wide eyed wonderings of the undecided

This is a first and fairly tentative step towards writing about the complicated nature of democracy and economics. Bare with me if it gets dull or is incoherent…

Democracy, meaning ‘the rule of the people’ is losing its relevance. As a concept, it remains the best form of organizing society that humans have ever conceived. Sadly, despite all efforts to achieve it, it is proving elusive.

I reckon politics, the means by which society creates and maintains democracy has become separated from political life – how a society experiences democracy. Loosely our political life is experienced when we wander down the road, go to school, breath the air, limp to hospital, watch fellow citizens live/die abroad in the name of our country, almost everything that happens in the public realm.

The role of a government then, is to manage the public realm. Economists call these public goods – those goods which can be accessed by everyone, and which, when one person consumes it, it doest prevent another from consuming it too – like street lighting, clean air or the armed services.

So, if a government’s role is to manage public goods, the political world is irrevocably intertwined with the economic world. Roads, hospitals, trains, schools, armed services are all economic entities. In the past, this has been the case, the political sphere and the public economic sphere were one of the same thing. This however is changing, in the UK and all over the world.

Now, the economic sphere, operating globally and regulated by the laws of the market (capital) has sought and achieved autonomy from the political sphere (operating in a nationally). I’ll stress now that the point I’m making is not one about economic efficiency, those debates are well rehearsed. The point is that through the states retreat from the public goods, the relevance of democracy has been severely tainted.

This separation is a continuing process, we see it everything from the privatization of public goods, to the shaping of foreign policy.

Privatization, of a public good, take water for example, takes the political issues of access, safety, maintenance, and price out of the political democratic domain and into the unregulated, unaccountable domain of the global economy. Hence Thames water can waste tonnes of water, forcing limited usage and higher prices and face no consequences, or internationally, the poorest people of Tanzania can no longer have access to clean water, owned by French companies, and their government can do nothing about it. Democracy loses relevance.

Taking foreign policy, the most obvious example, the Iraq war, the public good of our armed services has been deployed to ensure energy resources and reconstruction contracts for the global economy. With no relevance to the democracy that sent them there.

It’s a simple point, but a fundamental one I believe. If a government does not manage public goods, what does it do?

I invite people to help me revive my faith in our political system. Tell me I’m wrong, tell me my political life is not slowly but surely being stripped of politics.