Emmett Goodhope: Advanced Democracy

In this series of blogs, I will be writing about a number of ideas that I have had over the years about how leftists in the U.S. might go about building a new movement for advanced democracy.

By "advanced democracy" I mean socialism. So why not then just say socialism? Although I must admit to having a personal attachment to the term, I want to propose that leftists in this country begin to formulate a political language that resonates more clearly and easily with the mainstream of our culture. Unfortunately, U.S. socialism has been so historically weak as an institution, and has withered away so completely in the last 50 years, that we no longer have the capacity to use the "s" word and have it be understood accurately by anyone but a handful of intellectuals. So, I've decided to try to get along without it. (We'll have to see how this works in practice)

"Advanced democracy" seems to have been coined by the French CP in the 1960s. In that setting the phrase signalled a political retreat into an increasingly reformist politics. However, in our current U.S. context, I don't think that there are any more retreats that we could possibly make, so using the term (or one similar to it) seems likely to be a step in the right direction.

An alternative phrase, which I don't particularly care for, is "radical democracy." My impression is that this was first used by the new left in the U.S., though I'm not sure of its precise source or date of origin. Although the literal meaning of the word "radical" (going to the root) is quite good, its more mainstream connotation as "extremist" is not very appealing. In my mind, this makes the word less than optimal from the perspective of reaching out to a broad sector of the population, which is what socialists ultimately need to do.

Perhaps a few words about the expression "building a movement" are also in order. Its not meant to be taken literally, as if movements are engineered by a small group of knowlegable individuals. More realistically, movements arise from the interplay of broad social forces. I suppose what I really mean to say is something more like "building the leadership of a movement."

Speaking more explicitly about "leadership" then brings up two additional issues. First, the question of leadership is one of the classic themes of democratic (i.e., marxist) political theory. Many of the dualisms within left political theory--e.g., Party/Masses, Theory/Practice, Intellectuals/Workers, Voluntarism/Spontanism, Bureaucracy/Democracy, Reform/Revolution--are more or less strongly connected to this problem. As such, left thinkers have done a lot of theorizing on the leadership question, and most of this work has been carried out in the context of analyzing historical periods of vigorous social unrest (i.e., times having large social movements and strong movement-based organizations). However, the problem of leadership in a democratic movement has not yet been satisfactorily resolved (or if it was once resolved in a particular historical setting, then I would say that it still remains to be worked out for modern U.S. society).

A second and perhaps more timely question that comes up is: What is the role of "leaders" (i.e., activists and critical intellectuals) in relatively stable periods of capitalism, when social movements are either weak or non-existent? I believe that much less has been written on this subject. However, I would assert that it is an especially important issue for U.S. leftists because of the relatively long period of political stability that we have been living through since the last major period of social upheaval--the period of the 1960s and early 70s.

As this "blog-series" unfolds, I am hoping to be able to say some interesting things about these and other topics in the theory of advanced democracy.