Selforganised struggle instead of democratic puppet-theatre

We had a conference today called "Can the state of law protect you from dictatorship" (or maybe better to say the state that follows the law). We thought it was important to discuss these things especially given the recent events in Poland and the "threat to democracy" that the neoliberals are trying to convince everybody is much worse than their regular antidemocratic and anti-social politics. We gave lots of examples for why we don't defend the Constitutional Tribunal, but it defends capital and where it does something else, the government ignores it. A lot of noise steered by neoliberlas to get people worked up and help some people back to power, However, as critical as l am about the way that the word "democracy" is used and manipulated by the media, government, politicians and those who have power, l don't think it to too smart to use formulations like "democracy is nothing more then a political form of capitalist dictatorship". l get the idea but we have to be careful about a few things. First of all, there are people who postulate the liquidation of any democracy, to be replaced by government by elites - intellectuals, party elites, etc. And these people sometimes use formulations like "democracy is dictatorship". The second thing is that what we in fact propose (l don't know about you) is replacing bourgeoise and representative democracy with not only a more direct democracy, but with a new social idea based on equality in very real ways, not just equality to vote. So you know, we could discuss a long time whether or not to call this "democracy" - l personally don't like talking too much about direct democracy without talking about our social ideas - because direct democracy is talked about a lot, but usually by some liberal people who just like to decide things but don't necessarily have similar economic or social ideas. "Democracy" is not enough. But treating this notion in the way you do might alienate working people who actually think democracy is a good thing and what we need is more or it. Met plenty of people like that today and we should take our language into account because, (don't know about you) but we talk to all sorts of working class people all the time who don't necessarily like academic farts, but they can talk to us - however sometimes we have to use their notions and vocabulary, From this point of view, l think it is better to point out where democracy is not enough, where it is failing or where it is a fasade then just trying to get rid of that word.

We don't live in a democracy in the UK, the USA, or anywhere else on this planet, but under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie which masquerades as and calls itself a democracy and has managed to persuade nearly everyone that putting a cross on a piece of paper in a secretive polling booth every 4 or 5 years is what democracy is all about.

Making a choice between two or three politicians on a voting paper, all of whom represent capitalism, is hardly making a choice at all, but that's all that democracy currently is. Anyone who thinks it isn't is wrong.

Workers who think this limited type of democracy is good, and defend it, are making a big mistake and just showing how alienated they are. They are alienated from working class values where decisions political and otherwise were not (in 1871 and 1917) reached by putting crosses on papers but through intense discussions and close interaction.

The sort of communicative process that can take place today in workers strike committees and other kinds of meetings where Union officials are not present can also holdout the prospect of a genuine fairly free exchange of ideas which generally speaking bourgeois democratic procedures go out of their way to prevent, block and circumvent. The purpose of bourgeois democracy is to prevent the working class as far as possible, from thinking about politics at all and the Unions are masterful at helping achieve this.

We boycott elections, don't support political parties or going into politics and definitely do not support hierarchical unionism.

There are plenty of workers here who are totally disillusioned with this fake democracy and this is a good thing. What is not good is that different unions try to lead workers to get their buddies in power, which is all a farse. The worst thing for us is when people who carry black and red flags have candidates and even leaders of political parties in their ranks and symbolic "workers protests" become forums for political promotion, with no workers there, but lots of politicians.