The Paradox of “Democracy”
Victor Laszlo
February 8, 2006
Despite its importance to political life, few pundits ever question the assumptions of the US and European model of democracy, what we and other Marxists, sometimes dismissively, call “bourgeois democracy.” The recent Palestinian elections afford an opportunity to look at these ideas in depth.
Bourgeois democracy embodies several cherished notions: firstly, it narrowly limits the democratic process to an episodic decision procedure: elections. The unchallenged consensus in Western thought is that political life — and democratic expression — should be orderly and not disruptive of the world of commerce and the smooth functioning of bourgeois life. Democracy is exercised as a kind of regular holiday.
Secondly, bourgeois democracy identifies two central, but decidedly different ideas — the will of the people and the interests of the people — and uncritically links them with the electoral process. The momentary, shifting desires of people seldom coincide with their best interests. The principle flaw in this conflation is to associate what is subjective, and highly susceptible to influence and manipulation — wants and desires — with what is objective and directed to a better life — interests. While bourgeois social theory minimizes the distinction, bourgeois politicians understand it only too well in their practical activities. Political campaigns today are almost completely geared to achieving election results from manipulation or exploitation of individual desires, wants and feelings, including unconscious biases and irrelevant preferences.
And thirdly, bourgeois social theory emphasizes that electoral choices are “free.” Not in the sense that they need not be paid for — a sense that seldom occurs in bourgeois thought — but in the sense that they are unfettered. An individual has a right to vote—the only real democratic right of bourgeois democracy — and no one has a right to obstruct that vote. Of course exceptions have been made — criminals, minors, and the impaired — but the extension of this “freedom” to the working class, women, ethnic and racial minorities completes the bourgeois democratic revolutions which began hundreds of years ago.
When Europe broke from feudal tyranny, these fundamental notions were democratically progressive, permitting an ever greater number of citizens to determine their own fate. But as capitalism advanced, the means to distort and manipulate the electoral process advanced as well. What began as a democratic breakthrough becomes today a tool for imposing corporate tyranny and the interests of ruling elites upon the masses. Money determines outcome.
http://www.mltoday.com/Pages/Editorial/Laszlo-TheParadox.htmlhttp://www.mltoday.com/
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