Does democracy really exist in capitalist America?

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WORKERS sin PASa #0*45 12 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1987 Celebrations will be held this year to mark the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of the United States. Much is certain to be written in the press about the "virtues" of American democracy. But does democracy really exist in capitalist America?

Professor Paul Siegel puts forward the socialist view on the question in a four-part series of articles beginning on this page. Future issues of Socialist Action will take up the following topics-"The U.S. Plutocracy," "The Role of the Mass Media," and "The Police State."

Paul Siegel is Professor Emeritus at Long Island University. He has written several books on political and literary themes, including "Revolution and the 20th-Century Novel" (Pathfinder Press, 1979) and "The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World." (Zed Press, 1986)

Socialism, according to newspapers and television in the United States, is a bad thing. It means that you don't have the chance to choose what to buy or how to enjoy yourself or what to think. It is the opposite of "democracy" —which is what we have in the United States.

Socialism, so the argument goes, leads at best to regimentation and at worst to the concentration camps of Stalin. If through -out the world people are fighting to get socialism, that is because they don't know any better. The idea of socialism, it is alleged, cannot become popular in the United States, for it is a foreign idea that goes counter to our history and our way of life.

The truth, however, as this series of articles will try to show, is that the democratic rights we have in this country were won only through struggle; they are not the automatic results of our form of government. These democratic rights are precious and must be protected at all costs, but it is not socialism that threatens them.

It is capitalism that threatens our rights. In its early period, capitalism was progressive. But it has now become reactionary. What we call democracy under capitalism is extremely limited and superficial. The aim of socialism is the extension and deepening of this democracy. This aim is in the tradition of earlier American struggles.

Socialism betrayed by Stalinists What has made it easier to portray socialism as evil are the immense crimes of Stalin and the nature of the society constructed under him; a society that, although less terror-ridden under his successors, has remained essentially totalitarian.

But the rulers of this society have betrayed the socialist ideals of the Russian Revolution. It is often said that the present-day Soviet Union is the inevitable development of that revolution. This is the kind of deterministic reading of history (it happened that way, therefore it had to happen that way) of which Marxists are falsely accused.

If Stalinism is merely the continuation of Leninism, as both Stalinists and the defenders of capitalism claim, then it is very strange that in order to construct his regime, Stalin had to kill virtually the entire leadership that had survived from the time of Lenin and to reshape the Communist Party completely.

As Khrushchev revealed in his secret speech in 1956, 70 percent of the Central Committee of the Communist Party were put to death by Stalin in his great purge of the 1930s. Of these, 80 percent had joined the party before 1921.

Socialist roots in America The point that the idea of socialism goes counter to historic Americanism is itself unhistorical. Ideas cannot be kept out by national boundaries.

The historians Bernard Bailyn and Bernard Fay have shown how the ideas of the American Revolution originated in the English Puritan revolution of the 17th century and in the so-called Glorious Revolution that followed it. The ideas of the American Revolution in turn contributed to the French Revolution.

But, of course, in order for the seed to grow in a new national soil the social conditions have to be suitable. Revolutionists can't "export revolution" if people won't buy the idea.

Although the socialist movement in the United States is at present weak and fragmented, its past shows its potential. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Socialist Party was a significant political force. In 1918, it had 79 mayors in 24 states, 32 member congress.

In 1920, the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, ran for president from jail, to which he was confined for his opposition to World War I. He received a million votes at a time when the electorate was much smaller than it is today.

The socialist movement was undermined after the war by the post-war prosperity of the 1920s and crushed by the Palmer raids and other measures of undemocratic thought-control. But it revived during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Socialists of different parties, following the tradition of industrial unionism of Debs, played an important role in building the CIO, the union organization that enabled American workers to fight back against the employers' onslaught.

In the "Red Decade" the ideas of socialism gained a new popularity. Then, at the end of World War Il-just as after World War I-a post-war boom and repression took place. The Cold War and McCarthyism weakened and broke up the socialist movement.

We can expect, however, the tradition of Debs to be revived once more as American capitalism, despite temporary upturns, continues to be unable to emerge from the long-term economic crisis it entered in the mid-1970s. The idea of socialism will flourish on American soil because, despite all the attempts to stamp it out, it has roots here and the conditions are propitious for its growth.

Tyranny the Why do socialists say that democracy under capitalism is limited and superficial? For one thing, because most people spend a major part of their lives working for a living, and there is precious little demo -cracy in the workplace.

Workers in factories are like soldiers in an army with non-coms and officers over them-and we all know how much democracy there is in most armies. On production lines, efficiency experts dictate just about every movement workers make FALTORIES iELE GAM FT1)

ÉHER LȚ HFLPS every second of their time.

This is the tyranny of the workplace that underlies widespread job dissatisfaction, according to a 1973 report issued by a task force chosen by the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. The task force was commissioned in response to a plethora of articles about "blue-collar blues" and "white-collar woes."

"Young workers," concluded the report, "appear to be as committed to the institution of work as their elders have been, but many are rebelling against the anachronistic authoritarianism of the workplace."

The authoritarianism of the workplace is indeed anachronistic, but it is inseparable from capitalism. Factory owners are concerned about maximizing profits, not about democracy on the shop floor.

The reforms recommended by the task force amounted to making insignificant matters optional—allowing workers to replace light bulbs or to move from one job to another one that was much the same. However, absenteeism, sabotage, and wildcat strikes were lowered not by these measures but by the whip of the mass unemployment that came in the late 1970s and has remained a constant threat.

Workers are like the little tramp in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" who preferred the security of a prison cell to the "freedom" of the bleak world of unemployment. But the prison cell remains a prison cell.

"Management prerogatives"

Through labor unions, to some degree, workers have been able to gain a say about Eugene V. Debs their conditions at work. But what owners of factories call "management prerogatives" fundamentally prevail. What workers have been able to gain through unions has only come about through their fighting for it.

In the early 19th century, the established doctrine held by all respectable people was that labor unions, which "artificially" raised wages, violated the "laws" of economics, which were, as one popular textbook put it, "nothing less than laws of God."

The unions that were formed at the time of the rapid growth of industrialism following the Civil War had to buck this continuing sentiment. During the great railroad strike of 1877, The Independent, a church newspaper, said, "Compromises are not in order when men are fighting for higher wages....Napoleon was right when he said that the way to deal with a mob was to exterminate it."

Today, unions are an established part of the social structure. But they have become conservatized. The heads of unions for the most part no longer think of themselves as participants in a social movement of the dispossessed but as "business unionists" who sell the labor of "their" members just (continued next page)

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cavalrymen attack striking railworkers during SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1987 13 1877.

(continued from previous page) as businessmen sell the commodities produced by "their" workers.

Although they must seek to justify the deals they make, the labor bureaucrats are concerned above all with maintaining their comfortable positions and high salaries. They are not inclined to challenge "management prerogatives."

The idea that places of work can be owned and run democratically and collectively by those working there and that the entire industrial structure can be owned and administered in accordance with a rational plan by the working class at large is regarded as preposterous and, even worse, un-American.

"Of the people, by the people, for the people" does not apply to the workplace. Workers may have worked in a place for 20 or 30 years, but who are they to say that they should not be laid off or fired? That's a "management prerogative."

Small businesses decline

Of course, there are many small owners who work in their own businesses. These like to think of themselves as being their own bosses. In the first place, however, their number has much diminished. The United States today is far different from the 19th-century country of independent craftsmen and self-employed businessmen, a country in which 37 percent of those working for a living were engaged in business.

Small business now lives only on the margins of the economy. Its rate of bankruptcy is very high, and more than 90 percent of new businesses do not last 10 years.

In the second place, the idea that small owners are their own bosses is largely illusory. At the mercy of the vagaries of a market influenced by factors beyond their control, they are like small boats tossed James Madison about in the churning wake of powerful ships.

The situation of the family farmers is typical. There were 32 million of them in 1910 when the population was considerably less than it is now; today there are only about 7 million left. Agriculture is dominated by agribusiness, with 19 percent of the farmers raising more than 75 percent of the products. Foreclosures of mortgages and losses of land are greater than ever.

David Stockman, when he was Reagan's great strike of budget director, dismissed the plight of family farmers, traditionally the symbol of the independent American, as the normal shaking out from the economy of those who are inefficient. After all, he said, the farmers who went into debt were "consenting adults.

But the federal government in 1971-1976 encouraged farmers to go into debt to extend production for a speculative market, and its tax code and system of subsidies has favored large farm operators. The farmers, moreover, could not have reckoned on the high interest rates consequent upon the enormous armaments expenditures and huge national deficits under Reagan.

The small farmers as a class have been tricked, manhandled, and raped by the Shay's Rebellion: Furloughed revolutionary banks that were foreclosing their farms.

government and by agri-business. To call them "consenting adults" is to jeer at their desperate struggle. No more than workers are they able to determine their own destiny.

"Trust-busting" is dead

It is big business that dominates the economy and our lives. This domination has become so great that we have come to take it for granted. The early 20th-century struggle by the middle class for "trust busting" is dead, not because it won but because the victory of the great corporations forecast by socialists as in -herent in capitalism is so complete.

Today the 20 biggest manufacturing corporations hold 25 percent of all assets-the same as the 419,000 smallest companies-and the 200 biggest corporations hold 56 percent of all assets. A few giant corporations employ 75 percent of the workers.

With big business triumphant, we are told that we cannot do without it. It gives us jobs and all the blessings of our lives. Capitalism is the natural order of things while socialism is contrary to human nature. It cannot long endure and any attempt to institute it must bring tyranny.

"God's order"

But these very arguments were made against parliamentarian democracy in the days when it was coming into being. A hereditary nobility that ruled society, the of ite tle, nau domesti Tranquilly ararite po (7neri7 (lef sud, pate.

amour Pointy, de indun andestitted dis tirantation foite.

members of which were the "natural superiors" of other classes, was regarded as part of God's order.

The inherited prerogatives of this nobility-in France, they included the "right of the first night," the right of the feudal lord to enjoy the brides of his peasants—seemed as natural then as the "management prerogative" to throw workers out of work seems today.

Any attempt to do away with these "rights" or with what was called "the royal prerogative" of the absolute monarchy must result, it was alleged, in social chaos. Thus, said the 16th-century English theorist Sir Thomas Elyot, the democracy of the ancient Greek states led either to anarchy or to tyranny.

The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, living at the time of the English Civil War, insisted just as much on the enduring selfishness of human nature as do those who claim today that this makes socialism impossible.

But for Hobbes, this belief was the justification for an unlimited absolutism that was not to be divided between king and parliament. To question this unlimited and indivisible power was the first step in a return to a "state of nature," a time in history when the lack of order made life "nasty, brutish, and short."

"Anarchy and despotism"

The Loyalists at the time of the American Revolution also argued that democracy is inherently unstable, re -pressive, and expansionist, just as today the same is said about socialism. The Loyalist John Chalmers wrote, "If we examine the republics of Greece and Rome, we forever find them in a state of war, domestic and foreign."

In an attack on the Declaration of Independence, the Loyalists charged that the actions of the revolutionists revealed a sinister plot to reduce the colonies to "anarchy and the distractions of a democracy, and finally to force them to submit to absolute despotism." Democracy, despite its deceptive promises, must lead finally to despotism.

So, it was said, the revolutionists talked about liberty, but brought a new tyranny worse than the evils of the old order. "You find these pretended enemies of oppression the most unrelenting oppressors," stated the rector of Trinity Church in New York, "and their little finger heavier than the king's loins."

This sounds like statements now made about the Nicaraguan Sandinistas by those who, reversing things, are able to find that the contras are like our Founding Fathers. Defenders of privilege tend to find the same rationalizations.

"The leveling spirit"

Most of the benefits of the American Revolution were reaped by the wealthy merchants and planters. The insurgent farmers and artisans, who were the impelling force of the revolution, likewise gained more liberty than commoners of any details, a inter afree mum parti country had ever had—but they had to fight for it.

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 met under the shadow of Shay's Rebellion. General Henry Knox wrote fearfully to George Washington that the "creed" of "the people who are the insurgents" is "that the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all."

James Madison warned of "the leveling spirit" of "the majority faction," that is, of the great masses of people who were not well off, and said that the Constitution should "secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction." Nevertheless, he said, it was necessary to "leave something for the people."

Alexander Hamilton stated that "the mass of the people...seldom judge or determine right" and that therefore "a permanent body" composed of "the rich and well-born" should "check the imprudence of democracy."

Constitution for the wealthy In accordance with this thinking, the Constitution provided for a senate whose members were elected not by the people but by the state legislatures, for a president elected by an electoral college whose members were selected by the state legislatures, and for a supreme court appointed by the president.

The only national popular elections were for the House of Representatives, and the qualifications for voting in these elections, set by the states, included property holding. One-fourth of the adult population could not vote because they were slaves.

One-half of the white, adult population could not vote because they were women. One-third of the white, male, adult population could not vote because they did not meet property qualifications. Most of the voters could not be candidates because they did not satisfy property requirements for holding office.

The Constitution was adopted only after, in order to get popular support, the Bill of Rights was added. If "the mass of the "private rights," they had a very keen understanding of their own rights.

In the early part of the 19th century, an extension of suffrage and other democratic gains was won through such militant means as Dorr's Rebellion of 1841-1842, in which thousands of working people in Rhode Island organized a "people's convention" that wrote a constitution without property requirements for voting.

Martial law was declared, and the leader of the illegally elected People's Legislature, Alexander Hamilton Thomas Dorr, was convicted of treason. But under the pressure of the rebellion, reforms were grudgingly conceded.

This period of an extension of democracy lasted until the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s. The Civil War, which was essentially a second American Revolution, marked the last time in world politics that capitalists were able to lead a democratic revolution.

Following the Civil War, the enormous increase of wealth of the industrial capitalists more and more made the United States a plutocracy that was democratic only in form. We will explore this topic further in next month's issue of Socialist Action.

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Induction of labor by artificial hormones is another routine practice in American hospitals. A common method is the use of pitocin, an artificial labor-inducing hormone.

Dr. Roberto Caldeyro-Barcia, president of the International Federation of Gynecologists and

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People," according to Madison and Hamilton, did not sufficiently appreciate