Editing Marxists Behaving Badly (section)

==== 6. “Democracy” ====
We are  constantly  being  told  that  the  Soviet  Union  was  “not  democratic,”while  the Western capitalist and imperialist societies were “democracies.” This is misleading.

Neither  the  United  States  nor  any  other  capitalist  country  is  today,  or  ever  has  been,  a democracy in the sense that working people understand. No matter which party wins the voting, the ruling class continues to rule and little changes. Reforms are incremental at best, and then only when  there  are  massive,  militant  reform  movements  such  as  have  rarely  existed  in  American society.

In 1917 Lenin described capitalist democracy as follows:<blockquote>Marx grasped '''this essence of capitalist democracy''' splendidly, when, in analyzing the  experience  of  the  Commune,  he  said  that '''the  oppressed  are  allowed  once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!'''<ref>V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution. The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. Peking: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1970. Chapter 2, p. 105. Cited from the copy at the site “From Marx to Mao,” <http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/SR17.htm>.</ref></blockquote>Lenin simply stated, with a class analysis and from a revolutionary Marxist standpoint, what many in  the  capitalist  world  had  already  realized:  there is  no  democracy  in  the  self-styled,  so-called, “democratic”  capitalist countries.  Walter  Lippmann,  Harvard-educated  advisor  to  presidents, acknowledged this. In the first sentence of his 1925 book ''The Phantom Public'' Lippmann wrote:<blockquote>The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery offthere, but cannot quite manage to keep awake.<ref>[[Walter Lippmann]], [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=3840B1E29C20043F5590B4E8247F38F7 The Phantom Public]. With a New Introduction by Wilfred M. McClay. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993 (1927), p. 3.</ref></blockquote>Media historian Michael Schudson describes Lippmann’s dissection of the fallacies of democracy:<blockquote>A  problem  arises  only  if  someone  objects  to  current  policy –insofar  as  there  is general agreement, the public has no interest in politics and should have no interest. The people do not govern and should not govern; at most, they support or oppose the individuals who do rule.<ref>Michael Schudson, [https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=8011EB100FB4565619A8A0CE5083DD52 Discovering the News. A Social History of American Newspapers]. New York: Basic Books, 1978, p. 124.</ref></blockquote>The process of effecting ruling-class rule in the United States has become more subtle since Lenin’s  time.  Persons  who  begin  a  political  career  as  honest  working-class  people  become corrupted  by  the  political  process.  “The  squad”  of  social-democratic  congresspersons  are themselves  constrained  by  their  misunderstanding  of  capitalism  and  by  the  limits  of  what  is possible in the context of a political process that is out of their control. This same process was occurring in Lenin’s day in the British Labour Party, where blue-collar workers were sometimes elected to Parliament.

G.  William  Domhoff of  UC  Santa  Cruz has  applied  the  research  methods  of  academic sociology  to  the  study  of  how  the  United  States  is  ruled.  Domhoff  has  shown  the  specific mechanisms whereby the American ruling class, the wealthiest financial, industrial, mercantile, etc., capitalists control not only elections but the policies of the government no matter what party is  in  office. He  continues  to  publish  updated  versions  of  his  groundbreaking  work ''Who Rules America'', most recently in 2021<ref>See a list of the editions of this work on Domhoff’s Wikipedia page at <[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._William_Domhoff#Who_Rules_America? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._William_Domhoff#Who_Rules_America?]>.</ref>.

For decades Domhoff has studied this class and the methods it uses to frustrate anything remotely like democracy and has published many books that describe the ruling class’s methods of domination in subtle detail. Here is one quotation:<blockquote>Today,  a  majority  of  people  think  that  big  corporations  and  the  big  rich  run everything, and that government does not care about the average person.<ref>“State and Ruling Class in Corporate America (1974): Reflections, Corrections, and New Directions.” Critical Sociology 25, 2 (1999), p. 264.</ref></blockquote>Just as clear as the analysis of how the ruling class rules at home is the record of the imperialism of the so-called “democratic” capitalist countries. The European imperialists and the United States could have instituted democracy in the countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that they ruled. They never did so. On the contrary: wherever it looked as though something like Western-style democracy might be forming in countries like Nicaragua, Haiti, Iran, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile, US rulers stamped it out with force and installed fascist-type dictatorships. On the other hand, US rulers also ''oppose'' fascism when it has outworn its usefulness to them, as in Greece (1974) and Haiti (1986).

Western imperialists used massive violence to plunder their colonial possessions for cheap raw  materials,  as  markets  to  dump  their  overproduction,  and  as  sources  of  cheap  labor.  When people  in  the  colonial  countries,  sometimes  led  by  communists  but  often  not,  fought  for independence, or even for reforms, they were suppressed by force. Often this massive violence was described as “fighting communism.”

Mahatma Gandhi fought British imperialism and knew it for what it was. He wrote<ref>M.K. Gandhi. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi. “Answers to Questions [April 25, 1941],”Vol. 80, p. 200; “Interview to Ralph Coniston, Mahabaleshwar [Before April 25, 1945],”Vol. 86, p. 223.</ref>:<blockquote>Imagine a Hitler in occupation of England and successfully dividing Englishmen as Indians are divided in India and then mocking at them by saying, ‘I will ratify an agreement among you.’ '''I assert that in India we have Hitlerian rule however disguised it may be in softer terms.'''</blockquote>And,<blockquote>Hitler was “Great Britain’s sin”. Hitler is only an answer to British imperialism ...</blockquote>