ALB
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Interesting article on the origin of the Electoral College system.Even this system might have reflected more the popular vote if the members of the college reflected the vote for each candidate in each state, as can happen in two states and did happen this time in one (Maine):http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/08/mainers-take-matters-into-their-own-hands-after-bitter-presidential-campaign/The US election system is so full of anomalies like this, and especially as regards who gets on the voter register (and who doesn't) differing from state to state, that the US is not really in a position to give lessons on democracy to other countries. As you say, if UN election observers were allowed in, their report would be very revealing.
Young Master Smeet wrote:As with Brexit, the disturbing thing is thre is no discernable working class movement, except in asserting nationalist rights: repatriate the jobs that the Otehr has taken away. It really does call into question whether the working class is the agent of sociealism. Should we then, as Paul mason suggests today, tail end liberalism as a lesser evil?Depemds on what is meant by "working class". Reading the papers and watching TV on the result of the election the term seems to be used to mean "non-college-educated white males" but for us, of course, the term has a much wider meaning than that — all forced by economic necessity, by virtue of being excluded from ownership of means of production, to seek to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or a salary. That'll be over 90% of the population in the developed capitalist parts of the world. In the elections a majority of these voted against Trump who, in percentage terms, got less votes than those who in Britain voted to remain in the EU. Still, a disturbingly large number did.
You're right, Marcos, that "Populism" does refer to one strand of anti-Tsarist revolutionaries, the Narodniks, but it's not the only use of the term. In fact, in the USA at the same time as the Narodniks in Russia, there was a political party that was known as the "populists". I know you don't like wikipedia but this link has other references:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Party_(United_States)
Quote:Established in 1891, as a result of the Populist movement, the People's Party reached its zenith in the 1892 presidential election, when its ticket, composed of James B. Weaver and James G. Field, won 8.5% of the popular vote and carried five states (Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada and North Dakota), and the 1894 House of Representatives elections, when it took over 10% of the vote. Built on a coalition of poor, white cotton farmers in the South (especially North Carolina, Alabama and Texas) and hard-pressed wheat farmers in the Plains states (especially Kansas and Nebraska), the Populists represented a radical crusading form of agrarianism and hostility to elites, cities, banks, railroads, and gold.This too was an agrarian movement, so not really the same as Trumpism. Since then "populism" has also come to mean what Robbo says: demagogues railing against a corrupt political elite cheating the people. Trump certainly fits into that category (as does Farage and UKIP in Britain).
Here's what we said about LETS schemes in their heyday (before most folded):http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1994/no-1084-december-1994/lets-abolish-money
mcolome1 wrote:Only in the USA a patan like Donald Trump can become a presidentDidn't they elect one in the Philippines earlier this year? .But, then, the Philippines did used to be a US colony.
Another anomaly in the US way of electing the president — due to the first-past-the-post system being used to elect the members of the Electoral College:http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/third-party-candidates-having-outsize-impact-election-n680921
Actually, Clinton will have got more votes overall than Trump. It's just that he got more delegates to the Electoral College that formally elects the president in the US:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-us-election-results-latest-popular-vote-electoral-college-a7407826.html
Here's Steve Coleman's analysis of the Trump phenomenon made before he got elected:https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-both-the-old-crazy-and-the-new-normal-58728It seems he hasn't completely lost his old style of writing as when he used to write for the Socialist Standard
After Brexit. Now this. What next? Any bets on Marie Le Pen as president of France next year?There does seem to be a trend against globalization and a retreat into narrow nationalism. This is what happened the last time there was a prolonged period of slump and stagnation, in the 1930s. Whether there'll be a return to trade wars as then remains to be seen.The small mercy is that politically this is not taking the form of a movement to replace political democracy by political dictatorship. In fact it's rather more the opposite, with both "left" and "right" demanding more accountability and more direct democracy. That won't make any difference to the way capitalism operates (to put profits before people) though. What happens, then, when Trump fails to bring "prosperity" for the victims of globalisation he appealed to and who voted for him?
alanjjohnstone wrote:Is it simply because of the Leninist legacy and the damage? Or a hang-over from our founding fathers sympathy for Kautsky's writings? Wasn't it from Kautsky we got the socialist consciousness will enter the working class from the outside via the intellectuals in the Social Democrat Party and Lenin merely seconded that.Our party ("we") has never endorsed the view you attribute to Kautsky.Also, Kautsky's point was that socialist theories were originated by "bourgeois intellectuals" like Marx and Engels. This was wrong as, on the contrary, Marx and Engels became socialists through contact with ideas that had already been thought up by workers in France, Britain and Germany.I don't think Kautsky thought that this was a permanent process (your "will" enter), and that "bourgeois intellectuals" were still needed in his day to bring socialist ideas to the workers (though Lenin did, at least as concerned Russia), only that this was how these ideas originated in the first place (more "did originally" enter)..
Actually, in other of his writings Morris endorses something similar to the "council communist" system, the "federal principle" advocated by anarchists. In Socialism Its Growth and Outcome which he and Belfort Bax wrote, they suggested that the basic units (they use the term "lowest unit") should be the "township" and "the trade or occupation organized somewhat on the lines of a craft-guild":
Quote:On the other hand, the highest unit would be the great council of the socialized world, and between these would be federations of localities arranged for convenience of administration …. Though in the lower units of this great Federation direct expression of opinion would suffice for carrying on the administration, we cannot see any other means than delegation for doing the work of the higher circles.This seems to suggest that the "townships" would decide things at town meetings,i.e.by direct democracy. The individual would get a vote here, including to choose the delegates to the next level up. After that, delegates would choose other delegates to the next level.In the end it's a question of where you draw the line. Obviously (I assume) the members of the World Council would not be elected directly, but chosen by those at the level below (continental, regional as ex-national). Personally, I don't see any problem with continuing with the system that has evolved, where individuals get to directly elect the local council, the next one up (where there is one) and the "regional" (the equivalent of today's parliaments). There are also direct elections to the "continental" councils that the US House of Representatives and the European Parliament are.But of course it's not up to us today to lay down what should happen, but given that socialism won't have to start from scratch I imagine it will take over, and develop and democratise, the administrative units inherited from the political superstructure of capitalism.The anarchists favoured "federalism" because they were afraid of the so-called "tyranny of the majority" Morris dismisses in the passage that YMS quotes. But we are (social) democrats not anarchists.
Probably, but of course it's rigged as those "elected" at the first level are hand-picked supporters of the regime and so therefore all those at the higher levels.. I'm not sure there's any example of the system working as it's supposed to.
I see from an article in today's Times about someone who tried to stand as an independent candidate that China still uses the indirect system of election where the individual only gets one vote as favoured by Council Communists and others:
Quote:Once every five years urban residents may vote for grassroots "people's deputies", the lowest level of the toothless "people's congress" system that extends all the way to the parliament in Beijing. It is also the only level directly elected by the public, at least in theory.
