dittologica

Recent news from South Africa is serious cause for general reflection on the meaning of democracy. Although the coverage from South Africa is dominated at the moment by preparations for the 2010 World Cup, the street demonstrations for better living conditions would seem to be the more significant, if grossly underreported, story. Protests across the country have been directed at the failure so far of the country’s president, Jacob Zuma,  to deliver on promises to address inequalities and poor living standards (Al Jazeera, 13 October 2009).

In December 2007 Zuma was selected by the ruling party, the African National Congress, to replace Thabo Mbeki, who had been discredited for attempting to ensnare Zuma in dubious corruption charges, and more generally, for the failure of his neoliberal policies to improve the living standards of the nation’s majority.

The outbreak of street violence in the country’s poor townships nearly two years into Zuma’s tenure signals that the ANC has not yet done what is needed to win back the confidence of the people.

The South African example is hardly unusual. All over the world citizens of purported democracies are disappointed with the leadership offered by their political parties and elected leaders. As is the case in South Africa, where the party of resistance to apartheid has become the party of accommodation to the profit motive, it is also true for the United States, where those who voted for “change” aren’t getting much for their effort. And it is true for the UK, where an imperial-style succession landed the citizens with a leader they didn’t select and whose handling of the economy has fatally wounded the public’s confidence in the purportedly progressive Labour Party.

Even worse, the concept of democracy is often used as an overlay to mask autocracy or political chaos, as in the elections imposed by the occupying powers on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Democracy as currently practiced is too often a matter of window dressing and stirring words. And yet, in the face of overwhelming evidence of its absence, the citizens who bear the brunt of this failure are largely confused as to what is wrong. The problem is almost always regarded as the failing of individual politicians or political parties – an assessment which is nurtured by commercial and state controlled information networks. The solution to political failure supposedly consists in waiting for the next round of elections and then voting for another candidate put forward by the entrenched parties and their corporate backers.

Critical analysis of the manner in which political society is structured rarely finds its way into mainstream discourse. Instead, politicians and their shadows in the media promote the view that tinkering around the edges – a touch of regulation here; a dash of quantitative easing there; a few public figures shamed into resignation; a new round of elections – will solve all problems.

There are, or course, many around the world who not only hope for real change but who have a vision of a different kind of society. Their hopeful visions take many forms and shapes, but today the different visions are coalescing around recognition that universalization of the social and economic model bequeathed by the social engineers of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries have led humanity down the wrong path. This model, based on the paroxysms of the industrial revolution, came in both right-wing and left-wing varieties. Although a vast simplification, it would not be inaccurate to say that a main ingredient lacking in those traditional political models is the incorporation and preservation of mass popular movements. While mass movements often arise in the face of social adversity and become a political force capable of remaking the political order, they rarely persist beyond the transformations they bring about.

And yet grassroots movements are the stuff of real democracy. Such movements are purpose-built to make and remake society from the bottom up. They are based on the identity of common issues faced by large swathes of the population, and on a concerted cooperative effort to right wrongs and improve the collective lot. They are the seeds from which local self-determination can grow.

The effectiveness and prospects for success are greater when citizens are directly and collectively involved in solving their problems and creating suitable conditions for their own development.

It should go without saying that such movements cannot flourish without the active support of higher-level government institutions, which can provide funding, resources and organization beyond those available at local and grassroots levels. It is a two way street, and loss of accountability or responsiveness at either end is fatal.

In his recent book, The Food Wars, Walden Bello, sociologist, activist,  and member of the Philippine House of Representatives, documents the work of several international mass movements which assert the agenda of peasants and small farmers against the inroads of globalized-industrialized agriculture. Chief among these organizations are Via Campesina and Movimento dos Trabahaldores Rurais Sem Terra, which, in concert with other mass-based organizations, have taken on the WTO juggernaut and stalemated its drive to complete the monopolization of food production around the world by international agribusiness. As Bello writes:

“The paradigm of food sovereignty [championed by these movements] challenges at every point the pillars of capitalist industrial agriculture, emphasizing, among other principles, food self-sufficiency, the right of a people to determine their patterns of agricultural production, farming that is not based on chemical-intensive agriculture or biotechnology, equality in land distribution, and agricultural production and distribution resting mainly on small farmers and cooperative enterprises.” (Walden Bello, The Food Wars, 2009, p.148)

Internationally linked grassroots movements such as the ones Bello documents in The Food Wars may well represent the wellsprings of a new kind of social revolution for the twenty-first century. They not only challenge the destructive and exploitative practices of globalized capitalism, but they also provide models for civic organization at the grassroots level. To quote Bello again:

“…small farmer or peasant based farming is becoming a model for the locally or regionally sustained alternative economies that people are searching for. Peasants and their allies are demonstrating how food sovereignty and other paradigms based on the same principles are relevant, and indeed crucial considerations for all sectors of society.” (Bello, ibid, p.149)

It is worth reiterating that grassroots movements cannot succeed without support from centralized political structures which are supportive of their agendas. Grassroots movements cannot attain state power by themselves, but they can build coalitions to provide critical support to progressive political actors, whom they may or may not field themselves, and who must in turn be committed to using the state’s resources to support the goals of the mass movements. As stated earlier, any fracture in the relationship between the two would mean the end of  the entire project. This is precisely what has happened with so many of the world’s “labor” parties, which are “labor” in name only.

Faced with the justified loss of confidence in existing democratic processes around the world, perhaps the time is ripe to look beyond the next “election”, and to put aside hopes that the entrenched parties of the elites will fix the problems we face. Perhaps it is time to join others with similar problems and aspirations and try to build political power from the ground up.