Most of Europe is involved in a proxy war against Russia, costing billions of Euros and untold lives; untold because the personnel involved were not supposed to be in Ukraine in the first place. Who voted for the war?
This question sums up bourgeois democracy.
This has not prevented many on the left enthusiastically supporting it. This left, which normally would not dream of calling a strike without a ballot, has given a blank cheque to its ruling class and its state. Rather than demand a vote in order to debate the purpose and objectives of the war, they have simply endorsed it and called for it to be supported more vigorously. I doubt the idea of a debate and vote even crossed their minds, not least because they don’t have an alternative anyway.
The justification, ironically, is that Ukraine is a ‘democracy’ and Russia is not; even though the current president of Ukraine is no longer an elected leader, since his period of office has expired, while the President of Russia actually won an election, for what it’s worth. In the last few days Zelensky has tried to concentrate even more power in his hands by sacking around half his cabinet. That opposition parties and media are banned in Ukraine matters not a jot to these people while Russia’s elections are regarded as a sham. Let’s think about that for a minute and consider recent elections in the ‘democratic’ West as a comparison.
First, we have the new Labour government in Britain, elected with an enormous parliamentary majority by only 20% of the electorate on the basis of not much more than not being the Tories. Starmer and his colleagues did their best not to commit to any specific policies and have quickly broken promises that they did make – on energy prices and austerity. No doubt, further measures will confirm this course. The widespread opposition to genocide in Gaza, reflected in support for some independent candidates, could find no reflection in the choice of government as both Labour and Tories support it.
Second, we have the most powerful bourgeois democracy in the world in which counting the money is a better guide to who will win than the polling of support for the various policies that the candidates claim to support. The US is possibly even worse than Britain in terms of the vacuum of debate on what exactly parties will do when elected, whether anything they say can be believed and is not just a catalogue of lies. For every Donald Trump and Kamala Harris we have a Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. The main appeal of each candidate is aversion for the other.
When the usual mechanisms for making sure the ‘right’ candidates are selected fail these are ditched and the men and women with money and political power step in to make the ‘right’ selection. After months of primaries and the votes of millions – 14.5 million in fact – the Democratic grandees and apparatchiks stepped in to ensure that Genocide Joe would not be the Presidential candidate. In this he was simply the subject of the same machinations that ensured he was the candidate in 2020 instead of Bernie Sanders, who was judged too left wing regardless of the popularity of his policies or of himself.
Even the proponents of bourgeois democracy worry that all this is not sustainable, while certain sections of the left cling to it all the more firmly the more rotten it becomes. In an opinion piece in the Financial Times, a contributing editor noted that Kamala Harris has given only one media interview and even that not by herself – ‘she seems to think that if voters understand what she will do as president, they will be less likely to support her.’ It notes the irony that, while claiming to defend democracy against the “existential threat” to it posed by Trump, the failure to do what you say you are going to do means that ‘rather embarrassingly, you will be the one undermining the system of representative government.”
The argument of socialists is that bourgeois democracy – “representative government” – is a sham. How could it be otherwise in a system in which the means of production are controlled by the capitalist class, including the means of communication – of producing ‘the news’ and disseminating it, and the state machinery through which government policies are implemented – thorough its top personnel and the economic structures through which policies can be allowed to work or alternatively are throttled.
A final example of bourgeois democracy in action is in France, where the defeated Emmanuel Macron, having prevaricated for two months, has announced that Michel Barnier has been chosen by him to be Prime Minister. Despite the New Popular Front having won a plurality of the votes he has selected a leader from the right wing Les Républicans, which won only 6.57% of the first round vote.
The leader of France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon has declared that “We’ve been robbed in this election”. It is normally the largest formation that is permitted to form an administration but such normalities are always disregarded when the political establishment thinks that it faces some sort of threat, especially from the left.
The real anti-democratic nature of this move by Macron is not so much the abuse of this Presidential mechanism but what the employment of this power signifies. The elections were a decisive rejection of Macron and his policies, reflected in the vote for the New Popular Front and in the rise of the far right Rassemblement National. Yet Barnier was selected preciously in order to confirm and continue these policies.
The front page of the Financial Times explained that the purpose of Macron’s choice was to ‘find a candidate . . . who would not seek to undo his pro-business reforms.’ The fraudulent nature of the far right alternative to mainstream capitalist policies was revealed by the response of Marien Le Pen who is quoted as ‘cautiously’ welcoming the appointment and saying that “Barnier seems at least to meet one of the criteria we’d demanded . . . and be able to speak with the Rassemblement National. That will be useful as compromises will need to solve the budget situation.”
An analyst from one of the think tanks that litter the capitalist political environment stated that his appointment would ‘help in France’s bid to reassure markets over the economy and public spending’. “He’s a safe pair of hands known to market participants, known to Europe and the domestic political elite within France”, adding that he would be expected to ensure that ‘Macron’s labour and pension reforms would remain intact.’
So, there we have it. An overwhelming vote against Macron’s policies is turned, or is attempting to be turned, into an administration that will ensure their maintenance. It is not the clear wishes of the electorate that must be counted but that of the ‘markets’ – national and international capitalism – and the ‘political elite’ that counts.
For all the hypocritical cant about ‘democracy’ we have yet another example of how bourgeois democracy is democracy for the bourgeoisie. For the majority, including the working class, democracy does not extend beyond occasional visits to the polling booth in which meaningful choice has often been removed, or when it has not, constitutional devices are employed until these too are insufficient whereupon more forceful measures are employed.
Mélenchon is reported to have called for protests against this subversion of the popular will, demonstrating that, for the working class, democracy can only be enforced and guaranteed by its own actions. What this action cannot do, however, is democratise the state itself, which is the instrument of the political elite and the markets – the bourgeoisie and capitalism.
The resort to protest is testament to where power for the working class arises and where it must be advanced – in the organisation and mobilisation of the workers themselves. Elections can measure its strength and level of politicisation but only the workers own organisations can form a democratic alternative to the political elite, the bourgeois class and its state. This in turn demands that the organisation of the working class movement itself must be democratic, but until some current socialists stop supporting capitalist war in defence of bourgeois democracy they will have nothing but a reactionary role to play in building up the workers own democracy.
Sráid Marx 
0ne of the most creative Marxist inspired you tubers is called jonas celka. He makes stunning videos all by himself and happens to be barely out of short trousers. His latest video is called why did the middle classes support fascism? Great use of archival media footage .
paul cockshott placed a video on you tube three weeks ago on this theme of democracy called ” winning the battle for democracy”. One interestin thing about placing content like this on youtube is people who won’t read scripts will actually view it on youtube. I know this from my experiences talking to neighbours who are increasingly getting their news and commentary from watching youtube on their home televisions. Something for you to consider. Also many podcasts around political and economic themes go onto youtube. For myself I only read books that are niche and distant from public conversation. I stopped reading the classic left wing newspaper come script ages ago. Your own script is the last of the bunch fo me. Maybe you will switch to the new media in the near future.
“The argument of socialists is that bourgeois democracy – “representative government” – is a sham. How could it be otherwise in a system in which the means of production are controlled by the capitalist class, including the means of communication – of producing ‘the news’ and disseminating it, and the state machinery through which government policies are implemented – thorough its top personnel and the economic structures through which policies can be allowed to work or alternatively are throttled.”
There is a more fundamental basis, even, than this. Because the ruling class control the means of production, and do so on the basis of capitalist production, i.e. production for not only profit, but the maximisation of profit (though as I’ve set out in various places, in the short-term, that has been replaced by their drive to maximise total returns [capital gain + interest] on their financial assets) that becomes also the framework in which the interests of the state itself is set.
In Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx set out that so long as you accept the continuation of that system, capitalism, the wages system, then, the argument of Ricardo, from which the ideas of Ricardian socialism, and of social-democracy are derived is true. That is the interests of workers and of capital coincide, and the best conditions for workers are those of the best conditions for capital accumulation, i.e. high rates of profit. Its in those conditions that you get full employment, higher real wages and so on.
Of course, as Marx sets out, even in these best conditions, workers get even more screwed, because the condition of greater accumulation/higher rates of profit, is lower relative wages. When that expansion eventually leads to labour shortages and higher wages, squeezing those profits, capital becomes overproduced, leading to crises, workers laid off, technology is introduced to replace labour and so on.
If you talk only in terms of “the people”, “the nation”, or “the state” without class distinction, as most of the left does today, and when they don’t talk in those terms they think and operate in those terms, then it becomes clear that what is good for “the state” is always ultimately determined by what is good for capital. If labour shortages lead to crises, which lead to capital not being accumulated – the condition for which is profit under capitalism – then, the first priority of the government is maintaining those profits, by one means or another.
Policy of potential governments can only be framed in that context, and what is more, it appears rational for workers too to think in those terms. If your horizon is very limited, you will readily believe that the world is flat, because for all intents and purposes, for you in your practical activity it is. And, it is this limited horizon that leads naturally to the idea that capitalism is eternal, natural and for all practical purposes, for workers, it is. Their interests are limited to a trades union consciousness of bargaining for higher wages, better conditions, not losing their job, which depends then on their employers, their state, the state actually of the employers, doing well, and being competitive with other employers, other states.
The whole purpose of Marxism as a science rather than as a morality play, was to expose the true nature of those relations, and not limit itself to the narrow horizon of superficial appearances. But the “left” has abandoned that and returned to the ideas of Kant and Sismondi, to Proudhon and so on, which is why it has no answers other than petty-bourgeois, and so ultimately bourgeois answers.
It is important to note that the struggle against the far right is heavily promoted by the State and the corporate media. Yes there is some far left activities warning of dire consequences to come but this messaging would hardly get much of a hearing without the cooperation of the agencies that are in power. So the so called centre is exaggerating the presence of the far right to keep its self in command of both the State and Society. When you get down to basics the far right shares the same economic fundamentals as the centre, a variation in neo liberalism and its main problem of managing the tendency of a capitalist economy to become septic. The only point that separates the far right from the centre over the future of the economy is a rethoric about open versus controlled borders. So the far right and the centre are like brothers of a wealthy dynasty who have had a family bust up over their old man’s economic inheritance.
The far right are simply a reflection of the interests of the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, which has expanded by around 50% since the 1970’s. The interests of that petty-bourgeoisie – opposition to large-scale capital, particularly multinational capital, opposition to globalisation, and open borders, and opposition to the demise of the nation state – are hostile to those of the ruling-class, which is why the state has been acting against them.
That sections of the “Left” share some of those ideas – “anti-imperialism”, meaning a defence of the nation state, via rotten alliances, as well as “anti-capitalism”, meaning a drive to hold back capitalist development, particularly of the most, objectively, progressive mature forms of capital, in favour of defence of “small business” – is evidence of the extent to which it has become decadent, itself, reverting to the pre-Marxist, petty-bourgeois, reactionary, moral socialism of Sismondi, Proudhon and so on. The fact that it has spent decades tailing social-democrats and petty-bourgeois nationalists, as well as its own natural milieu within studentism and academia has reinforced that petty-bourgeois nature of it.
It was obvious that when the French left formed their own rotten bloc for the limited purpose of fighting a bourgeois election nothing good would come of it. When they, then, in the second round went further to stand down candidates to support Macronist candidates, it was obvious what would happen. Macron’s party got a higher vote than it otherwise would have done. Trotsky described the same phenomena in the French and Spanish PF’s in the 1930’s.
Then, Macron screwed the Left. First he sought to split the Socialists and centrists from the Left. That failed, so he made an alliance with the Republican Right, which has moved further Right, and with Le Pen. He probably expects that the Socialists will respond by now doing the deal he wanted before.
In the 1890’s, in Lenin’s polemics against the Narodniks, an epitome of that reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism and moralism, he notes that their ideas were contrary to the interests of the bourgeoisie, and often presented as being socialist or revolutionary. The Russian bourgeoisie, ignored the reactionary elements of their programmes and schemas, but, to the extent that the Narodnik ideas were petty-bourgeois, and simply lead via the processes of competition and concentration and centralisation to bourgeois solutions, the Russian bourgeoisie could incorporate them.
The bourgeoisie can always acquiesce in the various proposals for support for small business and so on, because they can go nowhere, other than to the further concentration of capital. As capital expands that petty-bourgeoisie of self-employed and small business people, become a labour reservoir, much as the peasants were in the past. It is why, we are some way from labour shortages, and crises of capital, which are the conditions when the bourgeoisie uses the Far Right to destroy the organisations of workers.