Democracy as a Site for Class-Struggle

The Marxist movement's concern with the form of government has been almost entirely instrumentalist in character: which form of government in bourgeois society best serves the interest of the working class in its struggle for the transcendence of this society. The purpose of the present paper is to argue that, at least in the context of a society like ours, this is too limited a perspective on the question of democracy. Much more is at stake for the working class movement in defending democracy than merely the freedom to organise. The struggle over the form of government, far from being distinct and secondary to the struggle to alter the class-nature of the state, is in fact intimately enmeshed with the latter, so that one cannot talk of the one without talking of the other