Can you talk about how an American democracy of false equalities and empty universals might be connected to the kind of torture, and gender diverse tortures, we witnessed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib?

The meaning lurking behind the model of “democracy” promulgated by the Bush administration is the fraudulent equality of the capitalist market, the freedom it illusively offers to all. Marx exposed long ago the profound inequalities that constitute the basis of what I still like to call bourgeois democracy. But the policies and pronouncements of the Bush administration amount to a parody of even those distortions. When democracy is reduced to the simple fact of elections- never mind that they were prepared by the mass brutality and destruction inflicted on Iraq by the US military- whatever we might consider to be freedom has disappeared. Those who present the gender and racial composition of the US military as a dramatic example of the equality offered by democracy have clearly lost sight of whatever promise democracy might hold for the future. Gender equality in the military is represented as the equal opportunity to participate in every aspect of military life, including equal opportunity to participate in the violence previous assumed to be the purview of men. This approach to equality leaves no space to challenge the status quo. The irony that women helped inflict the physical, mental, and sexual torture at Abu Ghraib is that their involvement points to the extrent to which this formal, abstract democracy has been successful in the military. When equality is measured in terms of access to repressive institutions that remain unchanged or even become strengthened by the admission of those who were previously barred, it seems to me that we need to insist on different criteria for democracy: substantive as well as formal rights, the right to be free of violence, the right to employment, housing, healthcare, and quality education. In brief, socialist, rather than capitalist conceptions of democracy.

Interview with Angela Y Davis in Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 2005. (via mashrou3-ummi)

Angela Davis had some of the best American political analysis in the 1970s, and she remains top of the fuckin’ game in the 21st century too.

(via davethebrave)