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In this section, the focus is on scholarship that has equated Marxism with twentieth-century ‘communism’ as this literature problematises the role of democracy in the communist movement and juxtaposes authoritarianism with representative democracy. Historically, Marxists did not focus their gaze on the importance of direct democracy,⁴ content with either vanguard notions of democracy led by the Party together with the advanced working class or with the representative democracy of the Eurocommunists and social democrats. This neglect of the importance of direct democracy and its relation to representative democracy was exacerbated by the liberal tradition’s collapsing of Marxism with authoritarianism and juxtaposing this with representative democracy as the only viable alternative.

There is a vast literature on Marxism that has been dominated by studies delving into the totalitarian and undemocratic nature of communism (for example, the work of Gabriel A. Almond, Hannah Arendt, Fernando Claudin, Joseph Schumpeter, Philip Selznick and Jacob Talmon). This image of Marxism as totalitarian, influenced by the larger political milieu of cold-war politics, was uniform in liberal literature on communism, which was concerned with demonstrating the Party’s absolute control over the ‘masses’ (see, for example, the work of Almond, Selznick and Talmon) and continues to influence scholarship, as is evident in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) which posits market capitalism and representative democracy as the pinnacle of human history. Similarly, Stéphane Courtois et al.’s Black Book of Communism (1999) concludes that communism is morally similar to Nazism, implicitly positing representative democracy as the only morally acceptable alternative. This anti-Marxist position also influenced the apartheid state, which framed the liberation struggle as part of the ‘rooi gevaar’ (red danger) coming out of the Soviet Union and influencing the South African liberation movement. The roots of this cold-war tradition hark back to the 1950s.

Many scholars in the mid-twentieth century were heavily informed by the liberal political tradition, taking representative democracy to be the one and only alternative to totalitarian communism (for example, Almond, Schumpeter, Selznick and Talmon). This tradition referred to vanguard democracy as totalitarian because of the way in which the Party (ostensibly made up of the advanced working class and revolutionary activists) enjoyed absolute power in the name of working class majoritarianism (see for example, Selznick 1952). This link between vanguard democracy and authoritarianism had merit, as Joseph Femia’s Marxism and Democracy (1993) shows how vanguard notions of democracy ultimately lead to absolute elite control in which individual voices are silenced.

Underpinning this allegiance to the liberal tradition was a critique of the dangers inherent in popular participation in politics. With the rise of fascism and the post-World War I establishment of totalitarian regimes (ostensibly based on mass participation), there was a tendency to link ‘participation’ with the concept of totalitarianism (Pateman [1970] 1999: 2). Thus the liberal tradition conflated totalitarianism with communism, participatory democracy and authoritarianism. In response, by the middle of the century, scholars in the liberal political tradition had cast grave doubts on popular participation in politics. In South Africa this resonated with apartheid policies that sought to exclude the majority from politics and embrace a narrow representative democracy for the white minority. In effect, what the ascendance of the liberal political tradition represented was a shift from a democratic theory centred on participation of ‘the people’ to a democratic theory based on the participation of an elite minority (104).

For many liberal scholars the intellectual roots of this shift could be traced back to Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy ([1942] 1975) in which he argues that democracy is not a theory of particular ideals or ends, but rather, is a political method with certain institutional arrangements for arriving at political decisions. Like the scholars he later influenced, Schumpeter (269) looked suspiciously on a participatory and decision-making role for the people and preferred to support the idea that a democratic method was defined by competition for votes among leaders.⁵ Schumpeter’s characterisation of the democratic method and the dangers of popular participation were widely accepted by the 1950s tradition, which built an entire canon of scholarship on these basic principles (Pateman [1970] 1999: 5). The disregard for popular participation ultimately bifurcated democratic politics into representative and vanguard democracies, both of which rely on elites – elected officials or advanced working class – as the guiding force in society. In many ways, the apartheid state adopted the liberal cold-war view of Marxism, though it was not itself liberal.

One of the most influential statements of the inherent dangers of mass participation and its links with communist totalitarianism was Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), in which he traces the history of what he calls ‘totalitarian democracy’ and is interested in showing how representative democracy and totalitarian democracy, while originating from similar traditions of eighteenth-century political theory, ultimately diverged in opposite directions (3). Demonstrating his distrust of popular participation, Talmon (250) argues that direct democracy, unlimited sovereignty and egalitarian social ideals hold within them the tendency toward totalitarian control of society. He further argues that the modern abstraction of human beings from their social relations (that is classes), which he sees at the core of the Marxian tradition, is a powerful vehicle for totalitarianism. For Talmon, communism is inherently totalitarian and popular participation in politics lends itself toward this end.

Shifting from the political implications of popular participation, the liberal tradition drew a link between individual psychology and vulnerability to communist manipulation (see for example, Almond 1954). Again strongly influenced by the liberal political tradition, scholars were increasingly concerned about the lack of capacity of the general population for democratic politics. Political sociology provided prolific empirical studies into political attitudes that summarised the primary characteristics of citizens from the lower socioeconomic categories as not only displaying a lack of interest in politics, but, more importantly, harbouring ‘widespread non-democratic or authoritarian attitudes’ (Pateman [1970] 1999: 3). This led many in the liberal tradition to conclude that the ‘classical’ view of a democratic person (capable of participating in decision-making processes) was unrealistic and increased participation would lead to instability of the current system (see for example, the work of Almond, Seymour Martin Lipset and Schumpeter). The liberal tradition, therefore, drew a link between the ‘authoritarian’ personality traits in the ‘masses’ and the attraction to communism. For example, Lipset’s Political Man (1963) adumbrates the link between education, socio-economic status and national development and a tendency toward authoritarianism and an attraction to communist ideology. The average person on the street was, the argument suggests, simply not equipped for participation in the political system.

In general, with their focus on the totalitarian character of Marxist-inspired communist experiments and their juxtaposition of totalitarian communism with representative democracy, these scholars challenged Marxism’s relevance in democratic conceptions of social transformation. One of the enduring legacies of the liberal tradition’s treatment of Marxism is that it narrowed the discussion of democracy to mean representative, electoral democracy, conflating participatory democracy with vanguard democracy and thus dismissing it as a form of authoritarianism. While the liberal tradition’s positioning of communism against representative democracy was largely an ideological tool to delegitimate Marxism, it also served to highlight the contradictory notion of democracy within the Marxist tradition. It also had the further effect of appropriating representative democracy as a liberal invention, distancing representative democracy from radical, egalitarian politics. The liberal characterisation, however, provoked responses from a range of scholars within the Marxist tradition that provided critique of Marxism (and communism) and reintroduced the importance of democracy for Marxism.