Deposing Mursi in Egypt and Democracy

After the news that president Mursi had been deposed by the military in Egypt, a FaceBook friend wrote:

I'm not going to celebrate a military coup against a democratically elected leader, no matter who he is. Hard to see any good coming out of this.

To which I responded:

 Democracy is more than elections, it's practical rule by the people and for the people through duly elected representatives, and it's the practice and persistence of the democratic popular rule that is more important. As in language learning the thing is "communication over correctness", in politics it's not the formalities of selection that are the gold standard, but the realities of priorities in long-term action. The selection of a team can be carried out with impeccable formality, and the team can still play like shit. If there's scope for running change and improvement, well and good, and little harm done. If not, there's a crisis and emergency tensions explode in violence.
In a lot of countries, Egypt included, there are such shifts in the relationship of the active masses to power and social norms taking place that there is little scope for running change and improvement within the social structures in operation. Which means that all the social weight of different social groups/strata/classes hurls itself into the arena higgledy-piggledy and piecemeal, now in part, now all at once, now in a flash, now like treacle, and in situations like this "democratic elections" is a paper label that will be torn to shreds if it isn't securely fastened on a solid substrate and protected by the transparent armour of social practice.
Contradiction and dialectics rule on the surface of today's events in North Africa and the Middle East, and not just in the depths like everywhere else. It's quite conceivable that a military intervention can be more democratic than an elected official's actions. For instance, a case can be made that the military interventions of Chavez were more democratic and proved so in the long term than the formally democratic actions of the US administrations of recent decades... not to mention the formally undemocratic actions of these same US administrations
Judging events in Egypt by the standard of democratic elections (a most elastic and slippery standard!) at the moment is political and historical myopia.

Discussing the same question on a mailing list, I commented:

The problem - as we can see in the US - is democracy in daily action, not so much the formalities of election. The better the daily dose of democracy, the better elections will work. Formal democracy is an indispensable social decision-making tool where the realities of power and consensus permit it. 

In most countries today the realities of class (or other mass social grouping's) power are contentious or becoming so, and consensus is flying (or has flown, or has always been) out of the window, which means that democratic formalities provide no solution for smooth social functioning. When this happens only coercion will work, and this means violence, and "bodies of armed men" to exercise it - as Engels defined the state.

In North Africa and the Middle East (NAME) today we are seeing (as in so many other places before) a living example of the brokering of social power between mass groupings of social interests (classes, strata, etc) and armed bodies. During such a transitional revolutionary period (think of the French Revolution) formalities take second place and the working out of the various contradictions and antagonisms can take years.

In NAME we have the further powerful influence of events and solutions (or unresolved crises) in neighbouring and distant but involved countries.

The Weimar republic is a good example of this process - one that went wrong as far as democracy in the sense of rule in the interests of the mass of the people is concerned. October 1917 is another good example, where the outcome was right - until the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy was able to seize power while the situation was still in post-revolutionary flux. 

The NAME revolutions are still unfolding, so it's pointless to hope for any formal solution soon. What should emerge eventually, unless we get the formal stasis ("peace of the graveyard") of totalitarian dictatorship or its imperialist comprador equivalent, will be a situation where the most powerful group/class is in undisputed control of power, economic decision-making and social levers of cohesion (media/propaganda). Then sufficient consensus will have been achieved and formal mechanisms for election and the exercise of social power will function smoothly. 

What to do when they smack us down

The following was posted on Facebook:

S M

aren't these companies supposed to obtain permits before they can proceed to fracking? shouldn't those permits detail the hazards the local population will be exposed to? when are we going to consider the precautionary principle?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/fracking-moratorium-urged-by-u-s-doctors-until-health-studies-conducted.html

Fracking Moratorium Urged as Doctors Call for Health Study

www.bloomberg.com

The U.S. should declare a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in populated areas until the health effects are better understood, doctors said at a conference on the drilling process.

I commented:

S - just asking questions like this isn't enough. The answer is "of course", followed by "so???". They've got to have their power to disregard humanity (and the world) removed, by force if necessary. They *never* hesitate to use force to further their ends. One example should be enough to demonstrate this: the US-engineered Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 - copper. They use force (preferably the threat of force, but that's just icing on the cake) to keep us and our interests out of power. When did you ever see an election where power over the economic structure of society was an issue? Or if there was, where it was allowed to take place, or if it still did, where the result was allowed to stand? Or, if the result stood, where the issue wasn't finally decided by force? Again Latin America provides a myriad examples. "If voting could change the system, it would be illegal." When they butcher and torture our families and friends and destroy our communities, it doesn't help to stand by and weep. Libya. Syria.




S M responded:

i hear you. is there a peaceful way, though?

I replied:

Nope. Never has been. No system has changed without the violent ejection of those profiting from it. Today we have a big problem. Previous system revolutions have started piecemeal - you could see a tide rising around the rocks - like the welling capitalist enclaves under slavery (in Rome say) and in the bourgeois city-states of Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Today the bourgeois capitalist system is entrenched worldwide and has to be overcome on a world scale - this is a much greater challenge. This doesn't mean every country all at once - the October Revolution and the post-ww2 revolutions showed us that. But capitalism will keep savaging humanity until the non-capitalist socialist system dominates the world economy. If previous oppressive systems were rocks swallowed up by a tide, capitalism is a pressure cooker (goatskin bottle) that will explode from the pressure building up inside it. The better the precision we use in cutting our way out, the less destructive the explosion will be. Which means that the more we know about this process, the better our chances - both of getting out and in fact of surviving at all as a civilized species.