What meaning can we give to this word outside the theoretical abstraction that today claims to define its framework and modalities? For it has become increasingly clear that neither elections, nor voting, nor political parties, and even less so state structures, are the expression of a real democracy; on the contrary, they violently oppose its effectiveness.
The primary function of a democracy should be, at the very least, the permanent search for consensus among all the populations concerned on all the choices determining social reality (in the broadest sense of the term), and its future. But capitalism’s pseudo-democracy is above all competitive, and above all produces losers. Losers who will find themselves atomized into diverse minorities, ignoring each other and thereby deprived of any power to intervene in what conditions their own destiny and even their daily lives. Those who control the machinery of this sham democracy can then easily transform the minority they represent into a “majority” which will then impose its law on everyone, at the expense of the common interest.
Such a state of affairs can only provoke more and more discontent and resentment, resulting in a deleterious societal climate that rots the whole of daily life, and whose depressing and harassing effects are felt by everyone. And most of the time without recognizing the root cause, which will be attributed to this or that according to partisan views.
Likewise, the representatives of this specific, globalized form of domination, veiling themselves behind the tatters of their democratic fiction, will reject any responsibility for this generalized social decay. They will even find in it the pretext for the permanent accentuation of repressive measures, increasingly detrimental to the very notion of freedom. As for the notion of equality, for these people it has an almost obscene connotation, and they don’t want to hear about it.
The irony of the story is that it is this minority, representing the ruling class and who have always deeply despised democracy, who today speak out for it throughout the world, while at the same time stripping it of anything that might give it meaning.
Direct democracy, the only thing that could truly serve the common interest, is obviously abhorrent to the small minority that holds almost all the power: they feel directly threatened by the mere assumption of their advantages and privileges, and precisely as a particular minority, that of the rich and possessors.
However, we must realize that this permanent confiscation of power by this minority can only endure because it takes place within the specific organizational form of capitalism, which, through the implementation of its alienating categories (its conceptions of value, work, progress, success, etc.), by maintaining the possibility.
Within this system, those who believe they embody this “elite” are, in fact, constantly replaceable, despite their best efforts to maintain their position. So it’s only by getting rid of capitalism in all its component parts that we’ll also get rid of the nuisances of these eminently renewable “elites” within the software of capital.
The very essence of capitalism is totalitarian – in fact, it is the most totalitarian religion that has ever existed on earth. As long as its system holds sway, democracy will remain a mere fiction, a knife without a handle and which is missing the blade.
