Democracy, the free market, the G20 and change

I mentioned in a recent post that I’d like to start dedicating a little space on this blog every week to talking about democracy and getting a better understanding of it. Well, the weekend seems like a good time to do a weekly post, and there’s no time like the present to get started.

In talking about the G20, I also recently mentioned a book called The No-Nonsense Guide to Democracy, which was written by a radical democrat named Richard Swift and published in 2002. I thought I’d ease myself into this by returning to Swift’s book and tackling it from the beginning. In fact, because it’s such a nice day and there are other fish to fry, I’m not even going to move beyond the foreword and introduction today. Thankfully, if we’re looking for relevant ideas, that’s as far as we need to go.

In his foreword, a fellow named C. Douglas Lummis, who is the author of a previous book called Radical Democracy, says that one of the main themes of Swift’s book is that the free market – “contrary to mainstream commonsense” – is anti-democratic. “Under the ideology of the free market,” Lummis explains, “the market ‘decides’ vital social matters that in a democracy would be decided by the people… Moreover, as the market image comes to permeate society as a whole, it begins to shape the political world as well, and citizens are transformed into ‘consumers of politics’, an audience for the antics of political superstars.”

Globalization, the argument goes, takes this effect a step further by taking vital decisions out of the hands of the state and raising them into “the ‘political stratosphere’ of international trade and finance organizations.” That’s bad news for people like us who live in democratic countries, because it takes away our ability to influence those decisions; these organizations aren’t accountable to us in the same way that the state is supposed to be. But it’s really bad news for people in the poorer countries that have become a sort of global impoverished working class; decisions that affect their lives, often for the worse, are made beyond their borders and influence.

Now, think about the G20 protests in that context – by which I mean the vast majority of peaceful protests and not the violent acts of a few adventure anarchists, because the latter’s not a legitimate example of protest or democracy.

If you’re reading a newspaper, or you’re out on the street, and you see a bunch of people protesting in honour of all kinds of different and supposedly unrelated issues – from equal rights to clean air to worker solidarity to slave labour and so on – then you could be forgiven for thinking that “the protesters” don’t even know what it is they’re protesting. But the issue at the heart of the matter – the thread that binds all of these protests together – is the shift in decision-making power from accountable governments, and the people they serve, to unaccountable trade groups.

You don’t generally read about that in the paper, because it doesn’t make for a good story. Hell, to be honest, I even managed to bore myself a little bit with that last paragraph. But that’s the issue, and once you realize that, you can start to feel like these protests have some genuine merit.

Unfortunately, and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, you can also start to feel like these protests aren’t going to make a big difference. Back in February, I took a little heat on this very blog from a couple of friends – and a guy who I’m pretty sure had gotten me confused with Matt Collins of Ninja High School – for saying that I wouldn’t be taking part in the protests. “I don’t disagree with the sentiment,” I explained, “but I’m also not convinced that any of these demonstrations could possibly have a direct and significant impact on the proceedings.”

I went on to say that there’s “a lot to be said for picking your battles,” and that “I doubt the days of action are going to achieve anything more than preaching to the choir.” I’ll admit that I was being a bit pessimistic, and my friend Kalin in particular felt that this was a “dismissal of local activism” on my part. He went on to make some very thoughtful points in the comments section about what a G20 protest could legitimately achieve.

Now, I can’t say that I don’t take issue with a few of Kalin’s points. For example, if he was speaking on behalf of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network when he said that that weren’t going to “condemn or stop groups from working towards [shutting the summit down] if that’s their preferred tactic,” then I think their methods deserve whatever criticism they get. There’s peaceful protest, which we all have a right to do, and there’s the non-democratic and often violent form of protest – or “diversity of tactics,” as it’s often euphemized. I think if you endorse or even waffle on the latter, then it hurts your credibility in doing the former. But maybe that’s just one of those differences of opinion that makes a good democracy go ’round.

Anyway, that gives you a good idea of what Swift sees as the difference between the idea and the practice of democracy today, and that difference points the way towards a more democratic system. “Swift makes clear that ‘democracy’ is not the name of a system of government existing in certain countries,” Lummis says, “but rather the endpoint of a struggle that has a long way to go… A shift away from what he calls the ‘strong market/weak democracy model’ requires not only a change in institutions, but also a change in ethos, from the ethos of political consumerism to the ethos of citizenship.”

In his own introduction, Swift asserts that his book “is an attempt to help breathe life into the democratic possibility. Not the pale democracy of once-every-four-years marking your ‘x’ for some well-oiled political machine and its manicured candidate. But rather a democracy that exists on all levels of society… A democracy that goes back to the root of democratic meaning: self-rule.”

How do we get there? How do we bring about that change in our institutions and our ethos? Let’s call that another discussion for another day.

Posted in Democracy