The Voting System of Bourgeoisie Democracies

[Hexen]

Well recently, while I do know the fact that originally the US voting system was originally intended for wealthy white land/bondowning males but how do you explain about workers/women and PoC suffrage (i.e. the "Right to Vote") in later eras also how do the voting systems work now? Or rather the origins of the popular voting system and how it works rather than the "voting is a scam/lie" explanation since we know it IRL there are material conditions and reasons how things work.

Just in case if I ever run into liberals saying "but anyone has the right to vote now" if I ever brought up the fact that the US system is originally intended for wealthy white males. Is there a historical materialist analysis of this?

[Marxaveli]

The fact that everyone can vote now is irrelevant - liberals and their identity politics do not take the class struggle into account (or do not want to do so), and because the state is an instrument of class rule, it renders voting useless - regardless if all can do it or not. The interests of private capital will always win out at the end of the day, even if the working classes are granted some piecemeal reforms. Even things such as women's suffrage were not granted without struggle, they had to be fought for.

[tuwix]

Just in case if I ever run into liberals saying "but anyone has the right to vote now" if I ever brought up the fact that the US system is originally intended for wealthy white males.

Then you can say tahat capitalist lobbies don't care who votes and how. They do politics instead of people.

[reb]

There are groups of so called marxists out there who view the state as in some way a neutral thing that just so happens to be embroiled up in the capitalist mode of production and that it can be unembroiled from each other. Hence the idea that many of them have about participating in bourgeois politics with the goal of limited reforms, that you can wield the state in some sort of workers' state, and so on.

The development of the bourgeois democracies and of various other forms of bourgeois state developed along side the development of capitalism. The introduction of some reforms and more voting rights for people, show the very limited role that participation in such states has in the actual relation that labor has to capital. For example, there those in the capitalist milieu out there who are for very limited to almost no state and there are others who are for a very heavy handed state, both of which are compatible with the capitalist mode of production.

Oppositon to capital comes from the day-to-day struggles of the working class with it's confrontation with the production process. We can see this in every area where the capitalist mode of production dominates, from England to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where production lowers from worker resistance, strikes, people stop giving a shit about work, so new and more labor discipline has to be brought in with the stick or with the carrot. The parliamentary reforms in England were part of the carrot but here too there was resistance from workers to things such as the shortening of the working day because it meant that more work had to be carried on in a shorter time, but either way, the capitalist mode of production continued.

[Agapi]

Yeah, everybody has the right to vote, but this is coupled with (in the US, absolutely insurmountable) institutional restrictions on what is acceptable in the ideology of the ruling class. This greatly limits the ability of socialists to earnestly participate in power blocs. Majoritarian winner-takes-all districts (FPTP), gerrymandering, supermajority passage requirements, and passage through a blatantly undemocratic upper house all greatly frustrate popular movements in the United States. The Electoral College is also an undemocratic element, but hasn't really exercised this much in recent times. That might change soon if Republican efforts to instate proportional allocation of electoral votes in swing states (so they at least get some instead of none) bear fruit.

And that's just the system as it is on the books. Campaign finance, the revolving door system, and the military-industrial complex ensure that federal officials legislate and enforce laws according to the needs of the organized few instead of the collective will, and these problems are in most cases only magnified if you drop down to the state or local level, as influence is cheaper and restrictions are looser.

This is why the U.S. is currently subsidizing private health insurance companies despite the public overwhelming supporting the idea of expanding Medicare to everyone in polls.

[AmilcarCabral]

Good analysis of the capitalist voting system, and I think that one of the main reasons that the poor masses resort to the pro-elections left (Green Party, Bernie Sanders, Commondreams.org, Alternet.org etc) instead of resorting to the real marxism left (Marxist workers parties), is that most people have been trained into the idea that the use of guns, weapons and violence is ok as personal self-defense protection. But they are educated into the idea that the use of weapons, and violence against any government is a big crime, it is evil, and something that only crazy people think about. So from my own humble personal opinion of why most poor americans (who are well-read, well-informed and who hate capitalism, Democrats and Republicans, wars, corporations, government corruption, imperialism) but who support the bourgeoise-liberal electoral-leftist options instead of supporting the real leftist options, might be the phobia that americans, europeans, and many people in many countries of the world have against the use of weapons for a political goal.

Many in the USA electoral progressive bourgeoise left view Hezbollah, Hamas, FARC as revolutionary groups, but at the same time, they do not seem themselves supporting an American Hezbollah guerrilla group in USA to overthrow the capitalist system

That's why I had to quit Facebook, I got tired of many people calling themselves leftists and posting articles from Counterpunch.org, commondreams.org, alternet.org, Democracynow.org I quit reading all those progressive news sites for their lack of marxism perspective


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The fact that everyone can vote now is irrelevant - liberals and their identity politics do not take the class struggle into account (or do not want to do so), and because the state is an instrument of class rule, it renders voting useless - regardless if all can do it or not. The interests of private capital will always win out at the end of the day, even if the working classes are granted some piecemeal reforms. Even things such as women's suffrage were not granted without struggle, they had to be fought for.

[cyu]

http://cjyu.wordpress.com/article/freedom-of-the-press-is-guaranteed-only-gcybcajus7dp-24/

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one"
A quote from A. J. Liebling, a writer for The New Yorker.

Freedom of the press is considered to be one of the cornerstones of a functioning democracy. Without it, you wouldn’t know what you were voting on, and the process of voting would be worthless.

Silvio Berlusconi is Italy’s wealthiest person. He also controls more “freedom of the press” than any other person in Italy. Of course, he also happens to have been elected to the most powerful post in Italy multiple times. Not too surprising.

Control over the media translates to control over the ideas and issues discussed at election time. The more that control is concentrated into fewer hands, the less of a real democracy the nation becomes. Authoritarian regimes use the same method to win their sham elections. Since they control the media, they control all discussion and critiques of various policies. Once you control the ideas, you control what people will vote for. The more control of the media you have, the easier it is to control the vote.

While the electorate may not be “illiterate” in the sense that they can’t read or engage in complex feats of engineering, they can still be rendered politically illiterate by surrounding them with media that only pretends to be “fair and balanced” or “pravda” when it is not.

As the gap between the rich and poor widens, it shouldn’t be surprising that many members of the wealthy classes would use their growing power to influence the media. The more influence they gather, the more they can consolidate their wealth, and further widen the gap. If left unchecked, the democracy itself would be destroyed.

As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1864:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for the safety of my country; corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in High Places will follow, and the Money Power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the People, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic destroyed.”

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/09/24/alexis-tsipras-at-the-kreisky-forum-vienna-the-complete-speechaddress-to-austrian-social-democrats/#comment-47125

Social democracy lost its way in Europe because, to state the obvious, democracy has pretty much been broken. If a wealthy financier or media mogul wields more power in political campaigns than a janitor or customer support worker, then like it or not, what you have is not a democracy. It may resemble a democracy in that people vote, but let’s be honest, all it is, is aristocracy dressed up to look like democracy.

What happened to social democracy is that there is, in fact, no way for them to survive in such a fake democracy. The only way for self-described “social democrats” to be elected in such an environment is to give up being social democrats – otherwise, those who hold economic power would never allow them to be elected in the first place.