Mature capitalist political economies all feature elaborate electoral institutions. This is useful to capitalism as it suggests that capitalism and democracy—a value that everyone purports to cherish—are compatible. More, if the citizenry can be made to believe that, through its democratic participation, it can limit any untoward capitalist excesses, it can be persuaded that it has freely opted for capitalism, warts and all. This helps maintain and perpetuate the status quo, even when there are many warts. For this to work for capital, the electoral system must be able, and may be expected, to put constraints on capitalist activities from time to time. This means that there is always a tendency for capital to curb democracy from becoming too effective, too prescriptive about how private wealth should be divided and deployed.

Michael J. Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, in their Report on Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, entitled The Crisis of Democracy, argued for curbs on democracy as the post-war era had emboldened citizens to make too many demands on capital. The Trilateral Commission, of course, was a big (very big) business organization dedicated to the maintenance of the primacy of capital.

Every now and again, this curbing may be excessive, causing problems for the legitimacy of the regime. There are signs we may be in such a moment.

Some of the more reflective capitalist friendly opinion makers are feeling pangs of anxiety. Not only is Warren Buffett telling his fellow 0.01 per centers that they have been heedless, reckless with other people’s life savings, but he is also cautioning them that they should be eager to contribute to the general good by paying a modicum of taxes. The prestigious Harvard Business School has put out a report entitled : ”Capitalism at Risk”. The risk, the authors, Bower & Leonard, say, is generated by the reckless behaviour of some bad apples, the arrogant disregard for democratic institutions shown hither and tither, and, of course, some of the egregiously painful outcomes of contemporary capitalist relations of production. More: that pain is being inflicted in a monstrously unequal manner. The unfairness and suffering is glaringly obvious.

Buffett, the Harvard group, and others like them, are cautioning the shakers and movers that capitalists must show respect for what the Occupation movement so neatly calls the 99%. If they will not, capitalism risks losing its legitimacy, derived in part from being associated positively with electoral democracy. It will be flirting with dangerous if, as yet, uncertain consequences.

In this piece, a modest argument is offered. It contends that, as resistance to the current ugly phase of capitalism unfolds in many ways, one facet of that resistance will have to deal with capital’s attempt to regain some of its lost ground by promising more and better democracy, by holding out to the public that capitalism is willing to let the public take charge of its own affairs once again. The suggestion here is that, while an opportunity to fight over what is really needed to become a democracy is to be welcomed, it should be remembered who is offering it for what purposes.

A rather skimpy overview of the limits of electoral democracy is offered with a view to show how much more is needed to become a democratic polity. We must be aware of this lest thinking capitalists fool us once again by offering us enriched, but still token, democratic participation at the ballot box, while continuing to limit our ability to constrain their power. We must not be bought off. The politics of this piece are those of Ernst Mandel who, when asked how he felt about accepting offers of increased democracy at the industrial workplace, said that he was in favour of more democracy, but that when something went wrong, you still blamed the boss as long as he still owned, and retained ultimate control over, the industrial workplace. Electoral democratic reforms are as useful to non-wealth owners as industrial democratic ones are to industrial workers but, in the absence of more democracy in all other and more significant spheres of social relations, they are way more useful to capitalism. This has to change.

Anti-democratic capitalists show their previously hidden claws

Our political leaders and opinion-moulders bombastically bombard us with statements about the depth and maturity of their respect for the rights of citizens to govern themselves democratically and how, therefore, they see their principal task to be the promotion and protection of our political institutions and freedoms, at the expense of everything else, even economic welfare. They don’t mean it. European politicians are more candid, more honest than their Anglo-American counterparts. They do not shy away from the admission that their principal task is the maintenance and perpetuation of capitalist relations of production, especially when it clashes with democratic ideals.

On 6 November 2011, a member of the newly imposed Greek Coalition government was interviewed on BBC television. He declared that the first task of the Coalition would be to enact laws to implement the odious deal that would see monies flowing to the Greek government (and, thence, on to private parasites). The angry folk in the streets had made it plain that the deal was abhorrent to them. Papandreou, the Greek PM and President of the Socialist International, felt the pressure. The elites and foreign investment chieftains’ responded with alarm and alacrity to Papandreou’s resultant suggestion that the deal should be put to the people before implementation. The pundits and the ‘markets’ pronounced Papandreou’s notion of direct democracy a failure of leadership. This is “no way to run a government” proclaimed the head of a European Chamber of Commerce. The people’s wishes do not come first.

What should happen, the free marketers declared, was, first, to have the nasty austerity deal rubber-stamped by pressured elected representatives knowingly acting against the electorate’s will. Following that, the installation of a leader trusted by the nation’s private creditors to do their bidding should be nailed down. Only then should a vote be allowed. It would determine which of the blighters who had allowed the imposition of the austerity deal should form a new government. That new government would be expected not to question the unwanted deal. This hollowed-out election process, opined the interviewee, would restore the legitimacy of government sufficiently to make its support for contemporary capitalism’s brutality acceptable for a little longer.

There it was: two revealing acknowledgments in one plan. First, almost explicitly, there was the understanding that the citizens could be, indeed would be, mollified and pacified by token democratic practices. The people, it is believed, do not demand much. Second, there was an acknowledgment that, while a little bit of democracy may be needed to pacify the unwashed public, it should not bestow enough decision-making powers on the people to enable them to thwart capitalists’ agenda. This dismissal of the usual cant about electoral democracy was in evidence as well during the swiftly following sequel in Italy. There the fall of Berlusconi was accompanied by his executive’s replacement by a bunch of unelected austerity deal cheerleaders and would-be implementers.

Serge Halimi reports in Le Monde Diplomatique that the installed austerity ‘czars’ in Greece—Lucas Papademos—and in Italy—Mario Monti—are members of the Trilateral Commission; a coincidence, to be sure.

Neither in Greece nor Italy are the people to be directly involved in these momentous changes, these coups d’etat. These are dramatic instances of capitalists’ willingness to ride roughshod over what the people in advanced capitalist nations have come to see as their fundamental democratic rights. There are many other, less dramatic, but insultingly arrogant, signs that capitalists feel themselves free to ditch the trappings of democracy. Increasingly, capitalists, drunk with the sense of unchallenged power stemming from their exponentially accumulating wealth, are taking the links out of the democratic chains that have chafed them for too long and that are, at this, a time of financial crises, seen as disposable. They sense an opportunity to rule as sovereigns did.

The gyrations and volatility of the financial markets have whipped capitalists and their flunkies into political action. They are pushing elected governments to make non-capitalists pay for the losses and, at the same time, weaken unions, workers and their allies so that the next stage of capitalism will leave capitalists freer than before to exploit and to plunder. The lamestream media (to quote the inimitable Sarah Palin) and their chosen experts and pundits stoutly proclaim that there is no alternative—TINA, to quote the even more singular Margaret Thatcher. Just now, despite what appear to be successes to the lametream media in the Greek and Italian situations, these opinion-moulders are having some difficulty persuading the masses. People’s fear and anger are becoming palpable. Where the assaults, the cuts, the brutality of (the anti-septic sounding) austerity measures are immediate, people are pouring into the streets and squares. Their vehemence and militancy are sending a strong signal that they know that the governments they are told they are free to elect, and which promise to live by the maxim TINA, are not the answer to their problems.

Offers to withdraw the anti-democratic claws

In short, everywhere there are indications that people are less and less willing to accord capitalism the legitimacy it derives from hiding behind the myth that electoral democratic institutions permit the citizens to rule as they like. Capitalism’s legitimators pretend that, if people did not like the system, they could change it by electing a different kind of government. The multiplying messages to the effect that less people are willing to buy this ideological package presents a very grave problem for thinking (as opposed to greedy, knee-jerk) capitalists.

One of capital’s reactions is to offer reforms to make electoral processes more attractive and, thereby, to restore their capacity to legitimate capitalist relations of production even as they are wreaking havoc on the world. This is what has been happening here, for instance, since the recent Ontario elections. Of course, the tainted impetus for the offer of reforms is not a reason to reject the reforms. They would improve the current primitive system of electing representative governments. But, it is important to remember who is setting the agenda for these kinds of reforms, and why they do so.

The would-be reformers proffer electoral improvements on behalf of the dominant class. They do so to preserve its interests. They do so to maintain and perpetuate the legitimacy of states (such a Canada and Quebec) as liberal capitalist democracies. The most significant word in that phrase is ‘capitalist’, not ‘democracies”. Unlike committed anti-capitalists, capitalists do not like democracy, certainly not an effective, enriched democracy. This is well-documented.

As capitalism emerged from feudalism, would-be entrepreneurs, would-be capitalists, needed the ability to exercise unfettered dominium over their resources. They militated for governments that would no longer have the absolute powers sovereign feudal overlords had had over individual wealth owners. They opted for a form of government that took away monopoly powers from monarchs and lords and claimed those powers for a government that they, and only they, would elect and that, therefore, could be counted on to represent their interests and only their interests. Now, capitalists, that is, those who privately appropriate socially produced wealth, are always few in number. Those who have to sell their labour power to those capitalists and their dependents comprise the bulk of the population of any capitalist political economy. This is why, originally, capitalists and their political allies denied the right to vote to non-wealth owners. The power of numbers was not to be given sway. The numerous, that is, workers and their allies, fought to change this. Capitalists understood that widening the franchise so as to include their class opponents as participants could undermine the great advantages obtained by having an electoral process they had chosen to replace the autocratic power of the monarch. Therefore capitalists resisted attempts by the numerous, by the working class, to enhance democratic institutions, although gradually they had to make concessions.

Three points emerge that are pertinent to the discussion that follows.

First, it is workers and their allies, not capitalists and their functionaries and opinion-makers, who are responsible for those elements of democracy and freedom we enjoy. It was the unions and their allies who fought for the enlargement of the electoral franchise and all the freedoms that are necessary to make it work: freedom of thought and belief, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and the like. All those freedoms of which we are so proud to-day and which we, in Canada, have inserted into our Charter of Rights and Freedoms as precious ones, were stoutly resisted by the capitalist class (and their judiciary) for as long as it could and, by then, they had been modified so as to make it relatively safe (although still irritating) for the working class to have them.

Second, what capitalists cherish is capitalism and they are bent on maintaining and perpetuating it by restricting democratic decision-making, based on the one person/one vote principle, as much as this is possible in an advanced liberal capitalist political economy. Making people believe that, if they have an effective electoral scheme they have all the decision-making power they could possibly need, is one way to attain their goal. ‘Democracy’ is a loss leader for their intellectual gatekeepers and manipulators. But, it is inherently dangerous and needs to be blunted in such a way that the appearance of citizen sovereignty exists while real power resides elsewhere.

Third, capitalism is anarchic in the sense that each and every profit-chasing capitalist acts in his/its interests, without regard for the viability of capitalism as a system. There is a tendency to undermine the stability of the system as triumphal, unthinking, capitalists, seek instant gratification. Their self-centred, increasingly aggressive profiteering undermines ideologically necessary institutions and structures. This is understood by conventional wisdomeers. For instance, the current financial crisis is attributed by mainstream defenders of the system as the outcome of a few renegade capitalists, heedless of the dangers of pushing the envelope too far. Every now and again this creates a crisis of legitimacy. Then repairs are in order, even if this irritates individual profiteers. We are at such a moment to-day. For the left militant, for the true democrat, it is important to understand that the concessions on offer are made to retain the system of oppression, not to end it as true democracy would.

The recent Ontario election and the elites’ concerns—are they our concerns?

The coverage and running of the Ontario election complied with what has become the norm. There was wall-to-wall coverage of the leaders, their television advertisements, assessments whether they were too negative, too crude, whether the ballyhooed televised debate had produced a winner; there were energetic discussions about the reading and credibility of countless polls and endless chatter about the excitement of the tightness of the horse race and about the meaning and importance of the novel uses of social media during the campaign. People on the left were energized, positively by the recent success of the NDP at the federal level and negatively by the prospect of a Conservative government at the provincial level. They had just seen the anointment of the much-loathed Harper regime, followed by the victory of a vulgar, right-wing primitive mayor in Toronto whose every uttering raised derision, anger and alarm amongst self-styled progressives and soft liberals. Then, the provincial election results came tumbling-in and the pundits, once again, had a great time, including those on the left: How to explain how the Conservatives snatched defeat from the jaws of victory? How to gauge whether the results would lead to a stable minority government or whether an early election would ensue? Should alliances be struck between the Liberals and others, presumably with the reasonably successful NDP? Had the NDP presented a platform that was significantly different to that of the other parties? and so forth.

All this to say that the election and its immediate aftermath created the impression that we enjoy a dynamic, vigorous democratic polity. But, eventually, a different question began to be posed, one that revealed real disquiet among the thinking supporters of the status quo. The troublesome issue was, of course, the low voter turnout.

Less than 50% of the potential voting public had bothered to vote. It meant that a government had been elected with circa 37% of 49% of the voting pool. In short, less than 18% of the potential voters had said explicitly that they wanted the government we now have. And, although it is not usually put in this way, it is crystal clear that a staggering 82% of the population rejected this government or were totally indifferent as to which party was to provide the government. Questions about the always fragile legitimacy of electoral democracy loomed into such plain view that even its usually smug cheerleaders could not ignore the threatening problem. Less obviously, inasmuch as the legitimacy of the electoral regime gives capitalism an acceptable face, the outline of an even more serious difficulty was making an appearance.

The angst is exacerbated as the Occupy phenomenon (physically unwinding as eviction after eviction is recorded), a deliberately self-conscious anti-electoral movement and an implicitly anti-capitalist movement, is starting to look like a movement with legs. Its slogan “We Are The 99%” is multi-layered and political dynamite. It not only points to the inequity of the unequal division of wealth and goods and services, but also to the fact that these patently unfair social distortions reflect the fact that democracy of the one person/one vote kind is not working. How is it that the overwhelming majority of supposedly sovereign citizens cannot halt the appropriation of almost all the wealth by the few who actually do not directly produce any of that wealth? Something, the slogan yells out, is rotten in democratic capitalism. This is why, say the occupiers, Occupation is necessary: electoral democracy is malfunctioning under capitalism. The malaise is so great that, this time round, tried and tested responses to discredit anti-establishment agitations, are not working very well, even though these methods of disparagement are still being trotted-out by the more stubborn status quo supporters.

In an upside-down way, these standard responses were on display during the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Lybia. Uncharacteristically, our capitalist elites and their lamestream media were rooting for people taking to the streets to change their world. They cheered these usually frowned-upon direct actions because, they reasoned, these brave rebels rising up against despotic regimes did not have access to the bounty of electoral democracy and the associated freedoms of speech, assembly and belief that the working classes in advanced capitalist democracies enjoy as their birthright. Indeed, all too frequently the Arab struggles were patronizingly characterized as praiseworthy efforts by backward peoples to attain the kind and level of democracy enjoyed by those of us dwelling in the civilized world. Smugness, nationalism and racism are embedded in our propaganda machinery.

Turning to our ‘civilized’ world, this same reasoning has been used against demonstrators and protestors for eons, frequently with a good deal of success. Here the argument is that we already enjoy as much democracy as we could possibly want. Only people misled by trouble-makers would take to the streets when they have the gilded right to participate as sovereign citizens in the electoral processes and to determine who should govern them and to what effect they might do so. In a nutshell, parliamentary-type democracy negates the need for direct action and is superior to it. This is why our dominant class and its media believe that the best outcome from the Arab uprisings is our system of representative government, a system that will then obviate the need to overthrow any government by non-electoral means (provided the rebellious people elect a government of which we approve; if they fail to do so, our true anti-democratic colours come out,but that is another story).

The historically low voter turnout in the Ontario elections may not be the straw that breaks the back of the camel carrying electoral democracy but, as seen, it occurred in a context where that laden animal was already faltering under the ever-increasing burden of doubts about the process’ ability to deliver on its promises. The Ontario turnout, while eye-popping, was just a slightly lower point on a curve that has been trending downwards for some time. In the preceding federal election in May, 2011, the number of votes went up from that recorded in the two elections that preceded it. But, those two earlier elections had had lower voter participation than any in history. The 2011 improvement, which recorded miserable participation rate of 61.4%, was, therefore, one that looked respectable only because the earlier showings had been so bad. Provincially, too, the numbers are trending downwards throughout the land. Indeed, if the rate is calculated on the basis of the number of people of voting age, rather than the lower base of those registered to vote, no Canadian election has reached 60% of the pool of voters since 1993. These numbers, of course, mirror those recorded in the U.S. There, the most publicized election process in the world, the presidential elections, attract 50 to 60% of the voters (not counting the many disenfranchised people in the U.S.) and, in a so-called off-year, 37% of voters participate in Congressional elections.

The indications are as clear as they can be: you can’t keep fooling all the people all of the time. There is a pronounced disaffection with the electoral processes. The gatekeepers of the status quo are going to have to redouble their efforts to maintain the belief that the right to vote in elections legitimates decision-making by the winners of properly conducted elections. Their concern is palpable, fanned as it is by, to them, surprising polls that show a well of swelling sympathy for the occupiers of the streets. All hands are jumping to the pumps: electoral democracy is to be re-branded lest our usually dormant citizens take a leaf out of the book of those colour-coded protestations that brought down regimes in Eastern Europe and/or the occupation of public spaces that overturned long-lived despotic regimes in the Arab world. Locally, the Ontario elections—a model of a properly run electoral process, according to the lamestream media– has spurred the would-be reformers on.

There is much talk, then, about confronting political financing laws (again!), lowering the voting age to, say, 16, to allow voting on-line, to teach more basic civics in high school, to reform the first past the post system by considering preferential and/or proportional voting schemes, to have compulsory voting, and so forth. From a committed democrat’s perspective, this conversation is welcome even though the reforms will not necessarily lead to better results for the vulnerable and oppressed or do much to legitimate capitalism. Australia, with a political economy that is very similar to that of Canada and Quebec, features compulsory voting and a sophisticated preferential and proportional voting regime. Its institutions are way more democratic than ours but the governments these better treated Australians elect are slavishly devoted to neo-liberal practices, steadily and systematically increase inequality, favour free trade, support coal and uranium mining with their ecology- and life-threatening implications, manifest an offensive degree of xenophobia, vulgar nationalism and a burning desire to be counted as allies by the imperialist powers as they wage their vicious wars.

Capitalism, especially matured (or, better, rottened), does not leave much room for the well-known will of the people, that is, for democracy, to flourish. There are structural, as well as instrumental reasons for this lamentable state of affairs.

Capitalism has never liked democracy and will never like it. It will limit its reach as much as it is possible to do so while satisfying the citizenry that they have the power to change things should it wish to do so. Do the electoral reforms on offer signal a defeat for capitalists as they purport to give those with numerical dominance, the working class and its allies, greater institutional heft in the process? The argument here is that they do not. Even if the reforms are achieved and even if they work as intended, they will leave capitalism’s powers largely untouched. This is so because only the election of representative government is being addressed by these reforms. Major sites of decision-making will remain democracy-free zones and they will continue to colonize the now slightly perfected electoral democratic institutions.

The pathetically restricted scope of democracy in liberal capitalist polities

We give the individual pride of place in our political and economic life. This is because we see ourselves as a liberal polity. Each of us is treated, for this reason, as equal in formal, legal terms. Each of us has the same right to participate in the governance of our society. The right to vote is almost universal for adults in advanced liberal capitalist democracies.

The governments we elect are given plenary power to pass enforceable laws in respect of a specific set of subjects. The limits of their legislative powers are found in constitutions, usually written constitutions. Thus, the people, as voters, have two sources of power over their elected legislators. First, they can stop them acting beyond the constitutional metes and bounds and, second, they can reward or punish their representatives as they see fit at the next election. That is it. The citizens’ direct participation in government is limited to this kind of participation. As an implementation of democratic principles, it is small beer. Consider:

1. As a matter of modern parliamentary practice, the governing party is usually the one that won a majority of the votes, although sometimes no party wins a majority of the votes cast and then coalitions or minority governments are formed.
2. The government rules by means of an executive group, a cabinet, more often than not chosen by the party that won a majority of the votes or which constitutes the dominant party in a coalition or minority government.
3. This executive, in turn, counts on party discipline to implement its decisions. Its adherents in the legislature are expected to abide by its decisions. This executive wields virtual absolute power as its supporters form a majority or is able to exercise power as if it were supported by a majority of elected representatives. An example of this less usual situation was furnished by the previous Harper government’s ability to act as if it had a majority by divide and conquer tactics used against its fragmented opponents, a tour de force that is likely to be replicated by the McGuinty government in Ontario.
4. The executive imposes duties of confidentiality on its members. Secrecy and opaqueness shroud its deliberations. The citizens have no direct input into central decision-making that will generate legislation, regulation and overall policy. The attenuated nature of democratic electoral participation is coming into view.
5. Because governments are chosen for set periods, typically somewhere between 3 and 5 years, and because they have jurisdiction over a vast array of legislative subject-matters, voters are forced to hope that, in a general way, one candidate and/or her party will best reflect the voter’s views on a huge number of issues and that the government will, therefore, approximate the government they would like to have. More, each voter may hold her nose because of that candidate’s/party’s views on some issues and still vote for her/it on the basis of a specific promise made on one or two issues or because, on issues significant to that voter, this candidate/party is better than other candidates/parties, even though on many matters this candidate/party may stand for things the voter does not want. In any one electoral district or riding, the reasons individuals have for voting for the same candidate/party will vary vastly. This gives the executive a lot of room for manoeuver and manipulation as it enjoys plenary, voter-unimpeded powers, for extended periods.
6. This creates anxieties because, as seen, we cannot be confident that an elected government was elected rationally. The electorate is dumbed down by lamestream media and politicians who reach for the lowest common denominator. Issues such as the appearance of candidates, their religion, their supposed sexual mores, their association with wealth/celebrity/sport and the like, might distort voters’ judgment; a downturn in a sector of the economy, a promised targetted hand-out or cutting of a specified benefit may cloud other significant issues for some voters; a national sporting triumph or debacle could affect an election, as could a sudden burst of patriotism spawned by far-away international events; etc. In short, any personality-bound feature, singular event, or faddish enthusiasm may impact on a choice that will have impacts which run counter to the overall views of those voters who were momentarily blinded. More: politicians play on the frailty of such voters. To tell those disappointed voters subsequently that they got the government they deserve does little to restore their confidence in the system. It is precisely because the system lets people down so often, in so many ways, that major reforms have been engineered.
7. As governments with almost unlimited powers reign, there is always a fear that, because they represent or want to represent majorities in the future, that they will pick on minorities to aggrandize and secure themselves. This danger to individuals, the lynch-pins of our liberal polity, and to our cherished notions of respect for the sovereignty of each and everyone of us, means that it has become common to limit elected governments’ powers by unwritten conventions or written constitutional documents, guaranteeing the rights and freedoms of minorities and individuals. Canada’s and Quebec’s Charters of Rights and Freedoms are illustrative. They simply allow the judiciary to strike down laws and regulations passed by governments if they interfere unnecessarily with the rights of specified minorities and individuals. The freedom to think, speak, assemble, associate, to be secure from police intimidation, to be free from discrimination, and the like, are to be safeguarded by the judiciary. The remedy for the anticipated—and frequently materialized-—failures of electoral democracy is entrusted to a profoundly anti-democratic institution.

The daily operations and planning of government are left to the public service. It is not directly responsible to the public. Ministers in the government are accountable for the operations, decisions and determinations of their departments. Citizens have no direct participatory role to play.

Once again, the attenuated nature of democracy is plain.

Inasmuch as workers in these bureaucracies, that is, lower level public servants seek to hold their bureaucratic masters to account, their rights to speak directly with the public or to use their economic power to force their public servant employers and their political responsible ministers to change their ways, they are seriously inhibited. Stringent enforceable laws have been enacted to restrict both the political and bargaining rights of such public service employees.

Once again, the implicit argument is that the impoverished electoral scheme is all the democracy to which people are to aspire.

Citizens’ freedoms as citizens in a supposed liberal democracy are further imperilled by their exclusion from decision-making processes that have major impacts on their lives, on their potential to govern themselves as sovereign individuals. A few examples should suffice:

1. The police and security forces of our lands are beyond any meaningful public scrutiny. We are asked to trust machinery controlled by people who are closer to the police and its objectives than to us. The police and secret services frequently ask for, and get, powers to survey, detain and bring charges in secret. Courts may be required to hold oversight hearings in private. We are to accept these distortions of the rule of liberal law because we will be allowed to protest about them at the next election, be allowed to vote without any likelihood that we will have had access to the information needed to do so.
2. This is even more true when it comes to the military where our lack of information and ability to participate is truly shocking.
3. The scope of appointment to the powerful judiciary is left to insiders, such as legal elites and politicians meeting in confidentiality-protecting sectors; the accountability of the judges to the public is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent. Yet, the judiciary not only determines the scope and implementation of our democratic political rights and freedoms, but it also acts as an intermediary between us, the people, and the use of coercive power of the State.
4. The mature capitalist political economies have put their Reserve Banks, such as the Bank of Canada, that is, their money/currency controlling institutions beyond the reach of democratically elected politicians, ensuring that only those with direct access to the reserve bank personnel have an effective voice. Needless to say, these people are culled form the ranks of the banks and other financial institutions, from the 1%, or more accurately, the 0.01%. Decisions that affect interest rates, purchasing and selling of housing, building and renovating houses, the capacity to import/export, and the like, are beyond the purview of direct democracy.
5. What is true of the central banks, is true in spades of the acronyms who rule the world, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the BIS, the ECB, etc. Their private, secret decision-making, with only the rich and powerful at the decision-making table, does not even deign to nod at the principles of democracy. Their decisions impact on billions of people’s welfare without a hint of democracy. Even when elected politicians purport to be meeting as democratic representatives to deliberate on economic policies, as they do at the G8, the G20 meetings, they are surrounded by veritable armies of representatives of the 0.01%. It is those people’s views that count and only those people’s views, not those of the public at large. This explains the palpable anger in the streets of any city that these leaders occupy when they meet behind police and army barriers anywhere in the world.
6. And, most of all, decision-making inside huge corporations whose revenues and assets dwarf the Goss Domestic Products of most nation states, affects everyone in the world. The decision whether to invest, where to invest, how much to invest, what good and services are to be produced, and the like, have enormous impacts on what governments do, want to do and can do. They limit government’s real world (as opposed to constitutional) jurisdiction. To make sure that politicians do not feel too oppressed by the limitations such self-centred decision-making imposes on their powers, corporations reward those politicians friendly to their objectives by handsomely funding political parties and campaigns and by the offer of nice, well-paying jobs to politicians and their advisors after they have finished serving corporations in government. Politicians find it easy to develop a sincerely held belief that there is no alternative to the agenda set by the 0.01%. (This, more than anything, explains why progressives everywhere who pin their hopes on self-styled social democratic electoral parties, will continue to be disappointed).
7. The decisions corporations make have immediate impacts on those people who need work, food, shelter and goods and services. The corporate sector makes all those decisions without a smidgen of democracy adulterating its profit-seeking mind. Inside the corporation, there is a form of democracy—it is shareholder democracy, that is, the obverse of real democracy. One dollar/one vote is the preferred decision-making model; the wealthy should rule is the motto. The workers who do all the work and take the risk of being injured, diseased or killed and of the economic losses that corporate cut-backs may wreak, get no vote. Money counts; people do not.
8. More, the corporate sector spends inordinate amounts of money on getting citizens to apply that mantra to their lives. They teach them that they are to consume, that their participation in society is to be that of marketeers. It is by voting with one’s dollars, by buying and selling corporate goods and services, that one governs one’s life. This is what politics is to be about.

The moral of this simple tale

Erich Fromm wrote that ”[o]pinions formed by the powerless onlooker do not press his or her conviction, but are a game, analogous to expressing a preference for one brand of cigarette over another. For these reasons the opinions expressed in polls and in elections constitute the worst, rather than the best level of human judgement…Without information, deliberation, and the power to make one’s decision effective, democratically expressed opinion is hardly more than the applause at a sports event.”

Even if electoral democratic practices are improved, people will be only infinitesimally closer to the ultimate aim: to be in charge of their lives, to be in a position to determine how they are to realize their potential as human beings. Anti-capitalists must exploit this moment of anxiety for capital to push for democracy in every sphere. It is easier said than done. But, if this objective is kept at the forefront of our minds, it will not be as easy as it has been for capital to confine us to the parliamentary arena where the potential for radical change is non-existent. And we do need radical change. The so-called Arab Uprisings and the Occupation movement are solid evidence that many people are ready for more democracy, for real democracy, not just for better electoral democratic practices. All political action, no matter how specific or local, should be coupled with demands for more direct decision-making power by the people to be affected by a decision or practice. As the indignant marchers in Barcelona say: ”We are going slowly because we are going far.”