Yep. Today is the last day. After today, there are no more. Tomorrow is the apocalypse. Or is that election? I've tramped up so many stairs,. spiralled down so many 20-storey tower blocks, caught my fingers so many times in letter boxes, been so cold and wet that I quite forget the difference between the two. Tomorrow I may rest.
But, not until after I've been down to the polling station to cast my write-in vote for World Socialism (SPGB)! And you, faithful reader, especially if you live in Lambeth and Southwark where you can actually cast a ballot for the Socialist Party's candidate Danny Lambert.
Remember, we are the party that makes no promises - it's you that makes the promise when you cast your vote to say "I am a socialist, I will work for common and democratic ownership and control of the wealth of the world between me and my fellow workers."
Lets see, come Friday, just how many promises we can collect, eh?
Socialist Party Election Blog : The blog by Socialists involved in Socialist Party campaigning in London Elections. For the main party website click Here
1 comment:
Socialists have no illusions about the democratic credentials of the politicians of the Left, the Right or the Centre. What the capitalist class, and the political parties that serve that class, call democracy is a contrived form of consensus in which the political parties conspire to ensure that the maximum number of people accept a system of law which guarantees a minority class in society the legal right to own and control the means of life of the great majority. To achieve and maintain that system of Law – and the Order that ensures the right of that minority to exploit and impoverish the majority – capitalism must have political control of the state machine.
A vital part of the process that maintains the illusion of democratic choice is the power to confine political knowledge – and, thus, political options – to those parties whose policies are firmly rooted in an acceptance of capitalism...
...When it comes to elections, choice is governed by information and knowledge and, since the allegedly democratic parties have ensured that the public have information about, and knowledge of, the present system and the politicians offering themselves to run this system capitalism goes unchallenged. Like Henry Ford's Model T, which was available in any colour providing it was black, current “democratic” practice is to allow us the widest possible choice as long as it is capitalism.Of course capitalist politicians and the people to whom capitalism entrusts the control of news and information will hotly dispute this... a party stating a case for an alternative way of running society would be disadvantaged, for capitalist politics, its parties and its media, are not based on rational examination of ideas but on the performance of media celebrities...
...But there is one heartening thought: unlike the parties of capitalism whose purpose is a permanent struggle, to gain power and, when power has been lost, struggle to regain it, our purpose is to make that initial breakthrough which will finally overcome the ability of capitalism's political agents to lie, confuse and misinform.
Unlike Members of Parliament elected to service capitalism, socialist delegates will not be observing parliament's meaningless rituals. When there is a majority of socialist delegates there will be no Queen's Speech, no White Papers nor any of the other shams that pass for democracy today. Just the historic announcement that capitalism has been abolished and that, henceforth, real participative democracy in the administration of social affairs, at local, regional and world levels, will obtain.
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/etheory/96-97/html/96Democracy.html
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