Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites
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Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites Trust in the Capacities of the People, Distrust in Elites Kenneth Good LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannery Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Good, Kenneth, 1933-. Trust in the capacities of the people, distrust in elites / Kenneth Good. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4985-0243-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4985-0244-3 (ebook) 1. Democratization—Case studies. 2. Elite (Social sciences)—Political activity—Case studies. 3. Legitimacy of governments—Case studies. I. Title. JC421.G66 2014 321.8—dc23 2014030920 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America Contents Introduction vii 1 Athenian Participatory Democracy, 508–322 BCE: Empowering the People and Controlling Elites 1 2 Democratization in Britain: A Long and Repeated Aspiration 21 3 Democratization in South Africa: The People versus a Militarist, Predominant Ethno-Nationalist Elite 63 4 Democracy in the Capitalist Heartlands: Alienation and Dysfunctionalities 111 5 Democratization from Portugal to Poland, 1970s-1990s, and in Tunisia and Egypt Since 2010 149 6 Democratization in South Africa: A Failing ANC and a Determined Autonomous Movement of the Poor 199 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 243 Index 257 About the Author 271 v Introduction Democratization at its basic level is a socio-political process and a society and politics that may grow out of it where people make the decisions on matters affecting them. Secondly, democratization is an unending struggle for such rights and power: to win them, hold on to them, to extend them. On the examples considered here, this contention has stretched over two and a half millennia and no end is in sight. The clear lesson seems to be that those who hold power strongly resist giving it up or even sharing it, and do so grudgingly, slowly, partially and deceptively. Thirdly, the contending classes or groups are essentially the poor and weak majority of the people, on the one hand, and an elite of wealth, education, status and power, on the other. It is hoped that the reality of this perhaps contentious interpretation, polarizing the majority against a small economic and political elite, will be demonstrat- ed through the studies presented in this book. Politics in democratic Athens 508–322 BCE, the first and still the greatest participatory democracy, revolved around the sharp socio-economic divi- sions between an uneducated poor majority and a small elite of wealth, education, and status—but not power. Democracy was initiated and deep- ened as the former gained political empowerment through active, institution- alized citizenship. All citizens were deemed equally capable of holding polit- ical office regardless of formal learning, and growing up in democratic Ath- ens was held to be an education in itself through the wide political experience a citizen necessarily acquired: the original, democratic meaning of the term idiote was a person with no interest in public affairs. Athens was a dynamic, imperialistic, wealthy class society to which the elite were persuaded to subscribe, because their military skills were rewarded, they were free to pursue their leisure and moneymaking, and because over time the popular democracy manifestly worked. Their public activities were however tightly vii viii Introduction controlled: the political disempowerment of the elites was the vital accompa- niment which made possible and extended the empowerment of the people. Athens endured for almost two centuries, in an environment of almost con- stant warfare, and was brought down, not by internal failings, but through the superior external force of Alexander the Great. The second study below is of Britain’s long and profoundly incomplete democratization, beginning in the embryonic capitalism of the English Revo- lution in the mid-seventeenth century, in an active and fairly overt struggle between, on the one hand, an inchoate class chiefly of the urban poor, repre- sented by the Levellers, and on the other, the Grandees in parliament, in landed and merchant wealth and, not least, in command of military power. The former may have represented some 100,000 people in the late 1640s, a sizable proportion of London and the soldiery of the army, while the Gran- dees were just a few, and very conscious that only they had a stake in the country and were thus fit to rule. The Levellers were forcibly suppressed, but they bequeathed notions of popular sovereignty, accountability, and of the rights of even “the poorest he that is in England”, which were taken up again and extended by the Chartists during the industrial revolution. For more than two centuries a small and very wealthy oligarchy dominated over the mass of the people, who never ceased to resist their suppression through crime, riot and insurrection—the limited means available to them. But their rights were notably extended through a range of self-help organizations—sick and burial groups, coops, benevolent societies, educational groups—which they set up in the new urban environments of the industrializing nineteenth century. They also established trade unions, social movements, and then a Labour party, and in a century-long struggle, won voting rights. The record shows that democratization in these disparate cases was indeed a harsh, unending struggle between a poor majority and a small, highly determined and uncom- promising ruling elite. Even as popular organizations were constructed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new elites arose within the unions and the Labour party, to feather their own nests and limit further democratization. An important third exemplifier is contemporary South Africa, initially in the crucial period of the 1960s to the 1980s, when an external armed struggle against apartheid, organized by the African National Congress (ANC) was nearing an end, and when a popular, autonomous democratic movement was highly active inside the country, under the guidance of the United Democrat- ic Front (UDF). It was formed in 1983, joined just two years later by the dynamic and militant Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). The Front was developing, through the late 1980s, path-breaking new meth- ods for combating elitism within popular organizations, notably their highly innovative ‘Principles of Our Organizational Democracy’, while also pro- moting a wide range of self-determining community groups and social move- Introduction ix ments. But the established leadership of the ANC saw this independent do- mestic democratization as a threat to their predominance in the black popula- tion and moved to subvert the UDF’s autonomy and aspirations, much as they had earlier forcibly suppressed their own pro-democratic rank and file soldiery in Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). Apartheid collapsed, but what re- placed it was not new participatory forms but an elitist, militaristic and authoritarian democracy obsessed with secrecy and espionage, the shortcom- ings of which have become increasingly apparent in recent years: a second stage of South Africa’s delayed but latent democratization. This is examined in the final chapter. The democratization that emerges here is thus a matter of aspiration and impulse by determined men and women, which fail more often than they succeed, given the power disparities between the people and the elites, yet appear and reappear again in other times and places. A prominent Leveller leader, ‘Freeborn John’ Lilburne, said at the end of the 1640s that, though they fail, their principles would shine on in the future, as they did with the Chartists 180 years later, whose leaders were in their turn harshly sup- pressed: killed, imprisoned, transported for life. Popular aspirations that failed and were nonetheless renewed, commemorated in Samuel Beckett’s words: “Ever tried; ever failed; Never mind; try again; fail better.” It is not surprising that democratization also represents an ideology and a record intentionally filled with obscurities, deceptions and lies; the insistence that ordinary people are incompetent and irrational, and that only elites are able to think for them and are fit to rule. On the one side in history, the ‘idle mob’, the ‘turbulent mob’, men as Cromwell sneered ‘with no interest other than in breathing’; and on the other ‘responsible men’, those with landed and commercial interests, or the ‘Struggle Heroes’ in South Africa recently. It also suggests that democracy is the gift of great men who sometimes come together in almost ‘miraculous’ circumstances, like Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk, 1990–1994, to confer good government on their fortunate people. The distortion of the record stems from the aftermath of democratic Athens, notable for the active and direct political role of poor and uneducated men, later deliberately ignored or traduced in the conservative British and American historiography. In smashing Chartism in the 1840s the oligarchy intended to obliterate even the memory of the many ordinary men and wom- en who had been highly active socially and politically up and down the country for over a decade. From the late 1980s, the political and military elite of the ANC aimed to erase the memory of the United Democratic Front and the thousands of men and women in community groups associated with them.