Reinventing Democracy: by Ash Amin
If democracy means rule by the people for the people, it has broken down. All we have today is rule by elites for national and transnational elites, marked by periodic social eruptions that fail to add up to anything transformative. The elites bounce back regrouped, the protestors are silenced or appeased, and electoral victories promising radical change end up captured by vested interests. The Arab Spring has yet to bring spring to the masses, the uprisings around the world against financial capitalism and austerity have only served to strengthen ties between banks, international financial institutions and the powerful states.
The millions of people crushed by the current economic crisis and its handling by the authorities are told that their sacrifice is needed for a return to better times, while reforming governments trying to protect the less well-off rely on the approval of lenders, rating agencies, the media and powerful states. These failures of democracy are worldwide, a feature also of so-called ‘mature democracies’. People everywhere are not doing much of the governing, while those supposed to be acting on their behalf are doing nothing of the sort. The consequence is growing social misery and injustice.
Left to its own momentum, this state of affairs will end in more authoritarianism or in revolutionary breakdown. A safer option would be to renew the democratic contract, clearly an aim of little interest to self-serving elites (and parochial movements) but presumably of some attraction to political forces committed to the fair and equal society. I say ‘presumably’ because it is not clear that the established wing of these forces, for example, socialist and social democratic parties & labour unions have shown much interest of late in making common cause out of embedded social injustices or in working with the insurgent movements that daily rail against the colonisations of elite power.
In Europe, for example, what does the official left have to say on democracy, equality, justice, or the good society? Nothing. It is as though it accepts the fracture of the democratic contract, the reduction of politics to electoral posturing and populist appeasement, the inevitability (perhaps the thrill) of sitting at the table where elites and their ideologues gather, in hope of small crumbs of social reform. In the process it has become deadened, devoid of a vision of society beyond the status quo, detached from the subjects, trials and tribulations of everyday life, oblivious to political struggle and organisation beyond the rituals of corporatist management.
Because of this deficit, the insurgencies worldwide for justice (from the occupy movement to anti-war protests and popular rebellions) have no means of amplification. Nor do the many efforts to forge a better society...
