Toward the democratic class struggle

Toward the democratic class struggle GAD HOROWITZ Introduction The term "democracy" has, like many other honorific terms, fallen victim to twentieth century doublespeak, which is a device used by the practical minded for the purpose of "adjusting their ideals to reality," thereby obscuring the gap between the ideal and the real, and substituting the name for the thing. We no longer use the term "democracy" to refer to a situation in which masses of people participate, directly and meaningfully, in the making of the decisions which shape the basic conditions of their existence . We have discovered that this is an unattainable ideal- which means not that it is absolutely, inevitably, and eternally unattainable , but that all our efforts to attain it have failed: limited as we are by ignorance, or by original sin, or by what seem to be inexorable social and economic necessities, we do not know how to attain it. We have therefore decided to adjust the ideal to the reality, that is, we have given up the ideal. We now use the term "democracy" to refer to the reality of our way of life. Of course there are large differences of opinion about the nature of that reality. Perhaps the most common view is that which was first formulated by Joseph Schumpeter, who defined democracy as "the rule of the politician," or, in a more extended phrase, as "that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote." Those who hold this view believe that we have the second best thing to real democracy. The people do not have the power; their elected leaders have the power; the people act through their leaders. This is, surely, in this world, a satisfactory approximation to the real thing. Assuming for the sake of argument that the ]ournal of Canadian Studies people do act through their elected leaders something that is not at all certain - and granting that the rule of politicians is a satisfactory substitute for the real thing - the question remains : is this really a description of the reality of our system? Is our system one in which elected leaders make the political decisions? Do we have even this second best approximation to democracy ? That depends on how one defines "political ." What are political decisions? If they are simply whatever decisions are made by politicians , the definition fits the reality. But tautology is never satisfying. What if the political decisions are less significant, less powerfully determining of the fate of the community, than non-political decisions? Can we then say that the community is governed by its political decision makers? The only way of avoiding this difficulty is to define "political" non-tautologically, as "pertaining to the polity." Political decisions are decisions which are of importance to the community, decisions on public matters. And it is a fact that the most important of these decisions are not made by our political elite but by other elites which are not accountable to the community. The common or Schumpeterian definition of democracy is therefore not an accurate description of the reality of our system. We have not even achieved second best. We have not even approximated democracy. I want to suggest that among the roles that the party system in our society can and should play, the most important is to move our society toward democracy - not the utopian democracy in which the people rule, but the attainable democracy in which an elite accountable to the people rules. If the party system is to play the role of moving us closer to democracy; if, in other words, our political elite is to be strengthened to the point where it replaces the corporate and bureaucratic elites as the source of the most important social decisions, our party system must be polarized on a left-right basis, and the main issues raised for discussion in the political arena must be class issues. I will argue not only that this change in the party system ought to be 3 brought about, but that it can be brought about, and with no evil side effects. The Democratic...