Democratising Democracy

By Ranjit Devraj

Democracy cannot be half-hearted if it is survive in the age of neo-liberalism, is what leading practitioners had to say at the Conference on Participatory Democracy.

Portuguese leftist intellectual Boaventura do Santos said he would like to see democracy as an all-pervading culture that seeps into every aspect of personal and organizational life in terms of what he called ''democracy without end''.

And the way to go about it is through participatory democracy in which all actors believe in and practice democracy profoundly rather than leave things to the kind of wishy-washy democracy that readily partners neo-liberal capitalism.

According to Vinod Raina, who leads the All-India People's Science Movement, democracy is in crisis mainly because elected representatives no longer reflect the aspirations of the people who voted them to power and feel free to act against democratic values.

One reason for this is that political parties have become the means for capturing power rather than serving the needs of participatory democracy. ''When the so-called representatives of the United States decide to inflict war on the world in the name of democracy then we are in trouble''' Raina said.

Raina said what is forgotten is that democracy cannot function unless it assures the livelihoods that most of the world is really in need of today and which is not necessarily the goal of neo-liberalism.

''The danger is that frustrations arising seem to be leading to a major upheaval - in fact the real challenge today is to prevent this upheaval from turning violent''' Raina said.

One answer, according to Raina, is a combination of local production and local governance as opposed to the non-democratic over-centralised systems and monopolies that are now being promoted in the name of globalisation.

Raina pointed to the cooperative movement in India, which produced locally spun cotton and handmade goods as a means of resisting western capitalism and colonialism but which is now on the verge of collapse under the impact of globalisation.

Santos said cooperatives represented the solidarity of deprived people which is important in the search for another world that can dispense with neoliberalism which only holds out the prospect of death.

Giampiero Rasimelli, from ARCI, an Italian NGO, also supported the idea of improving local autonomy as an answer to the many ills engendered by globalisation.
''What we need is a major movement in favour of local democracy''' he said.

Rajab Budabbus, the well-known Libyan economist warned that the push towards globalisation was actually a response to the needs of today's financial capitalism for vast markets through a logic which would seed the whole world converted one large market.