The Universalist Alternative: Full and Authentic Democratization and the Socialist Perspective
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”).
The electoral farce produces an impotent pseudo-parliament and a government responsible only to the IMF and the WTO, the instrumentalities of the imperialist triad’s monopolies. The democratic farce is then capped off with a ‘humanrightsish’ discourse that provides for respect of the right to protest—on 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.Democratization, in contrast, considered as full and complete—that is, democratization involving all aspects of social life including, of course, economic management—can only be an unending andunbounded 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 moread- vanced 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.
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 transitionmarked by a conflict between powers—the former ones in decline and the new powers on the rise.To give up on the question of power is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Only someone of extreme naivete 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. 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.
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 struggle. Which 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 is really their weakness, because those unions believe themselves bound to make only those extremely modest demands that might be acceptable to the employer.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.
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 area— either 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 conditions—sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable—fill out or substitute for general advances in the creation of new popular power structures.
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 Fete de la Federation to be forgotten)? ‘Centralization’ was the later work of the Thermidorian Reaction, capped off by Bonaparte.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.
The problem of multiple—local and central—power 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 IndoZAfroZLatin America—the 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.
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.
Coherent linkage of struggles in the diverse fields mentioned here—as well as others—requires 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 employerZemployee negotiation, for example, to impose equality between men and women, or to subject all important public or private investment decisions to thorough environmental review.Real advances in the directions here advocated would create a duality of powers—like 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.
The propositions put forward here—and many other possible ones—have no place in the dominant discourse about ‘civil society’. Rather, they run counter to that discourse which, rather like ‘postmodernist’ ravings a la Negri, is 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.
9.6