Genuine Democracy: What Is It?
It's not anything like what our rulers offer us in the USA or Great Britain or other parliamentarian so-called democracies
Even the BBC admits we have a fake democracy despite it being elected.
Genuine democracy is when the policies of the government and the laws it enacts TRULY reflect the values and aims of the vast majority of people and not those of a small privieged elite. Right?
Some say that to have such a genuine democracy one needs to have the government rest on the consent of the people, and that the way to ensure it does so is to have the government made up of elected representatives.
The problem with this “elected government equals truly democratic government” notion is that in actual practice it simply is not true.
For example, the United States government is an elected government. But in actual practice it is an oligarchy—rule by the wealthy—as is well known by virtually everybody and as is rigorously (with hard data and valid statistical analysis) shown in this academic research article here1, with summaries of it here and here.
In case one believes that the parliamentary system, in contrast to the American system, is genuinely democratic, an informative article to read is “Britain's Election Proves Their Voting System Isn't Only Undemocratic, It's ANTI-Democratic” by Jared A. Brock that shows how in the recent July 4, 2024 election in the United Kingdom, in which, as Brock notes, “All told, 9.7 million votes got Labour 412 seats. All the other parties combined for 19 million votes, but got only 238 seats. Twice the votes, half the seats.” 2
The American system of voting—the one that gives us our oligarchy or what I often call the ruling billionaire plutocracy—is also a system that is easily manipulated by the powerful to exclude the have-nots from any electoral victory, as illustrated by the Substack post titled, “How to Steal an Election.”
Even if we ignore the always-possible semi-legal shenanigans such as those the above-linked article talks about, state-wide not to mention national elections are by their very nature subject to all sorts of manipulation by people with a lot of money and hence power. Merely by controlling the mass (and most of the so-called “alternative”) media, Big $ is able to so effectively marginalize (or character assassinate) candidates who pose a serious threat to Big $, that a genuine champion of ordinary people and their values and interests has very little chance of being elected to an important office. And if by some chance such a candidate does get elected, we know what happens, right?
John F. Kennedy got elected president because he seemed to be perfectly friendly to Big $. But after the Cuban Missile Crisis almost resulted in thermonuclear war, Kennedy (and the USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev also) decided to end the Cold War, which Big $ absolutely did not want to do. As a result, Big $ orchestrated the assassination of president Kennedy.3
The fairly obvious fact is that elections do not a genuine democracy make. The very wealthy can easily make any supposedly elected government serve the very wealthy instead of the have-nots. Who really disputes this?
So, what then IS a way to have genuine democracy?
I describe a way to have genuine democracy here and I discuss why this is a truly legitimate form of government here. In brief:
There are no elections of representatives with sovereign law-making power
Genuine democracy is when the sovereign law-making power in a given local community (i.e., the government with no law-making authority above it, that makes laws that everybody in that local community must obey) is what I call the Local Assembly of Egalitarians, meaning the following:
All adults who live or work in the local community and who value no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and fairness and truth (as discussed here; I call such people egalitarians whether they have ever even heard that word or not, and they are indeed the vast majority as I prove here) and who believe that such people have a right to democratically make the laws that everybody in the local community must obey, have the right to participate in the Local Assembly of Egalitarians as equals and to democratically make the laws and policies that everybody in the local community must obey; furthermore, no other people have this right.
The reason the Local Assembly of Egalitarians governs only a local community rather than a larger region such as a United States state or an entire nation is that it is only possible in a relatively small (such as a U.S. zip code area) local community for the Assembly to realistically include as members all the egalitarians in the community who wish to participate in it.
The way that governmental/social order on a large scale (such as a United States state or entire nation or even the entire planet) can be achieved when the only law-making bodies are the sovereign Local Assemblies of Egalitarians is by Voluntary Federation of Local Assemblies of Egalitarians, which I discuss in the context of an egalitarian society here in the section about “voluntary federation.” Briefly, local assemblies send delegates to meet with delegates from other local assemblies and these delegates have the job of crafting proposals (not laws!) for large scale order that the local assemblies either implement or not as they wish. I also discuss here how voluntary federation of small sovereign powers (as opposed to top-down control by a central law-making power) is working to create large scale order very well today in our (alas) non-egalitarian society in ways that you will probably be surprised to read about.
In such a GENUINE democracy, people with anti-egalitarian aims and values will have a VERY hard time getting what they want
In today’s fake democracy, billionaires (i.e., anti-egalitarians) can control hundreds of millions of people by controlling (with bribes of one sort or another or blackmail or outright big-business threats) a relatively small number of elected politicians who write the laws that the entire population must obey.
In contrast to today’s fake democracy, in a government based on Voluntary Federation of Sovereign Local Assemblies anybody with anti-egalitarian values and aims will have a very hard time being influential.
Firstly, an anti-egalitarian would be quickly identified as such and ordered to leave the local assembly where they have no right to be (in contrast to our current so-called democracy where anti-egalitarians have every right to be the halls of Congress and the White House).
Secondly, the majority of egalitarians in a local community—all of whom have the right to vote in the Local Assembly of Egalitarians—are very unlikely to write anti-egalitarian laws. Since all egalitarians in a local community have the right to participate as equals in the local assembly, in order for an anti-egalitarian to get their wish they would have to bribe or threaten not just a small number (as today) but a majority of the entire population of egalitarians in the local community.
Anti-egalitarians hope to prevent us from aiming for genuine democracy by making us worship the anti-egalitarian U.S. Constitution
As I hope you will read about here, the U.S. Founding Fathers were enemies of We the People. And as I hope you will read about here, the U.S. Constitution that the Founding Fathers wrote was designed to ensure that the haves would remain in power over the have-nots. The ruling billionaire plutocracy LOVES the U.S. Constitution because it enables them to remain in power with their obscene wealth and privilege. This is why our rulers love it when anti-establishment leaders say that the problem is that we’re not properly following the U.S. Constitution—a document that says we must obey a few hundred elected politicians in Washington D.C. who are beholden to the billionaires and not to the have-nots.
Our rulers are counting on us not having a vision of what genuine democracy actually means. This way they know we won’t ever fight for a genuine democracy and they—the billionaires—will remain in power. This is why we need a massive public discussion about what genuine democracy really means. Part of that conversation must deal with the great misunderstanding about democracy—the false notion that a democracy can be of ALL the people, rich and poor alike—that the rulers rely on. I discuss this misunderstanding here.
Karl Marx absolutely did NOT advocate genuine democracy, and today’s Marxists don’t either
If you know of a Marxist individual or organization or government that advocates genuine democracy as described above, then please point them out to me and I will support them. But I doubt you will be able to find one. To understand why this is so, please read my article about Marxism here, or read the key excerpt from it in this footnote below.4 Regarding the Communist Party of China please read my article here. Regarding the Soviet Union, please read the sub-section titled “Workers and Peasants Fought Against the Bolshevik Party's Authoritarian Domination” in my article here.
The KEY question is, of course, “How can we prevent the abuse of power?”
I focus on addressing this important question in my article here.
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to have genuine democracy.
which concludes:
"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."
"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."
"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In other less academic wording, we have a fake democracy that is actually a dictatorship of the rich.
The first author, Martin Gilens, is professor of politics at Princeton University. The second author, Benjamin I. Page, is the Gordon Scott Fulcher Professor of Decision Making, Northwestern University.
Furthermore, as Brock notes, many (43% this recent election) of eligible votes didn’t vote (no doubt largely because they rightly didn’t think their vote would make any real difference) which means that: “If 33.8% voted for Labour, 66.2% voted against Labour, and 43% of eligible voters voted not to vote, this means Labour [the party that won and whose leader is the new prime minister[ actually won just 19.2% of the votes that were up for grabs. Less than one in five eligible voters expressly wish to be ruled by this Labour “supermajority” for the next five years. 80.8% do not. The new [labour] Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is not the victorious champion — he’s just the biggest loser.
This is shown in great detail in at least two books: The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, and JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.
The following is extracted from my article about Marxism.
Communists call for a centralized state to increase economic production "as rapidly as possible" in the Communist Manifesto (by Marx and Engels) as follows:
We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Marx advocated a strong central government unambiguously. In the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" by Marx and Engels, written in 1850, they declare:
"In opposition to this plan the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also, within this republic, for the most decisive centralization of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc."
Subsequently, Engels edited this paragraph with this note:
It must be recalled today that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. At that time – thanks to the Bonapartist and liberal falsifiers of history – it was considered as established that the French centralised machine of administration had been introduced by the Great Revolution and in particular that it had been used by the Convention as an indispensable and decisive weapon for defeating the royalist and federalist reaction and the external enemy. It is now, however, a well-known fact that throughout the revolution up to the eighteenth Brumaire c the whole administration of the départements, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by, the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within the general state laws; that precisely this provincial and local self-government, similar to the American, became the most powerful lever of the revolution and indeed to such an extent that Napoleon, immediately after his coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire, hastened to replace it by the still existing administration by prefects, which, therefore, was a pure instrument of reaction from the beginning. But no more than local and provincial self-government is in contradiction to political, national centralisation, is it necessarily bound up with that narrow-minded cantonal or communal self-seeking which strikes us as so repulsive in Switzerland, and which all the South German federal republicans wanted to make the rule in Germany in 1849. – Note by Engels to the 1885 edition.
Engles's point is simply that a strong central government ("political, national centralisation") is indeed required but that this is not in contradiction to also having local and provincial self-governments that act "within the general state laws" "similar to the American" system. Thus even Engels argues that there should be a strong central government the laws of which must be obeyed by everyone. The fact that Marx wrote the original paragraph clearly demonstrates that he advocated a strong central government.
After the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels added to their theory the idea of immediate recall of elected Central Government officials. In 1891 Engels wrote, in his introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France:
From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.
While immediate recall is a good principle, it is not a substitute for the more important need to reject the invalid authoritarian principle that says "You must obey the highest level of government (typically the Central government) just because the government declares it is legitimate." (Read about the valid versus invalid authoritarian principle in "What Makes A Government Legitimate?") Revolutionary movements aiming for genuine democracy had by this time already rejected this invalid authoritarian principle (go here to read about this history and here to read about why it is vital to reject the invalid authoritarian principle.) Marx and Engels, however, embraced the authoritarian principle. In their view the "deputies and officials" should be empowered--at least until they are recalled--to command (make laws for) everybody else. This is the opposite of how genuine democracy--voluntary federation--works, as described here.
For Marx, a strong centralized government was needed because it was, in his view, necessary in order to increase economic production to the point where scarcity would be abolished; only then could the state "wither away" in the classless society of communism. Marx was wrong; when economic productivity is a widely shared goal then decentralized power (voluntary federation, i.e., genuine democracy) is far more conducive to economic productivity than anti-democratic domination by a strong central government.
That all people--including both capitalists and working class people--primarily value and act chiefly out of self-interest (or as Marxists would put it, "all share the same ideology--the dominant class's 'hegemonic' ideology") was the view of virtually all intellectuals at the time Marx wrote and is the view of most even today. Marx differed from the others only in drawing different conclusions from this initial axiom (i.e., assumption.) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, by James C. Scott, is an excellent book by one rare modern intellectual who properly rejects this view of ordinary (subjugated) people that says they hold the same values as those who dominate them.