[lbo-talk] Europe's soft coup

[James Heartfield]

Wojtek ‘I have to admit that I have a bias against political parties. I believe that they tend to be a parasitic element that thrives on mediating citizen's access to government services, and thus tend to make this access as cumbersome as possible to extract higher premium for this access. So if political parties get a booty I do not lose much sleep over it as long as the system remains democratic i.e. guaranteeing a certain minimum of civil rights. In other words, I do not equate party politics with democracy.’

Comparisons are odious, but the polemic against ‘party politics’, and the ‘rule of the parties’ was a central theme of Nazi propaganda against democracy, as was the call for an unmediated relation between the state and the citizen.

‘Guaranteeing a certain minimum of civil rights’ is not at all the same thing as democracy, which means ‘the rule by the people’. Electing representatives on the basis of their political outlook is a system for putting the state under democratic control should not be thrown away in favour of something less democratic. In this case, technocratic government is nothing like another kind of bourgeois democracy, but removing the questions of government from any kind of public control.