Suffice it to say that the economic and social privileges that the propertied classes enjoy in our society depends for their existence on the denial of elementary human rights to the vast majority of society.ģ. Seen in the cold hard light of day, wage labour is really wage-slavery. The only difference between chattel slaves and wage workers is that the former were owned, whereas the latter are rented.
#Democracy 3 capitalist free
This is exploitation, period, and any sort of exploitation is inconceivable in a free society, because as long as one person can be exploited none of us are free. The capitalist class generates profits from the wage system by paying workers less in wages than the value of the product of our labour, which they take for themselves. Needless to say, this situation deprives us of our economic independence and forces us into a position of submission and subservience.īut it gets worse. In capitalist society the propertied classes own and control the tools of production, the places where we work and the things we work with, which means that those of us who don't own and control the tools of production are forced to work for those who do. The foundation of meaningful freedom is economic independence, and economic independence on a social level derives from the ability of each of us to control the fruits of our labour. Exploitation is inherent to class society. On the one hand we have those who own and control social resources, and who enjoy the economic and social privileges that accompanies such ownership and control, and on the other those who lack such ownership and control and are obliged by the circumstances of their birth to sell their labour for a wage, which is generally most of us.Ģ. Despite the claims made by the most powerful people in our society-who, we might add, have vested interests in doing so-the unity of the nation-state is an illusory one, because capitalist society is divided into economic classes. Since capitalist democracy provides us with meaningless choices, it also provides us with the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of freedom.ġ. While capitalist democracy appears to offer us choice-choice being the cornerstone of our freedom-the fact is that the choices it offers are not meaningful ones.
The fact that many of us commonly confuse these myths with facts changes nothing, since the truth of an idea is not determined by the number of people who believe it.
We achieve the common good, they say, by compelling all to respect the laws, which are applied equally to all without fear or favour. They say that freedom is something we enjoy as a result of choosing those political representatives whose policies best reflect the dictates of our own conscience to make laws on our behalf.
Capitalist democracy provides the conditions, they claim, under which each of us can determine the course of our own destiny and enjoy all the benefits in terms of creative autonomy and individual self-development that accrue to a truly free people. Supporters of capitalist democracy generally claim that it is the best-if not the only-way of organising a free society.
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