[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how different types of democracy have not upheld HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com.
The term Liberal Democracy promoted by the mass media is used for everything but what is fundamental: guaranteeing the self-government of the people
1. What do liberal democracies actually mean? A type of political regime based on the predominance of a solid financial, business and landowning oligarchy that does not recognize the political and organizational autonomy of the working classes and rejects class conflict. It pretends to make Capitalism and democracy compatible, but without regulating the markets and without recognizing the autonomy of the working classes. Therefore, there is a substantial contradiction between Capitalism-with-its-logic-of-power and a-democratically-organized-society.
And then there is Social Democracy
2. Social Democracy has no real identity; it adapts itself to hegemonic neoliberal globalization. Its role has been a) to accept neoliberalism as the only possible horizon, b) to depoliticize the economy, and c) to impose a limited and subaltern type of democracy that fragments popular sovereignty, weakens the contractual power of the working classes and erodes the strength of trade unions.
3. What then remains of democracy here? Actually only a set of formal procedures for electing the political class, for submitting to an increasingly nominal constitution with a predominance of economic-financial rules that the elected elites impose. This democracy is no longer our democracy (the one that stands for human rights); it is an oligarchic democracy, a democracy directed and submitted to the economic-financial and media powers.* This is the territory of true political confrontation; for this, clear ideas, program and organized social force are required. (Manolo Monereo)
*: Philanthropy falls under this category. Philanthropy (especially philanthrocapitalism a-la-Gates) keeps repeating patterns that are otherwise rooted in oppression. If we want a philanthropy that is transformative, we need to pass on the decision-making power along with the money. Otherwise, we will be stuck in Philanthropic Colonialism where donors keep the agenda setting power to themselves. Unrestricted money allows philanthropic organizations to do what they really want to do –and money brings access and can shift power dynamics –in the wrong direction. People of wealth are often at the decision-making tables and have access to spaces that people with less privilege do not have. So, it is about shifting the quality of the money given… (Ise Bosch and Claudia Bollwinkel)
Democratic Socialism, then?
4. When asking for more democracy only becomes a discussion about the number of people who vote in elections, we are face-to-face with the first damage to the sovereignty of the people. Democracy must also be expressed in material, social and human rights (HR) changes in each country. Most likely, if the proponents of a Democratic Socialism continue to act as ‘experts of the state’, the lack of democracy will not only override any progress in HR, but will override the entire left and anti-neoliberal forces of the country: i,e., finally, a gain for the extreme right…* (Primera Piedra)
*: The extreme right is growing globally mainly to safeguard their or others thriving business; their militants are driven and financed by the same interests that meet in Davos. In the 1930s, they were much more afraid of communism than of fascism. So, beware: today, without the communist threat, they fear the revolt of the impoverished masses and propose violent police and military repression as their primary response. (Boaventura de Sousa Santos).
And then there is repression in self-proclaimed democracies
5. When a democracy (of any of the kinds above) only prevails under conditions of repression, it is both an affirmation of strength and of weakness. It shows that it has more encouragement to survive against all odds than to flourish. The truth is that, in the long run, it will only survive if it flourishes. And this requires policies with a different logic –undoubtedly susceptible to generate conflicts among them. Only thus will it flourish. When a democracy prevails by resolving conflicts, this is an affirmation of strength. It shows that it has the courage to flourish. Added to the contemporary conflict is the action of a lumpen-capitalism, legal and illegal, racial and sexist, that persists at the base of the economy –a resentful base that colludes with the top of the pyramid and with the usurers in the corridors of corrupt and tax-evading financial capital. Therefore, democratic coexistence will have to coexist in parallel with proponents of these anti-democratic, coup-prone clandestine forces whose persistence shows that it has allies in the Armed Forces, in the security forces and in the dark forces of Capital. (B. de Sousa Santos) …an uphill struggle for the upper hand…
Bottom line: Democracy is the religion of the past
-We continue to practice democracy on Sundays and at Christmas under the ballot box tree. But few believe in it anymore. It is the dead god of modernity that survives. (Ulrich Beck)
-Let’s face it: If voting were to change anything, it would have been banned a long time ago. (Coluche, French comedian)
6. To begin with, US elites do not believe in democracy. The US is not even a democracy in the limited sense of one-person-one-vote under the ballot box tree. Actually, many elites, the world over, do not believe in democracy. They accept militarism and, at the same time advocate-for and sell democracy: a clear oxymoron. (Alberto Portugheis) [Moreover, in the international realm and historically, an aggressive unilateralism has characterized what some have called ‘the US’s force diplomacy’. (John Saxe-Fernandez)].
7. True democracy must be more social than institutional, more creative and dynamic than ordering and prescribing. The dark face of exclusion (or of hierarchical and selective inclusion) makes it clear that economic, social and cultural rights operate as mere devices of power and representation of the establishment. The bad thing is that HR have become increasingly privatized. Nowadays, it is not citizenship and society that constitute a challenge to HR, but rather it is their apathy that cracks the legitimacy of such rights. (Giorgio Solimano).
7. Mind you: Although in democracy there are no internal enemies but only adversaries, the truth is that, insidiously, external enemies negatively influence internal adversaries in a so-called democracy. Therefore, their voices must be neutralized. [Take parliaments; there, the conservative forces dominate political initiatives, while left-wing forces, disoriented or lost in ideological labyrinths or incomprehensible electoral calculations, revolve around a paralyzing and incomprehensible defensive strategy. Hence, surreptitiously, the extreme-right moves-in with the pretense of fighting ‘in the name of democracy‘]. (B. de Sousa Santos)
8. It is thus time to ask, without fear, if people in non-democracies are really made of iron to bear so many sorrows and mortifications. To ask if the time has not come to finally allow us an instant of rebellion, the instant so often longed-for and so often postponed of abandoning resignation and, once and for all, acting. And, I am not saying it; Alexis de Tocqueville said it: “The people always have the last defense of revolutions”. There is an indispensable, imprescriptible, inalienable and unpostponable task, which consists in giving back to the people the benefit of democracy with its HR dividends. (Louis Casado)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
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