Dân chủ là gì Và Việt Nam có dân chủ không?

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Dân chủ là cội nguồn để đi đến:

1. Dân chọn được người tài đúng chuyên môn để đưa đất nước phát triển về mọi mặt

2. Giám sát giữa 3 cơ quan Hành pháp, Lập pháp và Tư pháp để tránh lạm quyền, gây tham nhũng

Disclaimer: This is a Pakistani perspective on the question.

Let's start this with a story.

Ajay Kapur was the director of Global Strategy Research at Citibank, during the oil spike in the first decade of the 21st century where oil would go on to reach 140 bucks a barrel in 2008 (and 160 USD a barrel in around 2014 I think).

Ajay headed research into why the US equity market was not being impacted by the spike in oil prices. Logically speaking, a spike in oil prices in the US should lead to a spike in fuel prices at the pumps leading to less disposable income in the hands of US consumers. Which means, they would purchase fewer goods and spend less, leading to a businesses having less income. This would lead to a reduction in economic activity that should translate into a decline in stock prices for companies impacted by the reduced income.

The disconnect between stock market and the economic situation of the US was explained when Kapur factored in the fact that the US was a plutonomy: where the vast majority of its wealth was held by a small, concentrated cabal of families whose economic sway was vastly more powerful than the numerically larger but economically less powerful working class (and shrinking middle class).

Ajay’s purpose for these findings was to figure out which stocks his clients should invest in in the US market during a high oil price period, and he correctly identified luxury companies as the stable stock to invest in. Plutocrats are not impacted by fuel prices. They don’t live on budgets and from paycheck to paycheck. Their spending on luxury items would remain as is even during a recession and thus this stock would continue to yield profits to its investors.

But the more disturbing revelation of Ajay’s report was as follows:

When wealth concentration and inequality reach such heights that your average citizen isn’t really owning much of the economic pie anymore, then answer me this: In a political system where political factions need money to generate influence and presence and retain political power, who should they approach as potential donors?

The average citizen? Or the plutocrats?

If 20 families in my country own 60–70% of the wealth in it, what exactly is my impetus as a politician to serve the needs of the people when my access to the wealth that drives the political machinery stems from only a few notable wealthy elites?

If you have 5 million people living in desperate poverty, illiterate and malnourished vs 200 living in ultra-elite, wealthy status, it’s not hard in a democracy to manipulate electoral politics and voting in a manner that the votes of the 5 million end up not counting despite their numerical advantage.

Which is why democracy runs aground in nations like Afghanistan or the Latin American banana republics.

Americans surely must feel that their country is a democratic one. They can vote, they have separations of power, there is freedom of speech, courts of law.

But I suppose if you posed the same question to black communities wracked with police brutality, gang warfare and urban decay the concept of being a democratic nation suddenly doesn’t have much of a glow to it.

And I guess when Kent state university students were being gunned down in their college campuses for protesting against their country’s participation in war crimes in Southeast Asia, well America must not have felt very democratic back then.

Similarly, put 50 Pakistani elder men in a drawing-room to discuss politics and they will feel that it’s quite a democratic setting.

Ask their wives who have been banished to the Kitchen to cook feasts for their pleasure, and ask how much democracy exists in the stench and heat of the Kitchen, amidst hot burning metal pans and sweat pouring through silk shirts.

The tribe may define their tribal Jirga as democratic, even as it passes death by stoning sentences. The Swedes may define their democracy as flawed if the Prime Minister takes a BMW to work instead of a bike.

Democracy itself is a difficult thing to measure. We have tried though. We have indexes that measure how free a country is.

These same indexes declared Russia quite free in the 90s, under Yeltsin, even as young women disappeared from the streets, kidnapped to be trafficked into brothels in Europe. Or young Russian men dying in wars in Chechnya and succumbing to AIDS, alcoholism, and despair that wracked post-USSR collapse Russia.

If you ask somebody from Pakistan, they will define the perfect democracy as “corrupt” politicians hanging from lamp posts, judges and generals calling the shots and liberal “fascists” put in their place.

Same for other countries like America where the Republican definition of democracy varies immensely from the Bernie Bro's definition of it.

Quite often: Democracy's definition changes to suit the advantage of the person defining it. The college-educated, suburban soccer mom might voice her opposition to the illiterate getting a vote.

The army man may say that veterans should have a greater say in a democracy than civilians.

The rural farmer may want to stick it to the big city types and reduce the power of urban, populous areas in favor of the vast countryside with maybe a dozen people per dozen square kilometer.

Given all this differences in perceptions for what it means to be a democracy among people, as well as difficulty in agreeing to what standards a democracy should be measured by, the important thing to keep in mind when trying to study China’s democracy is simply that the definition of democracy and perception of it in China may not be the same as the one man, one vote democracy of the other nations.

From the Pakistani viewpoint: China’s democracy is built, not around the principle of equal representation, but wealth circulation.

But it seems quite clear to us at least that the Chinese government ensures a sense of equality and representation among its citizens not by giving them a vote directly, but by circulating wealth among them so that they remain relevant and key players to the Chinese economy. And thus, retain a relevant voice in public affairs by means of their individual economic power.

There has been a concerted attempt to paint China’s political and economic philosophy as a capitalist or semi-capitalist, particularly from the proponents of capitalism who are eager to use China’s success to bolster the credentials of the free market, neo-liberal, deregulated form of economics.

But the view from Islamabad sees the PRC leadership as still fairly dedicated Marxists who still uphold the philosophy of Marxism even as their methods have changed.

Central to the concept of the Marxist theory of labor is the fact that society is split between the working class who produce all the goods and commodities that society needs through their labor. And on top of them is a ruling class that takes the surplus-value of their labor and returns to them a fraction of the value while keeping the remaining portion with themselves while having contributed no labor to the production of goods.

This is the basis of the strained social relations in society and the injustice that characterizes it. That one class takes more than it puts into society in terms of labor (whether physical or intellectual). And leads to the emergence of class warfare.

If you don’t want to go all out with Marxist revolutionary tactics and seize the means of production/abolish private property: the softer approach is to circulate wealth in your society by returning a greater fraction of the surplus-value of labor put in by the working class back to them.

Wealth circulation can take many forms: It can be a literal transference of wealth from government taxation to the working class. Or it can be the implementation of social welfare programs, affordable healthcare, education, and subsidies, etc.

This lessens the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor and the surplus value they are deprived of, leading to a softening of class warfare lines and a just, equitable and egalitarian society to rise.

The Scandinavian nations can be good examples of this.

But note, that the definition of the just and equal society in Marxist POVs is not based on concepts like freedom of speech, the right to vote and so on. But on economic terms. Almost as if the ideals of freedom of speech and the right to vote can only arise properly from the seed of an economically just society where wealth is circulated and resources distributed fairly.

This is the basis of the Chinese democratic ideal: Not to blindly give the vote and freedom of speech while having no plan for economic wealth circulation. But to develop a system of wealth circulation first that allows for wealth redistribution and poverty alleviation.

And it has worked:

Because human freedom and rationality as ideals and the human intrinsic desire to live in a free, just society can only arise if the material and economic conditions a person finds themselves in are just in a material manner.

Otherwise, you end up with a democracy where the top 1% wealthy elite control the bulk of the economic pie and utilize their wealth to control media, political, law enforcement institutions to control and neutralize the voting power of the millions under them.

But if you have a large, educated and materially well off society that is capable of thinking about subjects beyond their day to day survival, then political ideals like freedom and democracy have a better chance of automatically manifesting (bar some external manipulation).

Countries like Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan right now are examples of nations where the ideals of one man, one vote and democracy were implemented without any care given to the economic systems of wealth circulation and wealth redistribution.

A democratic system without institutions strong enough to implement a nationwide, effective taxation system, anti-corruption bodies strong enough to ensure the tax was spent on the public welfare and legislative bodies honest enough to implement social welfare and public benefits programs is a democratic system that gives way to rapacious exploitation.

And you end up with elected parliamentarians looting the public exchequer, tin-pot dictators offshoring billions in wealth, political parties implementing tributary payoffs to maintain goons on the payroll. Billions if not trillions in wealth are offshored, misplaced, misspent or not utilized at all.

And a democracy becomes a desperate scramble to steal and accumulate as many resources as you can to protect your clan, family or tribe at the expense of everyone else. Public education remains underfunded. Children die of treatable diseases on hospital floors. The police serve as hired thugs for the ruling elite. And the folk at the top accumulate and concentrate wealth and the products of the working class’s labor while the working class toils in misery at the bottom retaining a fraction of the value they create.

This is the heart of the reason why post-colonial nations that adopted democracy before they could adopt strong institutions capable of taxation, anti-corruption and wealth circulation remained trapped in systemic poverty.

Which is how we end up with countries where you are free to vote as you please but you can die of thirst and starvation, gunned down in the street by opposing political factions, die of treatable disease and have the grim duty of watching your children grow up malnourished and illiterate.

The right to vote can mean so little in a society built upon economic injustice.

China may have adopted capitalistic ways of generating value but they have retained the Marxist philosophy behind what to do with that surplus-value. In that, this surplus-value is invested back into the working class as affordable education, healthcare, jobs and so on to return to them the very value they create.

And this economic justice is what translates into their attempts at creating a just society where the CPC manages and reduces the tensions between the working class and the owners of private property.

– Princess Irulan (Dune, Frank Herbert)

If you think the CPC has cracked the code to economic justice though, you would be wrong. And even within the mighty political iron framework of the CPC, cracks have begun to appear:

Alas, nothing lasts forever. And while it seems that the engine of economic growth will continue to churn, for now, it appears that the political will and appetite within state institutions inside the PRC to restrain and contain the wealth concentration of wealthy, politically well-connected elite will slowly erode as the comforts of a post-revolutionary government settle in a Brezhnev style ossification of state apparatus.

It should be kept in mind that the systemic damages from wealth concentration aren’t apparent immediately but take decades to manifest. And while the wealth concentration today may seem like a harmless side effect of Asia’s economic rise, 3 to 4 decades down the line the picture will be of ultra wealthy Chinese billionaires offshoring billions in wealth to starve public universities of research funds and pushing a shrinking middle class into poverty.

Exactly what’s happening in America today.

And THAT will be what undermines China’s democratic ideal far more than any ability or inability to vote.

This is not a deterministic future though. And the anti-corruption drives under Xi have yielded results that can be measured empirically if you know what data to look at:

There will always be a fork in the road moment for nations where they can choose what kind of future they want by deciding what aspects of society they are willing to tolerate and which ones they aren’t. Quite often, it’s the leaders at the top who set the pace for this tolerance and the lower hierarchies adjust accordingly.

From our experience in Pakistan, we have been a flawed democracy at times and a military dictatorship at others. In either case, we have seen the power of our votes neutralized in a system where economic resources are concentrated and offshored or integrated into tributary systems. And not given back to the toiling masses as education, healthcare, and subsidies. Leaving millions trapped in desperate poverty, willing to sell their votes for a single meatloaf (this happens literally btw).

Forget freedom and democracy, people are not even aware of what the power of their votes mean in a society where the wealthy elite control the levels of public education and media.

So perhaps we would be keen to explore whether we too, should adopt the approach of establishing economic justice before we establish democratic ideals. Or perhaps democratic ideals are something that could arise as a consequence of economic justice.

Only time will tell.

Nguồn: