Capitalism and democracy

As this is a year of elections for many people reading this I feel it's worth getting into the dilemma of voting in an election, which brings most people face to face with an conflict between the natural and the ideological. Many people seem to have this idea that voting in an election is preferable to not voting and that if you do not vote then you have no 'right' to complain about the system. Okay then, so what is the benefit of voting?

Voting is of course all about choice and is one of the choices we feel we can make about our lives together with reproductive choices, choices over where we live, choices over how we work and get our income, choices over education both for ourselves and our children. But see in order to believe that you have freedom of choice, you have to believe in free will, personal agency and to some degree personal belief. In order to make choices when it comes to voting, then it also comes down to values and what you feel is important to you.

This is where we run into a conflict.

You see if you're living in a society which is based primarily on capitalism, for example in the UK or the United States, there's a false dichotomy in values between the individual human being and possession and ownership. Who are you and how are you to be valued? What values do your opinions and beliefs hold? Are you valued for what you believe in, your individual experiences of life and your ethical stances? Or are you valued more for your ownership and property, the work you do, the money you have flowing through your bank account, and your value in the socio-economic system?

You see in any system which is based on capitalism and a belief in capitalism, not everybody who participates in an election by voting is expressing a choice or opinion which is equal in value to others. This is even pointed out by major political parties who make it clear that primarily, they are there to serve 'hard working families'. By implication this means that what you're voting on primarily is government of a capitalist-based society. What I want to point out here is that the only thing that matters in any election where you have binary choices for which party gets to govern only the numbers matter, not the opinions. Yes there are minor parties and some third choices, out there on the fringes of the system, but usually the outcome of any election is determined by which major party out of the major binary gets the most votes.

Therefore if you're taking part in any election, and irrespective of who you're voting for - which choice on the ballot - you are still consenting to be governed by whichever candidate or party wins the election. Elections are far more about consent - which is still a choice - than they are about your voice, your opinions and your beliefs. None of these things matter because all that matters are the numbers, how many votes each candidate gets, what percentage of the vote, and who gets the majority.

What this means is that you cannot have both capitalism and a democracy. This is a simple either or binary choice. You can either have capitalism and everything that comes with it, or you can have democracy and everything that comes with that. You cannot have both. You're mixing up different levels of reality and as is often the case, what is real on one level isn't real on the other.

There is no free will and no freedom of choice

If you think democracy is based on free will and having some kind of freedom of choice then I'm here to tell you that you're barking up the wrong tree. Actual reality - and what I mean here is what's really real as opposed to what is only relatively real or conceptually real - is based on the existence of the universe and Nature, both of which can be defined as a multi-dimensional continuum of sensation and experience. As we humans can only handle three or four variables simultaneously our perception of actual reality is extremely limited and this is even before we get into comprehension of reality.

Besides existence - any kind of existence - is based on relativity as is life. You cannot exist, let alone live, without being in relationship to everything else around you. The choices we make are not based on free will or any 'freedom' of choice, but come down to memory, pattern recognition, desire and our understanding of code. I've written about this in a previous blog post titled 'Your life is code' and I'm in the process of writing a new book on the subject.

Actual choice is complex and takes in such things as karma, consent and of course comparisons of existing possibilities and opportunities we can perceive with our existing models of reality. If you care to take a step back and think about it, all the choices you've made in life have all come down to the possibilities and opportunities you could perceive, your model of reality and past memory, and plain and simple desire for either an experience, a sensation, or conscious insight.

So what you think is free will and freedom of choice doesn't exist anyway and can be easily explained as something else. Besides you never get any freedom of choice in an election, because your possible choices have been predetermined by organizations - which also happens in many other areas of life. You might want to think how much organizations and institutions and other collectivities factor into all the choices you make in life. It's all part of the same issue here, which is how capitalism generally negates democracy and predetermines any actual choices you make.

But what I want to highlight or flag up here is the role of consent and social consensus both when it comes to individual choices and also when it comes to democracy (and elections). Consent, and giving your consent is very important because it determines what you allow, what you're prepared to accept and also what consensus you want to be a part of.

The role of human rights in elections

Individual consent and also social consensus become very important in any election which takes place in a society which is determined by capitalism. This is where we come up against what I regard as a hard truth about democracy. Voting in an election should never ever be about individual choices, individual circumstances and what you can 'get' out of the political system. Keep in mind that you as an individual simply don't figure that much in a capitalist society. Your value as a human is based primarily on what you own and what you can produce, i.e. your participation in the artificial and largely imaginary socio-economic system. This is because such a society is run primarily for the benefit of the organization, the corporation, the institution and the market as opposed to the individual human and the quality of their life experience.

What you also need to be mindful of is buying into false political narratives and also political issues which undermine democracy and human rights in favour of capitalism and authoritarianism (because all corporate structures are based on a top down hierarchy and authoritarianism). Below are some examples:

• Overpopulation

  Overpopulation is a particularly fatalistic political issue which determines that there are too many human beings on the planet and the solution is to somehow reduce the numbers of human beings. Okay so how?

  Besides who gets to determine how many human beings is optimum for this planet and how do they get to determine the optimal figures for world population? Also too many human beings for what exactly?

  I've come across this issue in green or ecological political circles, i.e. those people who go on about climate change. But see climate change is in itself not the issue. The issue is human abuse of our natural environment, human abuse of different species, and even human abuse of other human beings. But see this particular narrative sells you on the false premise that we humans have some degree of free will and personal agency when it comes to our natural environment and reduces the actual political issue of human abuse of the environment to a matter of numbers, which of course favours the capitalist system.

• Control of immigration

  This is another false political issue or threat which is used to negate democracy in place of capitalist values.

  So okay, who exactly gets to 'control' immigration? How do they go about it? Keep in mind here that immigration involves making various choices we all take for granted, such as the choice over where to live, the choice over where to work and how to earn an income, and the choice of what society one gets to live in. But see once again this is an important political issue which is reduced to numbers to fit the capitalist system because most immigration control is all about controlling the numbers.

  But see human rights is pretty inseparable as a concept or value. Valuing human rights does not work if only certain people have human rights and others don't. That's when human rights become social privileges. For you to have human rights everyone else has to have human rights as well. Furthermore human rights come hand in hand with social responsibilities. Human rights without social responsibilities become human entitlements, and like social privileges, cease to be human rights.

  Therefore if you have been basing your voting preferences and choices on control of immigration do not be surprised if your human rights are also stripped away and replaced by social obligations to the corporation or organization. You're still buying into a false political issue to reinforce capitalist values and vote against democracy and human rights. Just wanted to point that out.

• Lower taxes, smaller state

  To understand this point we need to understand money, how money flows and where money comes from. In any capitalist society all money comes from one source and one source alone and that is a bank. There is no bifurcated financial system where banks finance some things and individual citizens as taxpayers finance the rest. That is the illusion. What actually happens is that governments borrow money from banks to finance everything but levy taxes against spending to repay the interest on the money borrowed by the government to finance everything.

  Therefore taxation is levied by the government against money spent by individual citizens and also businesses. Your employer is spending money when they pay your salary so someone has to pay tax. When you buy anything you are spending money so you pay some form of tax. It's based on the principle of debt coming with interest and unless the money is stolen from someone or somewhere, taxation comes with spending just as debt comes with interest. With me so far?

  So what you have is another false political issue which reinforces capitalism and capitalist values at the expense of democracy, social security and so on. Keep in mind that the baseline of so-called 'democracy' or participation in society is the ability to work - this is not a secret. But see your ability to work and be productive is dependent on your health and fitness, which while isn't so much of an issue in your 20's and 30's can start to become an issue in your 40's, 50's and 60's.

  Furthermore this is the one issue where capitalism cancels out democracy. If we're being serious about everyone having a voice and that voice being of equal value, then social security is not an option, it's actually a 'must have'. If there is no social security for everyone, then you might as well restrict voting in an election to only for those above a certain annual income level and be open and honest about voting in a capitalist system rather than a democratic one.

• Being tough on crime

  So we come to another false political issue which leads us to believe that we are noting for something which is going to protect society and also democracy and that is the political narrative about being tough on crime and punishment.

  Being tough on crime and punishment does nothing whatsoever for society or - more importantly - the victims of crime. I would be far more willing to regard this as a real political issue if there were more measures for rehabilitation, restitution and harm reduction which for me is a massive issue when it comes to crime. Keep in mind here that in a way the police can be seen as the frontline in the upholding of human rights.

  >But that's not how this plays out because in reality the criminal justice system reinforces belief in free will, personal responsibility and personal agency which feeds further into capitalist values. Asking the simple 'cui bono?' (who benefits?) question gives you the answer that by and large it's the organization and corporation that benefits from the criminal justice system rather than the individual in society. An increasing number of products in supermarkets are produced from slavery within the prison system, fines and penalties make up an increasing share of government income and we are also dealing with the rise of single process prosecutions which are brought by a corporation or organization against the individual outside the criminal justice system itself.

  The BBC, the Royal Mail, the Department of Work and Pensions, train operation companies are all among the growing numbers of organizations who have statutory powers to prosecute individuals outside the criminal justice system.

So as you can see above there are different ways that through voting and participating in elections - if you're not paying attention to actual real political issues and voting consensually and socially - you can actually quite easily be voting against democracy and human rights and instead in favour of the capitalist system.

The real political issues

So if the above political issues are false or even illusory political issues in a capitalist system, then what are the real political issues that we need to be thinking about? Please keep in mind that I see elections as a very serious public event, one in which we give back political parties who form governments feedback on their governance in the form of consent and a social consensus. With this in mind the 20th century gave us three new concepts which have all entered into social thinking:

• the Freudian model of psychoanalysis
• fascism
• digital technology

This in turn gives us two very real and very important political issues that we all need to be thinking about for the ways they can seriously impact on our lives and our democracy.

• data mining and data sharing

  Even today a significant number of capitalist thinkers understand that the main currency of value isn't money - it's information and data. If we understand that the reduction of everything down to numbers, with this statistics and other forms of data, favours the capitalist system rather than a democratic system, we can see how data mining and data sharing are very important resources in any system based on capitalism.

  But see this throws up a fairly obvious and very real political issue when it comes to democracy, which is based on consent. Just how much of your personal data is granted consensually, and just how much of your personal data is obtained non-consensually? Hopefully I don't need to go much further into an explasnation for you to see and appreciate how this can easily become a very real, very major political issue.

• the creation of digital imagery

  The ability to create digital imagery, especially harmful digital imagery, is both without parallel or any comparison with any previous time in our history. This gives an almost unlimited potential and possibility for such an ability to create digital imagery as forms of propaganda, particularly when you have media complicit with the capitalist system. It's not without any surprise that many political figures and parties have swarmed to social media platforms and websites.

  Once again I feel that I don't have to go that far into an explanation for you to see how this is also a very real and major political issue.

I didn't include socialism as in innovative 20th century concept because socialism was fully worked out in the 19th century when there was no digital technology. But my point here is that we all need to be thinking about how we can make society habitable for human beings because capitalism does not care for either social values or human rights. Only in the initial stages of a capitalist enterprise do you get any concern for human and social value but after a certain point the emphasis shifts to numbers, data, profit and efficiency.

If we're not careful we could end up with having to deal with a three way conflict between human social values and human rights, the interests of capitalism and economic growth, and also the concerns thrown up by digital advancements and progress in digital technology. We are already starting to see the first conflicts arising in the area of work, and this is simply because the development of technology negates the necessity, accessibility and availability of work. There's a growing number of younger people who are not properly educated for the work which needs to be done, and a growing number of people who due to disability and health issues cannot do the work which needs to be done, and who also have limited or no opportunity to work in ways in which they are capable.

I'm also prepared to throw out the notion that currently there's less and less efficacy when it comes to democracy, elections and voting in general and this is because there's very little talk of meaningful reform among mainstream political parties and far too much talk about maintaining a status quo which doesn't really exist any more. See in seeking to destroy socialism what has been destroyed is conservatism and the loss of conservatism means that we also lose our guiding images through which we can develop a social consensus. This is something that is going to affect everyone in the long run.