One of my hobby-horses is that many forms of voting give voters a choices, but in the main, only preferential systems enable one to choose the choices. But more of that later. My view is that democracy and capitalism cannot work anyway, unless voters who exploited by the capitalists, or more generally - exploited, get a share of the swag from exploiting external groups, e.g. the Third World.
In effect, workers in Britain will support a Loyal Opposition (or Government) as long as they exploit the Third World more than they are exploited by their own bosses. We might call people in such a position net exploiters. Now democracy is relevant to philosophy, partly because of ethical issues, and partly because any hypotheses concerning its viability should be able to be tested scientifically. In ethical terms, we might say that democracy is the collective counterpart of the freedom to do as one wishes provided others do not suffer. In practice the proviso is not embedded in any democratic procedure, and checks and balances such as international law have very imperfect procedures to enforce them
In terms of hypotheses, can we test it, and if not, how do we respond? I am going to take the view that we cannot test it: alongside developed countries that in some way directly exploit the Third World, such as the United States, and many EU countries, probably not Greece, we have countries such as those of Scandinavia and New Zealand which for the sake of argument achieve their prosperity by favourable trade terms with the exploiting countries. We might call these countries secondary exploiters.
So unless we have shining examples of democratic capitalist countries that are not prosperous through trade with the exploiting countries - primary or secondary - we cannot refute this hypothesis. I think the hypothesis is a very reasonable one, and as a result we cannot condemn say communist countries for human rights violations from a position of moral superiority. My view is that left-wingers can rightly say "ah but this is all a hypothesis", but they must also show they are trying to make it wrong. They can address the problem without saying their voters are net exploiters!
And I think that secondary exploiters exist within society as well as in international trade. People like me who have provided professional services to capitalists in their working lives, whom the capitalists wish to take their side in industrial disputes. And when it comes to the crunch, they will side with the capitalists rather than the workers, both industrially and politically. Probably they form the backbone of the LibDems, though perhaps LibDem candidates are unlikely to suggest this. And this comes back to my original hobby-horse: with preferential voting I choose as my highest preference candidates who are the least exploitative, but still indicate I prefer Labour to Tory. Tories might say they prefer they too wish to prefer the 'least exploitative candidates', those who stand up to trade unionists and/or scroungers, but in the final analysis they prefer Tory to Labour.
Martin Prior
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Democracy' Issue 41
