In the first article in this series we discussed freedom under capitalism. The conclusion was simple: capitalist freedom for the vast majority of the population means the right to choose your master, your job, if you can find one. Once you have a master, you do what they say for most of the day, for most of your life. If you can’t find a master, you’re free to be homeless, hungry and eventually (few people survive being homeless more than about five years), and soon enough you’re free to die.
Yay Capitalism.
Note that this is structural: yes some people will become capitalists or otherwise escape the master trap, but the vast majority won’t and can’t. Someone is going to lose the dire game of musical chairs (jobs.)
Now let’s look at representative democracy.
In a democracy you’re free to choose your legislators or executives. You can’t vote for just anyone, though, only approved candidates. In most systems if someone runs without belonging to a party, they won’t win, and parties usually control you can become a candidate.
As a group the people who are elected will decide pretty much everything about how your society runs. Sometimes they seem to care about the citizens (FDR say) and sometimes they don’t. (Every American government since Nixon.) I can’t remember the last time food stamps were increased, rather than cut, other than a brief raise during the pandemic.
The number of elected people with real power is small compared to the population, and as an ordinary person your vote is generally meaningless. It’s never YOU who makes the difference. Big donors and other people who can organize groups of votes do, but that’s a vanishingly small number of people. So elected officials, especially at the national and State level pander to people with money or votes (pastors, for example. Used to pander to unions, not so much any more.)
Your choice of ruler is better than having a hereditary monarchy. Yes. But your actual power is insignificant. And Democracies have all the normal powers of government: they can draft you and send you off to die. They can send you to prison. They can take property from you. They can coerce you to work. Ideally they make it so people who lose the musical boss game are taken care of anyway, but often they don’t. Certainly they can do good and sometimes do.
But any freedom you have in a society is contingent on the government. Not drafting you. Making it so you don’t have to have a master. Making it so you can get health care, or not. Your freedom is contingent on what elected officials want: officials who structurally have every reason to pander to those with money or power: and that’s before we even get to the issue of bribery, whether while in office or after: Bill Clinton became very rich after leaving office. He was bribed post-facto and everyone knows that was the case. The last President who didn’t get taken care of this way was Carter.
Trump, of course, is just blatantly accepting bribes while in office, which has the dubious virtue of complete honesty.
A system where the people who decide what freedoms you have are structurally more likely to favor a small minority with wealth and power, and where if they are corrupt, you can’t bribe them, isn’t likely to maintain your freedom very well if important people think they’d benefit from you losing your freedom, is it?
Certainly people with money and power don’t really want you to not need a job and a master, because the people who have influence over them want cheap workers who will do anything they’re told to do.
Churchill quipped that Democracy was the worst system except for all the other ones we’ve tried.
Perhaps so, though the CPC and most Chinese disagree.
But even if true, representative democracy, at least in a system with significant wealth and power differentials, is a shit system where you have freedom only if elites feel it benefits them that you be free.
Perhaps in an egalitarian system it would work better, but under capitalism, which by its nature requires concentration of power, it does not
We’ll discuss other forms of organization as this series continues. For now, just note that representative democracy, by its very design, will tend to be more responsive to people who don’t want ordinary people to have freedom than to those who do want ordinary people to be free.
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Jan Wiklund
Scandinavian representative democracy worked fairly well from about 1900 to, say, 1970. That was because those who nominated were controlled from below; they were trade unions, cooperative business etc. Of course, every elected tries to escape from the control from below, and it took them about 70 years to do so.
The trick to avoid this is to keep people mobilised. Politics is the business of making good compromises between interests, but only the mobilised interests count. A society can’t work on autopilot. More about that in in Susan Strange: States and markets, 1988.
bruce wilder
What Jan Wiklund said.
Or what Tony Wikrent says every week.
Some powers in society have to be organized to conceive and pursue a public interest and general welfare.
Feral Finster
Something I wrote elsewhere:
“Representative democracy, as a practical matter, is a fraud, an exercise in passing the buck, in avoiding responsibility. Everyone in power claims to answer to and derive their authority from someone else, going ultimately back to “the people” who themselves do not directly exercise power, and who would find it difficult to exercise as a collective action problem, even if they had the formal authority to do so.
The technical term for this is a “beard”. That is, a cover for the rulers to do what they want, even though both the rulers themselves and their policies may be wildly unpopular. After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don’t like it, next time, you can vote for a different carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet, so until then, shut up and fall in line!
What this means is that real power is often in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, who typically don’t even want to stand for election because they don’t want the voters to know what their programs are, much less to exercise any oversight. Robert Moses is the classic example here. The spooks and Deep State provide a different example.
Even that minimal level of scrutiny is too much for some, and real power is often exercised by people not formally part of any government structure. Corporate lobbyists or Robert Kagan come to mind.
This is the principal advantage of a titular democracy over a more authoritarian system. A Lukashenko or a Xi cannot tell the public that he hears their concerns, he feels their paid, but sorry, his hands are tied, the Parliamentary Ombudsman just made a ruling that the decision has to first go to the sub-committee and then the full committee and they won’t meet until after the by-election, so sorry, he wishes he could help but there’s nothing he can do.
In an authoritarian system, everyone knows who makes the decisions and where ultimate responsibility lies. Who calls the shots and where the buck stops. Of course, heartwarming happy horseshit rhetoric aside, a Starmer or a Johnson isn’t going to let any law or procedure get in the way of something he wants, like bailing out the billionaires at the casino or an escalation of the War On Russia.
The Chinese and Canadian response to the COVID lockdown protests is most illustrative here. The Chinese government gave way to the protests. The restrictions were lifted. The Canadian government ignored every law, right and principle in putting the protests down, even their own courts said so after the protests were safely squelched, but somehow, nobody was punished or faced any consequences. Instead, a different corporate imperialist muppet was installed.”
mago
Let’s not forget that we export that glorious democracy around the globe especially to those little shit hole countries whose resources are coveted by the exporters.
spamned
Food Stamps (SNAP these days) were *increased* during COvid. Now they’re being cut for most recipients.
We had a lot of hope for change at the beginning of Covid (not over, btw with more airborne infections on the rise).
Stupid “we”. Soon to be dead “we” cuz markets…
Mark Level
All dead-on as usual, Ian, thank you.
A couple shares and responses. “Representative democracy,” my ass. What a sham!! There were times it was real, the Progressive era, FDR’s 4 terms mostly, not entirely, esp. the last term when he was about to die and they pushed out VP Henry Wallace, a Southern Populist (the evil “Socialists” that LAS rages on about) who was also very progressive on race too, when that was a minority opinion. They pushed in the Pendergast Machine puppet Harry S. Truman, a regressive racist and tool, happy to kill 100s of thousands of “Japs,” with nuclear weapons (a message to Stalin and Russia) & got bogged down in a failed war in Korea and was forced out by the smarter Eisenhower, who pledged to end that war and in fact did so. When he lost the election he had the lowest popular support EVER seen by a President, though Bush Jr. sank that low by the end (mas o menos), Trump certainly will if he survives this term.
I’m referring back to your last thread viz the Trump Royal family’s open corruption, George Galloway shared yesterday that he just cut a “deal” (LoL) with his own DoJ, he and his Mafia children will never get audited by the IRS in perpetuity!!
Max Blumenthal with Judge Nap just noted that Hunter Friggin’ Biden is now on a national speaking tour which people are flocking to (!?!), what the fucking fuck? When you make Hunter look good you are pure filth.
The defeat of Thomas Massey by a complete nonentity, Ed Gallrein, dude with a Hitler haircut, by Adelson and Zionist money in Kentucky was an open steal, they dumped a box at the end that was like 95% Gallrein votes. But hey, like people in Indiana & Ohio, I’ve spent a little time in all of these states, the voters are reactionary, racist and self-hating.
Let’s not forget that during the Civil War, Kentucky was the one Southern state that did not secede or join the Confederacy, at one time people there were generally very libertarian, in the sense in which that word is used worldwide, not the Milty Friedman/Ayn Rand vomit.
There are countries that DO side with their people when crises come, I will cite only 1– During the 08-09 Greenspan-Larry Summers Crash, Iceland bailed out their people and kicked the crooks in the Finance center out. Which leads me to the Pure Lies I heard on NPR this morning.
Some woman on giving a tongue-bath to the late Barney Frank, who just died. “He had incredible integrity and fought to hold accountable the people who caused the Financial Crisis and redeem the victims!!” He was always on the side of “the Underdog!” Pure horseshit, shameless. Smug, stupid Libs. Then I heard a segment on the great success of the plucky little Ukrainians who will “die to the last man” for US in an already failed war.
We have one commenter on here who pretends love for the Banderists, okay “pretends” is maybe unfair. Does he know that polls there show majorities want the war to END, they know the jig is up? But they have less representative government than practically anywhere, will be fed into a woodchipper. But we mean well, so don’t oppose it!!
DMC
Careful what you suggest. Sebastian Gorka may be listening.
cc
There are the ideals of democracy and capitalism, but what we in the West have in practice now are such thoroughly corrupted versions that I wouldn’t even call them democracy or capitalism.
Instead of democracy, here in the West we have plutocracy, and, more specifically, oligarchy, operating under an illusion of “democracy”.
Instead of actual market competition that works for the benefit of consumers, the people, like in China, here in the West we have what is exemplified by oligarch Peter Thiel’s mantra “Competition is for Losers” under the illusion of “free markets”. Thiel is a major backer of Trump and Vance, and under this administration, attempts to keep the illusion going are not even maintained.
Unfortunately, many in the West still cling to their comforting illusions though, thinking that the problem is only with Trump, and all will be well once the Democrats are back in office.
The combined effect of this, extended to the world stage, is that The West is a thuggish mafia criminal syndicate: the dons and capos of the West seek hegemonic control of the world and energy flows, attempt elimination or kneecapping of all competition (ex. Russia, China, Iran), exploitation of the Global South (latest examples: Venezuela and Cuba being forced into submission to the pimp and his gang), use of extremist/terrorist proxies (Azov, AQ/ISIS/HTS/Boko, MEK), etc.
As Oliver Hua also wrote recently:
But “rule by the rich” is plutocracy, not a democracy. The two don’t co-exist, meaning you cannot be a plutocracy and a democracy at the same time.
Trump’s merry gang of bandits on Air Force One has shown to these unsuspecting Chinese who really rule the US.
It makes one wonder – who is thinking now it is better to be ruled by Trump, Larry Fink, and Elon Musk than by Xi and the CPC?
https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/observations-from-the-xi-trump-summit
Hickory
In my book The Deepest Revolution, I discuss the way of life common to all free societies without a ruling class, and the way of life common to all unfree societies with a ruling class, and what lessons people could learn to collectively embrace a way of life humans evolved to live in – actual freedom.
Every society with a ruling class has some way of extracting labor from people. Feudalism, capitalism, communism, socialism are variations on a theme. Military slavery, wage slavery, prison slavery, chattel slavery, serfdom – there are many ways of coercing people to doing work they don’t want to do. Every society with a ruling class develops its own coercive systems and stories to justify these. People in all these societies are equally “free” – they are not free. Period. There are more or less strict systems of control, that always vary by privilege level and time period.
This is the way of life common to all unfree, conquered societies. For the vast majority of people:
1. you cannot choose the laws you live under
2. you must obey the laws you’re given
3. you may not enforce the laws you live under, meaning you’re forbidden from confronting injustice.
When people are forbidden from taking deep responsibility to stand in solidarity and confront injustice, irresponsibility becomes normal. In other words, when deep integrity, bravery, and wisdom become illegal after people are conquered, then troubles like superficiality, selfishness, cowardice, ignorance and so on become common. This has characterized all unfree, unhealthy nations.
In every healthy nation living traditionally – that is, every actually-free society – everyone is expected to take deep responsibility for themselves and the people around them. It is deeply satisfying to be a trustworthy member of a society of trustworthy people. Imagine having the highest standards for yourself and the people around you, and the people around you having the highest standards of trustworthiness as well, in every dimension.
This is how humans evolved to live. But when people are conquered, they are pressured to forget their ancestors traditional way of life, and even to believe it’s not possible.
I have documented hundreds of stories proving all these deep patterns, and found many personal and collective lessons helping people build deep trust relationships on the way to build new healthy nations where people can deeply trust their neighbors and leaders.
If you want to learn about actually-free societies, instead of having wishful thinking about ‘democracy’, freel free to check out the free video series or free book i put togther:
free book: https://thedeepestrevolution.com/
4-part video series: https://thedeepestrevolution.com/videos/
The four part video series gives a survey showing what healthy nations are like (what freedom is really like), what it’s like living in a society where sharing is normal and expected, how to have high standards so that trustworthy behavior is normal, and it even gives an example of a Deep Revolution, where people created a nation without a ruling class, without corruption and greed.
If you’re interested in freedom, study actually free societies. Studying democacies or socialist republics just means studying endless scams, fraud, and corruption. But if you never learn what healthy, free societies are like, you’ll never know what the end goal for deep social transformation needs to look like.
Feral Finster
@Mark Level:
Keep in mind that in Free And Democratic Ukraine(tm), expressing any opinion other than Total War Until The End is likely to earn you an unsolicited visit from the secret police, and they have ways of persuading you to agree with them. I personally know people who have been subject to the gentle methods and light touch of the SBU and pro-regime paramilitaries.
Similarly, we were assured that anonymous opinion polling in Afghanistan confirmed the broad and deep popular support for the puppet regime in Kabul and that Taliban support was minimal at best.
All that proved was that Afghans are not totally stupid. There is nothing lost in telling the pollster, even in an anonymous phone poll, what he wants to hear and potentially a great deal to lose by telling the truth, as the regime’s secret police were trained by the same CIA that trains the Ukrainian secret police.
Mark Level
Stewart M, you made me laugh in the last thread by referencing Bob Black, a very good writer and somewhat of a good thinker as an Anarchist, but a totally toxic wacko as a human being. My dad was a fascist, and thus I became anti-Authoritarian early, and even called myself an Anarchist earlier in my life. It’s the only (or nearly so) sensible philosophy if you have self-respect and love other people. I mean Socialism isn’t bad, the classical form, created better societies in Europe for many years until Hard Neoliberalism was installed by the 0.1%.
But back to Black!! Narcissistic, rage-filled, always starting sectarian fights with other Anarchists. Known for violence, against property mainly. I had a good friend for 4 decades, we met when I was 23 and he was 21, at work, who was a committed Anarchist. When I was living in Oakland, he worked once a week as a volunteer at the S.F. Anarchist bookstore, Bound Together Books. Bob Black hated them for whatever arbitrary reason, and was known for shooting marbles thru their display window a couple times a month. This kind of Nihilism puts more genuine Anarchists into an uncumfortable corner– do they report him to the cops? Then they’re violating their own principles . . .
I acknowledge The Abolition of Work was a great book. I prefer his friend and associate Adam Parfrey, who has a great sense of humor and isn’t a Hater or Bully as most know Black was. His Wikipedia page is pretty small, I guess those people don’t want to “promote Anarchy” by covering it thoroughly.
I much preferred the Editor of the excellent 1980s magazine, new agey Gnosis, Jay Kinney, who me and an Anarchist friend visited at the SF Anarchist Convention at the Armory in SF, around 2004 with another luminary from the movement. During or after running Gnosis, Jay Kinney did Anarchist Comics for a decade, excellent quality. Sadly, John and I missed our New Orleans friend John Clark the day prior, a professor at Loyola University, an organizer, later in life introduced and amplified “Bioregionalism” to the leftist debate table.
He once introduced me & my 3 or 4 other Anarchist friends to Murray Bookchin. Bookchin was great for a time, then became a miserable sectarian, “I ALONE have THE TRUTH!! ALL MUST BOW before my GREATNESS!!” He called everyone who didn’t bow before his Idols a “Lifestyle Anarchist”, he married a woman some decades younger who helped move him to the Right.
Many heroes don’t age well. Bookchin’s biggest influence, at least as far as MICIMATT is concerned, was that he was read by the Commisar of the Kurdish Seperatists and adopted MB’s ideology, including being pro-Feminist, and anti-hierarchical. He was captured by the Turkish government, sadly the Kurds will likely never get their homeland. Disgustingly, the Kurds are supported openly by the Zionist entity as an anti-Arab force in their region, so they have only a poisoned chalice to drink from. The enemy of my enemy is my friend can put you in the wrong place.
I talked to John Clark by emailing him at Loyola about 4 months ago, I was looking for my old friend Brad Ott, another 1980s Anarchist small publisher, he ran a small paper called “Dialogue”, united all of us on the Left, including Catholic Worker types, etc. basically anyone commited to a better world and not a disruptive force.
John P. Clark is still alive, a great force for good, wikipedia page is here– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Clark
Then you’ve got Egoistic Bullies and disruptors like Bob Black, kind of Nihilist-adjacent in the same way LAS is Banderist-Adjacent.
Oh, and my earlier post here, I said in the last thread would be about Drivel I Heard on NPR, if you read the posts in order you’d know that was the context for my take on her take on Barney Frank’s death. She also made an exclusionary remark that BF was “very good for the LGBT Community”. No Queer in there, No Trans either, only prim, repressed people allowed into her “community”, no Bull Dykes, Sissies etc. need apply.
Liberals do not equal Radicals, oil and water, they do not mix. Liberals do mix with Republicans and Fascists, that is acceptable to them, natural alliance.
mago
Like the way you think Mr Randolph.
Mark Level
Yes, Finster, of course. I’m aware of all you share, but Ukraine is on the list of countries I would never enter, alongside the Zionist Entity, Myanmar, Deutschland, etc. The fascism in those places is as bad as USA.
I’m sure we both recall what happened to Gonzalo Lira, a US citizen expat, sexual abuse, torture and eventual death in the Banderist Gulag due to medical neglect. He was a bit too Gonzo in telling the truth.
I’ve also referenced in the past some great work by a Journalist named Avraham Stein when the Russians captured Mariupol. The Azov thugs stayed hidden in the caverns below the Azovstal plant there until they were starved out. Stein with Russian permission filmed Nazi tatoos on dozens of POWs captured, forced to take their shirts off. Herr Hitler, the Black Sun, Swastikas, etc. The Russians put the Nazi ones in tighter control in prison, it’s no different than would be if US prisons were run competently (they’re not). Only one pro-Fascist person on this message board that I know of, funny that he hates Trump but agrees Antifa (if it even exists), nasty Russians, “Orcs” or “faggots” should be exterminated.
StewartM
Representative democracy has another, deeper, more fundamental problem.
Good government must act on the facts we know. Granted, what we know is rarely complete, and yes, all empirical knowledge is tentative and even sometimes in error, but it’s the best we have.
However, at any given time in history, the majority of the population believes stridently, passionately, and insistently that things provably untruth are indeed true about one more more things. If that majority elects representatives who then act on these beliefs, then the government will govern based on falsehoods. And the result of government on falsehoods, as best put by Voltaire, is this: “When we believe in absurdities, we will commit atrocities.” Every horrible thing done was done because (say, Gaza!) is because a group of people believed in something just-not-true (that the current Israelis ‘deserve’ Palestine because of things written in their holy book that when, examined by the archealogical evidence, just can’t be true).
The Founders of the US I think thought of this, and thought “education” was the answer. However (and Ian was the first to cue me onto this) has our education system has become ever-more all about credentialing and not education, to pad resumes and to meet some minimum criteria of vocational training, broad education and critical thinking skills have declined. AI of course is making this worse. In addition, in the US we have the problems of “parents’ rights” where parents claim indoctrination rights over their children (I would ban private schools, just because in my experience private schooling is far more about parents wanting to *keep* their kids from learning something rather than better learning).
Maybe the Finnish example in our public schools would be of help:
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/19/finlands-war-on-fake-news-starts-in-schools-ai-could-make-that-a-lot-harder
However, then again this runs into AI problems and also tends to worship at the altar of intellectual orthodoxy. Heterodox ideas can be good, and sometimes become the new orthodoxy.
So how to get
StewartM
Yikes!
However, at any given time in history, the majority of the population believes stridently, passionately, and insistently that things provably untruth are indeed true about one more more things.
Make that “…the majority of the population believes stridently, passionately, and insistently that things provably untrue are indeed true about one or more topics.”
That’s what happens when you’re interrupted when writing!
StewartM
Mark Level
Oh, trust me, I’ve read Black’s diatribes against Bookchin (“Withered Anarchism”) and several other essays roasting perceived ideological opponents (to one, I recall him saying “he keeps invoking ‘reason’ like a frightened child wanting to hold to its parents due to fear of the unknown” and “if that’s ‘reason’, then I don’t know reason from squat and I’d rather not.”
But, in the circles of the left, this is pretty mundane. It’s the Monty Python “Life of Brian” caricature of ‘revolutionaries’ more ‘het up against fellow travelers than the oppression they supposedly all opposed. But yes, “The Abolition of Work” is a brilliant essay that highlights where human societies, even ‘socialist’ ones, have failed.
Oakchair
One critique of public schooling as well as both parents entering the workforce is that it transferred us to a system of child rearing that is monopolized and more importantly controlled by capitalists.
It’s far easier to get a society to commit an atrocity if everyone in it believes the same absurdities. Universal home schooling would be decentralized and create more diversity in thought, knowledge and forms of education. It’s easy to imagine how this could cause more open mindedness, tolerance and discussion.
A problem with private schools is they cause the ruling class to not give a rats ass about education. My solution for underfunded schools: Make the rich send their kids to the poorest school districts. Then they will finally care.
StewartM
Oakchair
It’s far easier to get a society to commit an atrocity if everyone in it believes the same absurdities.
In my experience, being a native Southerner, it’s harder to foist an absurdity on the whole nation if you don’t start on the local level. Larger political entities are harder to seize and control than smaller ones, and decisions made by large groups is overall better than by smaller groups. Norway and Japan are wonderful in many ways, but they hunt whales. Everyone but the French could see that Captain Dreyfus was innocent. Most of the people in the world see what’s happening Gaza as genocide. The British overlords in India didn’t like Gandhi so he went ‘over their heads’, so to speak, to the people of the Britain proper. Ditto with Dr. King, his target audience wasn’t the White Citizens’ Councils but the people of the US outside the South.
Home schooling with rare exceptions I also have found to be just as bad. I know of only one, possibly two, cases where it worked out well.
Brian M
“Perhaps in an egalitarian system it would work better, but under capitalism, which by its nature requires concentration of power, it does not”
The key here is “under capitalism”. Any system where the political governance is under the economic system is going to be inherently unequal and unfair. This is the ultimate failing of Wester “democracy”. It made itself subservient to Capitalism rather than forcing Capitalism to work within constraints defined by the government designed to ensure that the economy worked in the interest of the nation and its people.
While obviously not perfect (no human activity can be) the Chinese have come much closer to the concept of keeping the economic system working for the nation and its people. In the West, we completely abandoned that concept, relying on Capitalism to deliver not just economic results, but governance outcomes. And it has, inequality is through the roof and the citizens have virtually no impact on government policies that are bought and sold in what is basically a political marketplace.