"Porto Alegre in Brazil has a celebrated 'participatory budget' process, where citizens gather in forums to decide how funds will be spent in their neighborhoods...this is what happens when people stop being consumers in a market and become authors of their lives, political subjects who both preside over resources and develop democratic ways of sharing them." ---Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing (p.146)
How have we managed our fitness for democracy? Between the 40 to 65 hours of work you've spent a week (if you're "lucky" enough to have work these days) how much time presented itself to you for community meetings I'm sure you were chomping at the bit to attend? Who decided the sustainability, opportunity costs, and budgeting decisions for the most recent development project in your neighborhood? You voted for McCain or you voted for Obama or you voted for neither--but did you vote for your block, your city, your state? Who controls what directly develops around you in the immediate world of your daily industry? Or are you a modern day tourist? Do you zip in and out of the neighborhood with enough time to eat, procreate, enjoy your cable programming, go to work, and play with the money you've earned--a renter of your existence (even if you "own").
For myself, so far only a "tourist", I know I have had very little input in the goings-on in my neighborhood. Part of the reason (for me at least and most certainly for many) is that my neighborhood keeps changing. Or, I should say, I enjoy the luxury of relocating periodically. However, my mobility, my shifts in occupation and location, betrays either one of two things: either I'm a migrant worker or I'm a middleclass to upper 1%-er with greater or lesser independent means along with a network of family-earned money and resources at my disposal. I fall into the latter category. Thus, my sense of going "local" is a bit skewed when it comes to political machinations, and authoring my neighborhood and community. My roots are "wide" or simply virtual, and if only virtual, then my political input at the local level also exits only virtually.
I by no means assume that democracy only functions in provincial local communities, and that well respected and industrious individuals who maintain multiple or temporary homes have no input in our representative, and let's face it, corporate owned and distributed democracy. I simply point out the fact that the more far-reaching our democratic virtues pervade, the more responsibility we must shoulder as a community working together, however rancorous and painstaking that process may be. Bottom-up politics must supplant the profit driven corporate owned top-down decision making pervading our democracy. We can only contribute to organizations so much before we have to roll up the sleeves and participate and enforce the kind of world we hope to achieve.
So my question is this: are you willing to facilitate, grow, and painstakingly participate in your democracy? Voting is the bare minimum--absolutely bare. We all know this, because our cynicism pervades throughout all our cultural commodities--our dissatisfaction with knowing how much and yet how little a single vote counts. Cynicism is itself a commodity packaged in ironic and unsustainable lifestyles of affluence that are costing us biodiversity, and disproportionately falling on the shoulders of women and the poor. Our new model cell-phone (with necessary minerals mined from the Congo, rape capital of the world) and BMW ultimately grow out of the endless pilfering of the Global South. We understand that the decisions that most impact our lives are deferred and very rarely handled by us. We know the multinationals rule. Some of us celebrate this.Some of us resign. Some simply don't care. For others of us, the market possesses all answers and all cures (oddly enough people who believe this are very rarely those born to poverty or shackled by the accidental factors of being born a woman or an "unfavored" minority).
But when did we begin describing ourselves as an "economic human"--what Raj Patel calls homo economicus? Are our Hobbesian brutality and greed, our "profit-motives" really "natural"? Are we as hard-wired for generosity and altruism as we are for greed and egoism? Could anything other than a model of infinite growth and profit-motive underlie our basic relationships and narratives?
We have to continue to ask those questions. History reveals how the matrix of economy and government have continually grown and changed our construction of self-identity. We must activate our sense of civic duty and responsibly participate in decision-making that has both local and far-reaching global ecological and economical consequences. However, if we maintain our self-interpretation as that of a "consumer", merely a flow of desire in a self-correcting market of commodities, then we may continue to sleep and allow those with the greatest financial capital to decide what is of ethical value, ecological value, aesthetic value, and spiritual value. YOU ARE NOT A CONSUMER!
The red pill or the blue? (sorry for the reference, but apparently cliches are as much a commodity as innovation).
Perri M.
A bit rough on the rhetoric I must admit, but I'm just starting, and I want to start posting examples, data, facts, figures, models, etc. Trying hard to think outside ideology within ideology--as Greenspan said, we all have one, and as he admitted to Waxman in front of the House Committee on Oversight And Government Reform (Oct. 23, 2008)"I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." Let's remember he was a protege of Ayn Rand.
ReplyDeleteGreat couple of posts, Mr. Perri M. I have two responses to (what I believe) is your thesis that corporate control over democracy must be solved by a better informed electorate. First, I believe that individual specialization makes greater participation in the democratic process impossible. Second, I believe the solution to corporate control of democracy is not more, but less, democratic process: we must diminish political power, thus dispersing the power from corporations back to individuals.
ReplyDelete(1) Aristotle once said that an ordered society could not exist beyond a herald's cry, implying that direct democracy beyond a few thousand people was impossible because of man's inability to communicate out of earshot. Democratic institutions are circumscribed by human limitations. Of course, with mass media, telecommunications, and the internet, the “herald's cry” is now effectively global.
But other human limitations provide insurmountable barriers to the democratic ideal. Specifically, individuals are limited by time, capacity, and desire to educate themselves in their preferred areas of interest; and politics is simply one area (of many) where individuals have little time or energy to invest. Modern societies require highly specialized professionals to perform tasks of growing complexity, where diversified knowledge is not only a luxury but increasingly an impediment to personal and social success. There is more to know about one's chosen trade than one can possibly learn, and no time to devote to other interests. What results is, perhaps, the lamentable death of the Renaissance Man; but from his ashes arises the Ubermensch with knowledge and skills to spur truly stupendous innovative power and social growth. In truth, “[t]he faith that increased education would lead to higher levels of textbook knowledge about government, and that this knowledge in turn would enable the electorate to measure up to its role in democratic theory, was misplaced.” (Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter, p. 8).
In the final calculus, the average citizen's political life reflects the greater economic requirement of a division of labor. Just as you and I cannot possibly hope to personally design, manufacture, and distribute our new cell-phone or BMW, neither can we personally research, plan, and implement every policy required in a well-functioning society. Instead, we perform a role in society as lawyers, servers, philosophers, etc., and vote-with-our-dollar on Nokia or Samsung, BMW or Lexus, to do their role in society as cell-phone and automobile manufacturers. Likewise, we take whatever knowledge we can scrape together in our spare time and vote on politicians upon whom we rely to inform themselves of policy decisions. In both circumstances, our “votes” are based on infinitesimally limited knowledge as to the circumstances behind each product or policy, simply because the vast majority of our time and interest is consumed by our own contribution to society (as lawyers, servers, philosophers, etc.).
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ReplyDelete(2) Unfortunately, corporations and special interests dominate the political arena with their sheer volume of campaign financing. These institutions steer debates by framing the issues and funding studies that illuminate facts they want us to consider while systematically obscuring countervailing information. “By telling us where to look, [they] also tell us how to choose[.]” (Popkin at p. 8). Whatever limited time the individual has to consider political issues is tainted with half-truths and folly.
The underlying implication of your thesis is that corporations use the democratic process to further their own interests. And, indeed, the political process presents quite an effective means of acquiring power! Laws exhibit breadth (they are the law of all the land), permanence (they require another feat of political will to overturn), and obedience (they are backed by imprisonment or death). It is no wonder that lobbying is a billion-dollar industry.
Democracy and political power is, fortunately, only one means by which individuals can effect their will upon the world. Already in this post I have mentioned one other: voting with your dollar. Freedom – the alternative to governance – results in diminished corporate control because non-monopolistic corporate influence is local (limited by market share vs. government's monopoly on jurisdiction), impermanent (corporations must change with immediate demands of the market vs. government's biennial voting cycle), and optional (consumers can switch to preferred vendor vs. government's monopoly of force). And where individuals care about certain social issues, he/she can shop at co-ops, farmers markets, and other vendors that distribute goods from humane producers, etc. To the extent that your thesis is true, the solution is to limit the control these corporations have by diminishing the role democracy has in our society: put simply, narrow the range of issues that corporate-democracy commands.
I have presented a bare-bones outline of my response to your post; I'd be glad to discuss further!
Dear Keyvan,
ReplyDeleteI just told Candice this is exactly what I needed to hear right now, because I still haven't registered to vote in Georgia, and the last time I voted was in the presidential election. So... GOOD JOB MOTIVATING!
:)
-Cat