Capitalist democracy is increasingly converging with its violent dictatorship

Capitalist democracy is increasingly converging with its violent dictatorship

Presidential elections in the USA, Bolivia, Iran, Chile, Hong Kong, and former French colonies like Ivory Coast and Guinea : around the world, the exploited are being invited in 2020, as they regularly are, to participate in elections supposedly to determine their own fate. They can be openly charades extending the power of dictators, as is often the case in Africa thanks to the French army and the financial intervention of Françafrique. They can represent, for young people, for exploited people full of illusions, for the middle class, the hope of participating in what would be the pinnacle of democracy : "free elections," which would finally regulate the political life of their country, in place of military dictatorships.

Yet in the countries that are the playthings of the great powers, this idyllic scenario never works, and these elections spontaneously combine with protest movements that take on an insurrectional turn. In Belarus, for example, workers are called to a general strike by opposition leader S. Tikhanovskaya, if Lukashenko has not resigned on October 25. Insurrection or elections ? In Guinea and Ivory Coast, opposition groups even refuse to participate in the charade. President Trump has even threatened to transform the election into a civil war if the results do not suit him ! In the USA, as in the rest of the world, wherever politicians cling to power or where they supposedly alternate democratically, it is big capital that decides everything. The future of the people does not depend on elections, but on the class struggle and, within it, on the ability of the exploited to organize and decide for themselves.

Faced with their economic system collapsing before our eyes, capitalists have only one way out : to toughen their political system of domination. The fight against terrorism and the fight against viruses are synonymous with restricting all our freedoms and layoffs... in the name of defending "our system," "the most democratic in the world." Only capitalist-style democracy, with elections as the only means of protest, could defend workers against the evils of the capitalist economy ? Nonsense ! Nowhere in the world has capitalist democracy mobilized against a dictatorial attempt !

In France, a quasi-official far-left, closely linked to the system, particularly through the unions, claims to want to give workers no illusions in this "bourgeois democracy," but to use elections solely to defend "workers’ interests," to develop "anti-capitalist," even socialist or communist, perspectives. Their lack of success in elections would demonstrate, from their point of view, that the working class would, for the moment, be incapable of building its own political alternative and therefore, a fortiori, its own revolutionary power. However, the conditions for the emergence of an embryonic workers’ power do indeed exist in France, and the yellow vests, like certain attempts at self-organization through strike committees, are not the only ones to demonstrate this. The working world’s belief in institutions, including political parties, union apparatuses, the state apparatus, and governments, is at an all-time low.

As for the birth of an authentically working-class democracy, where our class interests would truly be discussed, it will never take place in the arena of this anti-working-class chatterbox that has been the French parliament since the assassination of Jaurès by a Christian terrorist manipulated by the "democratic" state apparatus in 1914. A confrontation between bourgeois democracy and an authentic working-class democracy should already have taken place in the strike movements, the union days of action, such as the recent pensions movement, not to mention, of course, the yellow vest movement where this confrontation has often occurred. Because the formation of this embryo of working-class democracy necessarily involves a political confrontation with the bureaucratic union confederations linked to the state apparatus of the big bourgeoisie that arrogate to themselves the leadership of these movements. Since 1914 and the "Sacred Union" through which they endorsed the first global slaughter, these confederations, which in no way unite the class struggle, are nothing more than an outgrowth of bourgeois "democracy" in the workers’ movement. One of the consequences is that these trade union confederations subordinate all workers’ action to the capitalist government’s timetable, by only calling on us to demonstrate when a law is about to be discussed in parliament, as was the case for the last pension reform, and seeking only to negotiate the details and thus gain recognition for their role as a buffer for struggles. The unions call on workers to peacefully "pressure" parliament or the government. These movements therefore remain, in fact, an extension of electoral farces : workers "in struggle" are invited to remain voters "calling on" the legislature.

Certainly, this extra-parliamentary pressure has recently taken the form of "hard" strikes, costly and long for some workers, but this supposed harshness does not bother the capitalist class in any way as long as the exploited do not organize themselves on a class basis. And it is the self-organization of struggles, which the trade unions condemn and combat, which has proven itself in several of the latest movements : the movement of railway workers in the technical centers, the movement of hospital workers from the emergency rooms that they organized themselves from the beginning, and which continues, unlike the pension movement that the confederations took care to oversee and stop. It is not the electoral far left that has introduced embryos of autonomous workers’ organization into these latest struggles. It is too tied to the union apparatuses and to perspectives within the framework of capitalist legality for that. Now a revolutionary program, even an electoral one, could allow the most combative workers to popularize one of the next steps towards a large-scale movement like 1936 or 1968 : extending what was done spontaneously and on a small scale, particularly in the hospital movement.

The only political perspective for a true democracy for the world of work is indeed to form committees for struggle, discussion, decision-making, and action, in working-class neighborhoods, villages, towns, schools, and also factories, offices, and all businesses ; committees that unite by electing elected and revocable delegates at the national level. It is only these elections in our parliaments, our local governments, that will give rise to the "true democracy" that the Yellow Vests rightly demand and that they have begun to attempt within their own ranks.

An abstract and distant perspective ? No ! An embryo of a self-organized counter-power has been achieved on a national scale by the Yellow Vest movement. Although these latter are only a limited fraction of the working world, the holy terror they inspired in the ruling classes and in Macron, who unleashed his police against them, shows that such a counter-power will not come after a distant revolution : it will only be the prelude. During each struggle or event that affects our lives, let us set up our own assemblies where discussions and decision-making will take place.

This perspective, which may seem distant, has suddenly caught up with teachers who fear for their lives after the ignoble, fascist-style assassination of one of our own, a teacher worker. Gathering together, speaking out, and demonstrating became natural overnight for teachers and many other supportive workers. But "standing together," as the unions immediately did, behind Blanquer and Macron, who want to give a chauvinistic, anti-Muslim patriotic character to the reactions of indignation, who call on teachers to once again become Third Republic-style "foot soldiers," heroes of democracy, proud to die as martyrs like the hospital workers, is a death trap.

Let us beware of flatterers and flatterers. This school, created by the Third Republic, which the rulers are gradually undermining as they destroy the hospital and all public services, is suddenly glorified by those who are destroying it with their so-called "reforms." Let us remember that the Third Republic, which was born in the blood of revolutionary workers, the Communards of 1871, the first in France to establish a secular power and a genuine public school service, never gave women the right to vote, established a school that proclaimed in all its textbooks at length the racial inferiority of the "natives," the "Muslims," ​​the hatred of the Germans. This school trained a generation of young people ready to sacrifice themselves by going to slit the throats of German workers and peasants in order to save "democracy," in the capitalist slaughter of 1914.

It is clear that the government is trying to exploit a crime by claiming the country is threatened by war, thus justifying the establishment of an exceptional regime, which complements and prolongs the state of emergency under the pretext of health. The State, supposedly the enemy of terrorism, claims to want to protect the population and democracy, thus taking violently anti-democratic measures such as interning the family of a terrorist or expelling people who have no connection with this crime or finally to draw from it, under the pretext of alleged plots throughout the country, the establishment of an aggravated police dictatorship, finally the formation of a "national unity" which will serve to divide the population between Muslims and non-Muslims ! Macron thus hopes to expand the police dictatorship that he is already putting in place, with the state of emergency and now the curfew, under the pretext of health. Just as he’s turning the population against suburban youth, accusing them of not respecting the rules and spreading the virus ! Just as he doesn’t defend public hospitals for the health emergency, he doesn’t defend public schools for freedoms or democracy. Under capitalism in full collapse, this is no longer possible.

Hatred of Muslims and immigrants, disguised as "secularism," fascism disguised as defense of democracy—such is the agenda of a supposedly democratic capitalist state, that of Macron as much as of Mélenchon or Le Pen, in our next elections, in order to divide workers. The "police of the republic" did not protect the teacher, it will not protect us against all types of fascist attacks. So let us discuss these events, the means to defend ourselves, in our own assemblies, our own "self-defense councils." The capitalist republic is slipping further and further into fascism. More than ever, the emancipation, the very survival of workers, will be the work of the workers themselves.