I am glad to see a variety of correspondents moving in on the legitimacy of US Democracy. From the point of view of narrow bourgeois right, the issues for litigation multiply. From a wider, materialist, perspective it is most important to expose the relative conditional nature of the sacred ideal of Democracy and bring to the fore the concrete question of which class and which interest groups in fact hold power in a political system. The sudden developing tropical storm over Florida has implications not only for the processes that control power in the US. Because of the great importance US led-finance capital has placed on imposing the bourgeois rule of law throughout the world every embarrassment for the US democratic system is an embarrassment for global finance capital. The Secretary of State for Florida, and her panel supervising the election looked very uncertain at the news conference she has just held. Not only did the conference end to a number of shouts. Well aimed questions stopped the panel in their tracks, aware of the dangers of litigation. One of the most effective appeared to be whether the order of the ballot in Palm Beach County was in conformity with the established protocol, to which there was no easy answer. Shaking the sanctity of the Electoral College, might, as has been argued on LBO talk, start a process where other aspects of the bourgeois democratic system in the US, are questioned. The Emperor does indeed need to be stripped of idealist clothing. But so far the debate appears to have been about the politics behind the electoral college - pointing to the argument that the the august Founding Fathers did not trust the people to allow them to vote directly for the president. But what is the economic significance of the Electoral College? It was presumably that rising capitalism was prepared to support a federal arrangement only to the extent that the political system retained substantial power in the local states. The federal system ensures that resources in the USA overall have to be sufficiently distributed to keep the different states engaged in the political system. (Europe has not dared face the question of directly electing the executive of the European Union. It is inherently a very difficult problem for large capitalist federations or confederations.) The effect of abandoning the Electoral College would presumably mean that neither of the two big political parties had to win economic and political support in all the states of the Union for the purposes of the presidential election. Would however the requirements of winning representation in the Senate and the House of Representatives, still be sufficient to require geographically redistributive economics? If so, the ending of the Electoral College might reduce the overall influence of capital over the presidential election but eliminate the need for the system of primaries, allow a cheaper presidential campaigning period which could be financed through state funds. It would also permit the emergence of proportional representation and preference votes so that minority candidates would be able to build up more momentum without gambling on their ability to wage a spoiling campaign against one of the bigger parties. Large Finance Capital might have no deeply rooted objection to the ending of the Electoral College because if it weakened the federal processes of redistributing capital it would facilitate a smoother internal market for the uneven accumulation of capital wherever capital was centralising most efficiently. I suggest therefore that there are a number of possibilties opening the door to constituional change in the USA which within as short a period as ten years, which could just conceivably produce a much more rational bourgeois system but one open to effective pressure from working people. I suggest that the economic effects of removing one buttress of redistributive economics would not on balance be overwhelmingly reactionary. It might actually accelerate the relative movement of population to the large conurbations, and weaken the economic and political power of the older socio-economic patterns. Capital will be divided and in some confusion about whether to continue to support the Electoral College. Working people have a greater interest in its destruction, economically and politically. It should be attacked. A hypothesis. Chris Burford London
