A road in bad repair
Back at Monthly Review, Gregory Esteven is offering advice to the left on how to criticize Barack Obama. 'Our message', he says, 'should be that the problem isn't really Obama, or any other elected official for that matter, but the system.' OK, that's a well-travelled road, but maybe we'll encounter some new sights and insights along the way. Possibly new is Esteven's graphic for slow minds - designed to illustrate that, while conventionally the Democrats are thought of as on the left and the Republicans as on the right, it isn't really so in global terms; rather, matters look a bit more like this.
Leaving aside the creative visual component, however, Esteven's route is in bad repair. First off, here:
[O]ur current political system, though it is called "liberal democracy" and has some democratic features, is still a class dictatorship in the sense that the owning class dominates the state, including its repressive and ideological apparatuses, in order to facilitate exploitation of the working class.
Esteven also speaks of 'a political system that is at its heart undemocratic'. I have comented previously on the central piece of bad faith contained in this common leftist trope: it glides around the fact that these at-heart-undemocratic political systems, these class dictatorships, are superior as democracies to any alternative political system so far created by anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist regimes. I reiterate this point not in the manner of the standard rightwing taunt - as if to suggest that socialism and democracy are incompatible. My intention is to emphasize the following: a healthy left today, if it is indeed committed to democracy, needs to be aware, to have thoroughly assimilated, to be willing to say upfront and without equivocation, that the left's own record on democracy has not been an impressive one, that whole sections of the Western left continue to mumble embarrassingly about the undemocratic practices of would-be progressive movements and regimes enjoying support from them, and that, imperfect as may be, liberal democracies are a lot more accommodating of individual freedoms, human rights and democratic opportunities and movements than... well, than anything else on the political horizon right at the minute. They are, in truth, the indispensable starting point for whatever Gregory Esteven and his comrades may want to offer; at least, I would hope so.
The second thing worth drawing attention to is that to call these democracies undemocratic or dictatorships won't conceal from any intelligent observer the number of votes that leftists of the MR-category are currently able to win in democratic elections. Get the popular support for the kind of programme you favour and then you'll really be able to test how democratic or otherwise the existing liberal democracies are.
