Real Democracy Now!
Written for website of Irish SWP www.swp.ie.
The call for ‘Real Democracy Now’ was the key demand, and ‘They don’t represent us!’ the most popular slogan, of the great Indignados movement which occupied the squares of Spain’s cities in the summer of 2011 and transformed Spanish cities. And expressed in various forms the question of democracy and the quest for ‘real’ democracy has been central to many of the mass movements of the last few years, most notably the Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere.
It was also a major factor in the mass popular protests in Bulgaria that last week brought down the right wing government of Boiko Borisov in response to a huge increase in electricity prices. The call for direct democracy, along with attacks on corruption in government, also feature heavily in the programme of the new ‘5-Star Movement’, led by comedian Beppe Grillo, which has just polled 25% of the vote in the Italian elections.
Meanwhile, here in Ireland, November 2012 saw the launch of a new party, Direct Democracy Ireland (DDI). Their website defines direct democracy as:
…a form of democracy in which the people have the right to:
- Select their own candidates to represent them.
- Call a referendum on any topic if a sufficient number of people deem it necessary, by gathering a set number of signatures.
- Create legislation and put it to a referendum if a sufficient number of people agree with it, by gathering a set number of signatures.
- Recall, remove from office, any representative deemed to have acted in breach of their terms of employment.
Though
by no means original or specific to DDI (which in itself is not important) these
sort of ideas are very likely in the current climate to strike a chord with
many and may even attract significant active support. Five years of bank
bail-outs and austerity, coming on the back of decades of corruption stretching
back to Haughey and beyond, have generated widespread bitterness, anger and
cynicism in relation to the political establishment and established politics. Whatever
the relative standing of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the fact remains that the
two parties that have completely dominated Irish political life since the
foundation of the state stand, combined, at less than 50% in the polls. The
massive betrayal of working class people by Labour and their partners in crime,
the union leaders, has further deepened the cynicism, while the absence, up to
now, of strong resistance from the organized working class means that many
people are on the look out for ‘something new’. The idea of recalling corrupt
or treacherous TDs seems likely to be particularly popular.
How
should socialists respond to this development?
The
first thing to say is that we should welcome it. We are in favour of direct
democracy and a critique of how so-called ‘representative democracy’, or the
parliamentary system, works has been central to the socialist and Marxist
tradition ever since the Paris Commune of 1871. This extraordinary, but little
known, event (because largely written out of the history books) involved the
people of Paris rising up and taking over the running of their city for two and
a half months until they were bloodily suppressed by a combination of the
French and German armies. It was a pioneering example of direct democracy.
Writing at the time Marx commented:
The Commune was formed of the
municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the
town, responsible and revocable at short
terms [my emphasis]…From the
members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s
wages …The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high
dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves.
…the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual
force of repression, the “parson-power", by the disestablishment and
disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back
to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in
imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.
The whole of the educational institutions were
opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all
interference of church and state
Karl Marx, The Civil
War in France, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
How
much we in Ireland
today can learn from the Paris Commune 142 years ago!
The
socialist critique of parliamentary democracy as it exists in Ireland,
Europe, North America and
elsewhere stresses the following points.
1)
Elected representatives are not accountable to or
recallable by their electors except once every five years, ie when the damage
is done. This makes possible and even encourages promise breaking and
corruption. Eamonn Gilmore can say ‘It’s Frankfurt’s Way or Labour’s Way’ and
then go Frankfurt’s way all the way and promise not to serve in a government
that cuts child benefit and then do just that, and Ruari Quinn can publicly sign a pledge to
oppose student fees and then raise them. ‘Isn’t that what you do at elections?’
as Pat Rabbitte put it.
2)
The lack of accountability is closely linked to the
fact that we vote (once every four or five years) as isolated or ‘atomised’
individuals, not as part of any collective or on the basis of any collective
debate. As a result the electors feel powerless and are highly vulnerable to
the influence of the media, ie the super rich who control the media, and in
between elections they do not come together to assert control over their
representatives. Socialists therefore favour voting at meetings or assemblies
where debate and discussion is possible.
3)
Parliaments (and local councils) are only one part of
the machinery of state. In the other parts of the state apparatus – the state
bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police and armed forces – there is no election
or democracy at all.
4)
Most importantly, parliament is not where real power in
society lies at all. Real power lies with the banks and corporations who
control the wealth, finances and production of society. And just like the army
and the police, the people who run these institutions are not subject to any
sort of democratic election or recallability. James Connolly famously said that
you could ‘remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin
Castle’ but ‘England
would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her
landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and
individualist institutions she has planted in this country’. With equal truth
we say that we could elect any number of ‘honest’ TDs and hoist the green or
even the red flag over the Dail and the capitalists will still rule us through
their control of wealth and production.
Proposals
to look at ways of making elected representatives accountable and to enable the
people to force referenda on issues they feel strongly about are steps in the
right direction and should be supported. But by themselves they don’t go far
enough because they don’t tackle the undemocratic nature of economic power, of
big business, the banks and the corporations. We need to make not only TDs and
councilors recallable and subject to referenda if the people want it, but also
the CEOs and major decisions of big business and that can’t be done without
social ownership ie socialism and without mobilizing the working class
How
far the members of DDI will be prepared to go in this direction remains to be
seen but the fact that their ‘founder’, Raymond Whitehead, is a former night
club and restaurant owner, antique dealer, and teacher of “Transcendental
Meditation and The Science of Creative Intelligence” and that their ‘leader’ is
Ben Gilroy of the constitution obsessed Freemen, suggests their may be problems
there. Nevertheless a challenge to the extremely limited and essentially false
nature of liberal parliamentary democracy which masks the rule of capital is to
be encouraged.
However,
it is mass mobilization from below, a crucial part of which is action from organized workers, that will be necessary to
win these or any other democratic reforms and ultimately real democracy,
genuine ‘people power’ is incompatible with capitalism which, by its very
nature, involves the rule of the many by the few.
John
Molyneux
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