What is radical democracy?
Normally the reference to democracy is sufficient, but given the distortion of this term by reactionary sections of society and the estrangement of the term by replacing it with the construct of a „REPRESENTATIVE democracy“, the mention of „RADICAL“ (from the root) in relation to literal democracy (rule of the people) is not unfounded and obviously appropriate!
The meaning of the Latin term „radical democracy“ is obvious if one knows that „radical“ means going to the roots and „democracy“ means rule of the people. So let’s go to the roots of the rule of the people and develop it from there!
The basis of such a rule of the people are constitutive people. Therefore, ONLY the constitutive people can be the sovereign who have established themselves based on a constitution not on an ethnic group. Nobody dictates rules to sovereign constitutive people, because the sovereign always establishes the rules, the constitution and the laws by himself. If someone else establishes the constitution and laws, there can be no rule of people, i.e. democracy.
Naturally, there can be no „secrets/secrecy“ from the sovereign, because this immediately raises the question: who is allowed to hide something from a „sovereign“? If something is kept from the supposed sovereign and the sovereign is not in a position to remove this injustice, then the sovereign is not the real holder of power.
Under whose power do we actually live if the supposed sovereign (the constitutive people) has neither the right to have the force of law nor the right to be fully informed, i.e. if secret documents can be hidden from them? Whose power is such a system serving under which we live and which obviously only pretends to give us a participation in power?
Why are we being tricked into democracy? Because those who are currently still „POWERFUL“ are only able to secure their power as long as the legitimate sovereign does not come to his senses to organize his often superior forces in order to confidently establish his power.
All the activities of the still powerful reaction and, in turn, those of the progressive enlighteners of the masses are centered precisely around this self-confidence of every potential constitutive people that has not yet been created and established. The aim of neoliberalism is to humiliate and destroy the self-confidence of the masses about their far superior power.
This automatically leads to the task of progressive enlightenment:
Constant encouragement and training of the self-confidence of the masses about their immeasurable possibilities of power, with which they alone could solve every civilizational problem!
There is no other way out of the existing power structures than educating the masses about their power! Anyone who argues otherwise should face up to the debate on the subject here in this magazine, for example!
Once the awareness of the masses about their power has been developed and constituted, any attempt to prevent their power will appear very ridiculous and can be observed quite calmly.
It is thus a question of understanding and relating of the power of each one of us and how we can link this to the power of all people with equal rights, without infringing on our autonomy or the autonomy of all other people and groups.
More than 200 years after the French Revolution of 1789-93, which was the first to put „liberty, equality and fraternity“ on the revolutionary agenda, we have experienced a whole series of failed attempts. Some of their programmatic masterminds had strayed far from the origins of the revolutionary ambition. Therefore, it is time to return to the essential points of revolutionary change in our only half-civilized world. We are only half-civilized because the law of the strongest in war or civil war still prevails.
Since the „law of the strongest“ is no legal system in the meaning of the word, as it is normality in the animal kingdom, we are therefore only civilized in a very incomplete way.
As long as the respective power is not in the hands of constitutive people and the main activity of the current rulers is to enforce power by militant means at the expense of all of us, as long and they can thus force us to slaughter our brothers and sisters in wars for their interests, we live in a barbarism!
So we do not become civilized beings by violently procuring food, which we then have to violently defend again, but by eliminating the reasons for a world of violence in which we have more than enough for everyone! Only when we can put an end to this barbaric behavior and stop needlessly killing our fellow humans in a world of opulence, will we be able to call our species civilized. If individuals already want to live this civilization, it is still far from being characteristic for our species and the escape from their shared responsibility is an illusion. Some of our fellow humans consider themselves civilized, ignoring the fact that they can only live comfortably in a world of inequality through the system of violence of the powerful and are therefore benefiting from the barbaric conditions on this planet. If they would be thrown into the world of scarcity, just as the majority of people on this planet are thrown, then they too would have to fight for their survival against other people or die.
Normally, however, the wealthy people on this planet have easier access to various weapons and have an advantage over people born into poverty in this barbarism from the very beginning
I would like to take this opportunity to remind you in particular of the numerous guns in expensive bags and in the glove compartments of even more expensive cars. Not to mention the people who can hire the right bodyguards to go with them or are even provided with them by the ruling class system.
Naturally, an individual exit from the barbarism into which we are born in very different positions is not possible without creating a humanistic alternative, but the realization and recognition of one’s own situation in this barbarism is the basic prerequisite for the struggle for a real civilization.
We can only escape this barbarism as an entire species or never!
Anyone who has realized this will develop a special interest in communicating with all individuals of their species in a non-violent manner to reach an agreement on civilizational goals and to ally for precisely this reason. Anyone who carelessly or even violently rejects such civilizational proposals has obviously not grasped the fatal nature of the own situation yet. After all, every individual who is among the strongest today may find someone stronger tomorrow.
Anyone who has realized this will develop a special interest in communicating with all individuals of their species in a non-violent manner to reach an agreement on civilizational goals and to ally for precisely this reason. Anyone who carelessly or even violently rejects such civilizational proposals has obviously not grasped the fatal nature of the own situation yet. After all, every individual who is among the strongest today may find someone stronger tomorrow.
Since we do not know how much time we have before this planet could become uninhabitable due to cosmic coincidences or barbaric activities, which is possible at any time, I appeal to all civilized people of my species who wish to solve our problems peacefully not to waste any more time and to negotiate with each other continuously.
There is currently a history of radical democratic visionaries that needs to be developed further. From which appropriate social models and organizational structures can emerge that are capable of dealing with the tasks ahead. This is not about founding new parties then bound to the existing system of power by the oath of their representatives, but about creating parallel democratic structures.
Anyone who is skeptical about the term „radical democracy“ and has not heard or read anything about it can easily access the opinions of its opponents, for example, by researching Wikipedia and other „approved“ reference works that hold the defining authority of those currently in power.
At the beginning of such a discussion, it is usually necessary to remove the demonization of the term „radical“ and its equation with violent intentions. A radical approach to a problem simply means looking for the root, the origin, the cause of a problem to solve it from there. „Radical“ is therefore very often equated with „extreme“, suggesting extreme intentions of violence.
I also recommend using the dominant reference works such as Wikipedia to compare „radical“ and „extreme“ to draw a clear distinction and counteract further falsification.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is commonly regarded as the founder of radical democracy with his „social contract“. This concept was further developed by many philosophers. One of the most prominent philosophers on this topic was the German-American Hanna Arendt.
The basis of „radical democracy“ is solely the sovereignty of the people, i.e. the unrestricted power of all citizens with civil rights to decide on the constitution and laws and to fully manage and control the powers of the state. Democratic civil rights also include the right of every citizen to propose laws, i.e. to have the legislative initiative and to vote on all laws by name and in public. Representation by deputies in a parliament, who are allowed to act completely independently of the citizens, is not permitted in the face of a sovereign nation. This means that the election of representatives with mandates not bound to the people is in fact equivalent to disenfranchisement.
If we talk about radical democracy, a completely different government structure is needed to realize to realize the interests of sovereign constitutive people, because a parliamentary custodian acts completely independently of his ward (a person who is under custodianship). When it comes to radical democracy, a completely different political structure is needed to ensure the realization of the interests of sovereign constitutive people, since a parliamentary custodian acts completely independently of his ward (a person under custodianship).
Hanna Arendt recommends the council system as an alternative to the parliament, but there are different names for the same structure. They always mean the self-government of a constitutive people, starting from the smallest units, which then link their power to all sides with structures of equal rank and contractually secure it in such an effective way that one can speak of a real federation that respects the sovereignty of each individual and each group independently of the size.
It is obvious that the representative power of the super-rich owners keeps sovereignty from the masses and walks over them. This situation, which cannot be tolerated by a real sovereign, calls for a radical change to solve the most urgent problems of a fake community put at the service of super-rich oligarchs.
If we do not emancipate ourselves from our custodians and move towards self-government of the state, our deficient community will be continually plundered to the last shirt by the raids of our greedy custodians.
What are the preconditions for radical democracy?
Through the systematic establishment of a public and democratically organized debate space, the first connection between individuals and groups formulating a radical democratic interest is created. Only there all interested parties can come together and discuss solutions to our problems.
The organization of such public and permanent debate spaces, which naturally start asymmetrically and scattered, have the task of spreading far and wide into all local structures of manageable size until self-confident councils emerge that seek a purposeful coalition. Such local councils of the masses, which thus emerge from the masses and begin a completely new constitution, are the basic structure of every democratic society. Only there can a future nation of constitutive people debate problems unhindered, discuss solutions and make qualified decisions.
This process has already been unintentionally started through the new social media on the internet and is now meeting more and more resistance from the powerful and their servants. However, these social media and their networks are only an exercise and facilitator for what wants to be implemented in local and national assemblies.
Even the so-called „alternative media“ cannot replace real existing local democratic structures and usually work as a one-way street in which the audience has no real equal influence.So in the long term, we have no choice but to network, meet and negotiate democratically with each other to establish a parallel structure to the existing power and administrative apparatus, aiming to replace it with the self-empowerment and self-administration of all of us.
What are the practical steps to get there?
If we go back to the French Revolution, we discover popular societies with a wide variety of names that organized themselves in a radical democratic way, held debates and published newspapers. They were the prerequisites for all further democratic developments around the communes and their sections that were formed. Only these popular societies enabled the Parisian masses to make qualified decisions and begin effective self-government.
The French yellow vests, which are politically disparate just like any other organization, had taken exactly this old path again and are once again organized meetings in which they debate, discuss and decide. They did this explicitly without privileged politicians. When people with party books attend such meetings, their affiliation to a party does not matter because it does not provide them with any privileges in such a meeting.
Of course, we are in a very good situation to be able to prepare such meetings with the help of social media, but these are no replacement for real meetings. Before there are even larger mass protestsy, and they will probably come, we may still have some time to prepare ourselves and form a radical democratic nucleus that can then help with its preparatory work in popular assemblies. We can ensure that the broadest possible masses learn now what basic democratic principles are and how they can be applied effectively, without immediately falling back into old subservient habits. It is also important to provide information on all relevant economic and political processes and to prepare fundamental principles of a new constitution and new laws.
In addition, the difference between ownership and possession must be clarified and what different economies the two produce.Many people do not realize at all what it means when the right of ownership is exchanged for the right of possession. Only when most people have realized this they will have a simple but very effective goal in mind and know where the levers of power are hidden from them.
Such important concepts as the „imperative mandate“ for all officials, or what it means to be „sovereign“ as a nation of constitutive people, all this has either been withheld from the masses, or conveyed completely wrong and with deceitful intent.
The current state theory is completely absurd and mainly conceals the power of oligarchs. The concept of „power“ has even become so alienated that people usually have no idea of the difference between power and violence. How can such theoretical nonsense be used to explain the „separation of powers“ in relation to „power“ that supposedly comes from the people? Who have no real influence on the powers of the state, which are in fact not divided. But who has this influence? Who really has the „power“ in this system? Attempts are being made to conceal this fact so that the masses do not realize how they are being cheated out of their „claim to power“.
To replace the current, but completely absurd state theory listing five powers and unwilling to answer the question of „where power is located“ with a democratic one, we need a public debate on this and I invite all interested parties to do so here with letters to the editor and their own contributions.
By J.M. Hackbarth
Abbreviated translation by Peter Mueller (original article: https://radicaldemocrat.news/2023/05/21/was-ist-radikaldemokratie/)
