Democratisation of politics or politicisation of democracy? by by Farhad Mazhar
In the neo-liberal era Bangladesh may not succeed in installing the founding act of liberal democracy without keeping close attention to the ultimate aim of democratic politics which is the withering away of the state. People will still require a state and its form will be democratic in contrast to the ambiguous status of liberal states. It implies that cultivation of the people's power is the condition for strengthening democracy. Democratic state will not be a permanent institution. In that case it will mean that class will remain a permanent phenomenon of society. It will mean that democratic state is a transitional phase that will lead to its withering away
WE INTEND to address the theme 'democratisation of politics' suggested by New Age for its supplement issue; however, we immediately perceive a difficulty. The theme 'democratisation of politics' cannot be addressed immediately since we are not sure what our assumptions are about and what we mean by 'democracy' or by 'politics'. Most importantly, we are not aware of the limits and possibilities of these categories and, therefore, not capable yet to determine the utility of these notions. Noting that 'democracy' is today the 'main organiser of consensus,' Alain Badiou, the well-known French philosopher, says the word is assumed to 'embrace the downfall of Eastern Socialist Societies, the supposed well-being of the countries as well as Western humanitarian crusades.' It has become the tool for regime change and nation-building project as we see integral to the current global wars such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The xenophobic anti-Islamic hatred is cultivated contrasting non-western societies on the basis of degree of absence of democracy. To Badiou, the word 'democracy' is inferred from what he terms 'authoritarian opinion'. With sarcasm, he says 'it is somehow prohibited not to be a democrat.' If individual are suspected of not being democratic they are deemed pathological (Badiou, 1998).
The textbook meaning of democracy that it is the will and interests of the large majority determining the decisions of the state has been overrun by the concern of what another philosopher calls 'formal legalism'. Its minimal definition is the 'unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game (Zizek, 2003). 'Democracy' now means that 'whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results.' One can easily fit electoral realities of Bangladesh to the notion of 'formal legalism' Zizek is talking about.
The difficulty also lies elsewhere. Why 'democratisation of politics' and not 'politicisation of democracy'? Indeed, democracy requires to be politicised. We cannot discuss democracy anymore unless we problematise the notion with politics, or, in other words, unless we learn to make the critique from the political necessity of the people to constitute themselves as power, as agents of history. We must grasp 'democracy' as a political notion and not merely as moral notions such as tolerance to other, remaining sympathetic to opinions different from our own, right to vote and decide who should be ruling us; strictly remain obliged to a rule-based game such as election to transfer power from one section of rulers to another, to economically exploit the majority by a few every five years; etc. To distinguish 'democracy' from such commonplace notions, usually an adjective is used, to distinguish it from 'democracy' proper; it is known as 'liberal democracy'. We can perceive, even at the outset, that there is a difference between liberal democracy and democracy. To highlight the importance of democracy in contrast to liberal democracy, the revolutionary left has often termed democracy proper or 'true democracy' as people's democracy. The necessity to inscribe people on the term democracy may appear superfluous, and perhaps rightly so. But the necessity arose because 'liberal democracy' has been touted as the only democracy available for us and thus glorious struggle of the people for democracy, even liberal democracy, has often been effaced. To situate democracy within the history of people's struggle or, in other words, to frame it within the perspective of class struggle, it has become a norm to term democracy as people's democracy in contrast to 'democracy' – in our daily use which always means liberal democracy. Our task here is to make these differences clearer and rescue democracy from liberal abuse in order to raise fundamental questions that can guide our politics and assure us the necessity of the democratic transformation of Bangladesh. We obviously cannot deal with it fully here but at best suggest a direction for our investigation.
Liberal democracy
LIBERAL democracy is the political ideology of capitalism. Its paramount function is to justify the distribution of property and power that permits a minority of rulers and exploiters to exploit and dominate the lives of the majority. This is done by a theory of political and juridical equality in order to maintain the economic foundation of the economic inequality of capitalism; this arrangement allows self-expansion and accumulation of capital and reproduces unequal capital-labour relation.
Liberal democratic order can be traced in the period roughly from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, feudal society was breaking down and the embodiments and advocates of liberal democracy, by and large, were those whose social influence was grounded in their control over the developing power of capital. Power passed progressively from church to prince to parliament and finally to the marketplace. Liberalism developed as a result of the defeat of the landed classes in the hands of the emerging bourgeoisie. Against the feudal conservatives were the liberals or the bourgeoisie forging alliances with oppressed classes represented by the working class and their ideological supporters.
In the struggle of liberalism against conservative feudal aristocracy or landed class, democracy was a vital weapon. It was set against fixed status, hierarchy, authority and extra-worldliness and, on the side of mobility, contract, legal equality and choice. Liberal democracy universalised political and legal equality and choice, contract and mobility to ensure proper functioning of capitalist system since these appeals have ensured widest popular support against landed classes. In this sense, liberal democracy is an advance over many of the conditions that prevail in pre-capitalist societies.
However, ambiguity and the reactionary character of liberal democracy started to manifest as soon as the working class started to challenge the capitalist class with the same tools that were used against the landed class. Under these circumstances, liberalism had to find devices to protect itself from the ideology and movement of the working class. It is clear that working movement has been threatening its destruction from below since the development of capitalism. Therefore, liberalism may insist on democracy, but it must formulate the democratic creed in such a way that private property is protected against the increasingly franchised working class. Liberalism may profess itself as an advocate of equality, but it must shape 'equality' in a way that the capitalist class is able to retain its superior power. Liberalism may speak powerfully for freedom but the freedom it prescribes is to protect a system of privileged
liberty against the threat of growing labouring class. This ambivalence can be read in the treatises of great liberal thinkers such as Locke
and Mill.
Democracy question from
people's perspective
BECAUSE of the ambiguity produced and conditioned by history as well as class contradiction in capitalist society, the democracy question cannot remain limited to the ideology of liberal democracy. The radical posture of democracy that we historically experienced should be reclaimed and its fuller development must be envisaged through people's struggle for realising the imminent potential of democracy. This is what I would like to call politicising or politicisation of democracy. Democracy must not be degraded to 'legal formalism' although democracy requires certain formal rules to practise. Politicisation of democracy requires getting rid of the habit of thinking that democracy is opposed to dictatorship or dictatorship is contradictory to democracy. Such binary opposition, privileging democracy over dictatorship, does not help us to understand the nature of political power and, consequently, the potential and meaning of democracy. Political power is always dictatorial class power, although it may or may not be dictatorship of individual ruler. Liberal democracy is not merely a set of political or juridical practices; it is also a state form suitable for the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class to exercise dictatorship against the labouring oppressed classes under capitalism. It is democracy for the bourgeoisie but dictatorial rule against the class that is enemy to its existence. In essence, it implies dictatorship of a few against the rest of the majority of the people. To fully realise its own potential, democracy must become the democracy of the people. Given the nature of the democratic power, this will also be the dictatorial rule against the class that likes to maintain the economic inequality and oppression – the foundation of the capitalist regime. If democracy is to realise its potential historically, it must evolve from liberal democracy to democracy proper and this will inevitably take place. We are not talking about the subjective wish or capacity of any class in particular. If democracy signifies the power of the people, it would also mean the power to dictatorially fight and rule against the class that maintains the inequality in the economic sphere. We are discussing the nature of power and the imminent possibility of democracy and not what we subjectively like or dislike.
Democracy question is questions of power and form of the state
THE second vital point in order to politicise democracy is to insist that addressing the question of democracy is always addressing the question of the form of the state. Different democracies are 'forms of the state' and not merely set of formal rules and practices; they are particular configuration of the separate character of the state and the formal exercise of sovereignty. Democracy has always been related to the question of power, the power of the 'demos' or people, the capability of the 'demos' to exert coercion by itself.
However, dictatorial coercion by one class against the other is the reality as long as a society is a class society. If the task of democratic politics is to eliminate all inequalities including inequalities arising from the very foundation of capitalism, it also implies that the democratic struggle is the struggle for the elimination of all classes and conditions of their existence; in other words, it is the struggle for a society not based on class. If democratic struggle succeeds in achieving this state it also implies that there will be no need for coercive exercise of class power through the instrument of the state. So, we land on the well-known thesis of the 'withering away of the state'.
Whether human history will be able to achieve that state is a different question. What we have argued here is that the question of democracy cannot be addressed without interrogating its potential or future possibilities, without a reasonable assumption of the future of democracy. Democracy has the potential to wither away as a state, it has a self-annihilating character by which, if practised properly as a political project, it will end up in withering away itself as a state-form. This is the most interesting aspect of democracy that can be revealed to us as soon as we get rid of the hangovers of liberal democracy.
In this regard, liberal democracy is an opportunity as well as a hindrance. Opportunity in the sense that it may be a useful tool to eliminate legacies of pre-capitalist inequalities including feudal strains or relations allowing the constitution of a politico-juridical sphere above the inequalities and economic competition of civil society. Democratic functioning of the sphere of legal and political equality despite the existence of socioeconomic inequality is the most important element of liberal democracy. The importance of universal suffrage, granting all adult citizens the right to vote regardless of race, gender or property rights, is an important achievement of liberal democracy. However, its greatest failure from its own perspective manifests in decisions made through elections that are not made by all of the citizens, but rather by those who choose to participate by voting; the number of voters could be very low making a mockery of liberal representative government.
On the other hand, liberal democracy is a hindrance, the primary adversary and enemy of democracy. Democratic struggle has no other options but to expose the historically determined reactionary character of this side of liberal democracy in order to unleash the potential of democracy. While liberal democracy maintains and reproduces the economic inequality based on the institution of private property and developed historically as capitalism, the democratic struggle is the politics to eliminate economic inequality per se, creating conditions for the elimination of the classes and thus ensuring the withering away of the state.
The liberal democratic constitution defines the democratic character of the state. However, liberal democracy requires a founding act, a revolutionary moment to break away from the past and initiate a process for the people to constitute themselves as the state through the constitutive process of a constituent assembly in order to frame a liberal democratic constitution. This is known as the bourgeois democratic revolution.
Despite the glory of the liberation struggle of 1971, Bangladesh failed to institute a liberal democratic order. The constitution of Bangladesh had not been framed by the people. The representatives who were elected for the constituent assembly of Pakistan declared themselves as such after the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This is the main reason why the people of Bangladesh failed to reap any benefit from liberal democracy. It has artificially imputed and, since 1971, has been used as a veil for brutal economic exploitation by the classes that carry all the legacies of pre-capitalist societies including feudalism.
In the neo-liberal era Bangladesh may not succeed in installing the founding act of liberal democracy without keeping close attention to the ultimate aim of democratic politics which is the withering away of the state. People will still require a state and its form will be democratic in contrast to the ambiguous status of liberal states. It implies that cultivation of the people's power is the condition for strengthening democracy. Democratic state will not be a permanent institution. In that case it will mean that class will remain a permanent phenomenon of society. It will mean that democratic state is a transitional phase that will lead to its withering away.
Neo-liberalism has shifted the power of the state to the global corporations. In this new situation the democratic struggle of the people will have to be directed against the elite of global corporation. The class struggle will increasingly take the form of antagonism between people across borders against the few global elite who rules the world through the economic institutions of capitalism such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, etc. Present politics of Bangladesh cannot be democratised as such, but we can politicise democracy to learn quickly the strategy and tactics to install the founding act of democracy as quickly and as early as possible.
References:
Badiou, A, 1998, 'Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy', in lacanian link 16
Zizek, S, 2003, 'Too Much Democracy', http: //www.makeworlds.org/node/159, accessed on September 21
The textbook meaning of democracy that it is the will and interests of the large majority determining the decisions of the state has been overrun by the concern of what another philosopher calls 'formal legalism'. Its minimal definition is the 'unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game (Zizek, 2003). 'Democracy' now means that 'whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results.' One can easily fit electoral realities of Bangladesh to the notion of 'formal legalism' Zizek is talking about.
The difficulty also lies elsewhere. Why 'democratisation of politics' and not 'politicisation of democracy'? Indeed, democracy requires to be politicised. We cannot discuss democracy anymore unless we problematise the notion with politics, or, in other words, unless we learn to make the critique from the political necessity of the people to constitute themselves as power, as agents of history. We must grasp 'democracy' as a political notion and not merely as moral notions such as tolerance to other, remaining sympathetic to opinions different from our own, right to vote and decide who should be ruling us; strictly remain obliged to a rule-based game such as election to transfer power from one section of rulers to another, to economically exploit the majority by a few every five years; etc. To distinguish 'democracy' from such commonplace notions, usually an adjective is used, to distinguish it from 'democracy' proper; it is known as 'liberal democracy'. We can perceive, even at the outset, that there is a difference between liberal democracy and democracy. To highlight the importance of democracy in contrast to liberal democracy, the revolutionary left has often termed democracy proper or 'true democracy' as people's democracy. The necessity to inscribe people on the term democracy may appear superfluous, and perhaps rightly so. But the necessity arose because 'liberal democracy' has been touted as the only democracy available for us and thus glorious struggle of the people for democracy, even liberal democracy, has often been effaced. To situate democracy within the history of people's struggle or, in other words, to frame it within the perspective of class struggle, it has become a norm to term democracy as people's democracy in contrast to 'democracy' – in our daily use which always means liberal democracy. Our task here is to make these differences clearer and rescue democracy from liberal abuse in order to raise fundamental questions that can guide our politics and assure us the necessity of the democratic transformation of Bangladesh. We obviously cannot deal with it fully here but at best suggest a direction for our investigation.
Liberal democracy
LIBERAL democracy is the political ideology of capitalism. Its paramount function is to justify the distribution of property and power that permits a minority of rulers and exploiters to exploit and dominate the lives of the majority. This is done by a theory of political and juridical equality in order to maintain the economic foundation of the economic inequality of capitalism; this arrangement allows self-expansion and accumulation of capital and reproduces unequal capital-labour relation.
Liberal democratic order can be traced in the period roughly from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. During this period, feudal society was breaking down and the embodiments and advocates of liberal democracy, by and large, were those whose social influence was grounded in their control over the developing power of capital. Power passed progressively from church to prince to parliament and finally to the marketplace. Liberalism developed as a result of the defeat of the landed classes in the hands of the emerging bourgeoisie. Against the feudal conservatives were the liberals or the bourgeoisie forging alliances with oppressed classes represented by the working class and their ideological supporters.
In the struggle of liberalism against conservative feudal aristocracy or landed class, democracy was a vital weapon. It was set against fixed status, hierarchy, authority and extra-worldliness and, on the side of mobility, contract, legal equality and choice. Liberal democracy universalised political and legal equality and choice, contract and mobility to ensure proper functioning of capitalist system since these appeals have ensured widest popular support against landed classes. In this sense, liberal democracy is an advance over many of the conditions that prevail in pre-capitalist societies.
However, ambiguity and the reactionary character of liberal democracy started to manifest as soon as the working class started to challenge the capitalist class with the same tools that were used against the landed class. Under these circumstances, liberalism had to find devices to protect itself from the ideology and movement of the working class. It is clear that working movement has been threatening its destruction from below since the development of capitalism. Therefore, liberalism may insist on democracy, but it must formulate the democratic creed in such a way that private property is protected against the increasingly franchised working class. Liberalism may profess itself as an advocate of equality, but it must shape 'equality' in a way that the capitalist class is able to retain its superior power. Liberalism may speak powerfully for freedom but the freedom it prescribes is to protect a system of privileged
liberty against the threat of growing labouring class. This ambivalence can be read in the treatises of great liberal thinkers such as Locke
and Mill.
Democracy question from
people's perspective
BECAUSE of the ambiguity produced and conditioned by history as well as class contradiction in capitalist society, the democracy question cannot remain limited to the ideology of liberal democracy. The radical posture of democracy that we historically experienced should be reclaimed and its fuller development must be envisaged through people's struggle for realising the imminent potential of democracy. This is what I would like to call politicising or politicisation of democracy. Democracy must not be degraded to 'legal formalism' although democracy requires certain formal rules to practise. Politicisation of democracy requires getting rid of the habit of thinking that democracy is opposed to dictatorship or dictatorship is contradictory to democracy. Such binary opposition, privileging democracy over dictatorship, does not help us to understand the nature of political power and, consequently, the potential and meaning of democracy. Political power is always dictatorial class power, although it may or may not be dictatorship of individual ruler. Liberal democracy is not merely a set of political or juridical practices; it is also a state form suitable for the bourgeoisie or the capitalist class to exercise dictatorship against the labouring oppressed classes under capitalism. It is democracy for the bourgeoisie but dictatorial rule against the class that is enemy to its existence. In essence, it implies dictatorship of a few against the rest of the majority of the people. To fully realise its own potential, democracy must become the democracy of the people. Given the nature of the democratic power, this will also be the dictatorial rule against the class that likes to maintain the economic inequality and oppression – the foundation of the capitalist regime. If democracy is to realise its potential historically, it must evolve from liberal democracy to democracy proper and this will inevitably take place. We are not talking about the subjective wish or capacity of any class in particular. If democracy signifies the power of the people, it would also mean the power to dictatorially fight and rule against the class that maintains the inequality in the economic sphere. We are discussing the nature of power and the imminent possibility of democracy and not what we subjectively like or dislike.
Democracy question is questions of power and form of the state
THE second vital point in order to politicise democracy is to insist that addressing the question of democracy is always addressing the question of the form of the state. Different democracies are 'forms of the state' and not merely set of formal rules and practices; they are particular configuration of the separate character of the state and the formal exercise of sovereignty. Democracy has always been related to the question of power, the power of the 'demos' or people, the capability of the 'demos' to exert coercion by itself.
However, dictatorial coercion by one class against the other is the reality as long as a society is a class society. If the task of democratic politics is to eliminate all inequalities including inequalities arising from the very foundation of capitalism, it also implies that the democratic struggle is the struggle for the elimination of all classes and conditions of their existence; in other words, it is the struggle for a society not based on class. If democratic struggle succeeds in achieving this state it also implies that there will be no need for coercive exercise of class power through the instrument of the state. So, we land on the well-known thesis of the 'withering away of the state'.
Whether human history will be able to achieve that state is a different question. What we have argued here is that the question of democracy cannot be addressed without interrogating its potential or future possibilities, without a reasonable assumption of the future of democracy. Democracy has the potential to wither away as a state, it has a self-annihilating character by which, if practised properly as a political project, it will end up in withering away itself as a state-form. This is the most interesting aspect of democracy that can be revealed to us as soon as we get rid of the hangovers of liberal democracy.
In this regard, liberal democracy is an opportunity as well as a hindrance. Opportunity in the sense that it may be a useful tool to eliminate legacies of pre-capitalist inequalities including feudal strains or relations allowing the constitution of a politico-juridical sphere above the inequalities and economic competition of civil society. Democratic functioning of the sphere of legal and political equality despite the existence of socioeconomic inequality is the most important element of liberal democracy. The importance of universal suffrage, granting all adult citizens the right to vote regardless of race, gender or property rights, is an important achievement of liberal democracy. However, its greatest failure from its own perspective manifests in decisions made through elections that are not made by all of the citizens, but rather by those who choose to participate by voting; the number of voters could be very low making a mockery of liberal representative government.
On the other hand, liberal democracy is a hindrance, the primary adversary and enemy of democracy. Democratic struggle has no other options but to expose the historically determined reactionary character of this side of liberal democracy in order to unleash the potential of democracy. While liberal democracy maintains and reproduces the economic inequality based on the institution of private property and developed historically as capitalism, the democratic struggle is the politics to eliminate economic inequality per se, creating conditions for the elimination of the classes and thus ensuring the withering away of the state.
The liberal democratic constitution defines the democratic character of the state. However, liberal democracy requires a founding act, a revolutionary moment to break away from the past and initiate a process for the people to constitute themselves as the state through the constitutive process of a constituent assembly in order to frame a liberal democratic constitution. This is known as the bourgeois democratic revolution.
Despite the glory of the liberation struggle of 1971, Bangladesh failed to institute a liberal democratic order. The constitution of Bangladesh had not been framed by the people. The representatives who were elected for the constituent assembly of Pakistan declared themselves as such after the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. This is the main reason why the people of Bangladesh failed to reap any benefit from liberal democracy. It has artificially imputed and, since 1971, has been used as a veil for brutal economic exploitation by the classes that carry all the legacies of pre-capitalist societies including feudalism.
In the neo-liberal era Bangladesh may not succeed in installing the founding act of liberal democracy without keeping close attention to the ultimate aim of democratic politics which is the withering away of the state. People will still require a state and its form will be democratic in contrast to the ambiguous status of liberal states. It implies that cultivation of the people's power is the condition for strengthening democracy. Democratic state will not be a permanent institution. In that case it will mean that class will remain a permanent phenomenon of society. It will mean that democratic state is a transitional phase that will lead to its withering away.
Neo-liberalism has shifted the power of the state to the global corporations. In this new situation the democratic struggle of the people will have to be directed against the elite of global corporation. The class struggle will increasingly take the form of antagonism between people across borders against the few global elite who rules the world through the economic institutions of capitalism such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, etc. Present politics of Bangladesh cannot be democratised as such, but we can politicise democracy to learn quickly the strategy and tactics to install the founding act of democracy as quickly and as early as possible.
References:
Badiou, A, 1998, 'Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy', in lacanian link 16
Zizek, S, 2003, 'Too Much Democracy', http: //www.makeworlds.org/node/159, accessed on September 21
http://www.newagebd.com/2010/oct/10/anni10/anni10.html
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