The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
By Saliem Fakir · 3 Nov 2009
On a recent visit to Madrid, I attended the Global Progress initiative held on 2-3 October 2009. It was a most illuminating meeting on the question of the evolution of European politics in the last 50 years.
I was invited by the Centre for American Progress (CAP), which is very strongly associated with the Obama administration, Heinrich Boell Foundation (the German Foundation for the Green Party) and Fundacion Ideas (allied to the Spanish Social Democrats).
I had the privilege of being a ‘southern’ fly on the wall, given the right to observe, as it were, from within the inner sanctum of the beautiful Casa de America (built in the 19th century to improve relations between Spain and Latin America) where the meeting was hosted by the Spanish government.
The meeting saw over 200 progressives from the North-Atlantic and a sprinkling of us from the south reflect on left politics and its future within the North-Atlantic; primarily Europe where social democrats are seeing their voter numbers dwindle as one social democrat party after another loses power.
The debates at Casa de America have some resonance for the question of the left project in South Africa. The central question remains the value of electoral politics, party power and the determination of the economic wellbeing of citizens who vote these parties into power and who, time and again, may find themselves badly represented and betrayed.
The sombre mood of despondency hung thick in the musty air of the inner cloisters of Casa de America as social democrats contemplated their future in European politics.
The ensuing discussions threw up a whole raft of provocative questions. Questions seldom asked. Questions that should be asked given that things are taken for granted too many times.
Questions that get neglected or deferred as party members and officials get caught up in internal squabbles and their quest to survive the next round of elections either to maintain their hegemony or contain the attacks, from the right, against their hegemony.
Questions about whom and what constitutes the left today, besides what the left project is? One may even ask the provocative: are left parties like the ANC and their social democrat counterparts in the world not the establishment; so what is progressive about their politics?
Some suggest that their politics are about power, not people’s issues and more harshly, have a questionable relation to issues that affect the populace.
This is within a context of party and parliamentary politics ostensibly having little legitimacy and where, invariably, the differentiation between left and right is increasingly blurred. So much so that issues and genuine interests of constituencies are subservient to the game of power.
This is a subject of extensive enquiry and rich historical detail explored by Luciano Canfora, in an illuminating book: Democracy in Europe: A History (Blackwell, 2006) where he seeks to explode the very myth that representational politics marks a true shift of power – a people’s democracy or a manifestation of an elite vanguard that continuously stage manages the process of democracy and voter participation.
Political power seemingly plays a ratification role for economic power. As Canfora insists economic power is in control of oligarchic interests outside of the parliamentary and democratic system in the ‘sphere of economics and finance’.
This would include the power of various technical bodies and institutions that are servants of the moneyed class.
The role of these oligarchic interests is to finance the party political machinery only to subvert and by-pass democracy by making parliament defunct -- a mere morass of warm seats passing time aimlessly until the next elections.
He writes that the European problem stems from the fact that “the executive was strengthened and electoral systems were put in place that shifted the electorate towards the centre and selected politicians using criteria of wealth; this led to the final defeat of universal suffrage”.
Party political systems become a sham and corrupted through this ‘partnership’ between the political establishment and economic oligarchies.
In Europe, seemingly these interests between bourgeois politics and economic agents have converged. In South Africa there is no final conclusion on this score. A tension between white capital and black capital still invigorates the debate.
The left project, by these agents of economic transformation (the black empowerment groups) is questionable despite countervailing tendencies between state bureaucracy, the white capitalist and technical class and new black capital. If nothing else, their fights are about managing access to privilege.
The cast of characters involved in questions of political economy have only one dispute – how to share the spoils amongst themselves.
In essence, Canfora’s thesis is that true democracy poses a threat because its egalitarian ideals become too unwieldy. It is prone to a ‘chaos’ of views and contestations and bound to expose the true intentions of politicians and the elite classes because of the demand for transparency.
Democracy, in the end, does not become freedom for all, but freedom for the strongest. It is for those that can muster the most voters under the umbrella of their edifying rhetoric and the money they can throw at organizing this consent.
As Canfora at some point in his book rightfully points out, democracy is a type of system of relations between the upper classes and their competing interests. They agree to compete bound by certain rules of civility, after which they are free to fight, quite freely, for the economic spoils.
The social democrats have traditionally been regarded as urbane; a force for modernization and bringing to European workers a fair bargain as far as economic welfare was concerned.
There were certain historical events and a momentum of class conflict that gave legitimacy and power to progressive politics and the shaping of post-war Constitutions in many European countries where anti-fascism and anti-Nazism was rife. They gave rise to what is referenced as an era where ‘peoples’ democracies’ were popular.
But the left project is failing across Europe. It seems that what the left represents through the party political machinery of social democrats across Europe is distinctly off message. There have been resounding defeats.
Most recent being the heavy losses the Social Democrat Party of Germany had to endure and give way to the rise of Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Party for a second term.
As a recent paper by the CAP titled The European Paradox noted, everything should be going well for the left, but instead in Europe the right is gaining ascendancy. Merkel was also illustrative of the extent to which she could appropriate the left agenda and win votes for the centre-right.
The social democrats have also been losing voters to other centre-left and radical left parties who are an emerging minority of opposition parties within various European states.
Whether they are a new progressive force to contend with is still to be seen.
Some even talk of a new left arc emerging across the North-Atlantic. But this presumption may not be sustained.
Today, social democrats hold power in only five of the 27 European Union member states. Their overall decline in voter support has averaged around 27% since World War II.
As the CAP study notes, “social democrats have done a poor job of defining what exactly they stand for in the current era and how that is different from the conservatives, precisely.” Essentially, conservatives have been able to blur any differences between themselves and the social democrats.
The left’s problem or the so-called progressives in the North-Atlantic is that they do not admit their curse; that striving for a class shift and having brought it about is serving to subvert this very left programme, which has had a long history.
Bourgeois tendencies and preoccupations have long decoupled the left parties from radical politics.
The Third Way movement invigorated during the Clinton and Blair eras was an affirmation of this process of decoupling.
What Europe’s left politics needs is a class tension and strife between progressive and anti-progressive interests (real ones) for its project to be enlivened and succeed.
The elimination of poverty amongst the European populace, through various social protections, is the way in which the super-rich, the political and economic elite have managed to reduce class tensions and supplant material disparity for its opposite: the love for materiality.
This in itself mutes the radical tongue and breeds conservatism.
Conflicts over how the benefits of an economy are shared are replaced by other concerns -- mostly fears about continued job losses in the globalisation of the labour markets, the fear of the loss of savings from the financial crisis, fears about Islam, terrorism and immigration.
These are essentially concerns about contented citizens whose needs have been met. There is a shift from material fears to psychological fears amongst the European electorate.
The divide here is not about class or materiality. The divide springs from a certain psychology: How to preserve the project of pan-Europa and how to prevent pan-Europa from also becoming the place of ‘others’?
Europe’s politics, between left and right, is a divide on issues of exclusivity.
In its post-contentment period, the enlightened European left has lost its moorings from its true left origins. It is for this reason, given its infatuation with Europe’s success in securing a privileged life for its citizens, both left and right only differ on whether to be radically exclusive or libertarian in their exclusivity.
Here in South Africa, the problem is different: How to secure privilege for the elite and at the same time feed the masses after they, the elite, have taken from the coffers what they see is their right after years of struggle? But, as time reveals, these two strains of interests are becoming great sources of upheaval.
There is only one of two ways; a genuine shift from the trappings of privilege for a few or to suppress legitimate discontent by beefing up the police, the army and security apparatus where all else fails
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A Reasonable Life for All
The ideal of politics is to provide a reasonable life for all citizens.
Unfortunately the implementors of this ideal are subject to many human weaknesses and the ideal quickly becomes forgotten in a scramble for personal gain. We in South Africa are a glaring current example of this.
