>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/10/01 09:29AM >>>
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.
((((((((((((
CB: In a way, Mark is saying that the institution of universal suffrage is 3/4 of
Gramsci's theory of hegemony as it works in the real world.
The U.S. system was most blatantly undermined with the Kennedy assassination coup, for
anyone with half a wit. I guess that historical example could predict either way with
this one. The upheaval of the 60's might be in part impacted by mass disaffection
growing out of the coup.
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