It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. George Orwell
The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another – no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy. Friedrich Engels
America in 1824 saw the era of the Founding Fathers coming to an end. Over the next twenty-five years six presidents would reflect the United States’ sometimes uneasy transition from old tradition to an expansion of land, influence and opportunity. Democracy was the word on everyone’s lips. Ultimate Guide to the Presidents e2: Power to the People, History 2013
Jackson ... the most popular general since George Washington ... Of America's nearly 11,000,000 people only 10% were eligible to vote. ibid.
The true democracy, living and growing and inspiring, puts its faith in the people – faith that the people will not simply elect men who will represent their views ably and faithfully, but will also elect men who will exercise their conscientious judgment – faith that the people will not condemn those whose devotion to principle leads them to unpopular courses, but will reward courage, respect honor, and ultimately recognize right. John F Kennedy
For in a democracy, every citizen, regardless of his interest in politics, ‘hold office’. Every one of us is in a position of responsibility. And in the final analysis the kind of government we get depends upon how we fulfil those responsibilities. We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve. John F Kennedy
The very essence of our democracy is rooted in a belief of the worth of the individual. Edgar J 2011 starring Leonardo DiCaprio & Judi Dench & Armie Hammer & Naomi Watts & Josh Lucas & Ed Westwick & Dermot Mulroney & Damon Herriman & Jeffrey Donovan & Ed Westwick & Zach Grenier et al, director Clint Eastwood
Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy. Ramsey Clark
Capitalism and democracy are always in conflict, and the history of all capitalist states that have conceded universal suffrage has been, in part at least, a history of that conflict. What has happened in all those countries, including Britain, is that the forces of capitalism have conquered democracy, subdued it, suppressed its impact and left it to wither in irrelevance. Paul Foot, The Vote
These elements – the self-emancipation of the working class through their own struggle and the democratic society which follows such emancipation – are the heart of socialism. Without them, socialism is dead. All the other features of a socialist society – the planned economy, for instance – depend on a self-emancipated working class and a real democracy. A socialist economy cannot be planned for workers unless the workers are involved in that plan. Paul Foot, The Case for Socialism ch1
The argument, which swept like wildfire through the rapidly growing labour parties in Europe, was contested by a revolutionary minority boosted by two enormously powerful pamphlets – Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution (1900) and Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the revolutionary summer of 1917. Both pamphlets continued in the tradition set out by Marx in the 1840s. Far from contrasting socialism with democracy, they started from the principle of a democratic society controlled from below. Lenin specifically hailed the ‘elective principle’ as indispensable to a socialist society. Rosa Luxemburg’s passionate identification with the spontaneous movements of the masses shines out of every sentence she wrote. Her whole approach was democratic from start to finish.
Like Marx’s, their argument was not at all that there is some choice to be made between socialism and democracy but that the two are indivisible. The problem, they argued, with the ‘democratic’ approach proposed by the main European workers’ parties was that their democracy was not strong enough to contest the hierarchies of the rich. It locked democracy up in a small parliamentary island, while control over the ocean – industry, finance, law, armed forces, police, media – stayed in the hands of the unelected rich. The contest between the new confined democracy in parliament and the boundless undemocratic hierarchies of the rich would be, they warned, no contest. The rich would win; and in the process the workers would lose confidence in themselves and lower their guard still further. For the essence of the parliamentary argument was that ordinary people could and should do nothing to emancipate themselves. They should leave the sophisticated business of emancipation to their betters, to the educated elite within the movement who would make their way to parliament. If and when, as was inevitable, this elite failed to achieve even a small part of the emancipation they promised, the workers would be left high and dry, rudderless and hopeless. If the educated elite couldn’t do the job, they would ask, who could? Passivity would lead to despair, to the triumph of the right, with disastrous consequences for democracy.
The experience of parliamentary democracy this century grimly vindicates what Lenin and [Rosa] Luxemburg predicted. Paul Foot, Socialism & Democracy
In his speech in the House of Commons debate on war with Iraq, Tony Blair allowed himself a rather rambling excursion into what he saw as the basic reasons for the conflict. Perhaps unwittingly slapping down those of his ministerial colleagues who had likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler, he accepted that comparisons with the 1930s were not very relevant. The real battle, he said, is not between relatively rich countries, as it was then. Instead, the battle now is between civilised democracies like Britain and the United States and rogue regimes that could get control of weapons of mass destruction.
This analysis conveniently avoids the real reason for the world crisis – the growing division between rich and poor, between those who have enough money so that they enjoy democracy and those who have hardly any money, food or water, and therefore can’t. Paul Foot, Born Unfree and Unequal
What does it prove? It proves that Tony Blair and his timeservers at Millbank have nothing but contempt, not just for the Labour movement – that has been obvious for some time – but for the whole system of representation and selection in that movement. He much prefers to have an ex-Tory millionaire in parliament than to allow the ordinary process of Labour local selection to take its course. Blair believes, moreover, that the Parliamentary Labour Party is his own fiefdom and that he can and must choose the right sort of people to sit under him in parliament. It is not simply that he wants an MP for St Helens who will vote for him in the lobbies. He wants an MP for St Helens who by his past record, his wealth, his photogenic wife and children, his stately home and everything else about him, will fit the image of New Labour – the image of the smooth talking plutocrat who represents patronage, privilege and undemocratic power. Paul Foot, Election: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?
In Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution he discusses again and again the difference in tempo between the ponderous, predictable progress of social democratic politics – elections every so often; conferences every so often; meetings every so often, and everything hammered in to fit that timetable – and, on the other hand, the unpredictable but much more decisive pace of the struggle between the classes.
The conference/election cycle seems often the more powerful since it seems in a careful and rational way to gather together the entire force of the party or the union for a particular course of action.
In reality, however, the ability of the employers and their class to move at will, in their own class interests, entirely oblivious of any procedure or timetable, enables them to dictate the course of events. It is the ability on our side to do the same which is by far the workers’ most powerful weapon. Paul Foot, article 1987, ‘Battle for the NUM’
This was the grand idea of the ‘representative democracy’ which first stirred in England in the revolution of the 17th century, and was taken up with much more force at the time of the French Revolution. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man denounced all governments which were not chosen by the people. To the government of the day, which was chosen by a handful of brigands and courtiers, this was dangerous subversion, and Paine was sentenced to death for it. Similarly, when the Chartists in the late 1830s and 1840s demanded the vote as part of an organised working class movement of strikes and physical force, the rulers set their faces firmly against the proposal.
The idea of a representative democracy is essentially distasteful to a class of people who owe their wealth to the process of robbing the majority. Exploitation of the many by the few is the most hideously undemocratic process imaginable. How could the minority exploiters agree to a system where the majority can vote?
After the Chartists were beaten in open class warfare, the British ruling class, then the strongest and most cunning in the world, applied itself to this question. It was obviously impossible forever to resist the popular demand for the vote. Was it not possible, however, to concede the vote bit by bit, making sure that the concessions coincided with relative industrial peace, and above all making sure that as each new concession led to new governments, those governments could be constrained against any action which would threaten the wealth and power of the ruling class? So, for a hundred years (1867-1970) the vote was conceded piecemeal. Governments were elected of many different colours; but the real power, especially the economic power, stayed exactly where it was.
The result was that the representative system was deprived of the very essence of representation: the ability of the government to act in the interests of the people who voted for it. How was this done? By keeping tight in the clutches of the ruling class the areas in society where real decisions were made and acted upon. Industrialists who in a day could decide the real fate of thousands if not millions of workers were not affected by the elections. They remained in charge of their industries. So did the banks, which by a flick of the wrist could transfer billions of pounds and ‘bankrupt Britain’. The media moguls were free after the election as well as before it to blabber on incessantly about the Red Menace. Judges and civil servants gloried in the fact that they were not elected. Army officers and police chiefs were rarely threatened by a change of government, even when they were openly hostile to that government. All these people came from the same class. They had real power, and were prepared to use it to protect their class against any elected government. Thus the parliaments (which were quickly set up all over the world as soon as the success of the British experiment became obvious to other rulers) became, in Lenin’s phrase, ‘mere talking shops’. Paul Foot, article November 1991, ‘Will Labour Make a Difference?’