Glossary: democracy
Democracy is a Greek word meaning "rule of the people".
This is different than a
republic,
in which the people elect representatives to rule on their behalf. In theory,
representatives do the people's bidding. In practice, they're beholden to special
interests who provide campaign funding; they're susceptible to backroom dealmaking; and
they cast their votes under the shadow of behind-the-scenes influences. (There are
90,000 lobbyists in Washington D.C. today.) That these
practices undercut popular rule should be obvious.
The United States and all other advanced industrial countries are in fact not
Democracies, they're Republics, in which the people themselves do not rule. This
distinction is important.
Historically, there have been attempts at forms of governance which were far more
democratic than today's parliamentary republics. Several of the ancient Greek city-states,
particularly Athens, were governed by direct assemblies of citizens, without intermediate
representatives. Some Italian city-states tried something similar during the Middle
Ages. These experiences were vitiated however by
class-centric
concepts of citizenship.
In Greece, only landowning males were citizens: women and slaves and the propertyless
were not, creating in effect a democracy of the nobility, not the people. In Medieval
Italy, property qualifications restricted citizenship to wealthy merchants, rather than
landowning nobility. The effect was the same: the class rule of a particular segment of
the population rather than the populace as a whole.
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Probably the most intriguing attempt at large-scale direct democracy was the huge wave
of worker's councils which swept Europe during the revolutionary upsurge of 1917-1923.
These councils were typically structured in a pyramidal way, in which assemblies of
workers meeting in their factories chose delegates to local councils, which in turn
chose delegates to regional councils. Delegates were recallable at will; were required
to vote their mandates; and were selected for very short terms, often just a few weeks.
In Russia these councils were called "soviets", which is where the name
"Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" came from. The Bolsheviks' slogan was
"All power to the Soviets!", meaning replacement of the central state apparatus
with these bodies of delegates controlled from below. The European revolutions of
1917-1923 were fought largely over the issue of whether these worker's councils would
form the state, or not. They lost.
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