Real democracy on the march

In a bold and inspired move, Spain’s Real Democracy Now! movement is taking the struggle to towns and villages throughout the country, so that the issues they have raised can be presented and developed by many more people.

The movement (DRY or M15) is organising marches from towns in the north, east, south and west of Spain: Valencia, Barcelona, La Rioja, Galicia and Andalucía. It is in line with the desire of the democracy campaigners to be as inclusive, to break down barriers and to have the widest possible debates about the way forward.

Two legs are already underway, with over 100 marchers setting off from Barcelona earlier this week. Despite soaring temperatures, the protesters hope to walk 21 kilometres each day. The Valencia route is around 500 kilometres long. The plan is for all the marches to arrive in Madrid on July 23 for a rally and the presentation of demands to parliament.

Last Friday, as the Spanish parliament passed new laws against the rights of unions, democracy collectives agreed to begin planning for a general strike on October 15 to coincide with other direct actions.

The M15 campaigners are not, however, asking the largest trade unions – the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Confederación Sindical de Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) to call strike action. They feel that these unions are too closely aligned with the Socialist Party (PSOE) government.

DRY has been holding rallies, assemblies and encampments in city centres since May. The occupation of Madrid’s Puerta Sol saw tens of thousands of demonstrators – young and old – gather to reject the country’s established political parties, the PSOE and the right-wing Popular Party (PP).

With slogans like “They don’t represent us”, and “Don’t Vote for Them”, the DRY movement denounced the privileges of the ruling elites, insisting that “the current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights and is in many ways an obstacle to human progress.”

Assemblies in Barcelona, Madrid and elsewhere have posted lists of demands ranging from greater democracy and political change to basic rights to jobs, quality of life, housing, public services, respect for the environment, reduced military spending and the abolition of the monarchy.

The call for a general strike poses the question of what such an action is for. Showing politicians and businesses that “if we stop, everything stops”, as a spokesperson from the M15 movement suggests, will not be sufficient to achieve the aims of the marchers. And, whilst rejecting their politically-compromised leadership, the members of the major unions cannot be ignored, if a general strike is to succeed.

A general strike as a protest – such as the two-day strike starting in Greece today – cannot by itself reverse the course of events, politically or economically. Both are inextricably linked and driven by a globalised crisis of the capitalist system of production as a whole.

Just as the unrepresentative political elites are inseparable from the system of private ownership of the means of production, so the financial system sits on top of the system of production for profit. Changing that means addressing the issue of ownership and power.

For true economic and political liberation, the issue of the state and power cannot be evaded. As A World to Win has noted: “The present state has to go and power has to change hands, from the minority to the majority, in revolutionary practice. Corporate and financial power could be co-owned and controlled and exercised through a network of people’s assemblies.”

In our view, that is the precondition for establishing real democracy now in place of the capitalist version that is discredited in the eyes of large sections of ordinary people. This is an urgent question because undoubtedly the far right is waiting in the shadows with own sinister plans of its own to “clean up democracy”.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Power, representation and the state

There is now a competition between the Tories and some members of the New Labour cabinet about how to “redistribute power” in a bid to defuse an historic political crisis that shows no sign of abating.

Tory leader David Cameron is today setting out a series of proposals about changing the relationship between MPs and the government, including the idea of fixed-term parliaments, while Alan Johnson, the health secretary and a front-runner to succeed Gordon Brown, is advocating a form of proportional representation when it come to voting.

Cameron, astutely, put his finger on the key question in an article in The Guardian, where he wrote: “The anger, the suspicion and the cynicism – yes with politics and politicians, but with so much else besides – are the result of people's slow but sure realisation that they have very little control over the world around them, and over much that determines whether or not they'll live happy and fulfilling lives."

But what neither Cameron nor any other establishment politician is going to ever acknowledge is that this has always been the relationship between people and power in Britain and all other capitalist countries adorned with a representative democratic political system. Representation as a form of politics was designed from the outset to act as a barrier to and not as an access to power.

Representation as a modern political concept has its origins in the thinking of James Madison, one of the key architects of the American constitution. Concerned with the danger, to him, of “majority tyranny”, he wrote that representation provides a mechanism

to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.

So Madison’s objective was clear – to avoid decisions “pronounced by the people themselves”. Instead, they would be “represented”. Representation is, therefore, a transfer of power to others, its alienation. This seemingly voluntary giving up of power enabled then allowed the ruling classes to consolidate their rule through the construction of specialist institutions which evolved into the capitalist state, of which Parliament (and Congress in the US) is a subordinate part.

What Cameron and others are talking about are some cosmetic alterations to formal procedures in order to continue to disguise this essential truth about the nature of power in capitalist society: that ordinary people have no power – and can never access it – so long as the state continues to sustain the basic relationships of capitalism, whereby the rich and the powerful make the key decisions. This is the material basis for the alienation in society that Cameron refers to, which is reflecting itself in politics so sharply precisely because of the collapse of confidence in the capitalist economic and financial system.

In Unmasking the State, we put forward a series of proposals for a new, transitional democratic state which would replace the existing institutions and actually give ordinary people direct access for power so long denied them. Some of these ideas are summed up in our People’s Charter for Democracy, which we urge you to sign and help build the momentum for the revolutionary transfer of power itself to the majority.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor