Dear cj,
The following article just came out in the latest issue of New Dawn
magazine, published in Australia. Actually half of it came out, the
rest appears in the following issue. It was assembled out of several
postings from last century.
all the best,
rkm
============================================================================
THE NEW WORLD ORDER AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Copyright 2000 Richard K. Moore, All Rights Reserved
6000 words
22 Jan 2000
email: •••@••.•••
web: http://cyberjournal.org
A personal quest of discovery
-----------------------------
George Bush's comment in 1990, that the Gulf War heralded a
'new world order', was the trigger that got me started on
the path of analyzing and writing about political power
relationships. Bush was suggesting that the Gulf War was
more than a special case, that it was establishing some kind
of new pattern for international order. He didn't tell us
much about the details, and I found myself drawn in to
figuring out what he could have meant.
The starting point for the investigation was the Gulf War
itself. What was unique about it?
In some ways Desert Storm was a sequel to earlier events -
it was third in a series of blitzkrieg invasions -
blitzkrieg American style. "Blitzkrieg One" was the
shameful invasion of the tiny island of Grenada - carried
out mainly to test U.S. public reaction. The "Vietnam
syndrome" had been hampering U.S. interventionism for years,
and the Grenada invasion managed to make interventionism
popular again. Then came "Blitzkrieg Two" in Panama - on a
larger scale and again a hit with the American public.
Desert Storm - "Blitzkrieg Three" - continued this pattern:
bigger, more destructive, and again wildly popular.
Americans were glued to their TVs. It was like 24-hour a
day football, except that the violence was real instead of
symbolic. But it would be unfair to conclude from this that
American's are a bloodthirsty lot - what they were being
told by the media had very little to do with what was really
going on.
In all three events of this blitzkrieg series, a new regime
of control over the media was in evidence. Release of
official information was highly centralized, and media
channels made no effort to pursue independent sources - even
though sources were often readily available. The result was
more than simply slanted news - the coverage didn't resemble
previous war reportage at all, it was more like a real-time
Hollywood movie - a story with black-and-white characters
and a simple, clearly developing plot line. In the end, the
bad guys were defeated and the good guys were victorious,
and the whole tidy episode happened within the dramatic
attention span of the audience. That last word sums it up -
we in the U.S. had become an _audience to a presentation. As
in the the Roman Republic, the meaning of citizenship had
been reduced to the act of watching circuses.
What was unique about Desert Storm was the way in which the
project was internationalized. For the invasions of Grenada
and Panama, 'legitimacy' came from the approval of the
American public, and the propaganda was directed primarily
at an American audience. In Panama, for example, Americans
had been told that an unarmed U.S. serviceman was shot by
Panamanian guards. In fact the serviceman had sped through
a Panamanian military checkpoint and exchanged fire with the
guards - but this was not reported in the American press
until much later.
In Desert Storm, the 'legitimizing audience' became an
international one, and the contrived war-provocation
incident was one of international concern - the invasion of
Kuwait by Iraq. Iraq notified the U.S. State Department
about the planned invasion, and Saddam received an official
response that the U.S. would consider such a conflict to be
an "internal Arab matter". This raised two quetions in my
mind. Why did the U.S. create an excuse for bombing Iraq,
and why didn't the U.S. simply go ahead and carry out the
bombing on a unilateral basis, as in the earlier blitzkrieg
scenarios?
It seemed that the US was intent on achieving international
legitimacy for interventions, as a goal in its own right.
But the legitimacy sought was of a rather narrow variety.
The US wasn't really seeking allies as it did in WW II -
joint powers acting from a shared consensus. Instead, the
US simply wanted an official authorization to pursue its own
agenda, and token allies, whose presence was more symbolic
than of militariy substane. Much was made of the need for
an authorizing UN resolution, but once the resolution was
signed the US completely ignored the spirit and letter of
the resolution - and proceeded to carry out the war in
whatever way it wanted, releasing only the information if
chose to release.
These considerations led me to a tentative hypothesis
regarding the nature of the new world order to which Bush
was alluding.
It seemed that a whole slice of American culture - the
traditional warpath scenario - was being re-installed in a
larger context. Under this scenario, the international
(particularly Western) public would be managed with the same
Madison-Avenue / Hollywood techniques which had been
perfected in the US. Wars and interventions would be
justified by contrived or fabricated incidents, and once
underway would be pursued by means and toward ends which
would be largely unnanounced. The UN would be expected to
emulate the American Congress, which traditionally gives the
Executive a blank check in time of warfare.
This hypothesis, at the time, was highly speculative. It
was based on three asumptions: (1) Bush was serious with his
NWO remark; (2) his seriousness was linked to policies that
some community of people had the power to implement; (3) the
unique aspects of Desert Storm provided the necessary clues
as to what those policies were about.
I didn't realize it at the time, but subsequent events were
to overwhelmingly validate the hypothesis in every one of
its particulars. More about that a little further down.
While waiting for on-the-ground validation, I used my time
to investigate who this community might be, that could
define and then implement new world orders - of whatever
variety, and what _else was invovled in their new order
besides the globalization of US interventionism.
This led me to investigate corporate power, the
Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the EU, the free-trade
agreements, and the rapidly developing global bureaucracy
centered in the WTO (World Trade Organization), IMF, et al.
This led to a review of the history of the old world
order... the Enlightenment and the birth of republics, and
the relationship between the growth of capitalism and the
growth of 'democracies'. Here are three paragraphs from
"Common Sense and the New World Order", which was published
in New Dawn in September-October, 1995:
This nightmarish political regime is being expanded to the
Second and First Worlds by means of NAFTA (North American
Free Trade Area), GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade), the WTO (World Trade Organization), and other
similar agreements and entities. Unlike the IMF, which
controls via the purse strings, these so-called "trade
agreements" control via intrusion into the regulatory power
of signatory nations. By exploiting the treaty mechanism,
which has the force of national law, these agreements become
permanent parts of each constitutional system, making it all
but impossible for future governments to choose different
regulatory policies. Thus the transnationals are able to
translate temporary political ascendency, attained at
considerable effort and expense, into a permanent
stranglehold over sovereign nations.
Over the past century, the U.S. has felt free to "intervene"
unilaterally in dozens of countries to support the
operations of various corporate interests. As foreshadowed
by the Gulf precedent, the NWO scheme is to "legitimize"
such interventions, by embedding them within an
international framework. That framework won't be the U.N.
-- which includes too diverse a representative base --
instead, it will be framed within organizations such as
NATO, which fit better the technocratic model and are more
easily managed by the NWO elite.
Thus the military agenda of the NWO can be foreseen by
simply looking back at the history of U.S. imperialism in
the Third World. Whenever a country gets too uppity --
pursuing its domestic interests rather than those of
transnational corporate investors -- it can expect to be
subdued by overwhelming military force, preceded by an
appropriate media demonization campaign. Traditional
international law -- largely ignored in practice anyway --
is to be _formally_ replaced by an "internationalized", but
elite controlled, NWO Police Strike Force.
So far, I had been looking at two things: the events of the
day and a few history books. I had not yet heard of Samuel
Huntington and his "Crisis of Democracy" and "Clash of
Civilizations", nor had I looked into the Council on Foreign
Relations and the well-documented history of elite planning
as the basis for major US policies. The current genre of
globalization books had not yet been published, including
two landmark works: Michel Chossudovsky's "Globalization of
Poverty", showing how the IMF acts as a conscious agent of
Western neo-imperialism, and Mander & Goldsmith's "The Case
Against the Global Economy", which comprehensively covers
the economic and political aspects of globalization (but not
the military aspects).
All of this later material, together with the continued
unfolding of the NWO agenda on the ground, only served to
confirm and to expand the orginal hypothesis. The evidence
became overwhelming and conclusive. There _is a new world
order; it is a consciously organized project; it brings the
end of national sovereignty and the destabilization of
Western democracy; it is based on the intentional
maintenance of international conflict; it is to be backed by
a ruthless and centralized military force; it represents the
final stage of global capitalism, in many ways similar to
the predictions of Marx & Lenin - but with some significant
differences.
By the end of 1997 none of this, in my mind at least, was
any longer in the 'hypothesis' category. The investigation
had been carried out, and the conclusions were inescapable.
I turned my attention to two new projects: (1) learning how
to explain what I had learned in terms that could be
received by those who have been conditioned by a lifetime of
dis-education and corporate propaganda, and (2)
investigating what could be done to change things.
Nonetheless, up until mid 1999, much of the NWO was still
latent. The handwriting was on the wall, but the
implementation had not been carried out. For the skeptical,
Desert Storm could be seen as a one-off event, and even
still today the WTO has not unleashed its full powers
against environmental laws and the like. Most people still
think they are living in sovereign nations, and link the
term 'NWO' to right-wing conspiracy theories. Much of what
I was writing could be categorized as 'prediction'.
But in mid 1999, in the space of a few short months, the NWO
hammer came down - the final implementation of the global
military regime. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have announced
that Yugoslavia is only the beginning, that we can expect
interventions throughout the world as routine policy. NATO
is to be the vehicle, 'humanitarianism' is to be the
pretext, and centrally-controlled wag-the-dog propaganda is
to make sure events are interpreted with the white hats and
black hats plainly assigned to the right characters.
Clinton made it all quite clear, when he spoke to NATO
troops in Macedonia ("The Clinton Doctrine", from the
Washington Post, reprinted in The Guardian Weekly, July 1-7,
1999, p. 31):
"We must win the peace. If we can do this here...we can
then say to the people of the world, 'Whether you live in
Arica or Cental Europe or any other place, if somebody comes
after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse
because of their race, their ethnic background or their
religion and it is within our power stop it, we will stop
it.'"
You've got hand it to them... it's a very effective formula.
Who can resist the idea of 'doing something' to prevent
genocide?
The problem with the tidy little formula is that the same
folks who decide where to intervene are the ones who run the
global system that intentionally creates the conditions
which are destabilizing societies globally and making
pretexts for intervention plentiful.
It is the US who installed and supported Noriega, Marcos,
Pinochet, the Shah, and the Ayatollah; it is the West that
sold Saddam weapons of mass destruction; it is the West that
supported Suharto and profited from his crony-capitalist
regime and East Timor repression; it is the US and Germany
who intentionally promoted the destabilization of Yugoslavia
over the past decade and repeatedly encouraged Milosevic,
giving him enough rope so they could later hang him with it.
A band of arsonists has successfully usurped the role of
global fire crew. They start fires all over the world on a
routine basis, and whenever they want to intervene
militarily, all they have to do is turn the media spotlight
on the results of their own diabolical handiwork. Not only
that, but when they do intervene, as we've seen in Iraq &
Yugoslavia, they don't put out the fire: they simply burn
down the rest of the house.
If you seek alternative source of information, then you know
ethnic repression is going on all over the world, including
within staunch American allies such as Turkey and Israel,
and Most-Favored-Nations such as China. But when the mass
media gets around to 'revealing' such circumstances, then
you know you're being prepared for a sooner-or-later
potential intervention.
Let's move up one level, re/ strategic analysis... let's
'follow the money'.
In terms of global capitalism, what we are seeing in
Yugoslavia is a large-scale redevelopment project. When a
developer wants to build a new shopping center, or housing
estate, he bulldozes down all existing structures and starts
over from the ground up. That's exactly what happened in
Yugoslavia, and that's why the biggest bombs were aimed at
the economic infrastructure.
As Marx and Lenin foresaw, the global triumph of capitalism
has led to the exposure of contradictions inherent in the
system. Growth and wealth concentration, the engines of
capitalism, can only proceed so far. Real economic _growth
in the global economy has been relatively stagnant for more
than a decade now. The paper-growth that we read about in
the economic news and on the exchange ticker-tapes is
related more to the final stages of _concentration, where
giant TNC's gorge themselves with mergers and by taking over
markets currently served by smaller businesses or by public
agencies.
The engineered destabilization of Southeast Asian economies
was part of this concentration phase, knocking competitors
to Western-based TNC's out of global markets, and giving
those TNC's an opportunty to further gorge themselves on
undervalued Southeast Asian assets.
But as I mentioned above, even this IMF-assisted
concentration phase cannot last forever. The TNC's already
control something like 80% of global markets. They're now
rapidly squeezing the last few miles out of this growth
vehicle.
Capitalism is far from ready to give up the ghost, and new
growth vehicles are being developed. In Yugoslavia we see
the latest model being deployed. NATO blitzkrieg is the
bulldozer, and 'recovery' programs are the growth vehicle.
The people of the world must understand that it's "not nice"
to resist the dicates of the new world order.
The revolutionary imperative
----------------------------
The course of world events, for the first time in history,
is now largely controlled by a centralized global regime.
This regime has been consolidating its power ever since
World War II and is now formalizing that power into a
collection of centralized institutions and a new system of
international "order". Top Western political leaders are
participants in this global regime, and the strong Western
nation state is rapidly being dismantled and destabilized.
The global regime serves elite corporate interests
exclusively. It has no particular regard for human rights,
democracy, human welfare, or the health of the environment.
The only god of this regime is the god of wealth
accumulation.
From the beginning, this evolving regime has employed
dual-agenda propaganda. For each elite initiative there has
been a public cover story which made that initiative seem
palatable to public opinion. There has been a public reality
and a hidden reality. In public reality the UN was to begin
an era of peaceful international collaboration. In fact the
postwar era has been dominated by US interventionism in
support of international capital. In public reality the
Reagan-Thatcher revolution was about freedom and
individualism. In fact neoliberalism was about transferring
power to corporations and dismantling democracy. In public
reality humanitarianism has been the motivation for the
recent acceleration in Western interventions in places like
Iraq, Albania, Yugoslavia, and East Timor. In fact the
global regime has been establishing - in the public mind -
the "legitimacy" of its new world order.
In two centuries the Western world has come full circle from
tyranny to tyranny. The tyranny of monarchs was overthrown
in the Enlightenment and semi-democratic republics were
established. Two centuries later those republics are being
destabilized and a new tyranny is assuming power - a global
tyranny of anonymous corporate elites. This anonymous regime
has no qualms about creating poverty, destroying nations,
and engaging in genocide.
Our elite rulers did not lead us into tyranny and
environmental collapse because they are evil people, but
because they were forced to by the nature of capitalism.
Capitalism must continually grow in order to survive. If
investors have nowhere to increase their funds then they
stop investing and the whole system collapses like a house
of cards.
Propaganda myth tells us that capitalism and free enterprise
are one and the same thing. They are not. Under free
enterprise a business can provide a service or product, make
a profit in the process, and continue on stably for many
years. Under capitalism such a business would be considered
a failure - it does not provide a growth opportunity for an
investor. Under capitalism society is forced to continually
destroy old ways of doing things and adopt new ways - not
because it is good for society but because that is how
wealthy investors can increase their wealth still further.
That's why General Motors and Firestone banded together to
destroy excellent urban transit systems throughout the U.S.
in the 1940s and 1950s - so that people would be forced to
convert to automobiles and create growth for the automobile,
tire, and petroleum industries. For exactly the same
reasons, and during the same period, rail systems were
destroyed in Great Britain and Ireland.
The history of the past two centuries can be understood as a
process of creating new growth vehicles as required by the
capitalist system. Imperialism provided immense room for
capital growth and enough wealth was generated to be shared
with Western populations. This process continued up until
the late 1960s. At that point growth through external
imperialism began to slow down. Neoliberalism permitted
growth to continue by consuming the nest of capitalism - by
dismantling Western societies and subjecting them to
intensive capitalist exploitation. Globalization takes this
process even further - creating capital growth through
intensive exploitation on a global scale. The
new-world-order system of global tyranny is a necessity for
capitalism - in order to force the world's people to submit
to the exploitation which globalization represents.
Humanity can do better than this - much better - and there
is reason to hope that the time is ripe for humanity to
bring about fundamental changes. For the past two hundred
years capitalism has employed an unbeatable formula to
maintain its stranglehold over the world. That formula has
been based on the relative prosperity of Western
populations. Popular support maintained Western regimes and
those regimes had the military might to dominate the rest of
the world. That formula reached its culmination in the
postwar years when Western prosperity reached unprecedented
heights.
With neoliberalism and globalization, this formula has been
replaced by another. Western populations and democracy have
been abandoned and capitalist elites have bet their future
on the success of their WTO new-world-order tyrannical
system. In a few years this regime may be so thoroughly
established that it will be invincible. But in the meantime
- if Western populations wake up to the fact that they are
being betrayed - they have the opportunity to rise up and
assert the democratic sovereignty which they in theory yet
possess.
Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. The
nature of capitalism is forcing revolutionary changes. Those
of us in the West have a choice. On the one hand we can
acquiesce to global tyranny so that capitalism can continue
its insane growth. On the other hand, we can assert our
rights as free peoples - we can oust the elites from power
and reorganize our economies so that they serve the needs of
people instead of the needs of endless wealth accumulation.
This is our Revolutionary Imperative. Not an imperative to
violent revolution, but an imperative to do something even
more revolutionary - to set humanity on a sane course using
peaceful, democratic means.
Doing something about it - the means are the ends
-------------------------------------------------
The theory behind our current democracy-model is that people
- by joining parties or various other kinds of voting
constituencies - can collectively achieve some measure of
representation in the body politic. As we are all aware,
this process inevitably devolves into a game of
power-brokering. What could theoretically be a bottom-up
process of democratic input becomes instead a top-down
process of demagoguery and manipulation. Such a system of
'competitive factionalism' is ideally suited to enable power
usurpation by well-organized wealthy elites, and that is
precisely what has happened throughout the West. In the
case of the US, James Madison and other Constitution-framers
were well aware of these dynamics, and it was their express
goal to avoid 'too much' democracy, what they called 'mob
rule'. They felt the nation should be run by 'those who own
it.' They succeeded. And as you point out, the mechanisms
of usurpation work increasingly effectively as the scale of
operation grows larger.
But my own critique of electoral systems, is at a more
fundamental level. Instead of focusing on the corruption
aspect, which is scale related, I suggest that we start by
looking at the problem of democracy in-the-small - the
decision-making process at the local level. Our standard
Western model for this process, I suggest, is Robert's Rules
of Order. That is, proposals are made and voted on, and
when a proposal is adopted by a majority, then the matter is
settled.
In this small-scale microcosm can already be seen the
phenomenon of competitive factionalism. It is a win-lose
scenario. Instead of the best-solution for the whole
community, some majority faction achieves something
favorable for itself - and the rest are simply out of luck.
Majority voting leads to competitive faction formation as
surely as fire leads to smoke, even at the smallest scale.
Robert's rules, in typical practice, are about deciding
among alternatives. My central observation, as regards
democracy, is that 'decision making' is the wrong frame for
the democratic process. I suggest instead that the proper
frame is 'problem solving'. As one argument for this frame
shift, I - with some irony - point to the process that
occurs in a typical working team meeting in a modern
corporate setting.
In such a meeting a group assembles to solve a problem
(technical, managerial, marketing, or whatever). Ideas and
knowledge are pooled, via discussion, and the group moves
toward identifying possible solutions. Suggestions might be
rejected, refined, combined, modified, elaborated, etc, in a
process of open discussion and mutual education. In decades
of work in industry, I _never saw anyone suggest a vote in
such a meeting. It would be seen as absurd. How can you
possibly solve a problem by voting? You can only do it by
thrashing out the issues. I believe the argument for a
consensus-like democratic process can be made more strongly
by looking at these kind of models, than by emphasizing the
history of consensus, and its apologists, in the political
domain.
Majority voting functions as a mechanism to externalize the
problem solving process from the official political process.
Problem-solving tends to move offline, into factional
groupings (caucuses, party meetings, etc.) where legislative
proposals (solutions) are worked out by _other processes,
not documented in any rules of order. Thus society's path
(at each level of scale) is ultimately decided by these
other, offline processes - depending on which faction wins
the majority in each case. Wherever the actual
sleeves-rolled-up problem-solving is done is where the
future is designed. That place - the place where trade-offs
are considered - is, in some real sense, where power lies.
For democracy to work, and I think this could in some sense
be rigorously demonstrated, the problem solving process must
be brought online. That is to say, the problem solving
process must _become the official political process.
Participatory democracy (suitably defined) is not just a
good idea - it is a provably _necessary condition if
sovereignty is to truly lie with the people themselves.
Genuine democracy _requires that people collaboratively
solve the problems that affect their lives, that they
discuss together the trade-offs of different alternatives.
If they're 'outside the loop', they're out of power.
Consider what this means at the local, community, level.
Presumably we're talking about some kind of town-hall
scenario in which issues are talked through, leading to an
actionable 'sense of the community' regarding the 'best
overall solution' to the issues at hand - using
collaborative problem solving instead of divisive voting.
Clearly there are problems to be faced in making such a
scenario workable (modern busy schedules, ethnic divisions
within the locality, etc.) - but for the sake of discussion
let's assume that a town-hall meeting scenario can be made
workable at the most local level. This very thing does in
fact seem to work in Cuba, where upwards of 85% of the
population participate actively in such local meetings.
Meaningful involvement in societal problem-solving is
inherently motivating (ref: "politics as 'interesting'"),
and the community-collaboration process helps build a sense
of community even in places where we now see only alienated
consumerist family units.
Consider what kinds of issues need to be deliberated at this
local level, in order to achieve a democratic society. Some
might presume that 'local issues' would be discussed, and
that 'wider issues' would be handled somewhere else. Not
so. Not if "Genuine democracy requires that people
collaboratively solve the problems that affect their lives."
TNC's affect my life, GM crops affect my life, the
inadequacy of public transportation affects my life, NATO
affects my life, the existence of nuclear weapons affects my
life. National issues, and global issues, are also local
issues. The community is the only place where 'the people'
can get together face-to-face, and anything not discussed
there will a priori be decided in some non-democratic way.
It is generally only at the local level that _you (and _you
and _you) ever get to express yourself. If something
important is not discussed there, then _you have no input to
it.
Some problems - the ones usually called 'local' - can be
dealt with _entirely at the local level. I think it is
self-evident that the more autonomous the locality, the more
democratic the society - other things being equal. A
mandatory 'national curriculum', for example, would be
anethema in a democratic society, as perhaps would be a
uniform building code. There are many exceptions - areas
where laws and regulations need to be adopted more widely
which constrain localities - including civil-liberties,
child-labor, pollution controls, etc. etc. But by and
large, in a democracy, a community would feel in control of
its own destiny. The community is the fundamental
governmental unit in a democratic society.
The other problems - those which involve a larger scale of
society - obviously require a more complex process. I'll
skip the theoretical arguments and simply point out that
this process scales up very nicely. Not only that, but we
can see one implementation of the model working well in
practice in Cuba. The way they do it, after discussing a
wide range of issues locally - not limited to the 'local' -
is to select a slate of delegates to represent their
locality at the next 'higher' level of governemnt. These
delegates are typical community members, sent off
temporarily to represent the positions of the community - as
discussed in session. They are not full-time politicians
who, as in the West, consider that being elected gives them
a blank check to go off and pursue their own (or their
party's) agenda.
In terms of the more abstract model, the system scales up
this way. Besides handling its own affairs, the locality
talks through the wider issues about which the community is
concerned, especially those which are expected to come up
for discussion in 'higher-level' sessions. The goal is not
to come up with hard positions which are to be 'sold' or
'bargained' elsewhere, but rather to develop a 'sense of the
community' regarding their values and preferences, as
regards each particular issue. Unless the community
discusses an issue, no one can possibly know what its
'sense' is - and there is no way anyone could 'represent'
the community. (One reason our existing systems couldn't
possibly work.) The 'sense' only exists because it is
developed in community discussion. Just as in a business
meeting, this is a mutual-education, problem-solving
process. It is creative _work to come up with a community
'sense', and that is the work of real democracy - the true
meaning of empowered citizenship.
What happens at the next level is again a collaborative,
problem solving process. This is a fractal model, you might
say. In the local meetings, individuals don't come in with
fixed positions, ready to sell them. Instead they come in
with their own concerns, in all their subtlety, and
participate in a collaborative process to find a mutually
advantageous solution to problems. Similarly, at the next
level, delegates come in armed with their 'community sense'
- which is again a subtle fabric of 'concerns'. And as in
the local meeting, the assembled delegates collaborate
together to find solutions which address the various
concerns, to everyone's mutual advantage. Threatened
minorities (those whose local interests are somehow in
conflict with wider tides of concern), rather than being
ignored as in a majority system, are more likely to be at
the center of the discussion, since their concerns are the
ones most problematic to incorporate into a mutually
acceptable outcome.
That's basically the model. It's collaborative problem
solving all the way down, and all the way up, with
common-citizen delegates representing articulated agendas -
and no professional politicians. There are countless
peripheral issues, such as accuracy of media, which bear on
democracy. But my investigation of democracy, over several
years, both theoretical and empirical, leads me to this
basic model as being both necessary and sufficient (!), as
the core paradigm for genuine democracy. That is a very
strong statement, and I don't claim to have proven it here.
But I think the sketch has the approrpriate structure for a
more complete exposition.
In Cuba, fortunately for them, this process is more or less
the official government structure. For this model to be
applied in our pseudo-democracies, with their majority
systems, a bit of thought is required. And again, there is
a real-world example that can be used for illustration. It
is only on the scale of a single city, but all the
mechanisms are there. I refer to the "Participatory
Budgeting project" (PB), which operated for a time in in
Porto Alegre, Brazil. The city officially operated under a
majority electoral system. But there was a massive
grass-roots, bottom-up collaborative process (PB), which was
empowered to work out the city's budget. PB's process was
consistent with the model I've described, and it was large
enough to exhibit several levels of deliberations. What
happened in practice is that whatever the PB process came up
with, was implemented verbatim by the elected officials. And
the bugetary results were considered, by objective outside
review, as being quite sound. The system worked.
Speaking more generally, there would be two parallel
structures - the official governmental structure, and the
collaborative probelm-solving structure - the civil-society
structure. The first provides the mechanism to carry out
the bureaucratic necessities of implementing policy; the
second provides the democratic process by which policies are
formulated. Formal elections would become ritual
formalities, much like America's 'electoral college' which
has no volitional charter. A slate of delegate-candidates
would be selected, at whatever appropriate level of the
civil-society structure, and essentially everyone would vote
for them - since everyone has participated in the
collaborative process and is invested in its success. These
elected officials would then carry out their implementation
responsibilities using a similar collaborative
problem-solving approach, and representing the articulated
agendas of the constituencies with selected them.
Ironically, this parallel-structure system is extremely
close to the system we already have in the West! In our
current system we have a formal governmental system, and it
acts as the rubber-stamp implementation agent for another
structure - a structure which actually sets policy. That
'other structure' is the backroom deal-making environment in
which moneyed interests and power brokers work out who the
candidates will be, how the election issues are be framed,
how the campaigns are to be be staged, and what the
legislative priorities will be once 'their men' are in
office. Our policy-making process has always been separate
from the offical 'democratic' process, a point which I
developed above in terms of 'competitive factionalism',
'off-line problem solving', 'corruption', and 'usurpation of
power'.
The two-structure scheme is a sound one. Our governmental
structure functions well in its bureaucratic aspects,
generally speaking, despite neoliberal smear campaigns to
the contrary. The perceived 'bunglings' of government are
due to misperceptions of what governments are actually
trying to accomplish. Their actual (unannounced) task is to
serve the interests of corporations - and they do a very
efficient job of that. They only 'bungle' if you believe
their pseudo-progressive lies about why they're doing
things. We simply need to replace the wealth-dominated
structure that currently sets policy with a democratic
structure. There's no need to storm the bastilles,
dismantle the parliaments, nor write new constitutions. The
official governments can continue to do what they do now
rather competently - carry out policy set by someone else.
In this case by the people.
But where is this civil-society structure to come from - the
parallel structure which is to set policy. The answer is
embarrasingly obvious. You've probably already figured it
out. That parallel structure is the matured revolutinary
movement itself. 'The victorious movement' = 'The renewed,
empowered civil society' = 'The collaborative policy-setting
parallel structure'.
That is to say, the model for democracy is also the model
for movement structure. The means are the ends. As Gandhi
personified it, paraphrasing, "You must become the future
you seek". The movement itself must begin as a bottom-up,
collaborative, problem-solving process. Activist groups, the
scenario goes, come together and say "What are our different
goals? How can we combine forces and accomplish them
together? Let us articulate a platform that benefits us all,
and promote it collectively." From such a seed, everyone
can be brought in, for in truth we are all in this together
and all really want the same basic things. The process by
which the movement plans its strategies and actions serves
as training for how the movement - renamed eventually as
'civil-society' - continues into its ongoing task of guiding
society's evolutionary path.
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Richard K Moore
Wexford, Irleand
Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance
email: •••@••.•••
CDR website: http://cyberjournal.org
cyberjournal archive: http://members.xoom.com/centrexnews/
book in progress: http://cyberjournal.org/cdr/gri/gri.html
A community will evolve only when
the people control their means of communication.
-- Frantz Fanon
Permission for non-commercial republishing hereby granted - BUT
include and observe all restrictions, copyrights, credits,
and notices - including this one.
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