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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture &

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Marxism and democracy

a
Richard Wolff
a
Professor of economics , University of Massachusetts , Amherst
Published online: 24 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Richard Wolff (2000) Marxism and democracy, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture &
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Remarx

Marxism and Democracy

Richard Wolff

The historical relationship between democracy and Marxism reveals a sequence of

reversals (Miliband 1977,74 ff.). Sometimes Marxism has stressed the projection of
itself as the fulfillment of democracy, broadly defined. At other times, Marxism's
thrust has been more to criticize contemporary forms of democracy and democratic
movements as bourgeois, hence deeply and unacceptably limited in their scope and
contents.1 Further, Marxists have argued among themselves and reversed positions
on how Marxists should define and commit to democracy (Williams 1976, 82-7).
Marx himself punctuated a personal passage from radical democrat to communist
by strong critiques of the politics of those he often called democrats—for example,
in his 1850 "Address of the Central Committee of the Communist League" and in
the 1851-2 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon?
Later Marxists have differed among themselves in regard to democracy and demo-
crats. Significant numbers have embraced democracy theoretically and engaged demo-
crats as political allies. Indeed, some recent "post-Marxists" have declared their com-
mitment to "radical democracy" instead of to Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe 1985,1987).
Other Marxists have rejected democracy and democrats as elements of a movement
that deflects workers from class-revolutionary projects, thereby blocking transitions
to socialism or communism (Mercer 1980). Where Marx changed his position (mostly
in one direction) across his lifetime, many Marxists since have oscillated between op-
posing positions as first one and then the other gains sway over the majority. As a re-
cent study concludes, "The world-wide controversy over Marx's legacy today turns
largely on its ambiguous relation to democracy" (Meister 1990, 99).
 Remarx 113

The collapse of Eastern European socialism accelerated the post-1945 shift of

Marxists toward an enthusiastic embrace of democracy and democrats—expressed,
for example, in the view that insufficient democracy caused that collapse (Kotz and
Weir 1997). Unfortunately, in my view, these debates and oscillations have largely
missed the class specifics of Marx's critique of democracy; hence they have also
missed opportunities for an alliance of Marxism (Marxists) and democracy (demo-
crats) that respects the differences between them.
The particular Marxist position I want to advance here aims to break out of these
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oscillations on the grounds that either polar position is inadequate.3 Thus, I do not
argue for yet another reversal—for Marxists to distance themselves from democracy
and democrats as they have done in the past. Rather, Marxists should draw clear lines
of demarcation between the kind of democracy they affirm and the very different
kinds typically affirmed by most democrats today (as in the past). As Avineri noted,
Marx did something similar in his differentiations between "true democracy," which
entailed "abolishing class differences," and those "formal," "radical," "political," and
"Jacobin" kinds of democracy that did not (Avineri 1971, 34-8. 47). Moreover,
Marx's differentiations need not be seen as positing that true democracy is only some
distant ideal awaiting classlessness as its precondition. For example, I will interpret
Marx's differentiations as offering a basis and criterion for an alliance here and now
between democrats and Marxists.
Marxism's distinctive approach (and, hence, contribution) to democracy focuses
on the objects of democratic decisionmaking: the "what" of democracy's concerns.4
This alone distinguishes it from many other approaches to democracy. Many among
these stress the "how" of democracy: for example, can its procedures be indirect and

1. Especially in State and Revolution, where he built on Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme,
Lenin argues (a) that a complete or full democracy presupposes the classlessness that is Marxism's
project, and (b) that to realize such a full democracy is also to commence a "withering away of democ-
racy," (see Marx 1933, 31, 47, 58, 104-5), a concept complexly related to the "withering away of the
state." See also the vast literature on "reform" versus "revolution" which debates the relation between
democracy and Marxism (Mercer 1980). There, in one view, the "reforms" of establishing or strength-
ening democracy function as vehicles for Marxists to move beyond "reform" to "revolution." In the
opposing view, democracy functions necessarily or primarily as a means of stabilizing capitalist hege-
mony. I am indebted to what I have found to be the most thorough, succinct, and well-documented
discussion of how Marx, Engels, and Lenin conceived the relationships among democracy, capitalism,
and Marxism—namely Moore (1957), a work too little known, appreciated, and used.
2. For the relevant passages in these writings, see Marx (1971, 110-9, 271-2). See also the discus-
sions in Moore (1957, 84-113), Avineri (1971, 34-8), and Riazanov (1973, 88 ff.).
3. I use the word "particular" here to acknowledge that Marxism includes many different positions. I
support one such position without claiming that other positions are not "genuine" Marxism. Marxism,
like beauty and truth, depends heavily on the eyes and conceptual frameworks of its beholders.
4. I am not here concerned with Marx's early discussions (as in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right [1972]) where he referred to a "real democracy" that would entail a classless society and, with it,
the supersession of civil society. What matters to my argument is rather Marx's and Marxists' relation-
ship to the dominant notions of democracy as a distribution of equal power among members of a soci-
ety to participate in collective decisions over the conditions that affect their lives. In these notions, the
key three dimensions are who counts as such a member, how procedurally that equal power is to be
exercised, and over precisely what objects (conditions) it will be exercised.
 114 Wolff

representative, or must they be direct and immediate? The "how" democrats debate
such alternatives and sometimes denounce each other as not genuine democrats be-
cause of their positions on them. Other democrats debate the "who" of democracy:
must it include all, or can only some members of the community participate in a
democracy? If the latter, debate focuses on what will determine members' eligibility
to participate in democratic collective decisionmaking; such as age, gender, race,
property, education, and so on.5 While Marxists have engaged in these debates, their
special contribution to democracy as a concept and social movement does not lie in
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propositions regarding the "how" and "who" of democracy.

In my interpretation/understanding of Marxism, its distinctive focus falls primarily
on what is to be decided democratically. However, before describing this Marxism's
view on the "what," I need to acknowledge that Marxian approaches to democracy are
not the only ones concerned with the "what." Implicitly or explicitly, all approaches
take a position on what is to be decided democratically within any community (for
explicit examples, see Dahl 1985; Ellerman 1990). The reason for that lies in an ines-
capable practical problem: the potential objects of collective decisionmaking in any
community comprise an infinite list (spatial location, population growth, kinship sys-
tems, religious practices, what to produce, how to distribute products, how to organize
political life, class structures, artistic expressions, and much else.) Within any society
that includes collective decisionmaking, whether democratic or not (by any definition),
practical limitations of time, energy, and place require some selection from the infinity
of potential objects of such decisionmaking. Only a relative few can become its actual
objects during any particular historical epoch.6 Marxism's distinctive contribution to
debates over democracy is its explicit, critical argument about what should be included
among such actual objects of democratic decisionmaking and why.

Democracy and Class

At all times, while some potential objects become actual objects of decisionmaking
in any society, others remain merely potential. For example, feminists who are also
democrats might stress that their contribution (and commitment) to democracy pri-
oritizes making gender relations an object of democratic decisionmaking within their
communities.7 Antiracists who also are democrats might likewise focus on establish-
ing race relations as actual objects of democratic decisionmaking. Such feminists and
antiracists would link their commitments to democracy (whatever their particular

5. Norberto Bobbio succinctly defines democracy in terms of who and how, described as a "set of rules
(primary or basic) which establish who is authorized to take collective decisions and which procedures
are to be used" (1988, 24; emphasis in original).
6. The other side of this selection process refers to those objects not selected and thereby left to be
decided by noncollective (e.g., individual, family, tribe) and/or nondemocratic (e.g., dictatorial, oli-
garchic) decisionmaking.
7. Feminist (or antiracist) democrats might, for example, demand that the gender (or racial) division
of labor and gender (or racial) distribution of income in a society be made objects of democratic
decisionmaking.
 Remarx 115

views on the how and who) inextricably to the what of democratic decisionmaking.
They might well refuse to continue to allow gender and race relations to remain merely
potential but not actualized objects of such decisionmaking.
The particular Marxist position that I am arguing for takes a parallel position to-
ward democracy, but its focus is on class. The point is to make class and class change
actual objects of democratic decisionmaking. What Marxism contributes to the debates
over democracy is, first and foremost, the demand and arguments for placing class struc-
tures as such on the list of objects to be decided by democratic decisionmaking. Such
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Marxist democrats might thus refuse to embrace those democratic movements that keep
class structures off that list. Such a refusal would recognize and concretely specify in
class terms what it means to differentiate a bourgeois from a Marxian democracy.
To say that Marxism's contribution to democracy is to place class on its agenda
requires that the meaning of class be specified. This is necessary because Marxism
has a long, contentious history of coexisting multiple, different, and often incompat-
ible concepts of class in its theory and its practice. Having documented these in de-
tail elsewhere (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987), I will be brief here. The Marxian
concept of class I mean here is one not defined by reference to property ownership,
the distribution of power in society, or the consciousness of particular groups of
people. Rather, it is defined in terms of surplus labor—more specifically, in terms of
the processes of producing and distributing surplus labor or its products.
This interpretation of Marx's innovative concept of class thus differs from other
interpretations that see classes in terms of property owned (rich confront poor). Like-
wise, a surplus-labor approach differs from those that see classes in terms of who
has authority (powerful confront powerless) or which social groups become conscious
of themselves as classes confronting others.8 Which of these different class concept(s)
an analyst uses to think about society will shape the conclusions he or she reaches.
People with wealth may not have power or self-consciousness as a class, people
wielding power may not have wealth, people with self-consciousness as a class may
lack wealth or power, and so on.9 The different conceptualizations of class corre-
spond and contribute to different (interpretations of) Marxisms, hence to different
notions of Marxism's relation to democracy. In my interpretation, while Marx clearly
sympathized with and used property, power, and consciousness concepts of class,
he also offered a new and different concept of class focused on surplus labor. By
means of that surplus-labor concept of class, he generated a correspondingly unique

8. As I have discussed elsewhere (Resnick and Wolff 1986, 1987), individual theorists sometimes
subscribe to several of these different formulations and may also combine them into composite defini-
tions of class.
9. To say, as Marxists and others often do, that class "is a group of people who all relate to the labor
process in a similar way" (Roemer 1988, 5) resolves nothing. People "relate" to the labor process in
one way as owners, in another as wielders of various powers, in yet another in terms of their conscious-
ness, in still another in terms of surplus labor, and so on. Phrases such as Roemer's evade specifying
class—taking a position in the debate over what class, class analysis, and class politics mean—by col-
lapsing the differences into one composite definition as if all the terms cohered in a noncontradictory
amalgam.
 116 Wolff

social analysis and project for class transformation. My argument about democracy
and Marxism builds from this surplus-labor concept of class.

Class and Surplus Labor

Marx's distinctive contribution focused attention on a set of three social processes
others had overlooked—namely, the production, appropriation, and distribution of
surplus labor.10 He argued that all societies display subgroups of their populations
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engaged in transforming nature by their labor. Part of the produce of this labor is
consumed by those laborers: that is, their "necessary product" as yielded by their
"necessary" labor. However, these laborers do more than necessary labor and there-
fore generate more than the necessary product. In its English translation, this Marx-
ist "more" has come to be known as "surplus."11 Societies display different modes
of appropriating that surplus (that is to say, different mechanisms for designating who
receives such surpluses). Finally, the appropriators of surplus distribute portions of
it to others. The combination of the three class processes—production, appropria-
tion, and distribution of the surplus—comprises what Marx called a class structure.
Across the three volumes of Capital, Marx showed how European history de-
pended in significant ways on its interacting class structures (capitalist, feudal, and
other kinds). Since capitalism was, in his view, the prevalent (though hardly the only)
kind of class structure in modern Europe, he aimed to show his contemporaries that
the social injustices of their time were products in part of the particularly capitalist
class structure (the capitalist organization of surplus labor). He sought to remedy the
failure of other analysts, and especially of the social critics and radicals he saw as his
allies, to understand the capitalist class structure and to include its transformation
explicitly on their agendas for social change.
From the perspective of this interpretation of Marx, it follows that what Marxists
want within a democratic movement now continues to be the explicit inclusion of
the class structures—in the surplus-labor sense—among the declared objects of demo-
cratic decisionmaking. Thus, if a democratic movement's goals are limited to the
distribution (ownership) of social wealth and/or the distribution of political power
and/or the organization of popular consciousness, that does not accommodate the
Marxist goal specified above.12 For example, democratic movements that struggle

10. Marx did, however, acknowledge his intellectual debts to forerunners who had glimpsed but not
developed adequately other notions of surplus. His differences with them are developed in detail in
Marx's multivolumed Theories of Surplus Value.
11. Marx used the German mehr, which means 'more', but the more troublesome term (in the sense of
multiple, ambiguous meanings)—'surplus'—became the accepted translation and is used here.
12. Of course, Marxists can support those objects, but they are secondary for them while being pri-
mary for the others. In turn, what is primary for Marxists is secondary for the others. A democratic
movement that explicitly allies different elements with different primary and secondary objectives would
accommodate Marxists in the sense intended by this text. A democratic movement that refused such
accommodation to Marxists might still obtain conditional Marxist support, but that is a different, tac-
tical matter outside the boundaries of this paper's goals.
 Remarx 117

to make state versus private ownership of productive assets an object of democratic

decisionmaking but do not do likewise for class—for the ways in which surplus labor
is to be organized—thereby reject the Marxist class agenda. The same applies to move-
ments committed to democratizing the social distribution of political power (e.g.,
suffrage) or the cultural formations of consciousness (e.g., education) while ignor-
ing class qua surplus labor. Only insofar as democratic movements commit to in-
cluding the class structures of a society (the particular ways in which surplus labor is
organized and its fruits distributed) among the actual objects of democratic decision-
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making do they include what is here termed the distinctive Marxist contribution to
the democratic project.

Contradictions
Like feminists and antiracists, Marxists face the following possible contradic-
tion. A particular democratic movement may focus on the hows and whos of de-
mocracy while excluding from the whats, the actual objects of democratic decision-
making, those objects prioritized by feminists, antiracists, and Marxists. What then
is to be done? If the society in which this democratic movement arises is sexist and
racist, it will be understood that feminists and antiracists will voice strong criti-
cisms of the democracy proposed by such a movement. They may plausibly claim
that such a democratic movement secures and even strengthens sexism and racism
by deflecting its activists' thought and action away from those injustices. They may
declare such a movement to be among their enemies politically. This would hardly
amount to a blanket, totalizing opposition to democracy as an ideal or to its con-
cretization in particular systems (such as how democracy is organized [direct or
indirect] or who shares in democratic activity [all or some people]). Rather, it would
constitute an opposition over the what of democracy, an opposition concerned with
what are included among or excluded from the potential objects of democratic
decisionmaking.13
The particular Marxist position advanced here reasons in a parallel way. When
Marx denounced petty-bourgeois democratic movements, I think he meant to criti-
cize not their notions of direct or inclusive democratic decisionmaking, but rather
their complicity in keeping the object of class in its surplus-labor sense off the popu-
lar agenda for social change (see Marx 1933, 45-7). They were advancing a
democracy disinterested in the Marxian project of transforming class in its surplus-
labor sense. Such movements' focus on suffrage, empowerment, wealth redistri-
bution, direct elections, recalls and referenda, and so forth struck him as crucially
inadequate precisely because they colluded in the repression of alternative or-
ganizations of surplus labor, especially communist, thereby blocking them from

13. Diskin and Sandler (1993, 43) offer such an opposition to the radical democracy of Laclau and
Mouffe (1985). See also the related but different critiques of the latter authors by Wood (1986) and
Resch (1992).
 118 Wolff

becoming an explicit issue for debate, democratic decisionmaking, and social

change.14
Marxists who focus on class in its surplus-labor sense (in part to undo just that
repression) confront movements for democracy that are complicitous with that repres-
sion—intentionally or not, knowingly or not. Such movements have occasioned
Marxist critiques, as noted, in the past; they also confront Marxists nearly everywhere
today, as in the Economy and Democracy movement based in Russia and the Com-
monwealth of Independent States but reaching beyond as well (Buzgalin 1992). Marx-
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ists have criticized such democratic movements and their definitions and visions of
democracy even to the point of declaring them to be political enemies. Marx did that
in his time. I think it is appropriate again, adjusted for changed circumstances, now.
To take one example of such criticism, we may consider the history of the Soviet
Union. In the early years after 1917, masses of people participated for the first time
in democratic decisionmaking. The Bolsheviks altered the how and who of democ-
racy in radical ways that were stunningly exemplary for their time (and ours). They
also altered the what of their democratized decisionmaking: property distribution,
power distribution, cultural expression, and much else became actual objects of demo-
cratic decisionmaking for a while. The tragic history of how that democracy was later
narrowed and then abolished (a history associated with Stalin's name) is too well
known to need repetition here. However, a Marxist approach to the history of the
Soviet Union that proceeds with a concept of class in surplus-labor terms yields a
critique of both its more and less democratic phases. This critique pinpoints both
phases' disregard for the organization of surplus labor inside industry, their com-
mon nontransformation of industrial class structure.
Neither in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution nor later did Soviet
leaderships make the specific transformation of the organization of surplus labor in-
side state industrial enterprises an explicit object of decisionmaking, democratic or
otherwise (Resnick and Wolff 1994). Marx had defined exploitation as the organiza-
tion of surplus labor such that its producers were not also its collective appropriators.
The Bolsheviks made the eradication of exploitation a central commitment. One might
thus have expected officially promoted debate and democratic decisionmaking regard-
ing the various aspects of a communist reorganization of surplus labor inside indus-
trial enterprises, a restructuring such that those enterprises' industrial laborers who
produced the surplus would themselves collectively appropriate and distribute it.15
14. By communist class structure, we mean one in which the laborers who collectively produce a sur-
plus are themselves its collective appropriators. Thus, they receive and collectively distribute their own
surpluses (Resnick and Wolff 1988).
15. The coordination of production among interdependent enterprises is a different matter from how
surplus labor is produced and appropriated within them. Like capitalist enterprises, communist enter-
prises (or indeed, enterprises with any other class structures) would need to be coordinated by markets,
planning, or other mechanisms. Capitalist class structures display their particular problems, conflicts,
and changes within such coordination (concentration, centralization, monopoly, oligopoly, cartels, state
intervention, etc.). Communist class structures would entail different problems, conflicts, and changes.
There is no reason to presume (or history to support) that the problems of coordination among commu-
nist enterprises are more intractable than those of enterprises with other class structures.
 Remarx 119

But neither such a debate nor such a class transformation inside state industrial
enterprises occurred. The interpretations of Marx dominant among Soviet leader-
ships understood the transition from capitalism to communism differently, chiefly
in terms of property (from private to state) and power (from market to state plan-
ning). The organization of surplus labor inside industrial enterprises was rarely even
a secondary matter; it usually disappeared altogether from discussion and policy.
Both during the relatively democratic period before Stalin and thereafter, the issue
of class in the sense of surplus-labor organization was not among the objects of
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debate and policy; it was absent from the agenda for industrial change in the
Soviet Union.16 Ruccio (1984, 1986) has demonstrated the parallel point that in its
technical focus (upon physical output maximization from the available physical
inputs), central planning in the Soviet Union also ignored the issue of class as sur-
plus labor.
In the prevalent Soviet interpretation of Marx, the transition from capitalism to
socialism and communism entailed changing from private to state ownership of in-
dustrial property, subordinating markets to the power of state economic planning,
subordinating state power to a workers' political party, universalizing access to
medical care, education, and housing, developing workers' culture and conscious-
ness, and so forth. These, rather than industrial surplus-labor reorganization, were
understood to be "class changes."17 Lenin (1961,696), perhaps sensitive to the con-
tinuing exploitation inside industrial enterprises, had the courage to call the early
Soviet Union an example of "state capitalism" (Moore 1957, 30 ff.). His successors
repressed the issue of class in terms of surplus labor by simply declaring that capital-
ism (and, by implication, exploitative class relations) had been vanquished and re-
placed by socialism. On the basis of that declaration, successive Soviet leaderships
found any further discussion or action on the class organization of surplus labor in-
side the Soviet Union to be unnecessary, irrelevant, or evidence of hostility toward
the Soviet Union. Communism came increasingly to be characterized as the Soviet
goal and defined in vague, futuristic terms of production according to ability and
distribution according to need. This formulation, too, served further to obscure the
issue of the social organization of surplus labor.18

16. In a forthcoming book on the Soviet Union's class history, Resnick and Wolff show that Soviet
agriculture after 1929 included collective farms with communist class structures. Thus, in another
irony of Soviet history, communist class processes appeared first in agriculture. Moreover, the So-
viet state's relentless claims on the surplus produced on the collective farms undermined their vi-
ability and thereby focused collective farmers instead on their individual plots (see Resnick and Wolff
1994).
17. However one may applaud these other changes, as I do in large part, that does not require or entail
a blindness to the changes in the exploitative organization of industrial surplus labor that were not
undertaken or achieved. Indeed, the forthcoming volume (referred to in note 16) argues that the sur-
vival of industrial exploitation eventually undermined many of those other changes.
18. "Ability" and "need" are abstractions with no necessary relation to surplus labor. Of course, they
might be defined in terms of surplus labor, but that is just what was not done in Soviet discussions.
Hence their references to ability and need obscured class in the surplus-labor sense.
 120 Wolff

Marxism, Class, and Democracy

If class were to become an actual object of democratic decisionmaking, that would

mean discussing, debating, and choosing from among alternative social organiza-
tions of surplus labor (Cullenberg 1992). The strengths and weaknesses of past and
present experiences with them would become matters of historical and theoretical
research, public education, popular debate, and practical experimentation. The com-
plex social effects of exploitative versus nonexploitative class structures would be
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exhaustively explored.
To the extent that class became an object of democratic decisionmaking, directly
related questions would likewise become such objects. Class democracy involves
more than choosing among alternative organizations of surplus labor for any society
(communist, capitalist, feudal, and so on). Related questions to be decided by demo-
cratic decisionmaking would include, among others, the following.

Will different class structures coexist? if so, which class structures will coexist in
which industries, regions, and so on and in what proportions?
Which individuals or groups will occupy the positions, respectively, of producers,
appropriators, and receivers of distributions of the surplus in (co)existing class
structures? Will they occupy different positions across their lifetimes?
In communist class structures, how would the people who are not producers of sur-
plus (and therefore not its appropriators or distributors, either) nonetheless par-
ticipate in deciding democratically how much surplus will be produced and who
shall get what distributed portions of such surplus?
What mechanisms would be needed to subject the question of changing a society's
class structures to democratic decisionmaking?
At the moment when class is finally placed on the agenda for decisionmaking, how
will account be taken of each society's prior history of celebrating some class struc-
tures and demonizing others?

The contribution to democracy and to movements for democracy that Marxism

can offer is lost when Marxists simply add their voices to support democracy in some
general, abstract way.19 Likewise, the relation between Marxism and democracy is
addressed inadequately by arguing the latter's "indeterminacy" in the sense that de-
mocracy enhances both capitalism's stability and the struggle for socialism (see Jessop
1980). That kind of argument, like abstract support, renders democracy an instru-
ment we all define in the same way rather than, as stressed here, contesting the very
content of democracy as central to what is at stake. On the one hand, it is true that
democracy is about politics, or the social distribution of power, while Marxism in

19. In Marx's words, "the democrat . . . imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally"
(1971, 271-2). In like vein, Engels wrote about those invoking the "concept" of democracy: "That
concept changes every time the Demos changes and so does not get us one step further" (Marx and
Engels n.d., 445).
 Remarx 121

the interpretation used here is about class, or the economic organization of surplus
labor. On the other hand, these two different sets of social processes help to consti-
tute one another. Thus, the content of democracy includes a class component.20 For
Marxists committed to democracy as well as to a collective, nonexploitative class
structure, their democracy includes that class component. By contrast, when class is
barred from the explicit decisionmaking agenda of a democratic system or move-
ment, that exclusion can only work to sustain the existing class structures. Marxists
have the right and the obligation to criticize such kinds of democracy and the move-
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ments that advocate them.

The author wishes to acknowledge useful comments on an earlier draft by Carole

Biewener and Antonio Callari.

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