The Illusion of Choice: The Great Capitalist Con

Almost everyone in any well developed and industrialised nation is familiar with the concept of parliamentary party democracy, a system whereby you vote to elect a local candidate from your preferred political party to sit in parliament as a representative of your constituency every five years or so. Some countries do this a little differently, the US for example, but the basic concept is the same.

In most countries with this system, a handful of political parties become minor players in the system whilst two dominate. Vote counting systems play a major role in the formation of parliaments, such as first past the post (FPTP) which often results in a two-party system whilst variants of proportional representation (PR) often result in parliamentary coalitions of minor parties which form a government. Although the party or parties in power might change each election cycle, the limitations of liberal democracy itself play a huge role in who can come to power and what they can do whilst in power. Basically, regardless of who is in power, the rules by which they play remain dictated by the underlying system of which they are a part of.

So this begs a question - surely a conservative party is different from a liberal party, which in turn is different from a social-democratic party, right? This is true - they all have policies that differ on levels of public spending, taxation, immigration, housing, and so on. All of the aforementioned policies affect people in many ways, but none of them address or fundamentally change the basic cardinal political, economic, and social structures of a nation - what you might call the three main strands of society.

It is in fact very rare that you find either a party or government which is willing to make some radical alteration. What is the reasoning behind this claim? Radical alterations to any of the three main strands of society are in fact alterations to how structures of power, wealth, and social cohesion are distributed, maintained, and strengthened. A government that elects to change the way votes are counted, for example may put itself out of power during the next election cycle. Any government that seeks radical economic change threatens financial and corporate hegemony and risks losing their support both through donations and lobbying, and their economic contribution to society. Similarly, with social change - a government risks social upheaval, riots, and dissent if the change is too radical.  

Given the above, it becomes evident that the government and our three main strands of society are in many ways symbiotic with each other, they feed off of each other and reinforce each other. They in fact form a super-structure of power which as an imperative, has to be self-reinforcing; but it is only one half of the total formula.

What is obscured by this superstructure is another underlying structure of power, the base itself - capitalism. As a mode of production, capitalism dictates economic epithets, social relations, and how we structure things politically. This is key to understanding what helps to fundamentally form, maintain, and strengthen the three main strands of society; without them, there is no coherent society. Without governance or a state that maintains these three strands, capitalism would quickly unwind into complete anarchy after exhausting all exploitable resources and accumulating all it can. Talking abstractly, capitalism must therefore replicate all of its epithets, relations, and political mandate culturally, politically, socially, and of course economically, through the three main strands of society.

In other words, it creates a mandate for the nature of economics, politics, and social relations.

The superstructure and the base are symbiotic; the base shapes and maintains the superstructure whilst the superstructure maintains and shapes the base. This symbiotic self-reinforcement is what you might call ideology. 

Because of the nature of ideology itself, any force that is perceived as a threat to its hegemony is a force that must be dealt with. Political parties offering true alternatives are destructively pruned, constitutions remain either immutable or unwritten, and laws proposed to combat ideological ills are left unheard. Even culture itself must be maintained and shaped - books, newspapers, films, and art that do not reflect the status quo are castigated hysterically by all but a few, and anything itself culturally alien must "integrate", i.e it must be changed enough so that it becomes ideologically acceptable to the status quo.

The latter point is especially pertinent. Take the concept of patriarchy from philosophers such as Sylvia Federici: Because capitalism was first manifested from the desires of liberal, white, middle-class men, every other social or cultural paradigm that does not fit this archetype must fight for its right to existence. Only when these paradigms have changed sufficiently and become amiable to the whims of capital are they accepted. From this, it's easy to see how racism, sexism, homophobia, and chauvinism, in general, became the de facto defence mechanism against ideological change. 

As you can see, all chance of true political change is superficial at best and illusory at worst. As a real-life example of this, I point to the UK Labour party. It offered real systemic change, a fundamental change to capitalism itself, and at every point along the way was mired with both self-destructive controversy and brutal denigration from external sources. Why? Because the party was a threat to the hegemony of capitalism. And again, in the US with Bernie Sanders as a Democrat candidate, every effort was made by the establishment to denigrate, propagandise and manufacture negative a consensus - even his own party wilfully engaged in self-sabotage in order to get their self-appointed "safe" candidate!

What happens though in the rare instance a party with a true agenda for change does get into power? Due to the multi-party nature of parliaments, constitutions, and law, they often have very limited room for manoeuvre and are still constrained by the same three strands of society as all else is. I point to Syriza, a Greek democratic socialist party as an example of this and all that its ex-finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has to say on the matter.

What should we conclude from all of this? If we believe that political parties change very little, that parliamentary democracy is limited to only what is ideologically permitted, and that no change to the fundamental base of society can ever be enacted through these institutions, it would be fair to conclude that we have no real democracy at all. Any mandate for change must and can only happen in these top rungs of society, rungs that are inaccessible to most by virtue of wealth, status, time, and motivation required to access them. The best we can ever hope for when voting in or becoming elected members of these institutions is damage control.

And even if you do get there, what are you going to be able to do? Shuffling seemingly interchangeable parties in and out of power every five years or so might lead one to conclude that this arrangement is no better than a dictatorship. And if all capitalist ideology does is dictate our economic, social, and political relations, then we have no democracy at all. In fact, what we have is what Marx over 150 years ago described - A dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, of capitalism itself.

Until we have economic, social, and political democracy in their fullest meaning, there is a still fight to be won. One that cannot be won within the walls of parliaments, for the tools required for change are not embedded within the system itself, but in the minds and hands of those with the will to change the system.

"For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices." - Audre Lorde