marxism-digest V1 #6160 ["democracy means people are equal"]

[M. Junaid Alam]

"Democracy means people are equal.

In democracy, there is no political process, as people are equal.
...
There is never any justification for opposing the democracy ~ peoples'
rule.
The kind of stupid game playing that is seen above is the train ticket
to
the Gulags.  Slavery-free undemocracy is not slavery-free.  Have you
never
heard of wage slavery?  The favellas of Brazil?  If you don't think wage
work is slavery, you are outside Marx's conception of the world.
Slavery
still.

Democracy is a heart beat away from socialism.  No wonder classical
Athens
was in permanent crisis (the stasis, as the histories say), with
democracy
yet a class system and inequality.

How could Capitalist private property survive one month of true
democracy?

Democracy and socialism are parallel concepts."
====

I'm sorry Richard, that's about the most inane stuff I've read in a
while. In democracy there is no political process? Because...people are
equal? Slavery and wage-slavery are identical? D & S are parallel
concepts? What the hell kind of abstract sloganeering is all this?

Nestor was referring to the simple fact that the editor slipped in
"undemocratic" Mexico as an insidious pretext for it being A-OK to
invade, completely glossing over the slave-based society underpinning
his own nation. How the hell did you get from that to "the train ticket
to the Gulags?"

Sounds like a case of acute liberal infection to me; wanting to inject
abstract "democracy"--for "the people", of course--into the definition
of socialism in order to appeal to the indecisive and the insecure with
images of Evil Stalin dancing in their heads, trampling upon all
rational thought on political issues.