[lbo-talk] Ralph loves the nice plutocrats

[Bhaskar Sunkara]

There is nothing wrong with the Marxist (or any socialist) critique of
bourgeois democracy.  In the free market for votes capital has more power
than labor and has complete, despotic control over the sphere of
production.  This structural inequality makes political democracy a mere
shell of what it could be, but the concession of universal suffrage and
other democratic rights that we've already won gives us *some* room to build
an oppositional movement within capitalis.

I think if anything the broad left doesn't have a firm enough understanding
of the natural of capitalist state and the fact that radical parties can't
just aspire to run the state in the interest of workers.  Jodi Dean's
critique may apply well enough to left-of-center liberals and social
democrats who have always been wary of mass movements and whose politics
rely on a very technocratic, corporatist social arrangement.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 4:33 PM, Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Wed, 2009-09-23 at 14:41 -0500, Eric Beck wrote:
> > Methinks the left is not nearly critical enough of democracy.
>
> Jodi Dean has been writing some interesting stuff on the problems with
> left-wing valorizations of democracy at her blog[1], and in a recent
> article[2], "Politics Without Politics," she argues that the left-wing
> claim that our current political systems are not democracies "is
> childishly petulant. It's like the left is saying, 'if we don't get to
> play what we want, we're not going to play’. The failure of left
> politics to win, or even score, is equated with a failure of politics as
> such, rather than acknowledged in the specificity of left defeat."
>