The British Context

In the summer of 1896, London hosted the fourth meeting of the International Workers Congress, also known as the Second International. The chairman for the meeting was Henry Hyndman, the founder of Britain’s first socialist party, the Social Democratic Federation.Footnote ² This edition of the socialist congress stood out, according to its participants, because of its exceptionally confrontational and tumultuous sessions. One of the main objects of contention was whether political action was admissible and, if so, under what conditions. Building on a resolution already taken at a previous meeting of the Congress in Zurich, members decided to expel all those who did not believe in the necessity of political action for the advancement of socialism, which amounted to the expulsion of most anarchist delegates.Footnote ³ But even with the anarchists gone, and the necessity of political action established, the meeting remained disputed. Delegates could not agree on the means through which to carry out political action and, more specifically, they conflicted over whether the referendum and the initiative ought to be considered part of the toolkit of social democratic politics. One of the fiercest exchanges took place over the question of direct popular legislation. Although this was not the only time the referendum was debated by socialist parties, having been included in the Erfurt Program by the German SPD already in 1891, it was the first occasion in which it rose to absolute prominence.Footnote ⁴ Part of the reason why it acquired such relevance this time, is because the London Congress came at the end of a decade-long fight, carried out within the British socialist movement, over the meaning of democracy and majority rule for socialist politics, which was mediated and catalyzed precisely by the question of direct popular legislation.

The context for this longstanding disagreement between members of British socialism is to be found in the recent, but also exceptionally fractious, history of the labor movement in Britain. Although characterized by an early and relatively successful radical tradition, best exemplified by the Chartist movement, British progressive politics was late to join the international socialist movement. And notwithstanding the fact that Marx and Engels’ spent much of their time in London, it was not until Hyndman plagiarized Marx’s ideas and popularized them in several widely circulating pamphlets that Marxism started to take hold among the British working classes.Footnote ⁵ The best known of such pamphlets, titled The Textbook for Democracy: England for all was published in January 1881, as a platform upon which to launch the Social Democratic Federation, which was officially founded on June 7, 1881 and counted among its members Eleanor Marx and William Morris.Footnote ⁶ One of the main points of this platform was “the advancement of democracy, and the reference of all questions to the people.”Footnote ⁷ The official organ of the SDF was a weekly newspaper called Justice, from whose pages the most important members of the party developed and popularized an understanding of democracy irreducible to parliamentary representation, requested triennial parliaments, universal suffrage, land nationalization, collectivization of exchange and distribution, home-rule for Ireland and self-rule for the colonies.Footnote ⁸ These policy proposals, alongside a robust defense of direct legislation, were encapsulated in the pamphlet Socialism made plain, which was published in 1883 and effectively became the most exhaustive overview of the SDF’s political vision. In it, Hyndman and his colleagues argued that democracy required “legislation by the people, in such guise that no project of law shall become legally binding until accepted by the majority of the people.”Footnote ⁹

The initial enthusiasm that met the formation of the first British socialist party did not last long. In a matter of just a few years, the party was accused of opportunism when it became clear that it had accepted money from the Tory Party to finance candidates to the 1885 election, with the aim of splitting the liberal vote.Footnote ¹⁰ This scandal, alongside several internal disagreements about parliamentary strategy as well as Hyndman’s personality, led prominent members to leave the party and form an alternative organization, the Socialist League, which situated itself to the left of the SDF, rejected parliamentarism and advocated for “direct sovereignty.”Footnote ¹¹ Among its members, two are particularly notable for their critique of parliamentarism and defense of direct legislation, which they wrote about on the pages of the League’s weekly newspaper Commonweal. John Sketchley was a major figure in the movement and effectively the theorist of “direct sovereignty.” Himself a socialist activist, he rose to fame as the author of two widely circulated essays, titled respectively Principles of Social Democracy, which came out in 1879, and the later Shall the People Govern Themselves?.Footnote ¹² In these essays, he sketched out a vision of democracy predicated on the principle of direct popular legislation, as inspired by ideas put forward by French socialist thinkers in the early 1850s. Another major figure to have joined the Socialist League was Edward Belfort Bax. A committed Marxist and anti-reformist, his vision combined Comte’s positivism and a good dose of Hegelian idealism to explore the relationship between direct popular legislation, majority rule, and class politics.Footnote ¹³

As these remarks should have made clear, the SDF and the Socialist League disagreed on the specifics of parliamentary politics and institutional design, but they fundamentally agreed to condemn the existing parliamentary system and envisage a future in which the realization of socialism demanded the workers’ direct participation in the legislative process. And when the Socialist League was taken over by the anarchists, Bax and Sketchley were happy to return to the ranks of the SDF.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the SDF and the Socialist League’s defense of popular legislation was hotly contested by the nascent Fabian Society. While not organized as a party, the Fabian Society was populated by some of the better-known socialist intellectuals of the time, including Beatrice and Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw. Unlike Hyndman and Sketchley, the Fabians believed in the fundamental adequacy of the British constitutional system for the attainment of socialist ends and dismissed demands to expand the scope of democracy to include the referendum and the initiative as mistaken. The Fabians’ opposition to plans for direct popular legislation was mostly articulated by the Webbs, who extensively attacked the referendum on the grounds that modern politics requires expert knowledge, which could only be offered by trained bureaucrats and elite political figures. This position was presented in some of their best-known books, including in their coauthored and field-shaping study of trade union politics, Industrial Democracy (1897), and in Sydney Webb’s lecture series titled The Machinery of Democracy (1896), as well as in several other articles and essays, some of which are collected in Fabian Essays on Socialism (1889). Another prominent critic of the referendum was George Bernard Shaw, who advanced the idea of charismatic leadership in the guise of a superman, as iconically captured in his play Man and Superman (1903). Shaw’s opposition to direct legislation went as far as to push him to write a full pamphlet, titled A Report on Fabian Policy, to try and persuade the meeting of the 1896 London Congress that the referendum, as well as all other plans for direct popular legislation, had to be rejected.Footnote ¹⁵

Before delving into the details of these disagreements, and how they informed and shaped socialist understandings of democracy, it is necessary to introduce one last group, that came to play a major role in the debate over the referendum at the time of the International Congress in London: the editorial board of The Clarion, a weekly newspaper loosely connected with the newly founded Independent Labor Party (ILP), but alternative to its official organ Labor Leader. The main figures behind The Clarion were Robert Blatchford and Alex Thompson, both of whom were journalists and activists, who, thanks to firsthand experience, had grown disenchanted with parliamentary politics and political representation. Their contribution to the debate on direct popular legislation came in two forms. First, Blatchford started a campaign called “real democracy,” in which he theorized the incompatibility between leadership and democracy and demanded the substitution of delegation for representation in parliament. This campaign then morphed into a more radical set of demands: the abolition of parliament, parties, and party leaders, and the institution of a system organized entirely around direct popular legislation. This second set of demands was mostly developed by Thompson in articles for The Clarion and in three widely circulated pamphlets: Hail the Referendum! (1895), The Referendum and Initiative in Practice (1899), and The Only Way to Democracy (1900). Blatchford and Thompson’s campaign for “real democracy” became the most complete and thorough theorization of the necessary interconnection between direct popular legislation and socialism, both in its revolutionary battle against bourgeois politics and in its post-revolutionary organization.Footnote ¹⁶

The Compatibility between Socialism, Democracy, and Parliamentary Representation

With the expulsion of the anarchist faction from the International, it became clear that most socialist forces around Europe favored some form of political action. However, political action was itself an ambiguous concept, whose interpretation sparked an increasingly animated debate. Did political action amount to accepting bourgeois parliamentarism, or did it require pushing for alternative forms of political organization? Were socialist parties to maintain their revolutionary ideals or were they to accept a more gradual reformist approach? The reform controversy that animated the German Social Democratic Party is a particularly well-known example of the almost existential character of such questions.Footnote ¹⁷ British socialism went through its own version of this controversy, one in which the question of outright revolutionism was to remain marginal, in favor of a more moderate discussion of what political institutions – what type of democracy – would best serve the advancement of socialist ideals.

Amongst the most vocal and articulate defenders of the appropriateness of parliamentarism and electoral representation for socialist politics were members of the Fabian Society. Although never organized into a party, they shared a commitment to what they called “practical socialism,” a version of socialist politics that prized above all constructive engagement with legislation and administration, with the stated goal of improving the conditions of the working classes in concrete and measurable terms. As Shaw put it in Tract 41, the aim was “setting to work by ordinary political methods, and having done with vague exhortations to Emancipate the Workers.”Footnote ¹⁸ This approach derived from their outright rejection of Marxist historical materialism, and the teleological understanding of history that came with it, as well as from their proximity to British liberal radicalism and the ideas of John Stuart Mill.Footnote ¹⁹ More specifically, they embraced what came to be known as a “gradualist” approach to socialism, whereby political demands had to be worked out from within the existing frame of bourgeois parliamentary politics. Their program, as per their 1887 Manifesto, well reflects the distinctiveness of such a gradualist approach. Encouraged by the expansion of the franchise achieved by the Reform bills of 1884 and 1885, the Fabians demanded female suffrage, the redistribution of resources through progressive taxation, the democratization of municipal government, limited plans for railway nationalization, land reform, compulsory education, and home rule for Ireland. All this, they believed, could successfully be achieved by what Sydney Webb called “the machinery of democracy,” that is, parliamentary representation. However, the role and purchase of socialist participation in parliamentary politics was conceived differently by different members of the Fabian Society, and especially by Sydney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, as well as the leadership of the ILP. These differences, although ultimately secondary to the Fabians’ positioning in the wider context of the International, were of capital importance for their antagonists at home, who developed distinctive critiques of each and used them to build their own attack against parliamentarism and construct their defense of the referendum and direct popular legislation.

Possibly the most theoretically inclined member of the Fabian Society, Sydney Webb offered a widely articulate answer to the question of the suitability of democracy for socialism. This was best explored in a series of six lectures he gave in 1896, reports of which were published in Fabian News. The lecture series was organized in two parts, the first attacking mistaken accounts of democracy’s relation to socialism, the second presenting a positive case for his theory of social democracy. His starting point was a thoroughgoing criticism of what he fortunately branded as “primitive expedients” in democratic theory: government by public meeting, popular appointment of administrative officers and their rotation in office, the referendum and initiative. These themes laid the foundations for the more developed attack that he would wage, alongside Beatrice Webb, against “primitive democracy” the following year in Industrial Democracy.Footnote ²⁰ Reading the two sets of writings together, it becomes clear that, according to the Webbs, democracy was primitive whenever it rejected the principle of the division, and consequently of the specialization, of labor. This alone was the defining characteristic of modern politics which, unlike in ancient times, was fundamentally complex and, as such, required expertise to be dealt with. More specifically, experiments with government by public meeting in Switzerland and in numerous trade unions had demonstrated that these assemblies would systematically end up being controlled by either wealthy families (like in the Swiss case) or by officials (as in the trade unions). Similarly, people were not well-suited to choose officers and administrators, as they would select “the most known man” instead of “the best man.” And once chosen, there was no point in rotating offices, as the regular change of tasks would prevent specialization and the development of the expertise needed to run a modern society. Last, the Webbs recognized that the referendum and the initiative had their partisans in Britain and in the International but argued that these proposals were based on the misleading assumption that the people knew what they wanted, and that they could effectively choose between complex policy options. In Webb’s words, partisans of primitive democracy could not understand the fundamental insight of modern politics, that is, that “Society implies division of labor, and legislation is as much a distinct craft as shoemaking. The wise man chooses his shoemaker according to results; he does not prescribe by what particular device the shoe shall be made to fit.”Footnote ²¹

It is indeed to honor this insight that Sidney Webb based his account of “The Machinery of Democracy,” and later Industrial Democracy, upon the need for technical and political expertise. As the final three lectures go to show, Webb believed that legislation required specialists to both draft and execute laws. In the case of law-making, the expert needs to be an elected representative. Differently from a delegate, the representative is tasked with “ascertaining what are the ills from which his constituents suffer, and to devise the remedy for them […] it is the duty of the representative to teach his constituents as well as to learn from them.”Footnote ²² This passage highlights Webb’s understanding of the relationship connecting the expert representative to his constituents: while the latter offer the raw material upon which to exercise expertise, the representative remains in charge of deciding what is in the best interest of the constituents, who can then approve or disapprove of their actions. Although Webb had doubts about the people’s capacity to evaluate the representative’s actions, this mechanism of accountability remained nonetheless important to prevent corruption and abuses of power. As he put it, the expert representative “must be controlled by the electors, that is, by amateurs, [but] this is by no means an easy matter.”Footnote ²³ On the other hand, the hugely important task of administration and execution should be assigned to non-representative and non-elected experts, whose selection criteria is “their expertness only, and other experts are the only persons who can test this.”Footnote ²⁴ This level of expertise would only be reached through rigorous training and exposure to the specific demands of the job, hence why “their places should be permanent and their pay sufficient.”Footnote ²⁵ Expertise thus played out at all levels of politics: in legislation, through elected representatives, in administration, through unelected administrators, and in popular politics through the educational role of the politicians themselves, who would instruct the ignorant masses through their actions and propaganda. In other words, socialist politics, like any type of modern politics, had to fully embrace the machinery of democracy, which in turn meant accepting and fostering the accountable rule of experts in a context of unavoidable division and specialization of labor. The workers would themselves participate in the machinery by carrying on their daily specialized tasks, and voting representatives into office at regular, but not too close, intervals. After all, Webb believed that “society is an organism: each cell in the organism should be specialized to do its own work.”Footnote ²⁶

George Bernard Shaw shared the Webbs’ attack against primitive democracy and, very much like other members of the Fabian Society, opposed the SDF’s and the International’s fascination with the referendum and the initiative. He, too, believed the advancement of socialism to be compatible with parliamentary politics and representative institutions but argued for a different understanding and role for the representative. One that combined training and technical expertise of the likes depicted by Webb, with a vitalistic, almost Nietzschean account of the “Super Man”—he called this vision “Life philosophy.” Unlike the Webbs, Shaw did have reservations as to the daily functioning of the machinery of democracy, which he believed to be easily bogged down by partisan arguments and factional strife. He also doubted the value of universal suffrage, on the grounds that most of the population was fundamentally incapable of choosing good leaders. As he put it in the appendix to his famous 1903 play Man and Superman, the extension of the franchise had simply substituted “election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”Footnote ²⁷ His solution to widespread ignorance was to defend the idea that the representatives and all those in charge of the running of politics ought to be not simply experts, that is, educated and trained individuals. By contrast, he believed they had to be ‘supermen,’ by which he meant individuals whose intelligence was above the standard of the average man, and whose strength could be guaranteed by selective breeding. As he later put it “the legislator and the ruler should … be as unrepresentative of Everyman as possible, short of being inhuman.”Footnote ²⁸ From a practical point of view, this would entail preserving elections, as Shaw was very much aware that, once suffrage had been established, it could not be taken away. However, the threshold to run for election would be extremely high: there would be an examination, and only the top 5% of those who passed it would be selected and allowed to run for elections. In such way, the ignorance of the average voter would be compensated for by the exceptional talent and superman-like qualities of the candidates. A necessary consequence of such provision was the abolition of political parties, which were not apt to foster the superman’s qualities and decisions. Furthermore, Shaw believed that the machinery of parliamentary politics had to be reformed to look more like municipal government, to make the most of the qualities of the supermen representatives.

This vision of political representation had obvious elitist dimensions and it resonated with recent experiences in charismatic politics, including Louis Napoleon’s imperialism and the plebiscitary proposals of General Boulanger in France. These, as telling examples of plebiscitarianism and strongman politics, were very much part of socialist preoccupations across the Second International. And yet, Shaw was not alone to argue in favor of exceptional leadership. Even before the publication of Man and Superman, the newly founded ILP had started debating the importance of leadership for socialist politics, and it did so by explicit reference to Shaw’s writings. Partly, this was due to the experience in leadership of the party’s founder Keir Hardie, who himself defended an elitist, mostly Fabian, vision of political representation and would not agree to leave the party leadership and democratize its internal structures.Footnote ²⁹ But it was also, in equal part, a principled defense of the need for charisma and exceptional talent in carrying out the socialist struggle within the gradualist confines of British parliamentary politics. The clearest statement of such a push for leadership can be found in a series of articles published by A. H. Samuel (penname: Marxian) in the party’s newspaper, aptly called Labour Leader. In one such columns, Marxian wrote that British socialism was awaiting “a man strong in the pride of birth or in the conquest of fortune, a man destined to play the great card in the grand style; and the people will follow him to Social Democracy as they never followed one of their own class.”Footnote ³⁰ This statement well exemplifies the extent to which the editorial board of Labour Leader, its founder Keir Hardie and other prominent figures in the ILP, were comfortable not only with charismatic leadership, but also with the idea that it would be absurd to be “the sort of “Democrat” who seeks definite and helpful advice from such a mob” of “clod-pated bundles of nerves and appetites that constitute the human product of the Capitalist system.”Footnote ³¹ It is thus no surprise that the Fabian and Fabian-adjacent embrace of political representation, expertise, and gradualist parliamentary politics would be seen by many as “essentially an aristocratic creed,” and one that had to be attacked and dismantled for true social democracy to triumph.

The Alternative Vision: Democracy and Parliamentarism are Incompatible

The Fabian and ILP’s gradualist account of democratic socialism sparked the ire of the more radical wings of the British socialist movement, who developed an alternative understanding of socialism’s relation to democracy. The backbone of this alternative vision was the rejection of gradualism and parliamentary politics. These, it was argued, returned a distorted image of the will of the majority and, as such, were a violation of individual sovereignty and a rejection of real political pluralism. But before exploring the details of this argument, it is important to establish a clear overview of its theoretical foundations, which are to be traced back to an individualistic account of freedom and sovereignty.

Indeed, the starting point of the radicals’ attack on Fabian parliamentarism is the notion of sovereignty. Unlike most socialist and Marxist thinkers on the continent, Hyndman, Thompson, and their colleagues extensively relied on this concept. The main intuition was not different from basic ideas circulating in Europe at least since the 1789 French Revolution, namely that the source of legitimate political authority resides in the people and cannot be separated from them. Sovereignty is, in other words, inalienable. However, they interpreted it on an entirely individualistic basis. As Sketchley had made clear in his 1884, Principles of Social Democracy, “all authority comes from that aggregation of individuals we term the people.”Footnote ³² In other words, popular sovereignty is nothing but the sum of individual sovereignties. This way of thinking about the source of political authority had several conceptual implications. The most important was to deny any ascription of sovereignty to abstract or collective entities, be it a unitary understanding of the people or the nation. This is because, if sovereignty resides in the individual and is inalienable by definition, it cannot be transferred to any other entity that claims a status different from, or superior to, that of the single individual. Sketchley explained the impossibility of scaling up sovereignty from the individual to the nation in two interrelated ways. The first is to appeal to Rousseau and his argument according to which the “will” can never be alienated. Citing Rousseau almost verbatim, he stated that “No one can transfer to another his life – nor his power to think or speak. Will cannot be transferred”.Footnote ³³ The second reason why popular sovereignty can never be anything more than the sum of individual sovereignties is that he denied the metaphysical existence of a collective entity that is separate and qualitatively distinct from its members. It follows that we have no reasons to delegate—or as Sketchley would have it—alienate individual sovereignty to a collective body, be it “the people” or “the nation,” because “that which cannot be done by an individual cannot be done even by a nation, since the nation is but an aggregation of individuals.”Footnote ³⁴ From these reflections, Sketchley concluded that the source of authority of political decisions could only be found in the “sovereignty of the people, of the living people, the collective and present will of all the adult members of the nation.”Footnote ³⁵

Having posited that the only legitimate source of political authority is the aggregate of individual wills, the next step was to ask how it could be effectively expressed. Unanimity was the ideal, but Sketchley and his colleagues were aware that it was impossible in a context of class antagonism, where the material conditions and interests separating the property owners from the working classes were such to make genuine agreement unattainable and, in fact, undesirable. The alternative option was majority rule, insofar as it respected individual sovereignty and, at the same time, seemed compatible with a Marxist reading of social relations: not only did it help visualize class conflict, but it also had the potential of allowing the working classes to outvote the bourgeoisie by the simple fact that they outnumbered it in the general population. Of course, there was no guarantee this would be the case, as French elections in the Second Republic had abundantly demonstrated, but this said more about elections (as a means of collecting votes) than it did about majority rule—more on this later. Absent unanimity, Sketchley and his colleagues at Justice and The Clarion agreed to see in the majority principle the only legitimate decision-making procedure to express the individual wills of all adult members of the nation and push forward the socialist agenda. Of course, the conditio sine qua non for majority rule to be a meaningful expression of individual sovereignty was universal suffrage.

As mentioned in the previous section, universal suffrage (including women’s voting rights) had been a standard demand of the Second International since its foundation. Not only that, but in the British context, the Chartist movement had been demanding universal suffrage since the 1840s. In many ways, there is nothing new to the editors of Justice and The Clarion agitating for equal political rights. What set their campaign apart from other, more liberal, movements was its ambiguous relation to the practice of universal suffrage. On the one hand, they recognized its absolute necessity in order to even begin to talk about democracy, and as such defended and demanded it on a regular basis: “adult suffrage is really the only logical outcome of any argument in favor of the extension of the suffrage at all. Those who make the wealth of the country have the right, if anybody has, to vote as to how it should be governed.”Footnote ³⁶ On the other hand, however, they were very much aware that, whenever experimented with, universal suffrage had not necessarily served the needs and hopes of the socialist movement. As Thompson scathingly put it, it is a mistake to think that “the franchise is a kind of Alladin’s ring which, being rubbed, summons the good geni who can confer on them every favor asked.”Footnote ³⁷ The obvious case in point was the French Second Republic of 1848 which established, as its first act, universal male suffrage. However, vote after vote, popular participation to electoral politics returned conservative majorities in parliament to the point that conservative representatives felt legitimate enough to pass, in May 1850, a law that effectively abolished the republic’s greatest achievement—universal male suffrage—by introducing taxing residency requirements to the exercise of the right to vote.Footnote ³⁸ But also the subsequent trajectory of late nineteenth century politics demonstrated that the

Recent history had amply demonstrated that universal suffrage, although necessary, was not enough to express and aggregate individual sovereignties in a meaningful way. This conclusion, backed as it was by contemporary politics, demanded, however, further investigation. More specifically, Thompson, Hyndman, and Blatchford wanted to find the specific reasons why universal suffrage could not satisfactorily express individual sovereignty and concluded that it had little to do with universal suffrage per se, which as mentioned above, was a core democratic idea. Instead, it had everything to do with the specific institutional and procedural context in which universal suffrage operated. Their attention thus turned to discussing how parliamentary politics, alongside elections, political representation, and political leadership, effectively voided the majoritarian import of universal suffrage. In other words, their focus shifted to attacking any account defending the democratic nature of parliamentary politics, and especially those meant to prove its compatibility with the goals of socialism, that is, the gradualist approach espoused by the Webbs, but also by Shaw and Hardie. The attack started from the very idea of elections.

Thompson made clear that socialists ought to beware of equating the results of electoral participation with the popular will, let alone with the expression of the will of the majority. As he put it in one of his articles on The Clarion,

The reason why elections were so easy to mistake for an oracle were manifold, but they all somehow had to do with the fact that, under conditions of universal franchise, they could easily be presented as the simple and direct expression of the will of the people. Of course, Thompson claimed, they were not—no electoral vote returned a perfect mirroring of the voters’ preferences. He offered several arguments to prove his point. First, the result of any election was always filtered by an electoral law, which necessarily distorted the process of expressing preferences by aggregating them according to a specific criterion. The result is that, more often than not,

In other words, no election ever simply expresses the will of the majority, because whatever majority comes out of an election is never just the simple counting of votes at 50% plus one. Second, elections always rely on the bundling together of a given number of issues. As a result, elections force voters to accept a whole set of provisions, some of which one might not approve of, but are obliged to vote for as part of a least-worst logic. The fact that electors “are driven to adopt half-a-dozen [principles] which they bitterly disapprove” proved unacceptable to Thompson and his colleagues: it showed that elections worked with a fictional rendition of what the majority principle was, a gross approximation, and one that they were not ready to accept.Footnote ⁴² Furthermore, precisely because elections make it impossible to express preferences on each single issue, and because, as a result, representatives are unaccountable as to whether they pursue each issue in their program, elections tend to push citizens into voting for individuals instead of for the ideas they allegedly support. And even these individuals, they do not get a real chance to choose, as they are all selected by the same elite and pledged to serve their interests as opposed to those of the workers who vote for them:

Last, for all the reasons mentioned above and contrary to what Fabians, and especially the Webbs, believed at the time, electoral competition was not a desirable form of political education for the working masses, who were taught to delegate their judgment to representatives and would benefit instead from being trained in deciding for themselves. Thompson put it rather bluntly: “the whole system of election is calculated to discourage [the people] from ever thinking about anything.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Elections were thus a distorted manifestation of universal suffrage, and a falsified expression of the will of the majority or, as Thompson put it, “a sham”Footnote ⁴⁵ . Yet elections were just an aspect of a much wider problem, which had to do with the very structure of parliamentary representation and its bend in favor of expertise and a highly selective account of political competence. Even before fully embracing direct popular legislation, leaders of the SDF and the Socialist League agreed that political representation, as institutionalized in the British parliament (and in all other parliaments) was in tension with the democratic ideal of individual sovereignty. As Thompson put it:

Representation, as realized in parliament, was indeed problematic on many grounds, but they all ultimately reflected the domination of the bourgeoisie over the people—as explicitly theorized by bourgeois thinkers like Mill, or implicitly by the Webbs through their theory of political expertise. Both accounts, ultimately, favored the election of notables and members of the upper classes and, as a result, filled parliament with enemies of the workers. This played out in two ways.

It only allowed the members of the upper classes to run for elections, and these, because of their class affiliation, would never be able to understand the needs and demands of the working classes. Offering a theory that resonates with a form of class determinism, Sketchley and Thompson argued that:

Second, the Fabians and other enemies of the people cultivated a vision of parliamentary representation that systematically downplayed the political power of the working classes and aimed to thwart it by fostering a hierarchy of competences, best exemplified by the Webbs’s theory of the division of labor. This, Blatchford and Thompson argued, inevitably resulted in yet another version of class rule. Thompson cites French socialist George Renard to underscore that “the parliamentary system is the natural expression of an aristocratic or bourgeois society wherein a portion of the citizens are rightly or wrongly held to be incapable of managing their own affairs.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The result was that parliament could only be seen as the institution fostering the rule of the bourgeoisie, or as Sketchley said, a relic of ancient feudalism, when representatives received direct mandates to pursue the interests of their respective corporation, which in the late nineteenth century amounted to those of the bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁴⁹ Having taken stock of the anti-socialist nature of political representation, Belfort Bax invited his readers to deduce that, until parliaments are abolished, “the opinion of the majority as such can have no moral claims on the allegiance of minorities or of individuals.”Footnote ⁵⁰

The final reason why the majoritarian and popular import of universal suffrage was hollowed out in a parliamentary system had to do with political leadership. According to the editors of The Clarion, bourgeois parliamentarism in general, and the gradualist version championed by Shaw and the leadership of the ILP in particular, prized the prominence of and devotion to powerful leaders in national politics above anything else. As discussed earlier, Shaw and Hardie maintained that “true democracy does not mean that the people are to rule themselves, but only that they have the power to choose who shall rule them.”Footnote ⁵¹ Reacting to this position, the editorial board of The Clarion started a long-lasting campaign against political leadership within the socialist movement, and argued that democracy, to be real, had to be “leaderless.” This is because the “never-ending audacity of elected persons,” as Walt Whitman described it, creates leaders who claim for themselves the role of masters, when all they are supposed to do is obey and “put into operation the people’s will.”Footnote ⁵² Against Shaw’s and the ILP’s defense of leadership, Blatchford retorted, under the pen name of Numquam, that what makes a decision democratically legitimate is not its outcome, but the process through which it is taken and, most importantly, the political agent who takes it.

In this sense, the very idea of leadership was antithetical to democracy, even if backed, like in the case of Napoleon III, by the plebiscitary support of the vast majority of the population. For the reasons discussed above, these majorities were false. It followed that political leadership and especially that claiming to realize socialist political goals, was an illegitimate shortcut. As Blatchford put it: as a Democrat, I will agree to no attempt to coerce the people for their own good.”Footnote ⁵³ And although Thompson recognized that the idea of a socialist Caesar, who would introduce measures of his own accord and from above, “looks very enticing,” socialists had to realize that “experience shows that such a short cut to economic freedom often proves a long road after all. We prefer, therefore, deliberately to follow the course which our name indicates, namely, that of Social DemocracyFootnote ⁵⁴ .

In other words, majorities would be legitimate only if shielded from the influence of leaders, because individuals had to decide for themselves, without trusting charismatic personalities to lead the way toward the advent of socialism. This would, eventually, prove to be “the shortest way to democracy”.Footnote ⁵⁵

To wrap this section up, for socialist thinkers writing on the pages of Justice and The Clarion, individual sovereignty demanded rescuing the majority principle from bourgeois politics, and its defenders amongst the Fabians and the leadership of the ILP. Their embrace of parliamentarism was antithetical to democracy because it relied on elections, because parliamentarism offered no meaningful representation to the working classes, and because it favored technocratic expertise and plebiscitary leadership. To all this, the only alternative was the referendum, which, alongside other measures, was the core of “real democracy.” As Dangle put it in June 1894, “the laws [ought to] be proposed by the people, discussed by the people in their workshops and clubs, and directly voted by the people. And there would be no Parliament! No politicians!”Footnote ⁵⁶

Real Democracy

Having proved that participation to elections and parliamentary representation were expressions of “essentially an aristocratic creed,” which fostered bourgeois rule disguised as either competence or leadership, socialist thinkers set out to outline their own vision of democracy. This was predicated on the idea that each individual member of society ought to be able to take their own decisions, as only the direct exercise of individual decision-making would realize their sovereignty. In Thompson’s words, “instead of electing delegates to think and talk for them, the people should talk and think for themselves, in their homes, their clubs, their workshops, and all the places where they have the opportunity of interchanging ideas.”Footnote ⁵⁷ To let the people take their own decisions meant to establish what Blatchford and Thompson called, from the columns of The Clarion, “real democracy”: the idea was that “the will of the People rule the People. I say, I trust and respect The PEOPLE. Vox Populi: Vox Dei!.”Footnote ⁵⁸ But what did the editors of Justice and The Clarion mean when they said that in a democracy “the will of the people rule[s] the people”? What were the institutional implications of this conception of democracy as direct popular rule?

Little agreement existed on the exact details of the institutional implications of such theory. Some thinkers, such as Hyndman and Blatchford, were ready to accept that it would require maintaining aspects of the parliamentary system, at least in its initial phases. Thompson argued that the goal of direct popular legislation was the complete abolition of parliaments and representation. However, they all agreed that the conditio sine qua non of “real democracy”, the institution that would single-handedly make it possible, was the referendum. In their view, it was only thanks to the referendum that each individual citizen would be able to consent to the laws that bind them in a meaningful way. As the editors of Justice stated, “that laws should be accepted by a majority of the people before becoming binding upon them … seems to be the essential bases of any true democratic system whatever.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Indeed, the referendum was the only institution that would allow for the true exercise of individual sovereignty: people would get to decide on actual issues, as opposed to trust leaders or experts; they would consider one issue at the time, as opposed to deciding on bundles of issues, as it is the case in elections; they would not delegate their power to decide to members of other classes, like it happens with parliamentary representation; and the result of a referendum vote would always and necessarily express the actual will of the majority, because it would be decided by a simple counting of preferences. But how would a system based on the referendum work, and what would be its implications?

As Thompson put it, the key tenet was that “the laws should be proposed by the people, discussed by the people in their workshops and clubs, and directly voted by the people.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The political system would thus be structured around small local assemblies, tasked with drafting legislative mandates, laws of popular initiative and voting yes or no to draft legislative proposals. The inspiration for this idea was threefold. On the one hand, it came from the writings of earlier non-Marxist socialists and left-republicans active in France in the mid-nineteenth century, especially during the French Second Republic, and after the abolition of universal male suffrage in 1850. The main figures were Moritz Rittinghausen and Victor Considerant who argued for the abolition of parliaments, representation and elections, and the institution of a system of direct popular legislation via direct votes on citizens-initiated legislative proposals.Footnote ⁶¹ This project, although ultimately unsuccessful, enjoyed an afterlife in the imagination of radical socialists, especially Sketchley and Thompson, who often directedly cited from them and relied on their ideas to think about the referendum as the key to “real democracy”.

Another important source of inspiration was the more recent experience of trade union self-government in England. At around the same time as the debate about democracy and socialism was raging, trade unions had started experimenting with techniques of internal governance that were meant to give back control of union politics to their members. Among various experiments, the initiative and the referendum took center-stage, as they were widely used, debated, and studied (including, most extensively, by the Webbs in Industrial Democracy). Opinions on their appropriateness and effectiveness varied, but they were taken by Thompson and his colleagues to be an example of collective self-government, which was able to bring together the local dimension with national-level politics.

This directly led to the third source of inspiration for “real democracy”: experiments with federal, local, and communal politics. While British supporters of the referendum never really advocated for the complete decentralization of national politics, they were certainly trying to strike a balance between acknowledging the need for policies that applied uniformly across the nation, and the democratic demands of direct popular participation which, in most cases, had to take place at the local level. In their attempt to figure out the appropriate balance between the local and the national, they rejected romantic infatuations for village-politics, and instead focused on recent cases of communal self-government. Two stood out as particularly relevant. One was Switzerland, which had only recently passed a new constitution with extensive provisions for the use of the referendum and the initiative at local, cantonal, and federal levels.Footnote ⁶² The other example, which had taken a life of its own in socialist mythologies, was the Paris Commune. Thompson, although still young, was in Paris during the Commune, and often mentioned its use of a popular army and various direct votes to demonstrate the feasibility of his plan to make popular legislation the core demand of socialist democracy.Footnote ⁶³

Each of these three precedents played a significant role in shaping the vision of “real democracy.” The latter drew elements from each and combined them into a distinct institutional proposal. Real democracy functioned as follows. At the national level, citizens would choose delegates to serve in a unicameral legislative assembly. These delegates would receive explicit legislative mandates from their constituents (as will become clear, this was not a parliament, and the delegates were not representatives.) The mandates were to be formulated and debated at the local level, in public meetings open to all citizens and modeled on trade union councils and factory workshops. Once the mandate was formulated, delegates would draft legislative proposals in line with their mandates and submit each proposal to a national referendum. In addition to proposing laws, delegates were also responsible for implementing legislation and managing its administrative consequences. However, before any national vote occurred, each legislative proposal had to be discussed locally in public assemblies, as described above. The same procedure was applied to the evaluation of the delegates’ performance in executing and administering legislation. Citizens, through local consultations, retained the right to recall any delegate if dissatisfied with their actions. Moreover, citizens organized at the local level had the ongoing opportunity to propose new legislation via popular initiatives, which would be subject to nationwide referendums. This system fundamentally differed from parliamentarism: the people controlled the legislative agenda (through mandates and initiatives) and held authority over both lawmaking and administration (through referendums and delegate recall). In essence, the people directly shaped the rules governing their lives—hence, why it was an instance of “real democracy.”

This institutional system, predicated on the radical and unfiltered exercise of popular power, implied the redefinition of some key tenets of democratic theory. First, it reframed the discourse around the meaning of political modernity and the consequent centrality of the division and specialization of labor. Unlike earlier utopian socialists, like Rittinghausen and Considerant, Thompson and his colleagues were not unaware of the extremely complex nature of politics and modern social life more generally. In this sense, they did not deny the relevance of Sydney Webb’s reflections on the division of labor. And this is why, they distanced themselves from earlier proponents of direct popular legislation: they did not believe that self-rule necessarily or primarily meant the popular drafting of norms, although the right of initiative was never discounted. Yet, unlike the Fabians who believed that the division of labor had to be applied across all spheres of life, legislation included, they believed that legislation itself was a complex and multilayered process, whose most important phases could themselves be unpacked and divided. And while the actual preparatory work of drafting legislation could be considered a specialized task, the ultimate decision over passing legislation had to rest with the entire citizenry. In other words, they were ready to accept that some division of labor applied to the legislative process, which they were happy to delegate to specialized mandataries, but they were not ready to concede that the ultimate decision could itself be the object of the division of labor.

It is indeed in this context that the idea of transforming representation into a form of delegation gained ground for Hyndman and Blatchford. They argued that even with the most extensive use of the referendum, the presence of politicians would be still required, although in a different role. In a system of direct legislation, representatives would no longer be elected “to ‘rule’, or ‘govern’, or ‘command’ the people.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Instead, their role would be limited to offering their political expertise to counsel and inform the political debate, as well as to draft legislation which would then be put to the vote of the entire population: their role would be to “give their advice or opinion honestly and earnestly, and let that advice be accepted or rejected as the majority deems fit.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As a result, the referendum would effectively turn elected representatives into mere deputies, no longer chosen “to impose their will upon the people, but to put into operation the people’s will.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This change in terminology—from representative to delegate—reflected a change in the power vested in the legislative assembly: instead of making laws to serve their class interests, they would be forced to propose laws that would encounter the approval of the majority instead. The referendum thus worked as a form of mandate on the delegates that bound them to be accountable to their constituencies. Furthermore, Blatchford and Hyndman also proposed that delegates be paid and, when chosen, pledge loyalty to their political program and sign letters of resignation in advanceFootnote ⁶⁷ .

While Blatchford, Hyndman, and Thompson accepted that modern politics required some level of specialization and division of labor, they completely rejected the main implication that the Fabians had deduced from it, that is, that legislative decision-making required high levels of technical competence and expertise. So, even though they made space for competence in the process of drafting legislation and in the debate that had to precede its approval via referendum, they rejected the idea that the common man did not have the skills and expertise necessary to decide on the substance and desirability of legislation, however complex. According to the editors of Justice, the ruling principle was “the best sense of the crowd, upon the best counsel of its best men.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This implied a redefinition of the role of expertise in politics, which was in overt contrast to all the Fabians and members of the ILP had been predicating for years. While the latter had repeatedly asserted the incompetence of the common man in complex political matters, defenders of “real democracy” argued that, however complex the issue at hand, it had to be decided by the people themselves. This was justified by reference to two arguments.

The first was that to exclude citizens from decision-making amounted to a negation of their sovereignty, or as Thompson and Blatchford liked to put it, as a concession to a dictatorial vision of politics. To make their point, they waged a campaign against the Fabians’ “caesaristic” understanding of democratic politics. They warned the Webbs that, while “imperialism of a Comtist pattern we understand […], though we do not appreciate […], a caucus of Fabian Caesars posing as expert and dictating laws to Englishmen without recourse – it makes is for to laugh!.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The second argument against competence rested on contrasting political expertise, an elitist concept by definition, with political education. In this sense, they welcomed the Fabians’ emphasis on the need to improve working-class education but criticized them for promoting an elitist view of education as the domain of expert knowledge. So, they happily admitted that “the government of the people, by the people, for the people can only be effective when the whole people is intelligently interested in the details of its own business.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Where they departed from the Fabians was that they strongly believed that the common man and woman could in fact be educated and reach a level of political competence necessary and sufficient to take informed legislative decisions on every matter arising. They also affirmed that the best tool to achieve a good level of political judgment and understanding was neither technical study nor leadership, but the practice of deliberation and decision-making offered by the regular use of the referendum. It was through the daily exercise of evaluating and choosing legislation that people would grow into educated and confident decision-makersFootnote ⁷¹ . As Thompson put it, “the most powerful and perhaps the only means of interesting men in the welfare of their country is to make them partakers in the government.”Footnote ⁷² And the result would be that, finally, legislation would reflect “the common sense of the common people.”

The most important implication of such way of thinking about democracy was to redefine the meaning of majority rule. As seen above, the majoritarian principle had long been considered part and parcel of democratic politics, but according to the radical socialists discussed in this article, its institutionalization had always been impaired by several vitiating institutional mechanisms, including the fact that electoral systems are never purely majoritarian, that in a parliamentary system, electoral platforms always bundle numerous policies together, and that electoral preferences are more often than not motivated by considerations about the person of the representative rather than about the issues at stake. It followed that majorities coming out of electoral competitions could not meaningfully express the preferences of the majority of the population, because they did not track their will appropriately. The system of “real democracy” was designed precisely to overcome this problem. To start, real democracy would have completely changed the logic of law-making. Because citizens would vote on issues, instead of people, the legislative process would be purified from all considerations that soiled it in a representative system. Votes would no longer be the expression of plebiscitary support for leaders, as personal charisma, leadership, and technical expertise would have no role to play in the final approval or rejection of legislation. As Thompson put it: “the referendum and the initiative will divert political discussion from parties and men to principles and measures, and substitute thinking for mud-slinging.”Footnote ⁷³ But it also meant that there would be fewer and simpler laws, as, unlike professional politicians, the citizens “want to understand them” and have no interest in “muddling them.” Instead, “plain, practical clearness as to every issue is sought and found.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Further, in a system based on the referendum and the initiative, votes would not only be taken on issues as opposed to people, but they would also, and most importantly, express the will of the citizens on one single issue at a time, as opposed to an entire political program, like in electoral competitions. The result was that majorities would be tracked precisely on each single issue, making them the perfect mirror of the preferences of all the individual members comprising the nation: “The referendum and the initiative, alone amongst constitutional expedients, will make the ballot express the will of the people.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, the referendum offered an entirely different way of thinking about and realizing the majority principle because the meaning of the majority formed on a direct vote would be substantially different from that of majorities formed around partisan programs in elections and then in parliament. Because votes would be frequent, and on all sorts of disparate issues, no one stable and permanent majority could ever solidify and claim to express the will of the “People”. As discussed earlier, no such metaphysical entity existed, but was only brought to life by the electoral fiction. Instead, with the frequent use of the referendum,

There would be no long-lasting majority to rule the minority, but only “the government by the whole people,” by which Thompson meant a constantly changing configuration of mobile majorities, which would perfectly track onto the citizens’ preferences on a whole array of political issues. “The voter would exercise his individuality and his judgment on each separate point of politics that cropped up, and he would hardly ever agree three times in succession with the same person”.Footnote ⁷⁷

The consequence was the full realization of a genuinely democratic system of government—one in which the people would directly decide on legislation. This development would also, and significantly, give rise to a truly pluralist form of politics. In such a system, citizens would no longer be artificially divided into fixed majorities and minorities, where the largest group could claim the right to dominate all others for the duration of an electoral cycle. Instead, individuals would be truly free and equal, never subjected to domination, because no one could credibly claim to speak for a permanent majority. In other words, the frequent use of direct popular votes—through referendums and initiatives—would represent a celebration of majority rule, as it is the only mechanism capable of precisely tallying individual preferences. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, it would also serve to neutralize the overwhelming legitimizing power that majority rule often confers on social and political domination. If implemented regularly, majority rule via referendum would, in effect, abolish itself. In its place would emerge a multiplicity of shifting majorities, each corresponding to a specific issue under deliberation. These ever-changing, intersecting majorities could not be reduced to a single, stable social bloc. Rather, they would illuminate the pluralism inherent in any genuinely democratic society. This pluralism would not only reflect the diversity of social groups and values but also capture the internal complexity of individual preferences. In this way, it articulates a distinct and original form of pluralism, one that, while resonant with elements of the broader British pluralist tradition, departs from it in significant ways. It does so by challenging the very idea that stable groupings can exist in a truly free society—where, as previously cited, “an individual is unlikely to ever agree three times in succession with the same person.”

Thus, the project of “real democracy” involved a profound redefinition of central democratic concepts, most notably majority rule, but also pluralism and democracy itself. This reimagining was ultimately grounded in the deeply utopian vision held by Thompson, Sketchley, and Blatchford, who sought to unite socialism and democracy by means of institutional design: the referendum. They believed that such a mechanism, on its own, could dissolve the material basis of class rule and inaugurate an era of social pacification. As the concluding section will illustrate, it is precisely this utopian character that explains why their vision of “real democracy”—despite succeeding in incorporating the referendum into socialist programs—was never taken seriously as a viable political agenda by the leadership of the Second International.