Elections and Socialism

[Ismail]

I was thinking about elections under socialism, and I came to the realization that a lot of people tend to overstate the role of bourgeois-democratic organs of power and put primary emphasis on them when emphasis should be put on actual worker organizations (soviets, etc.) and mass organizations in general.

Case in point, many people condemn what they view as "uncompetitive" elections in states wherein representatives are elected to bourgeois-democratic legislatures and so on. I use the term "bourgeois-democratic" to refer to any sort of government body that is perfectly capable of existing under capitalism in a modified form. (E.g. Constituent Assembly was basically replaced by the Congress of Soviets and later the Supreme Soviet of the USSR) Essentially, it means national state legislatures.

There are two interesting examples of this (first concerning East Germany, second concerning Grenada) on how socialists (in these two cases, their actual "socialism" is of course up for debate) view legislative elections in ostensibly "socialist" states:

“The function of elections in the socialist system is misunderstood if they are regarded in the traditional way as being a method for approving or rejecting a policy and those who represent it... Because this system sees itself by definition as progressive, as serving the good of the people...

Thus elections have purely the function of general assent. At the same time they serve to mobilize and educate the mass of the people politically. The large-scale preparations for the elections—it would be wrong to call them an electoral battle—are intended to bind the citizens more closely to the system and to ensure their active support for those aims which the leading party prescribes for state and society. The actual ballot thus attains the character of a demonstration, it is ‘an act of self-assertion by the socialist state’. Election day is therefore not a day of political decision... it is a day when the political system asserts itself and, in the eyes of the SED, even a red-letter day. For this reason too it is the ambition of the political leadership to get everyone who is entitled to vote to the polls if possible. Although there is no legal compulsion to vote, the percentage of voters is always close to 100%: in 1963 it was 99.25%, in 1967 98.82%. The higher the percentage vote that can be recorded, the higher is the rate of success....

All candidates must introduce themselves to the electors at ‘electoral conferences’. At such conferences it may happen that the selection committee of the National Front is told by the electors' organization that certain candidates ought not to be selected...

For the SED, elections... are exclusively a ‘means of integration for the strengthening and further development of the socialist power of the state’... the function of elections in the GDR is simply to give assent to the system.”
(Kurt Sontheimer & Wilhelm Bleek. The Government and Politics of East Germany. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1975. pp. 78-80.)

“The New Jewel Movement did not hold elections. [Maurice] Bishop explained this decision on one occasion in the following way:

‘There are those (some of them our friends) who believe that you cannot have a democracy unless there is a situation where every five years, and for five seconds in those five years, a people are allowed to put an X next to some candidate's name, and for those five seconds in those five years they become democrats, and for the remainder of the time, four years and 364 days, they return to being non-people without the right to say anything to their government, without any right to be involved in running the country.’

In lieu of the traditional system, the NJM claimed, democracy in Grenada was manifested through numerous mass organizations and decentralized structures which received and seriously considered input from large numbers of citizens.”
(William Blum. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. London: Zed Books Ltd. 2003. p. 273.)

What is your stance on these two outlooks?

(Note: I don't know if this belongs either in Philosophy or Theory, so if a mod feels it's inappropriate for Philosophy then they may move it.)

[Dean]

I'm going to allow this.

[A.R.Amistad]

I'm going to allow this

naw, move to Politics it'll get more response there

[OldMoney]

There are those (some of them our friends) who believe that you cannot have a democracy unless there is a situation where every five years, and for five seconds in those five years, a people are allowed to put an X next to some candidate's name, and for those five seconds in those five years they become democrats, and for the remainder of the time, four years and 364 days, they return to being non-people without the right to say anything to their government, without any right to be involved in running the country.


Bishop kind of makes a good point about the way democracy worked back then, and still does today. Electing representatives who you hope are going to stand for what they say and what you belive, to a fixed timeframe is rediculous. Thats how bourgeois-democray works though. The whole system is made to fool the people into thinking they have power over thier own lives, but we know that the bourgeoisie arent into giving away power. I dont however agree that because democracy is corupted under bourgeois-democray we should not have elections. There needs to be more acountability built into the system, and more opportunity for the general massess to make thier voices heard.

Under bourgeois-democray voter turnout is rather low, statisticaly under 50% in the US. Its funny that people often dont vote because they feel like they cant make a difference, funny because under present conditions there they have no idea how right they are. The not funny part is that more people dont vote because they dont know anything about polotics or how thier country is ran. Within a true socialist or communist society the people would have better education and understanding of the system, and the whole political system would be more transparent. With the tecnology availiable to us today there is much opportunity for people to be more active on the daily opperations of those representing them.

[YKTMX]

For the SED, elections... are exclusively a ‘means of integration for the strengthening and further development of the socialist power of the state’... the function of elections in the GDR is simply to give assent to the system.”

The important point to make, I guess, is that, viewed as a whole, this is exactly the role of elections in bourgeois democracy, a point basically acknowledged in the most realistic bourgeois political science i.e. Schumpeter.

The basic momentum of policy in the political field is already decided before the election takes place. The job of the electoral ritual is to give a democratic veneer to the pre-arranged policy framework and to choose which group of people who implement it.

Look at the current British election campaign for a clear example of this.

And, of course, just as importantly, even this veneer of democracy does not exist in the economy whatsoever - which is run as a system of autocratic fiefdoms by huge bureaucratic corporations.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

There are obviously severe limits to bourgeois representation and elections. All socialists would agree with this. They are, at most a "snapshot" of public opinion at a moment in time. They can be used for educative purposes at best.

Having said that though what did Bishop or the DDR replace them with? Were there worker's councils able to make autonomous decisions? Why was there the need to preserve the bourgeois legislative institutions to begin with?

If the system in the DDR was successful in embedding policies within the people, as I understand was meant, why did the DDR rapidly collapse as soon as Gorby let out that the Soviet troops would stay in their barracks? East German workers could have said that, "yes we may have a lower standard of living than the West, but this is our system, we own it and we will fight to preserve it from capitalist restoration". Aside from some intellectuals and others, this did not happen.