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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Radical Futures
- Sprache: Englisch
What does it mean for the people to actually rule? Formal democracy is an empty and cynical shell, while the nationalist Right claims to advance its anti-democratic project in the name of ‘the People’. How can the Left respond in a way that is true to both its radical egalitarianism and its desire to transform the real world?
In this book, Gianpaolo Baiocchi argues that the only answer is a radical utopia of popular self-rule. This means that the ‘people’ who rule must be understood as a demos that is totally open, inclusive and egalitarian, constantly expanding its boundaries. But it also means that sovereignty must be absolute, possessing total power over all relevant decisions that impact the conditions of life. Only, he argues, by a process of explosive and creative tension between this radical view of the ‘we’ and an absolute idea of the ‘sovereign’ can we transform our approach to political parties and state institutions and make them instruments of total emancipation.
Illustrated by the real-life experiences of movements throughout the world, from Latin America to Southern Europe, Baiocchi’s provocative vision will be essential reading for all activists who want to understand the true meaning of radical democracy in the 21st century.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Foreword
1. Movements and Questions of Our Time
Our Democracy / Their Democracy
15 October 2011
From Indignation to Proposition
Beyond No and Beyond Exit
2. We, the Sovereign
The We
The Importance of Sovereignty
3. Social Movement Parties
Lessons from Another Moment
Where Movements Could Speak: Brazil’s PT
Not a Party, a Political Instrument: Bolivia’s MAS
The Tension between Collectives and Individuals
Keeping the Party in Check
How Parties in Power Change
Social Movement Parties Are Still Needed
4. Another State Is Possible
Popular Participation: The Left’s Hallmark
Participatory Democracy, Brazilian Style
Making the Road by Walking: The Zapatistas
Inside, Alongside, or Outside the System?
How Participation Can Co-opt
Transforming Institutions
Conclusion: Twenty-First Century Popular Sovereignty
Pink Tide: Inclusion and Transformation
Popular Sovereignty and the Global North: The United States?
Popular Sovereignty Beyond Private Property and The Nation State
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Radical Futures
Hilary Wainwright, A New Politics from the LeftGraham Jones, The Shock Doctrine of the LeftGianpaolo Baiocchi, We, the Sovereign
We, the Sovereign
Gianpaolo Baiocchi
polity
Copyright © Gianpaolo Baiocchi 2018
The right of Gianpaolo Baiocchi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2139-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baiocchi, Gianpaolo, 1971- author.
Title: We, the sovereign / Gianpaolo Baiocchi.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010020 (print) | LCCN 2018021112 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509521395 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509521357 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509521364 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Sovereignty. | Democracy. | Political participation. Classification: LCC JC327 (ebook) | LCC JC327 .B2322018 (print) | DDC 320.1/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010020
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Foreword
The book you have in your hands was completed in 2017, globally one of the darkest political periods in recent memory. It is hard to know if this moment will be one that will be remembered as having set us all on a path to even darker days of xenophobia, nuclear brinksmanship, and environmental fragility—or if this period will be remembered for having set us on another path, one charted by a generation of young people who, from Tahrir Square to Ferguson, from Avenida Paulista and Plaza Mayor, sought alternatives to representative democracy and market fundamentalism. The old, as the worn phrase goes, is dying but the new is not yet born.
Across the globe, and at the level of formal institutions, these are indeed very grim times. Whatever gains and optimism remained of post–WWII prosperity, of the 1968 social movements, and of Third World independence struggles, seem to have entirely faded. We seem to be making very little progress on the global existential issues of our time, be it climate change, the global housing crisis, or world hunger. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, we are closer than we have ever been to doomsday. At the same time, social scientists can barely wring their hands fast enough to keep up with the tidal wave of hard-right political sentiments across the Global South and North. Nationalist chauvinism in its various guises seems to have become an irresistibly resonant political lexicon. In Europe, fascist tendencies have found popular support and electoral footing throughout the continent, whether we are speaking of outright neo-Nazis or slightly more euphemistic versions that were part of the Brexit campaign.
Voters in Turkey and the Philippines have elected strongmen who seem to get more popular the more they flout basic democratic institutions. Meanwhile, the world’s largest democracy, India, now has as its prime minister someone who was never fully cleared of his participation in ethnic pogroms and who stokes communalist tensions with nearly every address. And in Latin America, many of the so-called Pink Tide of left-of-center governments have fallen, some of them spectacularly, being replaced with a combination of market orthodoxy and social conservatism that harkens back to the dark years of the military juntas.
And in the United States, just as Black Lives Matter burst on to the scene, promising for some the dawn of a new civil rights era, a right-wing presidency has unleashed demons many people did not know even existed among the country’s angry electorate.
The left is obviously in crisis in much of the world, unable, as of yet, to give a convincing response to this scenario. Social Democratic and Labor parties had been tilting right in an attempt to capture an electoral center, only to have their social base taken from them in many countries where right-wing movements have been better able to give expression, in however distorted a fashion, to discontent and existential fears. In response to the right’s organizing and full-throated political talk of the “people” (however narrowly imagined), these parties have responded with arid (and pro-market) policies, in an odd way becoming defenders of an establishment that for so many has not worked. And leftist parties, here meaning the broad swath of political formations to the left of social democracy, have not fared much better. Reformed or rebranded communist parties in Europe have not managed much of an electoral foothold, while newer parties like Greece’s Syriza have not managed to stay the course of a transformative political project. Most on the left recognize that we need to reorganize our institutional projects, but we have not quite figured out how, even if we should feel emboldened by the movements around us.
And the irony is that if leftism, as an institutional and political project, feels like it is floundering, it is not due to an absence of social mobilization or even the currency of leftist ideas. The early 2010s were marked by the Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and movements like it around the world. The early 2000s were also a period of enthusiasm for the World Social Forum, which seemed to bring together anti-neoliberal movements from around the globe. It is almost as if there were two separate worlds: the vibrant world of movements and mobilization, and the sterile and uninspired world of political parties. The tragedy of the left today is that the former finds so little reflection in the latter. Finding our way back to that connection is, as I describe in this book, not only possible, but among our most urgent tasks.
One example among many is Bernie Sanders’s insurgent candidacy in the Democratic Party primaries of 2016. Sanders, as is well known, is an independent senator from Vermont who selfdescribes as a democratic socialist. During the campaign, he was more critical of market orthodoxy than any major party politician in the United States in recent memory. He railed against the 1 percent, and spoke with admiration of some of the advances of Central American socialism and Cuban healthcare. Despite the fact that his campaign had little funding and was hastily put together, he garnered millions of votes among Democratic voters, in the end more than 40 percent of primary votes. This fact—that nearly half of registered voters of the Democratic Party offered their endorsement of a socialist candidate, has had very little impact on the party itself—which despite having been trounced by a far-right candidate shows no concrete indication of endorsing any more progressive economic or social policies or reforming its internal structure to become more democratic or open to grassroots inputs.
And while the US Democratic Party may be to the right of most social democratic parties, the example stands in well for the broader problem: the energies and democratizing impulses of social movements are currently disconnected from institutional politics. If it is in our movements, and in our life in common, that we invent, glimpse, discover, and prefigure the world that we want to inhabit, it is among institutions that we secure the conditions for that life to come into being. This book is about the connection between those two worlds and explores the theory of popular sovereignty, a leftist view of the link between democracy and rule.
Popular sovereignty is an emancipatory project. It is a radical reinvention of the idea of democracy, one in which a historic bloc of the oppressed makes up the center of a political community that is open, egalitarian, and democratic, and is sovereign over its own fate, fundamentally empowered to reclaim public grounds and institutions. It recognizes that in order for this egalitarian political community to fully emerge, state actions are necessary to continue to democratize society. And it also recognizes that existing state institutions are not structured for popular sovereignty and that they need to be transformed as they are enlisted, constantly held in check by both democratizing popular pressures imbricated in their midst and counterweights outside of its boundaries. This transformation is a political project that will encounter resistance from those used to benefiting from previous arrangements, so the popular politics activated by state reforms need to act as a counterweight to elite power. And implicit in its project is that its full realization transcends both nation-states and private property.
Popular sovereignty, as a “piece on the checkerboard,” does not often appear in the Anglo-American political lexicon, at least not on the left. The right, as with the Brexit vote, had no problem invoking the idea of parliamentary sovereignty in the name of a chauvinist project. In North America or in the UK calls for people’s power often come from the right, the ideas entangled with nativism, racism, and fear of others. But the right’s version of sovereignty is a closed political fiction, a parochial separateness that defines self-determination ultimately as the right to exclude others, a sort of turbo-charged NIMBY politics that protects hierarchies and private property. Yet even in the US and the UK there are other appeals to sovereignty that have a different valence: think of calls for indigenous sovereignty, Puerto Rican independence, or the Scottish independence movement. In each case it is a political logic that is generative, that is about interdependence more than about separateness, and that is quite compatible with egalitarian claims and anti-capitalist politics.
Popular sovereignty is a much more common concept on the left in Latin America and Southern Europe, where the idea of combining the energies and democratizing forces of social movements with strong state institutions in a mutually transformative relationship to advance social justice is commonplace and has many different inflections. Popular sovereignty finds expression in different ways in Barcelona en Comú; Podemos; the Workers’ Party of Brazil in its heyday; the Bolivarian revolution; the Zapatistas; radical movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Uruguay; among many others.
The concept of sovereignty, if not the word, in fact, appears simultaneously and independently among nearly all leftist political formations on the Latin American continent in the 1990s. From Uruguay to Mexico and Puerto Rico, movements spoke in the language and terms of sovereignty, of self-rule, and of exerting that rule through state institutions. And nearly all spoke of exerting that rule nationally or even at a continental level. It is true that Latin America has a more “statist” political culture than, say, the United States, but national sovereignty had a specific and powerful valence on the left. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore why this might be, but in Latin America, the history of US empire and struggles against it is decisive. The history of independence and anti-imperialist movements loomed large over these movements, as did the more recent history of US meddling to undermine progressive regimes in the region. And the imposition of austerity measures only seemed a continuation of US imperial ambitions.
And it is important to remember, too, that those speaking of sovereignty are not old-style statist socialists. They emerged from the new, plural, rainbow formations of the era, who were looking very critically at Eastern European experiences as failures and quietly distancing themselves from Cuban Communist Party vanguardism, especially during its Special Period. In some cases, these activists saw the nation-state as a colonial artifact to be overcome.
The very concept of sovereignty in the Global North can have a much more negative association on the left; I know it is with this concept that I may worry some readers. For some, it is a concept too tied to ideas of the nation-state or to bourgeois ideas for it to be of any progressive value. For others, it is its decisionism that is the problem. Sovereignty implies closure, finality, borders, negation, the very opposite of the worlds that we are wanting to build. And some influential thinkers today make the argument that sovereignty means applying the general will to state institutions when that ‘general will’ is always partial and less than the ‘will of all’—that sovereignty, in other words, risks cementing a partial view of the world. Others underline scale: some are comfortable with the concept applied to very local arenas, but much less so when we are speaking of higher levels.
