Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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democratic participation and public control: decisions about investment,
the nature and conditions of productive work, and so on. These are
among the reasons why capitalism and democracy are incompatible, if
by “democracy” we mean a system of genuine popular participation in
determining the conditions of social life.
In an important study of American political history, Thomas Ferguson
observes that
The prerequisites for effective democracy are not really automatic
voter registration or even Sunday voting, though these would help.
Rather, deeper institutional forces—flourishing unions, readily
accessible third parties, inexpensive media, and a thriving network
of cooperatives and community organizations—are the real basis
of effective democracy.
Even high voter turnout, which does not exist in the US, would mean
very little in itself: “To assess the meaning of voting in such situations, a
hard look is vital at the resources available to individual voters to form
and express an opinion—and above all to participate in secondary
organizations.” In these respects, he notes, “the American experience
has been less than edifying.” 1 Once again, the point is simply fortified
when we consider the vast range of essential decision-making over
general social life that is excluded in principle from the system of formal
democracy.
Business and the political system it has controlled since the earliest
days is, not surprisingly, hostile to meaningful democracy; in fact, any
such prospect has regularly been regarded as a serious danger by US
elites, either in the US itself or in its dependencies.
In the dependencies, the threat of meaningful democracy can be
suppressed by violence, and often is. El Salvador is a case in point. As