Democracy goes to a party
Taking up where I left off yesterday, there are letters in the Guardian today on 'Fidel's exit and Cuba's future' that for some reason I can't find online, and one of them (from Mary M. Scott in Aberdeen) reads as follows:
In your leader you describe Cuba as "undemocratic", but this is simply not true. It does not have a multiparty democracy like we do, but there are other kinds of democracy outside that narrow definition. Ninety-five per cent of Cubans vote at elections - and it is not because anyone is forcing them to. It is because people feel very involved in the democratic process and are involved with the selection of candidates. Because there is no multiparty system, point-scoring within politics doesn't exist. If there are problems with a policy, it is often put out to public consultation. The people of Cuba are consulted on a range of issues fairly regularly.OK, so it's only a letter to the press, but the blind spot at the centre of it is typical of the kind of advocacy to which I was referring yesterday, and it's instructive to note what it obscures. It is, of course, true that there are forms of democracy internal to single organizations, and that some organizations are democratically healthier than others, allowing for more debate, internal contestation and so forth. But the game changes where you cannot leave an organization except to go into the political wilderness. The option of exiting and legally contesting a party's progammes and policies from outside is an indispensable democratic resource. Every political party has certain things which it stands for: programmatic values, objectives, policies. If you can only argue from within, then this threatens a limit upon what you can say, since most parties will not accept open opposition to their most central commitments. Ms Scott disparages the point-scoring that can arise from party pluralism but somehow fails to see the obvious constraint that single-party systems impose on the expression and aggregation of political opinion.
