Democracy – and it is difficult to accept that in 2017 we still find ourselves having to explain this – is all about the will of the people over the ambitions of those in and behind government. The Partido Popular, the ruling party in Madrid, is a minority government that now no longer has the support of Congress for the actions it is carrying out against Catalunya. In reality what we have is a western government using military-style measures with a military police force against an apparently “illegal” act of democracy without the consent of its own parliament.
The Executive of the Modern State
Marx’s razor-sharp observation on the state as a mutual help society for the powerful decision-makers is echoed beautifully in the description of the Town Council in The Brigand’s Cave chapter of Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
Repression and the Rise of Capitalism à la Foucault
Nothing short of revolution, suggests Michel Foucault, will extricate “We other Victorians” from the polymorphous mechanisms of power which have conditioned us over millennia. The exercise of power has undergone a transformation from the feudal spectacle of the scaffold to the age of repression
Are Capitalism and Democracy Heading for a Divorce?
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and left unchecked it is difficult to see how our economic Frankenstein will not eventually turn on and destroy the democracies which have heretofore kept it in line.
Random Public Journal 