Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >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.
This is belief in magic -- in some mechanism or formula which will automatically and without risk give guaranteed results under any and all circumstances. As Yoshie points out in response:
> 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.
Actually, t here is no reason whatever (other than habit and Chruchill's famous vacuity) that elections will lead to democracy or that an actual democracy will make use of elections in any form.
All proposals for "democracy under socialism" that I have ever seen (and this really includes many of the observations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin) presuppose what they claim to provide. That is, the democratic mechanism that they propose cannot be introduced or implemented unless democracy *without gimmicks* has already been achieved. But if democracy without gimmicks has already been achieved, then there is no need for gimmicks.
This, for example, is the flaw in one of the more egregious of liberal copouts in current politics -- proposals for electoral reforms to control the power of money. If an when those reforms are achieved it will be because those now holding power (those who profit by money in politics) will have found another way for money to rule and thus need a new disguise, through campaign finance reform, for the use of money to control politics.
So how are we to achieve democracy? I don't have the slightest idea, though I admit -- nay, claim -- that it is probably a fundamental requirement either for a socialist seizure of power (democracy within the movement) and for building a socialist society. I do claim that until people stop daydreaming about gimmicks to achieve it and admit that we don't know how to, there isn't a chance of achieving it.
Carrol