4 - Material Bases of Consent

Summary

Introduction

Marx thought that capitalist democracy is an inherently unstable form of organization of society. It could not last. Writing in 1851, he expressed the belief that capitalist democracy is “only the political form of revolution of bourgeois society and not its conservative form of life”. (1934: 18) Twenty years later he still viewed democratic organization of capitalist societies as “only a spasmodic, exceptional state of things … impossible as the normal form of society”. (1971: 198)

This inherent instability resulted, in Marx's view, from the fact that the combination of private ownership of means of production with political democracy generates a basic contradiction:

The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundation of bourgeois society. From the ones it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation: from the others that they should not go back from social to political restoration. (1952a: 62)

Underlying this theory was the assumption of the fundamental political importance of the objective conflict of material interests.