The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin

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СКАЧАТЬ specific sense of a set of institutions that define and control its practices, is also a means either to facilitate or hinder the advancement of the people’s (the working/popular classes) interests. In this latter sense, we should then carefully distinguish the means of popular democracy from those of democracy reserved to the privileged. To describe democracy as “popular” could be taken for a pleonasm since demos means “people” in Greek. But the pleonasm is necessary because the democracy that the dominant ideology offers to us was designed and constructed to serve the privileged and not to promote the power of the popular classes.

      An authentic democracy is inseparable from social progress. That means it must combine the requirements for liberty with the no less important requirements for equality. These two values are not necessarily spontaneously complementary, but often in conflict. When liberty is combined with property, which is placed on equal footing and sanctified by the economic system, it reduces the space for realizing demands for equality. The property in question is that of a minority; in our era, it belongs to large financial oligopolies. In these conditions, the combination of liberty and property establishes the real power of a plutocracy, reducing democracy to ritual practices without any real significance. However, equality (or at least a certain amount of less inequality) can be—and often was in contemporary history—guaranteed by the government without great tolerance for the exercise of citizen freedoms. Combining liberty and equality is the essence of the challenge that confronts us today.

      The institutional democracy that the dominant ideology offers us is an obstacle to authentic democratic progress. Advances in democracy have always been produced by popular struggles, and such advances have always been more prominent in revolutionary periods.

      Democracy as we know it was not—and still is not—designed to encourage the expression of grassroot demands, but rather sets up obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Dominant recent tendencies in the institutionalized practice of electoral and representative democracy openly pursue the objective of reducing what their promoters call “the excess of democracy”! The dominant ideology links democracy with “freedom of markets” (that is, capitalism) and claims that they are inseparable: there can be no democracy without markets, thus no democratic socialism is conceivable. This is a tautological and ideological—in the vulgar and negative sense of the term—expression. The history of really existing capitalism as a globalized system demonstrates that this same truncated democracy has always been only the exception and not the rule.

      In the centers of capitalism, the progress of representative democracy has always been the result of popular struggles, held off for as long as possible by the power holders (property owners). It is an incontestable fact that such struggles have resulted in the expansion of suffrage (universal suffrage is recent), the strengthening of legislative power against the privileges of kings, aristocracies, and the military high command, and the legalization of limits to the freedom of property owners: labor rights, social security laws, etc.

      At the level of the global capitalist system, the link between (truncated) democracy and capitalism is even more clearly without any real foundation. In the peripheries (80 percent of humanity) that are integrated into real world capitalism, democracy has never, or almost never, been on the agenda of what is possible or even desirable for the operation of capitalist accumulation. In these conditions, I will even go so far to say that democratic advances in the centers, while they were indeed the result of struggles by the working/popular classes, were no less largely facilitated by the advantages such societies procured in the world system.

      Popular movements and peoples fighting for socialism and liberation from imperialism were behind the authentic democratic breakthroughs initiating a theory and practice that combine democracy and social progress. This evolution—beyond capitalism, its ideology, and the restricted practice of representative and procedural democracy—began quite early in the French Revolution. It was expressed more maturely and radically in later revolutions, in the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and some others (Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam).

      I am not one of those who refrain from severely criticizing the authoritarian, even bloody, excesses and abuses that accompanied the revolutionary periods of history. Explaining the reasons for such practices neither justifies them nor reduces their destructive impact on the socialist future aimed at by these revolutions. Still, we should also keep in mind the ongoing crimes of really existing capitalism and imperialism, the colonial massacres, the crimes connected with the “preventive wars” conducted today by the United States and its allies. Democracy in these conditions, when it is not simply erased from the agenda, is hardly more than a masquerade.

      Today, democracy is in decline worldwide. Within the context of generalized and globalized monopoly capitalism, democracy (even in its truncated forms) is not advancing—in reality or potentially—but, on the contrary, is in general retreat. In contemporary capitalism, electoral democracy—when it exists—is combined not with social progress but with social regression. Consequently, it is threatened with loss of legitimacy and credibility. “The market decides everything, the parliament (when it exists) nothing.” Moreover, the “war on terrorism” serves, as we well know, as a pretext to reduce democratic rights for the greater benefit of the plutocracy’s power in the era of obsolescent capitalism. People then are likely to be attracted to the illusion of retreating into “identities” of various sorts (para-ethnic and/or para-religious) that are in essence anti-democratic and a dead-end.

      In the countries of the capitalist/imperialist center, the working/popular classes (and even most of the middle classes, at least potentially) certainly aspire to a more real democracy, more equality, and more solidarity and social security—job security, retirement systems, etc. It is not certain that the ideology of cutthroat competition will be accepted indefinitely. But are the peoples of the North disposed to give up the significant advantages accruing to them through plundering the entire world, which implies maintaining the peoples of the South in underdevelopment? The ecological concern for “sustainable” development should lead to a serious reconsideration of these advantages. For this very reason, it has to be said that the manifestation of this concern seldom exceeds the expression of pious wishes. Here subservience to the democratic farce is internalized by a self-described “postmodernist” discourse that, quite simply, refuses to recognize the extent of such destructive effects. The main thing lies elsewhere it is said; what do elections matter in “civil society,” where individuals have become what the liberal virus claims they are—the subjects of history—whereas they are indeed not that at all!

      But the democratic farce does not work in the system’s peripheries. Here, in the “zone of storms,” the established order does not benefit from sufficient legitimacy to allow a stabilization of the society.

      The persistence of “backward-looking” aspirations does not result from the tenacious “backwardness” of the peoples involved (the usual rhetoric on the subject), but from an ineffective response to a real challenge. All peoples and nations of the peripheries have not only been subjected to the fierce economic exploitation of imperialist capital, they have also, consequently, been subjected just as much to cultural aggression. The dignity of their cultures, languages, customs, and history has been denied with the greatest contempt. It is not surprising that these victims of external and internal colonialism (Native Americans) naturally link their social and political liberation with the restoration of their national dignity. But these legitimate aspirations, in turn, lead them to look exclusively to the past, hoping to find there the answers to the questions of today and tomorrow. There is a real risk of seeing the peoples’ movement of awakening and liberation trap itself into tragic impasses when the “backward-looking” approach is taken as the central axis of the sought-after renewal. This confusion, among other causes, lies behind the “religious renewal.” By that I mean the resurgence of conservative and reactionary religious and para-religious interpretations that are “communitarianist” and ritualistic. Here monotheism quite easily is wedded to “moneytheism.” I obviously exclude from my judgment religious interpretations that rely on their spiritual sense to justify taking the side of those social СКАЧАТЬ