Tahir wrote:
>What I seriously questioned was the utterly preposterous notion put forward by Mark
and apparently supported by you that the
>franchise should be the key to all efforts of struggle right now.
Without prejudice to my undoubted capacity to be preposterous, I never said that.
I'm saying that modern industrial capitalist society is rooted firmly in
enlightenment conceptions of unioversal right, and this is the glue which holds the
social fabric together. Altho many undemocratic societies + states have enjoyed
success in developing industry and entering the capitalist world market, and altho
denial of the franchise and electoral fraud is commonplace everywhere including the
capitalist core-states, it has always been true that the respect for universal human
and social rights is at the heart of bourgeois legitimation and that the core states
on which the whole edifice of world capitalism rests, have ordered their processes
of social reproduction on the universal franchise. The reason for this is that
capitalist wage-labour as a category, a social order, and a system of government,
cannot exist without democratic right, without the franchise. Parliamentary
democracy is essential to the sustaining of a civil society, ie the alternative is
civil war, international warfare and the descent into barbarism. Struggle for the
universal right to participate in elections was the key struggle in all places and
contexts, including not least in S Africa, where the first truly free elections were
greeted by enormous queues of voters waiting days at a time in line at polling
booths for the chance to exercise the right on which everything else rests amd
denial of which is to deny the individual subject their dignity as a citizen.
However, it is the case that democracy and electoralism is just shadow play, just
platonic shadows thrown on the cave-wall by the class struggle itself. For
revolutionary communists, the franchise is not an end in itself it is only a means
to an end, just as it is only a means to an end for the capitalists and the ruling
class as a whole. Electoral democracy, parliamentary government and bourgeois right
are only *specific forms of enslavement*, they are the expressions of wage-slavery
which are constituted by the whole social superstructure of law, courts, property
and social rights, governing assemblies etc. Our goal is not to secure the
franchise, but to overthrow bourgeois democracy because it is corrupt inits essence,
not just at the margins where it fails, but even and above all, in its most
priostine form when it works: it is the form taken by ruling class hegemony, it is
the political and processual embodiment of alienation, it is the ultimate fomr of
sancitification and legitimation of the theft of surplus labour, it is the mechanism
by means of which the masses are robbed of the fruits of their work and are bound
into renewed wage-slavery.
It is just because the universal franchise serves bourgeois purposes so well, that
they cling to it despite themselves. This is why the theft of the US presidency by
George W Bush is such an important event, a watershed and a great turning point.
They themselves have debauched the ark of the covenant without which their own rule
cannot be sustained. They have made themselves lawless in the sight of their own
first principles. Whatever happens now, they have no redress except bute force. They
themselves have turned silent, sublimated class struggle into open civil war, for if
the self-appointed lawmakers themselves trample on their own law, then we should we
obey? Fear is not enough to glue society together. There must be consent as well as
coercion, but when consent is dispenses with and the brute rule of force is
proclaimed, then the social contract is ashes and the people are under no obligation
to behave differently.
When there is no secure civil process, and no law, then the masses always and
everywhere (history shows this) take matters into their own hands, shaoe their own
institutions, and create their own law and their own order. When the bourgeoisie
itself reckless teras down the whole politico-juridical edifice which was the labour
of centuries to construct, then the rest of us not only have the right, we have an
absolute duty to take matters into our own hands, to organise, and to create a new
and different social order, because if we do not, who else will? Who will be the
guarantors of life and liberty, if not the workers themselves? What other force can
prevent war and barbarism, when the ruling class has become barbarised and
criminalised? We cannot look to them for advice. We can look only to our own
counsel. We have to organise, and the highest form of working class
self-organisation is the mass revolutionary party and the highest working class law
is the law of the Party.
Mark
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