Surviving Capitalism (Not) : History of the British Chartist movement: People power versus privilege

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, May 16, 2010

History of the British Chartist movement: People power versus privilege

from Green Left, a review of the book entitled, ‘Perish the Privileged Orders’: A Socialist History of the Chartist Movement.

If you believed the corporate media, you might think that the greatest threats to parliamentary democracy in a country like Britain have come from Kaiser Wilhelm’s armies in World War I or — today — from Al Qaeda and Islamic jihadists. In fact, the greatest enemies of representative democracy in Britain over the centuries have been the British ruling classes themselves.

The moral suggested by this book review is that "those who do not understand their history, are condemned to repeat it."

We should also understand that the capitalist ruling classes have learned to live with, indeed, have learned to adapt to, representative democracy to serve their needs. Specifically they learned how they could control the representatives that we, the people, are allowed to vote for; and if a mistake were made by letting someone through that did not serve their interests, they have learned to use a variety of other methods to deal with such people: co-option, cutting off funding, media smear campaigns, disclosing embarrassing information about the person, on up to assassination.

Hence, we must move beyond representative democracy into direct democracy by localizing society and its economy. See the alternatives on this website.