>Nope, what you need is a mechanism, a culture, a commitment, a structure,
>wherein and whereby the people have the agency regularly to make wholesale
>changes to the political economic lever-fondlers. The notion of the soviet
>seems to me to work just so. That's the only way to avoid your heroes
>becoming your tyrants, anyway. If that comes as a surprise to you, I'm -
>well - surprised.
Elections as we know them don't necessarily help to democratize and are probably incompatible with the notion of the soviet. Depending on the conditions, elections bring about the exact opposite of democratization. Recall the end of the Sandinista revolution in the 1990 elections. In the elections, many Nicaraguan people voted in the hope that the U.S.-favored candidates would bring an end to the U.S.-backed Contra attacks and economic warfare. Little did they know that the end of Sandinismo would reverse all the gains made during the revolution (with regard to literacy, infant mortality, etc.) and usher in decades of impoverishment under the crushing weight of debts.
Under current U.S. labor laws, it is nearly impossible to organize new workers in large numbers. An employer can wage an effective anti-union campaign between the time when workers sign up for a union and the time when an election is held. It would be better if a union could be certified & the employer compelled to recognize the union & enter into the bargaining process at the moment when authorization cards were collected from the majority of workers. In this case, an election is merely a legal tactic to delay union recognition & collective bargaining.
In the U.K., the 1980s trade union "reforms" included the following elements:
***** These are the "reforms" which make it illegal to engage in solidarity strike action or political strikes (in the widest sense of the word); where it is only legal to picket your actual place of work (and then numbers are restricted to 6); where 7 days notice of strike action is required; where unions can be financially ruined if they do not crush unofficial strikes; where bureaucratically cumbersome balloting procedures have been imposed to tie up resources, lay the ground for legal challenges and generally slow down union responses; where a ballot must precede all industrial action - including go-slows, overtime bans etc. The list goes on.
In addition, the Tories have forced the unions to repeatedly sign up their entire membership every three years (with an idea I think borrowed from some of their Canadian pals). The result of this is a very effective and continuing drain on membership and resources. <http://www.cf.ac.uk/ccin/union/myviews/1may.htm> *****
In addition to the problems mentioned above, secret ballots can be anti-democratic & anti-militant. If a decision gets made by a voice vote or a show of hands, in contrast to secret ballots, militants can exert moral pressures on those who are wavering to vote their way & to step up the level of struggle. In most cases, whether we are examining revolutions or union organizing or collective bargaining, militants are a minority, and therefore, capital tries to dilute the strength & influence of militants through various legal tactics that favor individualism (such as secret ballots).
For labor movements to truly come back to life, working-class people must, in sufficient numbers, reject bourgeois mystiques of "free elections" & "secret ballots."
Yoshie
P.S. To ensure the ratification of a new contract, the OSU management worked hard to encourage "everyone" -- including those who crossed the picket lines -- to vote.