As someone who used to vaguely believe in electoralism, it’s insidious how the bourgeois class pretend it’s all fair voting, until it goes the way they don’t want. Then the rules change and you’re voting wrong and the imperfections of the ‘imperfect system’ get used 100% in favour of bullshit.
I’m not that old, and in my adult lifetime I’ve seen it happen in at least a few western countries (eg Recent France, state mandated fraud in the US, or the UK’s internal disinformation campaigns (including cooperation by state media) - The people vote for the “let’s minorly improve things” candidate, then bourgeois class solidarity causes shit to come out of every aspect of the woodwork to make sure that candidate cannot win. Even if everyone votes for the best candidate every time ever, there’s a 99% chance it’ll never matter (so long as the working class are doing nothing else to ensure it does).
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich–that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
Every time I feel I’ve made any observation of modern society, Lenin and/or Marx already made it over a century ago. Makes me very mad at how enduring this bullshit has been.
As someone who used to vaguely believe in electoralism, it’s insidious how the bourgeois class pretend it’s all fair voting, until it goes the way they don’t want. Then the rules change and you’re voting wrong and the imperfections of the ‘imperfect system’ get used 100% in favour of bullshit.
I’m not that old, and in my adult lifetime I’ve seen it happen in at least a few western countries (eg Recent France, state mandated fraud in the US, or the UK’s internal disinformation campaigns (including cooperation by state media) - The people vote for the “let’s minorly improve things” candidate, then bourgeois class solidarity causes shit to come out of every aspect of the woodwork to make sure that candidate cannot win. Even if everyone votes for the best candidate every time ever, there’s a 99% chance it’ll never matter (so long as the working class are doing nothing else to ensure it does).
Every time I feel I’ve made any observation of modern society, Lenin and/or Marx already made it over a century ago. Makes me very mad at how enduring this bullshit has been.
Throw this one the pile too https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/24/coup-j24.html and https://jacobin.com/2022/04/kevin-rudd-cia-us-embassy-julia-gillard-alp-coup
(I’m not 100 percent convinced on this one)