Democracy, real and imagined
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.
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.
I agree with 90% of this post.
The left really has no party to vote for, that is based in the working class. The Nader type groups are populist, prone to vacillate, and be unpredictable.
Regards.
Posted by
Frank Partisan |
9:25 PM
For the most part, I agree with you about Nader and the Greens. I will not rule out supporting some individual Greens on a case by case basis, however.
Posted by
The Haikuist |
9:47 PM
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