The Democratic Farce's Stage Scenery

This stage scenery was invented by the Founding Fathers of the United States, with the very clearly expressed intention of keeping electoral democracy from becoming an instrument that could be used by the people to call in question the social order based on private property (and slavery!).

The democratic fraud then displays itself as offering ‘alternatives’ (in this case, the Democrats and the Republicans) that cannot ever rise to the level required by a real alternative (offering the possibility of new, radically different, options). But without the presence of real alternative perspectives democracy is nonexist­ent. The farce is based on ‘consensus’ (!) ideology, which excludes by definition serious conflicts between interests and between visions of the future. The inven­tion of ‘party primaries’ inviting the whole electorate (whether its components are said to be leftist or rightist!) to express its choices of candidates for the two false adversaries accentuates still further that deviation so annihilating for the meaning of elections.

Jean Monnet, a true anti-democrat is honored today in Brussels, where his inten­tions to copy the U.S. model were fully understood, as the founder of the ‘new European democracy’. Monnet deployed all his efforts, which were scrupulously implemented in the European Union, to deprive elected assemblies of their pow­ers and transfer them to ‘committees of technocrats’.

Historically, continental Europe has not long experienced the calm waters of the democratic farce. In the nineteenth century (and even up to 1945) struggles for democracy, both those inspired by the capitalist and middle-class bourgeoisies and those expressing the working masses, ran up against resistance from the anciens regimes. Hence their chaotic pattern of advances and retreats. Marx thought that such resistance was an obstacle fortunately unknown in the United States.

He was wrong, and underestimated the extent to which, in a “pure” capitalist system (like that of the United States in comparison to Europe) the “overdetermi­nation” of political processes, that is to say the automatic conformity of changes in the ideological and political superstructure to those required for management of society by the capitalist monopolies, would inevitably lead to what conven­tional sociologists call ‘totalitarianism’. This is a term that applies even more to the capitalist imperialist world than anywhere else. (I here refer back to what I have written elsewhere about ‘overdetermination’ and the openings which it makes available.)

In nineteenth century Europe (and also, though to a lesser degree, in the United States) the historical coalitions put together to ensure the power of capital were, by the force of circumstance—the diversity of classes and of sub-classes—com- plex and changeable.

The Liberal Virus (as one of my books is titled) did the rest: Europe aligned itself more and more on the American model. Conflicts among the major capitalist powers helped cement the components of the historical coalitions, bringing about, by way of nationalism, the domination of capital. It even happened—Germany and Italy being particularly exemplary—that ‘national consensus’ was made to replace the democratic program of the bourgeois revolution. This deformation of democ­racy is now virtually complete. The Communist parties of the Third International tried in their way to oppose it, even though their ‘alternative’ (modeled on the USSR) remained of questionable attractiveness. Having failed to build lasting alternative coalitions, they ended up capitulating, going over to submission to the system of democratic electoral farce. So doing, the part of the radical left consist­ing of their heirs (in Europe, the ‘United Left’ grouping in the Strasbourg parlia­ment) gave up any perspective of real ‘electoral victory’. It is happy to survive on the second-class seats allotted to ‘minorities’ (at most 5-10 % of the ‘voting population’). Transformed into coteries of elected representatives whose sole con­cern—taking the place of ‘strategy’—is to hang on to these wretched places in the system, this radical left gives up on really being anything of the sort. That this plays into the hands of neofascist demagogues is, in these conditions, unsurprising.

A discourse styling itself ‘postmodernist’, which quite simply refuses to rec­ognize the scope of the democratic farce’s destructive effects, incorporates sub­mission to it. What matter elections, they say, what counts is elsewhere: in ‘civil society’ (a muddled concept to which I shall return) where individuals are what the liberal virus claims them—falsely—to be, the active subjects of history. Antonio Negri’s ‘philosophy’, which I have criticized elsewhere, is an expression of this desertion. But the democratic farce, unchallenged in the opulent societies of the imperialist triad, does not work in the system’s peripheries. There, in the storm zone, the established order does not enjoy any legitimacy sufficient to stabilize society. So, then, does the the possibility of a real alternative reveal itself in the watermark of the paper on which the ‘Southern awakenings’ that characterized the twentieth century, and which go on making their way in the twenty-first century, are written by history?

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