What Democracy?

14/03/2013
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The structural crisis that is affecting almost all of the "advanced capitalist" economies continues without any solution in sight. Low or no growth, or open recession, have been accumulating for more than four years, as we can see from the impact of the crisis on societies. In many countries the accelerated process of "social dissolution" is giving rise to growing social and political tensions.
 
Aggravated by the policies adopted by governments during the past decades in order to favour specific interests of financial capital and transnational corporations, this crisis has become a serious social and political crisis.
 
In effect, it was as a result of political decisions, supported by a consensus on the part of "governmental parties" -- conservatives, liberals and social democrats -- of the "advanced countries" to find a solution to the falling profits in industrial capitalist enterprises, that policies were adopted to facilitate the transnationalisation of business enterprises and the financialisation of economies. These policies were to free them from social and political imperatives, placing these economies outside the reach of sovereign decisions of peoples and of their legislative assemblies, and under the exclusive command of national and international institutions and organisms which are conceived and created to be "independent" of society and submitted to the market, such as central banks, courts and tribunals of commercial and investment arbitration, and free trade agreements (1).
 
In other words, if the neoliberal model was set in place this is due to the fact that the political parties, that for three decades have assumed power by turns, accepted the premise of the big financial interests: that markets are self-regulating and thus make the best decisions for economies, and that the only possible role of political parties and of governments is to become executors of the policies of a system that excludes any notion of a change of course that would prejudice these interests, and definitively puts an end to the idea of any sovereign power of peoples exercised through electoral democracy.
 
Jean-Claude Junker's version of There is no alternative
 
The proof of this was given by Jean-Claude Juncker, ex-president of the Council of Ministers of Economy and Finance of the Euro zone (Eurogroup) of the European Parliament, Prime Minister and Economics Minister of Luxemburg, who last January, shortly before the end of his mandate, criticised the austerity policies and the way that these were being applied (2) and who now, two months later, declared in an interview with the German Weekly Der Spiegel (3) that if the results of the Italian elections signified "the end of reform policies, this would be a serious error. The consequence of the result of the elections in Italy could not be a return to the policies that brought about the catastrophe. It is not possible to combat the financial and economic crisis by imposing new debts on a State already heavily in debt. There is no way out but a solid budgetary policy", that is, to continue with the policies of Mario Monti, the technocrat designated by the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and the IMF) to govern Italy.
 
Moreover, when asked if the Italian politicians should follow a policy that the majority of Italians do not support, Juncker replied to Der Spiegel that he would make a hard-hitting declaration: "One should not follow mistaken policies simply because one fears not being re-elected. Those who wish to govern have to take responsibility for their countries and for all of Europe. This means that, if necessary, they should undertake correct policies, even when many voters think they are wrong."
 
And when the interviewer asked him if this is not an "odd" way to understand democracy, the ex-president of the Eurogroup replied as follows: "Obviously the politicians should respect the will of the people insofar as possible, but they should always adhere to European Treaties. In Europe, more than at the level of national policies, we must follow the principle established by Martin Luther: use the language that people can understand, but do not just tell them what they want to hear."
 
At the end of the interview, asked if the fall of the Euro would be the end of the European Union, Juncker replied that "Existential questions should not even be asked." This means that peoples do not have the right to demand -- and much less to try to bring about -- changes in the policies that are oppressing them. Juncker went so far, in seeking to impose fear in his interview, as to evoke the threat of war if substantial changes were made. As Margaret Thatcher said, there is no alternative to the rule of markets over society.
 
In this context, what can we think, how can we react, when, in the midst of this depression, that in reality will require a lowering of the retirement age and a reduction of working hours without affecting wages, there is discussion taking place on raising the age of retirement to 75 years or more, as Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt (4) declared recently, affirming that Swedes should be prepared to work until the age of 75 and change jobs "in the midst of their working lives if they want to maintain the levels of welfare" to which they are accustomed.
 
It is no surprise to this writer that Reinfeldt "laid on the table" such a proposal, since a dozen years ago he had heard much the same from the mouth of Canadian Donald Johnston, then General Secretary of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who in an interview during the "mini-Davos" that is the Montreal Conference, said that it was necessary to increase the retirement age to 70 or 75 years.
 
Johnston, a most accessible former Canadian minister, was very upset when I replied that this proposal implied the elimination of retirement for a majority of workers in many sectors, since they would die before or a little after reaching retirement age if they were obliged to work to the age of 75 years.
 
Now this theme is "definitively on the table" because it has been raised and is being "analysed" and disseminated in positive terms by "experts" and in the press (5), and hence already is part of a plan to be executed: citing the National Office of Statistics, the British "Daily Telegraph" affirmed that the "self-employed revolution" has made it possible for 346 thousand British people over 65 to continue working, and that at the present time the number of people working past their retirement age has reached 1'400,000 people, double the number twenty years ago. Even worse, according to the calculations of Douglas McWilliams, executive president of the "think tank" Centre for Economics and Business Research of the United Kingdom, "anyone who enters the labour force of the United Kingdom at twenty years of age, will probably have to work until he or she reaches the age of 75, or even more, in order to retire with a decent proportion of retirement income."
 
We could continue with many more examples of these antisocial policies, since if there be something that should be done in the "developed countries", where the problem is not the production of wealth but its being seized by the oligarchy, it would be to lower working hours -- with no reduction in pay -- and lower the retirement age to sixty years, in order to give work to the unemployed and provide some opportunity to the generation of young people who appear to be condemned to exclusion, socially and job-wise.
 
All this explains why there is not a country in the European Union without an anti-Euro party, sometimes born as a response to the "dictates of Brussels" and to the subjection of national governments to the monetary and industrial policies of the European Union. In other cases it is a question of neo-nazi parties -- such as the Golden Dawn in Greece -- created by the economic and social crises and sometimes, as is the case with the National Front in France, of existing extreme rightwing parties climbing onto the wave of popular reaction against the Euro and the European Union.
 
Even in Germany, not for the same reasons as in the rest of the European Union, the anti-Euro initiative "Alternative for Germany" has just appeared, supported by the cream of academic conservatism. In Austria the successful and well-known Austro-Canadian businessman Frank Stronach (who in the 1950s started up a small business in Canada that today is the auto-parts transnational Magna International), is starting his own anti-Euro party, and if Stronach is in this it is because he thinks it is the future.
 
Social dissolution and extreme polarization
 
It is clear that it is the radical neoliberal policies of the European Union that create this social dissolution that is visible in many European countries, and that also create the dangerous political polarisations to be seen in the extreme right-wing parties that propose demagogic "national solutions" which in reality are reactionary corporativist projects at the service of capital.
 
In the midst of this rigidity, of aggressive austerity policies and of the processes of social dissolution that are destroying what little was left of family and social life -- through the elimination or brutal reduction of social programs, the privatisation of basic public services, cutting of wages and pensions, the elimination of job security and the implementation of "flexible labour policies" that impose unstable and badly paid jobs, often distant from family housing, chronic unemployment among the young and the not so young...etc. -- it is not surprising to see the growth, in these countries, of great social frustration and deep political disenchantment.
 
This social frustration and political disenchantment has in part been cleverly channelled by conservative forces and the mass media, to create a rejection of political parties and above all a rejection of ideas or proposals for change that have any socialist content. This also implies a rejection of labour unions -- that protect jobs for their members -- and in general cultivates hatred of foreigners who "steal our jobs" – by the parties of the extreme right in France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, etc. --, or of "these countries and lazy people who want to live at our expense", as happens in Germany, Finland, and other Nordic countries whose banks and pension funds are creditors of the unpayable debt of the peripheral countries of the European Union.
 
There are also movements that cannot be defined, such as the 5 Star Movement in Italy, since along with the majority of their demands -- which if they are not, should be on programmes of the Left, and in particular the radical Left (6) --, we find demands to eliminate trades unions or to deny the rights of citizenship to those born in Italy of foreign parents, notions that clearly pertain to the ultra-conservative or extreme right-wing movements.
 
The political commentator Thomas Walkom, from the Canadian daily the Toronto Star wrote (28/02/2012) that: "Politicians around the world would be wise to take note. This was not just a case of Italians being goofy. This was a case of voters saying they’ve had enough of kowtowing to the bond markets, the deficit cutters and those who would reform pensions out of existence. More to the point, they’ve had enough of so-called moderates and their know-it-all experts" and of those social democratic parties that "do the 'reasonable' thing, demonstrate their political 'maturity' and support 'necessary' fiscal restraint", like those now-discredited Greek Socialists, and now Italy’s Democratic Party.
 
What should be the role of the radical left?
 
It is not possible to ignore the fact that the "radical left" -- the parties and the range of social forces that have not renounced the social revolution -- have been in many cases very slow and continue to be slow to put forward proposals and realizable alternative policies that respond to the concrete reality of this structural crisis and to the aspirations of the masses -- understood as a social plurality -- who clearly want to stop this process of social dissolution and undertake social reconstruction on other bases than the present ones.
 
In an interview in 1998(7), in response to the question of how he saw the emergence of a new left capable of moving resolutely into the future and "daring the exodus" towards post-capitalism, the philosopher André Gorz outlined three aspects: 1) the need to reach a theoretical understanding of the mutation that we are now undergoing, of its long-range projection, of the impasses and crises towards which the system is moving; 2) having a vision of an outline of a post-capitalist and post-mercantile society that could emerge from the rubble of the wage-based society from which we are moving away; 3) obtaining the capacity to concretise this vision through actions, demands, political proposals that are at once anticipatory and plausible, and able to be undertaken now through intermediate objectives.
 
The fourth factor that has to be incorporated, Gorz said fifteen years ago, is "the lack of functioning, the failures, the risks of implosion that are more and more evident as a result of the application of the dominant economistic ideology. The United States and Great Britain are at the edge of a recession, the Extreme Orient in a state of collapse, in Europe the rejection of the 'pensée unique' and of the single policy imposed by the world financial power has gained considerable influence in the past two years. I believe that a new left cannot be other than a new extreme left, but a plural and non-dogmatic one, that is transnational, ecological, conveying a project of civilisation."
 
With respect to democracy...
 
In the Diccionario de la Lengua Española, democracy has two meanings: a) a political doctrine favourable to the intervention of the people in government; b) predominance of the people in the political government of a State.
 
If the definition is that clear -- intervention and predominance of the people in government--, why do some politicians and "experts" and the majority of the mainstream European and North American press distil so much venom towards Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian process in Venezuela, which is a magnificent example of what constitutes democracy, in both of its meanings?
 
And if I write on this it is because before the lamented death of Hugo Chávez, when the results of the Italian elections were known, judging by the reaction of European politicians and of their "experts", there was already a need to say that within the capitalist system for some time now the bourgeois democracy -- not to speak of participative democracy — has become a nuisance.
 
Now it is more necessary than ever to recall that the important labour and social achievements that neoliberalism is now destroying, as well as the functioning of democracy over time, and above all the decolonisation in Africa, Asia and Oceania, that all of these were in reality the forced response of US imperialism and that of the former imperial or colonial powers -- Great Britain, France, Belgium and Portugal – to the persistent struggle of workers, the growth of socialist and communist parties, the struggles of colonised peoples, and from the 1940s, to the existence of the Soviet Union with prestige in the masses and military power, of a "socialist camp" in Eastern Europe and the triumph of the Revolution in China.
 
Paraphrasing historian, professor and friend Yakov Rabkin, the concessions that the United States and their allies had to make, such as decolonisation and respect for the sovereignty of people, lasted but for a short time and are now a thing of the past, since the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.
 
La Vèrdiere, France.
 
(Translation: Jordan Bishop)
 
- Alberto Rabilotta is an Argentine – Canadian journalist.
 
 
 
Notes:
 
1.- See ¿El acta de nacimiento del neoliberalismo? http://alainet.org/active/40974&lang=es
El neoliberalismo está asfixiando la democracia http://alainet.org/active/41179&lang=es
Neoliberalismo, corporativismo y totalitarismo
 
2.- See ¿Signos de desbandada neoliberal? http://alainet.org/active/60951&lang=es
 
3.- Interview with Jean-Claude Juncker, Der Spiegel
 
4.- Sweden considers raising retirement age to 75: http://www.euractiv.com/health/sweden-prime-minister-considers-news-518068
 
 
6.- Program of the 5 Stars Movement, in Italian:
 
7.- André Gorz, « Oser l’exode » de la société de travail vers la production de soi - Entrevista realizada por Yovan Gilles para « Les périphériques vous parlent », primavera de 1998
 
 
https://www.alainet.org/fr/node/74565

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