representative democracy is that direct democracy is often placed in opposition to it. Yet direct democracy is not a replacement for or competitor of representative democracy, but rather, the two forms of democracy are vital institutional spaces for deepening and extending democracy in society. Direct democracy is appropriate and desirable for local-level decision making, while representative democracy is necessary for complex and large societies in which direct decision making by every member of the polity is impossible for every decision. The two types of democracy should not be seen to be in conflict with each other; rather, direct democracy and representative democracy complement and deepen democratic impulses in each other. Indeed, the aspiration of government by the people is further realised through combining direct and representative democracy.
This recent emphasis on direct democracy was anticipated by South African scholar Rick Turner, who argued for radical forms of democracy within the liberation movement in South Africa. The search for humanist and participatory dimensions of Marxism was articulated by Turner in his The Eye of the Needle (1972). After his assassination in 1978, he became an iconic hero of the liberation movement, but it was only toward the end of the millennium that the ideas embodied in The Eye of the Needle started resonating once again with movements. Turner looked to the importance of imagination, human agency, values and consciousness, which, for him, lie at the centre of social and human transformation. In other words, social transformation and human freedom only made sense in dialogue with each other as the one could not be attained without the other. He placed worker control and democratic planning at the centre of his understanding of participatory democracy and at the centre of human freedom (1972: 34–47). For Turner, vanguard democracy led by the Party impoverishes human freedom and social transformation.
One of the most famous recent examples of a direct democratic experiment is the Brazilian Workers’ Party’s (PT as it is popularly called) participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre (Baiocchi 2003; Baiocchi, Heller and Silva 2011; Bruce 2004). In 1986 the PT won the mayoral position in the city, but was not a majority in the city council. This led it to innovate. It decided to open up part of the city’s budget for popular participation. It held popular assemblies in neighbourhoods across the city where ordinary people got to decide what the city’s development priorities were. By democratising the allocation of part of the city’s budget, civil society was transformed into a robust arena of citizen participation. Neighbourhood associations increased from 240 in 1986 to 600 in 2000 and district-level popular councils increased from 2 to 12. Housing cooperatives jumped from 11 to 71 between 1994 and 2000 (Baiocchi 2005: 42). The participatory budgeting process not only gave civil society a voice to determine the investment of some of the city’s funds, but also created vibrant institutions in civil society (Goldfrank 2003). This is clearly a model of democracy that is different from vanguard democracy in which the Party dominates, or representative democracy in which elected officials make all the decisions.
Another radical experience in direct democracy is the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s (CPI[M]) democratic decentralisation campaign in Kerala, India (Williams 2008). While the CPI(M) is a vanguard party in name, in practice it has had to be extremely responsive and accountable to its support base, forcing it to create spaces of mass participation in state governance.7 Kerala became famous in the developing world in the 1980s for its achievements in human development, but had not achieved economic growth, which was necessary to maintain its redistributive programmes. In the 1990s the CPI(M)-led state government decided to try an exciting and novel experiment in participatory democracy (Williams 2008). The state devolved forty per cent of its finances to local government institutions that had to engage in local development planning with communities. Communities were involved in the deliberations, the decisions made and the implementation of development plans. A few elements of the decentralisation project are worth highlighting. First, a significant part of the funds were earmarked for local economic development projects, mostly through cooperatives. In this way, the state was marrying direct democracy in the political sphere to the economic sphere. Second, the devolution of power and resources was not about bypassing the state, but rather was about using participatory democracy to strengthen (through becoming more accountable and effective) the representative institutions. Third, this shift to decentralisation was not simply a decision of the state, but was integrally linked to the organisational support of the CPI(M). For example, the CPI(M) helped train thousands of community activists, through thousands of hours of training and four thousand pages of training material. The point is that it requires immense organisational support to coordinate grassroots activists. Finally, the project has been successful in galvanising people to become more involved in the development of their communities.
It must be noted, however, that these recent experiments in direct democracy work within representative democracy. It was the PT mayoral election victory that provided the opportunity for participatory budgeting, and the CPI(M)’s involvement in representative democracy that created the space for the radical experiment in direct democracy.
Conclusion
What the PT in Brazil and the CPI(M) in Kerala teach us is that radical experiments in direct democracy are part of the twenty-first-century Marxist imagination. What is also particularly noteworthy of these two experiments in direct democracy is that they were spearheaded by political parties. The experiences of Brazil and Kerala suggest that Marxist political parties can transform themselves from vanguard parties to parties that champion direct democracy and representative democracy. While I have focused largely on political democracy, any attempt at achieving democratic, egalitarian, ecologically sustainable, anti-capitalist transformation requires economic democracy in conjunction with political democracy. Thus, the same systems of direct and representative democracy from the political sphere must simultaneously extend into the economic sphere where workers own and control the relations of production and make decisions about how production is organised and about the distribution of surplus. Recent events in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Argentina, Bolivia and at the grassroots in South Africa could be described as further examples of such movements in the struggle for political and economic democracy.
Notes
1 This is not an exhaustive discussion of democracy in either tradition, but rather provides a rough sketch of the way in which liberals and Marxists have viewed democracy within the Marxist tradition.
2 While representative, parliamentary and liberal democracy are often used interchangeably to refer to elected governments or parliamentary institutions, I prefer to use representative democracy to explicitly refer to systems of government in which representatives are elected by the citizenry (universal suffrage) and constitutionalism, division of powers, basic universal and civil rights such as freedom of speech (both written and spoken), the right of assembly and artistic freedom are upheld. Representatives can be there in the role of fiduciary (that is, representing general interests and able to make independent decisions in their best judgements) or delegate (that is, representing particular interests and beholden to decisions made by their constituents) (Bobbio 1987: 47–48).
3 This is not to deny earlier attempts to envision a participatory democratic society. In the 1970s the New Left also pushed the idea of direct democracy, but it did not take root in many of the movements seeking social transformation.
4 There are, of course, important exceptions to this generalisation. The point I am making is that the dominant tradition within Marxism was vanguard democracy
