Posted on November 7, 2011 in
Articles The Article: The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative by Samir Amin in the Monthly Review.
The Text:
1. The Democratic Fraud Challenges Us to Invent Tomorrow’s Democracy
Universal suffrage is a recent conquest, beginning with workers’ struggles in a few European countries (England, France, Holland, and Belgium) and then progressively extending throughout the world. Today, everywhere on the planet, it goes without saying that the demand for delegating supreme power to an honestly elected, multiparty assembly defines the democratic aspiration and guarantees its realization—or so it is claimed.
Marx himself put great hopes on such universal suffrage as a possible “peaceful path to socialism.” Yet, I have noted that on this score Marx’s expectations were refuted by history (cf. Marx et la démocratie).
I think that the reason for the failure of electoral democracy to produce real change is not hard to find: all hitherto existing societies have been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various forms) and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the ruling class. This fundamental reality results in a relative “depoliticization/disacculturation” of very large segments of society. And this result, broadly designed and implemented to fulfill the systemic function expected of it, is simultaneously the condition for reproduction of the system without changes other than those it can control and absorb—the condition of its stability. What is called the “grass roots,” so to speak, signifies a country in deep slumber. Elections by universal suffrage under these conditions are guaranteed to produce a sure victory for conservatism, albeit sometimes a “reformist” conservatism.
This is why never in history has there been real change resulting from this mode of governance based on “consensus” (i.e. the absence of change). All changes tending toward real social transformation, even radical reforms, have resulted from struggles waged by what, in electoral terms, may appear to be “minorities.” Without the initiative of such minorities, the motive force of society, no change is possible. Such struggles, engaged in by such “minorities,” always end up—when the alternatives proposed are clearly and correctly defined—by carrying along (previously silent) majorities and may by universal suffrage receive ratification, which arrives after—never before—victory.
In our contemporary world “consensus” (its boundaries defined by universal suffrage) is more conservative than ever. In the centers of the world-system the consensus is pro-imperialist. Not in the sense that it implies hatred or contempt for the other peoples who are its victims, but in the everyday sense that the permanence of the flow of imperialist rent is accepted because that is the condition for overall social reproduction, the guarantor of its “opulence” in contrast to the poverty of the others. In the peripheries, the responses of peoples to the challenge (pauperization resulting from the process of capitalist/imperialist accumulation) is still muddled, in the sense that they are fated always to carry with them a dose of retrograde illusions of a return to a better past.
In these conditions, recourse to “elections” is always conceived by the dominant powers as the best possible way to rein in the movement, to end the possibility that the struggles become radicalized. In 1968 some said that “elections are for assholes,” and that view was not unconfirmed by the facts. An elected assembly, right away—as today in Tunisia and Egypt—serves only to put an end to “disorder,” to “restore stability.” To change everything so that nothing changes.
So should we give up on elections? Not at all. But how to bring together new, rich, inventive forms of democratization through which elections can be used in a way other than is conceived by the conservative forces? Such is the challenge.
The Democratic Farce’s Stage Scenery
This stage scenery was invented by the Founding Fathers of the United States, with the very clearly expressed intention of keeping electoral democracy from becoming an instrument that could be used by the people to call in question the social order based on private property (and slavery!).
With that in mind, their Constitution was based on (indirect) election of a president (a sort of “elective monarch”) holding in his hands some essential powers. Presidential election campaigns under these conditions naturally gravitate to “bipartisanism,” which tends progressively to become what it now is: the expression of a “single party.” Of course, ever since the end of the nineteenth century this has represented the interest of monopoly capital, addressing itself to “clienteles” that view themselves as having differing interests.
The democratic fraud then displays itself as offering “alternatives” (in this case, the Democrats and the Republicans) that cannot ever rise to the level required by a real alternative (offering the possibility of new, radically different, options). But without the presence of real alternative perspectives democracy is nonexistent. The farce is based on “consensus”(!) ideology, which excludes by definition serious conflicts between interests and between visions of the future. The invention of “party primaries” inviting the whole electorate (whether its components are said to be leftist or rightist!) to express its choices of candidates for the two false adversaries accentuates still further that deviation so annihilating for the meaning of elections.
Jean Monnet, a true anti-democrat is honored today in Brussels, where his intentions to copy the U.S. model were fully understood, as the founder of the “new European democracy.” Monnet deployed all his efforts, which were scrupulously implemented in the European Union, to deprive elected assemblies of their powers and transfer them to “committees of technocrats.”
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