A DEMOCRACY TO DIE FOR

“Russia’s war in Ukraine [is] a fight for global democracy, experts say”¹

When the elite speak of freedom and democracy, duck and take cover!

We know this story all too well. Once our ancestors fought and died to liberate Jerusalem for the one true God, then for King and Country, for the Fatherland, for der Fuhrer, Il Duce, Uncle Joe (Stalin) and worst of all for ethnic nationalism. More generally they fought and died in conflicts claiming to be struggles between good and evil. God is always on the side of the soldier. In WWI they fought to “Make the world safe for democracy” and 30,000,000 deaths later some precarious form of democracy was attained; only to be swallowed by competing powers in the next decade, e.g. the Weimar Republic becomes the Third Reich and back to a democratic republic in a few short years. War needs the patriotic banners; the people need the songs and the sound of trumpets that urge them on to perform heroic deeds on the battlefield and to die for a glorious cause “if necessary.” In short, it would seem that the citizens need lies and democracy provides the most seductive deceit of them all.

What is this lie we call democracy and what is its relationship to war?

The very word democracy is shrouded in distortion and mystification. This mystification contends that when true democracy is achieved and the true sentiments of the people are expressed then the outcome would correspond to humanity’s communal nature conceived as the universal ideal for society. As such it is posited as a stepping-stone in the glorious march towards revolution, liberation, freedom and universal progress. History however, paints a very different picture. Democracy is a delicate mechanism of totalitarian rule that can be dialed to the left or right to spawn democracy’s authoritarian form. This tyranny and this tyrant are not counter to democracy but rather part of its safety valve. The tyrant is always waiting in the wings, ready to evoke a “state of exception” and assume authoritarian power. When the crisis ends and the world is safe for capitalism, some form of popular tyranny returns claiming to represent the people’s will. Democracy and its advocacy is above all the primary locus of class collaboration, the anti-chamber for counter-revolution and war.¹ It is also conceived as a politically neutral form of governance that implements the will of the citizenry, but, not always with a humanitarian outcome.

Even in ancient Athens the democratic form enabled a popular tyranny. For instance, in 462 BCE the Athenian “democratic” Assembly voted to assist the Spartans’ repression of a slave revolt. An army of 4000 Athenian Hoplites slaughtered 30,000 Helot slaves. On the Island of Melos during the Peloponnesian war the Athenian “democratic” Assembly voted to kill all men and enslave all women and children on the island because of their refusal to pay tribute. Need we point out that modern democracies have been quite comfortable with brutal colonization, slavery, imperialist war and genocide? There is nothing about democracy that guarantees a peaceful humanitarian outcome. What is the real content of democracy in time of war? It is to forge a national identity where oligarchs, right wing militias, bankers and workers all identify first and foremost with the nation as Ukrainians, as Russians etc.

The democratic machinery serves primarily to modulate the congenital conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in a way that guarantees the permanent asymmetry of power in the favor of capital. To share in even a miniscule slice of power within the democratic machinery the workers must relinquish their revolutionary impulses. In other words in order to collaborate they must compromise to the point of self-betrayal. In times of war this betrayal becomes a death march into battle.

The best example we have of this form of collaboration was during the pre WWI years in Germany. The German Socialist Party (SPD) was organizing peace marches on the one hand while declaring their assurance that socialists would defend the Nation in the event of war with Russia on the other. Gustav Noske, in a much discussed speech in the Reichstag on March 25, 1907 assured his listeners that in case Germany were attacked, Social Democrats would fight for the country with the same “loyalty and devotion” as the bourgeois parties….” As early as 1907 at the Party Congress of Essen Bebel said: If ever we should really be called upon to defend the fatherland, we will defend it because it is our fatherland, the soil on which we live.

It is not by accident that Ukraine is suddenly lauded as a modern liberal democracy, fighting heroically as the veritable vanguard of international freedom, while the press largely ignores the actual conditions in pre-war Ukraine. The list of Ukrainian oligarchs that have their greedy hands in all sectors of the economy, who have significant control over local and national politics, who employ private armies and share close relations with right wing militias, closely resembles the balance of forces we can see in Putin’s Russia. Is this really an international fight to “make the world safe for democracy” once again! Or is it to make the world safe for the Ukrainian oligarch, the Russian and American imperialist or the everyday kleptocrat?

Defining democracy or delineating its functions is difficult to say the least.

Claude Lefort, along with numerous left social critics, argue that democracy is a revolutionary mode of governing precisely because it posits a “system founded on its own lack of a foundation;” meaning that it expresses the unmediated will of the people in form and content. But democracy does have a foundation, a foundation that mostly goes unnamed: We call it Money, “the bond of all bonds… that is also the universal agent of separation.² Democracy’s great value for Capital is its ability to conceal the ensemble of practices that constitutes the modern mode of production. This is not merely a mode of self-governance it is a mode of subjectivation i.e. shaping and controlling the democratic subject. This control is also a form of self-control one that is perceived positively by the subject. Democratic man sees his chains but is comforted by the fact that he can wave his arms to the right or left and know that the decision was his.

Democracy is a specialized form of political domination deployed as a universal objective value, it is set in place as a political end or ideal for society by an elite whose real power over society is not political at all but is grounded in an all-pervasive economic exploitation.³

This definition, borrowed from the journal Anarchy, captures the essential nature of democracy and will be expanded in a future text. We will just add here that democracy is not merely a form of political domination; it is also a form of generalized social domination that plays an essential part in the reproduction of capitalism. In other words, the democratic state is a bourgeois state i.e. a capitalist state, not because the bourgeoisie holds the positions of power but because it is itself the political expression of capital with an essential parallel development to the evolution of capitalism. This is to say that the state was and is an essential component of the capitalist mode of production; it makes it possible to own property without actually possessing it or occupying it, to insure that the laws, especially contract laws, are applied equally, to collect taxes, to manage the state debt, to insure the stability of the currency, to maintain the forces of order etc. All political tendencies and economic demands since capitalism became a system of exploitation must operate within this framework irrespective of discursive tendencies, right or left.

This war in not about democracy, it is unambiguously an imperialist war and cannot be supported on any side by the revolutionary left. The western powers will tap into all of the mystifications regarding “freedom,” ‘democracy,” the “fatherland,” “blood and soil,” the “Nation,” and if none of this works Gods themselves will enter the fight.

When the left worries about the isolation that may result from taking a revolutionary position we should remember Karl Liebknecht who stood alone in the Reichstag on December 2, 1914 and declared

A speedy peace, a peace without conquests, this is what we must demand…..

Only a peace based upon the international solidarity of the working class and on the liberty of all the peoples can be a lasting peace….. I vote against the war credits demanded.

Berlin: December 2, 1914

Today the imperialist swindlers are in control of both warring powers, and no matter who wins this conflict the working class of both countries will lose. Peace will not bring security and permanent warfare will be our future. The only choice today is the same as Rosa Luxemburg so forcefully declared at the outbreak of WWI: Today the choice is not between war and peace, the choice today is between socialism and barbarism.⁴

B. York

4/24/2022

1 See “ Hostetter, Richard. “The SPD and the General Strike as an Anti-war Weapon, 1905-1914”In 1900 August Babel, one of the co-founders of the German Socialist Party told the Reichstag that “…if it came to a war with Russia… I would be ready, old boy that I am, to shoulder a gun against her…. In the 1906 Party Manual with the line “The Social Democracy recognizes that the nation …. Cannot be left defenseless.

2 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 1844 p.377

3 Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #60, Fall/Winter 2005–06, Vol. 23, No. 2.

4 (Paraphrase) attributed to Rosa Luxemburg

1 Canadian News 03/ 01/2022