Form of organization of the political apparatus of the bourgeois state that legitimizes itself by representing social conflict as a market -Parliament- in which the major currents of opinion -embodied in the parties- exchange interests under a set of rules that guarantees the survival and development of the state itself and of the nation it constitutes.
Democracy and representation under the bourgeoisie
In order to assert its leadership over society as a whole, that is, to impose through the state the needs of the accumulation of national capital in a given territory/market that it makes its own, the bourgeoisie did not need to give the political apparatus of the state any specific form. Its first experiences of political power took forms as different as an oligarchic republic in Venice, a corporate state in Florence, the assemblies of the Comuneros in Castile or Cromwell's dictatorship in England.
All of them, however, had one element in common: they fostered different forms of representation of the subordinate classes in the state and its rituals. This representation generally went little further than the ceremonial: in Venice the minor guilds and the wage earners saw themselves included in the state and fought for recognition by battling to occupy better positions in public processions.
The meaning of representation in this framework is closer to theatrical representation than to the idea of political representation that liberalism would later adopt. But it shows how, from the very beginning, the bourgeoisie was aware of the need for a political apparatus that would exercise the dictatorship of its interests by involving the other classes.
On the other hand, processions, mass choreographies and ceremonial performances never disappeared as a way of trying to represent the workers in the bourgeois state, reaching their paroxysm in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.
Only when it reached maturity and set itself the task of constituting the social body into a nation, that is, of taking the leadership of a class structure already driven by industrial production, would it raise the liberal myths to a principle of government, ceding spaces of political power to the people, that is, accepting a specific political space in the state for the aspirations of the petty bourgeoisie and, indirectly, of the nascent proletariat. Modern democracy began to be defined as a system of representation based on the universal suffrage of property-owning individuals.
The proletariat and democracy in rising capitalism
It was the emergence of the proletariat as a political subject from the revolution of 1848 onwards that led the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes to grant the workers a space for self-organization... though only after virulent struggles that were repressed, almost always bloodily, by the liberal and democratic states of the time.
Rising capitalism then accepted the proletariat, in part of Europe, as a recognized political subject within bourgeois society. It accepted that the workers be represented within its institutions of government, aware that there was a margin, within its own domination, for the workers to win legal reforms useful to their own organization and constitution as a class (legalization of parties and organizations, legal recognition of strikes, universal suffrage, etc.).
At that moment, even though it fed reformist and revisionist tendencies, the effort to obtain this recognition was part of the process of the political constitution of the class and of the development of its organization as such (centralism).
The result of this whole period was the appearance of a space of workers' democracy, on the margins of and parallel to state democracy, in the mass organizational fabric that grew up around the party premises, the trade unions, the cooperatives and the numerous workers' cultural organizations.
Democracy, fascism and Stalinism against workers' democracy
The entry into the imperialist phase would transform the organization of the bourgeoisie and its relationship with the state, pushing it towards the forms characteristic of decadence: those of state capitalism.
State capitalism is no longer a capitalism of free competition but a monopoly capitalism, and the political apparatus of the state is transformed to reflect it. Imperialist war and the participation of parliaments in the administration of the war economy drove the big political parties to go from being expressions of competing interests seeking representation vis-à-vis the state to being state parties: specialized representatives of the state vis-à-vis particular social sectors, monopolists specialized in the management of large social groups and currents of opinion.
The counter-revolution would play a central role in this global reorganization of the bourgeoisie and the state, which overlaps with the reorganization of the bourgeoisie in the state. The two specific vanguard forms of the counter-revolution, fascism and Stalinism, applied themselves to destroying the space of workers' democracy built up over decades by the Second and Third Internationals and, in Spain, also by the CNT.
Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a particular governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy within bourgeois society. The task of fascism lies not only in destroying the Communist vanguard but in holding the entire class in a state of forced disunity.
To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary section of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash all independent and voluntary organizations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three-quarters of a century by the Social Democracy and the trade unions. For, in the last analysis, the Communist Party also bases itself on these achievements.
Leon Trotsky, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat", January 25, 1932.
The destruction of the space of workers' democracy and the integration of the trade unions into the wartime regimentation of the workers accelerated in the 1930s and were carried to their ultimate consequences under the anti-fascist banner during the counter-revolution in Spain and, after it, during the second imperialist world war. Almost always under the leadership on the ground of the Stalinist and socialist parties.
Thus, by mowing down the mass base from which the political organization of the class emerged, the counter-revolution -in all its forms- cleared the way for the most totalitarian tendencies of state capitalism.
A paradox: it would be these totalitarian forms that served the democratic powers to construct the fascism-democracy opposition... and later, during the Cold War, the democracy-communism opposition. But by then there was as little left of workers' democracy under the democratic states as under Stalinist state capitalism.
Democracy today
Today nothing remains of the mass workers' democracy that the counter-revolution tore out by the roots. The trade union is no longer a mere intermediary, but a monopolist of labor power, on a par with other industrial monopolies. And, more importantly, it cannot be anything else. But this does not mean that we have to abandon the goal of building a space of class democracy. In fact, it is essential. But it cannot start from the forms characteristic of a rising capitalism that will not return.
The difficulties are obviously immense. We live universally under different forms of state capitalism. The omnipresent logic of the market and competition of rising capitalism gave way to the merging, through the financial system and the state, of individual capitals into large monopoly groups.
As a whole, the state became a sort of organic whole, a monopoly of monopolies that, through more or less formal systems, regulates the whole of social life from top to bottom: from wages, through the coordination and agreements of employers' associations and trade unions, to the energy mix, by way of the information distributed through the media monopolies.
In such a framework, in which opinion is the product of one more monopoly industry, Parliament ceases to be the place where the various class fractions and interests meet and negotiate. The bourgeoisie no longer organizes itself through a market of ideas and interests but as an organic whole that secretes opinions for mass consumption through a thousand channels. Channels that distribute the same product in different flavors.
Elections become a mere gymnastic exercise of the state bourgeoisie's capacity to generate opinion. Of course, without ever ceasing to sell us the sacredness of elections as the expression of a non-existent popular will or an illusory power of the citizenry.
This does not mean that the bourgeoisie controls everything unchallenged from a perfect control panel. Although it captains the state and the big financial and capital groups, it is neither monolithic nor alone in society. A pack of hyenas is hardly a model of harmony, however coordinated it may be, and like every dictatorship of an exploiting class, its rule requires the active complicity of the intermediate layers.
There is no lack of examples, of varying significance, of revolts of the petty bourgeoisie in the daily news all over the world. In them, one side and the other will call on us again and again to defend democracy. They know that on that terrain we cannot, under any circumstances, assert ourselves as a politically independent class, but they do not give up hope of regimenting us around the democratic state as cannon fodder for their internal and external disputes.