At the remove of a hundred years, the ICA constitution is a text with a different political grammar than the one we are accustomed to. Nowadays, ‘democracy’ is generally understood as an established state of affairs: representation in parliament, the right to vote every few years, the right to say what you like as long as it doesn’t get in the way of business. It is not generally understood as a multitude collectively engaged in social and political struggle, even violent struggle, for the conquest of rights and freedoms based on social equality. . . . Nowadays democracy is the application of an abstract term. It is no longer the logic of a thing, but a thing of logic. The prevailing idea of democracy, at least if you were to listen to political speeches or read the newspapers, is little more than representation: you get to vote for the candidate of your choice, then the government gets in, and it does what it likes. . . . accepting this idea of democracy means accepting that ‘regardless of how destructive they are of public welfare, regardless of how much wealth they transfer into private hands, regardless of how the reality of their decisions is obscured from public view’, government decisions are legitimate and unimpeachable. . . . Some of these people say they are social democrats. That means they seek the election of people to introduce reforms that benefit working class people. They are not concerned with the dismantling of the bourgeois State form or any of that nonsense, though some of them will tell you that capitalism is bad, after a few drinks. But none of them talk about ‘the Social Democracy’ as an active revolutionary subject that seeks the ‘end of all tyranny – national, political and social’. That is James Connolly’s language.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 19:56:13 +0000