Date: Thursday, November 17, 2011, 9:03 AM
The lies of free market democracy
By fighting against the doomed system, the 99 per cent have nothing to lose but their disposability and dispensability.
Vandana Shiva
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2011 10:42
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On May 15, 2011, young people occupied the squares of the cities in Spain. They called themselves Los Indignados
- "the indignant". I met them in Madrid where I was attending the
meeting of the scientific committee that advises the Spanish prime
minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Their declaration states: "Who are we? We are the people; we have
come here freely as volunteers. Why are we here? We are here because we
want a new society that gives more priority to life than to economic
interest."
In the US, the ongoing "Occupy movement" commonly
cries: "We are the 99 per cent". This people's protest, inspired by the
Arab Spring, is directed against the unequal distribution of wealth; the
"99 per cent" here refers to "the difference in wealth between the top
one per cent and all the remaining citizens".
The fact that they were supported by actions around the world when
they were to be evicted from Wall Street on October 14 shows that,
everywhere, people are fed up with the current system. They are fed up
with the power of corporations. They are fed up with the destruction of
democracy and peoples' rights. They refuse to give their consent to the
bailouts of banks by squeezing people of their lives and livelihoods.
The contest, as "the 99 per cent" describe it, is between life and
economic interests, between people and corporations, between democracy
and economic dictatorship.
The organising style of the people's
movements worldwide is based on the deepest and the most direct
democracy. This is self-organisation. This is how life and democracy
work. This is what Mahatma Gandhi called swaraj.
Those
from the dominant system, used to hierarchy and domination do not
understand the horizontal organising and call these movements
"leaderless".
Gandhi had said:
"Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom.
But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual
always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for
the circle of villages till at last the whole becomes one life composed
of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance, but ever humble,
sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral
units. Therefore, the outermost circumference will not wield power to
crush the inner circle, but will give strength to all within and will
derive its own strength from it."
The general assemblies in cities around the world are living examples
of these "ever expanding, never ascending" oceanic circles. When
everyone has to be included in decision-making, consensus is the only
way. This is how indigenous cultures have practiced democracy throughout
history. Future generations are reconnecting to this ancient tradition
of shaping real freedom because corporate rule has displaced democracy,
and people's representatives have mutated into corporate
representatives.
Today, worldwide, representative democracy has
reached its democratic limits. From being "by the people, for the
people, of the people", it has become "by the corporations, of the
corporations, for the corporations". Money drives elections, and money
runs government.
Gandhi identified "modern civilisation" as the real cause for loss of freedom:
"Let us first consider what state of things is described by the word
'civilisation'. Its true test lies in the fact that people living in it
make bodily welfare the object of life ... Civilisation seeks to
increase bodily comforts and it fails miserably even in doing so ...
This civilisation is such that one has only to be patient and it will be
self-destroyed."
This I believe is at the heart of Gandhi's foresight. The ecological
crisis which is a result of the intense resource appetite and pollution
caused by industrialisation is the most important aspect of the
self-destruction of civilisation. Industrialisation is based on fossil
fuels, and fossil fuel civilisation has given us climate chaos and is
threatening us with climate catastrophe. It has also given us
unemployment.
Gandhi also refers to the fact that the sole
objective of "civilisation" is bodily welfare and it fails miserably
even in this objective and it fails in its own measure.
The new
movements of the future generations are movements of the excluded who
have been deprived of every right - political, economic and social. They
have nothing to lose but their disposability and dispensability.
'Free markets' mean freedom for corporations to exploit whom and what they want.
In spite of being the victims of brutal injustice and exclusion,
non-violence is a deep commitment of these new movements. "Occupy" is in
fact a reclaiming of the commons. The park is the physical commons in
every town. Today the parks are places for announcing to Wall Street, to
banks, to governments, that the 99 per cent is withdrawing its consent
from the present disorder which has pushed millions to homelessness,
joblessness and hunger.
Freedom in our times has been sold as
"free market democracy". "Free markets" mean freedom for corporations to
exploit whom and what they want, where they want, how they want. It
means the end of freedom for people and nature everywhere. "Free market
democracy" is in fact an oxymoron which has deluded us into believing
that deregulation of corporations means freedom for us.
Just as
the illusion of growth and the fiction of finance has made the economy
volatile and unpredictable, the fiction of the corporation as a legal
person has replaced citizens and made society unstable and
non-sustainable. Humans as earth citizens, with duties and rights, have
been replaced by corporations, with no duties to either the earth or
society, only limitless rights to exploit both the earth and people.
Corporations have been assigned legal personhood, and corporate rights,
premised on maximisation of profits, are now extinguishing the rights of
the earth, and the rights of people to the earth's gifts and resources.
The
new movements understand this. And that is why they are indignant and
are occupying the political and economic spaces to create a living
democracy with people and the earth at the centre instead of
corporations and greed.
Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist,
philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers.
She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology
and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and
farmers' rights - winning the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel
Prize) in 1993.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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