We have to move beyond 'post-democracy'

 The rise of Ukip and the parallel break-up of the Tory Party are part of a wider malaise across Europe that poses a threat to the established order. What happens next depends on whether we can get our act together in the face of growing reaction.

Ukip and the 5 Star Movement in Italy are just examples of the rise of populist, anti-politics. While these movements themselves are not fascist, their language, propaganda and nationalism has a threatening logic and opens the door to other forces. Nigel Farage rages against immigration and gay marriage, while Beppe Grillo is not hostile to Italy’s fascist past and is also anti-immigrant.

The swing to anti-politics – which can also take the form of not voting – coincides with and is driven by a rejection of austerity policies. Yet its origin actually predates the economic and financial crisis and is closely related to the globalisation process.

    

From the mid-1990s onwards, in Britain anyway, we entered a period which some refer to as “post-democracy”. Under this system, all the trappings of parliamentary democracy are retained, but the system is hollowed out. Corporate lobbyists and transnational, secretive, unaccountable agencies like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation actually determine policy. Elections become meaningless because the mainstream parties have been integrated into this process.

Ukip’s fear of the rise of the European “super-state” is not without foundation. The European Council has assumed fantastic legislative powers, while the European Parliament is the only one in the Western world that does not have the power to propose legislation and can only amend it. The Council operates in secret with its own secretariat and in reality calls all the shots. Of course, this has nothing to do with any known concept of democracy. In a challenging article for the new Statewatch journal, which monitors the EU and civil liberties Leigh Phillips notes:

The legislative decision-making apparatus is not parliamentary but intergovernmental and takes place primarily between diplomats behind closed doors. In truth, this is a form of treaty making rather than legislating, a method that historically was the realm of war, peace-making, and espionage. Great swathes of policy areas have been taken out of the domain of public, contestatory parliaments and placed in the hands of diplomats and civil servants.

Unlike most observers and to his credit, Leigh does not throw up his hands in horror at the rise of the Golden Dawn, neo-Nazi movement in Greece or Hungary’s Jobbik, with its Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) paramilitary association and what he describes as its “anti-Roma pogroms and unashamed Anti-Semitism”.

The question that he poses is what lies beyond “post-democracy”? We can’t return to the post-1945 social democratic consensus that lasted until the 1970s. That space is now occupied by the imperatives of corporate-driven globalisation. As Leigh says:

Depending on its particular flavour, anti-politics can exist as a cynical apathy that buttresses the neo-liberal post-democratic turn, or even wishes for an outright authoritarian turn with the arrival of a strongman saviour. But anti-politics can also be the germ of the overthrow of post-democracy if it embraces a progressive road that transforms anti-politics into the construction of (rather than just demand for) popular self-government.

Where his analysis falters, however, is in suggesting that “there is the possibility that the rejection of the political class transforms itself” into a belief in self-government” and “a desire for a transcendence of liberal political and economic structures”. Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence to indicate that democratic advances on this scale can take place without some decisive, organised intervention against prevailing state forces. That’s our responsibility to build. Nevertheless, Leigh reveals the dialectic in the break-up of the old order and his article is well worth reading in full.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

For a new democratic politics

Some leading political commentators have suggested that the present crisis gripping Parliament over fiddled expenses will fuel what they term “anti-politics” and that this is dangerous because it could play into the hands of the far right like the British National Party.

Seumas Milne was at it The Guardian, declaring that “the greatest danger of this week's parliamentary disgrace is the boost it will give to anti-politics: the roar of rage that they're all the same, the cynicism that nothing can ever really change”, while Steve Richards in The Independent has written that this week’s revelations have a “grisly simplicity that will fuel the existing anti-politics orthodoxy”.

The implication is that to be against “politics” as practised at Westminster is bad and dangerous. But surely Milne and Richards are making the mistake of identifying “politics” with democracy, confusing form with content. They are not the same thing. Politics is, according to dictionaries, the “art and science of governing” or “political activities” and opinions. So it’s difficult, if not impossible, to be “against” politics on these terms.

Democracy is a relatively newcomer in the modern history of politics and it is this side of the political equation that was struggled for in Britain by ordinary people who demanded a voice. The country was on the verge of revolution in 1832 when the ruling classes finally conceded a limited franchise. Chartists built a mass movement and laid plans for an insurrection in their struggle for the vote for working men.

If the disdain for Westminster “politics” has reached a crescendo, it is precisely because these historical gains which produced a representative, albeit limited, democracy have been undermined. Decisions at national and local level are made regardless of majority opinion – ranging from the invasion of Iraq, airport expansion, post office closures to bank bail-outs. When workplaces shut down because of the capitalist crisis we are not consulted. It is fait accompli. In terms of “political choice”, the differences between the mainstream parties are slim to non-existent.

So to be against this kind of “politics” is healthy and to be encouraged. Of course the political crisis opens the doors to the right, as it did in Italy (where the reformist left also had their chances, only to blow them because of their subservience to the same system). But it also creates opportunities if we can raise our horizons beyond the narrow confines of the parliamentary system and how to make it work better. It is better to see “anti politics” as a form of antimatter, containing vast amounts of potential energy that could provide the fuel for a new political democracy.

The current system is narrow, inadequate and operates to mask the real centres of power in British life - the executive, state institutions and the corporations. No amount of fiddling (pardon the pun) with the issue of MPs' expenses will change that. If the contempt for Parliament has reached new heights, it is because large sections of the electorate have for some time felt alienated politically, restricted to electing "representatives" once every five years to a body that is itself toothless.

The anger generated by the expenses' scandal could be mobilised to create new, alternative forms of democracy that, for example, give people power in their workplaces and communities along the lines suggested in the People's Charter for Democracy. By advocating an extension of democracy we can spike the guns not just of the BNP and the Tories, but of the state within the state that is watching and plotting in case Britain should become ungovernable at a time of mounting economic chaos.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor