I'm posting on the website the prologue of Arno Mayer's great book anatomising bourgeois civil war, 'Politics & Diplomacy of the Peacemaking: Versailles 1919-1921'. the url is: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base/mayer.doc Not everyone will see the point. However, remember that (a) bourgeois civil society is always in a state of civil war, and (b) democracy is the way this perpetual civil war is mediated. Bourgeois democracy is hypocritical, sanctimonious and fraudulent by nature. But it is also the principal form of legitimation of bourgeois hegemony and the principal form of social renewal of capitalist society. It is contradictory at its heart, and therefore always on crisis. The bosses may hate it, but they need it like oxygen. What the US deadheat presidential election has done is rip the mask of hypocrisy off bourgeois democracy and reveal its fraudulent and criminalised interior. This has happened because at least half the electorate is disenfranchised, either deliberately by the criminal exclusion from voters' rolls of many electors, or indirectly because corporate-finance capital is incapable of offering meaningul choice. People are asked to vote for things which are self-evidenlty not in their own interests, and in larghe numbers they decline to do so. The fact that half or more don't vote at all is itself a critical reality, full of historical consequence. The abstainers want to avoid the humiliation of participation in what on the face of it is a fraudulent process. At the same time, the immense, overbearing power of corporate-finance capitalism creates a psychosocial spectacle which crushes resistance, drowns out alternatives and makes oppostion also and on the face of it, futile. Although only a quarter of electors voted for Bush, nonetheless this means that Americans in large numbers voted for things which are clearly not in their private interests as citizens: social security and health care privatisation, the Bush 'tort' reforms which will allow, inter alia, tobacco barons to escape scot-free -- and other culpable coporate sectors, eg oil. Bush may usher in attacks on abortion rights, and more assaults on the historical rights and privieleges of the broad masses. 50m people voted for these things. 150m electors did not, despite the blandishments of corporate PR, and the incredible outpouring of propaganda, the huge expendieture totalling hundreds of dollars per elector, by pharmaceuticals, tobacco corps etc.. In fact, the stalemate, the standoff, is between the American working class and American criminalised corporate-financial power. Without the successful legitimatory mediation of the electoral process (which is now too thoroughly debauched to function properly), the raw nature of bourgeois civil war, always lurking beneath the surface, has broken thru at last. Because of the inherently authoritarian and partisan form of US democracy, the legitimatory crisis has immediately involved the judicial and legislative apparatuses, as well as the executive. If the world economy was at the beginning of a great economc upswing, this might not matter much. The follies of the past month might soon be forgotten under a more beign than expected Bush presidential mantle. But the world stands at the threshold of a deflationary crisis, of social, ecological and economic systemic breakdown, and of war. It is a good thing that bourgeois democracy has failed right in its heart, in the showcase headquarters of world capitalism. It is the beginning of the transition from private grief to public mass anger. But it is also a very dangerous thing. It is dangerous to keep your head when all around are losing theirs. It is dangerous to confront your neighbour with the fact that he is a burglar. Arno Mayer, in his great work on the Versailles era, was analysing the peculiar conjuncture of 1919 when world war had precipitated world revolution. Speaking of the Versailles Treaty which brought peace of a kind between Germany and the Entente powers, Mayer quoted Thorstein veblen who said that 'anti-Bolshevism was not visible in the the clauses of the Treaty, but it was the very parchment on which the Treatuy was written'. Faced with a terrible, open crisis, the criminal gangs who run the US state may also decide to hang together rather than hang separately. But the open warfare between them which has brought this crisis will not go away at their command, because they suddenly become to frightened to continue. The genie of class war is again out of the bottle. Therefore we also stand at the threshold of an era of the mailed fist, of the naked use of force by corporate-finance capital against the people. That was Dimitrov's classical definition of fascism, no? Mark _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
