Why is Bourgeois democracy undemocratic?

[Stalin Ate My Homework]

Now we all know that Bourgeois democracy is little more than the political representation of big business, in so far as it acts upon their interests by implementing anti-worker policies and entering imperialist wars etc...

Theoretically of course power rests with the elected representatives, but this is obviously not the case since the policies implemented by Bourgeois governments are contrary to the interests of the working class. This begs the question, who is really in charge and how do they make their influence felt?

Thoughts?

PS. If any leftists have written an appropriate critique of Bourgeois democracy then please point me in its direction.

[NewLeft]

You want to look into the theory of the state. It does not matter who is in power, the state was designed for the bourgeois.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/xx/state.htm
http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/lr/sp001715/marxron.html

[Zulu]

I've been reading this article today, it has a section with the general critique of the bourgeois democracy.

http://monthlyreview.org/2001/06/01/imperialism-and-globalization

Personally, I think the "representative democracy" is an oxymoron. Democracy can be only direct (that is when the entire enfranchised population votes for concrete legal acts), or it's not a democracy.

[Capitalist Octopus]

Read "In Defense of Anarchism". Great little book that profoundly affected my views.

http://www.ditext.com/wolff/anarchy.html

[Jimmie Higgins]

Now we all know that Bourgeois democracy is little more than the political representation of big business, in so far as it acts upon their interests by implementing anti-worker policies and entering imperialist wars etc...

Theoretically of course power rests with the elected representatives, but this is obviously not the case since the policies implemented by Bourgeois governments are contrary to the interests of the working class. This begs the question, who is really in charge and how do they make their influence felt?

Thoughts?

PS. If any leftists have written an appropriate critique of Bourgeois democracy then please point me in its direction.

Do you mean how do the ruling class rule since it isn't like CEO's directly run the government (although most elected officials and political big-wigs probably have been a CEO of something at some point)? Or do you mean why isn't representative democracy representative, why does it always side with big business?

I think the answer to both these things is through the hegemony of the capitalist system. There isn't just one mechanism for how our rulers rule, most institutions in this society are simply tied to the profit system by millions of various threads.

It's not like more unstable capitalist countries where they basically have to have the the media and education system directly dictated to by government officials. In advanced capitalist countries with more or less non-revolutionary level internal class struggle people are just stuck in the logic of the system: you have to work, you have to compete, you have to act in ways that will help you maintain yourself. If you are an academic you have to do research and publish and compete for a few tiny slots in universities... you probably have tons of debt and so you have to tailor your research in areas that universities and departments and fields are interested in. What they are interested in are findings that will add to their reputation in their competition for status and donations and funding. No doubt what receives the attention and funding are things that the deep pockets of big business and the pentagon and government want. So without some kind of dictate from an ideological center, students, universities, academics and so on are working to further the interests of the capitalist ruling class.

It's the same in the media and it's similar with elected representatives. For the political system, initially the ruling class merely restricted suffrage to people who would have the same or complementary class interests to their own: land owners - more than that, elite land-owners in the electoral college or state governments directly picked the President. But as capitalism both became more entrenched and was faced with more revolts by a more developed working class, political suffrage was expanded. Of course part of the problem is even if you can vote, you are voting in a game where the choices are already limited. This is both directly limited in the sense of two parties in the US with candidates who (at least the ones who get the funding and media coverage) have already been pre-vetted by the party leadership as well as the big corporate doners. Then considering the millions of dollars it takes to win a major office, not doubt the new representative is booked solid in their promised policy commitments.

But it's also limited in a general sense. We can vote on things, sure, but we are voting on things strictly within the capitalist framework. People can't vote if stealing cars is a crime or not, it's taken for granted by the whole logic of the system. People can't vote that the US going to war and killing people is murder. Feudal hegemony was based in the idea that the world is as it is because og God's will and plan. Capitalist hegemony is based on the idea that capitalism is "natural" and "universal" - that the interests of the capitalist class are the universal interests and values of humanity. This obscures the class nature of society and limits the options of what is possible within the context of these institutions developed within and for the maintenance of capitalism.

[Stalin Ate My Homework]

Jimmie Higgins: Thanks for your response. You say that the big institutions are all tied to big business through millions of unseen threads, what are these? For example, how exactly did the large corporations convince the government to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the individual political representatives and parties would have little to gain from this?

[The Jay]

Jimmie Higgins: Thanks for your response. You say that the big institutions are all tied to big business through millions of unseen threads, what are these? For example, how exactly did the large corporations convince the government to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the individual political representatives and parties would have little to gain from this?

Revolving doors, bribes, company shares things like that.

[Thirsty Crow]

Now we all know that Bourgeois democracy is little more than the political representation of big business, in so far as it acts upon their interests by implementing anti-worker policies and entering imperialist wars etc...The real political process is more complicated than that. Sure, in the end, the proposition that bourgeois democracy amounts to class rule, securing the hegemony of one class over another, holds, but I think there is a need to bring out the specificities.
In this sense, we can conclude that the bourgeois state mediates between different interests in society however they might be formed - be they based on sex, gender or sexual orientation, or on the position and role in the economy, but it does so from a strictly delineated position - that of te dominant social relations of production, and therefore, political rule is always bound with the necessity of keeping class hegemony intact. There is the whole field of possible manouvers opening up here depending on the balance of class forces and ideological/cultural forces, depending on the concrete conditions of accumulation in the case of the former, and on received and hegemonic cultural and ideological relationships in the case of the latter.


Theoretically of course power rests with the elected representatives, but this is obviously not the case since the policies implemented by Bourgeois governments are contrary to the interests of the working class. This begs the question, who is really in charge and how do they make their influence felt? The answer lies in the before mentioned fact that the state formation depends on the dominant social relations of production. An absolutist monarchy is inconceivable as the political expression of a society in which labourers are doubly free, first from any obligation or duty towards a specific person, as the case was in feudalism, and second, free from the means of production, or dispossessed of it.

Who is really in charge? Ultimately, it's the capitalist class.
How do they make their influence felt? By the fact that capitaqlist enterprises comprise the backbone of the tax pool and by the interconnections between employers' associations and officials of the state, to name just one possibility.

[Brosip Tito]

Democracy is based on the majority.

In bourgeois democracy, the minority (bourgeoisie) hold political and social power over the majority (proletariat).

Therefore, bourgeois democracy, or the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, is not democratic.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Jimmie Higgins: Thanks for your response. You say that the big institutions are all tied to big business through millions of unseen threads, what are these?Seen and unseen - just numerous ones, as if being in a spider's web. Lobbiests are obviously a "seen" way this happens, think tanks, various organizations fighting for either their specific industry-interests or whatnot are all influencing government and other social institutions such as academia and the media.

Why has the entire political mainstream suddenly all seem to come to the conclusion that public education and teachers are the big enemy of economic growth? There are various things on a mechanical level that have helped create this consensus (such as the Walton foundation and the Bill Gates foundation - I'm sure the Koch bros. are having think tanks working up policy papers about how terrible teacher unions are and why schools should all be private). But there are also just the bigger general agreements on where the country should be going right now and how to "fix" the economy and education system. Since for the ruling class the question of education is mearly how do we manage the population (i.e. just keep jobless youth off the streets during the day) and how do we reproduce the labor force we need, all the reforms offered from above have nothing to do with what's go for teachers/students or helps education actually happen. It all about how do we meet the needs of the economy: a less expensive public education where only the people who need it are trained in skills and everyone else is taught to be conditioned for the labor market.


For example, how exactly did the large corporations convince the government to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the individual political representatives and parties would have little to gain from this?I don't think corporations ever did. I'm sure many companies had specific interests and goals and things they wanted to see out of the war, but I don't think the war was directly about US oil companies or whatnot, I think the pentagon and foreign policy experts and so on drove that. People like Wolfowitz and the neo-cons were not getting instructions from BP and Shell and then coming up with other justifications for it.

The institution of the US military and foreign policy doesn't need to be driven by CEOs and specific industries, the whole logic of the US military is how to ensure that US interests and dominance is expanded or maintained. The US went to war IMO for the exact reasons you can find in official writings by Wolfowitz and Rice and so on - though you may need to de-code the jargon and read-between the lines to see it.

Their whole assumption is that the world is better off under US hegemony and so the war was done to ensure that the US maintained military dominance (and by extension, economic dominance). They have tried to build a stable US client state in Iraq for the main purpose of controlling the region and making sure that in 10 years China wasn't making a buch of deals in the middle east directly which could mean that the US is more economically marginalized and countries could have a choice in turning to one of several big powers for economic and military relationships.

So what does US hegemony specifically mean? It's assumptions are free trade to US-blocked companies and counties and conditional trade for others when the US wants it. It means maintaining the current imperial order of the world, it means keeping China in check from being a military force, it means keeping Russia in line, it means preventing non-alligned countries from blocking up. I don't think there were any companies that were really interested in Afganistan, but the war was still in the US ruling class's interests and logic because that war allowed the US to gain a military foothold inbetween Iran and Russia and within striking distance of a whole bunch of Easter European and Central Asian countries that are not fully connected to the US.

So the US military does things with a strategic logic, but what informs this logic? The logic of US capitalism and imperialism. So it's not like CEO's have had to make the government do this, the government did this on it's own for it's own reasons because the entire institution is based around how the US ruling class can maintain and expand it's power.

[Anarcho-Brocialist]

In the end the bourgeois will always purchase politicians, supreme court justices, purchase legislators to decree law in favor of the bourgeois. If they didn't the majority (working peoples) would have them all hanging from the gallows.

[Brosa Luxemburg]

Jimmie Higgins: Thanks for your response. You say that the big institutions are all tied to big business through millions of unseen threads, what are these? For example, how exactly did the large corporations convince the government to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the individual political representatives and parties would have little to gain from this?

Well, for Iraq OPEC oil prices were beginning to rise and such a rise in prices would be bad for a country like the United States, obviously. Saudi Arabia was our ally in OPEC and generally kept prices somewhat decent for the U.S. The U.S. wanted oil producing countries to tap into more oil and develop more efficient ways of extracting oil to lower oil prices, even though these things could possibly bankrupt these developing countries with dirt cheap oil, intense cost of taping into more oil, etc. These countries tend to be developing countries like Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, etc. and the higher oil prices were helping them develop. The Saudi government was feeling threatened by democratic oppositionists and Islamic fundamentalists who didn't want the government to be a pawn of Washington and the U.S. realized they were not a stable ally in the region. The U.S. government didn't (and still doesn't) mind high gas prices as long as they are not effecting the overall economy negatively but they didn't like the fact they were losing control of the oil in the middle east, considering they had an interest in it since the end of World War I. Also, toward the beginning of 2000 organizations closely associated with oil companies were printing material, open to the public, about how it would be favorable if the United States controlled the middle eastern region. Some of the people of the boards of these organizations (sorry, I can't think of their names off the top of my head) included Donald Rumsfeld and condoleezza rice. This is the pre-text to the Iraq war, it provided a good oil supply and, along with Afghanistan, provided a good geographical area to carry out other imperialist operations. This isn't a conspiracy theory. These things are open completely to the public.

I highly reccomend people read the book War Without End by Michael Schwartz (http://www.amazon.com/War-Without-End-Iraq-Context/dp/193185954X). It talks about these things.

[Leftsolidarity]

I suggest Lenin's "State and Revolution".

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

[Brosa Luxemburg]

In the end the bourgeois will always purchase politicians, supreme court justices, purchase legislators to decree law in favor of the bourgeois. If they didn't the majority (working peoples) would have them all hanging from the gallows.

:thumbup1:

[islandmilitia]

Jimmie Higgins: Thanks for your response. You say that the big institutions are all tied to big business through millions of unseen threads, what are these? For example, how exactly did the large corporations convince the government to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the individual political representatives and parties would have little to gain from this?

I think there are direct links and patterns of influence, some of which have already been identified - you have the fact that direct owners of capital tend to come from the same social and cultural backgrounds as leading politicians, there is also the fact that politicians tend to aim to get positions in the private sector when they retire from politics and need to represent the interests of capital in order to ensure that happens, then there is also the issue of campaign donations and media representation, with all that entails. I think the most fundamental point, however, is this: that the formal equality embodied in representative democracy (one person, one vote) papers over the basic inequalities that are embedded at the level of production, through the unequal distribution of the means of inequality, and that fundamental inequality in and of itself gives the bourgeoisie a strong level of political influence, despite formal equality, and irrespective of whatever more direct links there might be between politicians and capitalists. By this I mean that if the state adopts policies that pose a threat to the interests of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie will be able to respond in ways (be it with a strong sense of political consciousness or simply through the narrow pursuit of their economic goals) which will put pressure on the state to change its policies in order to maintain a basic level of stability and legitimacy. For example, if the state were to adopt incredibly high taxes for the rich, or threaten to carry out nationalizations without compensation, the bourgeoisie would be able to move their capital out of that country, and even emigrate as individuals, and those decisions would create adverse economic conditions and political pressure for the state to be more conciliatory. There are in fact many historical instances where a social democratic government has tried to be radical but has faced an investment strike from the bourgeoisie - for example, the Wilson government in Britain during the 1970s.

It is this line of argument that the Marxist theorist Poulantzas aimed to get at when he talked about the state being the structural guarantor of social order - when the nature of social order within a given set of social relations is one that depends on the consent of a particular group within society, the functioning of the state will necessarily be geared towards satisfying the demands of that particular group. This is especially true in the current context when barriers between national economies have broken down and the mobility of capital is greater than ever, and it's for that reason that we should have no illussions about social democracy remaining viable as a stable political formation.