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Indybay Feature

Crisis of Representative Democracy

by Dogwood Oversnow
The United States' representative democracy is in another huge crisis. So what's new, you say?
Our governmental bodies are failing us, and what I am learning is that this is the kind of crisis that you get over and over in a capitalist system, even one that has elections, representatives, and democracy.
Shall we go on waiting for this system to change, working to get our "representatives" to help us?
This brief article is attempting to encourage others to acquire, through classes and education, a solid foundation in social change dynamics in order to understand why we can not get real fundamental change in the United States. We need to study. For starters, we can begin with the question, what is our political economy, what forms and structures really constitutes the state in the United States?

Other topics of study are related to this first question, and line of inquiry. What is this governmental and political system we are stuck in? How do we get real change? These topics can be studied and knowledge can be acquired. There is a qualifier here though, one must study with people who actually deeply want change, and are capable of thinking deeply and philosophically using critical analysis.

What is critical is that we study with the teachers who are not only genuinely interested in real change, but those who are willing and able to think critically enough to really question the forms and structures that we are otherwise taught are "the best", and are natural and even organic. In other words, we must be with professors who can think out of the box, and critically. Real change, I am learning, late in life, will never happen just by getting "different people in office" in the United States.

Recently, I began to study social change at University and I am beginning to recognize that if these courses had been accessible to me earlier in my life, I may have saved a great deal of time, and studied social change and critical theory much earlier. The purpose of this article is exactly to encourage other people to not expect any real or truly lasting change from our system in the governmental forms in which it currently exists, or from schools or curriculum that do not care to really analyze and challenge our system. Do not study from people who do not think that that we could have something better than what we have now. So, what do we have now?

I had hoped our country would rise to the occasion of climate change and seriously begin to move to renewable energy structures years ago. I have hoped for four decades that I would live to see many other kinds of changes, and I worked very hard for change as an activist. Only, I did not know any real theory of social change. I worked from a passionate place of "belief", instead of systematic analysis and critical theory.

I had hoped that we would not target Muslims after "we", the United States further destabilized the Middle East by invading Iraq and other countries. Of course, I could go on and on listing these crushing disappointments that I have had to reckon with in my lifetime. We do have movements that are working effectively for change such as the, "Black Lives Matter" movement, the protests at Standing Rock, and the recent Women's March and much more. However, we are running out of time.

These examples I just named are crucially important, but we need change of a different order or we will continue to be the cat that was stuck constantly chasing it's tail. It will not really change anything much in the end, if we are left with a dying planet, and that will happen if we are left with the kind of representative system of government that we have, this so called, "democracy", and it exists within the political economic framework we currently have. Unfortunately, I found out too late, and only stumbled toward these kinds of theoretical and critical studies of social change in recent years. I hope other people are able to get this education as a matter of curriculum and access which I was, essentially, denied, because they are not easy to find in the United States.

Of course, I was denied this, essentially as a matter of course by the type of "state" in which I live.
I am not talking about the state, as in the one of the fifty states, but the state that exists to keep our kind of system in place. Educating people to understand the system is required for real change, and this change is what we need if we are to seriously address climate change and so much more, such as racism, which is created and tolerated and wielded in our type of political economy, in order to keep it, the political economy, "in place".

We do need a system change. A priority we might establish is to create, on a mass scale, the recognition that we need to be educated about the system from which we are actually seeking change, and our society, "us all", that exist within this political economy. Many of us need to be educated to the fact that our form of government delivers exactly what we are getting: repression, war, hegemony, oligarchy and rule of the few and the white and the male, while the majority are stuck in wage shackling, lack of affordable health care, poverty, and worse things than these few that I am mentioning. What kind of education could be more relevant to a human life than the one I am talking about, one that allowed us to think about what system surrounds us and includes us?

As long as we think that this form of "representation" within capitalism will work for us, us workers, us unemployed and "we" who rent, we who are getting older with no security or real help in sight, we who do not have homes, we who are people of color, we who are migrants, we who are women and we who want to be free to really be whatever gender we feel is most authentic- we will remain ignorant of the methods of change that are known. We will not even access the kinds of concepts that help us to think clearly, critically about these forms, structures and systems.

Outside the box that we are stuck in, is another kind of reality, and it can be better. In order to get something better, however, we must study what we have, and how this change for something better may come about. It is time we stopped pretending that chasing one action after another will do "the trick". It will not, we must have system change, also.

We must use analysis and critical theory, we need education by those who have studied these topics and are credentialed experts in these topics. As long as we go on believing that our government is the best that can be created, we will be stuck with it and all it delivers as a matter of course, by the fact of what it really is, the kinds of relations that constitute it, the kind of violence to truth that it engenders, and everything that follows from it's forms and structures.

There are fields of study, social change, sociology, and other classes and programs of study that exist, in which we can learn about social and political and economic change and how it happens, or does not. It is time for us to reckon with the fact that we have been stuck here for a long time. Let's recognize that we need to do something different to actually get a different result. Let's begin by studying the matters that pertain to the type of state, society and economy, and political economy we are dealing with, it is called, "capitalism" and our form of government is a kind of republic, informally called, a "democratic" state within an oligarchic form of capitalism.
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