Vol. 72/No. 8      February 25, 2008

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
Dewey’s conception of democracy crowns his pluralistic theory of society and his public service notion of the state. It is the crux of his entire philosophy.

In accord with his view that economic conditions and class relations do not determine the essence of political phenomena, he does not approach democracy as a historically produced and materially conditioned mode of government. He is the champion of a pure democracy “which never was on land or sea.”

“The keynote of democracy,” he wrote, is “… all those who are affected by social institutions must have a share in producing and managing them” (John Dewey’s Philosophy, pp. 400-401).

Dewey is here painting the portrait of an ideal democracy, not the features of any real one. None of the political democracies from ancient Greece to modern America meets these specifications. Each has been based upon relations of exploitation, exalted the rich over the poor, and restricted the participation of its people in the control of public affairs.

The Greek city-state republics were rooted in slavery, denied political rights to foreigners, slaves, and women, and were dominated by aristocrats. The democracies of the bourgeois era have been established on the inequalities of private property and the exploitation of wage labor by the capitalists. Their major policies have been formulated and executed by representatives of the wealthy classes. Many categories of citizens, including workers, women, Blacks, and young people, have been disenfranchised by various means. Even where all could vote, the power apparently vested in the electorate was actually exercised by the strongest and solidest section of the ruling class. American democracy has coexisted with chattel slavery, wage slavery, and imperialism.

Dewey believed that, while all this might have been true of other countries and perhaps even the American past, such perversions of democracy no longer needed persist in the United States. Here all the conditions had ripened for the creation of an unrestricted and classless democracy. Only tradition, lack of scientific method, and inadequate education stood in the way.

However, something much more substantial than ignorance thwarts the expansion of democracy for the American people. That is the social, economic, political, and military supremacy of the monopoly capitalists. This “power elite,” as the liberal sociologists call it, has no permanent attachment to democracy. It will tolerate the forms of democracy so long as these can be manipulated to its advantage and as long as the workers do not seriously challenge its rulership. But the leaders of this elite will not hesitate to discard such forms and turn to a “strong state” of a military, Bonapartist, or fascist character when the present system runs into a blind alley and they fear the loss of their privileged position.

The dollar democracy of the United States has been based upon the revolutionary achievements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and upon an expanding, progressive capitalist economy which enabled the ruling classes to obtain the support, or at least the tolerance, of the middle and working classes. Jefferson believed that democracy could not be secure unless it rested upon an extensive class of small landed proprietors. He coupled the decentralization of political power with the wide dispersal of property ownership.

Today both ownership and power have become highly centralized. How is democracy to be saved and strengthened under such circumstances? Dewey relied upon “men and women of good will, drawn from every calling” who will unite to establish a classless society and a purified democracy. No single class will lead the way.

But a better democracy can be built only on the basis of a new and higher economic foundation. And this can be brought into being only by taking the means of production out of monopolist hands by nationalizing them. The organized working class is the only force in American society with the capacities to carry through such an assignment.

The creation of the “classless democracy” envisaged by Dewey is a historical impossibility and a theoretical absurdity. All the political democracies known to history have been based upon and backed by some class or combination of classes. And when the classless communist society of the future is attained, there will be no place for any form of state, democratic or dictatorial.

Meanwhile, the most pressing problem of political life today is not to effect a transition from class rule to a classless democracy, but to go from the decaying and narrowing democracy of the bourgeois order to a workers’ democracy based on a nationalized and planned economy. The main agency for accomplishing this changeover is the independent organization and revolutionary action of the working class. A motley coalition of good-hearted and liberal-minded individuals drawn from all classes cannot do the job. The socialist rule of the working class can provide the only durable safeguard for democracy.  
 
 
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