Postmodernity and the crisis of democracy

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Colin Crouch "Post-Democracy" - Interview - YouTube

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnTOiso08HM

2011. 11. 7. - 업로더: thebalancebeam

Im Zuge der Recherchen zum Supertaalk #8 "Parlament vs. PR: Parteien in der Krise?" haben wir ...

Friday, November 28, 2008

Post Democracy: a Review

Colin Crouch's short and provocative work Post-democracy asks why and then suggests reasons for the departure of historic left-of-centre political parties across Europe from their traditional role of being political voices for those disadvantaged by unrestrained capitalism.

His analysis is rooted in 1) the rise of the global firm 2) the decline in the size of the manual working classes 3) the loss of confidence in the idea of a separate public sector distinct from the interests of business.

The analysis is broad in its scope - Professor Crouch's academic focus includes Europe-wide political behaviour - as well as memorable in its style. Good points are well made throughout the book, a work which has its roots in a number of papers produced for the Fabian Society and The Political Quarterly.

The book's central thesis is persuasively argued: that western nations have passed the historic high point of mass democratic action (which he locates in the mid-twentieth century) and have entered a phase in which many of the outward activities of democracy remain (universal suffrage, elected government, etc.) but in which direct political activity by large numbers of citizens has been replaced with government by elected elites.

This thesis stands in opposition to the idea that democracy in the Internet age is as strong as ever. While the proliferation of special interest groups is a fact of modern political life, Crouch argues that this atomising of the activity of citizens, at the expense of concerted party political action, actually confirm‎s the reality of post-democracy. These individual groups are insufficient in their breadth of focus to achieve significant structural and legal changes to restrain the hegemony of global firms, with their well-resourced access through lobbies to the handles of governmental influence and power.

Commenting on the rise of global businesses run by elite professionals with limited loyalty (and tax obligations) to any specific nation state, Professor Crouch notes that,

"In many respects this resembles the situation in pre-Revolutionary France, where the monarchy and aristocracy were exempt from taxation but monopolized political power, while the middle classes and peasantry paid taxes but had no political rights."

The author's portrayal of the role of central government in the post-democratic age is as frightening as it is recognisable. The "ellipse" of government, which now includes lobby groups allied to large firms as well as public-private partnerships has, says Crouch, resulted in governments which are similar in their structure and nature to the business with which they allied, though paradoxically weaker as they have handed over large areas of activity and expertise to private firms.

Such governments increasingly outsource many of their traditional functions (education, health care, transport) and increasingly see their role as facilitating the operations of businesses within the economy.

Based at the European University Institute in Florence, Crouch cites the Belisconi regime as emblematic of the post-democratic government:

"In the early 1990s....Silvio Berlusconi...rapidly filled the [political] vacuum ... by pooling resources from his extensive network of enterprises ... television channels, a publishing house, a major football club, a financial empire, a leading supermarket chain... Initially, Forza Italia had no members or activists at all as such. Many of the functions normally filled by volunteers were carried out by the employees of Berlusconi's various enterprises.... Forza Italia is an example of a political party that ... is essentially a firm rather than an organisation of the classic party type; it did not emerge from any formulation of interests by social groups, but was a construction built up by parts of the existing political and financial elite."

Rather than being the voice of mass political empowerment, the mass media is portrayed by Professor Crouch as a specific type of global firm. Examples of the effect of the dependence of post-democratic governments upon the mass media abound:

"We have become accustomed to hear politicians not speaking like normal people, but presenting glib and finely honed statements which have a character all of their own."

"Advertising is not a form of rational dialogue... Its aim is not to engage in discussion but to persuade to buy. Adoption of its methods has helped politicians to cope with the problems of communicating to a mass public; but it has not served the cause of democracy itself."

"Promotion of the claimed charismatic qualities of a party leader, and pictures and film footage of his or her person striking appropriate poses, increasingly take the place of debate over issues and conflicting interests."

As a specific example of this trend, Crouch cites "The exceptional Californian gubernatorial election of 2003, when the film actor Arnold Schwarzenegger waged a successful campaign with no policy content."

Accustomed as we are to being told that the public interest is served when business thrives ( a new spin on the maxim that "What's good for General Motors is good for America") , Professor Crouch's book is a well-argued reminder that there are human (and indeed, environmental) interests that are not fully served by such "success" when it is narrowly defined as generating shareholder bonuses and when these successes are achieved by firms exercising disproportionate power over the political process.

The final chapter ("Where do we go from here?") is, in my mind, the weakest part of the book, as it understandably takes a macro view of this question in 20 pages, providing only the broadest of suggestions of how citizens in a post-democratic age could begin to reengage in the political process through discovering their shared identity and interests and expressing them through both political parties and special interest groups.

Overall, this is an important book that, to me at least, had the effect of putting together a number of observable economic and political trends which, until reading it, had appeared to me as separate developments.

At 135 pages, the book is readily digestible and is well referenced for further reading . It also forms part of a series published by Polity which includes such titles as War and Power in the 21st Century, Governing the World Economy and Surveillance after September 11. If the tone and style of these other titles is as good as Post-democracy, then I will have stumbled upon a useful resource.

http://alshaw.blogspot.kr/2008/11/post-democracy-review.html

“Postdemocracy” – Interview with Colin Crouch

By

Florian Christof

– November 8, 2011

Preparing  Supertaalk #8 “Parlament vs. PR: Parteien in der Krise” ,  Werner Reisinger and Florian Christof met Colin Crouch, the author of “Postdemocracy”. The british sociologist gave them the following interview.

Supertaalk:
Prof. Crouch, if you would have to give a very brief definition of what the term “post democracy” means, let’s say in a few sentences, what would it be?

“… the energy of the political system and the innovative capacity have moved to other spheres.”

Colin Crouch:
Postdemocracy would be like postindustrialism. Postindustrial society – we have all the products of industry. Industrial activity continuous. But the energy, the dynamism of the economy has gone somewhere else. So where I use post-democracy with the same idea. All the institutions of democracy remain – we use them. It’s just the energy of the political system and the innovative capacity have moved to other spheres.

Supertaalk:
Since your analyses and criticism that you came up with in your book is focused very much on the anglo-saxon system of democracy – why is it that the book did get such a great response in europe where many countries have multi-party-systems. Not like in the US for instance.

Colin Crouch:
It was based originally on british, american and italian experience. The book was published first in Italy in fact, and had big resonance with the public there. But I could understand, because of the Berlusconi-Phenomenon. I have been surprised, that the resonance the book had in Germany and Austria also. I am slightly puzzled by. I think it could simply be that my thought-processes are more accessible to german people then to english speaking people.

Supertaalk:
I was wondering, when I read your book, it said the crisis of the classic democracy started in the 1980s or something like that. It was the same time when the neoliberal doctrine became very popular in the US and the UK; when Reagan and Thatcher started the massive off-shoring and the privatization of the public sector. David Harvey mentioned it in a brief video, saying that in central-europe people like to call it an anglo-saxon disease. Is there a coincidence of the decline of functionality of democracy and the neoliberal doctrine? Did it really come to privatization of politics? What are the coincidences?

Colin Crouch:
Yes, they are very closely related. And in the new book, i have just written about why neoliberalism survived the financial crisis, which should have made it very vulnerable. I have tried to make these links. It’s a very close relationship, indeed. Because the growing power of large corporations is a fundamental aspect of the shift of post-democracy. When I say, the political energy of the system has gone elsewhere – it has gone to rather secret private discourse between great global corporations and governments.

Supertaalk:
Your thesis came out a few years ago, it don’t say much about the European Union and the Euro-System, which is the current topic of the day. Can we get a brief statement on what your personal opinions are about the perspectives of EU and the stability of the Euro-System? What do you think?

“the economy is global and democracy remains very very national”

Colin Crouch:
Fundamentally the European Union is a very optimistic sign. One of the problems that democracy has, the economy is global and democracy remains very very national. The European Union is a means to getting beyond that. Unfortunately the European project, like it is now defined is a very neoliberal project. In particular the Monetary Union is more anglo-saxon then the anglo-saxons are. This is a design fault of the system, which Europe is suffering from.

Supertaalk:
If we regard the rise of nationalism in central europe, is a common economic government of the EU possible?

Colin Crouch:
Sadly, the prospect is very poor. There are at least two things. On the one side, neoliberalism: As Fritz Scharpf, the german political scientist has argued, market making is a negative form of constructing europe. It’s much more easy to do than positive institution building. So that’s one set of problems. The other set of problems is that national reaction to globalisation is increasingly taking this xenophobic form. Now these are two very negative forces preventing the construction of a good social europe.

Supertaalk:
What started as a protest movement against unemployment and a failing politcal system in spain with the slogan “real democracy now!” has now swapped over to other parts of Europe and the US where the Occupy Wall Street Movement has created heavy media attention. Now, what seems to be the beginning of a global rise of resistance to some situations created by governments – is this what you expect to be a way out of the post-democratic dilemma – for in austria there’s quite a big discussion going on about the traditional forms of participation (via the representative system, Anm.) versus new forms of democratic participation, e.g. it’s better to found a partie, because this is the possibility the representative system gives us to make an influence.

“We need both parties and civil society initiatives.”

Colin Crouch:
We need both parties and civil society initiatives. We cannot expect parties to do this alone, unless there is a real strong feeling in the public opinion that something must be done about this financial system and about this form of capitalism that we have. We cannot expect the parties to create that by themselves. So we need to support movements and protest that articulate this concern, and try to create a strong movement of public opinion, to which the parties can then respond. I don’t see parties and “bürgerinitiativen” as alternatives, they are necessary to each other.

Supertaalk:
Much has been written and said about the role of new forms of technology [and] systems of communication like social media, Richard Wilkinson mentioned the potential of free information and the conflict over restrictions on it. Do you think they have the capabilities to help and establish a more democratic society – more active citizens in a democratic sense? Or do they probably lead to, as some skeptics say, to a decline of public interest in politics?

Colin Crouch:
Well, they are serving very well, in assisting organisations with very slim resources. I think it’s rather similar to the history of newspapers. When newspapers, mass newspapers started, the existing elites were not interested because the did not control them. There was a great diversity of ownership, and this helped all kinds of opposition opinion – liberal groups, working class groups, anti – religious groups. Eventually, the great power centers understood this and began to buy up newspapers and controlled most of them. And I expect we shall see the same with new media, but at the moment, we are living in the period where they are useful to, and are being used by all kinds of groups.

Supertaalk:
Thanks a lot for the interview.

http://nonapartofthegame.eu/?p=3142

Servants of the 1%?: Politicians and the Economic Elite

by Pablo Torija

In recent years millions of citizens across the Western world have taken to the streets calling for real democracy.  These massive demonstration began in North Africa, but spread rapidly to Greece, Portugal and Iceland, and then to North America and much of the rest of Europe.  The most popular slogan of this international movement, ‘We are 99%’ – borrowed from an article by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz[1] – encapsulates the widespread sense that governments are serving the interests of a tiny elite, over those of the broader public.

The idea that democracy is dysfunctional and is serving a wealthy elite is not new.  In 2004 Collin Crouch published Post-democracy, one of the most inspiring books on this topic.[2]  It summarizes several years of work and explains how in spite of the regularity of elections in the Western world, in practice politicians do not represent the majority of the population. 

Crouch argues that the power of the working class followed a parabolic trajectory: After the Second World War, workers started to organise and press their demands though the agendas of labour parties.  The height of their power and representation was achieved in the seventies, when states recognised their rights and provided substantial public services.  The arrival of globalisation changed this post-war paradigm.  Industrial workers lost their jobs, which were transferred to emerging economies, and multinational corporations began to acquire the tremendous power which they enjoy today. 

Crouch claims that political representation followed the same parabolic trajectory and suggests that the impotence of the trade unions and the strength of multinational corporations distorted the democratic process.  Though workers make up the majority of the population, politicians now only serve the interests of shareholders and CEOs of large multinationals.  Politicians, he claims, work for the economic elite.

Crouch’s views are now becoming more widely accepted by citizens and scholars, and there is intense debate in academia and in the streets about the quality of our democracy.  I have therefore spent the last year of my PhD trying to gather statistical evidence to prove or disprove Crouch’s thesis, which is also the central claims of the Occupy movement.

I started with the notion that every political decision must benefit and improve the happiness of certain groups, whilst imposing a cost on others.  For example, when François Hollande proposed a 75% income tax on salaries above ?1m to pay for public services, this would have mostly benefited the poor, who are the main users of those services.  In this case then, we can say that the poor are the most favoured group (MFG).  On the other hand, when governments raise indirect taxes to ensure that banks do not lose the values of their stocks, we can say that the MFG are the rich, since it is they who own the largest share of financial institutions.  Some policies meanwhile would tend to favour middle income groups, such as public universities.  If we rank citizens according to their income, we can see how these three political actions have three different MFGs. 

GRAPH 1.

Most Favoured Group of different political actions.

 

This graph shows the three MFGs of the three political actions just mentioned.  Increasing taxes for the rich favours the poorer the most, as they pay less taxes and benefit most from the services those taxes fund.  Public university benefit the middle class most, since the rich pay too much for the service they receive, whilst the poor pay too much for a service from which they received little benefit at all (since they tend to drop out of education at secondary level).  A similar reasoning holds for a political action designed to protect the wealth of shareholders.

According to traditional theories, in a country with two political parties, both will target the median voter (percentile 50) as the MFG.  More recent research has emphasised the importance of political ideologies in determining the MFG of different parties (with social democrats, for example, favouring poorer groups than conservatives).  My research had three aims: (1) to determine which are the MFGs for each political ideology (2) to analyse whether the MFGs have changed over time (3) to analyse if the power of labour unions and the strength of multinationals affect who is the MFG.

I used data from the World Value Survey (WVS) which contains information on happiness, income and other socio-economic indexes in the OECD countries (Western Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan).  I matched this with data on these countries’ macro economic variables (GDP per capita, GINI index, affiliation to labour unions, percentage of national income as wages), as well as an index of political ideology, which measures the political orientation of the party in government (whether centre left, centrist or centre right).  In total, the database I compiled contains more than 100,000 observations for the period 1981-2009.

Once I had compiled the database, I conducted several regressions in order to calculate the MFGs.  I also considered which other macro economic factors were correlated with politicians favouring the rich or the poor, and whether different political parties represent different MFGs.  Once I had the coefficients of the regressions it was possible, with simple algebra, to calculate the MFG. 

Using extrapolation techniques, I analysed whether Western democracies were more representative in the seventies by analysing the MFG of parties with different political ideologies.  Graph 2 shows which were the MFGs of different political parties in 1975. 

GRAPH 2.

Most favoured groups in 1975, for different political ideologies

 

As we can see, there was a difference between centre left, centrist and centre right parties in 1975.  Centre left parties most benefited poorer individuals (percentile 16), and centre right most benefited richer individuals (percentile 81).  Furthermore, we can observe how parties with centrist politics were situated in the middle of the income distribution, benefiting the median voter (percentile 50).  This is a picture of a healthy democracy where different political parties represent different social groups.

But how does it look now?  Graph 3 shows the MFG in 2009 for different political parties.  As we can see, there is no difference between them.  They all benefit the richest 1%, whether centre left, centrist or centre right. 

GRAPH 3.

Most Favoured Groups in 2009, for different political ideologies

The change has been gradual and continuous for all parties (see graph 4).  Conservatives have shifted from favouring the 80^th percentile to favouring the 1% (percentile 100^th).  But by far the sharpest change has been amongst parties of the centre left.  Whereas once they defended citizens with low income, now they are hardly distinguishable from the conservatives.  From a qualitative perspective, this dramatic shift of the centre left parties can be associated with the deep changes that take place in social democracies after the economic crisis of the mid-seventies. 

GRAPH 4.

Changes on the Most Favoured Groups.

Blue region is an extrapolation of the data.

I was also able to identify some correlations between parties benefiting the richest and other variables.  Both weak labour unions and capitalists taking a larger share of the national income seem to be correlated with parties favouring richer individuals.  But correlation does not mean causality.  It is not clear therefore whether strong labour unions mean that the politicians are more likely to serve the interests of the poor, or whether politicians working for the rich tend to weaken labour unions.  The same holds for the relationship with capital’s share of the national income: it is not clear whether this is a cause or an effect.  Neither can this evidence help us better understand the role of mass media, the financial sector, or the action of lobby groups, for example.  It shows us that western democracies have become unrepresentative, but does not explain how we got here.

Nevertheless, what this evidence does show is that those movements that have used the slogan ‘We are the 99%’ are indeed correct.  Politicians in the OECD countries no longer represent the majority of the population and focus instead on the economic elite – the 1%.  Whether the new wave of global movements will be able to bring back real democracy is something that we will discover in coming years.

The original scientific paper on which this article is based is available here.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/servants_of_the_1_politicians_and_the_economic_elite

Postmodernity and the crisis of democracy

Jeremy Gilbert 28 May 2009

Subjects:

• democratic society

• The British Crisis

• Democratic Reform

About the author

Jeremy Gilbert is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Anticapitalism and Culture.

Two weeks into the public scandal over excessive expenses-claims by members of parliament, and the air is thick with cries for reform.The blogosphere rings as the liberal commentariat cry with one voice ‘Electoral Reform! A constitutional convention now! Charter 88 at last!'

(Can I exempt myself from this caricature? Sadly not. A well-known commentator and activist phoned me up the other day to ask what I thought the democratic left should be proposing. My response? ... ‘a constitutional convention!')

But as usual, the bulk of the liberal commentariat wants too little too late, is still fighting the battles of the previous generation, and remains in denial about the sheer scale of the challenges which it faces (with notable exceptions). So let's see if we can't move this debate along into the 21st century.

It may have been a long time coming, but this is the first moment in living memory when the palpable disillusion of the public with our entire system of representative government has become a major news story in itself. Such occasions come rarely, and when they do, they must always be examined for their inherent risks as well as for the opportunities which they present. My purpose here will be to examine both risks and opportunities, and to suggest that the analysis offered by even the most radical reformers amongst the political mainstream is too weak, localised and ahistorical to grasp the nature of the crisis and the character of any possible solution to it. Let me begin, however, by offering some evidence for my overall claim that the nature and scale of our democratic crisis remain poorly understood. Simply this: that this crisis clearly should have been a major news story - indeed, it should have been the major story - for at least the past five years, and yet it hasn't been. On at least two major issues, the democratic dimension has been overlooked by almost all commentators.

War and Privatisation: A Programme that Nobody Voted For...

Most strikingly, public anger towards the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the large-scale willingness to mobilise against it, have tended to be interpreted, not least by the Stop the War Coalition itself, as a manifestation of moral outrage against the invasion and its human consequences. While this, of course, was an important factor, such an explanation does not begin to account for the peculiar trajectory ofthe campaign, so markedly different from that of its nearest historic equivalent, the campaign against the Vietnam war in the late 1960s. February 2003 saw by far the largest public demonstration in British history, involving on some estimates almost 2% of the entire UK population taking to the streets of London to express opposition to the invasion. The unprecedented intervention of the Daily Mirror in openly calling for support for the demonstration showed what mobilising capacity the press still retains in this era of plummeting print-media sales. But more than anything this event demonstrated - as such events are intended to do - the scale and ubiquity of opposition to the war. Within months, however, the campaign had all but dissipated. Why?

We can only answer this question by considering the massive unpopularity of the war during the months leading up to the invasion; and the importance of the fact that the public knew the war to be unpopular, and strongly desired to exercise their right to make a ‘wise, well-judged refusal' of the decision to invade. It is true that opinion polls showed majority support for invasion at the precise moment when it occurred, but this slender majority didn't last long. Clearly boosted by the mainstream tendency to support a war which has become a foregone conclusion, for fear of showing insufficient support for ‘our boys' on the front line, it was not clear support for the decision to go to war. Most importantly, it was sustained only at the moment when the government was insisting that intelligence showed Iraq to present a clear and present danger to world peace, with ‘weapons of mass destruction' that could reach western Europe within a matter of minutes of being launched. The spurious nature of these claims has long since been accepted by all parties to the debate, and support for the war fell below even the level which preceded the run-up to invasion once it became clear that they had been the product of little more than government mendacity.

Despite its transparent lack of democratic legitimacy, the invasion went ahead, as no equivalent action could have done during the ‘golden age' of representative democracy (say, 1930-1970). For most of the period of the occupation, its consequences for Iraq's material and social infrastructures - and for the lives of its people - have seemed to be even more disastrous than predicted by its most pessimistic critics. And yet: public outrage has not mounted, has not built up to the fever pitch of indignation which might have been expected, if humanitarian morality or even explicit anti-imperialism had been the true basis for that historically unprecedented expression‎ of public will. Instead, the campaign against the war and the subsequent occupation of Iraq went into headlong decline immediately following the invasion. Anybody active in radical politics during the ensuing months and years will have been aware of the air of despondent resignation which seemed to fall over much of the population at that time.

This particular pattern of build-up and decline, of shifting moods and fluctuating publics, ceases to be mysterious if we understand what was really going on in February 2003. The anger which was being expressed during that month was not against the war as a military crime as such, but against the clear intention of the government to ignore or crudely manipulate public opinion in the pursuit of a manifestly unpopular policy. Consequently, it was the failure of a massive exercise in peaceful democratic protest to alter this course of action which provoked such disappointment. From a humanitarian point of view, there was every reason for discontent to increase and intensify as the occupation persisted (and I write as one who personally did continue to protest against the war on those grounds). From a democratic point of view, however, once the decision had been taken to invade, the argument was over and had been lost. Both the anti-war movement and the journalistic classes failed to appreciate that this was the real story in the UK: not the war as such, but the democratic deficit which had made it possible, and the palpable public frustration at their inability to make their voices count.

My other example is more straightforward. There can be little question that one of the major projects of the New Labour administration, with some of the most profound and permanent consequences for both everyday life and the distribution of power in the UK, has been its programme of public service ‘reform'. One way or another - through the Private Finance Initiative, the introduction and intensification of internal markets, or through the outsourcing of service-delivery to commercial agencies - this programme has involved the introduction of profit-seeking and commercial relations into as many areas of service design and delivery as possible. A mountain of polling evidence demonstrates that a small minority of the public - and a negligible proportion of Labour voters - has ever supported any element of this programme.

Ministers can point to the commitment to ‘public-private partnership' in published manifestos. However, it hardly needs spelling out that manifestos are read by few voters and are invariably short on detail; nobody can seriously doubt that most Labour voters have always assumed that they were voting against the general principle of privatisation and commercialisation when they voted Labour, and if they do doubt it then they can consult the polls. The fact is that most voters rely on broadcast and print media to inform them about the intentions and actions of government. On this issue more than any other, however, British journalism has demonstrated its scandalous inadequacy to the times. How many stories in the mainstream media have set out to explain to citizens the nature and scale of this historic transformation of public services? We all know the answer: not enough.

We also know perfectly well the defence which journalists would make of this lapse: this is a complicated issue, involving technical details and convoluted policy paradigms which are difficult to narrate, to explain, to make ‘sexy'. It is hard, they would no doubt tell us, to get the public interested in such things, and to make the issues in any way comprehensible. We may sigh and grimace at this kind of lazy self-justification. In fact, however, this is not just a lame excuse for professional negligence, but an observation which brings to light one of the key truths about the nature of our democratic crisis: contemporary politics is too complicated for twentieth century institutions to get to grips with.

The BBC and the print press are, to an extent, institutional relics of the industrial age, and they will not have the capacity to shed adequate light on the complexities of contemporary power and decision-making unless they rethink their intellectual parameters as radically as they have expanded their technological capabilities. In such a context, elites - for example, bankers and ministers - will pursue their own agendas with impunity, exempt from effective public scrutiny. The fact that MPs have been called to account for fiddling their expenses but not for trying to dismantle the public sector, and that overpaid bankers had to wait for the collapse of the entire financial system to attract any attention, only proves this point. In both of these cases, even once the issues have come to light, most of the relevant reporting has turned a story which should have been about a systemic lack of accountability in our most powerful institutions into a petty tale of personal greed. Such accounts ultimately obfuscate more than they clarify the real nature of our situation.

Post-Democracy

This situation is characterised, quite simply, by a chronic inability of our political institutions to give the public any real influence over policy. Any analysis of the broader crisis of democratic representation has to start here. There is no question that the self-serving greed of MPs, and the disparity between public expectations and parliamentary actuality, is an issue worthy of comment in itself; but it is also symptomatic of a much more profound mismatch between the received notion of what MPs are for and their actual role and function within the circuits of power which shape social, cultural and economic outcomes.

MPs, it is still fondly believed, ought to act as the conduits for the views of their constituents, causing those views to inform as fully as possible the key legislative decisions of parliament. Instead, the truth is that MPs are fairly junior members of a technocratic, managerial elite whose most exalted members were, until recently, the merchant princes of finance capital. It surely stands as proof of this claim, that both the US and UK governments have come close to bankrupting themselves in the effort to rescue these lordlings from the fate that they have brought upon themselves.

Sub-groups of this elite may be highly differentiated in terms of style, cultural tastes and mores; but on the whole it pursues its own political agendas with a high degree of consistency, and is more-or-less indifferent to public opinion. The continuity of core policies - despite the shifting emphases on ‘family values' or ‘personal freedom' - since Callaghan and Healey agreed to the IMF's conditions for economic aid in 1978, is sufficient proof of this. Membership of this elite does not necessarily confer great personal power: it would not be in the gift of any one of its members, from the US presidency downwards, radically to alter the course of global capitalist development which is its fundamental shared mission, even if they wanted to. Membership is assumed, however, to confer considerable personal influence in small matters, and above all to carry considerable material rewards. It is therefore hardly surprising that members of parliament have been trying to boost their incomes while largely acting as a rubber-stamping body for the government's agenda, which is itself merely a local adaptation of that international neoliberal programme which the UK was first committed to by Healey and Callaghan.

This is a situation which has been well documented and described by a number of first-class analysts and commentators (E.g. Anthony Barnett,This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution. London: Vintage,1997; Colin Leys, Market Driven Politics, London: Verso, 2001; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005). Among the most lucid is Colin Crouch, who argues that we have now entered an epoch of ‘post-democracy',within which the established institutions of democratic representation simply do not function to represent or to enact effectively the collective will of the citizenry.

One of the best-known and most widely understood explanations for this situation is that it is the key political consequence of economic globalisation. Put very simply: where governments no longer have the degree of control that they once did over flows of capital, labour, ideas, or people, then the capacity of individual national legislatures to determine what happens within their own borders is severely curtailed. Everything from wage levels and rates of inward investment to media content and the cultural makeup of local populations could once be regulated by the state, and now cannot.

As the capacity of governments to manage such broad factors shrinks, they are increasingly likely to emphasise the importance of their capacity to do the only things still in their power: for example, isolating individual scapegoats for social problems and subjecting them to highly visible forms of punishment. In the long-term, however, the ineffectuality of such measures can only generate an increasing sense - amongst both public and politicians - of the impotence of politics in the face of global capitalism. Such impotence breeds frustration, and frustration will manifest itself in various ways: for example, in an increasingly self-serving attitude amongst professional politicians, and a growing resentment of them amongst the people whom they are less and less able to serve effectively.

This account (which is my own, although it is derived from Crouch and others and summarises a widely-circulated position) is powerful, and demonstrably accurate as far as it goes. However, the problem with it is that it tends to face us with an insuperable dilemma. If the problem is the weakness of national governments, then surely the answer is to look to those supra-national bodies which enable national governments to co-ordinate their actions and pool their power, exerting a greater influence over the world and its directions. The trouble with this solution is: the more power is ceded to these bodies, the more they appear to pursue agendas which have nothing to do with the wills of citizens and the more purely do they seem to reflect the assumptions and goals of the global neoliberal elite.

The classic instance is the European Union. At the end of the 1980s, it might have seemed realistic to hope that something like a European civil society would emerge, as the European parliament became more and more influential over EU policy, and an increasingly-educated public came to pay more and more attention to it as a key arena of debate, boosting participation in European elections and fostering the growth of transnational political blocs and movements. Even before the recent financial crisis - with the legitimacy of the EU at an all-time low, and its transparent commitment to the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus' at an all-time high - such dreams looked laughable. After the debacle of the G20 meeting earlier this year, they look now almost incomprehensible: remnants of the mythology of another age. There is clearly no European civil society, and no presently-imaginable prospect of one emerging within the lifetime of any European adult alive today. The EU has proved itself largely incapable of influencing the direction of international neoliberal capitalism. Politics, whether we like it or not, is still lived and enacted at a local and national level, even while capitalism is managed and implemented globally. Doesn't this leave us with an impossible problem, and condemn us to a long period of ‘post-democracy'?

Only if the sole aspect of the situation that we look at is globalisation. The problem with almost all commentary on these issues is that this is the only element that it considers. But there are other issues of equal weight to think about when assessing the nature of our democratic crisis. Firstly, it must be acknowledged that public legislatures were at the height of their power in the ‘developed' democracies in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the organisational capacity of the labour movement (itself dependent upon an industrial techno-social context), and the threat of international communism, severely curtailed the power and the audacity of capital. This enabled politicians to mediate between different power blocs and to threaten powerful elites with the possibility of revolutionary upheaval if the democratic will of the people was blithely ignored. (See Stuart Hall's ‘The ‘Little Caesars of Social Democracy' inThe Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso, 1987). None of these conditions obtain today.

Globalisation is only one element of an interrelated set of processes which has seen almost every society on the planet subject to extraordinary levels of complexification. Internally, this can best be understood in terms of the highly variegated and differentiated nature of a society like the UK. The range of lifestyles, career paths, family forms, patterns of loyalty and belonging which are widely tolerated and which shape the lives of British people today would have amazed our ancestors even going back just one generation, never mind half a century. The diversity of personal lives and public views which is now tolerated even within once highly conformist professions such as academia or the law is a good indicator of this. As a result of these changes, individuals cannot be assumed to belong, as they once did, to large, relatively homogenous social groups sharing a largely similar outlook on life and a consequently similar set of political views. However, this is the assumption which underpins the party political system which we have inherited from the 1920s.

In an era when large-scale heavy industry was the foundation of the economy, when mass broadcasting was the key public medium, and when commerce could only offer a small choice of largely standardised products to consumers, it made sense to assume that citizens could be fitted into a few very capacious boxes; that the opinions of all those inhabiting any such box could be assumed to be largely similar on all issues; that bodies of opinion could therefore be collected together behind a small number of banners and allowed to fight it out only every four or five years. It made sense to assume that whichever party won such a contest could pursue a more-or-less stable agenda which more-or-less represented the wills and interests of its constituents, until the next such contest. Today, this model makes little sense. In the present context, the whole idea of mobilising large-scale majorities in support of an entire programme of government for five years without negotiation or adjustment seems improbable; and yet this is all that our political system is designed to enable us to do. It is no wonder that it cannot do it; instead, politicians are obliged to offer nothing but platitudes in order to fight elections, and there are no well-organised lobbies pressuring them actually to represent the interests of their constituents when they win them.

Postmodernity

In fact, this is not a new observation. What I am describing is only what Jean-François Lyotard first called ‘the postmodern condition' way back in 1979. Few thinkers have been more poorly understood by their commentators than Lyotard,and few concepts more routinely abused than ‘the postmodern'. So most readers, through no fault of their own, would do well to forget whatever they think they know about that term (and don't worry about Lyotard for the moment - this is extrapolated from his argument, but is not identical to it ). Whatever you thought it meant, whatever else it means, for the purposes of political and historical analysis what ‘Postmodernity' means is the following.

Industrial capitalism generates massive social and environmental problems, but for most of this its history (say, roughly, 1640-1970), it looked as if human civilisations were developing institutions and ideas which could keep those problems in check, regulating both capitalism and its consequences, even sometimes forming the basis for entire systemic alternatives to capitalism, and generally allowing someone - be it an enlightened despot, a democratic parliament, a General Secretary of the Communist Party or even a corporate Chief Executive - to make clear decisions about the general direction of travel. The history of ‘modernity' was the twin history of the development of both capitalism and these various other mechanisms of prediction and decision, of discipline and control. However, we have now entered an era when none of the ‘modern' institutions of government seem capable of really exercising any control over the material, socialand cultural changes which capitalism continues to unleash upon us. At the same time, none of the large-scale, coherent systems of thought which have been handed down to us from earlier moments seem capable of grasping the full pluralism and complexity of a world of such dense, wild, unregulated capitalism as we see all around us today.

Rather as theoretical physics currently has no coherent paradigm with which to grasp the nature and behaviour of matter at every scale, and is forced to muddle through with a number of diverse hypotheses which seem to hold good in their own contexts but don't apply in all cases, we now find ourselves deploying ideas, policies and loyalties in a haphazard and pragmatic way, unsure as to how it all fits together, and whether it even matters if it does at all. This is the postmodern condition. In a way, the crisis of democracy which we are experiencing today is only a symptom of this deeper shift: which is to say, it is symptomatic of the inability of institutions which were born in the industrial revolution and came to maturity in the era of cinema, railways and mass democracy to get to grips with the mercurial fluidity and speed of postmodern cybernetic capitalism.

This realisation, explicit or implicit, has informed a great deal of philosophical and political reflection in recent decades. One response is simply to throw our hands up in the air and declare politics as such to be a redundant concept, delivering ourselves to the nihilistic thrill of a world without shared values and meanings. We can be thankful that this quasi-Baudrillardian perspective seems not to have made the fashionable come-back of other cultural relics of the 1980s.

Certainly the most influential response is that which came to shape the ideology and practice of New Labour and similar ‘Third Way' administrations around the world: one can already see this perspective emerging in the early writings of Geoff Mulgan, for example, long before he became head of Blair's policy unit, and it is famously expressed in Peter Mandelson's perspicacious claim that the era of representative democracy was over and Philip Gould's touchingly ingenuous claims for the focus group as a genuine tool of consultative democracy. (See Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (eds), New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, by Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, London: Lawrence &Wishart,1987: and Gould in episode 4 of Adam Curtis' BBC TV documentary,The Centuryof the Self. ) What emerged here was a response which effectively acknowledged the end of the party-political model of the mid-twentieth century, and which proposed to replace it with government by an enlightened technocratic elite, who would use techniques such as focus groups and market research to find out what would make people happy, would try to give them more-or-less what they wanted, but would always keep in mind that maintaining the profitability of UK companies and investors must be regarded as the first priority of governance. This model works very well during an economic boom. It comes unstuck quickly, immediately, disastrously when the boom ends. This is what is happening before our eyes today.

During a boom, it is not necessary for the governing elite to make choices about how to distribute a limited set of resources. The financial elite can carry on reaping most of the rewards, as long as there is just enough cheap credit and extra tax revenue to keep consumers feeling comfortable and public services afloat. As soon as the boom ends, however, an ugly reality makes itself felt again: the fact that despite the disappearance of clearly demarcated political constituencies, what has not disappeared are clearly identifiable conflicts of interest between sections of the community. The interests of banks and those to whom they lend, of corporations and the employees whose salaries they must pay, of retailers and their customers, of high-rate tax-payers and public-service workers, cannot be perfectly reconciled, because in each case the incomes of the former can only be maintained at least partially at the expense of the latter. It is partly the persistence of such antagonisms, even while the political blocs which once enabled us to name and imagine them have disappeared, which makes politics today so confusing.

Radical Democracy Now?

However, at the same time, it is the unravelling of the technocratic solution to the postmodern problem which presents us with a new opportunity today. As philosophers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the one hand, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt on the other, have all argued in different ways (despite the mutual antipathy of these two pairs of writers), the postmodern context ought to be seen as in fact a moment of fantastic opportunity, a moment when the force of democracy might finally break free from the constraints placed upon it by industrial society, as the antagonisms which continue to persist within and across the field of contemporary social relations become evident and activated.

For Laclau &Mouffe, it is the very proliferation of such conflicts which might become the basis for a radicalisation of democracy. For Hardt &Negri, it is only in the manifestation of the creative power of ‘the multitude' (the vast collectivity to which all who work belong), against ‘Empire' (contemporary capitalism and its transnational institutional forms), that the possibility of true democracy resides. What is interesting here, is that from either of these perspectives, it is crucial right now to explode the lazy liberal view that yet more technocratic reforms could be sufficient to resolve the crisis of democracy. The fact that real conflicts of interest are at stake, and that a powerful elite has every interest in the continued and intensified de-politicisation of government, must be acknowledged and brought to the fore.

The situation then presents us with a question. What forms of democratic practice could make these antagonisms visible, and so enable democratic contestation to emerge again, in place of the empty theatre of impotence, gesture and resentment which politics has become? Do we really think that proportional representation for the House of Commons is going to cut it, as the Observer evidently does ? It hasn't prevented exactly the same degradation of politics occurring in every one of the ‘mature' democracies as well as many of the newer ones (and it is far too early to decide that Obama represents some permanent turning of the tide in the American case).

Why would it? The aim of PR is to prevent any over-mighty majority from emerging and to enable a pluralistic range of voices to be heard in public debate. No doubt there are key problems with British democracy which PR would remedy (most notably, the appalling over-representation of a few thousand voters in the south of England and the inability of the significant Green minority to establish itself on the national stage), but the lack of pluralism and the tyranny of the majority are not the fundamental problems which we face. In fact the problem is almost the opposite: postmodern culture is ready too pluralistic for its collectivities to be able to operationalize themselves effectively at the level of party politics, and PR would only make a very slight difference to that situation. At the worst, it might exacerbate it, if the endless cycle of parliamentary coalition-management were to leave the executive even freer than it is now to pursue elite agendas.

The crisis we face today is not just a crisis of the British constitution, but of the whole conception of representative democracy which we have inherited from a long-passed era. The very idea that an elected individual can be relied upon to be the political stand-in for a vast and complex community of constituents, while also remaining loyal to a national party organisation, is impossible to sustain in the postmodern context. But what is the alternative?

In the past weeks, we have heard an astonishing array of voices speaking much the kind of language that I have been using here: from Norman Lamont to Esther Rantzen, the value of ‘voting for individuals' rather than for parties has been extolled as one way of ensuring the probity of our representatives and bypassing the apparently corrupting influence of party. On one level, this is an obvious non-sequitur. It is not as members of parties, but as members of the entire technocratic neoliberal elite, that MPs have behaved as they have. There is clearly a level of self-interest involved in other members of that elite (e.g. journalists, newspaper editors and celebrities) trying to distract attention from the fact that they are all, systemically, over-privileged, overpaid and unaccountable.

On another level, however, the non-sequitur itself is telling. Parties are perceived to have become corrupt and corrupting because they are seen quite rightly to have become machines for the servicing of that elite and institutions for the professionalisation of politics, rather than vehicles for the democratic self-expression‎ of broader communities of interest. Tory MP Douglas Carswell has even called for MPs to be subject to direct recall by constituents: this comes close to the classic demand of the far-left Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, although they only proposed that MPs should be thus accountable to constituency parties. But it is in precisely this range of responses that we can discern the real danger of the present situation.

The idea of electing celebrities instead of politicians, like the idea of removing parties from politics, is not an idea which can tend towards the renewal of politics as such. In fact it is the opposite: it is an idea which accepts implicitly the neoliberal premise that politics as such is over, and that all we really need is to be administered and managed by competent and trustworthy (or even merely amusing) individuals. We have already seen the potential impact of this celebrity anti-politics with the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London. We could now be about to witness its final triumph over any prospect for the renewal of democracy. Such a renewal may well involve a complete reconfiguration of what we mean by ‘party', but the idea that it can involve either a simple reform of existing party procedures, or government by an individualised assortment of the great and good, or a general election under our present system, can only direct us further away from any prospect of positive change.

Of course, this leaves open the question of what we could mean by ‘the renewal of democracy'. This is not something that I believe can be laid down in a blueprint. ‘Model constitutions' are an ancient plaything of political philosophers, and they have their contemporary analogue in the endless reams of jolly clever policy proposals issued by think tanks, none of which will ever come to anything unless the balance of social forces is such as to make them desirable to some powerful constituencies. The primary issue is not what a twenty-first century democracy would look like, but what such powerful constituencies could bring it into being, and how we might assemble this from the disparate fragments of contemporary discontent (how we might actualise the potential of the multitude, to borrow from Hardt &Negri). I don't know the answer to this question, but would like to propose that it is precisely this question which cries out to be answered. Without the Chartists and their descendants, we would never have achieved what democracy we have in this country. Without a movement which can see past the next election or the constitutional debates of the 1980s, we won't get out of the mess we're in now.

Still, one can't duck the question of policy altogether. Clearly, to address the problems with the existing forms of representative democracy identified here, we need to seek out and experiment with processes of democratic consultation and deliberation which are far more participative and processual than what we have now. Weekly meetings of constituents to whom MPs must be accountable for their votes (and the same thing for local councillors)? An obligatory afternoon off work for all employees, every fortnight, to take part in such meetings? Extensive use of the internet to facilitate participation by those who could not attend physically? A devolution of all remaining powers of the crown prerogative to the parliament? PR for the House of Commons as well as for a new second chamber? Real tax-raising powers for the devolved national governments and the GLA? A return to the Liberal Democrat experiment with ‘neighbourhood councils'? Full election of the judiciary, the boards of hospitals, of school and university governors, of police boards, of the director general of the BBC? Probably, yes: all of the above and many other ideas besides would have to be considered, discussed, played-with and moved-beyond in any ongoing process of democratisation.

These are, effectively, the kinds of policy being experimented with now in some parts of Latin America, and theirs is the animating spirit of the World Social Forum. They are not new, but belong to a continuum of ideas which have been around for a very long time. Greens and radical liberals have been making similar proposals for years. Going further back, the socialist, communist and anarchist traditions have a long history of scepticism towards parliamentary democracy and of proposals for more involved and accountable institutions (from factory councils to autonomous communes). The New Left was always informed by a commitment to the ideal of a democracy that would be more and more participatory.

Today, do such proposals really sound any more utopian than did the demand for full manhood suffrage in the 1830s (never mind full adulthood suffrage)? At any rate, the point is not the details: the point is that without a general movement in this kind of direction, democracy can only ever decay. We have the potential elements for such a movement already before us in the UK: from the ClimateCamp (a hugely successful exercise in ongoing radical democracy) to Compass (whose proposals for the democratisation of public life are at times revolutionary in their implications), from the Green Party to the inchoate army of isolated voices crying out for change. If they could find a way to resonate together, then they could sing a very powerful song indeed today. Surely, if we have learned nothing else, we have learned this much from the past 30 years: democracy can only ever be, in Raymond Williams' phrase a ‘long revolution'. Otherwise it stagnates. It has been stagnating now for over a generation, and it is up to us to launch that revolution once again.

With thanks to Martin McIvor

Pablo Torija is a PhD candidate at the University of Padova.  He currently lives in Vienna where he works for the University. 

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[1] Joseph E.  Stiglitz, ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.’ Vanity Fair, May 2011.

[2] Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy.  Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/opendemocracy-theme/postmodernity-and-the-crisis-of-democracy