Karl Marx on Democracy, Participation, Voting, and Equality

Abstract

HHE CONCEPT OF democracy raises perennial divisions among its advocates and critics that may be characterized in the following way. Defendants see it as a complex of principles and procedures designed to realize certain values-those of liberty, equality, fraternity, justicesuch that it constitutes a uniquely favored species of political praxis. Critics of democracy, in sharp contrast, tend to see it as nothing more than a set of techniques designed to ensure the rule of the most powerful under the guise of popular consent. Among its critics, there is a further distinction to be made between those who see democracy as a necessarily corrupt form of rule, a political apparatus designed to ensure the rule of special interests (a number of Marxists, Leninists, anarchists, etc.), and those who see the reduction of democracy to such terms as a lamentable departure made necessary by mass politics, the military-industrial complex, etc. (Schumpeter, Bachrach, Pateman, C. B. Macpherson, more or less fitting into this category). Far from believing that democracy is corrupt sui generis, these latter critics condemn representative democracy as a departure from the direct democracy of antiquity and reserve hope for a return to apurer, more participatory form. An examination of Marx's own views on democracy shows that he by no means fits easily into the positions of either the qualified or wholesale critics of democracy and that he shares more in common with classical political philosophers, notably Plato, Aristotle and Hegel, on the subject of politics and democracy than is commonly assumed.' Marx's views on democracy call into serious question the (revisionist) Marxist assumptions that democracy represents the political epiphenomenon of a specific economic system and, consequently, constitutes no more than a set of practices or procedures to translate economics into juridicalpolitical terms. In addition, Marx, following Hegel, convicts advocates of participatory democracy (democracy's reformist critics) of radical