Manufactured Democracy: Seeds Of Crisis
By Farooque Chowdhury
03 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org
The questions manufactured democracy doesn’t answer signify only a few of the fundamental questions related to a ruling system. Political processes, arrangements, and institutions are not static till their demise. These are not also contradiction-neutral.
Factors within and around these processes, arrangements, etc. act and react in a complex way. This lively character comes up because of its relationship with society and mode of production, and the relationship is relative, and antagonistic to some and non-antagonistic to others. The reason behind is: these are not production relation-neutral. Rather, the class content of these determines their actions, responses, etc. Failures to articulate the class content make these obsolete. These are rejected, not always instantly, but through relatively long process, and sometimes within a very short span of time, at historical moments and junctures, by the emerging social forces, are sent to the archives, and replaced by new ones with the domination of emerged social political force. The democracy now being handed over in the periphery as commodity contains no property that can act according to the needs of the people; rather, it has been designed to act according to the desire of the centre of the world system. This contradiction carries the seeds of crisis of the system.
Political systems claiming to serve majority are incompatible with inequality. Utility of the system gets lost when it fails to redress inequality. It is now difficult to find a single relevant literature of the mainstream that does not tell about inequality, does not warn about increasing inequality. Superstructure based on appropriation breeds inequality. The present global phenomenon of rapidly increasingly inequality is the product of, in very general term, the present world system.
More than a decade ago Brown and others found: “Worldwide, the richest fifth of the population now receives 60 times the income of the poorest fifth, up from 30 times in 1960. In the UK, the ratio between the top and bottom 20 percent went from 4:1 in 1977 to 7:1 in 1991. In the US, it went from 4:1 in 1970 to 13:1 in 1993” (State of the World 1997). Citing Edward N Wolff (“Changes in Household Wealth in the 1980s and 1990s in the U S” May, 2004) and New York Times (March 1, 2007) John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff write: “The gap between the top and the bottom of society in financial wealth and income has now reached astronomical proportions. In the United States in 2001 the top 1 percent holders of financial wealth … owned more than four times as much as the bottom 80 percent of the population. The nation’s richest 1 percent of the population holds $1.9 trillion in stocks, about equal to that of the other 99 percent. The income gap in the United States has widened so much in recent decades that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S Bernanke … stated ‘the share of after-tax income garnered by the households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution increased from 8 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2004.’ In September 2006 the richest 60 Americans owned an estimated $630 billion worth of wealth, up almost 10 percent from the year before.”
What has happened in the “age of globalization” in the peripheral societies dominated by plunderocracy and lumpenocracy and dictated by MNCs and donors? Reports by the World Bank, UNDP, and ILO carry the evidence: increasing inequality and dispossession. Many of these societies are controlled by lumpens and coteries isolated from production process and many of these societies do not hesitate for a single moment to show the face of despotism by taking down the mask of petty democracy. In many of these societies workers have been demobilized, unions have been usurped by lumpens, criminalization has overwhelmed political institutions, media is controlled by local variety of mafia, and donors have purchased the dominant section of the academia. In many of these societies NGOs are increasingly filling in vacuums created by weaknesses of political parties and by lack of political forces that signify the weakness of social classes. But, it is only the social classes that can develop political process, institutions, etc.
The political scenario in many of the advanced capitalist countries is not hopeful: election dispute and reaching to its apex through the counting of type of perforated holes on the ballot paper, failings of the political institutions in resolving contradictions within the dominant class, exposure of responsible operative by top political leadership in retaliation of dissenting view, lies by top political leadership, and failure of the famous “check and balance” mechanism to identify manipulation before a blunder is committed, and blame game are a few of the signs of decay and of sharpening of unresolved contradictions in the body-politic. Signs of Nazism and racism, and signs of curtailing democratic rights are getting bolder on the political canvas in many advanced capitalist societies. These are the signs of decadence of democracy the dominant classes have established and nourished over centuries and these tell the historical limitations of the political system the world order has built up.
These signify nothing but crisis that, on the contrary, symbolize signals for change.
[This is a modified version of a part of a chapter from The Age of Crisis, Dhaka, 2009.]
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