The capitalist system may have nominally democratic institutions, but it relies upon working class compliance, passivity and lack of involvement in the process to carry out its worst features. There is the old nationalist lie that we are one country, one people, working together for a common interest. This ideology allows politicians to present us as if we have one common interest. Nationalism allows the politicians to limit democratic choice on the grounds that there is only one national interest. The “national interest” is in fact that the interest of the capitalist class of a country, not of its population.
The government is implementing policies for which no one voted, or would vote for. No one voted to cut care services for the old and the disabled. No one voted to close hospital departments or to delay repairing schools or to close libraries and sports facilities or to reduce rubbish collection. People getting what they didn’t vote for also shows that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as an expression of “the people’s will”.
This is not because there are no procedures in place for people to decide what they want, but because the way the capitalist economy works prevents some of these decisions being implemented. Capitalism is not geared to doing what people want and no amount of making the decision-making process more formally democratic can alter this. It is the continual boast of modern politicians that we live in a democratic state. When they say “we” they mean, of course, “they”, the ruling class. But the so-called democracy conferred on the working class is not a semblance even of the real thing.
We, the people, are told that we have democracy. We are told this by leaders who say we should trust them, who keep information from us because that’s in our best interest, who deliberately lie to us, who can have us spied upon, stopped and searched in the interest of national security. We are watched night and day in our town centres by CCTV, listened in on telephones, tapped into our e-mails. The State have access to more and more of our personal information, bank details ans what we spend our money on etc. They can put blocks on our access to the internet, they have centralised computer records to use as they choose. They decide whether we can show dissent or not. And they call this democracy.
The years of battering and enforced passivity has come to mean that for most of the working class the idea of them being in charge of affairs is inconceivable. The most damaging thing to the cause of true democracy is the repeated assurances that what we have nowadays is democracy and has created in many people's minds that democracy is not all that a great condition. Our masters, of course, wouldn't want it any other way.
The kind of representative system we have today is a charade and a fraud.
Many argue that Britain is a democracy and that we all benefit from living in a democratic society. We are told that we live in a "democracy" in which we are free to choose what kind of society we live in. By this they mean the regular holding of elections to parliament and local councils, the freedom to organise political parties, a press which is not beholden to the government, and the rule of law. If people object to the policies of the government or a particular MP, they can vote them out of office. If they oppose a specific action by a local council, they can set up a protest group and hold demonstrations, without the fear of being carted off to prison just for voicing their views.
But the most important of all political decisions – what the community produces – is never subjected to any kind of democratic process. Instead the city brokers merely decide which commodities will deliver the greatest or most reliable profits. In other words these decisions are made by a tiny elite minority in the interests of an even smaller minority. In capitalist society the only ‘choice’ voters have is who will decide how taxes are distributed to create and maintain the state infrastructure – armies, police, road, rail, law, health and social security system and, of course, the education system. Even this choice is only ‘given’ to the people once every five years between two political parties with no important differences in ideology. And this is political democracy?
What the capitalists and politicians call democracy is a contrived form of consensus in which the political parties conspire to ensure that the maximum number of people accept a system of law which guarantees a minority class in society the legal right to own and control the means of life of the great majority. To achieve and maintain that system of Law and the Order that ensures the right of that minority to exploit and impoverish the majority capitalists must have political control of the state machine. A vital part of the process that maintains the illusion of democratic choice is the power to confine political knowledge – and, thus, political options – to those parties whose policies are firmly rooted in an acceptance of capitalism.
For power to be lodged in the hands of the people does not mean merely that they are to have the widest possible franchise and equal voting power. It implies that the people are to have complete control of all social institutions, the ordering of all social activities, the domination of the whole social life. Such a condition of affairs presupposes at the very outset the ownership by the people of all the means of life, all the social products. There can be no other foundation for democracy than this common ownership of all the means of life, for where these fall into private possession social distinctions at once spring up, the owners become dominators. Real democracy - a social democracy - involves far more. The problem is that under a capitalist system there is a built-in lack of democracy, which cannot be overturned or compensated for by holding elections or permitting protest groups.
The Socialist Party welcomes the aspirations to political democracy. The World Socialist Movement sympathises with those workers around the world who fight at massive risk to themselves for civil liberties and rights. The fight for a measure of democracy world-wide is an essential part of the struggle for world socialism. After all, if workers are not able to fight for something as basic as the vote or to organise, they are unlikely to be able to work for the transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production for human need.
It is true that the vote, together with other hard-won rights such as assembly, political organisation and free speech, are most important. But can the act of electing a government result in a democratic society? A genuine, participatory democracy is part of the solution but is not the solution on its own. We do acknowledge that political democracy provides the best conditions for the development of the socialist movement. That is why we wish those well to all those struggling for political democracy throughout the world. The concessions and the elbow room that have been won in capitalist democracy are important and of value to working people. They are a platform from which socialist understanding can spread and the means by which socialism will be possibly achieved.
How can millions of people all have a say in running society?
The democratic organisation of all people as citizens of the world would need to operate through different scales of social co-operation. Locally, in town or country, we would be involved with our parish or neighbourhood. Even now, there are many thousands of men and women throughout the country who work voluntarily on parish and district councils and in town neighbourhoods for the benefit of their communities. But these efforts would be greatly enhanced by the freedoms of a society run entirely through voluntary co-operation. Such local organisation would be in the context of regional co-operation which could operate by adapting the structures of present national governments. Whilst some departments such as Inland Revenue and the Treasury, essential to the capitalist state, would be abolished, others like Agriculture and the Environment could be adapted to the needs of socialist society and could be part of regional councils and would assist in the work of implementing the decisions of regional populations. With the abolition of the market system, communities in socialism will not only be able to make free and democratic decisions about what needs to be done they will also be free to use their resources to achieve those aims. Communities will be free to decide democratically how best to use those resources. Small units could be run by regular meetings of all the workers. In the cases of large organisations these could be run by elected committees accountable to the people working in them. In this way, democratic practice would apply not just to the important policy decisions that would steer the main direction of development, it would extend to the day-to-day activities of the work place.
These days developments are now taking place which relegate phones and TVs to the museums along with the stone-age ax. We should be able to grasp the implication for democracy. This potential boon to humankind has itself called forth instruments which could, in a different framework, be of untold benefit. Such information and communications technology gives the opportunity for the population to keep themselves better informed and to take a more active role in decisions than at any time since the small city-states of ancient Greece. Information must flow freely, so all can have an opportunity of reaching a decision, of judging the performance of delegates and appointees, of deciding to challenge the actions of one body in a higher authority; and in real democracy, the higher authorities are those bodies which contain more members of the community concerned. Everyday life must be the signalling system that lets people know what their fellows want, the way of co-ordinating votes and decisions. A society of common ownership would have no need of constricting decision-making. Democracy would be an everyday process. When we own all the wealth in common we will have structures to ensure that we retain control of all decision-making levels where we feel we have need to involve ourselves and intervene. The more people can exercise a say in those actions, the more democratic the process becomes. Our aim of a democratic society is a practical possibility.
Democracy needs no boastful big leaders with egos to polish, no self-important experts and specialists. Democracy needs no rallying cries of flag-waving nationalism. Democracy, in essence, is simple and easily understood. Democracy speaks the whole truth, reveals all the evidence, enables informed discussion and decisions and requires inclusion for all in dialogue. Crucial to the question of democracy is not just the ability to make decisions about what to do but also the powers of action to carry out those decisions. Politically for socialists it is the heartbeat of every activity. Democracy is not just a set of rules or a parliament; it is a process, a process that must be fought for. The struggle for democracy is the struggle for socialism. It is the struggle for an idea, a belief that we can run our own lives, that we have a right to a say in how society is run, for a belief that the responsibility for democracy lies not upon the politicians or their bureaucrats, but upon ourselves. We want democracy to extend to all spheres of social life. For us that’s what socialism is – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole community.
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