ALB
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More talk from Biden supporters in the labour unions of a general strike if Trump refuses to accept a Biden electoral victory;
If political democracy was really under a threat of being replaced by a dictatorship, this would be one appropriate response. But I don’t think that Trump wants to try rule unconstitutionally as a dictator or in fact would be able to. That’s just scare tactics on the part of the supporters of his rival in a bid to get more votes.
The most he will try to do if he is losing will be to use an army of lawyers to try to invalidate votes for Biden in swing states that have gone against him.
In the end he will have to accept what the courts decide (unless he wants to spend the rest of his life in prison). He will also be aware that if there is an impasse in the Electoral College, when it meets on 14 December, and neither candidates gets a majority of votes there, it is the House of Representatives that will chose the President — which wouldn’t be him.
Yes, it’s good. Sort of reviewed in the April 2005 Socialist Standard:
“can we be certain that all decision-making will be by local communities voting.”
No, but nobody has said they should be. Taking decisions that affect a locality locally doesn’t mean that every inhabitant has to vote on every decision to be taken. Direct democracy is not a sensible option except for matters of principle requiring a simple yes or no answer. Most decisions are not that simple as there a whole range of options. This is why they are best taken by a committee, whether at local level elected by universal suffrage or a citizens assembly chosen by lot or some other means.
We don’t need to draw up recipes for the cookshops of the future, amusing as this might be. That’s undemocratic as well as pretty pointless. In any event, socialism’s decision-making structures won’t have to built up from scratch. It’s more a question of taking over and democratising those that will be inherited from capitalism. So, in parts of the English- speaking part of North America the local dog catcher may well still be elected. At a higher level I imagine the House of Representatives will be retained with the Presidency and Senate bring abolished. Who knows? The people around at the time might prefer a different recipe.
Extract from our Socialism As A Practical Alternative pamphlet;
”The power of the state, which operates from the concentration of centralized power in the hands of governments, will be replaced by a fully democratic system through which decisions will flow from the broadest possible social base to represent the views of the whole community. A democratic system of decision-making would require that the basic unit of social organisation would be the local community which could elect is delegates to a local council which could be given the responsibility for local administration.“
Maybe it does refer to “states rights” but the claim is the exact opposite of what Murray Bookchin based his theory of “communalism” on and in fact of anarchist theory and the Greens too. In any event, it doesn’t seem obvious that the smaller the political (decision-making) unit the easier it is for an oligarchy to control it.
That’s an odd quote (not from the author of the article), at least the second part is. You would normally think that the smaller the political unit is the less easy it would be run it oligarchically. Or, rather, the other way round, that the larger a political unit is the easier it would be to do this.
I wonder on what the quoted author based this view and what his evidence for it was.
The Socialist Standard’s review if Sunkara’s manifesto can be found here.
The author makes a good point when he says that the election of Biden will legitimise capitalist rule.
Here is the passage where he summarises the “coup scenario” which he identifies as “somewhat hyperbolic”:
”Some of the same people, who believe Trump “continues to lie” and is moronic, delusional, and incompetent, also believe Trump can carry off a coup. Trump, they claim, will command “white supremacist paramilitaries to be prepared to attack his and their ‘enemies’ if he loses on Election Day.” Adding, “Trump also wants Joe Biden and other leading Democrats imprisoned and perhaps even executed.”
We have come across that fantasist view too.
Remember this non-entity from last year and his claim at the Tory party’s conference?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-49884017
and this from the year before?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/apr/17/conservatives-workers-party-robert-halfon
He needs to be careful himself in case that “equalities” quango doesn’t brand him as anti-semitic too, on the grounds that talk of a New World Order is some anti-semitic “trope” (whereas it’s just conspiraloon tripe). Or maybe they’ll just accuse him of “illuminatiphobia”.
Piers defends his brother:
The idea that #JeremyCorbyn or any #Corbyn was or is in any way racist or antisemitic is A REVOLTING EVIL TOTAL LIE – A figment of the globalist #NewWorldOrder #MSM lie innuendo and smear machine. THAT is the boil that must be lanced.#OurMovement #StopNewNormal https://t.co/bntJRsAA32
— Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) October 29, 2020
The End of the World is Nigh on Tuesday 3 November. Or is it? We will soon know who is the fantasist.
Yesterday they were saying it was “socialist”. Today they are doing it themselves;
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/brandon-lewis-firebreak-lockdown-coronavirus-19162791
One of our comrades from NZ told us during the discussion on Discord last night that she had voted against both. Not because she was against euthanasia as such but because she thought that under capitalism it would be abused by people who wanted to inherit more quickly. She was against the cannabis one because she was against all smoking including tobacco. But I thought you could consume cannabis in a cake or in tea.
Meanwhile as the presidential circus passes by, people in America get to vote directly on more important issues in the one feature of the US political system that is more democratic (citizen initiatives):
