The End of Democracy: a dialogue between Tocqueville and Marx

I

The end of democracy: a dialogue between Tocqueville and Marx

1. Introduction

a. Political crisis

Political turmoil has reigned everywhere since the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe. The political reference point of two generations disappeared in little more than five years, in a process that seemed to contradict a somewhat simplistic view of history, according to which capitalism, which succeeded feudalism, would in turn be replaced by socialism.

The outcome of the Cold War represented the demise of the first socialist state which, from its inception, claimed to embody a universal model of organization to which all the world’s revolutionaries should aspire.

Today, 35 years later, we have a better perspective of this history. Things did not happen that way, and reality turned out, once again, to be much richer than the schematism of certain political and theoretical visions.

A feeling of euphoria took hold of the winners, who rushed to make good their triumph. This meant not only the conquest of a vast market in Eastern Europe, hitherto closed to their businesses, but also a feeling that -now yes- the whole world (or almost the whole world) was available for the expansion of capital.

The fall of the Soviet Union also dispelled the feeling that investing abroad, especially in the Third World, was not entirely safe, given the threat of the emergence of forces committed to socialist reforms that would jeopardize the interests of capital. The case of Chile, with its attempt at transformations carried out between 1970 and 1973 by the government of Salvador Allende, and the brutal solution given to that threat, was still very much present. But the disappearance of the Soviet Union radically changed things. As Paul Krugman said, external investment seemed less risky than before for the security of the Western world.

A predatory neoliberal model (a detailed analysis of which is beyond the scope of this study) spread, accelerating the process of wealth concentration throughout the world and particularly in the United States, accentuating social polarization and political tensions.¹

A one-track thinking model spread around the world. Some dreamed that this would be the case for the next thousand years. Others were content with barely a century.

But the reality - harsh and insistent - continued to unfold, and this accelerated deterioration of the social situation, the polarization of wealth, the aggravation of tensions, meant that, in a very short time (a quarter of a century proved to be nothing, in historical terms), the need to rethink what was happening, to readjust ideas to a reality that, once again, was escaping us, reemerged.

In Latin America, this period was accompanied by the end of the right-wing dictatorships that had seized power since the 1960s in Brazil, Chile in 1973 and other South American countries.

After a long and painful process of disarticulation of the opposition, it was deemed prudent to return to the institutionalization of political life. The concept of democracy then occupied a growing space in the debate, although the idea of a limited and, in a certain sense, tutored democracy persisted. A democracy in which the socialist horizon had disappeared.

On the other hand, as in no other region, the neoliberal model of privatization of state assets was applied in some countries, including Chile and Argentina.

The left, weakened by the blows received and confused by the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, became blurred. It has been, however, the reality, the result of this process of wealth concentration and growing social disparity, which has pushed the model into a crisis that seems to lead to a dead end.

b. Crisis of theory

If in political life there was a demand for a viable alternative, in the theoretical field the needs were no less great.

Democracy, hijacked by a liberal vision that believed it had reached its dream hour, was wielded as a model to be followed by all. And although that democracy was certainly much more acceptable than the dictatorial regimes it replaced, it could not provide an answer to some of the dilemmas that were (and still are) on the table.

The first is, precisely, that disparity deriving from the reconquest of clear and legally respected political rules and the predominance of a voracious and predatory economic system.

The theory took refuge -too often, it seems to me- in the resource of separating the analysis of both processes, in order to save itself the effort of explaining how the recovery of political rights coexisted with an increasingly reduced participation of the majority in the distribution of national wealth.

The theoretical dilemma had, in any case, deeper roots, to which we should inevitably return. It is about the limits of the rights of the majorities in a democracy, which had already been raised by Mill², Locke³, Madison⁴ and many of those who, for the past more than 200 years ago, dealt with the subject. Freedom, in liberalism, had a limit, as Laski reminds us, in his remarkable work on European liberalism, to which we will return on several occasions. That limit is property, in its bourgeois, or capitalist, form.⁵

The defeat of socialism in Eastern Europe gave new impetus to those who, from a theoretical point of view, dreamed of capitalism as the final station of history. The growing social inequality forced, however, to return to the texts, to try to find a light that would illuminate the road to equality that Tocqueville suggested to us as the motor of history.⁶

This text aims to suggest a path to return to the idea of equality, not as a goal to which we aspire, but as a path to which the facts are leading us, despite the resistance it encounters along the way. What we want to do is to highlight, in the enormous tangle of events, often contradictory, of our time, those that allow us to discover the route towards equality suggested by Tocqueville as the great driving force of history.

For this, we must also turn our eyes to the work of Marx⁷, which remains, in our opinion, one of the most acute visions of the world that was emerging from its infancy, full of energy, and which, after some 400 years of development, seems to be showing signs of senility. The growing social polarization, economic tensions and disenchantment with politics (which, for some, is a sign of the maturity of capitalism) are symptoms of this crisis.

This work, then, is based on a practical concern, on a life experience and a political restlessness, but also on a theoretical curiosity, to make a journey inspired by the work of two great thinkers -Tocqueville and Marx-, which, as we are well aware, is not without pitfalls, which we will try to avoid.

2. The democratic coven

Let us begin with Tocqueville’s blessing. It is not necessary for God to speak for himself to discover unquestionable signs of his will, said this remarkable French politician and writer. It is enough to examine the usual course of nature and the continuous tendency of events to discover that will, which is none other than the gradual and progressive development of equality. This discovery alone would suffice to give it the sacred character of the will of the sovereign lord. To want to restrain democracy, he assures, would then be to fight against God himself.

We will not commit this sin. We will try, in our journey, to delve, first of all, into the meaning of equality, which Tocqueville identifies with democracy. Looking at today’s society, we will search for the signs left along the way to try to discover where and why we have strayed from the Lord’s will. The second will be to unravel the nature of that democracy, for which, we believe, Tocqueville also leaves us sufficient signs.

If Tocqueville proposes the route, it is another of his contemporaries, Karl Marx, who analyzed more rigorously the nature of the regime that emerged and gave breath to democracy: capitalism. It is in Marx that we find the impetus to continue along the path which, according to Tocqueville, expresses God’s will: that natural and progressive development in search of equality.

As far as we know, these two contemporaries never met. Marx was 13 years younger and, when Tocqueville died, he was 41 years old. But it seems fair to us to bring them into dialogue, if only because of the greatness of their works, which have bequeathed us indispensable keys to the path of our modernity.

Democracy remains today at the center of theoretical and political debate.⁸ The political life of the contemporary world revolves around this concept. Democracy is the reference point for the most diverse political proposals. A quick glance at the international scene is enough to see the variety of claims to the term, from Mexico to Brazil, from Eastern Europe to North America, in Asia and Africa.

In Latin America, on September 11, 2001, at a meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Lima, Peru, the Inter-American Democratic Charter was approved, the first article of which states: The peoples of the Americas have the right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it. Democracy is essential for the social, political and economic development of the peoples of the Americas.

The conservatives of the National Action Party (PAN) claim it in Mexico and consider that its victory in 2000 represented the end of an authoritarian regime and the beginning of democracy in that country. In Brazil, the conservative Liberal Front Party (PFL) became the Democratic Party in 2007. Our greatest commitment is to you and to democracy in Brazil, they state on their website. The defense of democracy is the banner with which the president of the United States, George W. Bush (2000-2008), justified his foreign policy, particularly the military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the end of the 20th century, Bush said at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, there were about 120 democracies in the world. And I can assure you there are more on the way. In Spain, the Popular Party (PP), which groups part of what is left of the Franco regime, also claims to be democratic. In several countries, such as the Czech Republic, laws are in force that condemn to imprisonment from six months to three years those who publicly deny, question, approve or attempt to justify Nazi or communist genocide or other crimes of the Nazis or communists against humanity". As can be seen, there is only room for democrats.

The academic world could not remain on the sidelines of this reality. The subject has produced a vast literature in recent years. A quick glance allows us to cite authors such as Norberto Bobbio, Alain Touraine, Giovanni Sartori, Guillermo O’Donell, Francisco Weffort, Pablo González Casanova; there is no need to go into further detail to highlight the position that the subject occupies in the theoretical debate.

The debate on democracy was, and is -as we have already pointed out- closely linked to the fall of Eastern European socialism and the new political reality that emerged in those societies after 1989. With the end of the Cold War, a liberal concept of democracy was consolidated.

The use of the concept lends itself, however, to multiple interpretations. Although studies on democracy had already intensified before this event (especially in Latin America and Spain, Greece and Portugal, the countries of southern Europe, in the second half of the 1970s and 1980s). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union gave new impetus to