Democracy is turning into a feature of, for and by the market

AS the first decade of the 21st century ends, the further spread of representative democracy might count among its achievements. Warblighted Iraq has conducted elections. The incumbent president of the Ivory Coast faces eviction by fellow African leaders for ignoring election results. Even Myanmar’s junta has freed Aung San Suu Kyi, raising the possibility of real elections. However fraught its exercise or outcome, millions across the world have the vote.

Yet 2010 was also the year when the limits of electoral democracy, its vulnerability to vested interests and its failure to represent the interests of ordinary citizens became clearer than ever. The iconic democracies of the world demonstrated this starkly. In the US a president elected on a wave of support for change extended his predecessor’s tax cuts for the richest, placing the burden of deficit reduction on the less well-off. In India, the Radia scandal revealed how a staterun economy has been replaced by a corporate Raj.

Meanwhile, in Britain a coalition no one voted for managed to cobble itself together by breaking key manifesto pledges, throwing its ability to represent wider society into question. Nick Clegg promised the “biggest shake up of our democracy” since the UK’s 1832 Reform Act extended franchise beyond the landed gentry. Instead, his coalition has further narrowed democracy’s benefits to the wealthy entities whose interests drive its fiscal agenda. As civil servants face unemployment, heads of corporations such as GlaxoSmithKline and Argos join the former BP chief Lord Browne and Topshop’s tax-avoider, Philip Green, as government advisers. Such unelected influence leaves voters with little say in setting the agenda. A boardroom of millionaires makes decisions that benefit their class.

Witness the deal Vodafone swung on taxes now being demanded by other companies. Note the new corporate tax rate of what is in effect 8 per cent for UK-based multinationals which means, incredibly, that multimillion-pound concerns will pay less tax than people earning GBP7,500 a year. Such indefensible double standards run counter to what political theorists such as Alexis de Tocqueville knew: eliminating inequality is fundamental to real democracy. Like everything else once held as a resource in common schools, industries, utilities, woodlands, libraries and universities democracy is turning into a feature of, for and by the market. The principle of bestowing citizens with the means to control their lives is reduced to rhetorical pieties about “empowering” communities when local government funding is savagely cut.

When real democratic expression from below does emerge, it is met with alarm and threats. Victorian broadsheet denunciations of the “dangerous sentiments of the Democracy” were echoed in some media descriptions of recent anti-cuts protests as “mob rule”. There’s talk of banning student demonstrations on policing grounds. Union action to represent working people invites redbaiting, experienced most recently by Len McCluskey, who called for widespread resistance to austerity measures.The “kettling” recently faced by protesters outside parliament aptly symbolises current attempts to contain democracy and empty it of its real content the interests of ordinary people. Only if it can be reclaimed by vigorously asserting the prior claims of we, the people, to the commons our public spaces, our economic rights, our political processes and our shared resources will demos (people) kratos (power) win the day.