Over recent weeks and months, my brother has consistently said that the middle classes have always been the drivers of democratisation, an idea that contradicts the explicit and implicit viewpoints of both the Trotskyists and the anti-democratic far right. Both have said democratisation is driven by the poor and working classes, differing greatly of course in the evaluation of their intentions – the Trotkyists view democratisation as driven by a lower class fight for justice whereas the anti-democratic far right view it as driven by pure envy.
This morning, however, I found a fourteen-year-old Socialist Worker article (‘What Is Real Democracy?’) that on first sight suggest that my image acquired from Trotskyists of democracy as a product of class struggle by the working classes is not perfectly accurate. Author John Molyneux argues that the roots of modern democracy came from the early entrepreneurs known as burghers (from which we get bourgeoisie) who resented the power of the feudal aristocracy and the royal families. Democracy developed because the new bourgeoisie needed allies amongst the lower classes in order to defeat the old feudal ruling class. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie rejected even the very limited democracy of universal suffrage, and was only forced to grant it by the pressure of the working classes, although Molyneux argues that there was always some pressure for inclusion of lower classes.
If we look at Molyneux’ assessment, I will first note that pre-Reformation Christianity was intransigently opposed to minimal democracy, as is discussed by Vladimir Moss. Both Catholicism and Orthodoxy viewed democracy as per se atheistic and anarchistic. As Socialist Worker notes here, this view was never challenged until the Radical Reformation. I will next note that Molyneaux never mentions the middle classes as an agent of democratisation in themselves, only noting the urban poor and peasantry as allies of the bourgeoisie. He does not discuss the position of the petit-bourgeoisie in these struggles at all, failing even to note that the petit-bourgeoisie (at least the rural petit-bourgeoisie) possessed the necessary property to vote in the early constitutional oligarchies of Britain and the Netherlands. Nor, critically, does Molyneux discuss the differences between the four struggles which he mentions, especially between the conservative American Revolution and the much more radical French Revolution which actually began as a radical peasant struggle.
So, actually, whilst Molyneux does in some respects challenge the theory that democracy emerged purely and simply out of the struggles of the poor, he does not accept in any way the conventional role of the middle classes in democratisation. Rather, Molyneux, in effect, is arguing that democratisation results from severe elite conflict allowing the mobilisation of the poor. His argument is very incomplete: when he says:
“Increasingly the bourgeoisie came to resent the arbitrary hereditary power of the aristocracy, which they believed to be holding back not only their own advancement but also society as a whole”he does not discuss why the bourgeoisie resented the aristocracy. The history of many states that have remained authoritarian, especially in the Middle East and East Asia, shows that there is no necessary hostility between the bourgeoisie and the older aristocracy, and that the bourgeoisie can often incorporate itself into an aristocratic government.
and that this powerlessness and that the middle classes can never represent “ordinary, everyday people” is reflected in middle class political history.“...when a major class struggle breaks out, they [the middle classes] are relatively powerless. Unlike the capitalist class, they don’t decide what happens on a grand scale. Unlike the working class, they can’t usually affect the economy by going on strike, and they have no collective power to create a new, better society.”
