There is little doubt that the success of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi state elections has revolutionary potential. So far, the role of the masses has been confined to selecting which members of the political elite will govern them for the next five years. To be sure, they have, through mass movements and agitations, tried to make their demands effective, but the political system has remained resolutely top-down, bureaucratic and distant for the aam aadmi. The Left-wing view has always been, in Marx’s words, that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie". This disjunction between democracy’s lofty ideals and its shoddy reality and the huge gulf between the people’s representatives and the people has led to widespread cynicism about representative democracy. AAP’s politics wants to change that.

A section of the Left has always been in favour of participatory democracy. George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, was all praise for the mass democracy practised by the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. But we needn’t go so far back in history—in recent times, the World Social Forum, with their slogan Another World is Possible, has been actively campaigning for grassroots democracy in which the masses have a stake. The forum is an annual jamboree of civil society groups from all across the world and it may be no coincidence that the AAP leadership come from a background of civil society activism.

The collapse of old socialist societies has also led to disenchantment with the traditional Left. Antonio Negri, an Italian revolutionary who served a jail sentence for being part of the far-Left terrorist group known as the Red Brigades, and Michael Hardt, an American political philosopher, through their books Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, have produced what is sometimes called “The Communist Manifesto of the 21st Century". They have abandoned the old Marxist faith in the working class as the vanguard of the revolution and instead proposed the disadvantaged and marginalized multitudes as the new heroes who will usher in a truly democratic society. They call for “an institutional process of transformation that develops the multitude’s capacities for democratic decision-making" and the involvement of civil society groups. The various “Occupy" movements were recent examples of this kind of self organization at work.

The question is: is all this just theory and hot air, or are there successful modern-day examples of participatory democracy in action? The answer is to be found in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, which, since the late eighties, has been famous throughout the world for its participatory democracy. After the failure of state capitalism, it has become the new ideological model for the Left.

The ruling Workers’ Party introduced a system of participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in 1989. Municipal spending is decided by citizens, participating in discussions open to all. Neighbourhoods elect delegates to represent them at the city-level deliberations. Each neighbourhood elects members to a city municipal budget council, which determines how to distribute funds and approve capital expenditures. Note that the first half of the ’90s was a period of popular outrage in Brazil against government corruption, which led to the impeachment of the president. The comparison with the current disenchantment with the political class in India is obvious. Studies have shown that the participatory budgeting process has led to an improvement in Porto Alegre’s civic amenities, ranging from access to water, to education, to health and to city infrastructure and it has curbed corruption. Most importantly, the bulk of investments have been in the poorest localities in the city and Porto Alegre economist Aldemir Marquetti contended that the participatory budget was “a powerful instrument of redistribution of wealth". The biggest gain, of course, was that citizens became agents able to effect changes, instead of merely being consumers. The drawback is that in spite of the participatory budgeting system being extended to many cities in Brazil and in some other countries of Latin America, participatory democracy hasn’t had the same success there. Nor has there been any attempt to scale it up to the national level. AAP’s national debut, therefore, is a truly novel experiment. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the AAP will implement a participatory budget, which is the acid test of the kind of participatory democracy it preaches.

There are other concerns. AAP’s obsession with a draconian Lokpal, which can easily be abused, is an indication of its penchant for bureaucratic solutions. Commentators have drawn attention to the perils of unbridled majoritarian rule, without checks and balances. The view of the political right is best brought out by Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the US, who reportedly said of the masses, “Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast." The distrust of mass democracy is prevalent even among democrats.

What is likely to be the relationship between truly participatory democracy and the economy? If people really have a say in allocation of funds, it is very likely the net effect will be redistributive. The masses are unlikely to happily wait for benefits of growth to trickle down. That will certainly have consequences for the prevailing model of growth. And the ultimate question: is capitalism compatible with grassroots democracy? Or is the logical conclusion that, as proposed by Hardt and Negri, it will lead to a new economic system as well?

Manas Chakravarty looks at trends and issues in the financial markets. Your comments are welcome at

capitalaccount@livemint.com

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