The Commune's June 8th London forum: do we live in a democracy?

'Democracy' like other terms pro-revolutionaries are often stuck with using like 'anarchism' and indeed 'communism' is open to numerous different definitions and interpretaions.

In one sense we are deluged with 'democracy' in modern capitalism being asked to voice our opinions on, and vote on, damn near everything from the best of a latest batch of aspireing celebrities to who should 'represent us' in parliament, in the local state, trade union or 'community' panel etc etc. Democracy as it is experienced by most of us is just the political/civil reflection of the commodity society of isolated consumers. Endless 'choice' but no real power!

For a fairly good deep level critique of 'democracy' as it exists in the real world of capitalism and why we should reject it see for starters:

http://www.geocities.com/icgcikg/communism/c4_communism_demo.htm

and also:

http://www.geocities.com/icgcikg/communism/c8_mythdemo.htm

though I wouldn't recomend the authors for everything they write.

The Commune's editorial in the latest issue of their magazine seeks to retain the historical communist identity with the 'democratic' tradition by advancing a notion of 'workers self management' as against capitalist representative democracy, in the tradition of the council communist movement and more recently the British Solidarity group whom they have recently rediscovered.

This puts them ahead of the left and trotskyist tradition from which they have emmerged (though the last line of the editorial still seeks to retain the possibillity of parliament being used as a 'tribune' in apparent contradiction to the core argument). Still they need to take care not to fall into the same traps as previous 'sef-management' promoters who reduced communism to a matter of new political forms rather than a new human community.

I would be interested to see how this discussion develops - perhaps some of it might emmerge via both the Commune web site and Lib Com?

Do we live in a democracy? No.

"Democracy" in the context of private ownership of the means of production is non-democratic. We are encouraged to participate in all decisions that change nothing, for sure.

"Democracy" in terms of the operation of revolutionary organisations has a very different meaning.

Social revolution is made by the majority, so capitalist "democracy" is no more of a barrier than minority ownership of mass media to think of one example.

Confusion about terms is also part of the problem. How do you propose to make decisions? Democratically, obviously.

I think it's easier and clearer to present the idea that we don't live in a democracy and the only possible genuine democracy is a direct communist one created through class struggle, rather than confuse the issue and go on about obscure aspects of how bourgeois democratic ideology interferes with self-organisation (e.g. when waiting for permission to act from workers not directly in a struggle in the name of democratic principles - these ideas need to be discussed but great care should be taken with terminology).

the defining charactersitic of capitalism is, on one level at least, the formal separation of the economic and the political, and the transfer (or privitisation) of political issues (like control over production, allocation of social labour and resources etc..) safely away to the economic sphere and out of harms way and away from the newly introduced democracy of the political sphere, the consequences of this for any concept of citizenship based on the equal distribution of poltical rights and political democracy is obvious, so without an 'economic democracy' any discussion about whether we do or we don't live in a democratic society is pointless, the answer is of course yes we do live in a political democracy, but one of which the political sphere has been emptied of it's real social & political content. the political democracy we've got today would have been impossible under say feudalism as it would have completely undercut the method in which surplus labour was extracted, but given that method has now moved on, political democracy can now flourish and looked upon as a beacon of enlightenment, safe in the knowledge that it will never impinge on the method of apprpriation

this problem in a way has been perpetuated by those seeking to challenge it with a mirroring of this seperation of the 'economic' and the 'political' which continues to just play into the hands of those who followed in the footsteps of classical economy by emptying capitalism/the economic sphere of it's social & political content - that's why a lot of what marx wrote is so importantly relevant today, an attempt to reveal the political & social face of the economic sphere which had been obscured by classical political economists and their progeny, including many marxists who by following crude base-superstructure approaches only end up perpetuating the ideological approaches that marx himself was attempting to combat