Marx at the Polls: Recovering the Democratic Potential of Emancipatory Surveys

• In Event: Critical Theory in/as Political Science: Past, Present, Future

Abstract

Democratic theory has an uneasy relationship to political polling and experiments. On the one hand, survey techniques have been crucial to the emergence of a scientific understanding of public opinion, providing data for social science research, and a critical source of information for political parties and governments (Althaus 2000). On the other hand, as survey methods have grown in their sophistication and power, so too have the dangers of elite manipulation (Beerbohm 2020; Disch 2021). These tensions are only amplified by democratic reformers embracing innovations like Deliberative Polling with the aim of improving “the conditions under which the ‘will of the people’ develops” rather than “taking preferences as given” (Fishkin 2018, 2). What are the ethics and limits of using surveys and experiments to shape public opinion in a mass democracy? Is it possible for these methods to be deployed as a means for political transformation without falling prey to the charge of manipulation?

In this paper, we offer a fresh perspective on these questions from an unconventional source: the 1880 “Worker’s Inquiry” questionnaire found in the later writings of Karl Marx. We reconstruct Marx’s novel approach to survey methods and argue for its democratic potentials as a citizen-led, respondent-driven “emancipatory experiment”. Marx held that the process of completing the 101-question survey could itself trigger class consciousness. Workers would gain a critical awareness of their exploitation, a sense of solidarity with other workers, and an acknowledgement of the tasks of social, political, and economic transformation incumbent upon them. The survey, which was distributed to 25,000 French workers, would simultaneously generate empirical knowledge about French garment workers and initiate the process of transforming them into a revolutionary proletariat. Importantly, this change would not be imposed from the outside but generated internally, through updated self-understandings of workers themselves.

Adapting Marx, we theorise a mode of emancipatory experiments : surveys and polls that simultaneously capture the public’s current attitudes and initiate a process of self-transformation. We connect these emancipatory experiments to a mode of “activist scholarship” (cf. Davis and Mitchell 2022) that aims to recover the radical impulses behind social-science techniques. Specifically, we identify five distinctive advantages of emancipatory surveys and polls: (1) formation of political self-consciousness; (2) organisation and mobilisation of constituencies with shared interests; (3) amelioration of the status quo bias; (4) generation of mass deliberations complementary to mini-public exercises; and (5) rejuvenation of communicative power.

The paper begins with a review of recent literature on techniques and experiments in surveys and polls, identifying the ethical concerns that such studies raise from a normative perspective and discussing one common response to concerns about bias: mitigating researchers’ influence and observer effects in ways that align with the principles of social-scientific objectivity. In the paper’s second section, we sketch the context of Marx’s survey: the ideologically fluid and politically uncertain environment of late-nineteenth-century European socialism. Subsequently, we develop a detailed analysis of Marx’s survey itself, recovering Marx’s intentions and reconstructing the design of the questionnaire. Finally, we describe and defend the advantages of emancipatory experiments. Marx’s remarkable survey, we conclude, offers a new model for experimental research that strengthens deliberative practices and democratic institutions.

Authors

• Charles Clavey, Harvard University

• Sean W.D. Gray, Memorial University of Newfoundland