Editorial: Their Democracy - and Ours
Since the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, the Bush administration has bragged about its record as a force for democracy and freedom. Images of Iraqi voters, their fingers dipped in purple ink, have flashed on TV screens. Pundits have proclaimed that the war on Iraq was indeed really about liberation. A few commentators who have now abandoned the anti-war movement have been given ample air time.
But the notion that Bush and his ilk are serious democrats is nonsense. Nothing could be more disorienting for people who want to change the world than the idea that the US and other Western states are promoters of democracy.
In Iraq-a country under bloody US military occupation after a war condemned around the world-the US government did not want the direct elections that happened last January. Its original plan was to draw up a constitution, have indirect elections without mass participation and regulate political parties. Shiite Muslim leaders rejected this plan and organized major demonstrations against it, forcing US leaders to accept elections. Of course, Bush and the rest have tried to spin the elections they didn’t want to their own advantage, but we shouldn’t forget that these elections were never their Plan A and that resistance to the occupation grows.
Allowing the people of Iraq to determine their own future has never been a plan for the Bush administration. They intend to keep a large permanent military presence in Iraq in order to shape it as a neoliberal paradise whose natural resources (especially oil) and labour are ripe for exploitation by US multinational corporations, while using it as a platform to expand their political and economic interests in the region and globally.
In Venezuela, when a right-wing coup against nationalist President Hugo Chávez began in April 2002, the US government made its support for the coup clear. But popular mobilization defeated the plotters and restored Chávez to office, leaving the US administration embarrassed. Now that Chávez’s speeches are growing more radical (and some in Venezuelan social movements are demanding a real “revolution in the revolution”), Bush would love to see Chávez go the way of Haiti’s deposed president Aristide or Chile’s Salvador Allende, killed in the US-backed 1973 coup. However, Chávez’s referendum victory in 2004 makes it hard for the US to paint him as undemocratic.
The governments of the US, France and Canada supported the February 2004 coup in Haiti that put a vicious gang of thugs in office, and have continued to back this regime despite its repressive attempts to smash political opposition and social movements.
Iraq, Venezuela and Haiti point to two lessons already learned at great human cost in the last century. One is that Western states that bray about democracy will readily act to get rid of democratically-elected governments that pursue policies contrary to their interests. The other is that the kind of liberal democracy supported by everyone from George Bush to Jack Layton is a very weak form of democracy indeed.
It is a terrible mistake to equate democracy with the parliamentary systems that exist today. While unquestionably preferable to outright dictatorships, these are versions of capitalist democracy that allow citizens to only vote every few years on who will preside over a society in which most important decisions (in the workplace, for example) are made without any pretense of democracy. Balanced-budget laws, international economic agreements, and constitutions like the one proposed for the European Union make not only capitalism but its neoliberal version mandatory for elected governments.
In fact, the concept of “freedom” advanced by liberals has typically meant free markets and the protection of capital-not freedom for people at large. The US (and other) ruling classes are no different today: one doesn’t need to scratch too far beneath the surface of their rhetoric about “freedom” (in Iraq or elsewhere) to find their true economic interests. Indeed, the US National Security Strategy (2002) elevates free trade to a “moral principle,” and states that “free markets and free trade are key priorities” in the US’s global pursuits.
Thankfully, this is not the only democracy imaginable. In 2000, a popular uprising rooted in democratic grassroots organizations defeated the privatization of water in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. For a week, Cochabamba was in the hands of its working people. This was just the most recent upsurge in the history of the struggle for far-reaching democracy from below whose most famous high-points are the Paris Commune (1871), the Russian Revolution (1917) and the Spanish Revolution (1936). In this kind of democracy lies a flicker of hope that humanity might be able to avert the social and ecological disasters to which imperialist democrats like Bush and Paul Martin are steering us.