By Michael Faulkner – April 10, 2011
Any discussion of democracy is likely sooner or later to
recall Churchill’s famous dictum to the effect that democracy is the worst form
of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to
time. It is one of those seductive aphorisms that are thought to clothe a
profound truth in a pithy witticism. Churchill, like his literary kindred
spirits, Shaw and Wilde, was a past master in the delivery of such witticisms.
And, to be sure, this one has a prima facie ring of truth about it. But the
timing of his remark is of some interest. It dates from November 1947. He had
been out of office for over two years, after losing the post-war general
election of July 1945 to a Labour landslide. His heroic status as Britain’s war
leader had led many, including his closest allies in the United States, to
believe that he would triumph at the polls. He thought so himself. So, his
comments on the merits of democracy may have been in part a sad but resigned
reflection on his own fate at the hands of a seemingly ungrateful electorate. Then again, by
the end of 1947 the international political landscape had changed dramatically
since the end of the war. The cold war had started, fuelled to an extent by
Churchill’s speech at Fulton Missouri in March 1946, in which he claimed that
from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an ‘iron curtain’ had
descended across the continent of Europe. All those countries to the east of that
line falling within the Soviet sphere, were, he said, part of the undemocratic
bloc of communist totalitarianism. According to the cold war rhetoric that was
then becoming commonplace, Soviet totalitarianism was simply a different
variant of the Nazi totalitarianism that had just been defeated. So his ‘least
worst’ claims about democracy must also be seen as a defense of the
representative democratic systems in Britain, western Europe and the United
States as opposed to communist dictatorship.
Few would now seriously argue that the Stalinist regimes
that emerged in Eastern Europe after the second world war, were, despite their
designation as ‘people’s democracies’, in any meaningful sense democratic. But
the liberal subsumption of Nazism and Communism under the generic
‘totalitarianism’, fails adequately to address the profound differences between
them. Churchill certainly had ‘totalitarianism’ in mind when extolling the
merits of democracy as preferable to any other political system. Liberal
political theorists take for granted that ‘democracy’ in the modern world means
nothing other than representative parliamentary democracy of the type that has
evolved in most western countries during the past two centuries. The idea that
there could possibly be democratic alternatives to the liberal democratic model
is discounted as idealistic, romantic nonsense. The Stalinist regimes and
certain Third World dictatorships that claim to be democratic are cited as
negative examples, demonstrating the invalidity of any model of democracy other
than the western liberal parliamentary version. In rather the same way as the
failure of the Soviet and East European communist economic system has been used
to reinforce the claim that there can be no alternative to the neo-liberal economic
system that has triumphed in the west, so it is claimed that western-style
liberal democracy is the only desirable alternative to the single-party
bureaucratic dictatorships that ruled those states. It is taken for granted
that more or less everyone accepts this proposition. This assumes that everyone
is in agreement about what is meant by democracy and also, that everyone agrees
that the system we have at present is democratic. This is a rash and
unwarranted assumption.
The reality in Britain (and very likely in most other
democratic countries) is that there is widespread and growing cynicism about professional politicians and the
political system. A venal and prostituted ‘popular’ press systematically
panders to the lowest common denominator of supposed ‘public interest’. A
current case in point is the forthcoming referendum on reform of the voting
system. It is no exaggeration to say that the level of public interest and
information about the proposed ‘Alternative Vote’ option, even amongst otherwise
well informed people, is abysmally low. Although its adoption would produce a
more genuinely representative electoral outcome than the existing ‘first past
the post’ system, it will probably be defeated on what looks likely to be a
very low turn-out. The two main parties (Conservatives and Labour) have always
favoured the old system against any version of proportional representation, and
most of the press adopts the same stance.
But quite apart from reform of the electoral system, the
level of public knowledge and debate about democracy is still superficial.
Widespread public cynicism about the political system and professional
politicians has not yet led to probing questions about the nature and
limitations of representative democracy. The financial crisis of 2008 and the
bail-out of the banks at the expense of the taxpayers have caused real anger on
a scale not seen for decades. The onslaught on the welfare state in the name of
‘deficit reduction’ has produced the first serious signs of opposition. At the
end of March 500.000 marched in London under the banner of the TUC and the
public sector unions. New grass-roots organizations such as UK Uncut have
staged audacious public demonstrations on the premises of businesses and banks
guilty of tax avoidance. Anarchist groups, demonized by the popular press, have
physically attacked the bastions of corporate power and conspicuous wealth.
Things are stirring and as the impact of the onslaught on the living standards
of the majority of people becomes clearer opposition will certainly grow. The
prospect of this growing public resistance which will increasingly involve
direct action, raises crucial questions about the nature of democracy. Those in
power will hope that extra-parliamentary action will be limited to the odd
peaceful demonstration that can be easily contained. But it is precisely
extra-parliamentary opposition that needs to grow and become ever more
effective. And this must eventually encompass large-scale strike action.
Those who have advocated parliamentary representative
democracy as the highest form of democratic expression necessarily regard all
extra-parliamentary action as less legitimate. But the current popular
uprisings in the Arab world have brought to the forefront of public debate the
question of ‘people power’. The literal translation of the word ‘democracy’
from the Greek is ‘rule of the people’ (demos: people; rule: kratia), and this
recalls the concluding words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in which he
referred to ‘government of the people, by the people for the people’. Of
course, while lip service has been paid to the notion of democracy as
government, or rule, by the people, in reality it is taken for granted that
even under the most democratic voting systems, ‘the electorate’ will participate
in the process by voting every four or five years to send a representative to
the legislature. That will be the limit of their involvement. The belief that,
through a majoritarian electoral system, the people will be able to exercise
full political and economic power, enabling them to enact policies that would,
for example, bring about a radical redistribution of wealth and take the
commanding heights of the economy into public ownership, is completely
illusory.
Real power in Britain does not rest with parliament. No-one
voted for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, but he is set to take control of
the majority of the British news media. No-one voted to allow the accumulation
of unregulated power and wealth in the hands of irresponsible investment
bankers and, when they brought the whole financial system to the brink of
disaster, no-one voted to bail them out at the expense of the taxpayer. No-one
voted for the dismantling of the National Health Service and the decimation of
the welfare state. Yet all these measures are being undertaken by a government
that had no mandate for them, led by a political party which, without the
support of their Liberal Democrat partners who betrayed their election pledges,
would have no parliamentary majority. The manipulation of the parliamentary
system in the interests of a power elite, hell-bent on solving the economic
crisis into which their system has fallen by shifting the burden onto the
shoulders of the majority of the working population and the poorest sections of
society, has never been more transparent than it is today. A representative
democracy that is limited to the operation of a parliamentary electoral system
that affords no opportunity to redress the gross and growing inequalities of
wealth and real economic power in society, may rightly be regarded as a sham
democracy.
This doesn’t mean that it is without value or merit. Freedom
of expression and the freedom to organize, to resist and to strike, are
precious freedoms won over decades and centuries of struggle by working people.
They must be cherished and defended and cannot be taken for granted. The coming
months and years are sure to see growing resistance against the unprecedented
scale of attacks on the public sector and on the living standards of the
people. The degree of success of the popular struggles that lie ahead will also
be the measure of the growth of a genuine people’s democracy. Such a democratic
movement will not reject the parliamentary system, but neither will it be
confined to it. Only by the determined mobilization of extra-parliamentary
power, through trade unions, industrial action, direct action, occupations,
sit-ins and large-scale community initiatives will a real democratic popular
movement be able to tip the balance of power away from the corporate elite and
into the hands of the majority of the people.