Democracy

>What you’re saying isn’t wrong but no one has ever figured out a way to solve this.

>The inherent problem with democracy is that elections are ultimately influenced by money. This is fundamentally the basis of Karl Marx’s writings on the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. And while this is an important part of recognizing the problem, nobody has come up with a system that works better. Hence the old saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.
>The analysis of the problem usually works something like this:
>In a democracy, supreme power must rest with the electorate.
>No law, no court, no jury can wield higher power than the electorate as a whole.
>So long as an election is free and legitimate, the people chosen by that election must be assumed to represent the will of the people therefore cannot be superseded.
>Any efforts to remove the influence of the wealthy elite from elections (ie campaign finance laws) must be passed by the people who won that very same election.
>The leaders chosen in Step 3 are usually elected thanks to the money provided by the wealthy elite and serve their interests, therefore inevitably oppose the reforms in Step 4.

My problem with this analysis of “democracy” as a whole is that it is incredibly limited in scope, and is only really referring to how a liberal democracy functions and describes the political norms that came out of liberal revolutions in the 18th century and which were based on the writings of Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke.

And while it’s true that these revolutionary governments were far more democratic than the hereditary monarchies that they overthrew, the democracies that they crafted share very little resemblance to the colloquial definition that we typically associate with democracy.

When we refer to something as a democracy, that is usually short-hand for “a style of government where all authority originates from the consent of the governed.” So the line of thinking that gets to the conclusion you reached above goes something like this:

Our country is/was a democracy

Therefore at some point our country embodied/aspired to the ideal “all authority originates from the consent of the governed.”

We have failed to/no longer live up to this ideal, and we instead have a political system beholden to the interests of the wealth regardless of the interests/consent of the general public.

Therefore democracy itself is flawed/became corrupted.

However, this line of thinking used to categorically condemn/disparage democracy as a concept is faulty, because it substitutes our own ideal/aspiration for what we think democracy should be in place of the actual principles that our government was crafted around.

So let’s take a step back and look at what principles are actually embodied by liberal democracies, and how those principles came to be.

To do that we have to take a brief look at the social relations within feudalism that these liberal revolutions came out of. Feudal monarchies featured a long history of class conflict/class struggle, with periodic peasant revolts being a semi-regular occurrence, but the power dynamics of most feudal monarchies were able to remain stable because of an asymmetric application of force. Even though there would always be far more peasants than there were soldiers in the king’s and lord’s armies, the peasants were spread out and the technology to effectively communicate and organize over large distances wasn’t accessible to the peasantry. So, while a group of peasants might revolt against the lord/the king here and there, it was prohibitively difficult to get a critical mass of peasants revolting at the same time in a way that would overwhelm their armies.

What changed as time went on was the early development of specialized industry, and the increasing importance of inter-state commerce in contributing to the wealth of a nation. From this early mercantilism/proto-capitalism, we would see a number of social relations begin to change. First, you started having peasants moving out of the countryside and into towns/commerce hubs so that they could participate in the trades/join a guild. (This move was partly motivated by the tendency for kingdoms to start moving away “customary agreements” where peasants were tasked with either meeting some quota or spending part of the year working the lord’s land instead of their own and moving toward a system of monetary taxation. This was a transition that was supported by most peasants at the time, because it was seen as giving them more leeway in how they would pay their obligation to the lord/kingdom, and it was much less directly antagonistic than arrangements such as months of mandatory labor on the lord’s land.) Next, you also have the early formation of a wealthy and well-connected merchant/business class.

This class would co-exist alongside the hereditary aristocracy for some time, but naturally many were dissatisfied with being subject to the whims of a hereditary ruling class. However, unlike the attempts at peasant revolts throughout early feudalism, this new class was able to organize and communicate over large distances, and did so regularly through participating in inter-state commerce. These crucial differences would lead to the ultimate success of liberal revolutions such as the French and American Revolutions which were led by this merchant/business class (i.e. a bourgeois). Of course this class could not fight a revolution by itself, and had to win over the public to its side by invoking ideals such as freedom, liberty, fraternity and egalitarianism. This can be seen in the famous French motto “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

However, the leadership of these revolutions had a distinct class character, and the governments that were formed out of these revolutions would share this class character. We can see this in how limited the democracy that was created out of these revolutions would end up being. For example, the American constitution created a democracy where only wealthy landowners who owned at least 40 acres of land had the right to vote and participate in government. This very explicitly created a democracy for the few that was designed to represent the interests of the ownership class against the interests of the general public. The governing institutions that were created out of these revolutions bear very little resemblance to the ideal that we typically envision when we refer to democracy. It would be more accurate to say that these institutions replaced a ruling class based in hereditary right with a ruling class based on property ownership, which makes sense because these revolutions were led and organized by a property-owning class.

So getting back to your point about democracy, it’s not accurate to say that we have tried “democracy” and it failed/became corrupted, therefore democracy as a category is flawed. Rather, the opposite is true. Our governing institutions were created with a specific class character in mind, and the fact that they have maintained that class character for centuries proves how durable those institutions are, not how corruptible they are. The truth is that our government was never meant to represent the interests of the general public. These institutions will make concessions to the public for the sake of maintaining stability, but they have always represented a specific set of class interests.


>This conundrum was the basis for the popularity of the fascism movement after World War I. The idea was that democracies were weak, chaotic and controlled by an elite class of wealthy intellectuals, therefore a government run by a single ruling party would be better. Mussolini’s rise to power was a perfect example of this, one that Hitler emulated, and both appeared to be very effective in their early years by stabilizing and focusing on massive infrastructure expansions. Of course it was all a sham - they were in debt up to their eyeballs, but because they controlled the narrative through effective propaganda and press crackdowns, they kept the people ignorant of all this.

This history of fascism is completely apocryphal. Fascism’s “popularity” has nothing to do with a dissatisfaction with democracy. First, let’s take a step back and look at the historical context that fascism exited within.

During periods like the great depression, millions of people are torn away from their livelihoods, and thrown out to live on the streets. You see devastation across an entire society where large segments of the population are either unable to support themselves or just barely getting by. That kind of devastation is only comparable to the hardship brought upon by the destruction of events like war and natural disasters. The only difference being that in this calamity, nothing has been destroyed. All of the machinery of society is in perfect working order, and we still have all the resources needed to provide a decent standard of living for all. And yet even though we have masses of unemployed/under-employed people who are literally begging to be allowed to work in exchange for their fair share of the proceeds of production so that they have what they need to live, millions are being denied that chance because for one reason or another we have reached a point where it is no longer profitable for those who own these factories and other instruments of production to employ our labor. The lesson that this teaches to millions of people is that even though society has the capability and resources to provide for you, and even though you are willing to put in your fair share of work, your life only has value if you are generating profit for the class of people who own capital and who act as a gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses.

This experience naturally starts to develop revolutionary sentiment among the people, especially those who have become destitute through no fault of their own. Messages from socialists and communists start to grow in popularity, rallying people around messages such as "Labor is entitled to all it creates" and organizing people with a strategy of seizing the means of production from the capital owning class by standing in solidarity with all of the working class people who are in the same boat as us, so that we can use the places that we work at and use our own labor to advance our collective interests instead of having our labor be organized by an owning class who uses our labor to line their own pockets at our expense.

These are the conditions that fascism arises in response to. Fascism is never a populist movement that arises naturally from the people. Corporations and businesses start seeing growing anger and revolutionary attitudes developing among the people, literally making calls for heads of this ownership class, and they start working to develop the strategy and tactics that they can use to hold on to their wealth, power, and privilege. Fringe extremist groups like the Nazis or Mussolini's Black Shirts are given funding, weapons, and public platforms to spread their message among the people by these wealthy corporations. The strength of communist/socialist movements comes from building up solidarity between as much of the working class as possible, and uniting the people together under their shared class interests, so the counter strategy involves dividing the people up among as many fracture points as possible. Fascism is a simple divide and conquer strategy that seeks to keep the masses at each other's throats by inflaming hatred and bigotry along racial lines, religious lines, socio-economic lines, political lines, disability, and more. And this only works by selling a false solution to at least one segment of the population. Fascism acknowledges the hardship and devastation that people are experiencing in this time of economic crisis, but it tells people that the cause of this hardship is that our once great society is being weighed down by the burden of having to support all of these lesser "untermensch," that all of these immigrants, disabled persons, and culturally inferior races are a blight on the good, hard working, upstanding, pure-blooded German people. That the way that we can reclaim our past glory is by purging these undesirable elements from society. Fascism feeds people conspiracy theories about "The protocols of Elder Zion," telling them that their suffering is being caused by a shadowy group of Jewish Elites that are trying to control the world from behind the curtain and subjugate the German people for the benefit of the Jews. Fascism tells people that the communists who are tempting you with calls of solidarity are actually a part of this Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy and that they are trying to destroy your country.
Every aspect of fascism is designed to keep people fighting against each other, to breed distrust and contempt, to keep you wondering whether or not your neighbor that you knew your whole life is going to sell you out to the Waffen SS. Because that is Capitalism's only defense against working class solidarity.

And make no mistake that working class solidarity is always the primary target of fascist movements. As we know from Martin Niemöller's famous poem:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

>Marx’s theory was that eventually the wealth disparity would get so bad that a revolution of the worker glass what eventually happen organically, and at this point it gets considerably more vague as to exactly how this would be structured but there would be a really bad intermediate period, but eventually it would create a perfect utopia without the need for government and no need for elections because everyone has everything they need…somehow.

This is a complete misunderstanding/misrepresentation of Marx.

First, Marx’s theory of change did not have to do with increasing wealth disparity. To correct this, I need to give a primer on how to think like a Marxist.

Let’s take class analysis for example, something that is very central to Marx’s critiques and Marx’s theories.

Class analysis is not a moral framework that is used to assign value judgements about people based on which bucket they fall into. Marxism doesn't attempt to make any decrees about how if you are bourgeois you're a bad person and if you are proletarian you are a good person.

Marxism is a set of analytical tools for understanding how society is organized and what the driving forces behind social change is, and communists use that toolbox to aid and develop their organizing, strategy, and tactics.

Class analysis is useful as a tool not because it allows you to sort people into buckets, but because it allows you to identify the interests that are shared between people in similar situations. If you understand the interests of working class people and you know the leverage that the working class collectively holds due to the position they have within production, then you can use that understanding to build a platform around advancing those shared interests in order to rally people under a unified plan of action that is able to win those demands. Understanding the interests of the bourgeois and the leverage they hold that lets them advance those interests is necessary so that you don't get caught off guard by things like union busting and other kinds of retaliation against labor. By understanding the leverage and strengths of people who have opposing class interests, you can prepare for things like retaliation against striking workers by organizing strike funds, you can prepare for legal retaliation by organizing community policing and legal defense, and so on.

When we talk about class, the primary social relation we are concerned with a person's relationship to the means of production. The Bourgeois is that part of society who derives wealth, power, and privilege's from owning the means of production. Or in other words by using their ownership and the legal structures that support them to act as gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses to be productive. This part of society is able to extract wealth from society in far greater proportion than the value that they contribute by using their ownership over production as leverage, refusing to allow production to occur unless they get their "cut" from production. Each of these owners may be in competition with each other on an individual level, each one trying to capture a larger market share for themselves, but they still have a shared interest in maintaining the legal structures that allow them to maintain this position in society.

On the other end you have the proletariat, which is that part of society who owns no significant tools, land, resources, or other implements of production of their own. A proletarian may be able to obtain some level of sustenance as a small producer with their own tools, maybe growing food in their own garden, but who is unable to produce at a level that matches the current state of the art on their own and who is therefore unable to produce anything that is able to compete with other offerings on the market. This means that the proletariat is unable to barter/trade in order to make-up any shortfalls that they experience. The only thing of value that they have to sell is themselves and their labor, and so the proletariat is that part of society who is forced to sell themselves and their labor piecemeal to the part of society who owns the land, resources, and tools that they require to be productive.

This is how we are able to transition from a concept like property ownership into a concept like class. Because of how property relates to how society produces things, and because the production of society is the mechanism through how our needs/wants are satisfied, we can see that property relations are actually social relations. A factory is worth nothing to a business owner without the social character that the factory embodies. No one buys a factory for their own personal use, you buy a factory because you want to wield authority over the hundreds of people who are required to bring that factory to life. You buy a factory because of the social relation that factory grants you over the other people involved in production.

Class analysis can be as broad or as fine grain as you want it to be, and each approach has its uses. A simple analysis of capitalism can say that the primary class relationship we are concerned with is workers and owners and how the class interests of these 2 categories conflict with each other, and you would end up with a pretty accurate understanding of the social forces that shape capitalist society since that divide is what we like to call "the primary contradiction." However, you end up with people who don't fit neatly into those broad categories. The "small business owner" is a great example of this. They occupy a space in society where they are able to buy the labor of others and hold a position of authority over those workers, but are unable to earn a living in this way and are still required to contribute their own labor to that business in order to stay afloat. Does that mean they align more with workers or owners? If their mom-and-pop repair store has to shut down because a Walmart opened up down the street that can sell new products cheaper than their business can fix old products, does that not put them in the same social relation as someone who cannot compete with the state of the art employed by big businesses?

This is where sub-categorization comes into play. We usually call this kind of person petit bourgeois. If you are organizing political action around advancing a working class agenda, you might be able to make the argument that the petit-bourgeois would benefit from supporting a working class agenda. You could argue that these business owners hold a position in society that is transient and ephemeral, that they are harmed by the corporate domination of society more than they benefit from the legal structures that grant them authority over a small part of production, and that the continuous trend of capital consolidating into fewer and fewer hands means that it's only a matter of time before their business fails and they fall into the ranks of the proletariat. I even believe that most of these arguments are correct. So what is the utility of placing people into separate buckets and subcategories?

This comes back to the point I was making about Marxism being a set of tools used to aid things like organization and strategy. If you are a political party that is trying to organize support, you will have limited resources with which to do so. When deciding on which issues you prioritize, you are constrained by how much leverage your organization has to win the demands you are trying to rally people around. In that context, more granular class analysis can be incredibly useful. With a more granular analysis you can say, "I can see that there are good arguments for how petit bourgeois might be well served by a working class agenda and that makes them a potential group that we can win support from, but I think it's a mistake to focus our limited resources and tailor our messaging around making a tough sell to people who own a business because they aspire to wield authority over labor. We have better things that we can be spending our time and energy on."

This is the kind of framework that Marxist analysis is grounded in. It is an analytical toolbox that gives a lens that you can use to understand the world, understand the social relations of society, how those relations develop, how material conditions can give one social group leverage over another group so that their interests can win out when they come into conflict with competing interests, and so on. And this important thing to realize is that you don’t have to be a communist to utilize a Marxist framework/analysis. This kind of analysis is the same kind of analysis that I used at the start, showing how through the historical development of social relations throughout feudalism and the changing material conditions brought about by mercantilism shifted the balance of power in favor of the newly formed bourgeois, and how that historical shift culminated in the eventual victory of this bourgeois over the hereditary monarchies that they overthrew.

So Marx’s theories are not prescriptions saying “This is what must come to pass.” They are tools used to aid in your organizing and help develop a theory of change.

When you are referring to Marx talking about growing wealth disparity, I assume you are referring to Marx’s analysis on capitalism’s tendency to proletarianize the workforce. What this analysis says briefly is that as the state of the art in any given industry advances towards utilizing more capital-intensive methods of production such as factory work, it becomes increasingly difficult for small producers to compete on the market with the efficiency of large producers who can utilize these processes. Once the small producers with their outdated tools are no longer able to earn a living while producing at their previous output, they eventually find themselves in a situation where their only option to earn a living is to sell their labor to one of these businesses that is employing these state of the art methods of production.

While this process does inevitably lead to increasing wealth disparity and the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, Marx’s analysis is not based on tapping into some kind of discontent over wealth inequality. If discontent was a sufficient basis for the revolutionary reorganization of society, then slavery would have never been able to persist. What Marx notes as significant about the proletarianization of the working class is that it results in a great social reorganization of society where the general public begins relocating by the hundreds and thousands to find work in these growing industrial hubs and factory towns. What that creates is not just a social class that finds itself in a shared circumstance with one another, but now they now find themselves working side by side with a large number of their peers, concentrated into growing cities. This represents a significant change in the material conditions of the working class, where they now find themselves able to commiserate over their shared struggles in large numbers. Unlike the scattered peasantry of feudal societies, this proletarianized workforce finds themselves in a situation where they can develop a class consciousness with their peers. And this is what Marx identifies as a crucial development that can form the basis of collective action, and indeed these conditions do result in the spontaneous development of things like trade unionism.

But as I said above, you can use this analysis regardless of which class interests you represent. A communist who is advocating for the interests of working class would use this analysis to identify the shared interests held among those who find themselves in these shared circumstances, identify what leverage we have as a group, and then use that analysis to develop a plan of action that can be used to rally people around advancing those shared interests. But if you’re a business owner, you can use that same analysis to identify the leverage that your workers have against you if they present a united front, and you can protect your interests by trying to fracture any potential working class solidarity by promoting and encouraging segregation, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, racial bigotry, gender bigotry, religious bigotry, and so on down the list. Or to use a more modern example, you can try to prevent worker solidarity from forming by organizing your business as a gig economy job, where your employees will rarely if ever see their fellow workers and only ever interact with your company through an app.

To finish up, Marx is “vague” about how to achieve a working class utopia because the idea of a working class utopia doesn’t come from Marx. The definition of communism as a “Stateless, moneyless, classless society” is never something that Marx prescribes as a goal, that is a misrepresentation of Marx. Marx speculates that at some point in the future that the resolution of class conflict will eventually result in a stateless, moneyless, classless society, but doesn’t define communism in this way nor does he attempt to prescribe this hypothetical society as a goal that we must strive to attain. In fact, he directly refutes this kind of thinking. To quote Marx:

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”