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What the PT in Brazil and the CPI(M) in Kerala teach us is that radical experiments in direct democracy are part of the twenty-first-century Marxist imagination. What is also particularly noteworthy of these two experiments in direct democracy is that they were spearheaded by political parties. The experiences of Brazil and Kerala suggest that Marxist political parties can transform themselves from vanguard parties to parties that champion direct democracy and representative democracy. While I have focused largely on political democracy, any attempt at achieving democratic, egalitarian, ecologically sustainable, anti-capitalist transformation requires economic democracy in conjunction with political democracy. Thus, the same systems of direct and representative democracy from the political sphere must simultaneously extend into the economic sphere where workers own and control the relations of production and make decisions about how production is organised and about the distribution of surplus. Recent events in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Argentina, Bolivia and at the grassroots in South Africa could be described as further examples of such movements in the struggle for political and economic democracy.

Notes

1 This is not an exhaustive discussion of democracy in either tradition, but rather provides a rough sketch of the way in which liberals and Marxists have viewed democracy within the Marxist tradition.

2 While representative, parliamentary and liberal democracy are often used interchangeably to refer to elected governments or parliamentary institutions, I prefer to use representative democracy to explicitly refer to systems of government in which representatives are elected by the citizenry (universal suffrage) and constitutionalism, division of powers, basic universal and civil rights such as freedom of speech (both written and spoken), the right of assembly and artistic freedom are upheld. Representatives can be there in the role of fiduciary (that is, representing general interests and able to make independent decisions in their best judgements) or delegate (that is, representing particular interests and beholden to decisions made by their constituents) (Bobbio 1987: 47–48).

3 This is not to deny earlier attempts to envision a participatory democratic society. In the 1970s the New Left also pushed the idea of direct democracy, but it did not take root in many of the movements seeking social transformation.

4 There are, of course, important exceptions to this generalisation. The point I am making is that the dominant tradition within Marxism was vanguard democracy and not direct democracy.

5 He argued against the political participation of the ‘electoral mass’, because the ‘masses’ were only capable of ‘a stampede’ (Schumpeter [1942] 1975: 283).

6 The Italian, French and Spanish Communist Parties were the main parties that made up the Eurocommunist movement.

7 Like the SACP, the CPI(M) has factions vying for power. Since the 1990s the grassroots faction has been able to win enough space to shift the party into radically democratic spaces.

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