Democracy as a Tool of Oppression

The passage of the Gay Marriage Ban in California and Arizona reflects, in my opinion, how oppressed groups should not expect to be liberated by their oppressors. Asking the citizenry to vote for ending oppression based on sexual orientation in a society that valorizes the patriarchal family and therefore the male headed nuclear family is a non-starter. This is also a society where ‘common sense’ still conflates homosexuality with pedophilia and conceives of marriage as a ‘God’ given and ruled relationship, rather than a social relation of ownership and domination that tied women to men and made them subordinate to and dependent upon the husband. The annals of history show that marriage is not the bastion of love and equality, but a power relationship created through violence and dispossession. It has only been in the last forty years that spousal rape is even a legal category, since before that women had no right to say no to sex, since they were the property and therefore the play thing of their owner, oh, sorry, I mean husband.

Putting these questions to vote reproduces the tyranny of the majority. It makes about as much sense as putting to vote whether to let African-Americans have the right to vote during slavery. Asking a population that views gay people as an inferior subhuman ‘other’ whether they should be given rights may be formally democratic, but it is not the path to equality, at the current historical juncture. I know that saying democracy and equality are not one in the same may come as a shock to some of you but re-read your history books: democracy shaped by capitalism, racism, sexism/patriarchy and classism, amongst others, will never realize an egalitarian society. You do not ask the master to give the slave rights, the slave must demand rights from the master, which happens through struggle.

The denial of rights to Gay’s highlights the contradictions within a democratic society, where we are not all given the same rights from birth, in opposition to what we are told in school. Moreover, it shows how the democratic process can be employed to deny rights through the passage of law: we are a nation of laws after all! And if you haven’t been watching the news lately, especially Obama, laws are apparently the only things standing between us and barbarism or anarchy, take your pick. Laws, Laws, Laws. What people forget is that the law is not some neutral entity devoid of power. Law is reflective of the dominant power groups and therefore of class, race, and gender hierarchies, amongst others: and will be employed to provide and deny rights based on the current formation of power.

With this passage into law we see how the concrete inequality of everyday life, the ‘private’ sphere, is transformed into the ‘public’ sphere and consequently becomes state law. The state is now directly reflective of the oppression occurring on the level of everyday life. What happens in the daily life of gays, their status as second-class citizens, is now legitimated as just because the oppressor, through the ‘democratic’ process of voting, reaffirmed their constitutional right to maintain their position of power vis-à-vis the oppressed.

The right of gay people to marry whomever they want to will not come by way of the ballot anytime soon, at the state or federal level. If must be wrestled in the streets, which means building a broad based coalition that fights for this, and not just at the level of electoral politics. It is battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. And as one approaches the battle we must realize that many hearts and minds are too couched in anger, violence, bitterness, and close-mindedness to see that the oppression of others means that they themselves are oppressed: that until all bonds of oppression are ended no one can be equal.

The goal is not to replace the master but to end the position of master.

Why Obama is not a socialist nor a Marxist.

In the past few weeks the right-wing media machine has made a lot of hay around Obama's downward re-distributional economic policies. Obama has been called everything from a socialist to a Marxist because he advocates increasing a progressive tax system where those who make more pay more - which means re-instituting higher effective tax rates on those who make over $250,000 a year and lowering taxes on those who made less than $250,000. This would only go a small way to re-imposing the tax levels of the 1970s - which is needed to repair the infrastructure of the United States, meet social need and reduce inequality, which in the US is the highest of all 'western' post-industrial nations. Ever since the tax revolt of the 1980s through the present - at the level of the corporation and wealthy families - there has been less and less money to lay the foundation for true social wealth for all, not economic wealth for the elite.

On a local Florida news station the anchor even asked Biden if Obama was a Marxist. Her empirical support? A famous quote from Marx: "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs." A hallmark statement for re-distributional class politics. This phrase is therefore not solely a marxist statement but one championed by all those fighting against oppression and for the creation of a truly egalitarian society that realizes and meets the concrete social needs of people - be you a marxist, socialist, anarchist, ad infinitum. The fact that this phase is treated as a slur is beyond imagination, except in the nation-state that is the hegemonic center of global capitalism, where social needs are secondary to an adequate rate of return. And for the most part in American society never the two shall meet! The capitalist system is not designed to meet social needs as a primary function, and if it does, that is merely by accident, not by choice.

That people's concrete social needs are seen in such a negative manner expresses the illogic and irrationality of the capitalist system: a system that produces a culture where the concrete daily needs of people are not only unimportant and for the most part denied/repressed but are verbally denounced as socialist and marxist. If demanding that people have a house to live in, a secure job that pays a living wage, food on their table, and an affordable education and medical plan makes one a Marxist, then the majority of American's, based on public opinion polls, would be Marxists and socialists, but sadly, non of these demands a Marxist does make.

The capitalist press is designed to maintain the capitalist system, we should not expect them to tell us anything but lies, as such, what passes as fact, truth, or reality is really falsity.

The history of both Western Europe and the United States displays that downward economic redistribution does not lead to socialism nor communism. In fact, in the US, capitalism operated very well under a Keynesian (Welfare Capitalism) social contract where income re-distribution towards the working class occurred for two reasons: (1) the working class' political organization forced concessions on corporations and the state in a time when the state wanted to prevent the development of truly oppositional socialist, communist, and anarchist political movements, and; (2) the integration of the working class into the circuits of capitalism via higher wages was necessary to fuel mass consumption and thus increase accumulation through the development of a mass consumer society. The problem of effective demand required re-distributional policies combined with higher wages for more work (increased productivity - think of the Ford $5 wage as a national strategy). Keynesianism essentially combined the expanding of the economic pie with a larger share being given to the working class.

Capitalism is about production for profit as the guiding indicator of investment and thus production; along with the requirement that production be owned by private individuals, and under the current formation of capitalism - neoliberalism - this means ownership by transnational corporations [since corporations are now legal individuals and have the same rights as you or me - thank you ingenious lawyers for expanding the 14th amendment that freed the slaves and gave them personhood to include that of the corporation as well - may you rot in hell]. Therefore, economic redistribution is compatible with capitalism as long as it does not infringe upon the profit motive, in the sense of causing an unhealthy or detrimental decline in the rate of profit.

Socialism is about production for social needs where production is in the hands of the people. Obviously state-socialism fails to put production in the hands of the people, instead it goes into the hands of a bureaucratic political elite. Thus, libertarian socialism calls for the production of social needs as determined by worker and consumer councils - removing corporations and the state from control over production and therefore putting people in the hands of crafting the social world directly.

Moreover, if we look at Marx himself, he argued that the working class struggle was not solely about becoming better compensated wage-labor, sure that was a part, no one is going to argue against getting a higher wage, better working conditions and shorter hours, except your boss. But this was not the end-goal of Marx, who argued that the goal of the working class was to end their existence as a class: to end their existence as wage-labor. Marx sought the end of capitalism through the struggle of the working class to reclaim their power over shaping the world, their power of labor, from capital and subsequently place it in their own hands. Such a maneuver would end the workers subordination to the capitalist through the obliteration of that relationship of domination: a relationship where the employer controlled the labor of the worker and denied them their capacity for self-determination. Under capitalism, labor, as free spontaneous creative practice was denied the worker who had to submit to the work demands of their boss. Workers would only be free to realize their power over shaping the social world when they expropriated the expropriators - the capitalists - and ended the existence of capitalist private property - individual and corporate ownership over the means of production - and replaced it with the means of production held in common by the workers.

Therefore, we can see that Obama is no socialist nor Marxist. Obama supports both the profit motive, its priority over social need, and the right of capitalist property relations to determine what is produced, for how much, where it is produced, and so on. Obama is a capitalist and imbues and eschews capitalist ideology, but his re-distributional rhetoric speaks to the working class who is swamped with debt, and seeks to appeal to their psychological anxieties in order to obtain the imperial office. He could in fact institute this re-distributional politics but it does nothing to address the question of power, of having control over shaping the social world, which would be left in the hands of transnational corporations (an extremely undemocratic form of governance). Ownership over productive property is key, ownership over consumptive property provides no power whatsoever.

Obama is not a threat to US capitalism nor global capitalism. If Obama was truly a socialist or a Marxist there is no way he would be on the democratic ticket - which is bought and paid for by finance capital - Wall Street - amongst others, foremost among them, Goldman Sachs. The fact that sections of the capitalist media are trying to paint him in such a way show their affiliation with the McCain ticket - another faction of the capitalist class vying for power - or their explicit identification with the logic of the capitalist system unmediated by any political party, as such they are merely capital personified.