history of authoritarian control

history of authoritarian control
(Coordinator Comment)

The authoritarian control associated with the culture of war has continued from the beginning of recorded history up until the present time. There were many extreme cases during the 20th Century with Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union being among the most brutal. The list of dictatorial regimes is extensive and applies to all regions of the world. These regimes have been associated with all the aspects of the culture of war including use of enemy images, intensive armament and military training, control of the mass media with propaganda and secrecy, violations of human rights, prison labor camps and male domination.

At the same time there have been powerful movements of democratization, including both violent revolutions (which have usually produced new authoritarian regimes) and nonviolent revolutions such as those in South Africa, Eastern Europe and the Philippines.

Does this mean that the nation states of the world are turning away from the culture of war and towards a culture of peace? Some would answer this in the affirmative. Many political scientists have claimed that in recent times, "democracies do not make war on other democracies".

Despite the shortcomings of the analysis that "democracies do not make war on other democracies" it reflects an important advance of consciousness towards a culture of peace. It can be restated in the form "When bourgeois democracies want to make war on other bourgeois democracies, they are forced to do so in secret because their citizenry would not approve it."

But are democracies really democratic? In favor of democracy, voting rights have gradually been extended over the course of centuries.

But we should take seriously the Marxist critique made over a century ago by Lenin in The State and Revolution. He begins by quoting Kautsky that “the modern representative state is an instrument of exploitation of wage-labor by capital." and he goes on to say that bourgeois democracy is the "best possible political shell for capitalism"

One cannot help but recognize that wealth continues to determine most "democratic" elections. This comes at a moment of history when nothing is more evident than the increasing gap between rich and poor, both within and between nations.

The Marxist critique is also supported by the fact that democratic elections are aborted or overthrown by the major powers when governments are elected that do not support the international capitalist class. Hence, when socialists were elected in Chile under President Allende, the United States government joined with international capitalist enterprises such as IT&T to subvert the government and bring to power the military dictatorship of Pinochet. When Islamists were elected in Algeria in 1992, European states tacitly supported a military coup to overturn the election results. Since Hamas scored an electoral victory in Palestine at the beginning of 2006, the Europeans, Americans and Israelis have done everything possible to ensure that they could not govern. Although denied by the United States, many people around the world are convinced by the evidence that a recent coup d'état was supported by the Americans to overthrown the election results in Venezuela that brought Hugo Chavez to power.

Perhaps most important of all, there is no pretext in the capitalist states that economic decisions are made with democratic participation. Elected congresses and parliaments do not interfere in the "internal matters" of the capitalist enterprise which, after all, is where the exploitation and transfer of wealth occurs both within the country concerned and abroad.

Finally, democracy cannot function if the electorate is not aware of what its elected officials are doing? An increasing proportion of government actions are cloaked in secrecy, under claims of "national defense".

It is important to distinguish between democracy at the level of the state and democracy at the local level. Very often, at the local level, there is much more citizen participation and free flow of information. For this, and other related reasons, it can be said that at the present moment of history local government is much closer to a culture of peace, while the state is more engaged in the culture of war.