Democracy - a Chilean Journalists critique

DEMOCRACY?

Democracy, that liberal bourgeois promise, objectively no longer has any hint of reality. The freedom to choose rulers and legislators is not consistent with a real, full, substantive freedom. Although under normal conditions we can choose who to vote for and what to buy, capitalism does not allow the vast majority to choose to stop working, to stop selling their own talent and skills, freeing them from the conditions imposed by the buyer. Since the dawn of capitalism, we have known that the freedom of choice for non-owners is incomplete and formal: in order to live, they are obliged to renounce the free use of their life time and sell a significant fraction of it to the capital that consumes it to realize your own freedom. Worse still in 21st century capitalism.

The evidence shows that formal political institutions tend to be neutralized or captured by a nucleated sphere outside the State, by business corporations and the think tanks financed by them, which de facto constitute a political power insofar as they can exert a determining influence. on economic policies and internal public order. Key macroeconomic variables such as the interest rate, the exchange rate or the price level, can in fact be altered by investment decisions, purchase or sale of papers or capital movements of some of the main business groups. And it goes without saying when they act together, intentionally, for example, in the face of sectoral reforms such as the fishing law -signed by Longueira.but entered by the seven families-, the setting of royalty to the exploitation of natural resources, the tax on the rich or the campaigns against withdrawals and the closed defense of the AFPs. It is a displacement of real power made possible by the hyper-centralization and concentration of capital that tends to balance or exceed the relative weight of public institutions in many areas, installing a quasi “bourgeois dual power” against and / or in collusion with the State. . This de facto political power - a sibylline machine that digits ex ante the policies and decisions of the executive or legislative technocracy - is opposed to the de jure political power.and it makes democracy a mockery for the majority of voters who honestly believe in the discourse of the citizen and the citizenry. So what democracy are they calling us to defend? Defend this mockery? from https://www.elciudadano.com/columnas/chile-segunda-vuelta-cunde-el-panico-en-la-granja/12/11/