Can There Be Democracy Within the Capitalist System?

Capitalism and real democracy never had much to do with one another. However, formal voting in elections has worked nicely for capitalism.  After all, elections have rarely posed, let alone decided, the question of capitalism. That is whether voters prefer it or an alternative economic system.  Capitalists have successfully kept elections focused elsewhere, on non-systemic questions and choices. That success enabled them first to equate democracy with elections and then to celebrate elections in capitalist countries as proof of their democracy.  Of course, even elections were and are allowed only outside capitalist enterprises. Democratic elections inside them -- where employees are the majority -- never happen.

Real democracy means that important decisions affecting people's lives are made genuinely and equally by the affected people. The capitalist organization of enterprises thus directly contradicts real democracy. Inside the corporations that dominate modern capitalism a tiny minority -- major shareholders and the boards of directors they elect -- make key decisions affecting those below them in the corporate hierarchy, the employees.  That tiny minority decides what products the corporation will produce, what technologies will be used, where production will occur, and how the corporation's net revenues will be distributed.  The majority is affected, often profoundly, by all those decisions, but it does not participate in making them. Inside typical modern capitalist corporations, real (as well as electoral) democracy is excluded.  Societies that celebrate commitment to democracy and justify government policies (including wars) as promoting democracy also exclude democracy from their workplaces. That stark contradiction raises serious problems. Consciously or unconsciously, workers sense, feel, and express dissatisfactions reflecting that contradiction.
For example, workers know they are disregarded by those at the corporations' commanding heights.  They often feel that their capacities and creativities are unrecognized, undervalued and unused. Expressions of such feelings include absenteeism, interpersonal tensions, and job-related dysfunctions such as alcoholism, insubordination and pilfering. The exclusion of democracy from workplaces often provokes workers' resentments and resistance that reduce productivity and profits. Corporations have long responded by hiring multiple layers of costly workplace supervisors and providing big budgets for them. Those corporate expenditures are among the wasteful costs of capitalism: sums deflected from investment, economic growth and technical progress.

Elections outside the workplace stand in an ambivalent relation to capitalism's exclusion of real democracy inside.  On the one hand, elections distract people from their conscious and unconscious disagreements with working conditions. Elections focus instead on political candidates, parties, and alternative policies around issues which are all related to how the capitalist system is organised and run but never on a discussion regarding the differences between capitalism and alternative economic systems or even the possibility of a totally different and truly democratic system. That is why supporters of capitalism appreciate elections. Well-controlled elections do not question, let alone threaten, capitalism.

Workers denied democracy on the job may conclude that such crucial problems as inadequate wages, job security, and benefits flow from and are sustained by that denial.When conventional solutions fail and ever more people begin to question, challenge, and oppose capitalism, capitalists generally support police and military repression exactly as we are witnessing increasingly around the world. In extreme situations electoral democracy is ended by means of military coup or dictatorship.  However, ending electoral democracy usually provokes anxiety even among the capitalists who support it. They worry that ending electoral democracy provokes social criticism and systemic opposition. They do not wish to lose a key benefit of properly controlled elections: distracting workers away from the issue of capitalism per se.  Such elections are the cheapest and least dangerous way to secure the distance that capitalism keeps between itself and real democracy.

In a nutshell, capitalism is NOT democratic, capitalists are NOT interested in democracy, capitalism's politicians are there to protect the interests of capital and there is NO nice way to conduct capitalism in the interests of the majority, the working class. Anyone who is looking for something nicer, fairer, democratic even needs to be looking to a different system: socialism - nothing less.