Let us remember, first, that the victory of democracy over autocratic governments in Europe [or the US — Ed.] did by no means give the power, even in its formal sense, to the ‘individual’. For many decades, the citizen with the right to vote in European democracies was the white, ‘free’, male owner of land or capital. The voting right of workers, women, etc., is not an organic component of the definition of democracy, and has not been born along with it. It is, rather, the outcome of the struggle for justice of various classes and layers in the existing democratic societies — struggles waged under the intellectual and political banner of other movements, such as the socialist movement, the women’s rights movement, the anti-racial or anti-ethnic discrimination movement, etc., and, more often than not, waged by undemocratic or illegal methods.

—— Mansoor Hekmat, founder of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran

Interesting guy; seems to know whereof he speaks. And unlike too many leftist writers, Hekmat quite deliberately doesn’t require you to have a degree in Marxist criticism (or equivalent coursework) to get where he’s coming from. Worth a read, especially in a time when the Right, having spent the last hundred years deliberately confusing “democracy” with “anti-Communism”, can toss around oxymorons like “democratic-minded strongman.”

(Courtesy of Ken Macleod.)

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Update: I can’t resist posting this one more bit, which says more about the failure of third parties — left or right — to get anywhere than anything else I can remember reading:

If fundamental changes are not on the agenda — as the very act of elections, parliamentarism, and the existence of a non-revolutionary situation make the people understand — then it is quite natural that the deprived masses, who have no alternative but to be satisfied with reform, should vote for reformist personalities and parties within the ruling class itself — personalities and parties that, as they see it, have the actual possibility to bring those reforms about. The problem of the Left is not that the allocation of the seats is not proportionate to the number of direct votes, or that the neighbourhood Trotskyist party does not have equal possibilities for propaganda to eventually secure one seat out of four hundred. The problem is that, under normal circumstances, the workers do not regard someone who wants to become a member of the parliament for four years from a revolutionary position against capital a good representative for pursuing their interests through this particular channel.

Not that I’m asking for a revolutionary situation, mind you. But it’s nice to see someone explain this in terms that don’t amount to a second-order idiot plot.