Equality by lot

In a short article called “‘Democracy’ and Dictatorship” published on January 3, 1919, Vladimir Lenin asserts that

[As long as] the bourgeoisie continue to keep the entire apparatus of state power in their hands, [and] a handful of exploiters continue to use the […] state machine[, e]lections held in such circumstances are lauded by the bourgeoisie […] as being “free”, “equal”, “democratic” and “universal”. These words are designed to conceal the truth, to conceal the fact that the means of production and political power remain in the hands of the exploiters, and that therefore real freedom and real equality for the exploited, that is, for the vast majority of the population, are out of the question.

It seems that for Lenin “the means of political power that remain in the hands exploiters” which render elections undemocratic are primarily the channels of mass communication:

In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own 9/10 of the best meeting halls, and 9/10 of the stocks of newsprint, printing presses, etc.. The urban workers and the farm hands and day laborers are, in practice, debarred from democracy by the “sacred right of property” (guarded by the Kautskys and Renners, and now, to our regret, by Friedrich Adler as well) and by the bourgeois state apparatus, that is, bourgeois officials, bourgeois judges, and so on. The present “freedom of assembly and the press” in the “democratic” (bourgeois democratic) German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press

Thus, it is by manipulating the voters through what would today be called “misinformation” or “disinformation” (or what a few years ago was called “fake news”), that the elites manage to get majorities to vote against their own interests and maintain the situation in which they are controled by the elites. And in general, any electoralist system (whether in a capitalist system, or in a nascent socialist system, which he calls a “dictatorship of the proletariat”) is a system of oppression because the dominant class uses its control of the communication channels to get the voters to support it electorally. Therefore, the dominant class cannot be changed electorally but only by overthrowing the electoral system in one way or another.

This theory, according to which people can be manipulated into consistently voting against their own interests, is rather similar to theories that are commonly offered by liberals to explain why people vote for the liberals’ electoral opponents. Supposedly somehow the voters get manipulated by “populists extremists” or are brainwashed by mass media owned by some unscrupulous capitalists. At the extreme, we are told that people vote for undesirable elements (Trump, Georgescu) because of some fake online accounts or online ads by the Russians or the Chinese, whose influence inexplicably overwhelms that of powerful established domestic forces.

Of course, this theory, common to Lenin and modern liberals, is fundamentally anti-democratic. This theory claims that people can consistently misperceive their own interests so that when faced with a choice between an option that improves their situation and an option that harms it, they can be brought to consistently select the latter one. Note that this is the case whether directly asserting that a majority of the people are stupid or gullible, or more politely asserting that a majority of the people are “rationally ignorant”. If the people are able to understand their own situation, and if a good option is on the ballot, then all they have to do is keep “throwing out the bums” until they hit on the good option and then stick with it. If people don’t have the sense to simply do that, then they really need some noble guardians (whether the liberals or the Bolsheviks) to make decisions for them, or at least to set them straight by taking hold of the means of mass communication and making sure they understand what’s what.

Of course, both Lenin and the liberals are reluctant to openly assert their anti-democratic standpoint. They both want to claim that they are in fact promoting a democratic viewpoint. In the process they tie themselves in argumentative knots. Lenin in fact, while dismissing “small proprietors” as “helpless, stupid dreamers”, expressly claims that the proletariat has been “united and ‘schooled'” by capitalism into understanding its own situation so that it (and it alone) can overthrow the system that oppresses it. But if it can do so through a revolution, why can’t it do so electorally?

Another argumentative knot (or what the Marxists like to call “contradiction”) follows from a major point in Lenin’s narrative. Lenin devotes a lot of space to bashing “the Scheidemanns and Kautskys” – politicians who present themselves as socialists but who, according to him, betray the principles that they ran on. But then, if this is the case, what are the voters to do? “United and schooled” by capitalism, they vote for a good socialist. Soon afterwards, they find themselves betrayed. The same problem arises when the question is about supporting a revolutionary. How are people to know whether they should support a revolutionary party or leader? They may risk life and liberty to put into power a group or a person they believe in, only to be betrayed later.

While in the revolutionary setting there is no easy solution the problem of betrayal, in the electoral setting, where a low-cost choice between the various parties can be made periodically, the “throw the bums out” strategy is an easy solution. Any good choice on the ballot should at some point or another be hit upon and prove itself to be one. Why then does this eventuality never materialize? Maybe the problem is not that the voters are manipulated, but rather that there are no good choices on the ballot. But if so, why? The Iron Law of Oligarchy, presented by Robert Michels only a few years before Lenin was writing, would have been a good starting point for untying this knot.

Filed under: Elections, History |