by Azfar Hussain

Democracy is impossible without destroying native oppressors parasitic on imperialism.
   Maulana Bhashani
   
   Democracy cannot consist solely of elections that are nearly always fictitious and managed by rich landowners and professional politicians.
   Che Guevara
   
   ‘Democracy,’ in a way, names the political figures of the conjunction between particular situations and politics. In this case, and in this case only, ‘democracy,’ can be recaptured as a philosophical category. Hereafter democracy will designate what can be termed as the effectiveness in politics.
   Alain Badiou

IF CULTURE is political and politics is cultural—as they surely are in ways in which they are dialectically envisaged and enacted not only by the Italian theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci, but also by our Maulana Bhashani—we might try to seek certain crucial connections between Qazi Nazrul Islam and Bhashani himself, between poetics and politics, to address and even reconfigure the question of democracy in our part of the world. And we might make those connections at a time when democracy itself turns out to be a concept in crisis not only in Bangladesh but also on a global scale. True, Nazrul can by no means be reckoned a hard theorist of democracy as such; but his poetic insights into the question of total emancipation from colonialism and imperialism—as articulated boldly and even repeatedly in the pages of Dhumketu—can be fruitfully yoked together with Bhashani’s principle and praxis of a mass-line in both politics and culture to frame our discussion surrounding the question ‘Whose democracy is it, any way?’

   Admittedly, the question posed above is an old one—and we might even detect Leninist registers in this question, while remaining attentive to the difference between what Lenin calls ‘proletarian democracy’ and ‘bourgeois democracy’—but the question keeps returning with a vengeance in the era of what some political theorists have meanwhile called ‘over-democratisation.’ This idea of over-democratisation does not, however, suggest that we have already begun to inhabit a topographically even democratic landscape as such—in fact, we are far from it—but over-democratisation is an idea predicated on the phenomenon that everyone today wants to speak and act in the name of the ‘people’ themselves. So the epistemologically and politically enabling questions for me always are: The people? Which people? What people? Whose people? The people as subjects? Or the people as objects? The people as a mobilising trope? Or the people as even sheer fiction? The tropological or fictional or rhetorical people? Or the people within the horizon of the materiality of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality, for instance? It is this particular constellation of questions that I intend to keep in mind and even mobilise while thinking and talking about the political culture and cultural politics of democracy in Bangladesh.

   Let me then return to the question of the invocation and appropriation of the people. We know that even theocratic and fundamentalist politics have long justified their raison d’être in the name of the people. And, of course, what has come to be known as ‘bourgeois democracy’ has routinely rehearsed the so-called Lincolnesque prepositional principle of ‘a government of, by, and for the people.’ Even colonial governances, imperial rule, and military dictatorships have all historically justified and legitimised their theories and practices in the name of the people or the dêmos—the Greek for ‘people,’ one of the etymological roots of the Greek word d?mokratía or democracy. Of course, the politics of nationalism—its converging and conflictual versions notwithstanding—cannot simply ontologise or reproduce itself without invoking the people as a collective.

   There is, then, the case of socialism, whose entire theoretical horizon decisively embraces, and continues to re-constellate, the question of the people, positing that it is nothing short of ‘radical democracy’, or ‘people’s democracy’, or ‘proletarian democracy’—these terms themselves have a history of interesting variations and nuances within the Marxian tradition itself—which comes to constitute the initial stage of socialism. For a number of socialists, if not all, ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’—to the degree that the figure of the ‘proletariat’ here names the majority of the people as well as the most advanced and conscious section of them—is itself democracy radicalised, and democracy certainly rescued from the bourgeoisie, while marking the first stage of socialism. This is an idea that is by no means dead yet, the equation of ‘socialism’ and ‘dictatorship’ manufactured by bourgeois hegemony notwithstanding.

   For instance, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—taking his cues from none other than Lenin himself (given Chavez’s own account)—keeps that idea alive. Although Chavez is no Leninist in the strictest sense of the term, his Lenin-inspired experimentations with both democracy and socialism—and their mutual imbrication—have inaugurated a specifically promising chapter in the history of democratic and socialist movements in Latin America, as Tariq Ali rightly points out in his influential book on Latin America called Pirates of the Caribbean. Also, at a very recent festival called ‘Marxism Festival’ held in England—a festival that, among other things, renewed hope about our ‘new Marxian times’ at a moment when the current stage, and for that matter, the most advanced stage, of capitalism has reached its unprecedented dead-end, even in Francis Fukuyama’s version—there was this rhetorical question gathering the force of a gripping idea: ‘How can there be even a semblance of socialism without democracy itself?’ But, then, democracy itself is to be re-invented.

   Thus, it is not for nothing that the young Australian philosopher and film-maker Daniel Ross—also the author of a relatively recent and sensational book called Violent Democracy, and one whose pet project seems to be a critique and a rehabilitation of the German high-priest of ontology Martin Heidegger by way of re-reading the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben—goes on to identify a paradoxical condition in which democracy finds itself. Taking cues and clues from Agamben, Ross suggests that democracy on the one hand remains ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’ and, that, on the other, democracy remains ‘a concept in crisis.’ I don’t disagree at all with Ross here, while I also enthusiastically follow the heterologics of democracy Ross tends to chart out in the global context, maintaining that ‘from the Left to the Right “democracy” is the concept governing political imagination.’

   What, however, Ross and Agamben both leave out are the complex and interconnected configurations of class struggle, national liberation, and decolonisation, as they have variously informed and affected and even renewed the struggles for democracy in the ‘third world’—in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—within the larger contexts of capitalism and imperialism—those structures of production relations and power relations that influence, inflect, implicate, and even produce the practice of everyday life in today’s world.

   In fact, Agamben and Ross—both—are not even ready to get this simple but crucially dialectical idea, a global calculus of political economy in fact: no discussions of the advanced zones of capital can be reckoned adequate today without a rigorous engagement with the peripheral formations in the world.

   But let me now at least briefly dwell on democracy-as-a-concept-in-crisis in the Western context. It is important that we make sense of this crisis unfolding in the West, because it is still the West that continues to inform and even jazz up the so-called civil-societal concept of democracy in peripheral formations like ours—the kind of democracy that was exemplarily rehearsed by the last interim government in Bangladesh, a military-backed government that came to impose itself on the people without their mandate, a government that also invoked the ‘people’, thereby forging an unprecedented historical irony. It is instructive to remind ourselves that Fakhruddin’s military-backed interim government even slavishly adopted and mobilised the discursive practices of the US establishment in an attempt to promote ‘democracy’ in Bangladesh: ‘one-eleven’, ‘roadmaps’, ‘ID’, and so on. On the other hand, our traditional national ruling classes and their ideologues or intellectuals have hardly grappled with the question of democracy vis-à-vis the West at the theoretical and ideological—let alone practical—levels, while their role as the lumpen-bourgeoisie has not even enabled them to attain the level of bourgeois democratic consciousness in our part of the world.

   Yet there have been both material and ideological ties—both conjunctural and organic as they are—between foreign capital and the national ruling classes, or between US imperialism and the national ruling classes, the history of which can certainly be traced as further back as the days of even Sheikh Mujibur Rahman himself, one who was known for his almost consistent pro-American stance (subsequently enacted by Ziaur Rahman, of course). Indeed, like the uneven development of capitalism itself, there has been an uneven development of democratic consciousness in Bangladesh. Against this background, then, the struggle for democracy in our country today cannot meaningfully move forward by remaining narrowly or merely political—a point that was anticipated long ago by a poet like Qazi Nazrul Islam, whose repeated and rebellious invocation of the ‘equality of the people’ fiercely foregrounds the questions of class, race, gender, and nationality underlying imperialist-capitalist domination, while underscoring the need for ‘decolonising the mind,’ to use the Kenyan writer-theorist-activist Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Fanon-inflected phrase. It is from Nazrul that I derive this crucial formulation: without decolonisation there is no democratisation in our part of the world. And it is from Bhashani that I derive this dialectical injunction: the struggle for democracy must, then, be cultural in the best political sense of the term.

   Before I unpack further some of the loaded ideas that I have relatively quickly enunciated above, let me briefly point out certain aspects of the crisis of democracy in the West. It is significant that the most formidable and influential contemporary trinity of European or continental philosophers—the French philosopher Alain Badiou, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and the Slovenian philosopher Salvoj Žižek—all have been fiercely critical of liberal democracy in the West, whose contemporary crisis is today starkly evident in the crisis of capitalism itself for the simple reason that liberal democracy has continued to equate ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’ for quite some time now. It is this equation that is now backfiring for ‘democracy’ itself, suggests Alain Badiou in a recent interview, while Agamben suggests that as the French revolution marks the beginning of modern democratic thought in the West, modern democracy itself since then has been undermining its radical character and content by embracing, reproducing, and legitimising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘emergency’. Daniel Ross provides a gloss on this: ‘Whatever pockets of democratic radicalism have flourished momentarily here and there in the West, the tendency has not been an increase of popular control over government, but rather of increasing governmental control over populations.’ One might certainly say that today’s US imperialism remains hell-bent on globalising the thoughts of ‘necessity’ and ‘exception’ and ‘emergency’ in the name of democratising Iraq, Afghanistan, and by extension, the entire ‘third world’, targeted for nothing short of re-colonisation.

   Now Žižek on liberal democracy: ‘“Democracy” is not merely the “power of, by, and for the people,” it is not enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine the state decisions. Democracy—in the way this term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game. “Democracy” means that, whatever electoral manipulation took place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the US presidential elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic”: in spite of obvious electoral manipulations, and of the patent meaninglessness of the fact that a couple hundred of Florida voices will decide who will be the president, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat.’

   I have numerous local disagreements with Žižek, but I quote him here at some length because I think he symptomatically exposes the hollowness of today’s liberal democracy in the West—one that all three of them, Badiou-Agamben-Zizek, want us not only to critique but also to reject once and for all, while cautioning us that the entire circuits of NGOs-civil society-the World Bank/the IMF/the WTO are continuing to bury politics—and the ‘politics of the people’—beneath the ideas of good governance and effective administration and efficient management in an attempt to inaugurate a post-political society. It is this model of what might also be called ‘post-political democracy’ that the past ‘emergency’ government and the members of our so-called civil society have hitherto unabashedly privileged, while evincing clear signs of what the Chicana feminist theorist Emma Perez calls ‘ideological slavery’.

   Of course, Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek make sense with regard to their trenchant critiques of liberal democracy in their parts of the world, but a whole host of ‘third-world’ theorists from the African American WEB Du Bois and the Caribbean CLR James, through the Latin American Jose Carlos Mariategui and the African Kwame Nkrumah, to our Maulana Bhashani—in their different ways and contexts—emphasise the need for re-inventing both politics and democracy in the land of the natives themselves. But how do we re-invent them? First of all, we need to reject completely the tradition of mainstream politics in Bangladesh that has routinely invoked the people without radically centring them and their agendas—a tradition that has never made decolonisation one of their central tasks, a tradition that has long been known for its ideological slavery, a tradition that continues to equate democracy with ‘free and fair elections’ instead of taking democracy as the equality of rights and opportunities, a tradition that remains tied to and even dictated by corporate interests and US imperialism, and, in short, a tradition that has reached its creative dead-end.

   This tradition can never offer democracy for the people—for the majority who are working-class people and peasants in Bangladesh. The rejection in question then constitutes an indispensable condition for the re-invention of democracy—a re-invention that further calls for a permanent cultural struggle against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy, profoundly interconnected as they are. There can never be a real democracy for the exploited and the oppressed under conditions of today’s late capitalism and late imperialism that routinely reduce the ‘people’ to ‘bare lives’ or even statistical numbers in the name of necessity and emergency, while also re-forging new hegemonic and oppressive blocs in the interests of both profit and power. And there can never be a democracy for the majority of our people in Bangladesh, when our legal system, our administrative system or our bureaucracy, our police and military systems, and, no less significantly, our educational system all remain still colonialist in character and content. And there can never be a real democracy in our country, if its people cannot claim and access their own national and natural resources. And there can be no democracy under the conditions of patriarchy—patriarchy that obtains and operates both micro-structurally and macro-structurally in our lives. Our permanent cultural struggle for democracy needs to target all those hegemonic blocs, even destroy them, through the production of new knowledges, new consciousness, and even new democratic beings in the interest of the total emancipation of the people. As our Maulana Bhashani—like the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti—put it once: ‘The telling is in doing.’

   Indeed, every moment can be a moment of rebellion and creation in the service of democracy.

   Azfar Hussain is currently a visiting professor of liberal studies/interdisciplinary studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, while he has recently taught English and world literature at Oklahoma State University, USA.