>"...vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic republic
>and has no suspicion that it is precisely in this last form of state of
>bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a
>conclusion..."
Isn't he talking about the form democracy takes or as it's presented to people (much in the same way advanced capitalist countries have bourgeois democracy and present this as the millenium in political forms), rather than simply dissing democracy as such?
Try reading these:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/04/bakunin-notes.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-speech.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
>This is pretty slippery and very unclear, and it's practically all KM ever
>said about the topic.
See above. And he isn't easy to read.
>One presumes he's trying to say that formal democracy
>(laws, legislatures, courts, rules, votes, human rights codes) must be
>accompanied by substantive democracy (participation and information), that
>form alone is not enough. But to call formal democracy "vulgar" is pretty
>damned dangerous, and to remain so cryptic about the
>necessary-but-not-sufficient status of voting and formal procedures is also
>hardly cutting-edge democracy.
He calls it vulgar in the same sense there are "vulgar Marxists". What's so dangerous about that?
>This is as close to a central topic as you could get, if you're a Marxist.
Actually, the central topic involves classes, not so much democracy as such.
>So, don't we have to make major upgrades here? KM left us little on this,
>and what he left is barely useful, at best.
What exactly were you expecting, a blueprint for the Perfect Democracy?
Todd