It is election time in South Africa, and typically, when we think of elections, we think of freedom and democracy. But these powerful words have merely become buzzwords, thrown around at election time with little concern for their meaning and implications.

As Antonio Gramsci noted, the ruling class maintains dominance, not exclusively through coercion or force, but also through social and cultural institutions that promote particular values, beliefs, and world views, that become common cause. The system of values that dominate society at any given epoch are and always will be the ideas of the social class that rules that society. This is the case because the class that rules society is always in charge of the major instruments and levers of power and control in the given society.

If this is true, then we need to ask what freedom and democracy mean, and how these words have been mobilised to pacify us as citizens.

Class-divided societies have this characteristic feature; the class that rules is always in the minority and the classes that are ruled constitute society’s overwhelming majority. This reality is critical in the deeper exploration of the conceptualisation of democracy.

If democracy is understood as “rule by the people”, where decisions are made by the people and for the people, then we need to ask how could democracy visit poverty, hunger and disease upon the selfsame people, as it does on a daily basis? It can only mean that the democracy whose praises are so loudly sung does not exist for the overwhelming majority, but is the preserve of the few fat cats in society who exercise control over the main means by which to create and sustain life.

This is not a democracy. American scholar Noam Chomsky’s description of US democracy has parallels to South Africa. As Chomsky states, “let’s be clear about what democracy means. In a democracy, the public influences policy and then the government carries out actions determined by the public”. Contrary to this, Chomsky argues that the US government, like many others, develops and carries out policies that benefit corporate and financial interests. This is not democracy, it is plutocracy.

Democracy and capitalism are incompatible. Under democracy, freedom is the ability to actively participate in social and political life. Under capitalism, freedom is merely the ability to participate in the market, to sell your labour. A daily wage of R20 – as happened in a recent case – is an example of this betrayal. In government and corporate eyes, we are free to sell our labour for R20 per day, but we are not free to debate, discuss, challenge, propose, or influence in any way the economic orthodoxy that produces policies that affect our lives.

Again, and whereas the meaning of full employment for those who do not own is the employment of all who are unemployed, for those who own, full employment means the employment of the unemployed only to the extent that there always remains a meaningful army of the unemployed so that it should be easy to retrench and dismiss with ease those workers no longer wanted by the owners without the threat of being worker-less.

Thus, under capitalism, full employment is not really full employment, just as freedom is not freedom and democracy is not democracy.

Though elections are an important site of the struggle, our elections are a terrain of the bourgeoisie, the cigarette smugglers and gangsters – Adriano Mazzotti’s interests are imbued in Malema’s anger and hot air, while the Ruperts of this world’s interests are imbued in Ramaphosa’s new dawn.

Democracy is meant to be the will of the masses. Elections should be part of the endless struggle against the powerful minority. For those in power, elections are merely a means to an end. They are viewed as the fora through which people can express their voices, but once concluded, people must be disciplined and must know their place. Under democracy, elections should open up the possibilities of struggle and place the government in the hands of the people.

Elections create governments that are the executive arm of the ruling class. The gains that we do witness are not because of the benevolence of the governments, but because of the painful sustained struggle of the working class; gains are achieved through the Amadiba Crisis Committee and Mining Affected Communities United in Action anti-mining struggles, the blood and the sweat of the Marikana mineworkers and communities barricading our townships to assert their humanity.

None of these struggles is part of the election euphoria.

Whereas these events should be the theatre of struggle for political parties, they are ignored. Politicians have abandoned the trenches in favour of playing politics during election time. I must confess that the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (Numsa) and the South African Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party are possible exceptions.

Numsa has been known for its long-standing and gallant struggle, and as the most democratic union. The big question for its workers’ party, the Socialist Workers’ Revolutionary Party (SWRP), is can it remain democratic, can it place the government in the hands of the workers and the people, and can it remain true to its long-standing struggle credentials?

The working class is faced with two options in this country – one is to take their CVs and NSFAS accounts to the ballot box as a form of protest against unemployment that has reached alarming levels, the second is to vote SWRP.

At its heart, the crisis of mass-unemployment must be seen as the clearest expression of the crisis of capitalism. It is the system that has failed so many people in our country, which has pushed young people to drugs and turned our communities into concentration camps.

Capitalism has eroded human life and biodiversity. We are living in a world that is a ticking time bomb due to fossil fuels. Until elections have meaning for the working class, are for the working class, about the working class and through the working class, they remain the means to keep the working class in its place.

And that is perpetual servitude. DM