[TLDR (too long didn’t read): This Reader is about how we have come to a point where democracy is without democrats and citizens are without rights. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text].
The great neoliberal consensus of the 1990s is now broken
1. We are in a breaking point of history, because the marriage between the market economy and representative democracy has ended in divorce, has broken; the two have distanced themselves from each other. We now have a not-really-democratic-monied-class prone to use violence* in order to contain the ‘dangerous classes’ (i.e., claim holders increasingly demanding). (Alvaro Garcia Linera)
*: Over-and-over, experience tells us that the political Right is no good for democracy or for human rights (HR); it rather uses democracy when convenient and discards it, sometimes violently, when inconvenient. (Boaventura Sousa Santos)
2. But it is not only the monied class that uses violence; occasionally, the-excluded-who-cannot-take-it-anymore use violence too. Actually, violence has served to topple dictatorships and corrupt regimes. But it has not served to bring about free and HR-respecting democratic societies, as it has often been tragically demonstrated. Civic protest is and will always be legitimate in a democracy, but not so violence that destroys and keeps people from demonstrating peacefully.** (Fernando Ayala)
**: Mind you though: Democracy has only ever advanced through the revolt and reforms demanded by the excluded, and it is thus premised on a political outlook grounded in the hope for a better, though perhaps never fully realizable, future. (Wendy Brown)
The world is engaged in a great ideological struggle between democracy and autocracy (Joe Biden)
3. Less democratic regimes are more likely to use nationalism. They are more in need to shore up legitimacy, especially when economies fail to perform, and they are more able to direct public opinion. Furthermore, modern autocracies feel compelled to fraudulently perform at the ballot box –while some un-democratic governments do not even have elections. Exalting nationalism thus offers an easy and dangerous way out. (–wither HR…) Considering the link between authoritarianism, populism and nationalism, these phenomena need to be considered jointly. (Florian Bieber)
4. Since the 1970s, we are observing a direct attack against democracy.*** Its objective: push citizenry to depoliticize and to de-ideologize the decision-making processes in public affairs. Its logic: the extension of democratic rights puts capitalism at risk; too much public participation makes democracy un-governable. So, democracy itself became/becomes the problem. Since then, slowly (or not so slowly…), democratic rights have been eroded. The neoliberal takeover succeeded in its objective and reformed the state disjoining it from democracy as a way of life in society.
***: In 1975, the Trilateral Commission (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilateral_Commission) declared that democracy was overloaded due to ‘an excess of rights’. This was in a direct attack against the economic, social and cultural rights, as well as against the social-democratic parties of the day. (B. de Sousa Santos)
Democracies without democrats and citizens without citizens’ rights (Marcos Roitman)
-Things being what they are today, a well-organized country is one in which a minority makes the majority work and feed them –while it governs them. (Voltaire)
5. ‘Market democracies’ have no room for deep ethical concerns or the consideration of egalitarian and HR values. Applied to the most vulnerable, social justice is abandoned, because it distorts the laws of the market and is definitively not part of democracy under capitalist tutelage. (M. Roitman)
Be critical when there is no progress, but also when there is
6. ‘Liberal (representative?) Democracy’ is to the ideal of a democracy like the GNP is to true happiness of the people. Liberal democracy may be important, but not sufficient and most of the time leads to problems along the way. Criticizing liberal democracy may be rude or ugly, but this only because the reality we criticize is ugly. Trying to do away with/ignore real hard facts, only because reality is ugly and painful leads to a dead end. (B. de Sousa Santos)
Liberal Democracy continues to function as an ideological illusion, as a ‘theater of the absurd’
-While real democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. (Amanda Gorman)
7. Liberal Democracy further fails to provide fair social relations and surrenders to technocratic management and considerations. Social institutions have become prisoners of the safety technology purports to offer, uncritically accepting whatever technical expert knowledge provides and using it as the only justification for political decision-making; this only binds democracy to an untenable status-quo. We need to do things differently. So, an activist model of democratic self-government can and must also be worked out particularly using the option coming from the HR perspective. (Duncan Kelly, Ulrich Beck)
8. Bottom line? To live in a real democracy, we have to demand and actively claim for it. (Humberto Maturana) From now on, democratizing our societies is to mean: de-mercantilizing, de-colonizing, de-patriarchializing and HR proofing them. (B. de Sousa Santos)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–Democracy cannot be exported in armored vehicles. (Jacques Chirac)
-The United States of America are a country that transitioned directly from barbarity to decadence without ever having known civilization (Oscar Wilde)