Chapter #3: - DEMOCRACY AS A DEEP CONVICTION

Democracy is a term that comes from the Greek civilization and means “the government of the people.” But democracy involves a lot more than the way to govern a country, as it is directly related to the way in which humans assume their life. In Ancient Greece, the rights and liberties of citizens did not include foreigners, slaves and women. They weren´t able to practice the Greek democracy. After the fall of the Greek culture and the uprising of the Middle Ages and Feudalism, the new ideas of Illustration gave life to the Liberal Democracy idealized by philosophers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, which consisted in strong institutions and periodic elections. The Liberal Democracy brought the principle of the division of power into three branches to conduct the modern State, but at the beginning it denies the possibility of building a democracy connected to the daily life of the people. Therefore, during the French Revolution women were not admitted at the Assembly which was writing the Declaration of Men and Citizen Rights, so a French woman called Olympe de Gouges pushed for the Declaration of Women and Citizen Rights and for that reason the French revolutionaries condemned her to the guillotine shortly after.

The construction of Democracy and its meanings have been an arduous mission for humanity through time. Ecuador was born with a constitution that just allowed the vote of literate men, older than 22 years old, owners of properties assessed in 300 pesos or more and that have a non servile profession such as a physician, lawyer or priest. In 1869, Gabriel Garcia Moreno promulgated a constitution which gave unlimited power to the President, created the Death Penalty to political offenders and imposed the Catholic Religion, not just as the only religion allowed by the State, but also as a requirement for citizenship. The conception of democracy had changed with the time in all parts of the Earth, as in Ecuador, but the radical and deep democracy has the same meaning for the entire world: Respect to other people´s thinking, rights and liberties.

Throughout history the world attested that not only the Established Order violated the democratic principles because the Left didn´t understand for many years the real meaning of democracy. The Left was slanted. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union prohibited its members to write poetry because they denominated that gender of literature as a “bad bourgeois habit” and they consider that the Leftist writers had to write just the literature of the leaflets. The situation of the women didn´t change a lot under the socialist regimes of the 20th Century; in some countries of Eastern Europe women had to ask for permission from the Party to get married. The socialist women wanted to combine the class struggle with the emancipation of women but the answer they received from the socialist leaders were indifference, chauvinist and hostility. For these reasons, the leftist precursor of Feminism, Flora Célestine Therese Trsitán, said: “Women are the proletarians of the Proletariat.”

Thus, the obsolete point of view of the Old Left wanted to manage the great issues, not the daily and common ones of the people; politics does not embrace all topics of life. Democracy is more than a speech. The Chilean feminists used to say while they fought against the dictatorship: “Democracy in the house and in the bed.” That is the objective of the New Left; socialize democracy as a permanent practice in all human activities. The class struggle and economic relations are not the only forms of discrimination: the lack of democracy supposes the political, social, educational, labor and family violence, and abuses of different types of power, which are shown in every human activity. Democracy is the recovery of everybody’s rights.

Rosa Luxemburg thought that the true democracy would be the revolutionary power of the workers. Now, in the 21th Century, it is urgent to accept that power would not be just for workers, but for all the citizens. The New Left has to accept that the problems of democracy have to be solved with more democracy, obviously questioning the old paradigms of the Liberal Democracy exclusively reduced to electoral competition. The New Left believes in democracy and accepts that the way to come to power is through the existing democratic mechanisms. The principles of Democracy should not only be applied for the institutional life of the State, but also for our private lives, in that way the democratic values could be applied on economic opportunities as well.