It’s clear the political system is structured this way to defend the interests of the haute bourgeoisie, tailor-made to fit a capitalist regime.
Bourgeois democracy isn’t the will of the people. It is an ordered structure masking oppression.
The interests of the dominant class continue to govern without displaying the overt brutality of absolutist regimes.
Barbarous violence is replaced by vulgar mass media propaganda. Alienation chokes off any response. A silent consensus fills the void left by fear of repression.
Bourgeois democracy is no less obscene than that of authoritarian regimes. Its brutality is concealed and refined.
Bourgeois democracy spreads exploitative and dominant-submissive relationships round the carefully controlled culture.
It creates a society which reproduces conservative morality and reinforces the capitalist ethos.
These include getting rich quick, the obsession with climbing the social ladder and the depiction of alienated and decadent behavior as ideal models to follow.
Our values consists of consumerist mania, acquiescence, egoism, and self-interest. We live in a society based on spectacle and illusory capitalist prosperity.
All this is reinforced by well-trained petty-bourgeois subordinates, creating a complex network of authoritarian relationships which guarantees stability.
They knew what was good, based on a lower-middle-class education which ensured conformity.
They trusted figures of authority [teachers, preachers, conservative media]. They became intent on reproducing the status quo.
The bohemian bourgeoisie disturbed their petty minds. Forefront artists who questioned established values became hate figures.
Those with deadened minds were determined to promote faith, family and fixed values.
A willingness to take risks was divided by class and age.
The conformists loathed what they saw as dangerous propaganda which promoted disbelief, doubt and sexual liberation.
Excerpt from The Last Throes of Capitalism [2021]
Neoliberalism’s hegemonic gospel of a lean electoral democratic state and a powerful capitalist market reinforced material inequalities.
Democracy became a legitimating paradigmatic exercise in which capital and its agents solidified their hold on power.
Neoliberal democracy and its material injustices were perpetrated by a handful of cold-blooded global capitalists.
Greed and unfettered capital accumulation were at the core of the game.
When the game got messy, capitalists asked for divine intervention. The liberal democratic state entered the scene.
This resulted in billions of hard-earned cash from the masses being used to rescue these greedy capitalists.
The liberal democrats connived with capitalists in the name of austerity politics.
Liberal democracy was in its deepest crisis and in danger of self-destruction.
I’m pretty certain he’s no enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or conceptual art. They’d be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth.
It’s possible to be an atheist and a fervent fan of avant-gardes. His God-hating isn’t the view of a scientist cleansed of prejudice.
It belongs to a specific cultural context. There aren’t many supporters of anarchism or the virgin birth in liberal suburbia.
It’s a brand of common sense that mostly believes in what’s reasonable. The provincial philistines smugly gather to toast themselves.
What good sense! They advocate permissiveness so long as it doesn’t hurt others, It’s white line, middle of the road, safely lip-synching liberal platitudes.
What makes the contemporary setting post-political is the exclusion of the possibility of politicization, raising the particular to the level of the universal. A specific crime, issue, or event comes to stand for something more than itself.
It’s not just a single problem to be resolved. Rather, it symbolizes a whole series of problems confronting the system as a whole.
Post-politics mobilizes the vast apparatus of experts, social workers, and ‘guardians’ to reduce the overall demand of a particular group to a therapeutic administrative problem.
Yet the politics of erasure is taking place around us. Underneath the pavement, behind newspaper headlines, on layered billboards and graffiti-laden walls.
The urban landscape is continuously peeling away and papering over itself. Its surface is a living thing in flux between the binary processes of decay and renewal.
It adapts to the shifting demands of culture to replace, remove and re-imagine itself. There’s a relentless revision of form.
We are approaching the end game. The decay, decadence and destruction of bourgeois politics. What follows is pleasurably unpredictable.
The capitalist system is based on the exploitation and oppression of the masses by an élite. Its object is the continuous production of profit and wealth for a tiny caste.
Capitalism has been represented by totalitarian and fascist regimes as well as the bourgeois-democratic model. The masses have been persuaded that democracy is synonymous with freedom.
Bourgeois democracy, as the representative expression of capitalism, is the political system that asserts and maintains its extensive domination from behind a liberal facade.
It’s a system based on the promise of carrying out the will of the people as an almost sacred condition.
This delusion allows the masses to vote once every four years. They elect a leader who will play the role of everyone’s political idol.
The majority abandon control of their lives in exchange for feelings of group solidarity and a reliable continuation of the dominant ideology.
Most people are gullible. They are engrossed by the spectacle. A few see through it. It gives us a sense of superiority. It’s good to be odd.
It’s naive to maintain hope in ‘democracy’. There’s a ruling political party with two or more factions within it.
We may think we have a choice but it’s only one between wafers and cones. Politicians as pedophiles trying to seduce us with ice-cream promises.
No wonder the bourgeoisie feel guilty if they don’t vote. Liberal democracy is made for and by them. Would you vote to end slavery if you were a plantation owner?
Presidential elections are circuses of marketing and management, spectacles of fund-raising and targeted voter ‘mobilization’.
Voting is futile, an endorsement of an illegitimate system that persistently and viciously works against our interests.
The political machine can’t serve us because its masters are the banks and corporations which demand the cheapest possible labor.
They profit by any means necessary. With our negligible salaries, unemployment checks, welfare or food stamps, we simply don’t count.
The government sees us as nuisances, to be tranquilized by mass opiate media. Coming soon: we’ll be rounded up and put to work in concentration sweat shops.
Banksy
Bourgeois democracy is a cover for brutal exploitation and oppression, a facade to conceal the dictatorship of the bourgeois ruling class.
This bourgeois ideology instils the concept pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights.
Yet there remains an impoverished class who are ground down as a result of capitalist wage-slavery.
The mass of people are conditioned to believe in endless wars which are called humanitarian intervention. This is a lie covering naked aggression and exploitation of resources, including the availability of even cheaper labor.
The capitalists and profiteers grow fat on the property and wealth usurped by them and the ready-made apparatus of state power.
The bourgeoisie are compelled to be hypocritical and to describe their rule as popular government’ or ‘democracy’.
These variations are euphemisms for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the exploiters over the exploited.
