We live in a time of excessive centralisation of political and economic power. In European Union countries, half of all these countries’ lawmaking takes place in Brussels. A broad and coherent scale of institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund are having more say over how people all over the world organise their lives. The trend of centralisation of politics on a worldwide level goes hand in hand with increasing monopolisation processes in the economy. Fusion between industrial conglomerates is the order of the day. A corporation such as General Electric has more capital than the collective capital of the poorest third-world countries! Neo-liberal politicians gladly praise the sacred market and promise the populations of the world heaven on earth, but this ‘promised land’ seems reserved for fewer and fewer people.

De-democratisation

Through these developments, the word ‘democracy’ has been stripped down to ‘the people’s right to choose their own government’ (Prisma dictionary). This shabby view of democracy manifests itself in the constantly reoccurring election circuses where it’s becoming more difficult to convince people that their vote reflects a real choice. The ever-increasing ‘de-democratisation’ of social decision-making processes leads constantly to conflict, not only between those who make the decisions and those on whose behalf decisions are made, but also within both groups. In order to be able to continue this de-democratisation, the politicians play a conscious game of ‘divide and conquer’. Divisions among ethnic groups and social classes, for example, are carefully cultivated and these divisions are used to cover up fundamental inequalities of rights and opportunities, and to play off the different groups against each other. At the same time, every form of social unrest that germinates gets channelled into so-called ‘opposition parties’ and ‘Non-Governmental Organisations’. In exchange for a place at the table of the powers-that-be, they keep society’s malcontents at home on the sofa, in front of the television. The attentive reader will have understood it already: the author of this brochure is saying that within narrow parliamentary channels, it is impossible to bring about real political change.

On our way to a post-parliamentary project!

Parliamentary democracy is a capitalist discovery, which gives form and sustenance to the elite and to hierarchies, thereby justifying inequality. The parliamentary puppet show, with its ‘professional politicians’, doesn’t involve people in decision-making but instead pacifies and neutralises them. Elections and other ‘moments of democratic participation’ are nothing more than folklore that gives parliamentary capitalism the appearance of legitimacy. Politicians, together with their loyal mass media, do their best to try to convince us that there is something worth voting for, but this is exaggerated, to put it mildly. The choice between candidates only represents a difference in style. Parliamentary channels offer only a narrow margin of possibility for change. Stick your neck out and get your head cut off.
We have seen enough of parliamentary democracy; we do not need any more time to determine that it is a fraud. There is no excuse for the enormous and ever-increasing gap between rich and poor and between the North and South. There is no excuse for the continued waging of war, in our name, in countries where the population already has little or nothing to eat. It’s high time for a post-parliamentary project, a project that not only fights parliamentary-capitalist power relations, but at the same time brings a just and workable alternative into being.
The good news is that an alternative does exist: direct democracy. The pursuit of direct democracy is a struggle for radical democratisation of all decision-making processes in society. The intention of this booklet is to show that direct democracy is not a new ideology where you have to first convince the masses and then you can seize the power; it is not an unrealistic utopia. Direct democracy is a concrete way of achieving horizontal organisation in the here-and-now, from the local level to the global level.