The common belief shared almost universally
even by the most trenchant critics of “liberal democracy” is that it is the
legislative arm of the State – the Legislature or Parliament or Congress – that
determines the political direction of a country and its people; and that the
Executive (the bureaucracy or public administration) merely executes or
implements what is decided by the Legislature. And it is an even more ingrained
belief that this political will emanates directly from “the electorate” through
the election of political “representatives” to the Legislature or Parliament.
And, as we know, this political will is expressed through an electoral process
that is monopolised by political parties.
What few understand, however, is the simple
truth that even the political organisation of electoral parties must conform to
strict “constitutional guarantees” that allow the Deep State (the bureaucracy
or, if you wish, “the system”) to control the constitution of political parties
– their membership, their charters and programs, their funding. Even before it begins
to formulate its political program, therefore – indeed, right from its political
birth and inception – a political party must conform to the organisational
rules laid out by the Deep State in the Constitution. Remember that, as Carl
Schmitt incessantly reminded us, the Constitution sets out the rules – but it does not tell us who precisely is the
person who decides! In other words, there are two levels at which the Deep
State controls the outcome of elections and the implementation of the so-called
“political will of the people”. The first level is by setting out strict rules
– the strictest possible because they are legislated in the Constitution – with
which all political participants and parties must comply. Indeed, as we know,
many constitutions either explicitly or implicitly institute political parties
as being already part and parcel of the Constitution itself! In other words,
even before political parties can express the will of their members, they are
already obliged to play “by the rules”!
But the second
level of control is that even though the rules are set out clearly in writing
since the Code of Hammurabi or the Roman Decalogue, the reality remains that
the Constitution does not prescribe who
precisely will decide upon the rules and – most important – on their
“exception”! The constitutional rule is ultimately dependent both for its interpretation (the Judiciary) and for
its enforcement (the Police or the
Army) upon the decision of a particular person or group of persons! This
means that the bourgeoisie is always able from the outset to determine the
outcome of “the parliamentary game” by sheer virtue of the fact that its own
members occupy the offices of political power in the Deep State!
Of course, once political parties succeed
in having their “candidates” elected to the institutions prescribed by the
Constitution – and most specifically to Parliament -, then the candidates
elected, the “electoral or party representatives”, are even more constrained
and bound by the parliamentary rules set out in the Constitution! One thing is
for an elected representative to get to Parliament; it is quite another once
that “representative” gets to Parliament – because once in Parliament the
representative can no longer simply represent the electorate or party that got
her or him elected but must indeed first and foremost represent the
Constitution! He or she must be bound by the myriad rules laid out either in
the Constitution and in all its instrumentalities. Essentially, a
representative or member of parliament must act always “in the interests of the
nation” – which is to say, in the interests of the persons who already are the
guardians of the Constitution, which is to say, in the interests of the Deep
State as it is constituted by the bourgeoisie!
It is not the case that the bureaucracy of the
Deep State is impersonated or embodied by functionaries selected at random or indiscriminately from the body of the population – from the body
politic. As everyone knows, the selection of the bureaucracy is almost
exclusively decided by the existing bureaucracy – and this bureaucracy goes
back to the early establishment of modern bourgeois parliamentary regimes. This
is a way of saying that the old Absolutist State, the Ancien Regime, never truly died: it simply metamorphosed into the
present-day State bureaucracy, into the Deep State. The Parliaments that the
bourgeoisie established since the American and French Revolution, and since the
earlier English Revolution with Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament – these
parliaments had the paramount and indispensable function of absorbing and neutralising the conflicts and contradictions and antagonisms existing
in our societies provoked predominantly by the sheer violence and brutality of
the bourgeoisie, by its domination over the rest of society. And the
bourgeoisie achieved this aim, albeit reluctantly, through its co-optation of
social antagonism by means of the institutions of parliament and ultimately of
the political parties.
Indeed, it is a historical fact that the
organisation of working-class parties themselves – the European
social-democratic parties and Labor parties – quite faithfully mirrored the
bureaucratic organisation of the bourgeois Deep State because, once the
“elected representative leaders” of these parties joined the Parliaments it was
impossible for them even to begin to govern and legislate without complying
with and strictly adhering to the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the
bourgeois Deep State. As we have seen with greater intensity and frequency
recently, political parliamentary representatives are invariably torn between
formulating and promoting their political “mandates”, on one side, and then winning
over the co-operation of the existing bureaucracy in order to implement them!
Almost invariably, elected representatives
find that by the time they attempt to implement their mandates the bourgeois
bureaucracy – empowered by the constitution – bluntly forces them to restate
and indeed recant and renounce their original “democratic mandates”. To the
degree that the democratic mandate of parliamentary representatives has to be
translated into the rules of the parliamentary game and then be made to fit
into the straitjacket of bureaucratic execution – by that time any
“transformational” and indeed “revolutionary” or even “democratic” content that
these mandates had is totally lost in the bureaucratic maze!
The Deep State – the bureaucratic Executive
– thus has the power to neuter and defeat any conflictual and antagonistic
content that the bourgeois constitutional electoral process might have placed
in motion. As one droll but piercingly accurate anarchist motto has it, “if
elections could change anything, they would be outlawed!” This histrionic motto
in fact quite accurately and brilliantly summarises the reality that
“elections” (parliamentary democracy) are entirely dependent on “the
constitution” (the deep State) which ensures that elections cannot change the
Constitution erected by the bourgeoisie: - quite simply because such a change -
and not this or that insignificant policy, fruit of the squabbling between
political parties and politicians – would clearly amount to the most serious
crime! There is no crime more serious in a constitutional democracy than any
attempt to change the Constitution! The Constitution is sacrosanct to the
bourgeoisie not because it contains the infamous “democratic guarantees”
idolised by Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville or Edmund Burke, but
simply because these “guarantees” are the foundations of bourgeois domination
over the entire nation and its population! They are “guarantees” – in other
words, they are legal rules independent of the democratic will of the society,
and specifically of the working class – that do not emanate from the society
itself but – as the word “guarantee” suggests – from a pre-existing “constituted
power”! Modern bourgeois capitalist regimes adamantly and rigorously and
violently proscribe any and all attempts at “constituent power”!
In the “parliamentary game”, the sheer
connivance of political parties in the bolstering of the Deep State is starkly
evidenced by the phrase “Her Majesty’s loyal opposition”. The concept of “loyal
opposition” clearly illustrates and demonstrates how the “alternation” of
political parties in forming governments is entirely subordinated to
maintaining the status quo embodied in the Constitution and administered by the
Deep State! The “loyal opposition” to which all political parties must subject
themselves under the Constitution demonstrates the ultimate supremacy and
pre-eminence of constituted power
over constituent power – of the
status quo over any revolutionary velleity by the antagonistic movement; it
represents the forswearing and abjuration by political parties of any activity
that may challenge the established constitutional order. (For a revealing
exposition of the historical development of political “opposition” parties in
the United States, see R. Hofstadter, The
Idea of A Party System. For Europe, see our already cited M. Duverger, Les Partis Politiques.)
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