Beyond Elections is a full-length documentary film, made by Sílvia Leindecker & Michael Fox, produced by Estreito Meios.
First, let me say that Sílvia Leindecker and Michael Fox have made a film that ought to be seen by anyone who cares about the future of both Latin America and the whole human family. It provides useful hard information (There are 33,000 independent Community Councils in Venezuela, for example) and at the same time, it shows that the poorest of the poor, such as the people who collect rubbish off the dangerous streets of Latin American cities, are articulate and shrewd and exhibit high levels of judgement and management capability.
No-one who sees "Beyond Elections" can fail to be impressed and moved and inspired. It provides fascinating actuality footage of thousands of people participating in Participatory Budgeting, Community Councils, worker cooperatives, social movements and other democratic innovations,
Moreover, there are millions of ordinary people doing this radically democratic kind of civic duty all over Latin America. Something important could be happening here.
Note, however, that I say "could": as a warning against taking the hopeful message of "Beyond Elections" simply at its face value.
The ninety percent of the film that shows people participating in local decision-making processes, working cooperatively and reflecting on their experience, is entirely positive. The other ten percent is inadvertently negative, however, because the interviews with "political leaders", "experts" and academics show a dire absence of a coherent 21st Century theoretical framework for extending democracy "Beyond Elections".
Without such a framework, these admirable popular initiatives cannot be sustained, refined and - most importantly - combined and extended outside their current spheres to every level of society and government.
Let us start, however, from one of the major positives. Here is Paulo Adriano Fernandes, a teenager from the Novament's Hip Hop Group in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.
"Each achievement that you make you want to make more and more. I think that Participatory Budgeting (PB) was our first step. Now we need to take our second, third and fourth steps until we get our perfect democracy. Beginning in Porto Alegre, we need to continue throughout Brazil, so that the whole of Brazil thinks the same way, so we can get to the highest leader in Brazil and perhaps get to the world leaders, and like that transforming this into a perfect world."
That is the challenge that political theorists and practitioners everywhere should be addressing, but the "political leaders", "experts"and academics in the film lack Paulo's visionary boldness and have no idea how such a desirable transformation be achieved.
These deficiencies emerge in the first five minutes with a ludicrously inept and ill-informed account by NYU law-professor Jeremy Waldron, of the form of democracy that was enjoyed by the citizens of Athens 2500 years ago. Waldron succeeds in reinforcing my long-held prejudice that lawyers are psychologically incapable of understanding, still less explaining, democracy. Then, near the end of the film, (Part 15 on YOUTUBE) Martha Harnecker is allowed to imply that Latin America's populist democratic innovations are linked in some way to the kind of "Socialism" that was proclaimed by the brutally totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR until their collapse in the late 1980s.
Helllloooo, Maaarthaaa!! Remember Ceucescu, Honecker, Petrov, Beria, Gomulka, Stalin, Brezhnev et al? The OGPU, MVD? The Gulags? The show trials? The crushing of hope in Poland, Latvia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and elsewhere? The millions of people who were murdered in the name of "Socialism” in Eastern Europe and the USSR?
Seemingly not.
Being a Marxist intellectual evidently means never having to take responsibility for the terrible human consequences of one's ideological imperatives.
And here we have the roots of the theoretical deficiencies that the film inadvertently lays bare. Radical Latin American politicians and intellectuals are steeped in Marxist formulations and analysis. And, although the 20th century applications of this essentially 19th century paradigm have proven ferociously anti-democratic, they persist in the illusion that Marxist discourse has something useful to contribute to the development of increasingly participatory democracies.
If the "expert" contributors to “Beyond Elections” seriously want the democratic innovations shown in the film to blossom into fully-realised participatory democracies, they first need to lay aside their Marxist blinkers, and ask how the information presented in the film can be integrated within a 21st Century theory of “perfect democracy”.
Harnecker herself, for example, says that the city governments that implemented the Participatory Budget processes...
" know that resources are scarce and it is fundamental that decisions over these scarce resources are not made by some group in some office but by the people themselves."
Raul Pont, the Marxist ex-Mayor of Porto Alegre, says,
"It is not enough to be a specialist. The democratic debate that involves hundreds and thousands of people produces very different results than that of the political office or planning on the computer with graphs and tables. It is a little bit of...democracy without end."
What they seem not to know or even think to ask, it seems, is "Why?".
Why do participatory processes produce both very different results and a more effective use of scarce resources? These outcomes are not covered by Marxist theory. The value of popular participation in producing alternative outcomes to those of centralised technocratic decision-making and the better use of scarce resources nowhere figure in Marxist discourse.
These and related phenomenon do figure prominently, however, in the vast but largely unregarded, literature of Systems Science that has emerged in the last thirty years of the 20th Century.Those outcomes are elegantly and completely accounted for by the Cyberneticians' "Law of Requisite Variety", which applies across all cultures and organisational types
If we, as citizens, academics, journalists and especially, political leaders, want to try to realise Paulo Adriano Fernandes' vision, then Systems Science of which Cybernetics is but a part, can provide us with some (though not all) of the key concepts and methodologies we will need.
Systems science enables us to think, act and learn together to continually improve First Steps such as Participative Budgets, and then to identify and take the Second, Third, Fourth.... Fortieth Steps towards "perfect democracy".
Before coming to the connection between systems science and participatory democracies, we need to look at how Paulo Freire foreshadowed the crucial role that Liberating Leaders have to play in providing the resources and the intellectual foundations that citizens will need if millions of them are to contribute to their societies' decision-making processes.
Paulo Freire and the Liberating Leaders of Participatory Democracies.
As an educator, Freire's basic theme was that the most effective learning and change occurs when 'educatees' and 'educators' learn from each other through problem- posing dialogues in what he called 'Culture Circles'
Problem-Posing Dialogues enable the participants in Culture Circles to develop a shared understanding of each other, of their societies and their own circumstances. The new ways of thinking and understanding and the literacy skills that emerge from these dialogues are liberating for everyone, whether educator or educatee.
I first understood the universal relevance of Paulo Freire's ideas in 1982 and 1983 when I was interviewing scores of English working people, systems technicians, managers and senior executives who were taking part in lengthy and successful participative processes of socio-technical systems design and implementation.
Almost all of them said how much they had learnt, how much more confident they were, how they could do things now that they would never have dreamt of trying before, how the working atmosphere had improved, with much more mutual trust and respect, how their customers were much happier, and how they had greatly reduced costs and waste.
This very detailed information revealed similar conduct and liberating outcomes to that of the Culture Circles' problem-posing dialogues reported in more general terms by Freire in “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and, of course, by the people from the barrios and favelas interviewed in “Beyond Elections”.
In our political, cultural and commercial spheres, the Command and Control model of leadership is the norm. This obsolete Leadership Paradigm is based on Monological forms of communication, (such as four hour speeches to passive or blindly adulatory audiences) and, as Paulo Freire shows, it gives rise to oppression,apathy, hopelessness and a congenital failure to learn.
For participatory democracies to be established and sustained, Command and Control Leaders will have to be replaced by 'liberating' political leaders, who have adopted what Freire calls Dialogical forms of communication, participation and learning, so as to generate the high levels of co-operation, trust, optimism, energy and creativity that will be needed to achieve Steps Two, Three and Four
Moving beyond Step One: Tackling Systemic Dilemmas
To start co-creating the kind of “perfect democracy” that Paulo Adriano Fernandes wants to see, Liberating Political Leaders would combine Paulo Freire's Learning Principles with key concepts and methodologies from Systems Science to participatively improve the performances of any complex human system: a school, a hospital, a neighbourhood, a city, a government department, an economy, a whole nation.
When Paulo Adriano Fernandes talks about Participative Budgets being the First Step, he has echoed what I heard in 2003 when I talked to some of the people involved in organising Participative Budgets in Porto Alegre.
They told me that it had been very difficult to go beyond that first step. The Participative Budget process works very well for highlighting and solving specific problems or generating useful facilities. But, the city government could not use the PB process to involve the citizens in more complex, more strategic, more long term city-wide issues: health, education, the environment, transport, etc.. Moreover, having, for example, built schools and funded cooperatives, through the PB, how could the less tangible but more intractable issues - the quality of the education, managing the enterprise effectively - be tackled democratically?
Then in spite of the achievements and popularity of the PB process in Porto Alegre, after fifteen years of electoral success, the PT seemed to have lost its way and run out of ideas, so that its candidate was likely to lose the next election - which he did.
For systems thinkers the explanation is clear.
Step One, the PB process for example, is fine for tackling finite and linear issues, where problems can be clearly defined, where practical, tangible solutions can be devised and implemented to general satisfaction. Such finite and linear problems range all the way from fixing a vacuum-cleaner to building a nuclear power-plant, to putting a man on the moon.
However large or small or complicated they may be, these finite, measurable and linear problems are qualitatively different to the open-ended, complex, inter-connected, constantly shifting systemic dilemmas that will be encountered in Steps Two, Three, Four, and onwards.
These systemic dilemmas are capable of many different definitions, and incapable of finite solutions. They emerge in every complex human organisation. What is our purpose? How do we improve our productivity? How do we reduce staff turnover? How do we reduce costs and waste while maintaining the quality of our products and services? How do we reduce crime and make our city safer? How do we eliminate corruption? How do we improve the behaviour of our students? How do we raise educational standards? How do we manage the economy? How can we make our city more democratic, more efficient and more participative? How do we reduce our city's carbon footprint, while constantly improving the quality of life for our citizens? How do we avoid the so-called "iron" Law of Bureaucracy in our 21st century democracies?
And so on, all the way up to the level of the state and beyond.
Such systemic dilemmas can only be tackled if our societies are led by Liberating leaders who have a good understand of systems science and use a wide range of Participative System-Change Processes to engage us all in finding ways to resolve them. Traditional political, economic and sociological formulations, whether of the left or the right, are as obsolete as pre-Copernican cosmology, pre-Darwinian biology or pre-Pasteuran medicine.
Put another way, our Liberating Political Leaders will think, act and learn with us to co-create ever-more participatory democracies by using concepts and methodologies derived from the work of Systems Thinkers, such as Paulo Freire, Stafford Beer, Horst Rittel, Peter Checkland, Joseph Tainter, W. Edwards Deming, Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Peter Senge, Tarso Genroe, Karl Polanyi, Ricardo Semler, Dee Hock, John Seddon, Joe Trippi, Guy Routh, Steve Keen and many more.
When so much political debate in Latin America and elsewhere is dominated by an often unacknowledged Marxian perspectives, it is hard to introduce novel ways of thinking. But, these are crucial issues for the future of the whole of the human family and I hope that Silvia Leindecker and Michael Fox will want to explore them in other films. Paulo Adriano Fernandes and millions like him deserve no less.
iPaulo Freire: PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED and EDUCATION: THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM. TBC
