On democracy

[Free Radical]

"Of forms of democracy first comes that which is said to be based strictly on equality. In such a democracy the law says that it is just for the poor to have no more advantage than the rich; and that neither should be masters, but both equal. For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will best be attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost"
Aristotle (2008) The Politics of Aristotle, BiblioBazaar, LLC

Democracy has been an important issue for debate for well over 2,000 years, as indicated by this quotation from Aristotle (384 BC to 322 BC), concerning just one of the forms of democracy that he considered.

The political left has had a complex relationship with democracy. In many ways the history of what we call 'the left' is directly associated with the birth of modern democracy as we know it - and the term 'the left' itself dates from the democratic assembly created during the French Revolution of the late 18th Century. In the 19th and 20th centuries the Marxist left called for a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' which we have been exploring on another thread http://forums.redpepper.org.uk/index.php/topic,845.0.html .

But what does democracy mean to the left now in the early 21st Century? What should it mean? What do we want from democracy? What kind of democracy would we like to create? How does it figure in our thinking? How should we think about democracy?

[Johnnywas]

Free Radical

democracy means so many things to different people that its a little difficult to know where to begin (important though your questions are)

however, it may be worth starting with the pluralist model. or as some would have it "bourgeois democracy".  in other words modern liberal democracy of the type charecterised by Robert Dahl. basically people vote, everybody can vote, all votes are equal,  the  government is subject to recall and there is a free and active press to encourage discussion of the issues

i think that if there were a group of people stranded on a desert island after a plane crash this  is possibly how they would aspire to be govern. So, all in all, its not a bad 'model' for how politics should operate

however back in the "real world" there are substantial difficulties with the  type of democracy envisaged by Dahl

I can see three -

1) contra to the liberal view not everyone has equal opportunities or life chances in the real world.  there are rich people and there are powerful people on the one hand. one the other there are poor people and there are people whose views are marginalised. the rich and powerful are able to associate into factions and classes and use their wealth and power to ensure that decisions which a democratically elected government might choose to implement are in fact impossible. furthermore, as a class, they are able to use the language of individual property rights to challenge the legitimacy of governments of a egalitarian persuasion. because the corrosive impact of inequality in capital is largely hidden from view.      

to ensure liberty,  democrats have to work hard to ensure equality of outcomes or at least a better approximation of that
  
2) the theory of democracy can also neglect the importance of individual rights to democratic constitutions - the right to associate, the right to expression, to religious observance etc.  without respect for its citizens, democracy can take an increasingly authoritarian form.   fortunately, we have a set of rights outlined for us in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. its not a document which is in any way sacred and its not without potential failings but it is a fairminded effort to chart those areas of life where we should seek to ensure personal autonomy.

3) the vast majority of people are excluded from voting or from exercising meaningful rights across a substantial area of their lives. for most of us work is organised on an almost feudal basis. its time to address this. and I think that in the past the left has been rather slow to advocate reform.   the UK is quite backward compared to other established european democracies (Germany and Scandinavia).  the Left failed to support the Bullock Report - but having dismissed it as insufficient no progress has been made even towards its limited aspirations .  


j  
      

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Helpful initial contributions I think, especially the point about workplace or economic democracy which certainly deserves delving into in more detail.

But let me extend the question. As Brigg often reminds us on these boards,democracy involves not just the rule of the majority but also the protection of minorities. In practice, it is often the left which constitute, or speak up for, current minorities as they are contemporarily politically conceived: but the owners and controllers of the world's wealth are also a minority and most leftwing theory is based on the idea that their 'rights' must be challenged. ('Expropriate the Expropriators' and all that.) Apart from crude utilitarianism (these folks' liberties interfere with the majority's liberties, and prevent the majority exercising their democratic rights so the 'greatest number don't get the greatest happiness') is there a clear justification  in democratic theory for why this particular minority, but not others,  should be over-ridden?

I  ask not because I want to argue in favour of the rich and powerful, but because I'm interested in teasing out the tensions and ambiguities in marrying up socialist and democratic theory. We have discussed 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' on another thread forever and a day and most of us have rejected that sort of approach: but I wonder if there are other questions at a deeper level to also be resolved?

[Free Radical]

Johnnywas and Charlie

Many thanks indeed for such thoughtful responses - it's the kind of response I was hoping for in opening out such a fundamental subject.

Johnnywas - you point to the reality that democracy does not in any sense guarantee equality. Aristotle perhaps implies that democracy is linked to equality as well as liberty - which few would dispute. And perhaps for the left, this aspiration towards equality is something that we tack onto our support for democracy in a way that often distinguishes us from the political 'right'.

You also point to the importance of 'rights' since democracy can also (as Jefferson said I think) be a kind of tyranny. The idea of human rights goes back quite a long way but particularly I think to the Enlightenment, and is also related somehow to the growing importance of the idea of the individual as well as the human. Such things in the Enlightenment are elevated to universal values. The US Constitution talks about 'inalienable' rights - a useful concept, whether you ultimately believe it or not, as it puts down a line in the sand that cannot be crossed (much as our own government tries and sometimes succeeds in doing).

Thirdly, and I think this is particularly important for thinking on the left, you talk about a potential aspect of democracy not just in relation to government but in having control or an input into other areas of life. Many such institutions in this society still enshrine this to a degree - school governors for example, but perhaps those of us on the political left might call louder and more clearly for such extensions of democracy in this sense. Since 1979 this kind of participatory democracy has been under attack in the UK by political centralisation, quangoisation, and privatisation.

And, yes, in retrospect the left would have done very well to support the Bullock report - industrial democracy seems to me to be vital, though personally I don't go down the completely syndicalist or anarchist roads, attractive as they are in some way - because I see a positive role for the state and notions of justice, despite the evident problems with the state.

Charlie

Also very thoughtful contributions, and I like the way you tease out the vexed issue of supporting democracy whilst perhaps wishing to trample upon others property rights... In how many different ways this is justified - historically, morally, and, as you say in terms of utilitarianism. Clever ways around this issue are taxation of course, and the old aristocracy have declined because their tangible assets could not be hidden and could be taxed, but a new aristocracy has arisen that in some ways is worse than before since they have no ties to any place or people - only perhaps to money... And how we deal with that issue is a challenge.
If taxation could be made truly effective (corporations and the superrich are able to evade much of it at present) then we could ensure far greater equality of income and far better public services.

[Jon Teunon]

For democracy to be more than the vapid smokescreen it is now - it has to be economic as well as political - and the best way for this to be realised is through land reform (ensuring everyone has a stake in society) and the kind of industrial democracy already highlighted on this thread. (Personally I have no problem with the anarchist/syndicalist position - the people are the state - but we are so far from this extreme that it should be cause for disagreement).

Utiliatarianism is a highly reactionary and oppressive mode of thought - just an excuse to beat the minorities with. Any leftist position must defend the minorities or it can go to authoritarian hell.

My answer to Charlie's interesting point, is that the rich's posotion of power is so divisive and potent in the first place, it effect infringes on the (economic) rights of the rest of us, which for me is why the left opposes unequal societies in the first place.

[Johnnywas]

Jon

thanks for that very pithy reply to Charlies question about why we should have no very substantial regrets about redistribution of wealth.  all government have to make choices between conflicting interests and there is a strong case that the concentration of ownership by a tiny class of rentiers and superich undermines the common values necessary to sustain a civilised society.

however it is right to ask about 'means' as well as ends. in a pluralist society there is an expectation of due legal process and an expectation that measures taken to prevent injustice are proportionate. it may therefore be entirely right to redistribute wealth whether through high taxation or through nationalisation but it would be difficult to justify that if it left the property class without reasonable means of support.

however the issue is rarely so stark. so does a Government have a moral obligation to compensate shareholders in a nationalisation when the shares are worth more than a nominal amount  ?

i think not, but its an issue which divides public opinion.

j  

[Brigg57]

I think the Threadneedle street thread shows the nature of democracy in our society, and I think we need to take an even more critical attitude than we do. The demonstrators have the vote, yet they are regarded as fair game by the police who patrol order in our democracy. They are outside the pale, and anyone who has lived in a poor area - an area where home ownership is virtually non-existent - is made aware that they're beyond the pale too. The police are there to patrol that pale, to make sure that the rubbish who live there don't disturb the ctizens represented by our democracy.

I think people have become fixated on the vote as what constitutes democracy, as shown by the occasional cry for proportional representation as a panacea for the weakness of the Left in Parliament. It's certainly understandable - the vote is somethng that was fought for by the radical movement over a long time, from the Levellers to the Chartists. Once respectable men had the vote - Gladstone made a famous speech where he said working men had the sense of responsibility which made them fit for the vote, unlike their irresponsible Chartist forebears - respectable women wanted it too; pretty soon everyone wanted it.

But the vote does not constitute executive power, real political power - as Bevan once pointed out, power had been there, but as soon as people like him got near it, it was suddenly shifted. The vote has become a check on dictatorship, and a check which is usually pretty well-behaved in this country. Political power is more or less exempt from the vote, being subject to a ballot every five years and having great control over the result through a whipping system, Cabinet collective responsibilityand a monarch to whom recourse can be had in case of dire emergency; the social power of capital has many safeguards built in for protection - unless it fails, as it did last year - and even then there are built-in protections.

This is why GDH Cole, the socialist theorist, described the vote as merely characterising a 'bare ballot-box democracy'. It's only just a democracy (compare with North Korea to show it's not a dictatorship - they do have elections in N korea, but they're not nail-biters). This is why the New Left, many of whom had attended Cole's seminars at his home on Holywell St in Oxford) pointed to an undemocratic society covered by a political democracy. The Communist Historians (Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm) uncovered a history of struggles for democracy which could connect Communists to a native tradition rather than Stalin.

So far, so humdrum. Well-worn ground, though ground that has to be learned again every generation perhaps.

But the influence of the New Left and the Communist Historians have declined. Where Raymond Williams once pointed to an undemocratic society where the working class had been trained into a surly subservience through cultural deprivation, we now have Jon Lawrence (fast becoming one of the UKs prominent historians) and Philip Gould (one of Blair's gurus) arguing that the working class merely want to better themselves through buying houses, while Williams is denounced for elitism - the culture of East Enders is working class, sorry suburban (still fucking peasants from what I can see, as one man once sang) and to be protected against elitist sneers.

The fact is that democracy (in the most demotic-suburban sense) has become the most respectable term in the language. Call for democracy somewhere and you find you're kicking an open door (or a door which is open as long as fundamental social power is not challenged).

The fact is that the old Establishment which presided over a grumbling populace has been emasculated; the landed aristocracy long gone as a power; the public school brigade are being replaced by the bovver-boys of Thatcher's stock market, their fraud later given a veneer of fashionable cool by Blair; sport is now a democratic if not demotic expression of the people - compare Herbert Sutcliffe, the cricketer who always accepted the referee's decision no matter how bad, with post-George Best footballers who spit on the field and kick the other side to get the ball - albeit a democracy dominated by business.

Why? The person most responsible for democratising our society is Margaret Thatcher. She was the one who blew the doors off in a radical transformation of Britain - a transformation already prepared, waiting to happen, but she was the one who did it in her 'peasants revolt against the Tory party grandees and all they represented. The Left talked for a long time of making Britian more democratic - Thatcher did it.

The question is what type of democracy was brought in, and what can replace it now that its social base has been shown to be vulnerable (we've rejected dictatorship, most of us). The violence of the cops at Threadneedle Street is just the start. Once a society feels threatened, then it reacts with violence, and the social power which rules over our society feels very threatened all of a sudden, since last autumn.

FR - Aristotle hated democracy - he thought of it as a degenerate form of government - he wanted a constitutional government, a polity, and that meant the exclusion of women, slaves and children. Only responsible men could be citizens. I am very distrustful of democracy, or any form of government - to me, checks on power are what is important, protections of individual dissent as well as of minority groupings (the Left has been a bit careless about individual dissent).

[Jon Teunon]

Jwas

Yes there has to be a balance and no left wing position should ever be grounded in revenge. For example expropriation is necessary but shouldn't be used as an excuse to inflict punishment or humiliation, all justified as class warfare.

Basicallly people should not face unecessary hardships, but since the left includes those of the material kind as well as of the more political kind eg religious persecution, then it is reasonable to view dispropotionate inherited wealth as an infringement on other peoples' rights. This is not to be seen in isolation or as a crime so bad that all other considerations are to be suspended. But it needs to be considered as part of the political debate - which it quite clearly is not now.

It is absurd that there are still vast amounts of land in the hands of the descendants of the victorious side of the Battle of Hastings, including Elisabeth Windsor. The Plantaganet family (from Henry II to Richard III) are still the major land owning family! Never mind the capitalism we've still haven't dealt with feudalism yet! (Which one of the many reasons why I am so distrustful of Marx - I really think that in all his Hegelian enthusiasm he did tend to get ahead of himself...)

So let's have some grown up debate in the country about genuine land reform etc. But it won't take place in Parliament (or at Brussels). The Humans Rights Act forbids any expropriation without any proportionate compensation, which is frankly absurd. Or at least loaded in the favour of the aristocracy. The Duke of Westminister is the richest man in the UK because his share of the Norman Conquest cherry cake happens to consist of large sections of London. And the EU/UK Law really refects waht most people think? That if we wanted to use it for social housing ,the Duke of Westminister should recieive the fortune that a lawyer would be able to negotiate? Is that democracy? Bastardised Feudalism?

But if the majority of people think that is unfair why should thet be constrained by legislation they had little or influence on? It is not persecution to point out that there are still a few thousand people who have no moral right to so much wealth and that the issue should be explored.

As in your case of your share holders, the devil is of course in the detail. Are the people concerned going to be losing such a fraction of their income, or their only means of survival? How much should they be left with? But anyone with any imagination can see ways of expropriating fairly and proportionately - and trying to ignore the inequality will get us nowhere.

Brigg

I like your post but it still boils down to the lack of economic democractic content which makes our system so sterile: it is still the case that if you don't have consdierable property you have no power (with or without the vote).

Thatcher wasn't as radical as many (left or right) have claimed she just saw through all the Post War apologetic right wing rhetoric and saw the above point as clearly as conservatives always have such as Cromwell and the Grandees in the Civil War, but which the pro-establishment movement had been forced to (temporarily) concede by the huge increase in support for collective political action after the War (the Welfare State etc).

She believed that only those who have property, and consequently a stake in the bourgeois settlement, can be trusted with political capital. So where Cromwell and Ireton made clear in the Putney Debate with the Levellers that only those who paid the Hearth Tax (ie who owned property) should be eligible to vote, Thatcher knew that disproportionately do the middle claasses vote in relation to tye working classes. (I read once that %80 of the mc vote whereas only %20 of the working classes do). FPTP just reinforces this - your point about PR is spot on.

And her Council House sell off was obviously just a way of creating more of 'our type' of people a batant attempt at social engineering - a term which her regime was always quick to throw at the left.

Her and other run-of-the-mill reactionaries is to confront the issue of property by protecting those that have. Yes let a relatively small amount of new recruits into the elitist propert owning circle, but still steadfastly defend the few, and sod the rest. You and I know that it is not want the majority of people really want, in this or any other country.

[baslamak]

"The fact is that the old Establishment which presided over a grumbling populace has been emasculated; the landed aristocracy long gone as a power; the public school brigade are being replaced by the bovver-boys of Thatcher's stock market, their fraud later given a veneer of fashionable cool by Blair; sport is now a democratic if not demotic expression of the people - compare Herbert Sutcliffe, the cricketer who always accepted the referee's decision no matter how bad, with post-George Best footballers who spit on the field and kick the other side to get the ball - albeit a democracy dominated by business."

Briggs57

Not sure if the first part of this paragraph is true, yes the public school brigade took a rest or kept a low profile, if one looks at Cameron's shadow cabinet and those around London's Mayor, they seem to have reemerged with a vengeance, covered in democratic slime. The same is true in the media and the arts.

 I also feel you are mistaken about the aristocracy, this country is still a monarchy thus such people whose very existence is based on the hereditary system are well ensconced at the 'top'. Take a look at the UK military and the law. If you look at the ST rich lists this bunch are well represented within the top half.

"they haven't gone away you know"

[Free Radical]

Brigg

Just on Aristotle - it is commonly said that he hated democracy, but there are other views e.g. a paper by Clifford Bates a professor of politics from the US http://members.tripod.com/~batesca/dem-a.htm#N_3_

I certainly agree that the left has been a bit careless about political dissent.

Did Thatcher bring in a 'democratic' revolution - in some ways - and I like the characterisation of her 'peasants revolt' against the Tory Grandees, which I think has a lot of merit. Obviously you are not really a Thatcher fan, but I think she also destroyed much of the more 'organic' (for want of a better word) democracy - the bottom up democracy of the NHS for example, and it is this kind of democracy that the left seems strangely silent on at times - as though we can somehow capture government, or even the means of production but sometimes lose sight of the fine detail of the way our society functions. Or then, if we focus on the fine detail we then sometimes lose sight of the big picture (at my first ever Labour Party meeting at the age of 16 in a suburban living room there was quite a long, no doubt useful, discussion about bus routes, whereas when I went to my one and only Young Communist League meeting - it put me off for life - there was a call to celebrate Stalin's birthday).

These myriad points thrown up by Baslamak, Jon and Johnnywas are also worthy of comment. Can I take just one for now, which is the moral nature of some comments - Jon's statement that no left wing position should ever be grounded in revenge is one such. I agree by the way. But the left has had such a complex relationship to morality. It often seems to lurk in the wings as some kind of virtue that dare not speak its name, or morality is trotted out as though it is simply blindingly obvious (and sometimes perhaps it is). But it is so often conflated with sectional interest (which of course I can understand) - and Marxism seemed to raise this up to a virtue at its crudest. So perhaps we need a more sophisticated analysis of the moral basis of left wing thought too - which takes us into some odd territory. Christian socialism had an obvious map and a compass for example, but where do secularists and atheists begin...?

Another problem is means and ends - and (this has come up before) - is democracy a means or an end...?

[Jon Teunon]

FR

Democracy, the genuine deep participatory kind I mean, is definitely the means.

As you say the NHS and other everyday parts of society should be thoroughly democratised and the silence on this subject from some sections of the left (most notably from the authoritarian wing I would suggest...) is unexplainable - perhaps apart from the point you suggest about their obsession with only capturing the State.

I strongly believe that the more people genuinely claim political and economic control of their lives the more they get  a taste for it. The main reason why so many people get turned off by 'politics' today is because the democratic process is still so shallow and esmasculated. People can sense a sham when they see one and they act accordingly.

But genuine control of the workplace and public spaces of society is anything but a sham.

And Basmalak is completely right about the aristocracy and their power, a point I also made. Just go to

http://www.who-owns-britain.com/

to realise who much wealth - both finacial and in terms of land -  still lies in the hands of the aristocracy, including the Windsors. It is obscene.

[Johnnywas]

Jon

i'm not aware that the Human Rights Act  requires compensation by the State to property owners in advance  of nationalisation although it does require the Government to seek appropriate legal powers and to make a clear public interest case

the UNDHR also has a right to own property individually and in association with others (article 11).  However the UNHDR has a long history and its not usually used to prevent measures of redistributive nature where they have been enacted in law.  measures to confiscate the property of minorities and nationalities are sometimes challenged, largely because they are either arbitrary or dicriminatory.  in any case most socialists would admit to wanting  to allow  some types of  personal property.

no doubt however the law in both cases is complex and there will be teams of lawyers debating the issue for eternity.

j

[Brigg57]

baslamak,

I think that the ways of the old aristocracy are still with us in important areas, but a serious change has come about.

As a child I was horrified by one of the stories my dad told me of his time in the Army in Germany immediately after the war. It was a time when the Little Lord Snooties of Britain were held in particular contempt by many ordinary people, who were hoping that their new Labour Govt would end all that crap once and for all. A guy in dad's barracks insisted on listening to classical music - I don't remember whther they had individual record players, or radios, or whether he was just boasting about it - I'll ask dad when I see him this Easter. But he may well have been trying to assert his superiority over the rest, who liked jive and big band music. Dad told me that a group of them beat him up - not just a dusting up, but they hurt him bad. When I went to a secondary modern, one of the kids was a 'posh kid' in his talk and dress, and he was targeted, like a couple of the "pansy boys". The social prejudice is real, and very hurtful, and has a genuine basis still.

The upper classes in Church, Army, Law are dominated by Oxbridge, and Oxbridge is very biassed indeed to the public schools. Do a sociological headcount and you'll find it. The public schools teach their young children to rule, tell them they're born to rule, and that they must rule ruthlessly and cleverly. There is no change there.

But the power of the aristocracy has long gone. The time when the great country houses - in the sense of the landed estates of a Salisbury, a Derby, a Devonshire, a Bedford - were important political centres is gone. They were economically broken after the First World War when the great land sales of 1918-21 marked the biggest shift in landed wealth since the Norman Conquest, their power in the Lords broken earlier and virtually ended by Blair, their ability to show off their young ladies in the Debs ended in the late 50s when Princess Margaret complained that "every tart in London was getting in" and their annual Queen Charlotte's Ball turned into a snobbish farce when the Queen stopped coming and all the young ladies had to curtsey to a dummy's model. After 1945, many of the remaining aristocracy either turned into charladies and floor cleaners (eg Lord Montague of Beaulieu) or like the commercially-minded Duke of Bedford were forced to turn their country houses into show estates for the hoi-polloi to wander around. The monarch remains very important to the system in all sorts of ways, but the death of the People's Princess showed the Windsors which way the wind was blowing.

It's the nature of the people who changed, but their training in which they aped the older aristocracy remained the same. Winchester (for Labour), Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge still dominate. Socially they know how to cut - I can attest to that in the intellectual social circles of the Left where they dine and exert rules much in the same manner as the Right. But it's money which counts now, not birth. Boris Johnson's grandma was a Circassian slave, he boasts, but when I first came across him he looked and talked like a Toby Jug - nothing to distinguish him from the English upper orders, even though he was half Turkish.

But it's money which counts now, and that is where Thatcher made the difference. I recently read an interview with the Pet Shop Boys, an ageing singing couple, who said that in the 80s money was the big issue - were you against it or for it? In the 90's, money just became an assumption; nobody questioned it. In the last decade, they said, is there anything else?

When Thatcher went to Oxford, it wsas from a grammar school in Grantham. She was a Methodist, and converted to Anglicanism at Oxford, perhaps because it was a way of getting on. But she remained at heart a Methodist - the Lord helps those who help themselves. She never fitted in with the Tory grandees, who had inherited the old Anglican idea of communitas - that the shepherd looks after the flock. She had nothing but contempt for such an approach - to her, virtue must be rewarded with wealth, and vice punished with poverty. It was a shopkeeper's view of democracy, like the Chamberlains whose politics was also founded on hatred of the landed aristos. She had the energy and the clarity which imposed a new type of democracy on Britain, and New Labour is its heir. Cameron's attempt to show that, like the Prince of Wales, he's every guy's pal is the heir of that, too. It's a veneer, like Blair's - but not a veneer for aristocracy; like Blair's it's a cool veneer for money, naked wealth, with virtue rewarded and vice punished.

Democracy doesn't mean equality - not necessarily. Until 1948, some business people and academics had more than one vote, even. but the vote doesn't mean democracy. Democracy is a reflection of the society, it's a means whereby the state becomes connected to society. Democracy is now about money and property, not birth (though the rich make sure their kids are all right and propagate the family wealth, imbibe the old values, treat their inferiors as equals while acting to them as superiors). Democracy in our society is still a democracy, though - if you have a lot of property, you find the state is more responsive to you than if you have a little property; if you have a little property, you find the state is more responsive to you than if you have no property; if you have no property, you find you ahve the vvote but the state has nothing to do with you except to rule you.

Jon,
I can't answer in detail yet, but I don't agree with your agrarianism. I don't want any land, and if I were forced to get my livelihood from the land, at the mercy of the seasons and climate, I would not survive, any more than the urban dwellers of Kampuchea survived when they were compelled to live the life of virtue. I don't suggest for one moment that you are like Pol Pot, which would be insulting and absurd, but think it through - is your agrarianism to be forced n me and millions of urban dwellers like me? One of the good points of Marx - he mentions it in one of his letters as an original point - was his demonstration that landed property had become an element within capital, and was no longer a force in its own right.

FR

briefly, (as I'm filling up space and I'm getting sorta tired), but importantly, I want to start with what appears to be an academic point and end with what I regard as significant. I don't read Greek, but I thought your man was making clever-clever points about Aristotle which didn't add up (Aristotle thought a polity the best form of government, and it resembled a democracy in many ways - nobody ever accused him of hating democracy, merely that he saw mob-rule as the degenerate form of a polity). If you neeed me to, I'll discuss this through the mail, but I don't feel this is the right place for an academic discussion.

However, an important point is that Aristotle excluded women and slaves from the polity. The Levellers later excluded women, servants and wage-labourers (though some were agin the exclusions). The Chartists mainly excluded women, too. It's the nature of democracy to differentiate, and the democratic tradition of all these people from Aristotle to the Chartists and Jefferson (who excluded women, Indians and slaves) was to stress the importance of participation for power to take place. You can have a democracy without equality, and participation can never be equal. For all these people, independence was what differentiated the citizen, and if you were dependent you couldn't be a member of the polity. There was a reason for that, and attempts to extend participation by decentralising power have proved both quixotic in practice and problematic in theory. You can see I don't think participation is a panacea, and that I don't have the space to say why it's such a problem on this post.

I am aware that I run against the grain of the Left, and can only hope that it arouses curiosity rather than a reiteration of the safe prejudices.

[Jon Teunon]

Jwas

I'm relying on Kevin Cahill's Who Owns Britain for my information, for example this quote from p. 77:

The European Convention of Humna Rights, recently incorporatedbinto UK law, prohibits confiscation of any property without compensation, for any citizen whose government has signed up to the convention...on this basis any attempt by the Government to dispose of either the crown Estate or the Duchy of Lancaster would lead to the compensation for the Queen.

This would apply to any property - including the large sections in urban Britain.

Brigg

Sorry but I'm not sure I got my point across well enough - I'm not advocating we return to a prelapsarian age of Rouseau's noble savage etc!

The land held by Aristocrats gives them real finacial leverage - resulting them being in the ST top 200 list. That is how Cahill came to write his book - from information he had come across researching the list.

Since we still don't have a Land Registry we still don't exactly how much some of these people have, not surprisingly the tend to be a bit secretive. But Charles Windsor rents out a lot of properties in Cornwall for the hoi-polloi to live in - and not necessarily as agricultural workers of course. These landowners can - and do - turn land into cash by selling it off - they own it they can do what they like with it.

Hence my point about the Duke of Westminister owning so much land in London. Pointing to the severe inequality in the UK- some of it still steming from the parcelling out of land from 1066, is not a call for us to return to being peasants - the opposite!

[Free Radical]

Brigg and Jon

Brigg - I don't claim any particular expertise on Aristotle - it was merely that I am aware of different interpretations of his attitude to democracy. (And I dont read ancient Greek either... sadly). But I included his quotation because I thought it was interesting in itself - even if it didn't typify his opinions, and also just to show the length of history of these ideas.

But on your other point about participation - yes, indeed I am curious! Do say more when you get a moment...

Jon and Brigg - about land - I can see where you are both coming from I think. I certainly agree with Brigg that the actual power - political power of the old landed aristocracy is by and large gone (obviously they are more powerful than an equivalent number of your average city dweller). If their power lingers it is because they have made a transition from landowner to wealthy investors, through their inherited wealth. The Duke of Westminster is a rather special (and from his perspective fortunate) case - but even here the Tory legislation on purchasing of freehold from leaseholders will no doubt slowly erode even that position. But, by and large I don't believe that political power lies primarily with the aristocracy. Nor am I sure quite what large scale redistribution of land would achieve - some distribution of income from rents of course - but it would be interesting to see some figures on say impact on public finances... Death duties I think have little by little eroded that inherited wealth?

Brigg your view of Thatcher is very interesting and I think there is much merit in it - I'd forgotten that she was a Methodist, just like I was as a child... maybe I should open that corner shop... But, of course Methodism was also closely associated with radicalism of the left and the birth of the Labour party. But I think it's interesting that her Methodism would have given her a certain distance from the culture of the establishment and the Tory grandees.

[Johnnywas]

Briggs

You seem to feel that the Right (or the propertied classes) are entirely reconciled to the democratic tradition and democracy no longer presents a challenge to the status quo

I would certainly have to agree that theres nothing radical about Westminster Politics at the moment. We have the major "left of centre" party in power and its failed to make any indent on the issue of inequality during its 12 years of Office. I'm afraid that is a pretty strong indictment of Labour and perhaps indeed the type of politics that we have in this Country

Although a member, I've never felt that the Labour Party had the ability to change society exclusively through its own efforts. My feeling is that as a movement we have put far too much faith in machine politics and a too singular reliance on traditional labour politics. That was particularly  notable in 1997 when most of the Labour Left seemed to have downed tools. Some because they didn't want to upset the opinion polls and some because they had  no idea how to react to unpopular measures enacted by their own party. In retrospect the Labour Left should have continued to campaign outside Parliament for measures to promote equality, for environmental reform etc. Thats not, of course, the model of Parliamentary socialism the Labour leadership has promoted over time; theirs was been a top down model.  However its the type of politics that involves people and which eventually creates ground up pressure for change

However, protesting and campaigning outside Parliament is not opposed to democracy. Even if it may occassionally result in trespass and disobedience. Democracy, in the sense, I  understand it requires from time to time that active dissent.  Parliament is at best a forum for debate. Politics is something which happens to people in Communities and which is driven by shifts in popular opinion

There are of course limits to what might be described as democratic.  For example democrats rightly view terrorism as something that closes down avenues for debate rather than something which expresses a grievance and encourages its resolution.

This isn't going to become a 'mea culpa'  but I do rather regret not supporting PR more actively in the 1990s (although I have always been in favour).  Its not attractive to the Labour or the Labour Left as the Party does well under FPTP when in power and few on the Left would prosper under alternative scenarios but as I have indicated here the Party should not be seen as the movement. A stronger campaign for PR would have helped make that point.

J

[Free Radical]

Johnnywas

I suppose I believe that the radical thing is that we have democracy at all. It's limited of course, but hugely important and we should perhaps not underestimate that. Potentially parliamentary democracy is very radical - though if it ever really threatens too much the entrenched powers (whoever they may be, and this has shifted somewhat over the years) those powers can resort to attacking democracy. My belief is that the left, especially the Marxist or anarchist left, has too often failed to see the radical nature of democracy and too easily dismissed it as 'bourgeois'. But democracy (and this is where Marxism or at least dialectics is useful) is always part of a dynamic struggle between different interests, often played out under the surface.

Like you I have remained in the Labour Party. It has of course been hugely disappointing, in ways, and for reasons, well explored on these boards. One problem has been Labour's constitution itself, which even from the beginning was focused on securing representation in parliament. This was natural enough for a federal party (which did not at first have individual members of the party - only affiliates) because all of the other 'organic' work within society was carried out by the affiliates (and still is to a degree) - the unions, the coop movement, the Fabians etc. But little by little the party has come to eclipse it's sources of power in society and fallen under the control of the leadership. Now it seems to be heading for the doldrums as its democratic structures have become in many ways redundant or moribund as a result of being bypassed and made irrelevant - this is so from the branches, through the General Committees, to the National Executive Committee and to Conference - all bypassed to some degree or other. This is not necessarily a permanent shift, but it is one that needs to be reversed even if other changes wider changes in society mean that we do not necessarily return precisely to the 'status quo ante'. We need genuine and completely transparent democratic structure and mechanisms in the Party - something almost absent at present.

Since I think that politics is about power - it's distribution and its uses - I don't believe it only happens in communities - it does also happen in parliament, but we ought to be aware that power, and therefore politics also lies elsewhere, outside of parliament - principally in the centres of the economy, also in the media.

As to PR - I think it is no panacea. There are plenty of examples of really dreadful politics built upon a PR constitution - Italy, Israel. Nor should we forget the election of the first Nazi government under a PR system. I'm not saying that tinkering with the constitution is never appropriate but I don't see it in any sense as a fundamental issue. And, no doubt there are plenty on the far right who would also welcome a PR system with open arms. (If we do need a PR system, the French system has much to commend it I think).

[Johnnywas]

free radical

i agree that democracy is much more radical  in its conception than Marxists sometimes give it credit

Marxs writings on socialist politics seem to me to veer between a rather conservative outlook for the near distance (the Dictatorship of the Proletariat) and a vision that the State would then 'wither away.'

there is a big academic debate on what the state withering away means. it  could mean that the State is no longer necessary which would put Marx fairly close to Bakunin or it could mean that the State ceases to need coercion and the instruments of coercion disappear   

However, I have to say that I'm not sure how the State can "wither away" in a complex modern society. I'm not even at all sure that its desirable not to have a collective ordering of human affairs supported by an executive. How else will we solve the problems of environmental degradation and social injustice ? Far better to have a democratic government than to career between tryanny and lawlessness.

after all it is a cliche that where the left has failed to build democratic institutions which inspire a degree of loyalty that has allowed the Right in. whether thats in the shape of Napoleon, Franco or Pinochet.

but its also probably true that its collective politics which has made freedom possible. in  societies without any 'democratic' values politics was largely reduced to the ability of the rich and powerful to command the population. by acts of association; rather than individual defiance we have established equality before the law; rights for all and personal autonomy.
the history of that has been largely also the history of democracy..

as a coda, I am grateful to you for correcting me on the issue of  Communities. I perhaps implied that Communities exercised power. I didn't mean that.  I meant that political beliefs are forged outside Parliament. Few are influenced by the limited coverage of debates in the Chamber. Socialist ideas are circulated by word of mouth or through sympathetic media. The movement is in that sense more important than the party apparatus in creating a coherent ideological alternative to the free market.         


j

[Brigg57]

a lot of points made here. I meant to answer a few, but got waylaid and the thread developed. That's a good thing. I seem to have written an inordinate number of posts, and it embarrasses me.

JonT, I'm sorry I misunderstood your point on land. I think land nationalisation is the obvious answer to the ownership of the land by the descendants of the robber barons who came over with Will the Conk. The Church of England owns a lot too, and I was informed once that St John's College in Oxford owns an uninterrupted area of land from the gates of the college to London - it pays the money for the dons (did you know that if appointed a don your 'small' wage is supplented by a book fund and by quite a large entertainment fund (named as alcohol, in case any of the pious Fellows thought int erms of women or lads). However, for most people, it's the ownership of the houses which lie on teh land whihc counts - ye merry landlord collecting ye rent.

Jwas, I don't see how you can draw the conclusion that I think the Right is reconciled to democracy. Often it isn't - Action Francaise still has a following among the French Right, I believe. But the British Right is on the whole reconciled to the democracy we have - it was reconciled to democracy in the 30's, which is why Oswald Mosley got nowhere. If there was ever a genuine threat to property, however, they would be looking sideways at some Hitler or other.

The fact is that democracy is pliable, malleable. It's preferable to a naked despotism unless you're the sort of radical who is wedded to guns, that is unless you're a psycho. But democracy could adapt itself to a constitutional monarchy like Tsarist Russia (for a brief period in 1906), a tightly-controlled capitalist society like Britain, a libertarian free-for-all racist society like the USA, or a socialist community. A socialist democracy could be libertarian, de-centralised, or highly centralised and authoritarian. It's not the democracy which is as valued as what is associated with it. The only time democracy becomes valuable is when you don't have any.

However, in our society, a society increasingly based on propertied wealth rather than propertied birth, democracy is quite fragile. The vote is the only real instrument which gives it the air of a democracy (there are other instruments which make it liberal, of a sort), and the vote no longer counts as it did. Before universal franchise, the vote meant somethng - it was attached to property (on the whole) and was a sign that the vote's holder was a figure who had to be consulted by those entrusted with ruling Britain. Now the vote is universal, but is still just a vote - "a bare ballot-box democracy" as Cole called it.

The vote doesn't really make a country a democracy unless it carries power with it, and executive power in this country is controlled by the vote in such an indirect manner that we can only just call ourselves a democracy. To change the electoral system is meaningless without a change in power, and as FR has argued, the existence of PR has never brought this shift of power to the people. It's been adopted for mayoral elections not from any popular demand, but because enthusiasts have organised in the elitist manner which makes a difference in British politics, and pushed it through. There isn't any demand for PR; it's not seen as relevant to the economic problems faced by people. If it is adopted by a clique, there won't be any rsistance to it, because there is no demand for PR to be rejected. It's rightly seen as an irrelevance, in the way that devolution of power to the regions has been rejected by people as an irrelevance.

When you talk of a shift in power, then you are talking of radical change. otherwise, it matters little what electoral system we have.

FR, I'm in full agreement with you so far, and will say why I think a direct democracy is inapt in the way so far proposed.

Charlie, you write of economic democracy, but unless you take a syndicalist approach (which you don't seem to be) I don't see what it means other than the sort of union consultation commmittees existing in Germany today, or in factories during the Second World war - these are hardly radical and operate without any real popular interest being shown. A real economic democracy would need to take control of the economic forces of supply and demand which at present control us all. That is a very difficult undertaking indeed, but may well be the only way forward from the cycle of boom and crash which still dogs our society, despite all claims by Keynesians after 1950 and free marketeers after 1980.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Brigg,
I'm quite aware of the lack of precision in my own thinking about economic democracy. My only excuse is that I'm hardly alone in that. I don't particularly find the idea of one model of such democracy convincing be it syndicalism or any other single alternative. But I do think that we have a range of models which I'd be keen to see the left exploring, from worker co-ops, to more conservative forms of worker or consumer owned business ( such as John Lewis), to planning agreements, to the kind of reformist social fund capitalism I have mentioned before.