‘Leftist’
Alchemies and Direct Democracy
(A
necessary clarification)
By Kostas
Lampos PhD
As the saying goes, “Before it pours, it rains”. And it is true that the
cause of all evil that happens in the socio-political level is the morbidity of
someone, or some brains that fantasize that they are messiahs destined to ‘save
society’ from other bad messiahs who also use a thousand lies to deceive and
exploit. So every new party of young rescuers build, with the help of foreign
experts on opinion control and the ‘national philosophers’ of the local
systemic intelligentsia, their own ideology, which is always presented as a new
type of magic potion that includes healthy doses of ‘leftism’, ‘anticapitalist’
alchemies with which they promise everything to their political clientele, the
modern political-partisan fairytales aficionados.
They promise the Greece of the 21st century[1]. They even go so far as to
promise direct democracy (with plenty of capital), but in installments and
always careful not to mention anything regarding the cause of the misfortune of
the working class and thus of humanity’s tragedy, which is none other than the
consisting social inequality that occurs from the methods and policies of the
production and distribution of goods, which in turn stems from the forcibly
occupied and illegally patented private property over the means of production.
It is private property on the means of production that determines the
production and distribution of goods, which creates and recreates the power of
the few over the many, which produces economic inequality, poverty, hunger and
destructive wars for the sole purpose of increasing the profitability of
capital and the private property of the capitalists.
Therefore when politicians and political parties do not speak about this
reality and instead promise equality, justice and a better than their opponents
political mediation between the inhuman and destructive capitalism and the
working society, they commit a conscious political deception of society.
But this is exactly what politicians are paid for. This is their job. To
deceive the workers on behalf of their employers, the oligarchs in the
capitalist system. And this ‘profession’ will only be abolished in conditions
of real direct democracy, where political ‘power’ will be held alternately for
a limited time only (and with impending immediate recall) by all citizens
without exception.
To operate this system of delusion, the individual competing capitalist
groups maintain professional politicians’ production farms, acting on behalf of
the capitalists and displacing the causes of the ‘misfortunes’ of society, from
the capital (which hides behind its’ civilian staff and more specifically the
bourgeois parliamentary troupe) to the victims, the voters, who are no more
than mere spectators in the parliamentary system theatre show.
A theatrical mob where expendable hypocrites professional politicians star
alternatively in the roles of the far right, right, center right, centrist,
center-left and leftist government, the opposition and willing wildcards
wearing the masks of the fascist, the racist, the neoliberal, the centrist and
the leftist, working as surrogate institutions and as tin men where, when and
if they manage to align behind ‘their political programs’ more than 3% of the
electorate, to form a single-party or multiparty governments with the sole
purpose of laundering capitalism while hypnotizing society with the illusion of
democracy and political participation.
A society that in the last decade, seems to be finally fed up with the
hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of bourgeois parliamentarism. People all over the
world are fed up with the crimes of capitalism and with the compromised and
deadlocked policies of the dogmatic traditional leftists and the petty
bourgeois Left who espouse an Orwellian Soviet type of State control. All these
people who poured out in the squares of the largest cities of the world and
spontaneously declared their demand for direct democracy show that society is
finally fed up[2].
It was a first modern attempt, a rehearsal of societies to move from the
position of the object of exploitation by capitalism to the position of the
subject of history and the end of capitalism. And even as a rehearsal, it was a
nightmare for capitalists.
To make this nightmare disappear the capital employed the usual ‘leftist
wizards’, ‘new social democrats’, “radicals” aching for power, ‘self-proclaimed
and on duty connoisseurs of game theory’ and several mass media opinion makers
that all worked together to persuade society to abandon the squares and the
calling for direct democracy, and return to their couches and in the scheme of
representative democracy in the prospect of the new messiahs-saviors that would
avenge society against the old bad political messiahs.
So a new political deception scene was set up, a circus featuring magicians
who would tear the Memoranda of allegiance with one “swift strike”, and ‘would
make the capitalist market dance on our tune”.
Of course the new scene would include special courts leading to
scaffoldings for their corrupt political opponents as well as “restore the
minimum wage and pension” in the levels of the “golden” era.
Therefore the always quick-to-trust and always betrayed people (the so
called ‘sovereign people’ according to the bourgeoisie) decided, stunned as it
were, to ‘delegate political power’ to the new ‘left’ illusionist and his
political gang which consists of naive or cunning politicians and adventurers,
wrapped in the straitjacket of the right-wing defense minister.
Very soon, this newly founded government began to sign new memoranda, worse
than the previous ones, selling off the national wealth for the next 99 years
on the grounds that these are less than the four hundred years of slavery to the
Ottoman empire and legislate immediate cuts in salaries and pensions and the
uprooting of the remaining workers’ rights and restricting pluralism and any
civil liberties.
Worst of all, however, is that the ‘first left-wing government of Greece’,
hooked on political power, chose to side along the economic elite and leave the
society that put them in power (the opposite choice would have required the
abandonment of the government, the outspoken critique against capitalism and
the support of the forces of Labour, Science and Culture of Greece, and
furthermore of Europe and the whole world for their political independence and
the formation of a broad anti-capitalist front with a clear view to social
self-management on the basis of common ownership and classless democracy).
Instead they did something even worse. They chose to mingle in the
inter-imperialist competition between Germany and the United States of America
for the exclusive control of the European Union and the global hegemony, while
abandoning their promise of concentrating their efforts to a change in the EU,
from an organization controlled by the elite, into a United Europe of Peoples
and the direct-democratic society.
This shift to the right wing and neoliberalism forced the ‘left government’
to side with neogermanism[3] or Americanism[4] in turns, until they were forced
to resign from the illusions regarding their position and potential power to
the political chessboard and to finally become an example to be avoided, which
helps Americanism and global capitalism in their goal of turning the peoples of
Europe to extreme right-wing parties and autocratic governments, and
potentially to a fascist and racist nationalism that would turn us to the 19th
and 20th century fascism regimes, if a stop is not put promptly to this
downward spiral.
All this resulted in SYRIZA losing its’ political clientele and the
electorate, at least as shown by opinion polls, to turn again to the
reconstituted conservative and reactionary directions since, as dictated by the
supposed ‘common sense’ according to public opinion makers, all the politicians
are ‘the same’.
Faced with these developments Tsipras remembered his leftist populism in an
effort to cheat the Greek People anew, offering ‘constitutional reforms,’
‘Polls’ and ‘Peoples’ initiatives’, falsely copying the illusory Swiss model
cleptocracy, which has been the destination of the stolen public capital funds
from all corners of the planet as well as all the capital obtained from illegal
activities in order to be rinsed and camouflaged under the supposed ‘direct
democracy’ in the service of global capitalism[5].
Mr. Tsipras pretends to ignore that the main feature of direct democracy
are not the referendums which are particularly popular in dictatorial regimes
and in the bourgeois representative democracy, but the communal ownership and
social self-created conditions of fairness, equality before the law and social
equality.
He pretends to ignore that in conditions of extreme economic and social
inequalities and torn societies where the economic oligarchs with their
political dynasties and their gangs have all the power, the supposed referenda
are there only to make society an accomplice to their criminal policies, since
they know that voters can be manipulated. But even when that manipulation
fails, then the secondary political power succumbs to the primary economic
power, as it happened last year with the ‘operetta referendum’ of Mr. Tsipras,
who turned the NO into a YES in less than a day and with the terms set to him by
the ‘big bosses’.
Mr. Tsipras has come a long way in a very short time in the wild capitalist
West and has distanced himself so much from the, I guess pure, leftism of his
youth that is impossible to return to it. But even if he tried, no one would
believe him anymore. Therefore all he has left is a ‘heroic exodus’ with all
the risks involved in such a choice.
Otherwise in order to keep the power he is forced to harden even more the
already tough policies dictated by the centers of capitalist globalization and
develop into a kind of Balkan type of Benito Mussolini that every day that
passes will arouse more and larger sections of Greek society against him and
will be recorded in history as a conscious traitor not only of the global left,
in the sense of direct democracy, and those who believed in him, but the whole
country and Hellenism.
From this experience the victims of capitalism, of its’ bourgeois democracy
and its’ urban and petty ‘left’, must draw their own conclusions. The forces of
Labour, Science and Culture must realize that the work of the social liberation
cannot be entrusted to the contractors of their exploiters, cause then they are
doomed to have the fate of the mythical Sisyphus.
They, the forces of Labour, Science and Culture, must understand that the
scientifically valid and socially useful knowledge, the liberating technology
and the rising humanist culture of the 21st century (all legacies of all the
past generations), can make possible the creation of a better world, if they
are freed from the clutches of the economic elite as has always been the vision
and the effort of the progressive and liberating forces in human societies.
This will be a world based on common ownership, proportional economic and
social equality, and classless democracy[6] without which there can be neither
democracy nor freedom, nor valid future for humanity.
No more right and ‘left’ alchemies. No more fake democracy, unemployment,
poverty, hunger and inhuman and destructive wars just to grow the profits of
the 1% of the world population in the expense of the 99% of humanity.
No more capitalist barbarism[7]. Now is the time for a New Enlightenment, a
New Ecumenical Humanist movement that will sweep away all the negative elements
of the old regime of inequality, through local, regional, national and
universal direct democratic radical anticapitalistic assemblies of local and
national societies and humanity as a whole, to enable through simultaneous
procedures of self-institution, the birth of a classless democratic society,
the only real form of direct democracy.
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[1] Lampos Kostas, Greece in the Threshold of 21st Century, (Fight for the
territorial integrity, national survival and Direct Democracy), in: http://lefthumanism.blogspot.gr/2013/12/greece-in-threshold-of-21st-century.html
[2] See also: Lampos Kostas, Direct Democracy and Classless Society – The
long road of humanity towards social equality and Humanism, NISIDES publishing
house, Salonika 2012 (Greek publication).
[3] See Lampos Kostas Neogermanism. The new nightmare of Europe? POLITES,
35 / February 2012 and 36 / March 2012 and http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1225116 and: Neogermanismus: Der neue Alptraum Europas? in: http://lefthumanism.blogspot.com/2012/
[4] Lampos Kostas, Americanism and globalization. Economy of Fear and
Decline. PAPAZISIS, Athens 2009.
[5] See at: Lampos Costas Myth and reality the Swiss ‘Direct Democracy’
POLITES, 42 / October-November 2013 and on: http://tvxs.gr/news/user-post/gia-mytho-kai-tin-pragmatikotita-tis-elbetikis-amesis-dimokratias
[6] Lampos Kostas, ‘Classless Democracy and Humanism in the 21st century’,
-Direct Democracy in the 21st century, Nisides, Salonica 2013
[7] See also, Lampos Kostas, ‘God and Capital –an essay on the relationship
between religion and power’, Koukkida publishing house, 2015, and 2016 (2nd
edition).
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