Haiku Politics

Sunday's New York Times magazine published an article by Jim Holt titled "Export This?", in which he discusses the difficulties associated with the use of the word "democracy". He points out that the word has been used to refer to forms of government that are often radically different from one another--including some that most would actually consider dictatorial. He also points out that the American system of government differs in significant ways from the original Athenian concept of democracy. Holt writes:

The most distinctive feature of Athenian democracy, as the British political theorist John Dunn reminds us in his forthcoming book, "Democracy: A History," was its "fierce directness." Laws were made by an assembly that every full citizen had the right to attend, address and vote in as an equal. (Excluding women, resident aliens and slaves, that left about 30,000 participants.) The assembly's agenda for each meeting was decided on by a council of 500 citizens, chosen by lot. The only elected figures were military generals, and this was considered the least democratic aspect of the system.

This is clearly nothing like our own system of government. In fact, Holt writes,

Our own government, to the Athenians, would look like an elective oligarchy. In fact, it was deliberately set up to ensure, as James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share" in it.

The last point raised in the above quote is particularly salient. The US government was never intended to be a true democracy, and in fact many features of our government were designed to serve as roadblocks to thwart the implementation of the popular will. The bicameral legislature, the division of powers between executive and legislative branches, and the lack of direct election of the President (and originally the Senate as well) are all examples of this.

Holt's article does raise an important question--what is a democracy, really, and what makes a society democratic? Holt points out that the US is governed "by professional politicians". More importantly, Holt adds that

Clearly, politicians do not represent us in the sense of being like us: quite apart from some peculiar psychological characteristics common to the breed, they are older, maler, whiter and lawyers almost to a man. Ideally, though, they represent us in the sense of looking after our interests, the way a guardian represents an infant in law. Unlike an infant, we have an intermittent right to replace them with other politicians if we judge them to be ineffective in this representative role. But, owing to a byzantine division of labor, much of what politicians do is hidden away from the public eye. Moreover, in one of the more devastating theoretical arguments against democracy, Anthony Downs observed that most citizens have no economic incentive to learn enough about what politicians do to vote intelligently. Nearly half of American voters acquiesce in their infantilization by not voting at all.

Here we see Holt briefly touching on the question of economics, but only briefly. The ostensibly representative nature of our government, as Holt alludes, may not be as democratic as it claims to be. This is not only because voters have no economic incentive, as Holt suggests, to learn about what politicians do. It is also because, for one thing, the system does not operate on a fair playing field. Powerful economic interests influence governance and the electoral process, and elections themselves are limited to--in the case of the United States--a duopoly of two parties with entrenched bureaucracies and a close relationship with powerful economic interests. The range of issues available for public debate are framed and constrained by those two parties and the economic interests they represent. Voters at some level actually have a reduced incentive to participate in the political process because the political process itself is inherently unfair.

Any attempt a addressing the problem of what constitutes democracy without a class analysis is thus inherently limited in its usefulness. In reality, the question of economics is crucial. In capitalist societies, decisions having vast implications for society are left out of democratic control. The management and distribution of social resources are left in private hands, and managed for profit; furthermore, the exigencies of the marketplace result in some decisions being made without any conscious decision whatsoever. Thus the vast majority of people, largely working people who sell their labor on the marketplace, are without any say in the economic decisions that affect their lives.

Holt briefly dismisses the notion of a class analysis by referring to the Stalinist dictatorship as a failed attempt at "expressing the will of the proletariat". However, it is interesting to note that Marx and Engels looked to the Paris Commune of 1871 as the model for a proletarian society. Engels described in his 1891 Postscript to Marx's essay "The Civil War in France" the way he envisioned establishing "a new and really democratic state". Among the characteristics of such a "really democratic" state that he saw in the Paris Commune were the following:

In this first place, it filled all posts,— administrative, judicial, and educational,— by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were also added in profusion.

The goal of eliminating "place-hunting and careerism" among politicians was thus seen as a key element of such a democratic form of government. Eliminating the privileges of power, both by the right of recall at any time and by eliminating government jobs as a conduit to wealth, are seen as ways of transferring power more democratically directly to the people.

The goal of giving people democratic control over their lives can only be achieved, I would argue, in the following ways. One is to deconstruct the structures of power. This means that representative government is stripped of all the impediments to full democratic control, and bureaucracy is eliminated as much as possible. In addition, economic and political decisions should be merged into a single democratic process, in which working people own the means of production democratically while also exercising the most direct and democratic control over economic and political decisionmaking.

The Socialist Party USA describes this conceptually as "radical democracy" as the cornerstone of democratic socialism. As the party's statement of principles puts it, in its section on a "Democratic Revolution From Below":

No oppressed group has ever been liberated except by its own organized efforts to overthrow its oppressors. A society based on radical democracy, with power exercised through people's organizations, requires a socialist transformation from below. People's organizations cannot be created by legislation, nor can they spring into being only on the eve of a revolution.

They can grow only in the course of popular struggles, especially those of women, labor, and minority groups. The Socialist Party works to build these organizations democratically.

The process of struggle profoundly shapes the ends achieved. Our tactics in the struggle for radical democratic change reflect our ultimate goal of a society founded on principles of egalitarian, non-exploitative and non-violent relations among all people and between all peoples.

To be free we must create new patterns for our lives and live in new ways in the midst of a society that does not understand and is often hostile to new, better modes of life. Our aim is the creation of a new social order, a society in which the commanding value is the infinite preciousness of every woman, man and child.

It seems to me that unless we achieve this kind of radical democracy, then the ostensible "democracy" that is said to characterize American society (and other societies) is little but a charade, masquerading what is at a fundamental level a real lack of democratic involvement by the people in the decisions that affect their lives.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:59 AM | Permalink | Comments

The New York Times ran a story yesterday on the campaign by Bob Casey, Jr., for the US Senate in Pennsylvania. Despite Casey's appalling views on abortion, Democrats and liberals in the state have lined up to support him. This once again illustrates not only how morally bankrupt the Democratic Party is, but how blind to progressive issues liberals frequently are as they put their blind allegiance to the Democrats above principle.

Just as an example of how low the Democratic Party political apparatus is willing to sink, the Times reports that "the nine Democratic women in the Senate, including some of the strongest advocates of abortion rights, recently signed a letter of support that struck a similar note, describing Mr. Casey's election as "critical to our efforts of regaining the majority in the U.S. Senate." Meanwhile, the usual cabal of liberal drones among interest groups have signed up to support him:

Many supporters of abortion rights,sometimes grudgingly, sometimes led more by their minds than by their hearts, are lining up behind Bob Casey Jr., a Democratic contender for the Senate who opposes abortion rights. The invitation to a recent Casey event in Philadelphia, raising money for his campaign to unseat Senator Rick Santorum, a Republican, perhaps captured the mood. "Pragmatic Progressive Women for Casey," it declared.

The article does note that there is some anger among some liberals over this issue, including the National Organization of Women. Unfortunately, when push comes to show, NOW's membership in Pennsylvania will presumably jump on board and support Casey as well. Here we have a case where many liberals are generally, no matter how grudgingly, willing to toss one of the key civil rights issues of our time overboard in the interests of supporting their beloved party. The Times article points out that Casey was recruited by the Democratic Party leadership to run for the post! I can't help but wonder how many liberals would have supported an avowed segregationist Democrat in 1964 just for the sake of defeating a Republican? And yet, morally, this is the equivalent of what liberals are doing now in their support for Casey. More appallingly, this support for the candidate originated from the Democratic Party leadership.

I contrast the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party and its leadership with that of legitimately left wing parties. To cite just one example among many, the Socialist Party USA states in its platform plank on civil rights the following:

We demand full support for every woman's right to choose when, if, and how to have children, including the right to free abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy, without interference or coercion. Clinics providing abortion services must have the full protection of the law.

Or, to cite another example, the California Peace and Freedom Party states on its website:

We respect the right of all individuals to control their own bodies, including free abortion on demand.

This is not something that the Democratic Party can claim. Its leadership is too busy trying to create a "big tent" that includes anti-woman and anti-choice candidates.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:54 AM | Permalink | Comments

Diane Feinstein has joined the chorus of Democrats and generals calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Given her long history as a warmonger and a war profiteer, this should immediately raise a red flag to any leftist that there is something seriously wrong with how this issue is being handled. And, in fact, there is. That's because this desire to punish Rumsfeld for what is going on in Iraq completely misses the point, and, more importantly, it illustrates once again how utterly misguided the Democratic Party is with respect to the Iraq war.

The push behind getting rid of Rumsfeld is based on the notion that he has incompetently managed the war in Iraq, either by ignoring the advice of his military commander or otherwise bungling the situation. But the problem with the Iraq war is not, and never has been, that it was mismanaged. The problem is that we shouldn't be fighting the war at all. To criticize someone simply for mismanaging the war is to implicitly accept the legitimacy of the war. In fact, this is precisely the tack that Kerry used in his 2004 campaign, where he argued that he would manage the war better than Bush; Kerry would send more troops to Iraq, Kerry would use more force in Fallujah, and so on. Meanwhile, during the last week or so of his candidacy that year, after Lancet published its study on the massive human toll of the war, Kerry was silent on that issue, while instead he went on about a missing arms cache or some such nonsense--as if anyone cared. The point is that, for Kerry, the war was all about running the war competently, not about the morality of the war. This has been the typical Democratic Party approach to the Iraq War, and it is utterly contrary to the belief that antiwar movement holds that the war itself is wrong.

Punishing Rumsfeld for the war going badly would miss the point entirely. Rumsfeld would only be taking the fall for the wrong reasons, and more importantly, it would not affect Bush's presidency or his continuation of the Iraq war. And it is opposing the war as a whole, not just how it is being managed, where the antiwar movement should be focusing its energies.

Posted by The Haikuist at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

The ability of the French people, organized through mass action in the streets, to force the government to retreat on the CPE law, illustrates an important principle of the radical left--namely, that mass movements have the power to pressure governments in bourgeois democracies.

This is important because it gets to the heart of bourgeois political culture, and the myths that sustain it. The greatest myth among these is that the purest act of democratic citizenship is voting. We are told that through voting, citizens can affect change by electing representatives who will carry out the popular will. This myth is shared by both liberals and conservatives. What underlies the myth is a belief in the credibility of our political institutions, and an accompanying assumption of a genuinely democratic character that underlies them.

In reality, for activists and radicals who understand the faults in the current system, and who wish to press for social change, voting is among the least useful, and most ineffective, acts of citizenship. The reality is that our political system is governed by two capitalist parties, both of which serve the interests of the ruling class. Voting as a choice between two capitalist parties is no choice at all. Elections are as much distractions as anything else; given that bona fide radical voices are excluded from the public debate, what we have instead is a charade, masquerading as "democracy".

For liberals, this belief in the credibility of the electoral process as the chief means of accomplishing social change leads, inevitably, to support for the Democratic Party. If you have confidence in elections as a means of accomplishing change, then you must correspondingly believe that electoral victory by one of the major political parties is the vehicle for that change. Thus liberal ideology's ties to voting are intricately linked to its ties to the Democratic Party as its electoral expression.

This represents a typically top-down conception of social change. It believes that one of the governing ruling class parties, once in power, will institute social change from above by enacting legislation. But in reality, no social change is possible unless the people demand it; and it is the power of mass action, which scares the ruling classes more than anything else, which serves as the catalyst for social change. Real change comes from the bottom up.

Independent social movements have always been the most effective at accomplishing social change when they took their cause to the streets. It is pressure from below, by popular social movements, that have led to many of the reforms that we have seen in American society, from social security to civil rights. It is not the Democratic Party that we can hold responsible for having given us these reforms, but rather the American people who pressured the government into doing so--not through voting, but through mass actions, such as demonstrations and strikes.

Elections are, ultimately, largely a distraction. They distract social movements from their mission by seducing them into channeling their energies into electoral campaigns for bourgeois candidates. Thus we saw in 2004, when the antiwar movement lost momentum as many of its adherents jumped onto the Kerry bandwagon--this despite the fact that Kerry had voted for the war and was not running an antiwar campaign! How much this lost momentum cost the movement is hard to gauge, but it was only thanks to Cindy Sheehan in the following year--an activist who took her cause to the streets rather than the ballot box--that the movement was kick started again.

In France this year, all of this was made abundantly clear, as the people took to the streets and opposed the attempts at chipping away at workers' rights.

I am not arguing that the left should abandon electoral activity. On the contrary, elections are very useful, if the radical left avoids the trap of supporting bourgeois political parties, and if radical third parties use elections as a means of education and mobilization of activists. I support left wing parties when they run in elections--such as Socialists, Peace & Freedom, and sometimes the Greens. What I do think, though, is that it is important that the left not fall into the trap of accepting the legitimacy of a corrupt political system that passes itself off as "democratic", and then as a result jump onto the bandwagon of one of the parties that actively participates in that corrupt system. Real democracy will come only when we replace the current political and economic system with one in which the people institute radical democratic rule from below. Economically, this means rule of the workplace by the workers, and social planning of resources at a broader level of society. It also means establishing radical democracy as the basis of a new political system, built from the bottom up, and based on the people's organizations that arise as part of popular struggle. Only through legitimately participatory democracy that cuts through the existing bureaucratic institutions and that replaces rule by the capitalist ruling class can we find the ultimate expression of our radical demands for social change. In the meantime, we can pressure the existing ruling elite through the action of mass political movements that are independent of the two ruling parties.

Posted by The Haikuist at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments

In an article by Louis Uchitelle, published in the Sunday New York Times, titled "Seizing Intangibles for the G.D.P.", we find the following juicy little quote:

The numbers show that the profit portion of the gross domestic product has risen mildly in recent years, while the wage-and-salary share has shrunk slightly. There is evidence, however, that because of the way the G.D.P. is calculated, the actual shift is much more pronounced.

"We know that income inequality is quite substantial," said Harry J. Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown University, "and this new evidence suggests that it is worse than we thought."

The article delves into the complexities of the way the G.D.P. is calculated, specifically detailing one small change that is being experimentally proposed by the government bureau that produces the quarterly G.D.P. report. This change, involving how R&D expenditures will be calculated, has the interesting effect of exposing a fact that has been at least partially masked up to now:

This reclassification leaves no doubt that workers are being left behind as the G.D.P. expands. When R & D is counted as profit, the employee compensation share of national income drops by more than one percentage point. In a $12.5 trillion economy, that's big money.

Here we have yet further confirmation of a trend that other signs are also pointing to--namely, that in the US economy, the disparities in wealth between the riches and the rest of us are increasing. The article concludes with this comment: "Then, too, most of the nation's workers are bereft of bargaining power. Unless that returns, labor's share of national income seems likely to continue its decline."

Posted by The Haikuist at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments

Scott Ritter has written an interesting blog entry about the problems besetting the antiwar movement. One of the important points he makes is that the causes of US militarism are rooted deep in our political and economic culture, and only if the antiwar movement successfully addresses these root causes will it ever have any success. In particular, he notes that the Bush regime is plagued by widespread popular dissastisfaction over the war in Iraq--but this is only because the war has gone badly. Had the war gone well, most Americans would at this point have been fully in favor of the war.

What Ritter is criticizing is what is essentially a practical, rather than a moral, view of imperialist war adventures. Ritter is right. Only until the morality of imperialist aggression is part of the political debate in the US will Americans begin to look beyond whether a war is quick, relatively painless, and "successful". An imperialist war should be wrong whether it is quick and easy, or nasty and devolves into an unending catastrophe. The problem is that this "pragmatic" view of war--that all that matters is whether the war is managed well--is precisely what the opposition Democratic Party has been advocating in recent years. John Kerry's campaign in 2004 was all about running a more competent war than Bush was doing; Kerry would have sent more troops, would have used more force in Fallujah, would have kept better control of munitions supplies, and so forth. Kerry never ran an antiwar campaign, and yet many in the antiwar movement blindly followed lockstep in the Democratic Party path and voted for him anyway.

As Ritter says,

Take the example of Congressman Jack Murtha. A vocal supporter of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, last fall Mr. Murtha went public with his dramatic change of position, suddenly rejecting the war as un-winnable, and demanding the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While laudable, I have serious problems with Jack Murtha's thought process here. At what point did the American invasion of Iraq become a bad war? When we suffered 2,000 dead? After two years of fruitless struggle? Once we spent $100 billion?

While vocalizing his current opposition against the Iraq War, Congressman Murtha and others who voted for the war but now question its merits have never retracted their original pro-war stance. Nor have they criticized their role in abrogating the Constitutional processes for bringing our country into conflict when they voted for a war before the President had publicly committed to going to war (we now know the President had committed to the invasion of Iraq by the summer of 2002, and that all his representations to the American people and Congress about 'war as a matter of last resort' and 'seeking a diplomatic solution' were bold face lies). The Iraq War was wrong the moment we started bombing Iraq. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein is no excuse, and does not pardon America's collective sin of brooking and tolerating an illegal war of aggression.

The reality is, had our military prevailed in this struggle, the American people for the most part would not even blink at the moral and legal arguments against this war. This underlying reality is reflected in the fact that despite our ongoing disaster in Iraq, America is propelled down a course of action that leads us toward conflict with Iran. President Bush recently re-affirmed his embrace of the principles of pre-emptive war when he signed off on the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which highlights Iran as a threat worthy of confrontation. This event has gone virtually unmentioned by the American mainstream media, un-remarked by a Congress that remains complicit in the war-mongering policies of the Bush administration, and un-noticed by the majority of Americans. America is pre-programmed for war, and unless the anti-war movement dramatically changes the manner in which it conducts its struggle, America will become a nation of war, for war, and defined by war, and as such a nation that will ultimately be consumed by war.

Actually, it is worth pointing out that Murtha did not call for an "immediate" withdrawal, but rather one taking place over six months, and it wasn't a withdrawal from the region, but rather a redeployment of troops elsewhere in the area where they could be used for further militaristic adventures. But the point remains that the US is, as he says, "pre-programmed for war", and as long as the focus in our political system is on the competence of warmaking rather than the morality of it, we will never see our way out of the woods.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

Liberal blogger Michael Stickings wrote this posting, which is an unapologetic defense of liberalism and an argument that liberals need to reverse the recent rightward pull of the center of political gravity and move it back leftward.

He makes a valid point about the fact that the political center of gravity has shifted rightward in American politics over recent years. But where I disagree with him is that I believe that this rightward pull is due to the inherent failings of liberalism itself. I also strongly disagree with his praise for some of the leading political hacks of the Democratic Party as representing any kind of political salvation for this country.

I wrote the following as a comment in that blog entry:

There is no question that the center of gravity in American politics has been pulled rightward over the last 35 years or so, and as a result, the definition of "liberal" has also been pulled rightward. That is why Nixon, lying scumbag warmonger that he was, is sometimes refered to as the "last liberal President"--because after his presidency, in which we saw the creation of the EPA, OSHA, and the Clean Air Act, and in which Nixon once proposed a guaranteed minimum income for all Americans, the "liberals" in Washington moved ever rightward, to the point where Al Gore in 2000 was essentially farther to the right than Nixon was in 1970.

This is one of several of the problems with modern liberalism. Liberals turn to their heroes, various Democrats like Al Gore or Howard Dean, whose ideology would historically not have been considered particularly left of center. They pin their hopes on a supposedly "progressive" ideology that isn't particularly progressive and a political party like the Democrats that is intensely tied to corporate interests and US imperialism abroad.

As I see it, liberalism was stillborn, and its failures have only come to fruition in recent years, because it didn't really know what it wanted to be. It was so afraid of socialism, it distanced itself from radical solutions to the serious problems of the capitalist system, that one could argue that it was as much a reaction to radicalism and socialism as it was to conservatism. Liberals like Hubert Humphrey in the 1940s purged the Democratic Farmer-Labor party of radicals and socialists, thus insuring that the Democratic Party would not be a party that dared to threaten corporate interests. In fact, the very use of the word "liberal" in our nation's political discourse for its so-called left wing is telling--in American politics, no mainstream politician dares uses a word like "socialist" or even "social democrat". It is this fear of the left that inevitably led liberalism to slide rightward over the years.

I think there are other fundamental problems with liberalism. As I wrote in my blog enter "Corporate Consolidation and the Failure of American Liberalism", liberalism never really offered a successful or meaningful challenge to corporate power, nor did it ever, with its attachment to market economics, come up with any way of taming the evils of capitalism that would ever work--and this is essentially because the evils of capitalism cannot be tamed without replacing the system with something better. Liberals, afraid of radicalism, are unwilling to seek radical solutions, and instead pay allegiance to the economic and political system that creates the very evils that liberals say they want to address.

In this modern era of globalization and neoliberalism, American liberalism is at a loss to really cope with modern international capitalism. Ultimately, liberalism has proved itself to be a failed ideology.

Possibly the most heartening thing I have seen in all of this is the possiblity that some liberals are starting to see the light. For example, consider a recent article in the liberal magazine Nation, in which Ronald Aronson said, "It's time to break a taboo and place the word "socialism" across the top of the page in a major American progressive magazine. Time for the left to stop repressing the side of ourselves that the right finds most objectionable. Until we thumb our noses at the Democratic pols who have been calling the shots and reassert the very ideas they say are unthinkable, we will keep stumbling around in the dark corners of American politics, wondering how we lost our souls--and how to find them again."

As I see it, failures of liberalism could not be plainer than they are now. The solution to our problems lies not in a return to liberalism, but a birth of radicalism.

Posted by The Haikuist at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments

The San Francisco Chronicle is running a three-party series of investigative articles on Nancy Pelosi. Yesterday, as part of this series, the Chronicle ran a story detailing her fundraising activities. It provides fascinating reading for those of us on the left who recognize the close ties that the Democratic Party maintains with wealthy and corporate interests. For example, the article points out

With the connections she gained through her investment banker husband, Paul Pelosi, her unfailing devotion to the Democratic Party and a lifelong propensity for building relationships with loyal supporters, Pelosi has been in an ideal position to recruit wealthy believers in the Democratic cause. "If you travel in upper socio-economic circles, it's always good to tap those people,'' said Agar Jaicks, a San Francisco Democratic activist, who was one of Pelosi's earliest political advisers. "She became very good at it, and the better she got, the more in demand she was."

The Chronicle lists some of her top contributors, which include several northern California capitalists, including the owners of the Gallo Winery in Modesto, the heirs to the Levi Strauss Company, the owners of The Gap, and others.

None of this should server as any surprise, of course. Pelosi is the epitome of the modern day liberal Democrat, who will certainly not do anything to rock the boat or otherwise offend her corporate contributors or her friends in big business; her husband, Paul Pelosi, is quite wealthy; the article reports that "Paul Pelosi's investments range from an ownership share in the Wine Country resort, Auberge du Soleil, to millions of dollars of stocks in companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Disney Co. to ownership of a three-story commercial building in downtown San Francisco." This she has in common with her fellow Democrat and San Franciscan Diane Feinstein, whose husband the war profiteer benefited from the Iraq war enough the couple could sell their old mansion and buy an even bigger $16.5 million mansion in Pacific Heights.

Once again we can see why progressives, leftists, and radicals should have nothing to do with the Democratic Party.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments