Posted by david searles on December 11, 2008 at 21:30:18:
In Reply to: Re: Think Democracy! posted by David Searles on December 11, 2008 at 11:38:38:
An SLP statement in 1915 comparing the SLP position to that of the SP
position. The given reason that the political govt. must be
eliminated (as opposed to I suppose a binary system of
political/industrial govt.) is exceedingly weak - that given the
large numbers of the population that a legislature of a political
govt. cannot be a representative body but a deliberative body!
+++++++++++++++++
It is not the function of political government to
administer production. Its chief function is to maintain
"order," which, in capitalist society, means to keep
in subjection the modern slave class — the wage
worker. Political government — the State — rose upon
the ruins of primitive communal society, formed and
directed obedient to the new basis of society, that of
private property, which synchronously gave rise to class
rule, and since then political government has been and
is allied with the interests of the ruling class. And as
further proof of the fact that the political government
has outlived its usefulness and become, instead, an
encumbrance upon the productive forces of modern
industrial society, we point to the fact that since the
theory of a true, representative democracy is based
upon proportional representation, and since, with the
rapid increase in the population the representative body
would become so large as to make it anything but a
deliberative body, it would put society to the alternative,
either to abolish the idea of democratic government,
by fixing the number of representatives arbitrarily,
in short a government no longer having a true
basis of representation; or on the other hand continue
to increase the number of representatives in proportion
to the increase in population, making this body,
as already said, so large as to defeat the very idea of
representative bodies — namely, to assemble in one
place for the purpose of deliberating and discussing.
Whichever horn of this dilemma the pure and simple
politicalist choose, he will be running his head against
the wall.
Instead the Socialist Labor Party proposes to organize
the useful producers of the land in industrial
unions. Thus, for instance, the workers of the textile
industry would organize into one industrial union,
with the local union as a basis. These local unions will
be composed of all the actual wage workers in a given
industry in a given locality, welded together in trade
or shop branches, or as the particular requirements of
said industry may render necessary.
Delegates from these local industrial unions from
the various localities in America in a given industry
will form a national industrial union, and the delegates
of National Industrial Unions of closely kindred industries
will form an Industrial Department, these industrial
departments, represented in a General Executive
Board, constituting the industrial government,
answering in a sense to the present government and
House of Representatives. All that is outlined here may
be modified or elaborated as special conditions require.
http://marxists.kgprog.com/history//usa/parties/slp/1915/0000-slp-
socialistmovement.pdf