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<font size=4><b>The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative |
by Samir Amin <br><br>
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http://www.amandlapublishers.co.za/analysis/916-the-democratic-fraud-and-the-universalist-alternative--by-samir-amin</a>
-<br><br>
</font><font size=3>1. THE DEMOCRATIC FRAUD CHALLENGES US TO INVENT
TOMORROW’S DEMOCRACY<br><br>
Universal suffrage is a recent conquest, beginning with workers’
struggles in a few European countries (England, France, Holland, and
Belgium) and then progressively extending throughout the world. Today,
everywhere on the planet, it goes without saying that the demand for
delegating supreme power to an honestly elected, multiparty assembly
defines the democratic aspiration and guarantees its realizationor so it
is claimed.<br><br>
Marx himself put great hopes on such universal suffrage as a possible
“peaceful path to socialism.” Yet, I have noted that on this score Marx’s
expectations were refuted by history (cf. Marx et la
démocratie).<br><br>
I think that the reason for the failure of electoral democracy to produce
real change is not hard to find: all hitherto existing societies have
been based on a dual system of exploitation of labor (in various forms)
and of concentration of the state’s powers on behalf of the ruling class.
This fundamental reality results in a relative
“depoliticization/disacculturation” of very large segments of society.
And this result, broadly designed and implemented to fulfill the systemic
function expected of it, is simultaneously the condition for reproduction
of the system without changes other than those it can control and
absorbthe condition of its stability. What is called the “grass roots,”
so to speak, signifies a country in deep slumber. Elections by universal
suffrage under these conditions are guaranteed to produce a sure victory
for conservatism, albeit sometimes a “reformist” conservatism.<br><br>
This is why never in history has there been real change resulting from
this mode of governance based on “consensus” (i.e. the absence of
change). All changes tending toward real social transformation, even
radical reforms, have resulted from struggles waged by what, in electoral
terms, may appear to be “minorities.” Without the initiative of such
minorities, the motive force of society, no change is possible. Such
struggles, engaged in by such “minorities,” always end upwhen the
alternatives proposed are clearly and correctly definedby carrying along
(previously silent) majorities and may by universal suffrage receive
ratification, which arrives afternever beforevictory.<br><br>
In our contemporary world “consensus” (its boundaries defined by
universal suffrage) is more conservative than ever. In the centers of the
world-system the consensus is pro-imperialist. Not in the sense that it
implies hatred or contempt for the other peoples who are its victims, but
in the everyday sense that the permanence of the flow of imperialist rent
is accepted because that is the condition for overall social
reproduction, the guarantor of its “opulence” in contrast to the poverty
of the others. In the peripheries, the responses of peoples to the
challenge (pauperization resulting from the process of
capitalist/imperialist accumulation) is still muddled, in the sense that
they are fated always to carry with them a dose of retrograde illusions
of a return to a better past.<br><br>
In these conditions, recourse to “elections” is always conceived by the
dominant powers as the best possible way to rein in the movement, to end
the possibility that the struggles become radicalized. In 1968 some said
that “elections are for assholes,” and that view was not unconfirmed by
the facts. An elected assembly, right awayas today in Tunisia and
Egyptserves only to put an end to “disorder,” to “restore stability.” To
change everything so that nothing changes.<br><br>
So should we give up on elections? Not at all. But how to bring together
new, rich, inventive forms of democratization through which elections can
be used in a way other than is conceived by the conservative forces? Such
is the challenge.<br><br>
THE DEMOCRATIC FARCE’S STAGE SCENERY<br><br>
This stage scenery was invented by the Founding Fathers of the United
States, with the very clearly expressed intention of keeping electoral
democracy from becoming an instrument that could be used by the people to
call in question the social order based on private property (and
slavery!).<br><br>
With that in mind, their Constitution was based on (indirect) election of
a president (a sort of “elective monarch”) holding in his hands some
essential powers. Presidential election campaigns under these conditions
naturally gravitate to “bipartisanism,” which tends progressively to
become what it now is: the expression of a “single party.” Of course,
ever since the end of the nineteenth century this has represented the
interest of monopoly capital, addressing itself to “clienteles” that view
themselves as having differing interests.<br><br>
The democratic fraud then displays itself as offering “alternatives” (in
this case, the Democrats and the Republicans) that cannot ever rise to
the level required by a real alternative (offering the possibility of
new, radically different, options). But without the presence of real
alternative perspectives democracy is nonexistent. The farce is based on
“consensus”(!) ideology, which excludes by definition serious conflicts
between interests and between visions of the future. The invention of
“party primaries” inviting the whole electorate (whether its components
are said to be leftist or rightist!) to express its choices of candidates
for the two false adversaries accentuates still further that deviation so
annihilating for the meaning of elections.<br><br>
Jean Monnet, a true anti-democrat is honored today in Brussels, where his
intentions to copy the U.S. model were fully understood, as the founder
of the “new European democracy.” Monnet deployed all his efforts, which
were scrupulously implemented in the European Union, to deprive elected
assemblies of their powers and transfer them to “committees of
technocrats.”<br><br>
To be sure, the democratic fraud works without big problems in the
opulent societies of the imperialist triad (the United States, Western
Europe, and Japan) precisely because it is underwritten by the
imperialist rent (see my book The Law of Worldwide Value). But its
persuasive authority is also bolstered by the consensus “individualist”
ideology; by the respect for “rights” (themselves acquired by struggles,
as we are never told), and by the institution of an independent judiciary
(even though that of the United States is partially basedas in most of
the “sovereign” stateson elected judges who have to finance their
election campaigns by appealing to the ruling class and its
opinion-makers); and by the complex structure of the pyramidal
institutions charged with guaranteeing rights.<br><br>
Historically, continental Europe has not long experienced the calm waters
of the democratic farce. In the nineteenth century (and even up to 1945)
struggles for democracy, both those inspired by the capitalist and
middle-class bourgeoisies and those expressing the working masses, ran up
against resistance from the anciens régimes. Hence their chaotic pattern
of advances and retreats. Marx thought that such resistance was an
obstacle fortunately unknown in the United States. He was wrong, and
underestimated the extent to which, in a “pure” capitalist system (like
that of the United States in comparison to Europe) the
“overdetermination” of political processes, that is to say the automatic
conformity of changes in the ideological and political superstructure to
those required for management of society by the capitalist monopolies,
would inevitably lead to what conventional sociologists call
“totalitarianism.” This is a term that applies even more to the
capitalist imperialist world than anywhere else. (I here refer back to
what I have written elsewhere about “overdetermination” and the openings
which it makes available.)<br><br>
In nineteenth century Europe (and also, though to a lesser degree, in the
United States) the historical coalitions put together to ensure the power
of capital were, by the force of circumstancethe diversity of classes
and of sub-classescomplex and changeable. Accordingly, electoral combats
could sometimes appear to be really democratic. But over time, as the
diversity of capitalist coalitions gave way to the domination of monopoly
capital, those appearances dwindled away. The Liberal Virus (as one of my
books is titled) did the rest: Europe aligned itself more and more on the
U.S. model.<br><br>
Conflicts among the major capitalist powers helped cement the components
of the historical coalitions, bringing about, by way of nationalism, the
domination of capital. It even happenedGermany and Italy being
particularly exemplarythat “national consensus” was made to replace the
democratic program of the bourgeois revolution.<br><br>
This deformation of democracy is now virtually complete. The Communist
parties of the Third International tried in their way to oppose it, even
though their “alternative” (modeled on the USSR) remained of questionable
attractiveness. Having failed to build lasting alternative coalitions,
they ended up capitulatingsubmitting to the system of democratic
electoral farce. So doing, the part of the radical left consisting of
their heirs (in Europe, the “United Left” grouping in the Strasbourg
parliament) gave up any perspective of real “electoral victory.” It is
happy to survive on the second-class seats allotted to “minorities” (at
most 5–10% of the “voting population”). Transformed into coteries of
elected representatives whose sole concerntaking the place of
“strategy”is to hang on to these wretched places in the system, this
radical left gives up on really being anything of the sort. That this
plays into the hands of neofascist demagogues is, in these conditions,
unsurprising.<br><br>
A discourse styling itself “postmodernist,” which quite simply refuses to
recognize the scope of the democratic farce’s destructive effects,
incorporates submission to it. What matter elections, they say, what
counts is elsewhere: in “civil society” (a muddled concept to which I
shall return) where individuals are what the liberal virus claims
themfalselyto be, the active subjects of history. Antonio Negri’s
“philosophy,” which I have criticized elsewhere, is an expression of this
desertion.<br><br>
But the democratic farce, unchallenged in the opulent societies of the
imperialist triad, does not work in the system’s peripheries. There, in
the storm zone, the established order does not enjoy any legitimacy
sufficient to stabilize society. Does the possibility of a real
alternative then reveal itself in the watermark of the paper on which the
“Southern awakenings” that characterized the twentieth century (and which
go on making their way in the twenty-first century) are written by
history?<br><br>
THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF THE VANGUARDS AND OF THE ENLIGHTENED
DESPOTISMS<br><br>
The current storm is not synonymous with revolution, but is only the
potential carrier of revolutionary advances.<br><br>
Not simple are the responses of the peripheral peoples, whether inspired
by radical socialist idealsat first, anyway (Russia, China, Vietnam, and
Cuba)or by national liberation and social progress (in Latin America, in
Asia and Africa during the Bandung period). They bring, to varying
degrees, components with a universalist and progressive outlook together
with others of a deeply retrogressive nature. To unravel the conflicting
and/or complementary interferences among these tendencies will help us to
formulatefurther on in this textsome possible forms of genuine
democratic advances.<br><br>
The historical Marxisms of the Third International (Russian
Marxism-Leninism and Chinese Maoism) deliberately and completely rejected
any retrograde outlook. They chose to look toward the future, in what was
in the full sense of the term a universalist emancipating spirit. This
option was undoubtedly made easier, in Russia, by a long preparatory
period in which the (bourgeois) “Westernizers” vanquished the
“Slavophile” and “Eurasian” allies of the autocracy; in China, by the
Taiping Uprising (I here refer you to my work: The Paris Commune and the
Taiping Revolution).<br><br>
At the same time, those historical Marxisms committed themselves to a
certain conceptualization of the role of “vanguards” in social
transformation. They gave an institutionalized form to that option,
symbolized as “The Party.” It cannot be said that this option was
ineffective. Quite to the contrary, it was certainly at the origin of the
victory of those revolutions. The hypothesis that the minority vanguard
would win support from the immense majority proved to be well founded.
But it is equally true that later history showed the limits of such
effectiveness. For it is certain that maintenance of centralized power in
the hands of these “vanguards” was far from uninvolved in the subsequent
derailment of the “socialist” systems that they claimed to have
established.<br><br>
Did “enlightened despotism” constitute the theory and practice of those
historical Marxisms? One can say so only on condition of specifying what
were andprogressivelybecame the aims of those “enlightened despotisms.”
In any case, they were resolutely opposed to völkisch nostalgia. Their
behavior in regard to religionwhich they viewed as nothing but
obscurantismtestifies to that. I have expressed myself elsewhere (
“L’internationale de l’obscurantisme”) about the qualifications which
need be appended to that judgment.<br><br>
The vanguard concept was also broadly adopted elsewhere beyond those
(Chinese and Russian) revolutionary societies. It was the basis for the
Communist parties of the whole world as they existed between 1920 and
1980. It found its place in the contemporary national/populist
third-world regimes.<br><br>
Moreover, this vanguard concept gave decisive importance to theory and
ideology, implying in turn putting similar importance on the role of
(revolutionary) “intellectuals” or, rather, of the intelligentsia.
“Intelligentsia” is not synonymous with the educated middle classes,
still less with the managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, or professoriate
(in Anglo-Saxon jargon, the “elites”). It refers to a social group that
emerges as such in some societies under specific conditions and becomes
then an active, sometimes decisive, agent. Outside Russia and China,
analogous formations could be recognized in France, in Italy, and perhaps
in other countriesbut certainly not in Great Britain, the United States,
nor generally in northern Europe.<br><br>
In France, during most of the twentieth century, the intelligentsia held
a major place in the country’s history, as, for that matter, is
recognized by the best historians. This was, perhaps, an indirect effect
of the Paris Commune during which the ideal of building a more advanced
stage of civilization beyond capitalism found expression as nowhere else
(see my article on the Commune).<br><br>
In Italy the post-fascist Communist Party had an analogous function. As
Luciana Castillana lucidly analyzes it, the Communistsa vanguard
strongly supported by the working class but always an electoral
minoritywere actually the sole makers of Italian democracy. They
exercised “in opposition”at the timea real power in society much
greater than when associated with “government” subsequently! Their actual
suicide, inexplicable otherwise than as result of the mediocrity of their
post-Berlinguer leadership, buried with them both the Italian State and
Italian democracy.<br><br>
This intelligentsia phenomenon never existed in the United States nor in
Protestant Northern Europe. What is called there “the elite”the
terminology is significantscarcely comprises anyone but lackeys
(including “reforming” ones) of the system. The empiricist/pragmatist
philosophy, holding the entire stage as far as social thought is
concerned, has certainly reinforced the conservative effects of the
Protestant Reformationwhose critique I stated in Eurocentrism. Rudolf
Rocker, the German anarchist, is one of the few European thinkers to have
expressed a judgment close to mine; but since Weber (and despite Marx) it
is has been fashionable to unthinkingly celebrate the Reformation as a
progressive advance.<br><br>
In the peripheral societies in general, beyond the flagrant cases of
Russia and China, and for the same reasons, the initiatives taken by
“vanguards,” often intelligentsia-like, profited from the adhesion and
support of broad popular majorities. The most frequent form of those
political crystallizations whose interventions were decisive for the
“Southern Awakening” was that of populism. A theory and practice scoffed
at by the (Anglo-Saxon style, i.e., pro-system) “elites,” but defended
and accordingly rehabilitated by Ernesto Laclau with solid arguments that
I will very largely make my own.<br><br>
Of course, there are as many “populisms” as there are historical
experiences that can be called such. Populisms are often linked to
“charismatic” figures whose “thought” is accepted, undiscussed, as
authoritative. The real social and national advances linked to them under
some specific conditions have led me to term them “national/populist”
regimes. But it must be understood that those advances were never based
on ordinary “bourgeois” democratic practicesstill less on the inception
of practices going still further, like those possible ones which I will
outline further on in this text. Such was the case in Ataturk’s Turkey,
probably the initiator of this model in the Middle East, and later in
Nasser’s Egypt, the Baathist (Iraqi and Syrian) regimes in their initial
stages, and Algeria under the FLN. During the 1940s and 1950s, under
different conditions, similar experiments were undertaken in Latin
America. This “formula,” because it answers to real needs and
possibilities, is far from having lost its chance of renewal. So I gladly
use the term “national/populist” for certain ongoing experiments in Latin
America without neglecting to point out that on the level of
democratization they have incontestably entered on advances unknown to
those earlier “national/populisms.”<br><br>
I have put forward analyses dealing with the reasons for the success of
advances realized in this domain by several Middle-Eastern countries
(Afghanistan, South Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq) which appeared more promising
than others, and also the causes of their tragic failures.<br><br>
Whatever the case, one must be on guard against generalizations and
simplifications like those of most Western commentators, who look only at
the “democracy question” as boiled down to the formula that I have
described as the democratic farce. In the peripheral countries the farce
sometimes appears as a fantastic burlesque. Without being “democrats”
some leaders, charismatic or not, of national/populist regimes have been
progressive “big reformers.” Nasser was exemplary of these. But others
have scarcely been anything but incoherent clowns (Khaddafi) or ordinary
“unenlightened” despots (quite uncharismatic, to boot) like Ben Ali,
Mubarak, and many others. For that matter, those dictators initiated no
national/populist experiments. All they did was to organize the pillage
of their countries by mafias personally associated with them. Thus, like
Suharto and Marcos, they were simply executive agents of the imperialist
powers which, moreover, hailed them and supported their powers to the
very end.<br><br>
THE IDEOLOGY OF CULTURAL NOSTALGIA, ENEMY OF DEMOCRACY<br><br>
The specific limits of each and of all national/populist experiments
worthy of the name “populist” originate in the objective conditions
characterizing the societies comprising the periphery of today’s
capitalist/imperialist worldconditions obviously diverse. But beyond
that diversity some major converging factors shed some light on the
reasons for those experiments’ successes and then for their
retrogressions.<br><br>
That aspirations for a “Return to the Past” persist is not the result of
thoroughgoing “backwardness” (as in the usual discourse on this subject)
among the peoples involved. Their persistence gives a correct measure of
the challenge to be confronted. All the peoples and nations of the
peripheries were not only subject to fierce economic exploitation by
imperialist capital: they were, by the same token, equally subjected to
cultural aggression. With the greatest contempt the dignity of their
cultures, their languages, their customs, and their histories were
negated. There is nothing surprising in these victims of external or
internal colonialism (notably the Indian populations of the Americas)
naturally linking their political and social liberation to the
restoration of their national dignity.<br><br>
But in turn, these legitimate aspirations are a temptation to look
exclusively toward the past in hope of there finding the solution to
today’s and tomorrow’s problems. So there is a real risk of seeing the
movements of awakening and liberation among these peoples getting stuck
in tragic blind alleys as soon as they mistake retrogressive nostalgia
for their sought-for highroad of renewal.<br><br>
The history of contemporary Egypt illustrates perfectly the
transformation from a necessary complementarity between a universalist
vision open to the future, yet linked to the restoration of past dignity,
into a conflict between two options formulated in absolute terms: either
“Westernize!” (in the common usage of that term, implying denial of the
past) or else (uncritically) “Back To The Past!”<br><br>
The Viceroy Mohamed Ali (1804–1849) and, until the 1870s, the Khedives,
chose a modernization that would be open to the adoption of formulas
reflecting European models. It cannot be said that this choice was one of
“Westernization” on the cheap. The heads of the Egyptian state gave the
highest importance to modern industrialization of the country as against
merely adopting the European model of consumer markets. They committed
themselves to assimilation of European models, linking it with renewal of
their national culture to whose evolution in a secular direction it would
contribute. Their attempts to support linguistic renovation bear witness
to that. Of course, their European model was that of capitalism and no
doubt they had no accurate conception of the imperialist nature of
European capitalism. But they should bear no reproach for that. When
Khedive Ismail proclaimed his aim “to make Egypt into a European
country,” he was fifty years ahead of Ataturk. He saw “Europeanization”
as part of national rebirth, not as a renunciation of it.<br><br>
The inadequacies of that epoch’s cultural Nahda (its inability to grasp
the meaning of the European Renaissance), and the retrograde nostalgia
embodied in its main conceptson which I have expressed myself
elsewhereare no mystery.<br><br>
Indeed, it is precisely this retrograde outlook which was to take hold
over the national-renewal movement at the end of the nineteenth century.
I have put forward an explanation for this: with the defeat of the
“modernist” project that had held the scene from 1800 to 1870 Egypt was
plunged into regression. But the ideology that tried to counter that
decline took shape in this retrogressive period and was marked by all the
birth defects implicit in that fact. Moustapha Kamel and Mohamed Farid,
the founders of the new National Party (Al hisb al watani), chose
back-to-the-past as the focal point of their combatas their “Ottomanist”
(seeking the support of Istanbul against the English) illusions, as well
as others, reveal.<br><br>
History was to prove the futility of that option. The popular and
national revolution of 1919–1920 was not led by the Nationalist Party but
by its “modernist” rival, the Wafd. Taha Hussein even adopted the slogan
of Khedive Ismail“Europeanize Egypt”and to that end supported the
formation of a new university to marginalize Al Azhar.<br><br>
The retrograde tendency, legacy of the Nationalist Party, then slipped
into insignificance. Its leader, Ahmad Hussein, was in the 1930s merely
the head of a minuscule, pro-fascist, party. But this tendency was to
undergo a strong revival among the group of “Free Officers” that
overthrew the monarchy in 1952.<br><br>
The ambiguity of the Nasserist project resulted from this regression in
the debate over the nature of the challenge to be confronted. Nasser
tried to link a certain industrialization-based modernization, once again
not on the cheap, with support to retrograde cultural illusions. It
mattered little that the Nasserists thought of their project as being
within a socialist (obviously beyond a nineteenth century ken)
perspective. Their attraction to völkisch cultural illusion was always
there. This was demonstrated by their choices concerning the
“modernization of Al Azhar,” of which I did a critique.<br><br>
Currently, the conflict between the “modernist, universalist” visions of
some and the “integrally medievalistic” visions of others holds
center-stage in Egypt. The former are henceforward advocated mainly by
the radical left (in Egypt the communist tradition, powerful in the
immediate years after Second World War) and getting a broad audience
among the enlightened middle classes, the labor unions, and, even more
so, by the new generations. The back-to-the-past vision has slipped even
further to the right with the Muslim Brotherhood, and has adopted its
stance from the most archaic conception of Islam, the Wahhabism promoted
by the Saudis.<br><br>
It is not very difficult to contrast the evolution that shut Egypt into
its blind alley to the path chosen by China since the Taiping revolution,
taken up and deepened by Maoism: that the construction of the future
starts with radical critique of the past. “Emergence” into the modern
worldand, accordingly, deploying effective responses to its challenges
including entrance onto the path of democratization, guidelines for which
I will put forward further on in this texthas as its precondition the
refusal to allow retrograde cultural nostalgia to obscure the central
focus of renewal.<br><br>
So it is not by chance that China finds itself at the vanguard of today’s
“emerging” countries. Nor is it by chance that in the Middle East it is
Turkey, not Egypt, that is pedaling in the race. Turkey, even that of the
“Islamist” AKP, profits from Kemalism’s earlier breakaway. But there is a
decisive difference between China and Turkey; China’s “modernist” option
is supposed to reflect a “socialist” perspective (and China is in a
hegemonic conflict with the United States, that is to say, with the
collective imperialism of the Triad) conveying a chance for progress.
While the “modernity” option of today’s Turkey, in which no escape from
the logic of contemporary globalization is envisaged, has no future. It
seems successful, but only provisionally so.<br><br>
In all the countries of the broader South (the peripheries) the
combination of modernist and retrogressive tendencies, obviously in very
diverse forms, is to be found. The confusion resulting from this
association finds one of its most striking displays in the profusion of
inept discourses about supposed “democratic forms in past societies,”
uncritically praised to the skies. Thus independent India sings praises
to the panchayat, Muslims to the shura, and Africans to the “Speaking
Tree,” as though these outlived social forms had anything to do with the
challenges of the modern world. Is India really the biggest (in number of
voters) democracy in the world? Well, this electoral democracy is and
will remain a farce until radical criticism of the caste system (a very
real legacy of its past) has been carried through to the end: the
abolition of the castes themselves. Shura remains the vehicle for
implementation of Sharia (Islamic canonical law), interpreted in that
word’s most reactionary sensethe enemy of democracy.<br><br>
The Latin American peoples are today confronted with the same problem. It
is easy, once one realizes the nature of Iberian internal colonialism, to
understand the legitimacy of the “indigenist” demands. Still, some of
those “indigenist” discourses are very uncritical of the Indian pasts at
issue. But others are indeed critical and propose concepts linking in a
radically progressive way the requirements of universalism to the
potential to be found in the evolution of their historical legacy. In
this regard, the current Bolivian discussions are probably able to make a
rich contribution. François Houtart (El concepto de Sumak Kawsay) has
made an enlightening critical analysis of the indigenist discourse in
question. All ambiguity vanishes in the light of this remarkable study,
which reviews what, as it seems to me, is probably the totality of
discourse on this subject.<br><br>
The contributiona negative oneof retrograde cultural illusion in
relation to the construction of the modern world, such as it is, cannot
be attributed primarily to the peoples of the periphery. In Europe,
outside its northwestern quadrant, the bourgeoisies were too weak to
carry out revolutions like those of England and France. The “national”
goal, especially in Germany and Italy and, later, elsewhere in the
eastern and southern parts of the continent, functioned as means of
popular mobilization while screening off the nature of such nationalism
as a compromise, half bourgeois/half ancien régime. The retrograde
cultural illusions in these cases were not so much “religious” as
“ethnic,” and were based on an ethnocentric definition of the nation
(Germany) or on a mythologized reading of Roman history (Italy). Fascism
and Nazismthere is the disaster that illustrates the arch-reactionary,
surely anti-democratic, nature of völkisch cultural nostalgia in its
“national” forms.<br><br>
2. THE UNIVERSALIST ALTERNATIVE: FULL AND AUTHENTIC DEMOCRATIZATION AND
THE SOCIALIST PERSPECTIVE<br><br>
I am going to speak here of democratization, not of democracy. The
latter, reduced as it is to formulas imposed by the dominant powers, is a
farce, as I have said (in “The Democratic Fraud Challenges Us to Invent
Tomorrow’s Democracy”see above). The electoral farce produces an
impotent pseudo-parliament and a government responsible only to the IMF
and the WTO, the instruments of the imperialist triad’s monopolies. The
democratic farce is then capped off with a “human-rightsish” discourse on
the right to proteston condition that protest never gets close to
mounting a real challenge to the supreme power of the monopolies. Beyond
that line it is to be labeled “terrorism” and criminalized.<br><br>
Democratization, in contrast, considered as full and completethat is,
democratization involving all aspects of social life including, of
course, economic managementcan only be an unending and unbounded
process, the result of popular struggles and popular inventiveness.
Democratization has no meaning, no reality, unless it mobilizes those
inventive powers in the perspective of building a more advanced stage of
human civilization. Thus, it can never be clothed in a rigid, formulaic,
ready-to-wear outfit. Nevertheless, it is no less necessary to trace out
the governing lines of movement for its general direction and the
definition of the strategic objectives for its possible stages.<br><br>
The fight for democratization is a combat. It therefore requires
mobilization, organization, strategic vision, tactical sense, choice of
actions, and politicization of struggles. Undoubtedly these forms of
activity cannot be decreed in advance starting from sanctified dogma. But
the need to identify them is unavoidable. For it really is a matter of
driving back the established systems of power with the perspective of
replacing them with a different system of powers. Undoubtedly any
sanctified formula of the revolution which would completely and at once
substitute the power of the people for the capitalist order is to be
abandoned. Revolutionary advances are possible, on the basis of the
development of real, new, people’s powers that would drive back those
power centers that continue to protect the principles underlying and
reproducing social inequality. Besides which, Marx never expounded any
theory of “the great day of revolution and definitive solutions”; to the
contrary, he always insisted that revolution is a long transition marked
by a conflict between powersthe former ones in decline and the new
powers on the rise.<br><br>
To give up on the question of power is to throw out the baby with the
bathwater. Only someone of extreme naïvete could ever believe that
society can be transformed without destroying, albeit progressively, the
established system of power. As long as the established powers remain
what they are, social change, far from dispossessing them, leaves them
able to co-opt it, to take it over, to make it reinforce, rather than
weaken, capitalist power. The sad fate of environmentalism, made into a
new field for the expansion of capital, bears witness. To dodge the
question of power is to place social movements in a situation in which
they cannot go on the offensive because they are forced to remain on the
defensive in resistance to the attacks of the power-holders who, as such,
retain the initiative. Nothing astonishing, then, in Antonio Negri, the
“prophet” of that modish anti-power litany, fleeing back from Marx to St.
Francis of Assisi, his original starting point. Nor anything surprising
in that his theses should be played up by the New York Times.<br><br>
I will here put forward several major strategic objectives for the
theoretical and political discussion about social and political struggles
(inseparable one from the other), which must perpetually confront the
practical problems of those struggles, of their successes and
failures.<br><br>
First of all, to reinforce the powers of workers in their workplaces, in
their daily struggles against capital. That, it is said, is what they
have trade-unions for. Indeed, but only if the unions are real
instrumentalities for strugglewhich they scarcely ever are any more,
especially the “big unions” that are supposedly powerful because they
group together large majorities among their target groups of workers.
Such seeming strength derived from numbers is really their weakness,
because those unions believe themselves bound to make only “consensus”
demands that are extremely modest.<br><br>
What reason is there to be astonished that the working classes of Germany
and Great Britain (called “strong union” countries) have accepted the
drastic downward adjustments imposed by capital over the course of the
last thirty years whereas the “French unions,” grouping as members only
minorities of the class and thus supposedly “weak,” have better (or less
badly) resisted such adjustments? This reality simply reminds us that
organizations of activists, by definition minoritarian (since it is
impossible that the class as a whole should be made up of activists), are
more able than “mass” (and thus made up largely of non-activists) unions
to lead majorities into struggle.<br><br>
Another possible field of struggle to establish new forms of power is
that of local government. I certainly want to avoid hasty generalizations
in this areaeither by affirming that decentralization is always a gain
for democracy or, on the other hand, that centralization is needed to
“change the power-structure.” Decentralization may well be co-opted by
“local notables,” often no less reactionary than the agents of the
central power. But it can also, as a result of the strategic actions of
progressive forces in struggle and of local conditionssometimes
favorable, sometimes unfavorablefill out or substitute for general
advances in the creation of new popular power structures.<br><br>
The Paris Commune understood this and so projected a federation of
Communes. The communards knew that on this question they were carrying
forward the tradition of the Mountain (Jacobins) of Year One (1793). For
the latter, contrary to what is unreflectingly said (how often do we hear
that the Jacobin “centralists” completed the work of the Monarchy!), were
federalists (is the Fête de la Fédération to be forgotten?).
“Centralization” was the later work of the Thermidorian Reaction, capped
off by Bonaparte.<br><br>
But “decentralization” is still a dubious term if it is counterposed as
an absolute to another absolute, that of “centralization.” The challenge
confronting the struggle for democratization is to link the two concepts
to each other.<br><br>
The problem of multiplelocal and centralpower centers is of crucial
importance for those countries that, for various historical reasons,
exist as heterogeneous agglomerations. In the Andean countries, and more
generally in “Latin America”which ought to be termed Indo/Afro/Latin
Americathe construction of specific power structures (“specific” here
denoting that they are endowed with areas of genuine autonomy) is the
necessary condition for the rebirth of the Indian nations, without which
social emancipation has scarcely any meaning.<br><br>
Feminism and environmentalism are likewise fields of conflict between
social forces whose perspective is that of overall social emancipation
and the conservative or reformist power centers consecrated to the
perpetuation of the conditions for perpetual reproduction of the
capitalist system. It is certainly out of place to treat them as
“specialized” struggles, because the apparently specialized demands that
they put forward are inseparable from overall social transformation.
However, not all movements that consider themselves feminist or
environmentalist see matters that way.<br><br>
Coherent linkage of struggles in the diverse fields mentioned hereas
well as othersrequires constructing institutionalized forms of their
interdependence. It is a matter, again, of displaying creative
imagination. There is no need to wait for permission from the actual laws
to start setting up institutionalized systems (informal, maybe
“illegal”), by permanent and de facto compulsory employer/employee
negotiation, for example, to impose equality between men and women, or to
subject all important public or private investment decisions to thorough
environmental review.<br><br>
Real advances in the directions here advocated would create a duality of
powerslike that which Marx envisioned for the long socialist transition
to the higher stage of human civilization, communism. They would allow
elections by universal suffrage to go in a direction quite different from
that offered by democracy-as-farce. But in this case, as in others, truly
meaningful elections can take place only after victory, not
before.<br><br>
The propositions put forward hereand many other possible oneshave no
place in the dominant discourse about “civil society.” Rather, they run
counter to that discourse whichrather like “postmodernist” ravings à la
Negriis the direct heir of the U.S. “consensus” ideological tradition. A
discourse promoted, uncritically repeated, by tens of thousands of NGOs
and by their requisite representatives at all the Social Forums. We’re
dealing with an ideology that accepts the existing regime (i.e. monopoly
capitalism) in all its essentials. It thus has a useful role to play on
behalf of capitalist power. It keeps its gears provided with oil. It
pretends to “change the world” while promoting a sort of “opposition”
with no power to change anything.<br><br>
THREE CONCLUSIONS<br><br>
The virus of liberalism still has devastating effects. It has resulted in
an “ideological adjustment” perfectly fitted to promoting the expansion
of capitalism, an expansion becoming ever more barbaric. It has persuaded
big majorities, even among the younger generation, that they have to
content themselves with “living in the present moment,” to grasp whatever
is immediately at hand, to forget the past, and to pay no heed to the
futureon the pretext that utopian imaginings might produce monsters. It
has convinced them that the established system allows “the flourishing of
the individual” (which it really does not). Pretentious, supposedly
novel, academic formulations“postmodernism,” “postcolonialism,”
“cultural studies,” Negri-like animadversionsconfer patents of
legitimacy to capitulation of the critical spirit and the inventive
imagination.<br><br>
The disarray stemming from such interiorized submission is certainly
among the causes of the “religious revival.” By that I refer to the
recrudescence of conservative and reactionary interpretations, religious
and quasi-religious, ritualistic and “communitarian.” As I have written,
the One God (monotheism) remarries with alacrity the One Mammon
(moneytheism). Of course I exclude from this judgment those
interpretations of religion that deploy their sense of spirituality to
justify taking sides with all social forces struggling for emancipation.
But the former are dominant, the latter a minority and often
marginalized. Other, no less reactionary, ideological formulas make up in
the same way for the void left by the liberal virus. Of this,
“nationalisms” and ethnic or quasi-ethnic communalisms are splendid
examples.<br><br>
Diversity is, most fortunately, one of the world’s finest realities. But
its thoughtless praise entails dangerous confusions. For my part, I have
suggested making conspicuous the heritage-diversities which are what they
are, and can only be distinguished as positive for the project of
emancipation after being critically examined. I want to avoid confusing
such diversity of heritage with the diversity of formulations that look
toward invention of the future and toward emancipation. For in that
regard there is as much diversity both of analyses, with their underlying
cultural and ideological bases, and of proposals for strategic lines of
struggle.<br><br>
The First International counted Marx, Bakunin, and followers of Proudhon
within its ranks. A fifth international will likewise have to choose
diversity as its trump suit. I envisage that it cannot “exclude”: it must
be a regroupment of the various schools of Marxists (including even
marked “dogmatists”); of authentic radical reformers who nevertheless
prefer to concentrate on goals that are possible in the short term,
rather than on distant perspectives; of liberation theologians; of
thinkers and activists promoting national renewal within the perspective
of universal emancipation; and of feminists and environmentalists who
likewise are committed to that perspective. To become clearly conscious
of the imperialist nature of the established system is the fundamental
condition without which there is no possibility of such a regroupment of
activists really working together for a single cause. A fifth
international cannot but be clearly anti-imperialist. It cannot content
itself with remaining at the level of “humanitarian” interventions like
those that the dominant powers offer in place of solidarity and support
to the liberation struggles of the periphery’s peoples, nations, and
states. And even beyond such regroupment, broad alliances will have to be
sought with all democratic forces and movements struggling against
democracy-farce’s betrayals.<br><br>
If I insist on the anti-imperialist dimension of the combat to be waged,
it is because that is the condition without which no convergence is
possible between the struggles within the North and those within the
South of the planet. I have already said that the weaknessand that is
the least one can sayof Northern anti-imperialist consciousness was the
main reason for the limited nature of the advances that the periphery’s
peoples have hitherto been able to realize, and then of their
retrogression.<br><br>
The construction of a perspective of convergent struggles runs up against
difficulties whose mortal peril to it must not be
underestimated.<br><br>
In the North it runs up against the still broad adhesion to the consensus
ideology that legitimizes the democratic farce and is made acceptable
thanks to the corrupting effects of the imperialist rent. Nevertheless,
the ongoing offensive of monopoly capital against the Northern workers
themselves might well help them to become conscious that the imperialist
monopolies are indeed their common enemy.<br><br>
Will the unfolding movements toward organized and politicized
reconstruction go so far as to understand and teach that the capitalist
monopolies are to be expropriated, nationalized in order to be
socialized? Until that breaking point has been reached the ultimate power
of the capitalist/imperialist monopolies will remain untouched. Any
defeats that the South might inflict on those monopolies, reducing the
amounts siphoned from them in imperialist rent, can only increase the
chances of Northern peoples getting out of their rut.<br><br>
But in the South it still runs up against conflicting expressions of an
envisioned future: universalist or backward-looking? Until that conflict
has been decided in favor of the former, whatever the Southern peoples
might gain in their liberation struggles will remain fragile, limited,
and vulnerable.<br>
Only serious advances North and South in the directions here indicated
will make it possible for the progressive historic bloc to be born.
<br><br>
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