The case for a new political democracy
Speech to AWTW rights conference by Paul Feldman
Corporate-driven globalisation has brought us to an end point in social history. And at the same time we have reached the boundary of a new chapter in our long struggle for rights.
The current political state system no longer even pretends to embody democratic aspirations and methods.
Our right to vote, for example, has lost its significance and no longer carries the power to influence the course of events.
All traditional political parties stand for the same thing – market capitalism under god.
The state is neither representative nor accountable. Secret decisions by the executive are the norm. Conspiracies to subvert democracy and dissent abound.
The ever-closer connection to the corporations and financial interests has led to the evolution of a market state in place of the welfare state.
Many decisions are now taken by unelected, unaccountable and undemocratic global and regional bodies like the WTO, IMF, EU and World Bank.
The state is unwilling and incapable of dealing with major global issues such as climate change and terrorism – except through worsening the situation.
It is undermining or withdrawing from delivering on key social rights – health, education, pensions – all achieved by decades of struggle.
In trying to maintain control and authority, the state, as we have seen, resorts increasingly to authoritarian rule, cracking down on dissent and civil liberties.
It is increasingly lawless – as events from Iraq to the detention of terror suspects without trial shows.
A strategic challenge – even a dilemma - is before us as a result. How do we turn the tables on the state? How do we achieve human and social rights in the 21st century?
We are obliged to ask: is it possible to bend the existing state and its institutions to our will? Will protest and pressure restore our rights? Will our rulers yield in this way?
Do they have the freedom of movement? Can the state, for example, turn the clock back to a pre-globalisation period and restore the welfare state? To ask the question is to answer it.
In my view, which we explain in A World to Win, the institutions that comprise our political system are beyond repair/reform. Ultimately they have no independence from the capitalist system they rest on.
In the era of globalisation, this is more the case than ever before. the state, which once mediated between competing interests, is now openly partisan. Whatever democratic aspects it had are fast disappearing.
Of course we must take every opportunity to defend our rights, using every avenue including parliament and the courts to make our case.
But let us be under no illusions that setting out to establish new rights as well as retrieving the ones we have lost brings us into a direct conflict with our political rulers and state institutions.
We have to aspire to act ourselves in a mass way to take history forward. We cannot accept that the present, defective parliamentary system is the last word in democracy.
As we campaign for our rights, we should advocate new democratic political institutions that move history forward in a positive direction. Unless we do so, we are always caught on the defensive, trying to hold our ground but never advancing.
We should campaign for a written constitution – that sets out a framework for more advanced human and social rights than we have today. For example:
- the right to work free from exploitation by others – achieved through co-operative, not-for-profit forms of ownership and control of major economic and financial resources
- to organise independently of the state in societies, trade unions, free from state surveillance, legal restrictions and oppression
- the right to a safe environment – achieved through respect for nature and laws that state that production has to be based on ecological sustainability
- the right for all sections in society to be directly involved at every level in decision-making processes in bodies that exercise real power
- the right to health care free from exploitation by the pharmaceuticals and their manipulation of new drugs and research
- ree education for students at all ages
- dignity in older age through pensions at average income and free care
- access to affordable, decent housing without the burden of mortgages or the exploitation of private landlords
- equality for minority communities and asylum free from punitive restrictions
- a legal and penal system based on equal access, the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, self-policing and rehabilitation
How to achieve this? A mass movement, such as we have seen in other countries from Eastern Europe to South America, with these aims in its sights, can make the change.
The mass of the people are now unrepresented, effectively disenfranchised. But the state is increasingly lacking in authority and legitimacy. The authoritarian state serves only the interests of the elite.
Time is not on our side. we face the twin threats of outright dictatorship and climate change. We should heed warnings from history and not leave it too late.
We actually have the right to fight for something better than the status quo, just as pioneers of democracy have always done.
We should pick up where the Levellers and Chartists left off. To turn the tables on the state by transforming the state into institutions that serve the interests of the majority.
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