The problem with ideas like this, that the wealthy control everything so just give up, is that they don't promote any progressive way forward. We all laugh at Simpson's episodes like "" target="_blank">I Voted for Kodos", and it is true that our candidates can seem like bad carbon copies of each other at times.
But struggling for greater access to suffrage still knee-caps the ruling class--they wouldn't try for things like Citizens United and blocking different marginalized groups from voting if they didn't find the process threatening. Sorry to quote my blog here, but these texts aren't digitized yet, otherwise I would quote from an online original source:
“As Lenin persistently emphasized, the fight for democracy is at the heart of the class struggle" (Henry Winston, Strategy for a Black Agenda, 1973)
William Z. Foster also illuminated the basis of the anti-racist people's force which is the chief foe of racist monopoly: “The workers, as Lenin points out, develop bourgeois democracy to the utmost, and then make the leap to Socialist democracy. The fight for socialism is a struggle, by democratic means, for the highest form of democracy, which is completely unachievable under capitalism.”
“These democratic freedoms the working class also struggled to establish, defend and expand; but it fought, too, for its own specific democratic demands-higher wages, shorter hours, popular education, Negro people’s rights, the right to organize and strike, social insurance, protection of women and children in industry, etc. to all of which, historically, the ruling class has been opposed. These working class demands, fundamentally different in substance from the limited democracy of all American bourgeois leaders past and present, are the roots within the framework of capitalism, of what will eventually mature under socialism as proletarian democracy.” (William Z. Foster, History of the Communist Party USA, 1947)
Creating apathy for democratic processes is also a ruling class goal--a dangerous one. We might have criticisms of Obama, but the fact that he received the most votes for President ever in the nation's history made the ruling class go apeshit. We can all see it in the insane attacks on people's rights going on right now. People who can afford to be apathetic are probably not from one of the groups under attack. (I'm looking at you Mr. Yale Lecturer who wrote this article...)
This isn't the time to just sigh and say that it's all just an illusion. Sorry this is so long, but I feel strongly about this. Marxists don't say that democracy is an illusion--we look at the conditions in the world we live in, survey the obstacles, and plan a way through.
= new reply since forum marked as read
