2 On democracy
2.2 Representative democracy and class struggle
Today‘ democracy’ is probably the most ideologically biased and hackneyed term of all. All constitutions of modern western states spin the yarn of peoples’ sovereignty as the wellspring of stately power. There is no greater lie than the central statement of capitalist nation states:“ All state authority is derived from the people!” As I have pointed out democracy originated from stately rule of the demos over the majority of society.
We have to distinguish between administration and rule. Irrespective of all social strata and classes a community naturally needs an administration to organize the everyday matters of coexistence, all the more today with population of billions of fellow men and women. This necessity for administrations is inseparably linked to the interests of the ruling class which holds power in history. Contrary to antique Greece there is not even a demos to rule over society today. Nowadays sovereignty goes with a capitalist middle class assigning to the nation state the basic task to secure their economic, political and cultural world – quite naturally“ in the name of the people”.
Our concern today is about Western representative parliamentarian democracy in the countries and on EU level. This system of government is of bourgeois origin forged in revolutions in Cromwell’ s England, in France and the American anti-colonial War of Independence. At first glance these revolutions enfranchised all people. However, a closer look reveals that all their political achievements were indeed in favour of the bourgeois middle class with its core group of capitalist industrialists. The bourgeois middle class, formerly the Third Estate, harks back to the leading groups of citizens in late medieval towns. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century ultimately rang in the age of capitalism.
The bourgeois revolutions did not much care for the sub-classes. The majority of the people historically jumped from the frying pan into the fire. They were liberated from serfdom and debt bondage only to face the fate of industrial wage workers. The capitalist system degraded them to a new social class of exploited, miserable, industrial labourers- the proletariat. In all European countries as well as North America society became deeply divided into these two main social classes of capital and labour.
What about democracy in such fundamentally split, modern societies? Until now most social confrontations were around the proletar-
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