Ashish Kothari – About 50% of the world’s population will be voting in national elections in 2024, across several dozen countries. Some (Bangladesh and Taiwan) have already taken place, some (India) are underway while finalizing this article. This is the biggest polling year ever in history. But more than the mind-boggling statistics, what is remarkable is that several of these countries have a disproportionately high impact on world affairs, and it is sobering to note that in many of these, right-wing, dictatorial, ecologically insensitive candidates are trying to retain their seats (Putin in Russia, Modi in India) or trying to make a comeback (Trump in the USA). Other influential countries or blocs going for elections include the European Union (with several of its countries also swinging to the right or abandoning pacifist approaches to join NATO), and South Africa, suddenly in the limelight because of its complaints of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Whatever takes place in these elections, one thing is clear: we continue to miss the real meaning of democracy, and because of that, the possibilities of achieving meaningful transformations for billions of people (and the planet) independent of national elections.
We have forgotten what democracy means
Democracy, as practiced in ancient Greece, denoted forums in which all citizens (minus, glaringly, women and slaves), could decide on matters of wide significance. There is also increasing evidence of village-level decision-making that involved all or many adults in ancient India. Democracy was not about power being in the hands of elected politicians and appointed bureaucrats, which is what modern, liberal democracies have mostly been reduced to.
When India proudly proclaims it is the world’s largest democracy, it bases this claim on the fact that it has ‘fair and free’ elections for the entire citizenry above 18 years old. This is not to be underestimated, for ensuring such a process (even if not entirely ‘fair and free’) for the 950 million people of voting age in India is a stupendous task. At least in theory, it gives such a large population some degree of control over which party will form the next national government.
Yet such an exercise fails to come anywhere near the true meaning of democracy. When people go to the polling station to vote, we partly cede their right to be decision-makers on our own. We are all born with the power and the right to make decisions for ourselves, at least on matters affecting our lives, but have been conditioned by decades of liberal democracy to hand over power to politicians and bureaucrats.
The erasure of people’s power builds on thousands of years of patriarchy in which women and minority genders have been marginalized from forums of decision-making; hundreds of years of centralized rule (kings and despots) in which ‘subjects’ were told it was natural to obey their rulers; hundreds of years of casteism, racism and colonialism that deprived millions from exercising decision-making power; and decades of liberal, representative democracy which has brainwashed us into thinking that nation-state governments are the best alternative to kings and despots. These have been sanctified by religious or secular systems convincing us that such centralization of power was ‘natural’ or ‘God-given’ or the most ‘rational’, by priests, political scientists, and economists.
Combine this with capitalism, and we have a heady mix. Due to neoliberal economic globalization, most people on the planet now probably dream of achieving riches (monetary), fame, and power, living in a mansion, buying the latest gadgets and vehicles, taking holidays in exotic destinations, becoming the envy of their neighbours, using their own money or when not available, begging, borrowing, or stealing. But the same economy is unable to meet these aspirations and desires. As capitalists rake in enormous profits, inequality between the rich and the poor has widened to its worst ever in global history, and over a billion people are not even able to meet basic needs.
Simultaneously, with the corporate capture of media, people are fed seductive lies that it is the ‘other’ who is to blame for their crises – refugees, religious or ethnic minorities, ‘foreigners’. Public discussion (and the education system) has been so dumbed down that entire generations of people are finding it difficult to dig below the surface of the pat answers they are presented, or are simply too ‘comfortably numb’ to do such digging.
But some have not forgotten
Not everyone, however, is so brainwashed or lulled into complacency. In the 1980s, Indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico, decided to take their lives into their own hands; a decade later, the Zapatista movement declared itself autonomous from the Mexican state. Since then, they have run their affairs with no central state. Also around the 1980s, a village of Adivasis in central India raised the slogan, “We elect the government in Delhi, but in our village, we are the government.” They initiated a democratic process in which they took all decisions through the gram sabha (village assembly) by consensus and forced government departments to spend their budgets according to the assembly’s priorities. Another 90 villages in the same district in Maharashtra, federated under the Korchi Maha Gramsabha, are trying a larger scale of self-determination (with the threat of government-supported mining hanging over their heads).
In the war-torn quadri-junction of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the 40-million-strong Kurdish people, along with other ethnicities, have attempted to carve out a zone of autonomy and self-determination. This is struggling due to the continued oppression and violence by the nation-states in which they are embedded (especially Turkey), but at least in some areas, there are remarkable successes. This includes Rojava, where the feminist ideology jineoloji is one foundation of governance, economy, and socio-cultural relations. In the heart of capitalist Europe, the urban settlement of Christiania (Copenhagen) has attempted an anarchic, democratically governed community with no private property or central command structure, and only cooperative-run businesses. And as David Graeber has shown, crucial elements of recent movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the USA had elements of anarchic direct democracy.
All these and many other initiatives are showing that true democracy is where ‘ordinary’ people in collectives have the rights, capacities and forums to participate in all decisions affecting their lives. Importantly, these cannot be based on tokenistic participation, e.g. where women in an Indian village assembly are present because Indian affirmative action law reserves positions for them, but stay quiet because of ancient patriarchal order. Nor is it a situation where the majority brow-beat the minority, or powerful castes and classes steer decisions in their own interests.
Rather, in these initiatives, many years of process (such as special women’s assemblies in advance of the full village assembly) have helped build the confidence and capacity of historically marginalized sections to hold their own. Here the rights, capacities, and forums of participation are added to by a fourth crucial element of successful democracy: the maturity or wisdom to make decisions that are in the best interests of all.
Unfortunately, much of the conventional left political movements have focused predominantly on ‘capturing’ state power rather than building the power base of people on the ground. While many of them have been way better than right-wing parties in aspects like welfare schemes, they have centralized power, have not fundamentally changed economic paradigms, and have failed to meet the impossible aspirations capitalism has created in the public. This perhaps explains, at least partially, the frequent shifts of the electorate towards authoritarian men promising seductive short-cut solutions. It also perhaps explains why global agreements on the environment, human rights, or the Sustainable Development Goals framework, are failing to tackle the planet’s biggest crises.
Nation-states are so busy competing with each other, so strongly focused on parties retaining power and propping up capitalist behemoths, that they don’t have the time, inclination, or imagination needed to solve these crises; one could even argue that they thrive on the continuation of crises!
Only a few revolutionary leaders have placed faith in ‘ordinary’ people. In the first few years of the Kurdish rebellion, against suppression by the nation-states they were surrounded by, their desire was to become an independent country. Very soon, however, one of their key leaders, Abdullah Öcalan, realized that such a goal could be self-defeating, for a centralized nation-state could itself rob people of real freedom. He began arguing for a form of ‘democratic modernity’ that needed no centralized state, with autonomous communes running their own affairs but coordinating over larger landscapes as a form of ‘confederal’ politics. This has been attempted in parts of the Kurdish territory.
When India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi argued that the Indian National Congress (the party that formed the government) should focus less on consolidating power in New Delhi and more on empowering each village to become a ‘little republic’. Unfortunately, our political leaders adopted a parliamentary system with a focus on elections and representative politics, though they did set up a strong federal system with some levels of autonomy for states and in the 1990s devolved some powers to rural and urban bodies of governance. The contradictions inherent in a liberal democracy are now painfully visible, the party currently in power consolidating an authoritarian grip over the country.
Worse still, having been lulled into thinking that we are exercising our democratic rights by participating in elections, and brainwashed into believing that a strong man in Delhi asserting a majority religious order will solve all our problems, much of India’s electorate seems to be tolerating this subversion of real democracy. With some differences due to different histories and cultures, the story is the same in the USA, Russia, and many other countries going to the polls this year.
Real democracy is an uphill battle but one we must wage
The dominant military-industrial-capitalist-religious order is clever. It undermines the living conditions and future of billions of people (and species), but convinces us that it still has things in control, and is doing all it can to make our lives better. If you don’t like a particular party in power, it tells us, go elect another one. If you don’t like a particular brand of soap, go buy another; some are even ‘organic’ and ‘skin-sensitive’. If you have no jobs, or you feel threatened, blame not the system, but that ‘other’ who has no right to be in the country- one with a different skin color or religion, one arriving by boat from a war-torn country. And if someone has told you that there are colonial, racist, or other reasons why such people (and, if your crops are being eaten up, animals) are in your backyard, they are said to be feeding you lies.
Why get into complex explanations and difficult solutions when our ways are so simple, says the system: just go do retail therapy (thanks for the profits), go vote in the next elections, or (shh …) go and kill one of those intruders in your backyard. Or why stop carbon emissions in the first place when technology (mostly still untested) will help us magically capture whatever we release?
The system will not tell us that there are real solutions that will benefit all and that this entails building community processes of taking things into our own hands, including political and economic power. Hundreds of examples of this already exist across the world, combining such localization and wise governance of the commons with the struggles for gender and social equity and ecological sensitivity into what can be called a ‘flower of transformation’. In several, communities are also asserting their own (very diverse) traditional institutions of governance, sustaining the fluidity and maturity they often displayed, while rethinking some of their problematic aspects (such as domination by elder men or ‘upper’ castes). Many of these initiatives are not rejecting state institutions altogether, but rather asserting that such institutions must be accountable to the basic grounded units of democracy, subject to constant people’s checks and audits, and formed by frequently changed delegates or representatives (to curtail power concentration).
Electoral processes themselves need major reforms, if they are not to be distorted by who has more money, or not dominated by illegitimate social clout based on caste, class, gender etc., or not become a source of hostile divisions within society.
Mahatma Gandhi’s notion of swaraj or Abdullah Öcalan’s democratic modernity are very relevant to today’s world. They are strongly assertive of individual and collective freedoms and autonomy, but with sufficient restraints on behaviour to ensure that the freedom of all other peoples is not undermined. One can even extend this to the non-human, such that radical democracy is infused with an ecological flavour, an eco-swaraj or radical ecological democracy. Perhaps Marx’s final stage of communism, where the state “withers away”, individuals are no longer alienated from their labour, and the ecological rift between humans and the rest of nature has healed, has essential similarities to this. Unfortunately, the supposedly ‘communist’ regimes of Russia and China were (and are) contradictory to such a state of statelessness.
There is also a growing demand for rethinking political boundaries, especially between nation-states in regions that were earlier colonized, for these boundaries have divided natural and cultural flows with detrimental impacts on people, wildlife, and crucial ecosystem functions. Biocultural regionalism, or bioregionalism, is proposed as a wiser way to organize political decision-making, bringing in the voices of the rest of nature, and rebuilding broken connections and the commons.
It’s all a tough ask, but who said democracy was easy? Simplistic, convenient pathways have brought the world to the brink of ecological collapse and perhaps another world war; maybe the paths to a peaceful, saner future lie in more creative, deliberative, dignified, and inclusive decision-making processes. Meanwhile, of course, let us hope that at least a part of the world’s population is able to conjure up hopeful news in 2024, even if bringing in a progressive party will only be a short-term band-aid covering a deeply festering wound in the affairs of humanity.
* Shortened version of the original article published at https://www.meer.com/en/78655-illusions-of-elections-super-year-2024 on 24 February 2024.