Re: human rights and national sovereignty / actual democratization

At 04:11 PM 5/3/99 +0400, you wrote:

>Glen, you can add this opinion to your stock. The problem with communism
>globally or even at the level of a culturally diverse city is that the
>incentives to produce for others are too low to enable a large
>population to survive. Unless it is accompanied by the brute force of a
>fascist dictator to punish the shirkers and the lazy bones, the people
>will remain poor. If there are too many people, they will starve. To
>enable a large population to survive and flourish, a private property
>system is necessary to provide people with incentives to produce and
>trade. Local communism is possible, but world communism is a recipe for
>misery. 
>

        To allow for chosen 'local communisms' to exist means recognizing
property law for communal as well as individual 'rights.' Individual right's
property regimes are only one sided hegemonies, and sabotage any chosen
forms of more mutualized organizations by establishing the protocol of
'governmentality' (Foucault) on the individual level. If democracy lacks a
concern for social mutualities, what kind of democracy is it when democracy
is normatively understood as a concern for providing social feedback to power?
        In addition, I would pose that the state itself has to be tailored
to include many different forms of human community structurally speaking in
one network of power with a plurality of means to achieve or to speak to
power. It's far from enough to let 'politcs' work it out, since informal
power structures and gatekeeping clientelistic relationships to these
informal structures in the formal structure are the actual 'in/out' of power
and actively set up other's externalized politics. Means should be set up to
provide more choices of speaking to power, to keep the informal networks in
power more atuned to being representative (or they are out of power),
instead of thinking that one can 'get rid' of informal power. One has to set
up situtions where informal power has to 'work' for its constituency against
other potential informal competitors. In addition to the formal structure
setting up informal power relationships in the gatekeeping of highly
circumscribed formal structures procedures for reaching the state at any
level (mentioned in the previous post), it is actually the informal
stuctures of power that rule. Simply place them in a political ecology where
they have to work to keep their formal position. This means balustrading
more localist bases of organization and political economy. This is a double
edged sword of course between state break up and democratization, expecially
when the break up would likely be the course of another state's invasion or
state consolidation on more unrepresentive 'formalized informal' lines, like
the embedded relationships of feudalism.
        To take a United States example, the Founding Fathers failed to
countenance exactly how political parties on the nation-state scale entirely
short-circuited their elaborate systems of balances, once they began to
expand. Power was passed rather formally from Vice-President to President
until the 1820's, when this broke down and set up competiton and space for
nation-state level factionalism in the Jacksonite era.
        I describe this in a bit more detail on a web site
(www.sit.wisc.edu/`mrkdwhit/cdi1.htm - choose the essay link),  for
theoretical as well as practical interest in terms of 'democratization'
strategies. Democraticization means having a state that avoids informal
systems of power co-opting formal processes of politics. Democracy, a
fortiori, has nothing to do with discourses of 'economic expansion,' though
they are generally associated as a causal chain (economic expansion IN ANY
SENSE leads to democracy) justifying foreign 'acceleration/domination' of
other states political economies. "Hey, we're doing them a favor. We're
'democratizing' them." It's more the special case that economic expansion IN
ONLY ONE SENSE can lead to 'democratization.' I would pose this case as
being one where manufacturers are sited in the state, and their competition
for the state's ear leads to a frissioning of state power (democracy), which
is formalized in various ways. Athens. Colonial United States. England in
the 1600's in the textiles economy particularly fighting the "TNC of the
16th century,'the Hanseatics. The Hanse had territoriality 'rights' and
monopoly market 'rights' in England, granted by the Crown itself--later
disputed when the merchants indigenous to England began to challenge the
Hanse's preferential status. 

        So,  this means building states from more than appeals to
'democratic legitimacy' (1)without any organizational means of providing
different routes to power--ways around the systemic gatekeepers that would
expand off the formal state apparatus, (2), without recognition of both
individual 'rights' and communal 'rights--' and (3) with the structural
access at the local level to show it. I would theorize that there are
certain 'positionalities' and typologies of human organization that should
be 'balustraded' together, if democracies on the scale that state's have
attempted to impress them on populaces (and people's desires to have the
state's do so undermining their own political organizational ability) if
'democracy' is to ever mean anything more than, to paraphrase Gore Vidal,
'the Great-American nonsense word.' 
        Once more, I recommend my website, mentioned above, particularly to
comparative-minded sociologists or political scientists interested in
theorizing democracy, with a practical bent. Or (where are you guys?) people
interested in aiding me set up a case scenario in some United States city
for these ideas, an experiment of sorts.
        

My Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison






>
>-- 
>Pat Gunning, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
>Web pages on Subjectivism, Democracy, Taiwan, Ludwig von Mises,
>Austrian Economics, and my University Classes
>http://www2.cybercities.com/g/gunning/welcome.htm
>http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/barclay/212/welcome.htm
>