14 August 2008, Johannesburg
Dear friends and comrades In the SACP and all the SA organisations All the panellists coming from far away and close to home All the African parties present, dear all
It`s a great joy to be here in South Africa again. We were here at the SACP congress, last year; it was such an exciting, impressive experience, for its political and cultural content and for the human touch. So we have been longing to come back
And here we are, and now again the topic is democracy, that is, translated to English, people’s power. We need to save the concept from the capitalist disfiguration, accelerated by neoliberal globalisation. So much oppression, terror and war have been launched in the name of democracy that it faces the risk to become a dirty word.
The lack of real opportunities for all to exercise the formal civil rights and liberties in liberal democracy is inherent in the concept, as it is designed and defined for the perseverance of the capitalist system.
That does not mean, of course, that these rights and liberties are not important, you South Africans know that better than anybody, after decades of struggle against apartheids negation of the most elementary civil eights for the people. You also know too well that half of the lifetime – the workday – still is excluded even from that liberal habitat, where the control over production is reserved for an exclusive minority.
The struggle for true peoples power has always been limited, hindered or crushed by capitalism that kidnapped democracy right after the first attempts in the French revolution. There is a similarity to how neoliberalism frustrated your National Democratic Revolution after the abolishment of apartheid.
We know that liberal democracy is in deep crisis. Various form of liberal, representative democracy has been tried out around the world during the past century. But linked to capitalism it has proved unable to create durable conditions for a dignified life, and has, with some time limited exceptions, led to every day growing inequalities
It´s obvious that this democracy model, that has been installed in former colonies, still under imperialist domination, have failed.
But also in the rich, imperialist countries, where we live, in the self-proclaimed first world, the distance and the lack of confidence are growing between the representatives of the system, and the represented. It looses credibility, people loose trust, passivity and egotism grows, people don’t feel that they can participate and make their voice heard.
This happens even in Sweden, during many years considered the outstanding example of the possibility of a welfare state in a so called mixed economy. I thought it might be interesting for you to know how that could happen, and my answer would have to do with lack of real democracy.
The Social Democratic Party in Sweden was founded 120 years ago, organized by the emerging trade unions of the time, as a tool to conquer the power and build a socialist society. They conquered the parliamentary power, and a lot has been done and achieved during 100 years in Sweden, but not socialism.
And in effect, socialism seems further away now than 40 years ago, and capitalist power stronger than even in the beginning of the struggle, although more refined without the necessity to use brutal force. Sweden´s leading right wing party even won the latest elections, by pretending to be a self-proclaimed workers party.
Liberal democracy with a highly developed welfare state was built in Sweden during the first half of the 20s century by a strong workers movement with a high degree of mobilisation and participation. Fearful of a Bolshevik revolution the financial powers accepted this development through a historical pact with the workers movement. It allowed the building of the welfare state as long as it did not touch the capitalist power over production and the dictatorship in the workplace. That stayed in the hands of a small group of rich families, oligarchs in modern language.
This Swedish model reached its highest expression, but also its limit in the 70s. Starting in the late 60-ties we had a strong upsurge in the trade unions of radical demands, including workplace democracy and partnership in ownership of the production means through wage earner funds, with the goal to abolish capitalism.
When the proposal of wage earners fund finally reached parliament in the eighties the social democratic party leadership was loosing links to the movements base, abandoning the socialist goal and was becoming an easy target for the overwhelming neoliberal propaganda. The basic idea of the wage earners funds was abandoned, and the trade unions lost much of their leading ideological and political role.
With the internationally emerging neoliberal globalisation, the Swedish capitalists reclaimed the initiative. And in the 90s, with the Soviet Union gone to ashes, they managed to impose their so called “only way” with privatisations, deregularisations, free capital movements, cut backs in the public sector, and so on, you all know too well the ways of the model.
The difference from South Africa is that Sweden still is a rich country, part of the imperialist European Union, and the working class still has a comparatively high material standard. Part of this is both due to -and threatened by - the increased exploitation of work in the so called second and third world.
The Swedish model showed to be problematic in the long run, because it was based on class collaboration, not on the advancement of class struggle: when capital intensified class struggle on their part, labour was not prepared.
The model was also problematic because it put equals signs between socialism and state agencies, and with a tendency to reduce the citizens to welfare clients or consumers, without participation, without empowerment.
And it limited the socialist idea to the distribution of welfare, leaving the means of production – and the profits - in capitalist hands.
In its final phase it was leading to the privatising also of the distribution of welfare, at the same time heavily reduced.
And the left parties, socialist and communist, in Europe have to a big extent become electoral parties, often reducing their aims to try to make the best of the system, try to stop the worst solutions, but not to challenge the system. They have lost their mass basis and become locked into the parliamentarian work. The labour movement is in a low ebb in the advanced capitalist world, also in Sweden.
At the same time the profits in the Swedish transnational companies have grown high during the 90s and this century’s first decade thanks to deeper exploitation of the less technically developed countries. At the same time as the consumerism in our country was nourished the exploitation of the so called third world led, and leads to impoverishment there, and to intense mass political activity that we can learn from, but also need to support.
Because at the same time as the as the imperialist metropolis proclaimed the end of history, after the collapse of the soviet system, a new counter power started to build in the peripheries.
A new movement emerged especially in Latin America,a massive resistance to the neoliberal globalisation, to old dictatorships and to new plutocracies: people had had enough of betrayal and enough of hypocritical talk of democracy, a talk that became more and more frequent, in the propaganda from the dictatorial centres of world economy, at the same time as its real content became more and more diluted.
Now Latin America shows us that real alternatives exist, not only in a small island that has resisted throughout decades, but also all over the continent. Now new forms and constellations once again take up the words that many of the old left had ceased to pronounce, and they resist the transformation of the earth, its water, human labour and all human life into merchandise.They proclaim that it is not enough with representation decided in election every for or five years; politics must involve mobilisation, organisation and participation, all the time.
The need is obvious and urgent. Only the active peoples participation can save the world, build sustainable societies that celebrate the human dignity and break away from foreign domination.
In the left international forum we wanted to introduce these emerging practices and theories of participative democracy to the broad left in Sweden, by bringing together people and organisations from the South.
We wanted to know about their experiences and together find ways to regain true democracy as a tool to change the world for the better. We started with an international conference in Stockholm 2004 and continued with regional conferences, the first in Caracas, then in Manila, in the Balkans and Middle East, and now in South Africa
Participatory democracy - these words are used for very different realities and purposes, like when the World Bank uses them for its neoliberal purposes. For us it means to reclaim the real meaning of the democracy word, that is peoples power, where people can participate in the power also between the elections to representative bodies every 4 or so years
Based on the experiences and discussions we have gathered since we started 2004, we have tried to elaborate a preliminary definition, where we establish some of the basic characteristics inherent in different experiencies of practising participative democracy, mainly in the so called third world
We define participatory democracy as a process through which education and practical implementation promotes equal rights and possibilities for all to participate and influence in both direct democracy and in the decision-making in elected representative assemblies, through
Basically, we define participatory democracy as a way to struggle for and build socialism
What we have learned from our conferences and hope to learn from this, is how different groups can participate as subjects, how ethnic, gender, cultural groups, rural and urban poor take part in the social struggles against multiple forms of capitalist oppression, the exploitation of work, the patriarchy, the discrimination, the sexism, the racism, the ecocide.
We are looking for experiences that succeed to break the limits that capitalism inevitable puts to any democratic process, and to any form of people’s sovereignty, looking for forms of high intensive democracy, a participative protagonist democracy, the self government of the producers.
We think that it can be found in the liberation struggle and in the emancipatory practice of the peoples, the subjects that create themselves on the road. It is still a class struggle, but the old industrial proletariat is not alone
That’s why we are here, for solidarity, for interchange, for learning, to discuss and develop the theory that we also need in order to develop the practice, listen to experiences of grass root mobilization and participation, focusing on expanding the democratic space, developing an alternative people’s economic, political, social and cultural agenda, as well as alternative forms of popular government.
If socialism is the future, we must build it now!
So once again I want to thank you all for making this conference happen, and for your contribution to its richness of experience, debate and learning on the way of making democracy reality
Thank you all!