Disintegrating Democracy: From the Promise of the Soviet since 1905 to the Contemporary Crisis of Corrupt Democratic Forms

Abstract

The appearance of soviets in 1905 brought the promise of democratic control from below, but the promise was short-lived and fell victim to the conditions of Civil War and later Stalinist degeneration, when democracy was crushed in every important way. A century has passed and formal democracy is disintegrating. In the USA, democratic forms and institutions are empty shells robbed of democratic content, corrupted by the direct or indirect influence of money. In the 20th century important elements of a more advanced political democracy—universal franchise, representative democracy, free speech and other basic rights—were conceded in response to the existence of the Soviet Union and to contain radicalism at home. The advances in political democracy were won through the efforts of socialists in the labor movement. After 1918 and 1945 the radicalized working class demanded and gained social protections and democratic advances. The concessions provided a springboard for more demands. The democratic reforms of the second half of the 20th century strengthened democracy, but cut into the profitability of capitalism. With the disintegration of the USSR and Eastern Europe, the social democratic concessions were less necessary, and increasingly difficult to deliver in the age of finance capital. Thus the collapse of the Soviet Union hastened the decline of Social Democracy. At the same time, bourgeois democracy is being hollowed out, nowhere more pronounced than in the USA itself. It is caricatured in the so-called new democracies of the former Soviet bloc and now in occupied Iraq.