Democratic Marxism: the Legacy of Hal Draper

Abstract

How many today would disagree with Vasily Grossman’s suggestion, in his book Forever Flowing, part novel, part meditation on the Soviet Gulag, that behind all those ‘crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; [the] skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues’, stands the figure of Karl Marx?² The idea of a genetic link between Marx and Stalin has established itself as ‘normal science’ and to paraphrase the poet Yevtushenko, the guard has been doubled, trebled over Marx’s tomb. Marxism must confront the horrors of its twentieth century past if it is to have a twenty-first century future. Each and every foothold it offered the Gulag must be rooted out. This chapter examines one contribution to the task, Hal Draper’s excavation of an alternative, radically democratic Marx and the development of a democratic Marxism by the group he helped to lead, the Workers’ Party-Independent Socialist League (WP-ISL) from 1940 to 1958.

However well-intentioned Marxists are nowadays about the need to value democracy the latter simply cannot play a significant theoretical role in the class analysis of politics (Gregor McLennan).

The iron dictatorship exercised by the Stalinist police administrative apparatus over the Soviet proletariat was not incompatible with the preservation of the proletarian nature of the state itself — any more than… the fascist dictatorships exercised over the bourgeois class were with the preservation of the nature of the capitalist state (Perry Anderson).

Political power is not a pre-condition for bourgeois rule, why should it be a precondition for working class rule? (Oliver Macdonald).

This is so because of the very nature of the working class as a class. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which is by nature a property owning class, it does not develop its economic and social power within the womb of the old society. The bourgeoisie could do this under feudalism because its social power is expressed in the first place through its ownership of the private property on which the wealth of society rests. The working class, which owns no property, can ‘own’ and control the means of production only through a political intermediary, the state. And it can ‘own’ and control the state only through democratic participation. Without democracy statification points not to socialism but to what we know as Stalinism. Democracy, therefore, is not merely of sentimental or moral value for the Marxists, nor is it merely a preference. It designates the only way in which the rule of the working class can exist in political actuality (Hal Draper).¹

Stalinism is a social system based on the state ownership of the decisive means of production and the uncontrolled domination of the state machine by the bureaucracy not by the working people. The state owns industry and an uncontrolled bureaucracy ‘owns’ the state. Socialism, on the other hand, is the collective ownership of the decisive means of production under the democratic control of the working people themselves. The vast difference is the existence of democracy for the mass of people.