“The first step in the revolution by the working class”, wrote Marx in the Communist Manifesto, “is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy”.
Thus the 1888 English translation supervised by Engels.
A literal translation of the 1848 German text would be something like: “the first step in the workers’ revolution is the elevation of the proletariat to the ruling class, the winning of democracy”. Hal Draper commented, fairly I think, that the 1848 text is “cryptic” as “a way of intentionally avoiding a definite statement” on whether democracy (meaning government decided by free vote under universal suffrage, and without a monarchy standing above it, then as yet won nowhere) was separable from workers’ rule or not.
Marx and Engels never backed down from the fight for formal democracy (free elections, etc.) but came to argue that it is possible for the capitalist class to tame it.
Workers’ rule will require a more fluid system of democracy, pioneered by the Paris Commune and more thoroughly expressed by the workers’ councils of 1917: merger of the legislative and the executive, right of recall of representatives, all officials on workers’ wages. It needs an underpinning of social equality so that workers can actually use their formal political rights.
Stable capitalist states can tame formal democracy by:
• The unelected state machine (top officials, etc.) who filter and shape what may be voted on in elected assemblies, and its implementation. At the extreme, the military part of the unelected state machine can override formal democracy, but the system has many more subtle filters
• The influence of well-financed lobbyists and established capitalist institutions on elected governments.
The un-radical Labour prime minister of 1964-70, Harold Wilson, in his memoirs, described in his memoirs the government’s course as being “forced” through meetings with the Governor of the Bank of England “into the adoption of Tory policies”.
Capitalists have an economic “dictatorship” in big industry and the banks which can offset the ideals of an elected government.
• The influence of money and media access on elections: only the well-off, or already well-established parties, can afford to run campaigns with the profile and visibility to gain credibility with workers worn out from their daily labour and trained from childhood into lack of political confidence
• The lack of accountability: once members of the elected assembly are in place, they are there for four or five years, with very limited accountability
• Political parties formed by workers and their allies to change the system become bureaucratised and their top layers, with living conditions like managers’, are seduced into managing the system.