>>> "Max B. Sawicky" <sawicky at epinet.org> 03/28/00 10:28AM >>>
We're going to have to agree to disagree,
Charles.
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CB: OK. agree.
In general my reply to what you say below is that the American ruling class has become past masters at corrupting all the democratic procedures you list below. In the main this is done through money controlling at every level. Hear me good. I don't mean this as rhetoric or metaphor. I mean There is every bit as much control by a tiny elite in the U.S. as in China
So, for example, there are elections for President every four years, but who can get to be a viable candidate and office holder is completely (completely !) controlled by the monied class. Whatever competition there is is between factions of the ruling class. And this is true of 100% of the top and middle level positions in government, and 99% of the lower positions. Then , as I emphasized when discussing the Kennedy assassination, the ruling class does have coup d'etats if it becomes necessary to fire a President. Then if a movement starts to get going that might represent people independently, McCarthyism or COINTELPRO and assassinations of MLK etc. that type of undemocratic control occurs. Similarly with the Bill of Rights' freedom of press. Sure , anybody can start a television station. If they have a billion dollars. The Democratic and Republican parties are both agents of big business. They are not more representative of different interests in society than different f! actions of the Chinese Communist Party.
I could go on and on. The point is that the ruling class has become totally efficient at corrupting the democratic forms founded in the American Revolution, such that those forms ,such as elections, cannot be said to constitute democracy in practice that is superior to that of the PRC or Cuba.
What do I mean by totally efficient ? I mean that all major or important decisions and the whole direction and history of the country are controlled, by the monied class, despite all the sound and fury of the average citizen voting or speaking out or writing letters to the editor or marching to petition for redress of grievances. I mean truly, in your words, that there is an absolute bottom line control by money, as much as any king, emperor or dictator and their ruling classes down through history. And it is getting worse as time goes on. The bourgeoisie have consoldated their power and perfected their corrupting methods. One they currently emphasize is turning off most of the people from voting most of the time ( in part by giving them meaningless "choices" between candidates)
The true heads of state of the U.S. are not the President and Congress. They are a fairly anonymous bunch "on" Wall Street". And the People never get to vote for them , even in 20 years. They are total dictators from the standpoint of "elections". David Rockefeller is dictator for life. The bourgeoisie rule by hands off management ( to coin a phrase), from behind the scenes.That slang is more significant than jokes about Reagan. The beauty of this is that when things go wrong, the public leaders take the fall for it.
None of this is an exaggeration or radical rhetoric. And I have not come close to detailing all the dictatorial content to the phony democratic form in America. I have lived it my whole life. So, don't try to tell me that American democracy is not rotten to the core in practice. I am living it right now. You cannot get elected to low office, let alone high office without money. __________
CB: Popular sovereignty is not the whole story , but all any talk about democracy, including yours, is meaningless, unless you derive the answers to the questions about rights and democratic procedures from that first principle. For example, what do you mean by "democratic" procedures ?
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I mean stuff in the Bill of Rights, elections of political leaders, political parties, etc. LThe kind of thing one observes often in the advanced capitalist nations but hardly ever in the PRC and similar countries.
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So your example of Lord High Muckety is meant be a criticism of U.S. and
British "democracy" I take it.
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No, as you well know. We don't have elections every 20 years for a single head of state, for instance.
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Of course, there can be distorted versions of what is democracy , so what
? What are your principles of democracy and why are they meaningful ?
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See above as to what. As to why, let's just say for the sake of brevity that I hold those truths to be self-evident. ________
CB: Well, we can do that if you are forthright and simply admit that democracy has been sacrificed by the U.S. , then we can compare the PRC and U.S.
There is no comparison on democratic grounds. The only game is to contract economic progress for the masses in the PRC to freedom in the U.S., an exercise we have all gone through before and which no longer does the PRC much credit, IMO.
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I mean afterall, the U.S. Constitutional principle of popular sovereignty
is meaningless according to you. And surely on the questions of rights and
procedures , the U.S. is not democratic. Money rules. CB
>>>>>>>>>>
There is much more in the Constitution than that. Money dominates, but it does not rule in the absolutist you imply, as you know.
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CB: What I know is that money does absolutely control the American political system. We live in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and I am not putting dictatorship in quotes.
On the principles, what there is beyond popular sovereignty is a carrying out of the basic and most general principle of popular sovereignty. The rest of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is working out the details of how to have popular sovereignty. In theory.
Why do you think we have elected representatives ( i.e. Articles I and II out of 3 in the Constitution) ? Because a republic is a practical way to have the people rule when you have such a large population. But the point is having an elected President and Congress is a way of fulfilling the basic principle of popular sovereignty. And so on through all the major principles in the Constitution. If you don't understand "All Power to the People" as the basic principle of democracy, then you don't understand the rationale behind all the other procedures and specifics that you refer to. The Constitution is not a hodge podge list of principles. Its parts are interrelated and form a whole. It has a theory. The theory of popular sovereignty.
But in practice, today, it is a total sovereignty of the monied class.
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If it did, you and I would be selling shoes instead of having some space to make trouble.
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CB: What the bourgeoisie know , and evidently you don't , is that we are not causing any trouble. And as soon as we do, they will cut us off at the knees. Not only that, by letting us speak out openly before we really do anything, the bourgeoisie get a warning and know who to keep an eye on. They have turned the Freedom of Speech into an early warning system for them.
There is as much space to cause trouble in China as there is in the U.S.
So, I agree to disagree.
CB