Bourgeoisie Increasingly Unable to Hide Contempt for Democracy
With elections taking place in countries representing more than 40% of the world’s population, 2024 has been dubbed the “year of elections” by the media. Continuing a growing trend, however, these elections are laying bare the farce of bourgeois democracy amid the crisis of capitalism, with parties putting forward candidates elected by no one and heads of state openly ignoring election results.
In the United States, the Democrats are attempting the nifty trick of claiming to be the saviours of “democracy” while kicking third parties off the ballot and nominating a presidential candidate, Vice-President Kamala Harris, who has never received votes from anyone. In 2020, Harris pulled out of her presidential bid before a single primary vote was cast. After U.S. President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with Donald Trump, Democratic “donors” called on Biden to cancel his re-election bid. Despite initial resistance from Biden, he eventually abandoned the race and endorsed Harris.
The timing of Biden’s resignation was convenient, in that it followed the end of the Democrat primaries and allowed Democrats to choose a candidate unencumbered by pesky concerns like the will of voters. Immediately the entire political and media establishment swung behind Harris. The media blitz on behalf of Harris underscores the role of the bourgeois press in shaping public opinion. Almost overnight, a politician who had been seen as a joke of a public speaker became hailed as one of the remarkable orators of our age. “Greatest acceptance speech I’ve ever seen,” gushed Globe and Mail columnist and genocide enthusiast Andrew Coyne.
What is Harris running on? To quote her old boss Joe Biden, that “nothing will fundamentally change.” Harris continues to provide limitless support to Israel and its genocide of Palestinians; to the military and police, to anti-immigrant policies and to building Trump’s border wall. Democrats are touting Harris as campaigning on “joy”, which is as vague and meaningless as Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign based on “hope” and “change”. The main party of U.S. imperialism, Democrats stand only for maintaining the rule of the U.S. capitalist class and its bloodsoaked empire.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron has provided an interesting response to legislative election results that saw the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) win the most votes: Macron simply chose to ignore the results. Nearly two months after the election, Macron has refused to appoint a prime minister from the NFP, which has nominated Lucie Castets to fill the position. The Revolutionary Communist Party in France noted in its paper Révolution that whoever becomes prime minister will preside over a regime of austerity and racism:
[T]he decline of French capitalism – relative to other imperialist powers – is such that the bourgeoisie urgently and objectively needs drastic counter-reforms in all areas of economic and social life. This is the central reason for rejecting the candidacy of Lucie Castets, whose official programme – that of the NFP – is admittedly very moderate, but contains a series of progressive measures which the French bourgeoisie does not want to hear about.
For the capitalists, Révolution says, the mission of the next French government is “to transfer the burden of the crisis of French capitalism onto the backs of young people, workers, the unemployed, and pensioners.” However, it continues:
[T]he bourgeoisie is faced with a major problem: the deep crisis of its regime and the new composition of the National Assembly make it very difficult to implement the counter-reforms and budget cuts it needs.
No absolute majority can emerge from the Palais Bourbon [meeting place of the National Assembly]. Whoever it is, the next government will have to rely, at best, on a shaky scaffolding of bargains and contradictory commitments. In other words, it will be a shifting, unstable ‘coalition’ likely to be swept aside at the first serious shock. And there will be plenty of shocks. The question of public debt, for example, is already a burning issue which would become explosive in the ever more threatening event of a new recession.
The French comrades have responded by calling for a general mobilization of workers and youth, an extra-parliamentary movement on the streets to halt the austerity policies demanded by the bourgeoisie. This is the way forward.
In Britain, “Sir” Keir Starmer’s Labour Party were the beneficiaries of the collapse of Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in the latest election. While the British press hailed this as a landslide victory, Labour actually lost half a million votes compared to the 2019 general election. A YouGov poll found that 48% of those who voted Labour did so simply to get rid of the Tories, while only 5% voted Labour because they agreed with their policies.
Starmer, indeed, went out of his way not to promise anything after becoming Labour leader—at least not for workers. For the capitalist class, on the other hand, he went out of his way to out-Tory the Tories, staking out right-wing positions on every issue and promising to be a steady pair of hands for British capitalism. The result of the British election is similar to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, in that Labour/Democrats won not by offering policies voters liked, but by default on the basis of not being Tories/Republicans.
To be fair, Starmer was fairly upfront in promising to rule on behalf of the bosses, not the workers. Now he is rolling out a program of austerity, which as in France and other countries can only be fought by mass mobilization of workers and youth. Austerity policies always illustrate the hollowness of claims that we live in a democracy. The majority does not support policies that reduce their standard of living and only benefit the bosses, yet our “democratic” rulers obligingly impose these policies on behalf of their masters.
More than any other issue at the moment, it is Israel’s genocide in Palestine that reveals the vast gulf between public opinion and the policies of “our” governments. A Leger poll in June—commissioned by the right-wing, pro-Israel National Post, no less—found that 45% of Canadians agreed Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip, compared to 23% who disagreed. A majority, 55% of Canadian,s view Israel negatively and only 29% view it favourably; 26% believe the country is too supportive of Israel, 12% believe it is not supportive enough, and 23% believe Canada’s support for Israel is about right.
These polls show a majority of Canadians have a negative view of Israel, and a predominant share of the population believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and Ottawa has been too supportive of Israel. Yet these views find no real expression in official electoral politics. While parties may issue mealy-mouthed statements talking about support for a “ceasefire” and a “two-state solution”, their real views always amount to ironclad support for Israel, as expressed in the thought-terminating cliché: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Liberal, Conservative, NDP—all parties are complicit in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
The continued, undying support for Israel by western governments against the will of the majority is precisely what gave rise first to mass protests against the genocide in Gaza, then to the student encampment movement calling for universities to divest from Israel. With the encampments crushed by state violence, the Palestine solidarity movement is at an impasse. That’s why the Revolutionary Communist Party in Canada is launching a campaign this fall calling to organize a student strike for Palestine. The ruling class has made clear it will not listen to popular demands to end the genocide; we have to make them listen.
We are all taught growing up that we live in a democracy, that the government represents the will of the population and that the people express their will through voting. The truth is that any state is an instrument of the ruling class. So-called liberal democratic governments exist only to serve the bourgeoisie and ignore the will of the population whenever those run counter to the interests of the capitalists. The contempt of the capitalist class for democracy is precisely why amid austerity and cuts for the rest of the population, they continue to lavish money on police—strengthening the ability of state forces to crush popular resistance movements in blood.
Democracy, we are told, is synonymous with voting and expresses the will of the people. That is clearly not the case in a class society such as capitalism, since all parties now support unpopular policies against the will of the majority. The sole force capable of overthrowing capitalism and leading the revolutionary socialist transformation of society is the working class.
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said in The Communist Manifesto, “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.” Only when workers are the ruling class will the majority of society be able to democratically decide its own fate.