>>What democracy is being faked? What is the idealist concept of democracy by
>>which we can see Bosnia is a fake?
>>
>>Is Democracy in the UK not also a fake??
>
>Chris ignores the obvious difference that people in Britain, however
>deluded, elect their political leaders, while people in Bosnia have
>their High Representative appointed by officials of the EU. (Read David
>Chandler's Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton, Pluto, 1999)
>
>In ignoring the difference between formal democracy in Britain and
>actual dictatorship in Bosnia, Chris is returning to a long-standing
>Stalinist tradition of poo-pooing questions of democratic rights as
>'mere illusion'. It was this false-hard pose that led Chris' party to
>insist that the accession of Fascism in Germany was just more of the
>same, and indistinguishable from the 'social-Fascism' represented by the
>Social Democratic Party.
So this is the hidden secret of the analysis: the illusion that to be able to elect your leaders once every few years is democracy.
I do not yield to anyone in the importance of fighting for bourgeois democratic rights, but to elevate them to an idealised version of democracy is unmarxist nonsense.
Let me deal with secondary diversionary matters first however. In paragraph two Jim H tries a counterthrust mistaking his opponent. He is presumably referring to the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded with the Third International. Owing to circumstances beyond my control I was not a member of any organisation in 1932, let alone the CPGB, when the social fascist, class against class, line prevailed disastrously in the Comintern.
Jim H is posing a false undialectical contrast. It is important to remember the limitations of bourgeois democracy. Asserting this does not mean ignoring its positive features. Few on this list I guess would see it as an unqualified virtue. It is obvious that it operates as a system that maintains capitalism in power. The electoral system is massively dominated by capital, either in the form of donations, or or shaping major media organisations.
In the USA no politician dare take on tobacco capital or gun capital lightly, let alone the whole stock exchange and bond markets.
In Britain no government could be elected that is against the USA. The preparation of such politics in any overt form would be immediately labelled as eccentric and marginalised.
The fact that Bosnia was stabilised by forces of armed men from outside, who stopped the armed men inside from killing another 200,000 people, is not remarkable. The fact that the new state structure is subservient to these foreign forces is only to be expected. The new colonists do not claim it is a model of democracy. They claim it has been an exercise in stabilisation and conflict management. Intellectually clever articels by LM may win a niche in a section of the intelligentsia, but they will not win the broader battle.
Jim H and LM of course have a robust case for arguing that Bosnia is subservient to western military and economic power. What is the new revelation of saying that democracy has been faked? What illusions in bourgeois democracy is LM promoting?
All bourgeois democracy is a fake because it runs the state ultimately in the interests of the exploiters while giving the surface appearance that it is run for the whole people.
"To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament - such is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics," Lenin argued in State and Revolution, 1917.
To call that sort of idea Stalinist is to distort the history of 20th century marxism.
What is more materially relevant to the people of Bosnia and Kosovo, is whether they have the right to have a roof over their heads and not be driven from their homes or murdered because they come from the wrong communal group.
LM may be able to get the odd piquant article in the pages of the anti-imperialist(?) Times, but they cannot win the bigger battle with such methods.
Chris Burford
London