If you have just laws, you have no overwhelming need for
elections, the laws and accountability through these laws (i.e. constitutional and general law including employment law) can form the essence of democracy and
protect the citizen and provide for an accountable system of government;
elections are in contrast something of a lottery, and they can rarely provide a
result that really represents the majority interests, although it always holds this promise out to the electors. The law is something that
is crafted over time by society to, ostensibly, provide social justice; it is in this sense
science at the level of politics. But this science meets with the anti science
of current economics, the science that wishes to ignore science and opt for
chance; the anarchy of the markets, it sees order and the idea of a 'command economy', an economy guided by
humans, to be the enemy. It therefore likes lotteries. Here therefore it has met the rigors of the class struggle. The struggle for just law sits alongside the struggle for more authentic democracy, it is the bedrock of the move to greater accountability.
The fact is that the law in current advanced capitalist societies has
failed to represent the majority, and electoral democracy has also failed to
defend their interests, and this is the major problem of our
times, we have seen protests ranging from Brazil
to Egypt via Turkey and Greece . This is a problem that cannot be
solved by more and more elections with the same arrangements (as in Egypt is being
tried, but at least the recent elections are over a constitution). Certainly,
less corruption and more genuine accountability is always to be welcomed if it
is at all possible or credible by election, but can this be achieved within
most of the present corrupt parliamentary systems in Europe ?
Specifically Greece , Spain , Italy ,
the UK ,
or within the EU state apparatus that sits atop them, there is a democratic
deficit.
The law in capitalism supports capitalism, this is obvious, which
means it supports a system of wages and exploitation and the anarchy of the
markets. Lately this system has bailed out massive corporations and banks, but
called for austerity for workers, who are also intended to pay for these bail
outs in their taxes. This is patently unjust, but there is no law that can
really intervene; at best more obvious fraud may be tackled with ineffective
fines and in a very few cases imprisonment of individuals (e.g. Madoff). So the
problem of current democracy, even if it was at its best and most
representative and accountable, always hits the wall of law which defends
capital against its critics. The structures of exploitation are legal, so to
abolish them would therefore be illegal, unless the law is changed. Can the law
be changed by the elected lawmakers in parliament?
Superficially this is the role of the executive power, but
we can readily see that no party or representative is so radical as to suggest
the abolition of the employment laws that allow for exploitation, on the
contrary, we even, since the onset of the crisis, have witnessed a return to
near slavery with the expansion of zero hours contracts in the UK and
'mini-jobs' in Germany. Precarious kinds of labor are rife these days. Electoral democracy has stagnated not because it has
the possibility of ever actually functioning perfectly but has merely lately
slipped into bad ways, but because we have reached its political limits within
the capitalist economy and the laws that maintain it and it maintains. This has
been shown to us by the crisis. The crisis has revealed the truth of electoral
representative democracy, that it has limits of representation, and so is
limited democracy, limited by law and by economics, There will be calls,
against this, for a new constitutive power, new law, and new kinds of
democracy; we have seen the start of these with the Occupy type movements. But many of these calls avoid looking at the issue of class, and therefore tend to ignore the necessary role of the majority working class in protests, which is likely to lead to fragmentation. Recently more working class protest has broken out in Burgos, Spain, which have so far been successful and have not been shy of this dimension.
Gary Tedman
