Re: Once more on you know what...

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

En relación a Re: Once more on you know what...,
el 15 Dec 00, a las 8:12, Jose G. Perez dijo:

[Mandatory voting]...
>     is not more democratic ... in the here and now, today, to punish people
> for NOT voting is just one MORE repressive tool in the hands of the
> bourgeoisie.

This is characteristic. I am not speaking of the State PUNISHING anyone for not
voting, I am thinking of a struggle to obtain from the bourgeois state the
conditions that make popular vote effective and crash the pitiful and
reactionary system that plagues American politics. One of these conditions is,
so to say, to claim that if the State has a right to draft people to defend the
Nation, then it must accept that these people are not hindered from voting in
any way. This is abstract, I know, but it is not me who can put this in
concrete, specifically USA terms.

>
>     All the reforms in the world are worthless in "fixing" U.S. bourgeois
> democracy. It is, as we say in Spanish, a "democracía," with the emphasis on 
> the
> "CIA."

Certainly so (Translation for non-Spanish speakers: in Spanish we do not say
"Cee-Eye-Aye", we read the "word" cía).  I am not proposing that anybody
"fixes" anything, I am suggesting that the proper implementation of universal
vote runs so much against the interests of the bourgeois political machine in
the United States that it may -perhaps- become an interesting front of
struggle. Thus, I also agree with what follows:

>
>     Defense of the right to vote of working people and especially the
> oppressed peoples who have historically been systematically denied this
> right is NOT THE SAME as trying to make bourgeois "democracy" more truly
> democratic. We need the former the better to fight to OVERTHROW bourgeois
> democracy.

And what I suggest is that perhaps, in the conditions of the United States,
bourgeois democracy cannot be reformatted. This is precisely why I suggest that
struggling for the enforcement of a truly representative "bourgeois voting
system" may be revulsive for people who have been taught that their democratic
system is the best possible one, nay, perfect! Well, it is not perfect at all.
A truly democratic system would have to ensure that every citizen can vote.
This, the American system certainly does not ensure. What's more, it ensures
exactly the opposite. Of course that I agree in that

> Making bourgeois democracy "work" or even "work better" is a
> hopelessly utopian quest.

Although, if you ask me, I prefer Argentinean roguish bourgeois democracy to
Argentinean criminal military-oligarchic rule... It is easier to organize for
revolution under the former than under the latter. My proposition does not run
against the following, which is only common sense:

>
>     As Fidel explained in a recent interview with Salvadoran journalist
> Mauricio Funes, it is impossible to speak of democracy in any meaningful
> sense when one man has $90 billion and the other sleeps under a bridge. For 
> "one
> person, one vote" to be meaningful, there must be substantive equality for the
> "one person" compared to other "one persons."

But I guess there are more persons sleeping under bridges than persons who have
$90 billion. This is the idea. Of course, the rich ones can always buy the poor
ones. But there is a limit, again, in that you cannot buy a whole class that is
supposed to pay _you_ for your living standards, property, and so on.

[...]

>
>     Making voting "mandatory" in no way furthers [concrete working-class]
> fights. It is like requiring everyone to buy a newspaper in order to further
> "freedom of the press." That is not the way to make working class votes count.
> The way to make our vote count is to organize ourselves independently of
> the ruling class parties and put up our own candidates.

A bad example, IMHO. Under the conditions of bourgeois regimes, however, the
equivalent of "mandatory voting" would be "equal financing of the press, no
matter what are its political orientations" and a ban on advertising.  This
would put the NYT at the level of any anarchist leaflet, and "people" would be
allowed to choose freely from the dictatorship of money.

The fact that this -reasonable from the abstract point of view of the bourgeois-
idea sounds outrageous is precisely why I think that proposing mandatory voting
may become a strong club in our hands, sorry, YOUR hands, comrades. But of
course, I may be (most probably I am) shooting on my foot.

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx