[Marxism] text on equitist political-economic democracy submitted for review

[Christopher Gray <rasputin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Alternative to the Totalitarian Self-Degeneration of Capitalism --- 
Political-Economic Democracy"
http://www.global-samizdat.org/Global-Samizdat/GS6-PoliticalEconomicDemocracy/GS6-PoliticalEconomicDemocracy.htm
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The excerpt below is taken from the first of four hypotheses:
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Progressive Negation of Bourgeois Democracy, and of Bourgeois Civil 
Liberty, is Dialectical Negation. What we seek is an «aufheben» 
extension, not an absolute abolition --- i.e., not an undialectical / 
abstract negation --- of bourgeois democracy.

It is suicidal, ahistorical, and simply wrong to condemn all of 
bourgeois democracy --- and all of bourgeois civil liberty --- as if 
they were without any substance at all.

The expanded social reproduction witnessed within the ascendant phase of 
capitalism, along with its advances in voting rights, and in civil 
liberties, afforded the majority of the populations of the core 
capitalist nations greater protections from the depredations of the 
capitalist class and of its state than they had ever before enjoyed --- 
e.g., ending the "bad old days" when anyone who would not kiss the ass 
of the king was subject to summary beheading, or drawing and quartering 
--- and made it possible for that majority to transcend the status of 
peasant and serf semi-slavery, to form unions, and to attain to "middle 
class" standards of living.

The post-1800s, decadent phase of capitalism, with its gathering 
social-entropic momentum of contracted social reproduction, its 
pro-contraction ideologies [e.g., most recently, ruling-class perverted, 
"People are Pollution'' 'ecologism'], and its slide into hybrid, 
private-/state-capitalist totalitarianism, is set to annihilate all of 
those gains.

However, this fact, in truth, only accentuates --- it does not erase --- 
the importance of those gains, and of the fight to resume and extend 
them --- except in the demented minds of nihilists.

Indeed, only the resumption, and extension, of those past gains in 
democratization, that are now in jeopardy, can any longer prevent their 
complete annihilation.

Now, only the extension of political democracy to encompass 
political-economic democracy, as defined below, can save even political 
democracy, and then only by also advancing political democracy beyond 
anything it ever was --- or could have been --- before, within the 
'''real subsumption''' of all other/earlier-extant social relations [of 
production] by the capital-relation.
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correspondence:
proletariat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

best wishes,
chris
http://www.point-of-departure.org
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