We need socialism to save democracy 

From Washington to Moscow, Ankara to Buenos Aires, democracy is withered, dying, or already dead. The hope that the twenty-first-century far right would rule within the norms of liberalism has given way to alarm and the desperate realization that these forces actually mean what they say. Millions of us rage and mourn, yet our political nightmare has no end in sight. The authoritarians exploit and hijack neoliberalism’s discontents, while the feckless neoliberal center leads us into every political trap. This downward spiral weaponizes democracy against itself, and leads to the question: can we save democracy?

For most of human history small bands and tribes practiced collective self-rule. They had to—before the state there were no police or prisons to keep us “in line.” We had no choice but to work things out together on the basis of shared freedom. We can’t know the details of our ancient self-organization. But in the broadest sense, these forms usually had to be democratic, based in the self-rule of the people. So democracy is not fundamentally alien to our nature. We are more or less evolved for it.

But since written history began, democracy has been relatively rare, always contested, and never complete. Written history began with the rise of states. States rose to defend class rule. And class rule conflicts with democracy.

Some see democracy simply as a stabilizing device devised by ruling classes to perfect their rule. Actually democracy has always been fought for by the working and subaltern classes. It has always come from below. A revolution from below ushered in the direct democracy of ancient Athens. The slave-owning and educated classes, including the likes of Plato and Aristotle, opposed it. Rome saw centuries of class struggle expand the circle of its more restricted democracy. Intellectual, artistic, and scientific culture flourished under these ancient democracies. At the time freedom was understood as popular sovereignty. Ancient people believed there was only as much freedom as there was democracy. But the slaveowning aristocracy never disappeared, and it eventually displaced these dynamic cultures under the repressive return of oligarchic dictatorship in its own interests.

Revolutions throughout history required mass action by working people. Constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and republicanism grew out of the English, American, and French Revolutions. These state forms established the partial foundations of modern democracy. But they also restricted democratic involvement to members of the ruling class, property owners, and most often white men. Actual voting rights were won piecemeal over decades that extended over centuries. The world’s first nationwide working-class movement was the Chartist movement in England in the 1840s, demanding the right to vote. The labor movements in England and the U.S., together with abolitionists and self-organizing enslaved people, pushed to end slavery, the precondition of Black suffrage. Feminist, abolitionist, and labor movements pushed for women’s suffrage. Votes for women first happened on a nationwide scale in the newly established workers’ republic of Soviet Russia, a product of class struggle at its highest pitch. Independent Black struggle with the support of Black, Left-led, and mainstream unions like the UAW won back Black voting rights, effectively stripped since the end of Reconstruction, in the 1960s.

Democracy requires much more than voting rights, starting with freedoms of speech, press, and assembly. On these scores too, struggle from below has been the essential catalyst, as for example in popular plebeian “mobbing” that forced the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. Or the Industrial Workers of the World’s free speech battles in several U.S. cities before World War I.

The end of colonialism in Africa and Asia allowed democracies to develop in dozens of countries, from India to South Africa. Subaltern classes drove decolonization. But from the beginning, popular democratic aspirations for resource and wealth sharing in the liberated colonies met brutal resistance from imperial corporations and governments. The drive for democracy implied socialism. But unfulfilled democracy ended in disillusionment, often enforced by bloodbaths. Popular demoralization resulted, and the generations following the decolonization era have fallen prey to authoritarian rightists like Modi, Bukele, and Milei.

The backdrop to today’s global democratic retreat is neoliberalism. Imperialism imposed neoliberalism over the heads of Latin American, African, and Asian democracies through engineered debt crises and IMF loan conditions. In the rich countries, elitist think tanks, oligarchic media, legalized political corruption, and today the algorithmic manipulation of mass consciousness toward the right continually shove hated free-market transformations down our class’ throat. Democracy is abused in every way to achieve all this: it is flouted, corrupted, distorted, restricted, mocked, and even discarded.

Across the world, South and North, the decline of working-class and Left organizations facilitated these disasters by weakening our resistance. In a vicious circle, our weakened organizations failed to resist austerity attacks, causing our class to lose faith in democracies that increasingly failed them, facilitating further attacks, and so on.

Thus modern history is again demonstrating the fragility of democracy amidst class society. There are two sides to this: On the one side, ruling class restriction of and resistance to democracy. And, on the other side, working class atomization.

Lenin, in State and Revolution, refers to the “thousand cuts” that limit democracy and make it add up to “democracy for the rich.” In the U.S. these “cuts” include the Electoral College, unequal Senate representation, sweeping Supreme Court powers, campaign financing, corporate lobbying, mass incarceration, corporate media dominance, citizenship restrictions, gerrymandering, and much else. These factors mutilated democracy long before the far right’s current offensive.

On the other side, working class consciousness and organization can become locked in a negative dialectic. Individual workers sense our powerlessness in the sea of millions of others, while giant forces like governments and corporations dominate. Many workers nevertheless follow and engage in politics, but inevitably many others never move beyond apathy in a system that doesn’t serve or respond to them. This makes it harder for them to organize collectively. They can become easy prey to the white supremacy and xenophobia deeply rooted in U.S. political culture. And it makes many of them vulnerable to fear-driven, irrational, and antisocial political movements like MAGA and Q-Anon, enabled by sophisticated techno-libertarian platforms. (With libertarians like Musk, Thiel, and Zuckerberg, who needs totalitarianism?)

Sometimes unionization gains momentum, feeding a positive dialectic between organization and consciousness. But if this does not lead to revolution, union gains eventually go into reverse as perpetual capitalist reorganization undermines their industrial and spatial foundations. And as the constant pull toward labor-management cooperation exerts its force, especially on union leaders distanced from the rank and file.

Unions are central but never enough for social movements or revolutions. Grassroots organizations of specially oppressed people, neighborhood organizing, tenants’ unions, student groups, mutual aid collectives, rank and file movements, and workers’ councils need to proliferate and synergize. Unions on their own do not match capitalist power, but comprehensive class organization can.

Such organization is necessary not only to democratize existing society, but to replace it. And post-revolution, it is necessary to build upon all of this. We have to universalize collective organization and the democratic culture and experience it implies, in order to entrench full-fledged democracy. Even in the most liberal of capitalist social democracies, the combination of formal political democracy and majority unionization of our class does not outweigh the individualistic social psychology inherent to capitalism. We still compete with each other for jobs, poverty still pushes some to crime and the rest of us to guard our little personal hoards of property, we still live in a sea of advertising, inequality still demoralizes us, and we all still see our class’ power eclipsed by corporate, government, and blind market forces.  So Sweden moves to the right too.  That social psychology, that mass lived experience, is what makes frighteningly large minorities ripe for Trumpian cults. It makes the social consensus for democracy paper thin.

Capitalism crowds out effective electoral democracy through campaign financing, corporate lobbying, and economic sabotage of any redistributive reforms they don’t like.  It forces our class to live under the authoritarian structure of workplace management, really a daily submission to dictatorship, instead of workers’ democratic control of production. Socialism means abolishing minority control of the social wealth, placing it under the democratic control of our class workplace by workplace, and in society as a whole. This would dispossess the capitalists, ending the barbaric division into classes that has plagued us throughout written history. And it would end the capitalists’ endless sabotage of democracy.

But this would only be the starting point in making democracy impregnable. A society of millions and billions creates inherent problems of accountability and transparency.  Mass participation, mass vigilance, and active mass democratic habits will be required on an unprecedented level. We must become accustomed to the practice of democracy at all levels of social life—neighborhood (including self-policing), school, workplace, consumer, environment, and law and other large-scale decision-making. When we are socialized into meaningfully empowered and overlapping organizational membership, rather than into alienated and atomized powerlessness, then we will be able to ensure democracy as the historical norm rather than the embattled exception.

Marx and Lenin’s writings on the Paris Commune and the Russian Soviets are invaluable for envisioning the real-world unfolding of grassroots democracy through class struggle. The failures of these profoundly democratic experiments were mostly due to external factors like invasion and brutal poverty. But as Sam Farber writes in Before Stalinism, influences on the Bolshevik Party from the Jacobin faction of the French Revolution also contributed to the disastrous reversal of democracy that played out in Russia soon after the Revolution. For example, the move from a multi-party government established by the 1917 Revolution to a one-party state. This is a mistake for revolutionaries to avoid. We need an unwavering democratic commitment, an appreciation for the myriad complications it involves, and meticulous study and thought devoted to its practical implementation.

Democracy under capitalism is fatally constricted yet precious. We agonize before its authoritarian liquidation. Fighting back cannot win unless social and democratic methods and demands combine. Neoliberal democracy cannot be stably restored. We need a militant working class movement, with class demands aimed at poverty and oppression, at the heart of democracy’s defense. The unprecedented mass spread of working-class community ICE defense across the country today, especially if unionists connect it to their workplace power, represents our chance to start organizing that fight. And today’s radicalizing working-class majority is ripe for the long-held argument of the tradition of socialism from below: only revolutionary workers’ power, socialism, can win lasting democracy.