lpetrich
Contributor
Anti-politics and the 1% : Democratic Audit UK
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Advocates of it often want to restrict the powers of parliaments, suppress disagreements and silence vocal minorities, etc. Such advocates sometimes envy China and similar countries with their seeming success in politics-free decision-making.
I'm not convinced of that, because of the lack of clearly better alternatives.Representative democracy has come under attack from different directions during the global financial crisis of 2008 and beyond. In assessing these critiques, Matteo Mameli and Lorenzo del Savio argue that he existence and strength of the two strongest kinds of attack show that the current dominant kind of electoral-representative structures have become irremediably obsolete.
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This has inspired Occupy Wall Street and many similar movements and political parties. Their alternative is mass movements with very loose leadership.The electoral-representative institutions of contemporary democracies are arguably little more than instruments in the hands of corporations and of the super-rich, both of whom control electoral-representative structures through lobbying, the financing of electoral campaigns, the “revolving doors” between politics and business, etc. By means of these mechanisms, the richest 1% can constrain and direct the action of democratically elected politicians, and thereby determine the economic policies that affect (often negatively) the remaining 99%. In the last 35 years, these policies have produced more efficient and subtle ways for the super-rich to extract resources from the planet and from the rest of the population.
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In short, technocracy.This is the call for depoliticization that finds its rationale in the wish to increase the efficiency of decision-making in contemporary democracies. According to this view, many decisions currently taken by elected bodies should instead be taken by independent and unbiased experts, or by strong executives with the advice of experts.
Advocates of it often want to restrict the powers of parliaments, suppress disagreements and silence vocal minorities, etc. Such advocates sometimes envy China and similar countries with their seeming success in politics-free decision-making.
Constitutions that feature strong parliaments and local councils, bodies that make decisions that JP Morgan often dislikes, like lots of the "wrong" kind of government spending.A telling instance of this form of anti-politics is a report released in 2013 by JP Morgan – the global financial giant – on the Euro crisis and the need to reform the institutional arrangements of the so-called “peripheral” countries in the European Union. According to this report, one problem is the “anti-fascist constitutions” of these countries. Such constitutions are said to be problematic because they protect labour rights and the right to protest, and because they result in weak executives and in “consensus building systems which foster political clientalism.”
The authors argue that, between those two lines of attack, representative democracy is doomed, and that we will face a fight between mass movements and oligarchy-enabling technocrats.This example indicates that efficiency-driven anti-politics is often a call for restricting or weakening the democratic oversight on policy-making in order to give more power to the markets and ultimately to corporations and financial firms. Experts – especially economic experts – are never really independent or unbiased. Efficiency driven anti-politics is a weapon in the hands of those who aim to establish an oligarchy-controlled technocracy.