2 On democracy
2.2 Representative democracy and class struggle
Today ‘ democracy ’ is probably the most ideologically biased and hackneyed term of all . All constitutions of modern western states spin the yarn of peoples ’ sovereignty as the wellspring of stately power . There is no greater lie than the central statement of capitalist nation states : “ All state authority is derived from the people !” As I have pointed out democracy originated from stately rule of the demos over the majority of society .
We have to distinguish between administration and rule . Irrespective of all social strata and classes a community naturally needs an administration to organize the everyday matters of coexistence , all the more today with population of billions of fellow men and women . This necessity for administrations is inseparably linked to the interests of the ruling class which holds power in history . Contrary to antique Greece there is not even a demos to rule over society today . Nowadays sovereignty goes with a capitalist middle class assigning to the nation state the basic task to secure their economic , political and cultural world – quite naturally “ in the name of the people ”.
Our concern today is about Western representative parliamentarian democracy in the countries and on EU level . This system of government is of bourgeois origin forged in revolutions in Cromwell ’ s England , in France and the American anti-colonial War of Independence . At first glance these revolutions enfranchised all people . However , a closer look reveals that all their political achievements were indeed in favour of the bourgeois middle class with its core group of capitalist industrialists . The bourgeois middle class , formerly the Third Estate , harks back to the leading groups of citizens in late medieval towns . The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century ultimately rang in the age of capitalism .
The bourgeois revolutions did not much care for the sub-classes . The majority of the people historically jumped from the frying pan into the fire . They were liberated from serfdom and debt bondage only to face the fate of industrial wage workers . The capitalist system degraded them to a new social class of exploited , miserable , industrial labourers - the proletariat . In all European countries as well as North America society became deeply divided into these two main social classes of capital and labour .
What about democracy in such fundamentally split , modern societies ? Until now most social confrontations were around the proletar-
11