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.

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 a hereditary aristocracy. 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 to 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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