The greatest lie¶

The greatest lie ever told by western "democracies" is that elections = democracy. The implication being that, as long as the people have the final say in who leads them, those people will act as their "representatives."

We know this process isn't working for the people. Public polling shows that people are increasingly aware that the government is not serving their interests, and serves a small group of powerful people instead. The blame is often laid at the feet of corporate donations helping pro-corporate candidates win elections. But it goes so much deeper than that. The entire electoral process was designed to launder public sentiment without too much danger of needing to actually serve the people.

A good way to think of this is the "sham elections" of fascist Italy, Germany, and Japan. We all intuitively understand that an election where ballots have a giant "Ja," a tiny "Nein," (plus armed security forces) don't actually tell us what the people really want.

So why did they even run these elections if they didn't care about the people's will? Several reasons. https://t.co/r4dQn14Zvg We often think of "legitimization" in the context of these sham elections supposedly demonstrating to the outside world that the regime has popular support.

The "legitimacy" is actually for the base. And it's not exactly a trick, just an empty affirmation. The simple act of affirmatively voting for the ruling party helps build a sense of loyalty in the base. This means they're more likely to comply with the party's policies, act as "citizen deputies," socially pressure their neighbors, and create a culture of unity. For these regimes, the point of the election is not as a way of making the government responsive to the people, it's to make a specific, galvanized subset of the people feel an enhanced allegiance to the party. You're probably thinking "Of course, but those are repressive, one-party regimes. My country has real democracy, with multiple parties who need to compete for your vote!"

Except your options are not really "choices" in the sense of you deciding how the government is run. Think about your options as a well-informed voter. You already know what the candidates and their parties stand for. You know who sort of aligns with your values and who is absolutely NOT an option.

In other words, for you, the ballot already has a huge "Ja" and a tiny "Nein." The goal of every party in a representative democracy is to convince as many people as possible that they are the obvious, only choice. If they can do that without actually changing their policies, they will.

So why won't they ever push for pro-people policies? Here we get to the impact of capital.

As long as there is "competition" between parties, elections require financial resources to pay staff, market the party, rent space, etc. A party with no money is not really a party: it's just a philosophy club. The tougher the competition between parties, the more money that's necessary for their existence. This is such a fundamental structural truth that it's not even a question of parties being "corrupted" by money. It's more that they are actively built by capital. Bourgeois revolutions throughout history were, in essence, ways to establish capital as the deciding force in governmental affairs, rather than heredity and force. This was presented to the people as democratic liberalization, that now "anyone can rule if they win elections!" The fact that the goal was never to give power to "the people" should be made pretty obvious by who was allowed to vote in the beginning stages of these bourgeois democracies: property-holders. Constitutions were invariably drafted by the holders of capital. Suffrage was granted in stages, only once it became more disruptive to the political order to deny the vote than to admit new groups into the process.

When that suffrage is deemed too disruptive, it is simply abrogated. Either by legislative, administrative, or military means. There is no real danger to capital of needing to give up its hegemony as a result of the government it helped create. Instead, electoral politics gives it a pressure gauge to determine how seriously it should take public discontent and what to do about it. Reforms, when they happen, are made as short-term concessions to relieve some of that tension. They are made with the understanding that they can always be undone within the "democratic" framework, and that capital will not need to accept a permanent loss of power. Democratic "rights" in this context are only portrayed in that way to absolve the ruling class of the consequences of their hegemony. But they are deliberately set up in a way to mitigate class-based solidarity, and divide the working class into manageable constituencies. By "allowing" these constituencies to vote in their atomized self-interests, and ensuring those interests do not align along class lines, capital is able to continue operating in the same spirit as the sham elections of fascist regimes. When class interests become too coherent and mobilized, those constituencies must simultaneously be reasserted and realigned in opposition to class solidarity. Hence, fascism and anticommunism go hand-in-hand. It's also why fascism comes with a breakdown in "democratic norms." If the goal of electoralism is to reinforce constituent politics over class solidarity, fascism can handle that just fine, by using extrajudicial means to continuously and violently fracture the working class. In other words, democracy is not "breaking down." It was never meant to serve your interests. As conditions worsen, the true enemy of capital--class solidarity--becomes a greater threat. So a more rigorous form of fracture is necessary, and fascism takes over from "democracy."