Page 233 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Unit 12: Karl Marx: Class Struggle and Social Change and Theory of Surplus Value

due concern for minority rights; and (c) freedom to form political parties, and recognition of free Notes
competition. The emphasis on harmony in Socialist society was inconsistent with the first
proposition of the democratic theory. Marxism did not offer any clue to the distribution of political
power in a Socialist society, and was equally ambiguous on the concept of majority rule. The
introduction of universal adult franchise in Germany in 1866, the electoral reforms in England in
1867 and 1884, and the mushrooming of socialist parties, weakened the essential proposition of
the state as an instrument of oppression, controlled by the bourgeois minority exploiting and
oppressing the proletarian majority. The reforms gave the workers an opportunity to control the
state by winning the majority of votes, and thereby seats in the parliament. “Marx’s politics is
based on particular qualities of the bourgeois state in the nineteenth century”.
Marxism in theory and practice could never provide a primer for constitution-based representative
democracy. The important fact to note was that “neither Marx nor Lenin spoke of a law governed
state ... because they considered that the state would inevitably wither away”.
Marx never addressed himself to the issue of rights, political freedom, power and the role of
authority in a socialist society. For all his libertarian vision, Marx himself was consumed by the
idea of having absolute, total, concentrated state power, unrestrained and unlimited. He was
contemptuous, of, in fact had very little faith in, a constitution or law, dismissing them as shams,
formalities and covers to conceal bourgeois oppression and domination. The attack on formal
democracy by promising substantive democracy resulted in reducing formal democracy to the
point of non-existence. Marx overlooked the protection that constitutional representative democracy
and rule of law gave against arbitrary rule, and the freedom it ensured against physical harm. He
failed to understand the dynamics of democracy in empowering people being more revolutionary
than a bloody, violent revolution itself. “He profoundly underestimated the capacity of democratic
societies to correct or mitigate the injustices that seemed to him built into capitalism. The concept
of the ‘class struggle’ which is central in the thinking of all Marxists seems largely irrelevant in
America and Western Europe”.
Berlin’s last observation about the obsolence of class struggle in advanced industrialized countries
can be extended to the developing world now. There is no more talk of revolutionary transformation
of society, or that the “East is Red”. Moreover, the possibility of using democracy as a means of
realizing socialism never moved to the centre stage of his analysis of future society. “The overall
sweep of the Marxist historical scheme relegates democracy to a subsidiary role in the drama of
human development”.
This was where the Social Democrats scored over Marx, for they, and in particular Bernstein,
insisted on the need to combine democracy (representative parliamentary institutions with universal
suffrage) with socialism, bringing about a breach that could never be closed between German
Marxism and Russian Communism.
The idea of Communist society being classless and equal remained a myth. Djilas, in the New Class
(1959), pointed to the presence of the nomenklatura in the former communist societies, namely
those who enjoyed privileges and special status because of their position within the hierarchy of
the Communist Party, thus confirming the fears of Bakunin that the dictatorship of the proletariat
would create fresh inequities and new forms of oppression and domination. Perhaps no one has
captured the myth of a classless society better than Orwell in his Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-
Four. As Orwell observed succinctly “... so-called collectivist systems now existing only try to
wipe out the individual because they are not really collectivist and certainly not egalitarian—
because, in fact they are a sham covering a new form of class privilege”.
An examination of the development of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat revealed a
tension between the concept’s organizational necessity, though maybe of a transitory kind, with
the larger Marxist hypothesis of enlargement of human freedom. The idea of delineating and
working out a participatory model of democracy was never completed by Marx. This was also
compounded by Marx’s inadequate handling of the crucial role of the theory of the state. In

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