Author: DANIEL JIMÉNEZ / UNIVERSO VIVO. "If the elections were open to all kinds of people, the property of the landowners would be insecure." This phrase is not from any dictator from North Africa, but from the main forger of the US constitutional system. UU., James Madison. Madison was the ideologue of the American Magna Carta, which later served as a reference for the French Revolution and subsequent bourgeois revolutions that gave rise to our current democracies.
The students of Madison's work usually agree that the American Constitution served, paradoxically, as a brake on the democratic trend of the time, which sought to open the institutions to the direct popular participation. That is to say, the modern bourgeois democracies were already born with a trick, so that they were democratically controllable.
Unfortunately for those who are leading these controlled democracies, it is increasingly difficult to hide the exclusionary nature of such political systems. The Real Democracy movement has just put it in evidence perhaps more clearly than ever. Citizens have become aware, as those protests show, that they are not welcome as a political actor; rather, it is seen as an upstart by the ruling class, except when it touches that of the `` democracy party ''; that is, vote every four years. So I know we are invited to your party, to that party that we and we pay for.
The leaders of the great ruling parties have made the mistake of being too clear about who really rules in these controlled democracies, which after all are no more than pyramid power systems. The base, which is the citizenship itself, barely counts, except to support the full weight of the building; that is, to be the pagans of the system. A step further up is the political class, much smaller in size, but which monopolizes decisions that affect the future of the governed, which have very different Easy to climb a step and become leaders.
Finally, in the very small peak of the pyramid is what they call the markets. That curious euphemism, so widespread by the mass media, is tremendously useful for not putting names and surnames to the big bankers and private fund managers who hide under a diffuse denomination, little transparent and defined, in tune with the opacity of the markets themselves.
Interestingly, if the mobility between the base of the pyramid and the next step, that of the ruling political class, seems almost impossible, the situation is completely different when we talk about this intermediate step and the top of the pyramid. In fact, rather than a separation between the two stadiums, we should talk about a revolving door, which makes a great businessman overnight become an important political leader, and vice versa. It is worth mentioning Berlusconi and Aznar as examples in both ways, but the cases are so many that they would give for several books.
In short, those of us who support the mobilizations of Real Democracy We already do it because we want to tear down the pyramid. The thinkers-architects of this unfair socioeconomic model call us anti-systems. They talk like this because they consider that we have no other proposals, even though they are already being built; from the base, not from the pyramid. Unfortunately, they are unable to understand that the Sol camp is already a new model of architecture. As Buenaventura Durruti once said, "we are not afraid of ruins, because we carry a new world in our hearts."
Daniel Jimenez is one of the Universal Reporters of Universo Vivo. Person closely linked to the world of social movements, he was a member of VdeVivienda and currently collaborates on communication issues with the Social Action section of the CGT union in Madrid. He is also responsible for communication of Ecolo Verdes. His texts can be read in the main alternative media, such as Rebellion, Kaos en la Red or Diagonal.
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