No Participatory Democracy Without A Participatory Economy
By: ALEXACTUS T KAURE
“THE harmony of egoism promised by Adam Smith, and the prospect of greater happiness promoted by Jeremy Bentham, failed miserably when confronted with the great divide between rich and poor in early liberal capitalist societies”, wrote CB McPherson, a former professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
He argued that early liberal society produced enormous riches for an exceedingly small minority, rendering most agricultural and other workers no better off than the animals they tended. That was a heavy indictment on the pretensions of the liberal democratic system that was built on the model of the capitalist market. What I want to do here is to juxtapose that 19th European experience with the African condition in the 21th century. In fact, I’m tempted to argue that the African condition for the great number of its people is not very much different from the conditions that McPherson is describing in the context of the Western societies of the time.
But let us first get a handle on these two essentially contested concepts: ‘participatory democracy’ and ‘participatory economy’ (parecon). Let’s draw that thin line between formalistic and substantive democracy. Any African leader will tell you his/her country is democratic because there are regular elections, rule of law, respect for human rights, freedom of the press (even presidents like Mugabe, Al-Bashir or dos Santos, for example, will maintain such). That’s democracy at the formalistic level where the masses are required to say ‘this is the person I want to rule over me’. Then after the elections the masses are told to take a back seat and thus become mere spectators until the next elections.
As for substantive democracy, it contains the above elements but goes beyond in the sense that there is a great leeway for citizen participation in the political process. Thus, it is safe to talk of a ‘participatory democracy’. The elements of this type of democracy include: a well-informed, alert citizenry that exercises and exerts its influence over political events or can even change the course of it. It also calls for greater political involvement and participation in the affairs of the country through interest groups and the broader civil society organisations.
Thus many progressive scholars started to argue that ‘participatory democracy’ should naturally usher in ‘participatory economy’. In his seminal book: ‘The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy’, McPherson, using that model of democracy, maintained that workers must be given more choice in the management of their economic affairs. Proceeding from that perspective, democracy was viewed as a system of self-management where citizens are expected to take greater interest and involvement in determining the rules and regulations that affect their lives.
Where, how and whether this idea of ‘parecon’ has been implemented is difficult to point out a specific case. But I know that the former Yugoslavia, under President Marshal Tito, had a system of economic self-management in place. How successful that was, is hard to tell. In the West, according to McPherson, unfettered capitalism underwent an important transformation because of pressure from different sources, including the emergence of a social conscience as a result of the growing strength of socialist and proletariat movements. The state was thus forced to take a more active role in moderating the harshness of the system.
In fact, this is how the so-called welfare system was born in a number of European countries, more prominently in the Scandinavian countries. This is a far cry from what has been happening in a good part of Africa where many of our people have become not only political but economic spectators, while the rulers and their cronies are unashamedly and with impunity stealing from the ‘family silver’. This situation is taking place even in countries that went through protracted wars of national liberation to gain their independence such as Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish some of these former fighters from mercenaries bent on exploiting foreign countries.
I have, over the years, been to a number of countries in south, north and west Africa and it is the familiar story of abject poverty among many of their citizens. There is no role model of a progressive development agenda in Africa even among those countries that are endowed with natural resources. Libya under Muammar Gaddafi tried on the economic front using the oil-revenue but then he got the political kingdom totally wrong. This reminds one of Rosa Luxembourg trying to persuade Lenin that they cannot implement socialism without democracy. The two have to go together, and in retrospect she was right.
Let me, by way of conclusion, say that a good part of Africa will continue to resemble 19th century Western societies because at the theoretical level one cannot expect ‘non-participatory democracy’ to provide for a ‘participatory economy’. At the practical level, the masses have to develop a social and political conscience and civil society organisations should not be appendages of the ruling parties.