of early capitalism, the bourgeoisie defended on principle the freedom of parents to send ten-year-old children down the mines, the freedom to force workers to toil twelve or fourteen hours a day. But one freedom was obstinately refused – the freedom to form workers’ associations, forbidden in France by the famous Le Chapellier law, which was adopted during the French Revolution under the pretext that it forbade all coalitions of a corporatist nature.
These apparent contradictions in bourgeois ideology disappear once all these attitudes are re-organised around one central theme: the defence of the property and interests of the capitalist class. That is the basis of all bourgeois ideology, not some intransigent defence of the ‘principle’ of freedom.
This is clearest when one examines the history of the right to vote. Modern parliamentarism was born as the expression of the right of the bourgeoisie to control public expenditure, which was financed by the taxes they paid. It was Charles I’s attempt to levy taxation without summoning Parliament between 1629-40 which led directly to the English Civil War. It follows logically that the bourgeoisie denied the right to vote to the popular classes who paid no tax – after all, would not their ‘demagogic’ representatives continually vote for new expenditure, given that they were not the ones who paid for it?
What is at the bottom of bourgeois ideology is not at all the principle of equal rights for all citizens (its historical attitude towards the right to vote falls pitifully short of this principle), nor the principle of guaranteed political freedom for all, but, of course, the defence of wealth and the right to get rich through the exploitation of wage-labour.
2 The bourgeois state in the service of the class interests of capital
It was hardly very difficult to explain to workers in the Nineteenth Century that the bourgeois state was not ‘neutral’ in the class struggle, that it was not an ‘arbiter’ between capital and labour, intended to defend the so-called ‘general interest’, but that it clearly represented an instrument for the defence of the interests of capital against those of labour.
Only the bourgeoisie had the right to vote. Only the bourgeoisie could freely refuse to employ the workers. As soon as the workers went on strike and collectively refused to sell their labour power on the conditions dictated by capital, the police or the army were sent in to fire on them. Justice was clearly class justice. Parliamentarians, judges, officers, colonial officials, ministers and bishops: they were all part of the same social class. They were bound together by common links – of money, interest and family. The working class was totally excluded from this nice little world.
This situation was modified once the modern labour movement began to grow, developed substantial organisational strength, and obtained universal suffrage through direct action (political strikes in Belgium, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, etc.). The working class found itself well represented in parliament (it also found itself obliged to pay a major part of taxation – but that is another story). Reformist workers parties participated in coalition governments with the bourgeoisie. In some cases they even started to make up governments exclusively composed of social democratic parties (Great Britain, Scandinavia).
Thenceforth, the illusion of a ‘democratic’ state above classes, a real ‘arbiter’ and ‘conciliator’ of class conflicts, was able to find a readier acceptance inside the working class. One of the essential functions of reformist revisionism is to sow widely such illusions. At one time this was the exclusive prerogative of social democracy. Today the Communist Parties, which follow a neo-reformist line, put about the same sort of illusions.
The real nature of even the most ‘democratic’ bourgeois state is, however, immediately revealed if one examines its practical functioning together with the material conditions for its functioning.
It is typical of the bourgeois state that, as the working masses gain universal suffrage and their representatives enter parliament in large numbers, the centre of gravity of the state based on parliamentary democracy inexorably moves from parliament towards the apparatus of the permanent bourgeois state:’Ministers come and go, but the police remain.’
This state apparatus is in perfect harmony with the middle and big bourgeoisie because of the way it is recruited, its selectivity and career structure, and its hierarchical method of organisation. Indissoluble ideological, social and economic links tie this apparatus to the bourgeois class. All its top officials earn salaries which allow accumulation of capital (sometimes modest, but real for all that), giving these people an interest even as individuals in the defence of private property and the smooth running of the capitalist economy.
Moreover, the state founded on bourgeois parliamentarism is linked body and soul to capital by the golden chains of financial dependence and the National Debt. No bourgeois government can govern without constantly calling for credit – controlled by the banks, finance capital and the big bourgeoisie. Any anti-capitalist policies that are so much as sketched out by a reformist government come up immediately against financial and economic sabotage by the capitalists. The ‘investment strike’, the flight of capital, inflation, the black market, a decline in production, and unemployment quickly result from this counter-attack.
The whole of Twentieth Century history confirms that it is impossible to use a bourgeois parliament and a government based on capitalist property and the bourgeois state against the bourgeoisie in any significant way. Any policy which attempts to follow an effective anti-capitalist line is quickly confronted with a dilemma: either capitulate to the blackmail of the power of capital, or break the apparatus of the bourgeois state and replace capitalist property relations by the collective appropriation of the means of production.
3 The limits of bourgeois democratic freedoms
It is not by chance that the labour movement has been in the forefront of the struggle for democratic freedoms in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. By defending these freedoms, the labour movement at the same time defends the best conditions for its own advance. The working class is the most numerous class in contemporary society. The conquest of democratic freedoms allows it to organise, to gain the assurance of numbers, and to weigh ever more heavily in the balance of forces.
Moreover, the democratic freedoms gained under the capitalist system represent the best way to school the workers in the greater democracy which they will enjoy once they have overthrown the rule of capital. Trotsky rightly talks of ‘pockets of proletarian democracy within bourgeois democracy’ in relation to the mass organisations of the working class (the possibility of holding meetings and conferences, of organising strikes and mass demonstrations, of having their own press, schools, theatres, film clubs, etc.).
But it is precisely because democratic freedoms have such a great importance in the eyes of the workers that it is so necessary to grasp the limits of even the most advanced bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
First of all, bourgeois parliamentary democracy is indirect democracy, within which some thousands or tens of thousands of mandated persons (deputies, senators, mayors, local councillors, etc.) participate in the administration of the state. The vast majority of citizens are excluded from such participation. Their only power is that of putting a ballot paper in the box every four or five years.
Secondly, political equality in a bourgeois parliamentary democracy is a purely formal, and not a real equality. Formally, both rich and poor have the same ‘right’ to launch a newspaper – with running costs totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds. Formally, both rich and poor have the same ‘right’ to purchase air-time on the television, and thus the same ‘possibility’ of influencing the elector. But as the practical exercise of these rights presupposes access to powerful material resources, only the rich can fully enjoy them. The capitalists will succeed in influencing a large number of voters who are materially dependent on them, will buy newspapers, radio stations and time on television thanks to their money. The capitalists ‘control’ parliamentarians and governments through the weight of their capital.
Finally, even if one ignores all these characteristic limits of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, and wrongly supposes that it is perfect, the fact remains that it is only political democracy. For what is the use of political equality between the rich and poor – which is far from the case! – if it goes hand in hand with permanent, enormous economic and social inequality, which is growing all the time? Even if the rich and poor did have exactly the same political rights, the former would still have enormous economic and social power which the latter lack, and which inevitably subordinates the poor to the rich in everyday life, including the practical way in which political rights are applied.
4 Repression and dictatorship
The class nature of the state based on bourgeois parliamentary democracy appears most clearly if one looks at its repressive role. We all know of innumerable social conflicts where the police and military have intervened to break strike pickets, to disperse workers’ demonstrations, to evacuate factories occupied by the workers, and to fire on strikers. We don’t know of any cases in which the bourgeois police or army have intervened to arrest employers who were making workers redundant, have helped workers to occupy factories closed by capital, or have fired on the bourgeoisie which organises both the high cost of living and tax evasion schemes.
The apologists of bourgeois democracy would reply that the workers broke ‘the law’ in all the cases cited, and that they endangered the ‘public order’ which the repressive forces have to defend. We reply that this confirms that the ‘law’ is not neutral but is bourgeois law which protects capitalist property; that the forces of repression are at the service of this property; that they behave very differently according to whether it is the workers or the capitalists who commit formal breaches of ‘the law’; and that nothing confirms better the fundamentally bourgeois character of the state.
In normal times the repressive apparatus only plays a secondary role in maintaining the capitalist system, since it is de facto respected in everyday life by the great majority of the working class. It is different in periods of crisis (whether the crisis be economic, social, political, military or financial), in which the capitalist system is profoundly disturbed, in which the working masses express their desire to overthrow the system, or in which the latter itself no longer manages to function normally.
Then repression comes to the forefront of the political scene. Then the fundamental nature of the bourgeois state quickly reveals itself in its naked form: a body of armed men in the service of capital. Thus a more general rule in the history of class societies is confirmed. The more stable the society is, the more it can afford the luxury of granting various formal freedoms to the oppressed. The more shaken and unstable by profound crises it is, the more it has to exercise political power through open violence rather than by means of eloquent speeches.
Thus, throughout the history of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, there are many experiences of the suppression of all the democratic rights of the workers by bourgeois dictatorships; military, bonapartist, and fascist ones. The fascist dictatorship is the most brutal and barbarous form of such dictatorships in the service of big capital.
Fascism not only suppresses the freedom of the revolutionary and radical organisations of the working class; it also seeks to crush all forms of collective organisation and resistance of the workers, including the trade unions and the most elementary forms of strikes. Furthermore, in this attempt to atomise the working class, it cannot simply rely on the traditional repressive apparatus (army, police, judges) if it is to be at all effective; it must be able to call on private armies emerging from another mass movement: that of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, desperate because of the crisis and inflation, and yet alienated from the workers movement by the latter’s failure to launch a bold anti-capitalist political offensive and to present a short-term credible alternative to the capitalist crisis.
The working class and its revolutionary vanguard cannot be neutral to the rise of fascism. They must defend their democratic freedoms tooth and nail. To this end they should counterpose to the rise of fascism a united front of all workers organisations, including the most reformist and most moderate ones, in order to crush this evil growth in the bud. They must create their own units of self-defence against the capitalists’ armed groups, and not depend on the protection of the bourgeois state. Workers’ militias supported by the mass of workers and uniting all the workers organisations, preventing every fascist attempt to terrorise any section of the masses, to break a single strike, or to smash any meeting of a workers organisation – that is the way to bar the road to the fascist barbarism which otherwise would lead to concentration camps, massacres and torture, to Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and the Santiago de Chile stadium. Every success in this fight also allows the working masses to pass onto the counter-offensive and, in opposing the fascist menace, to fight the capitalist system which gave birth to and suckled it.
5 Proletarian democracy
Marxists fight to substitute a workers state – the dictatorship of the proletariat and proletarian democracy – for the bourgeois state, which always remains, even in its most democratic form, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And this workers state is characterised by an extension and not a restriction of effective democratic freedoms for the mass of working people. It is absolutely necessary to emphasise this basic principle, especially after the disastrous experience of Stalinism, which undermined the credibility of the democratic speeches of the official Communist Parties.
The workers state will be more democratic than the state founded on parliamentary democracy in that it will extend direct democracy. It will be a state which will begin to wither away from its birth, leaving entire areas of social activity to the self-management and the self-administration of the citizens concerned (post, telecommunications, health, educa- tion, culture, etc.). It will gather together the mass of working people in workers’ councils which exercise power directly, abolishing the fictitious borderline between executive and legislative powers. It will eliminate careerism in public life by limiting the earnings of all officials, including the most highly placed, to the salary of the average skilled worker. It will cut across the formation of a new caste of administrators by introducing compulsory rotation as a principle in all delegation of powers.
The workers state will be more democratic than the state based on parliamentary democracy inasmuch as it will create the material bases for the exercise of democratic freedoms by all. The printing presses, radio and television stations, and assembly halls will all become collective property, and will be put at the disposal of any group of workers which wants to use them. The right to establish various political organisations and parties, including opposition ones; to create an opposition press, and the right of political minorities to express their views in the papers, on the radio and television – these rights will be jealously defended by the workers’ councils. The general arming of the working masses, the suppression of the regular army and the repressive apparatus, the election of judges, the hearing of all cases in public; these will be the best guarantee that no minority can assume the right to exclude any group of working people from the exercise of democratic freedoms.