More to the point, the lack of democracy theorists ignore the actual history of liberal democracy and socialist democracy. The meaning and evaluation of democracy have changed over time, and neither capitalism nor liberalism has an exclusive claim to it. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, democracy meant rule by the lower classes or the oppressed, and almost all major political thinkers from Aristotle to the founders of the United States opposed democracy. Above all, liberalism valued choice and competition—the choice and competition between parties in the political arena and between commodities in the market place. Democracy came to the United States and other liberal republics gradually and then not as rule by the lower classes as such, but as participation by the lower classes in elections, as the franchise was extended first to men without property and then to ex-slaves, women and youth.
Historically, socialism had a stronger claim to democracy than liberalism. Whereas liberalism only gradually claimed democracy as a value, socialism from the start embraced its classical meaning as rule by the lower classes. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx said that “the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”698 Whereas liberal democracy venerated choice, socialist democracy valued equality, in the sense of the abolition of the capitalist class’ superiority, domination and exploitation. Just as liberalism assimilated democratic forms, so socialism developed democratic mechanisms. Lenin had argued that workers would not spontaneously develop socialist ideas and revolutionary organizations and that consequently a vanguard party had to lead a socialist revolution. Rule by a vanguard party, however, did not mean the same thing as rule by the workers and peasants themselves. Over time socialism had to develop ways to increase the participation and control by the workers and peasants, including broadening membership in the Communist Party and developing soviets, trade unions, and other mass organizations.699
Though the process of developing democracy was far from over, the Soviet Union had developed a variety of political institutions and practices designed to provide popular participation. Every subsequent socialist country adopted and adapted the Soviet innovations. The Soviet practices included using newspapers as ombudsmen as well as news sources, vesting trade unions with power over workers’ rights, production norms, and the disposition of social funds, and creating soviets, production committees, community assemblies, governing committees of living complexes, and other Party and government bodies. Though many of these populist institutions atrophied during the difficult years surrounding the Second World War, they revived in the 1950s and involved greater and greater numbers of working people. Even under Brezhnev, popular participation in government showed many signs of vitality. Writing in 1978, when the Soviet Union contained 260 million people, a group of Soviet writers gave the following figures on Soviet political activity: 16.5 million Communists, 121 million trade union members, nearly 38 million Young Communists, over 2 million Soviet deputies, 35 million people who work with the deputies in the Soviets of People’s Deputies, 9.5 million members of People’s Control bodies, and 5.5 million members of production conferences of industrial enterprises.700 Of course, participation in a socialist soviet, just as participation in a bourgeois election, provided no conclusive proof of popular control, but it nonetheless represented, however imperfectly, the striving for a kind of socialist democracy.
If Soviet democracy was developing in some areas, however, it was experiencing problems in other areas. The special Party stores and privileges, however modest, as well as the growth of some wealthy beneficiaries of the second economy, mocked socialist equality. The primary authority of the Party had the effect of making the soviets advisory bodies at best or rubber stamps at worst. The second economy corrupted some in the Party and government. The point is that socialist democracy had both strengths and weaknesses. The complexity of the actual situation is generally not acknowledged by those who assert that a lack of democracy brought down Soviet socialism. Of course, that a society that was suffering neither invasion, economic crisis, nor popular discontent fell apart makes for an arresting paradox. To this paradox, now another must be added: it fell apart in spite of political organizations in which millions of people participated.701
The idea that centralization played a pivotal role in the collapse is just as problematic as that of the lack of democracy. The Soviet Union was the first country in history to try to organize its economy around state-owned enterprises (with some elements of non-state enterprises) and centralized state planning (with limited markets). Only a strong central government with a planned economy could achieve the goals of socialism: socializing property, protecting the revolution from enemies within and without, achieving rapid electrification and industrialization, elevating education, health care, and housing for all, and developing the most backward and oppressed areas of the country. There was no blueprint for this, and no guarantees that this would work. The entire history of the Soviet Union involved constant experimentation with various kinds planning mechanisms, different price, wage, and investment policies, and degrees of centralization and decentralization within the context of state property and central planning. To say the Soviets were continually confronting problems associated with central planning is manifestly true. They repeatedly strove to find the proper role for decentralized decision-making within the context of a centrally planned economy. To say, however, that the problem was simply centralization itself is like saying the problem with socialism is socialism. Such a position, by the way, is pretty much where Gorbachev ended up when he scuttled the central plan and opened the door to private enterprise. In other words, to say that centralization caused problems is a truism, but to say centralization itself is a problem amounts to a rejection of socialism.
The proponents of the lack-of-democracy theory believe they hold one trump card. If the Soviet Union had possessed a vital socialist democracy that really expressed the will and interests of the working class, and if the Communist Party really represented the vanguard of the working class, then the workers, including the Communists themselves, would have resisted the overthrow of the Communist Party, the evisceration of socialism, and the restoration of capitalism. Since, according to this view, neither the working class nor Communists did resist, something was lacking in Soviet democracy. The actual history of the Soviet collapse escapes this logical net. As we show in Chapter 6, working class resistance did occur. Why this resistance was not great enough to stop the dismantling of socialism is, of course, a great puzzle. In a sense, however, the lack of democracy theory actually understates the puzzle. The vast majority of people in an advanced industrial society submitted passively while a small minority turned the common wealth into their private gain, impoverished the rest of the population, and de-modernized a society for the first time in history.702 The acquiescence of a people to policies that are demonstrably not in their own self-interest constitutes a deeply troubling phenomenon, well-known in capitalist countries, and much more common than we would like to suppose. That Soviet socialism did not manage to create citizens capable of transcending the kind of inertia, willful ignorance, and business-as-usual attitudes that immobilize most people most of the time may disappoint but should not surprise us. It is as much an indictment of liberal democracy as of socialist democracy.