Democracy and the expectations of ordinary people

Few people seem to recognize that democracy has an economic side to it — one powerfully intimated at the close of Michael Moore’s latest documentary film, Capitalism — A Love Affair, where he observes (I don’t recall his exact words) that in the light of what he has documented in the film, capitalism is an unacceptable system. And then his closing remark; something like: “There is an alternative to it. It is called democracy”.

Before seeing his documentary Sicko on the private healthcare system in the United States — a system that compares unfavourably with public healthcare in Canada, Britain and Cuba (yes, Cuba!) — I was not all that impressed by Moore’s cinematic offerings, which I thought were too doctrinaire, and not sufficiently understated or nuanced to be effective as critiques of certain mainstream American practices. These ranged from the easy availability of guns Bowling for Columbine to the cynical economic exploitation, by the Bush administration and its cronies, of the war in Iraq Fahrenheit 9/11.

But I thought that both Sicko and Capitalism — A Love Affair had a very powerful impact through their sheer “letting the events and the facts speak for themselves” kind of approach — even if one grants that a director (in this case Moore) unavoidably plays the crucial role of selecting and “directing” the way the film unfolds.

The concluding words in the latter film reminded me of Hardt and Negri’s work on democracy in the age of globalisation, so powerfully articulated in Empire (2001) and Multitude (2005). In the latter they list and discuss a number of “global demands for democracy” in the contemporary world, which have been increasing in strength. In so far as these are directed at governmental authorities and multinationals, they are attempts to communicate a variety of grievances pertaining to serious encroachments on the principles of democracy, which they understand as a form of social and political arrangement which can only, justifiably, happen or “arise from below”, as “the rule of everyone by everyone”, that is, governance with the participation of the people (who would thus be both the “rulers” and the “ruled”).

The worldwide protests (some of which we are witnessing right now at the G8 and G20 meeting in Toronto) against the global political and economic system can therefore be understood as a sign that “democracy cannot be made or imposed from above”. Hardt and Negri list three principal elements which recur constantly across the board in all the global demands in question as preconditions for democracy, namely: ” … the critique of existing forms of representation, the protest against poverty, and the opposition to war”.

One should keep in mind that these grievances are indissolubly connected to what Hardt and Negri take to be an increasingly obsolete political conceptualisation and vocabulary, which were forged in the crucible of the birth of modernity, and which can increasingly be seen as having little purchase on the requirements for democracy in the postmodern, globalised world. As such, they are manifestations, at a fundamental level, of what may be described as the contemporary crisis in communication at many levels.

One may gain some understanding of this state of communicational failure from closer scrutiny of some of the contemporary “demands for democracy” briefly listed above. Drawing a parallel between the social and political significance of the more than 40 000 cahiers de doléances (lists of grievances) compiled all over France and submitted to Louis XVI just prior to the French Revolution of 1789, and the accumulating lists of similar grievances today — ranging from the most local contexts to the “highest”, most encompassing levels of governance — they observe (in Multitude) that one might see these protests, today, against the present form of economic, cultural and political globalisation in the same light as the protests preceding and foreshadowing the 18th-century French Revolution.

The very fact that, in Multitude, Hardt and Negri can write that “[m]ost contemporary protests focus, at least in part, on the lack of representation” — which they also refer to as “the crisis of representation” — draws attention to (the lack of) communication between constituencies and those who supposedly represent them worldwide, from local through national to global (international) institutions of representation. The following excerpt seems to have been written at least partly with the 2006 local government elections in South Africa in mind (p. 270):

‘The false and distorted representation of local and national electoral systems has long been a subject of complaint. Voting seems often to be nothing more than the obligation to choose an unwanted candidate, the lesser of two evils, to misrepresent us for two or four or six years. Low levels of voter turnout certainly undermine the representative claim of elections: those who do not vote serve as a silent protest against the system.”

Does this not ring a familiar bell for South Africans, who, not too long ago, witnessed, in their young democracy, “low levels of voter turnout” (which were admittedly much higher at national level elections after the Polokwane coup), and were, weeks after the local government elections of 2006, witnessing protests on the part of communities (I recall Christiana in the North-west Province, and Kirkwood in the Eastern Cape, to mention but two) about unwanted appointees, like mayors, that political parties were foisting on them? It is no exaggeration to claim that these protests signify a fundamental divergence in interests between the electorate and their so-called representatives, who (before these elections) were widely accused of corrupt practices for personal gain.

In South Africa the disillusionment on the part of only recently franchised voters is probably also connected with recurring evidence of the growth of a broader elite class, at the cost of the working classes. When I recently read the reports in the Mail and Guardian concerning the way that a family member of the chairperson of the Local Organizing Committee was benefiting financially from the accommodation requirements of overseas visitors during the World Cup, and, secondly, of the arrogant manner in which Eskom management appropriated for themselves millions of rand for the most expensive World Cup tickets (some of which sold for R17 000 each!), I was not only disgusted. I was also reminded of Hardt and Negri’s work on the growing protests against the three conditions listed above, especially the second one — the protest against poverty.

The first report has since been dismissed by the official in question (Danny Jordaan), and one does not know what to believe in this case (but I assume that M&G had evidence of what it claims in this regard). As for the second report: imagine the sheer arrogance of these fat cat, high salary-earning executives who — at a time when they are assuring the unions that worker demands for wage increases are unrealistically high (!), and when Eskom needs billions to expand its power-supply capacity — arrogate to themselves the right to spend millions on themselves for luxury seating, with sumptuous meals being served to them while watching World Cup soccer matches!

My reason for referring to these instances in the context of the demands for democracy as outlined by Hardt and Negri, is simply this: humans’ historical memory is appalingly short, and unless those in power (not only in South Africa, but worldwide) recall events such as the submission of the people’s grievances to the French king just prior to the French Revolution in 1789 (referred to above), they may find themselves facing a much broader and more sustained series of protests, if not a rebellion, on the part of the working classes.

In Michael Moore’s film, alluded to earlier (Capitalism — A Love Affair), there are several scene-sequences where ordinary, middle-class members of the American public are shown showing their displeasure at the way that the elites were rescued from financial disaster with the help of public funds, and I have been noticing signs of spreading dissatisfaction on the part of Americans in the international press, too. And no wonder: while these scoundrels (like Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs), who are, by all accounts, largely responsible for precipitating the global financial crisis, are sitting with their bums in the butter, as it were, millions of Americans have lost their homes.

My advice to the ruling elites is simple: start doing what is democratically just, in economic terms, as far as the masses of workers are concerned. One cannot ignore the probability, that, sooner or later, they will have had enough of being exploited, while the elites flaunt their mostly unearned wealth. In economic terms, what is democratically just is called “distributive justice” — in a society that has the pretence of promoting justice, this is no less important than “legal justice”.