The Liberal Order and the Power of the Rich

Under the ancien régime, the bourgeoisie was interested in the sanctification of private property and the freedom of trade and industry. In the seventeenth century, John Locke, the English philosopher and forerunner of liberal thought, derived his understanding of personal rights from those of private property — over one’s body, possessions, wife, slaves, and colonized land (he was a shareholder in the Royal African Company).

From 1789 to 1792, the French Revolution introduced a voting system limited to a minority of taxpayers and granted the king the power to veto laws passed by parliament for a period of almost six years. During the period of constitutional monarchy, the Legislative Assembly removed obstacles to the expansion of production and trade: commonly owned land was put up for sale; trade monopolies, price controls, and tolls were abolished through the Allarde Decree of March 1791; and trade guilds were abolished by the Le Chapelier Law of June 1791, which also banned the first workers’ organizations.

This set a precedent for what was to follow. If the bourgeoisie was generally in favor of a more representative form of government, it also wanted to restrict the right of representation to a privileged elite. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the founding documents of both constitutional monarchies and republics severely restricted democratic freedoms. Tax-based voting systems were the rule.

In 1795, the French Thermidorean deputy Boissy d’Anglas justified this state of affairs in the following terms:

The property of the rich must be guaranteed. . . . We must be governed by the best: the best are those who are most educated and most interested in upholding the laws; but, with very few exceptions, you will find such men only among those who, as owners of property, are attached to the land that contains it, to the laws that protect it, to the tranquility that preserves it.

In France, “universal” (male) suffrage did not take root until the Third Republic, after the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. In Germany, it also dates back to 1871 for elections to the national parliament. However, voting rights were still based on the payment of taxes in the states, above all Germany’s biggest and most powerful state, Prussia. Those rights were further restricted by Otto von Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws at the federal level from 1878 to 1890.

Full male suffrage was introduced in Britain in 1918 and in Italy in 1919. Women received the right to vote in Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia before 1914, but only after World War I in Germany and Britain (although in the latter, only women above the age of thirty who owned a certain amount of property could vote until 1928). In France and Italy, women had to wait until 1945 for access to the franchise.

Everywhere, the right to vote was a conquest of popular mobilization rather than a gift from the bourgeoisie. The progressive Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen put it well in February 1871: “He who possesses freedom otherwise than as an object to be sought, possesses it dead and spiritless, for the notion of freedom has this peculiarity that it always expands as it is acquired.”

Having said that, the extension of voting rights did have some beneficial consequences for the bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage obviously gives greater credibility to the system of bourgeois democracy, which can claim to express the will of the majority, all the more so since workers’ parties in numerous countries have been participating in the state’s executive bodies since the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

But this was not the only advantage of this system of rule for the capitalist elite. The parliament elected by universal suffrage allowed the bourgeoisie to seek compromises between its various factions. The multiparty system also made it possible, if necessary, to present governmental alternatives without threatening its domination of the social order.

Universal Suffrage and Economic Feudalism

The advance of universal suffrage coincided with the rise of monopoly capitalism, at a time when the wealth of a small minority was increasingly at odds with the common interest. From then on, the new economic feudalism of banking and big industry trampled on democratic principles. The axis of political power shifted from parliament to the executive and the upper echelons of the state apparatus, which guaranteed privileged access to the dominant fractions of capital. Jurists speak in this context of a “rationalized parliament” that guarantees the autonomy and stability of the executive.

Bourgeois democracy has never ceased to be a system based on the rule of an oligarchy — the power of a small, privileged class — even if it requires the periodic consent of the people. It pays lip service to democratic rights. In his book Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière rightly calls it a “mixed form, born of oligarchy, redirected by democratic struggles, and perpetually reconquered by oligarchy.”

What are its limitations? Most of these features can be found in systems of this kind:

1. It presupposes the division of the electorate into an active minority and a passive majority, with politics as the domain of the former, to the exclusion of the latter. The political alienation of the majority thus goes hand in hand with their economic alienation.
2. It underrepresents the working class through voting systems, electoral divisions, and the exclusion of immigrants.
3. It gives blocking power to an unrepresentative upper house (the French Senate, elected by 160,000 people; the British House of Lords, made up of life members, hereditary peers, and ecclesiastical lords by right of the Church of England).
4. It makes the head of state, especially when elected by universal suffrage, a kind of monarch not subject to parliamentary control.
5. It is short-circuited by the government and the upper echelons of the state apparatus, who propose virtually all legislation and have the constitutional means to override the votes of parliament, which is reduced to the status of a “registration chamber.”
6. It is subordinate to international bodies that are partially or totally beyond the control of the people (European Union, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, etc.).
7. It is formal rather than substantive because it is subject to the sanction of capital (today we say “the markets”), which controls the levers of power over public debt, investment, and employment, not to mention the media.
8. It is threatened by freedom-destroying laws (whether regular or exceptional) and repressive bodies (police, army, secret services).

Authoritarian Statism and Fascism

In his 1978 book State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas described the emergence of “authoritarian statism,” a form of rule that he distinguished from police, military, or fascist dictatorships, and that tended to reduce democratic rights. He criticized the near-absolute monopoly of the executive over legislation and its concrete implementation through “decrees, judicial interpretations and adjustments of the civil service” that empower the administration, as memorandums take precedence over legal provisions. Under such conditions, state policy is formulated in restricted circles, under the seal of secrecy, in a way that permits the interference of private international networks such as the Trilateral Commission.

In this model, the president is the “focal point of various administrative power centers and networks,” which become the “effective political party of the whole bourgeoisie, acting under the hegemony of monopoly capital.” The alternation of parties in power is reduced to a sleight-of-hand exercise, opening the door to a veritable “dominant state-party.”

This authoritarian statism, Poulantzas explained, is “neither the new form of a genuine exceptional state nor, in itself, a transitional form on the road to such a state: it rather represents the new ‘democratic’ form of the bourgeois republic in the current phase of capitalism.”

This form of rule differs from fascism: the latter results from a “crisis of the state,” Poulantzas observed, and “is never established in cold blood.” Its existence “presupposes an historical defeat of the working class and the popular movement.”

However, he insists that authoritarian statism contains “scattered elements of totalitarianism” and “crystallizes their organic disposition in a permanent structure running parallel to the official state.” Thus, it cannot be ruled out that, after a profound defeat of the social movement, “any fascist-type process” could develop, not from the outside (like historical fascism), but from “a break within the State, following lines that have already been traced in its present configuration.”

The Modern Origins of Direct Democracy

If we look back to the founding revolutions of the modern age, we can find far more radical understandings of democracy than would later be entertained by the bourgeoisie and its political representatives. In the seventeenth century, during the First English Revolution of 1642 to 1651, the Levellers, ancestors of the Parisian sansculottes, demanded full male suffrage for the election of the House of Commons, the abolition of the House of Lords. They also wanted an end to tithes, indirect taxes, and imprisonment for debt.

In France, on August 10, 1792, the seizure of the Tuileries Palace by the plebeian masses of the capital led to the abolition of the monarchy, the election of the Convention by all adult men and the vote on the Constitution of June 24, 1793. This document was the most advanced in the history of representative democracy, although it was never implemented because of the war with France’s neighbors, followed by the Thermidorean reaction.

In economic terms, these more radical tendencies still upheld the right to private property, which they conceived as the property of small craftsmen, owners of their tools. They associated the indecent wealth of businessmen with abuses, such as hoarding and monopolies, that the law should prohibit. On the other hand, after the expropriation of Church property, which accounted for roughly 10 percent of France’s arable land, at the end of 1789, as well as that of the aristocrats who had fled abroad, the landless peasants obviously did not share the same religion of private property.

The Constitution of 1793 also provides for complete freedom of opinion, assembly, press, and religion, as well as “the protection of public liberties against those who govern us.” It upholds the right to work and welfare as “a sacred debt owed by the nation to its members.” When the government violates the people’s rights, it celebrates insurrection as “the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Revolution and Democracy From Below

It has been less widely noticed that the 1793 Constitution based popular sovereignty not only on full male suffrage (from the age of twenty-one, including foreigners who have been resident for at least one year), but also on the periodic gathering of the entire electorate in Primary Assemblies of 200 to 600 citizens (which can be convened by one-fifth of their members). Municipal, district, and departmental administrations were to be elected at each level by the population concerned. The Jacobin leader Louis Antoine de Saint-Just described this as the “communal basis” of popular sovereignty.

This text was intended to codify the forms of direct democracy (popular associations, revolutionary committees) that had spontaneously sprung up in thousands of communes. It provided for the election of deputies to the National Legislative Body for a one-year term by the popular assemblies. Bills were to be submitted to them, with the possibility of contesting those bills, and the revision of the constitution was to proceed in the same way.

According to other parts of the document, a twenty-four-member Executive Council was to be appointed by the Legislature and half of its membership will be renewed each year. The hierarchy of military ranks was to be respected only during periods of service in the armed forces.

However, this constitution lacked two fundamental democratic aspects. The first concerned those who had been enslaved in the French colonies. The Convention finally voted for the abolition of slavery on February 4, 1794, because of the slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture and the threat of British and Spanish occupation of French Saint-Domingue.

The second related to women’s rights. The drafters of the constitution never even contemplated recognizing the political rights of women, even going so far as to vote for the prohibition of women’s popular associations and societies on October 30, 1793.

This sexist measure was followed by the confinement of women to their homes on May 23, 1795, three days after the Paris Bread Riots, which also demanded the application of the Constitution of 1793. These two denials of democratic rights would weigh heavily on the future of emancipation movements in France and beyond.

After the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, Karl Marx saw the French Revolution as a “gigantic broom” sweeping away the last “relics of bygone times” before Napoleon took up the work of building a tentacular state begun by the monarchy. In 1885, Friedrich Engels looked back self-critically on his own and Marx’s call from 1850 for the “strictest centralization” of power after a revolution in his native Germany, attributing it to a misunderstanding about the history of the French Revolution:

It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the whole revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire the whole administration of the departments, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution.

Self-Emancipation and the Exercise of Liberties

The long history of democratic struggles, revived by the European revolutions of 1848, led Rosa Luxemburg to take a critical view of the actions taken by the Bolsheviks in power after Russia’s October Revolution. For Luxemburg, the Bolshevik leaders unjustly showed “a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, for freedom of the press and of assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of basic democratic liberties of the people.”

She objected to the fact that the Soviet constitution of July 1918 limited voting rights “only to those who live by their own labor.” This restriction, she argued, would apply “not only to the capitalist and land-owing classes, but to the broad layer of the middle class also, and even to the working class itself,” since the economic crisis of post-revolutionary Russia meant that “growing sections of the proletariat” were being reduced to informal activities by the destruction of the productive apparatus.

In the early 1930s, faced with the danger of fascism, Leon Trotsky insisted on the importance of defending the “strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy” that could be found “within the bourgeois state,” first and foremost the organizations of the working class (trade unions, political parties, educational and sports clubs, cooperatives, etc.), but also its political and material achievements (social legislation, civil and political rights).

Today at a time when the vast majority of people have lost sight of the horizon of socialism, democratic aspirations play a central role in the struggle to wrest control of our lives from capitalist profits and of public life from the oligarchic governments at their command. This explains the call for “real democracy, now!” issued by the street occupations of 2011, not only in the Arab region, but also in Spain and the United States, as well as France’s Nuit Debout and Yellow Vests movements.

In fact, any serious policy of opposition today is necessarily guided by the central question of changing the political regime. As Trotsky argued in 1934, discussing a situation with certain similarities to our own, characterized by economic crisis and the rise of the far right: “It is not enough to defend democracy; democracy must be regained.”