From IWW to Bolshevik

From IWW to Bolshevik

            Democracy was the creation of the bourgeoisie by destroying the inherited rank of the old aristocracy. The needs of the bourgeoisie in a capitalist society deform and limit political democracy.  The constitutional politics of political democracy is more than just limited it still is a serious threat to it authors the property owning corporate capitalist.  Even political democracy soon outgrows its origins.  Hostility and violence is direct the working who take democracy earnestly, by the bourgeois liberals who claim to take democracy seriously.  The institutional violence of repression against the democratic movements in the US has been central ion the formation US political culture. The legitimate options to social change remain structurally limited.  Party politics leading to election of government personnel is the sum total of democracy.  Any political activity out side theses narrow legitimate channels is defined by the powers to be as subversive to democracy and suppressed.  Authoritarian bureaucracies those limits the debates and options even before the issues are defined protected democracy.  Democracy became only a means for selecting government officials.  Elite’s define the issues to be debated through their control of economic possibilities set by capitalist needs.  These people of property control the contest of democracy itself (Bottomore1979: 12-17).

            Democracy is the conclusion of a struggle to include more and more people in relationships of wealth and power in ever increasing equality among all the people.  Democracy is the ultimate struggle for working people, within state society.  As long as state society survives democracy cannot be surpassed.  Only through revolution can bourgeois political democracy, be replaced by social and economic democracy, and at which point the political aspects of democracy is outlived.  Under capitalism the workers must defend bourgeois democratic rights.  The capitalist will abrogate democracy, before this same democracy will be abandon by working class organizations.  The bourgeoisie used democracy to further their commitment to private property, profits, and an open market economy.  In the bourgeois republic political democracy remains shallow, limited, it is a superficial facade that hides the tyranny of wages slavery.  Private property always stands opposed to democracy at any level.  The market economy is always a cruel joke on the workers.  The complete control over the means of coercion, formation of ideology, and the all-powerful market means bourgeois society can never become truly democratic or completely representative sovereign without a complete social, economic, and political revolution.  This revolution must be total or it will fail and bourgeois society will be re-established (Lenin 1970a: 22-25).

            With the growth of the bourgeoisie and their corresponding political revolutions, the state grew in size and importance, from a parasite to a civil bureaucracy that manages all the details of daily life of an entire population.  From the late middle age until the liberal revolutions the state became increasingly expensive to the point of stifling the further economic development of the ruling classes.  The state must represent the interests of the most dynamic part of the upper classes, the capitalist, who ultimately controls the economy.  Yet the state came in serious conflict with the interests of parts if not most elements of the upper classes.  The state became too expensive and too restrictive, and conflicts between purpose and function developed, similar problems would develop again in the 20th century worldwide.  In theses conflicts the working majority soon learn that neither side represents their interests (Trotsky 1969: 39-40).

            Law and order is the main means of violating the basic human rights within the United States.  Labor organizations can easily be targeted because of the perceived threat to private property.  Subversive organization are defined, officially, in such away as to allow repression of any of the groups which may question the assumptions of the capitalist economy by government.  It is not only within the United States that repressions of dissent the norm, but also around the world the U.S. Government felt free to use violence either through direct intervention or by supporting regimes with abysmal human rights records.  The mass culture in the United States has been manipulated to create a popular demand for suppression of alternative views of life, and open support for shameless neo-colonialism around the world.  Violence is the official policy when preserving liberal society of the United States and its worldwide empire.  The purity of principal of basic liberal civil rights around the world and at home, require the direct violation of those self same rights in order to protect the foundation of liberal society.  Life in liberal society is mystified; in away that creates a total culture of support for a capitalist economy and bourgeois rule. Resistance becomes impossible without a fundamental ideological break within the radical from the education within liberal version of bourgeois society.  With out this break any serious resistance becomes psychologically impossible.  Alternatives become limited within safe bounds in a way that can be incorporated within capitalism protecting private property and bourgeois rule.  A spiritually vacuous life becomes the norm, leading to metaphysical illusions and escapism as the only hope for relief (Luxemburg 1970: Saxton 1992; Bakunin; Lenin 1973b; Marx 1968; Trotsky 1968).