Conference Papers : Crisis, State and Democracy

2014

Authoritarian statism was part and outcome of the crisis of bourgeois hegemony and hence of the state, the centralization and personalization of state power, the growing importance of state bureaucracies for the organisation of social classes, and the crisis of the bourgeois and workers’ parties. One of the defining characteristics of authoritarian statism, he wrote in State, Power, Socialism, is that public administration “tends to play a monopoly role in politically organizing social classes and ensuring hegemony”, and that parties become “veritable transmission belts for executive decisions, rather than being centres engaged in political elaboration and in working out compromises and alliances around a more or less precise programme” (SPS, 229).

Utilising Poulantzas" theory of "authoritarian statism", this paper locates the source of the state"s ability to reproduce capitalist relations in the bureaucracy"s control over the lacuna between knowledge and power. The establishment of the lacuna is facilitated by the state"s monopoly over violence and the structurally maintained by the imposition of a bureaucracy as its bridge-master interpreting law. Systemically strengthened, by dethatching it from democratic processes, the bureaucracy more efficiently organises the long-term interests of the dominant fraction of the power bloc. The statutory independence of the European Central Bank (ECB) is an example of bureaucratic-executive melding that is characteristic of Poulantzas" "authoritarian statism". Because of the relative autonomy gained by being independent, the ECB is able to intervene in domestic Greek politics in order to organise the long-term political interests of international financialised capital. The November 2011 Greek technocratic government headed by Lucas Papademos is the preeminent example of this ability to intervene.

The central point of this presentation is the examination of the particular characteristics of social and political movements that develop in the context of neo-liberalism, and especially their relationship with violence, in a period characterized by the world economic crisis. This crisis is not at all limited to the economic level. We are in reality in a conjuncture of neoliberalism's deep political crisis; economical and social crisis that touches large sections of the population; crisis of political representation, including the crisis of the left; crisis of legitimation of the State and its apparatus, as well as of institutions; crisis of hegemony of neoliberalism. We are focusing in the Greek paradigm, Greece being the first member country of the European Union that this crisis manifests itself in that manner that leads to the economical and political intervention of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank. Thus, we are facing a series of interventions in economic, social and political level that bring out structural changes in the way that the political system is constituted.

This paper seeks to explore how Neoliberalism and Neoliberal powers are dispossessing Democratic Values while at the same time creating and distributing a new form of governmentality, that of the governmentality of crisis. Drawing upon the case of the 'Greek Crisis', I will try to examine how a financial crisis has posed a challenge not only at an economical, but also at a political and social level. During the first pages of this paper, the current debates about Democratic crises and their relationship with Neoliberalism will be presented, and it will be argued that Democracies nowadays can be better understood as systems which support financial interests rather than citizens's rights. The focus of attention will later turn upon Greece's moment of crisis, and how it can be explained as a crisis of Neoliberalism rather than a National crisis. From this point, I will move forward discussing the political and financial events which took place during the first years of the Greek crisis and I will then illustrate how media create false representations with the aim of replacing citizens's political values with new forms of technocratic governance.

This article is an inquiry into “crisis” as an analytical concept, eventually to be applied upon the “democracy”. It recovers the conceptual history of the concept of crisis. Throughout history, from its origin in Greek mythology and philosophy, to its modern scientific meanings, crisis has always been connected to the idea of “immanence” and an apparent opposition between subjectivity and objectivity. The concept of crisis explores the boundaries between judgment and process, between ideology and material circumstances and is therefore closely linked to the historical, dialectical, critical and emacipatory perspectives in social science. This crisis-perspective is applied in an analysis of the influence of the euro-crisis upon democracy within the setting of the Portuguese social conflict. Throughout history, every hegemonic crisis of capitalism has affected the dominant meanings of democracy. Hegemonic breakdown of the liberal, electoral representative democratic model in the peripheral areas of the European Union, created the space for – and is created by - divergent narratives about democracy.

Thesis under the PhD program in Democracy in the 21st Century, 2020

For nearly three decades democracy seemed to be unquestioned and unquestionable. The Fukuyaman post-political and post-history framework dominated social theory and mainstream political science approached democracy solely through its formal liberal representative prescription based upon free and fair rules of competition between parties. Also, critical political theory had more or less accepted the liberal political horizon; proposing deliberative, participative and agonistic alternative models which left capitalism itself evermore unquestioned. In the middle of the Global Financial crisis, the Euro crisis, the emergence of the Occupy movements and the Arab Spring, these certainties seemed to eclipse instantly. The main objective of this research was to discover why and how democracy was going through such a legitimacy crisis. This thesis is an inquiry into the relation between crisis and democracy based on the case-study of austerity-ridden Portugal between 2011 and 2015. Based upon a historical analysis of democratic theory throughout the evolution of capitalism and a critical analysis of the concept of crisis in the construction of political knowledge, this research studies the relationship between Portugal’s political economy and the development of its democracy; from the period of fascism, over the Carnation Revolution and the European integration process to its present period of crisis and austerity. Our research is based upon the idea that democracy is an ideological concept – in which ideology refers to the medium through which consciousness and meaningfulness operate – and that crises emerge the “fundamental contradictions in society”; breaking up the hegemonic consensus. As diverging, potentially legitimate interests emerge, the dissensus in society is concentrated in the conceptualization of democracy itself, producing divergent narratives and perspectives of it: a Demodiversity is the apparent expression of the crisis of the hegemonic form of democracy. Such hypothesis has been substantiated by applying a critical discourse analysis to interviews of the various sides of the social conflict under austerity conditions. Besides the 67 people that were interviewed at the anti-austerity protests; we also interviewed 8 key-players: policymakers, opposition members of parliament, social movement activists and Trade Union leaders. For at least three decades, the traditional liberal-democratic democratic discourse has based upon the technocratic depoliticization and the culturalization of political problems, while government policies are formally legitimized based on procedures, law, elections, parliamentary majorities, ratified treaties and constitutional judgements. Austerity only deepened and normalized the neoliberal dimensions of inevitability and exceptionality. Besides the dominant model, we distinguished three other competing discourses of democracy which could have formed an alternative democratic content: the Acampadas, the Trade Union model, and the alternative party model. While the union discourse focusses on a conceptualization of democracy based upon everyday working and living conditions, collective action and direct participation, the social movements were more utopic by focussing on systemic change, horizontality, and practices of prefiguration. The discourse of the parties, was more institutionalist, focussed on organization, power, and the state, focussing on social and constitutional rights, elections, history, ideology, and strategy. This thesis argues that an articulation between these models – in the form of socialism – is necessary to present a viable alternative to the hegemonic liberal-democratic form. We conclude this thesis by critically analysing possible shortcomings of the separate alternative discourses, and how, to different extent, they were rearticulated back into the hegemonic liberal-democratic model of democracy. Notably, we focus on how aspects of depolitization and aesthetics in the assembly movements and how the excessive hope in electoral change and subsequent coalition-negotiations around the Geringonça-project did not solve the structural problems behind the democratic crisis.

HISTOREIN, 2014

Democracy is in crisis. Th is crisis is the paradoxical outcome of its triumph over its erstwhile rivals. Having prevailed over the totalitarian projects of the first half of the 20th century it has developed in such a way that it is now undermining its original goals of individual and collective autonomy. Modern liberal democracy – the outcome of an inversion of the values of tradition, hierarchy and political incorporation – is a mixed regime. It involves three different dimensions of social existence, political, legal, historical/ economic, and organizes power around these. A balance was achieved after the upheaval of World War II in the form of liberal democracy, on the basis of reforms which injected democratic political power into liberalism and controlled the new economic dynamics it had unleashed. This balance has now been lost. Political autonomy, which accompanied modern historicity and its orientation towards the future, has been overshadowed by economic activity and its pursuit of innovation. As a result, the very meaning of democracy has become impoverished. The term used to refer to the goal of self-government, it is now taken to be fully synonymous with personal freedom and the cause of human rights. The legal dimension having come to prevail over the political one, democratic societies see themselves as ‘political market societies’, societies that can only conceive of their existence with reference to a functional language borrowed from economics. This depoliticisation of democracy has facilitated the rise to dominance of a new form of oligarchy.

Democracy is in crisis. This crisis is the paradoxical outcome of its triumph over its erstwhile rivals. Having prevailed over the totalitarian projects of the first half of the 20 th century it has developed in such a way that it is now undermining its original goals of individual and collective autonomy. Modern liberal democracy – the outcome of an inversion of the values of tradition, hierarchy and political incorporation – is a mixed regime. It involves three different dimensions of social existence, political, legal, historical/economic, and organises power around these. A balance was achieved after the upheaval of World War II in the form of liberal democracy, on the basis of reforms which injected democratic political power into liberalism and controlled the new economic dynamics it had unleashed. This balance has now been lost. Political autonomy, which accompanied modern historicity and its orientation towards the future, has been overshadowed by economic activity and its pursuit of innovation. As a result, the very meaning of democracy has become impoverished. The term used to refer to the goal of self-government, it is now taken to be fully synonymous with personal freedom and the cause of human rights. The legal dimension having come to prevail over the political one, democratic societies see themselves as 'political market societies', societies that can only conceive of their existence with reference to a functional language borrowed from economics. This depoliticisation of democracy has facilitated the rise to dominance of a new form of oligarchy.