Assemblies for Democracy – why Left Unity should get behind this
John Tummon of Stockport Left Unity writes.
I think pushing forward a debate about democracy onto the Left and wider society is one of the key missing links in the radical movement that we need to put back in place if that movement is to move forward with a clear alternative social vision to capitalism.
For me, democracy is more about process than structure; I am fundamentally opposed to ‘resolutionary socialism’ because it takes the form without the soul of democracy and thereby indulges itself in a disingenuous imagining of non-existent mandates based on split votes – in so doing, it apes bourgeois parliamentarianism’s claim to political legitimacy, when in fact the elites running the western nation states only started re-badging their chosen political form as ‘democracy’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to the threat arising from having to concede of the extension of voting rights beyond ‘people of property’. ‘Democracy’, in its bourgeois form, arose historically and causally in response to the rise of socialism.
The Left has hardly moved the idea of democracy forward over the past 100 years, when the Council Republics which sprang up in Central and Eastern Europe, most prominently the Petrograd Soviet, drawing from Chartism and ‘Utopian Socialism’, with their ideas of communitarianism, co-operation and self-management; ideas largely ignored by social democratic and Leninist histories. These socialists were grounded in working class politics and also often preached and practiced the liberation of women and a radical gender politics that would often not be matched by the left until the late twentieth century.
These Council Republics sprang from the self-organisation of the working class and advocated a more radical and more direct democracy which often went hand in hand with demands for greater control over MPs, championing plebiscites and referenda as well as suggestions for the rotation principle in leadership to prevent the emergence of a permanent leadership. In 1921, some of these socialists came together in the International Workers’ Union of Socialist Parties, also known as ‘Vienna Union’.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s a string of independent socialists of this type defied the stark dichotomies between communist dogmatism and social democratic reformism, both of which merely aped the bourgeois concept of democracy, with its emphasis of form, not content.
The key question for these ‘third position’ socialists was not about political power but about social power. Democratic processes needed to be adopted in all power relationships – in the family, the workplace, in neighbourhood groups and even in the army – and still do. Ideas about industrial democracy, workers’ control, socialisation and workers’ self-management were particularly prominent among left-wing socialists who refused to commit themselves either to the reformism of social democracy or the undemocratic antics of the communists.
The crisis of democracy is best and more accurately seen as a crisis of bourgeois parliamentarianism; I am glad the Greens recognise this, which is why I put forward a motion to the last LU conference supporting their Peoples Democratic Convention. It got a derisory vote, based mostly on grim tales of the Greens’ support for cuts in Brighton, which confused the issue.
If such a debate about democracy can be dealt with so cursorily within Left Unity, I can only conclude that there is an enormous amount of work for Assemblies for Democracy to do within the Left, let alone among the wider public.
I could tear my hair out at times when witnessing the Left’s continuing inability and unwillingness to exploit the crisis in bourgeois parliamentarianism; at times it seems that all that separates us from capitalism is a different economic vision; Marx’s more holistic concept of human emancipation involves so much more than this and there is an urgent need to return to it.
All power to what Assemblies for Democracy are trying to do!
See their site here – http://assembliesfordemocracy.org/
8 comments
8 responses to “Assemblies for Democracy – why Left Unity should get behind this”
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John,
Thanks for this.
I’m all in favour of embracing participatory, direct democracy; it is after all the only way we can run a socialism society.
Who are the people behind ‘assemblies for democracy’ though?
If it’s not people who start from an understanding that capitalism is the problem & socialism the solution we could inadvertently end up supporting reactionary politics.
Regards,
John
John, there is more about them on the website here – http://www.demsoc.org/team/.
Beyond that, I have no idea.
The same John Tummon, of Left Unity who proposed at the last conference:
“To show solidarity with the people of the Middle East by supporting the end of the structure of the divided nation states imposed by the Versailles settlement and their replacement by a Caliphate type polity in which diversity and autonomy are protected and nurtured and the mass of people can effectively control executive authority’. Left Unity distances itself specifically from the use of intemperate, inaccurate and moralist language such as ‘terrorism’, ‘evil’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘viciously reactionary’, ‘murderous’, genocidal’, etc in discussion about the Middle East; these terms are deployed by people and forces seeking not to understand or analyse, but to demonise in order to dominate, and they have no place within socialist discourse.”
Yes, Newky, but what is the relevant point that you are making about me raising this? Is there a contradiction between the two that you want to elaborate on?
Your quote from that absolutely dreadful amendment put to LU Conference is very well put, Newky. Anyone who tries to provide excuses for and seeks support for the barbaric reactionary views of Islamic State in particular, or any form of pro “Caliphate” ideology (ie, rule by a theocratic totalitarian state – based on a particular set of Imams’ sectarian and profoundly reactionary interpretation of Islam) , has no credibility putting forward arguments for “democracy”.
Let us remember that that dreadful pro Islamic State amendment (for that was quite clearly what it was , stripping away its slippery verbiage), gained a mere THREE votes at Conference. LU Conference in fact voted overwhelmingly to denounce the barbarism of Islamic State and to support the struggle of the Kurds in their battle with this murderous clerico-fascist movement. But of course it was only this awful amendment alone that quickly got circulated right across the internet and mass media by the enemies of socialism – giving the impression that Left Unity somehow supported this reactionary viewpoint.
There should be no place in Left Unity, (a party of democratic socialism, and actually also a party fully in support of even the compromised freedoms for all (particularly women) represented by capitalist Bourgeois Democracy when compared to the barbaric theocratic alternative represented by the totalitarian “Caliphate” model of Islamic extremism) , for apologists and proponents of clerico-fascism in any form.
You are a badly broken record, John Penney, full of jargonised long sentences replete with demonising and selective accusations against me. You are so close to islamaphobia on too many counts and a 100% sectarian who uses bourgeois political techniques of name-calling. Try arguing against my article on Democracy instead of ranting for a change!
The supporter of an organisation that engages in mass murder of prisoners of war, ethnic cleansing, enslavement and rape of women and children, torture, murder of homosexuals, etcetera… complains he is being ‘demonised’. Talk about brass neck.
It’s good that John Tummon has so little support inside Left Unity, but it’s still a stain on the party that such a sick,evil individual is allowed to retain membership.
For me, I think there is much for the Left to do re democracy and widening its scope. It seems to me fundamental – the fact that Farage can even dress up as a People’s Party with folk who should be solidly behind Left unity is testament to the failure of the Left over my lifetime to make the incursions it ought to have done to bring about and realise a socialist reality or however close we can get to it. For me, though, I believe there is scope for a New Chartist approach with key elements like the Chartists of old. One of the ways to overpower the, for want of a better term, neoliberal establishment will be by force of numbers – a real mass movement – its possible, witness the Athens gatherings and there are more. Real participatory democracy will bring economic democracy across the board in my view without which comrades will be
repeating our words and deeds in another century of marginalised desires and three more generations will be lost to the exploitation and despoiling we witness today. Except the depletion of our environment may herald something else…..