The Era of Democracy

In 1907, a twenty-two-year-old postulant at the Mecca of radical Marxism in Leipzig, where he contributed to the Leipziger Volkszeitung and attended the university as a doctoral student, de Man still maintained his contacts with the Flemish socialist youth organization in which he had already played a significant role. The pamphlet excerpted below, a fuller version of talks that he had recently given back in Flanders, is illustrative of his pre-World War I, unreconstructed faith. A number of issues that were to play a crucial role both in the history of the socialist movement in the decades to come, and in his own later efforts to reconstitute the ideological basis of the movement, are evident in its pages. Here, however, their resolution is unselfconsciously within the orthodox Marxist tradition, although with hindsight it is now possible to detect foreshadowings of the ideological innovations that de Man was to develop.

Perhaps the most fundamental issue is that of man's "voluntaristic" response to his historical circumstances; in the present text the moral and explanatory basis for the struggle of the proletariat is assumed to be self-evident from the fact of capitalist exploitation. The pursuit of interests then is identical with the struggle for self-preservation and calls for as little justification; the only problem is to direct the energies of this struggle in the historically effective, organized form of the class-conscious socialist movement. A second theme, in later works to receive far-ranging elaboration, concerns the appropriate deployment of forces until the day of revolution has arrived; here the question is disposed of through the implicit assumptions that (a) that day is not far off; (b) class struggle will have as its most notable effect the growing consciousness on the part of the proletariat of its class-bound, underdog position; and (c) nevertheless there are at least some short-term gains to be wrested from the enemy.

Third, while the bulk of the pamphlet is directed at a knowledgeable analysis of the balance of political forces within particular countries — an analysis that we have not reproduced, in line with de Man's acknowledgment that the details were only of transitory significance — the underlying assumption is that ultimately the power and numbers of the proletariat will be sufficient to bring about the conquest of power on a mass-democratic basis through exploiting the political and legal rights of the bourgeois order. Last, however — and this is the polemical basis for the whole pamphlet — the proletariat is not to be taken in by the snares of formal, bourgeois democracy, which can and will serve as a buttress and disguise for the interests of the bourgeoisie threatened by the rising proletariat rather than as an open road to the realization of socialism.

While the author makes no pretense of originality — in the preface to the pamphlet he refers the interested reader to Karl Kautsky and Anton Pannekoek for further guidance — in a sense that is the point of its inclusion here, to form the baseline for the later ideological developments with which de Man is identified. Nevertheless even in this early work it is possible to note beyond the cliches of orthodox Marxism the vigor and knowledge the author brings to his analysis, the assurance and deftness of his capacity to pamphleteer, and at the same time his ability to bring an intellectual's familiarity with the European cultural heritage to bear on mundane questions of political tactics. These same qualities were to serve him well in his later, heterodox, and original work of ideological reformulation.

HET TIJDVAK DER DEMOKRATIE

The [1905] revolution in Russia with its immediate goal of a democratization of the state, the introduction of universal suffrage in Austria and Hungary, the overthrow of the Conservative government in England, the spreading and flowering of radical democracy in France, the progress of the "liberal" parties during the last Reichstag election in Germany, the fall of the Kuyper government in the Netherlands, the revival of a "democratized" liberalism in Belgium — these are the essential events in the history of the last few years that have originated and confirmed the belief of many socialists in the onset of an era of democracy in Europe, from which socialism should gradually but directly emerge. Indeed, the catchword "democracy" has become so accepted in the Belgian socialist press that day after day it is used as inseparable from, even synonymous with, socialism. However, what is meant by the term "democracy" is usually not easy to discern. To the remark of the apprentice in Goethe's Faust:

But an idea is bound to the word,

Mephistopheles replies:

Quite so! Only one shouldn't be too troubled,
For precisely where ideas fall short,
A word can be readily supplied.
Using words, it is easy to dispute,
Using words, it is easy to build up theories,
Using words, it is easy to believe ...

Nowadays there are indeed few words used with better effect to disguise their lack of a determinate and clear meaning than "democracy." The French political economist Le Play once said: "What one strives in vain to attain through an ever so skillful association of clearly defined words is rendered easy with unclear expressions which, according to the outlook of those who read and understand them, can be used in the most different, even contradictory, senses. Many words lend themselves to such use at present, but four are particularly prone to cover up thought: the words freedom, progress, equality, and democracy." In his frankness, the good Le Play seems not to have noticed that these are precisely the chosen catchwords of bourgeois democracy, the pillars of liberal ideology. All too often the word "democracy" is uncritically taken from the conceptual arsenal of this liberal ideology to add to our own supply, which however has enough intellectual weaponry not to have need of enriching itself by the acquisition of wooden swords.

Democracy as a Goal and as a Movement

But what does this word "democracy" mean?

In the many cases where use hides a lack of a clear conceptualization, it, of course, means nothing at all.

But insofar as there is actually a meaning, in general this can be regarded from two points of view: as absolute and relative,...