1 May 2015 ---- In this essay, I start to debate and contest the political theory produced
to classify all parties, and in extension, all political organizations, inside an umbrella
that models political participation inside indirect democracy in a liberal approach.
Before going deeper into criticism, I will highlight some aspects. This article is not
intended to enter the specific debate about the theories of political parties, but to
contest the essential part of the hegemonic approach for political organizations
definitions. We argued against the Marxist and Marxist-Leninist tradition in the two first
essays. In this one and the next, we will argue against the theory produced to reinforce
the powers that are political models in Western societies. Besides struggling against
hegemonic definitions, I must recognize that political science has discussed this subject
extensively, and that the object of analysis - the political party - is a unit of
essential structural analysis for the area, and that there is a large (and boring)
literature about it.
I recognize the validity of all these study approaches (the hegemonic ones), but I conduct
a study that, from the ideological point of view, approaches the party in terms of the
functioning of its structure; hence, there is a certain emphasis based on the terms and
concepts used by classical theory. This approach of the organic functions intends to
observe the types of role that this unit of analysis plays in the exercise of the process
of Democratic Radicalization (and, obviously, in the Democratic Confederalism process),
understanding the political front inside a liberal democracy as a permanent strategy
including the popular action, forcing the State to be responsive, and being consistent
with the expansion of rights and individual and collective freedom, given the multiplicity
of subjects, demands, identities, and general issues.
I start with the premise that the substantial increase in social participation and
organized protest creates the conditions for increasing social tension, passing through
this route the form of projection and attempt of hegemony consolidation of the anarchist
political organization or the anarchist party - based on the incidence and integration of
the organized structures of lower classes.
Within this context, my fundamental analytical axis is the functioning of the political
organization and the necessary training for its projection considering the strategic
concept of radicalization of demands through the participative and protesting route. The
aspect that changes with respect to the traditional method of political science production
- is the explicit (not implied like a hidden premise) ideological point of view - and the
location of the voluntary and integrative social organization (political party with
cadres having internal democracy) being strategic for the accumulation of power from a
labor and left libertarian point of view.
Before returning to the theme of modelling of this organization, it is interesting to
analyze some of the current literature. I discuss in particular what concerns the
characterization of the party, the type of participation, the macro-political environment
(which democracy?), and the format of the long-term process where this organization
operates. For the characterization of political parties, a definition is presented by
Bobbio in his famous political dictionary. There, Norberto Bobbio and his associates
describe the party as:
[...] the party encompasses very different social structures, from groups bound together
by personal and particular ties to complex organizations of bureaucratic and impersonal
style, whose characteristic is moving within the sphere of political power. [...] the
associations that we can consider to be actual parties were created when the political
system reached a certain degree of structural autonomy, internal complexity and work
division allowing, on the one hand, a process of political decision-making involving
diverse parts of the system and, on the other hand, that among these parties include, in
principle or in fact, representatives of those whom the policy decisions refer to [...]
Bobbio and his associates characterize the parties as a kind of mass organization or mass
electoral and this is seen as a phenomenon equivalent to an organizational setting and as
a set of functions developed. I characterize these functions, among many, such as
political representation, political mediation, political questioning, influence on key
decisions of a society, cadre school for the elite, specific power niche, and promoter of
various diffuse and specific interests. All of the definitions above are well fixed within
the traditional and hegemonic way of doing politics. Not for our project.
As long as the strategic goal is different from oligarchic parties, a political
organization devoted to social change is a recipient that stimulates and accumulates
social power and experiences of social protest. The role of the strategic discussion
centre is the nature of a social organization like a political party.
The similarities between the anarchist and democratic confederalism traditions and
theory are evident again. If we compare my premises above to the following text it is easy
to observe similarities. Reading the interview of Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK)
Executive Council Co-President Bese Hozat (in PKK English website) there is an almost
identical definition of what must be the party's mission and crucial points. I thought it
would be better to enumerate some of these crucial points:
"...it remains inadequate to define the PKK as an insurrection movement because of the
fact that the party has presented the democratic nation paradigm, improved the democratic
confederal system of peoples, built an alternative project of democratic peoples' system
against the five thousand year old statist government system and is leading the building
of this project now. With the democratic, free and equal form of life and the democratic
ecological system what the PKK has built is the only system that will liberate the
peoples. The Kurdish people are today giving a struggle to build this system on the basis
of their own will. In the current state of affairs, the PKK has gone beyond a movement and
become a social living system."
A political organization can be a social institution for educating a new ruling class
elite as recognized inside liberal and hegemonic theory. On the other hand, it can be a
place for developing a revolutionary mindset feeding real socialist projects into day by
day life, without losing perspective on the strategic assets. A political organization
that is not a self-proclaimed vanguard will never become a new elite, like the
Nomenklatura in a soviet model, but will organize itself to operate as a motor for social
change.
Bruno Lima Rocha has a PhD and MSc in Political Science and is a Professor of
International Studies and Geopolitics teaching at 3 local universities in Southern Brazil.
website: www.estrategiaeanalise.com.br / e-mail: strategicanalysis@riseup.net / Facebook:
blimarocha@gmail.com
http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/north-kurdistan/bridges-between-anarchism-and-democratic-confederalism-3.html
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