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Democracy Is More Ours than Theirs

Submitted May 31, 2004 - 4:31 pm by Al Giordano
Franz,

Re:

"Democracy, a direct product of the bourgeois-capitalist French and Industrial Revolutions, was invented to serve only ruling class interests.

When Subcomandante Marcos signs virtually all of his communiqués "¡Justicia! ¡Libertad! ¡Democracia!" he is clearly speaking about a more evolved form of democracy (and so am I) than what the French took from the Greeks and what the North Americans took from the French. Over 200 plus years, the concept has evolved.

Particularly in recent years, in Latin America, the "counter-conquest" of the idea of democracy from a tired and stale concept of "rights given by a text" to a more decentralized, communitarian, "from below" model reflected for millennia in many indigenous traditions, has evolved in giant leaps.

(You can even see this debate in the early years of the United States of America, when Jefferson pleaded that "democracy" could only work if power is decentralized... he lost that debate.)

For those reasons, and more, I do not discount democracy as an ideal, nor am I willing to surrender it's flag over to the enemy. In its truest, highest, greatest form, it does not belong to the enemy. It belongs to us, all of us, collectively. Both Marcos and Chavez have gone great lengths to recapture that flag, and I think that has much to do with their successes.

Al

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