Overview:
Neoliberalism has been very bad for democracy. The corporate capture of politics has robbed people of much of the leverage they felt they had on the democratic process. Even more, this book shows it has also led some on the left to completely lose their bearings on the issue.
As it has turned out, democratic failure has been the mainspring of revolt against the crisis of neo-liberalism. ‘You don’t represent us’, ‘the people want the fall of the regime’, and ‘democracy now’, are cries being taken up by people in main squares all around the Mediterranean and beyond. This book, a selection of essays about democracy by prominent left intellectuals published in 2009 in France and translated into English this year, shows how unprepared most of the left was for these developments.
The reasons are simple. Many of the contributors take such a bleak view of what has happened to mainstream democracy that they tend to assume the whole project itself is fatally flawed. Conclusion; democracy, at least as we know it, will not be a central issue for the left.
The book is full of eloquent descriptions of how democracy has been hijacked. For Wendy Brown ‘even democracy’s most important if superficial icon, “free elections”, have become circuses of marketing and management, from spectacles of fund-raising to spectacles of targeted voter “mobilization”. As citizens are wooed by sophisticated campaign marketing strategies that place their voting on a par with choosing brands of electronics, political life is increasingly reduced to media and marketing success’ .
Outrage at how business manipulates democracy combines with the view that the whole concept has been co-opted during the Cold War. The two thoughts taken together lead again and again to the gloomiest of outlooks. For Kirstin Ross for example, ‘it is difficult to overstate the enormous gain Western governments managed to consolidate when they successfully advanced democracy as the opposing counterweight to communism. They had actually gained control of the entire word for themselves, leaving nary a trace of its former emancipatory resonance’ . And for Alain Badiou, ‘democracy, the emblem and custodian of the walls behind which the democrats seek their petty pleasures, is just a word for a conservative oligarchy whose main (and often bellicose) business is to guard its own territory as animals do, under the usurped name world’.
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Sincerelyours
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