Did we fight for Freedom or For Democracy?

Paul Mawisa Chauke

>>> DomzaNet <[email protected]> 1/5/2010 3:37 pm >>>
Democracy or Freedom?


A review of “The State and Local Government”, by Peter Latham,
Manifesto Press 2010

To pre-order this book, please e-mail Dr Peter Latham,
[email protected] 


Dominic Tweedie, Johannesburg, South Africa, 5 January 2010

What is democracy for? Is it good? Why? Are freedom and democracy the
same thing, or do these two contradict one another?

These are some of the prior questions that need to be answered before
studying local or municipal government in detail. The thirteen
chapters
of Peter Latham’s “The State and Local Government” begin with
four on
the necessary theoretical underpinnings to precede his examination of
Local Government. The last three, and particularly the very last
chapter, attempt to synthesise the theoretical background with the
valuable, detailed, empirical and historical material that makes up
the
middle part of the book.

Now, which is boss: Democracy or Freedom? Christopher Caudwell had no
doubt. In his essay “Liberty, A study in bourgeois illusion”,
1938,
Caudwell wrote that “This good, liberty, contains all good.” He
wrote:
“I am a Communist because I believe in freedom.”


But in a great deal of political literature, including some communist
literature, it is not freedom but democracy that is taken as the
be-all
and end-all of politics.

Lenin was bold enough to sort this matter out in Chapter 4 of “The
State and Revolution”, a book he commenced writing on the eve of the
Bolshevik-led Revolution of October, 1917, and which was interrupted
by
that enormous event. The book, as planned, was never completed.

Lenin was unequivocal:

“…it is constantly forgotten that the abolition of the state means
also
the abolition of democracy; that the withering away of the state means
the withering away of democracy. …Democracy is a state which
recognizes
the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e., an
organization for the systematic use of force by one class against
another, by one section of the population against another. We set
ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i.e., all
organized
and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in
general.”

Democracy is a system of coercion of the minority by the majority, and
therefore it is not freedom. Freedom will arrive with the withering
away of the state. Thus spoke Lenin, who proceeded to argue that
therefore, the withering away of the state should commence at once,
and
that nothing should be done to preserve or restore the state. It
should
be smashed.

At that historical moment (the weeks in 1917 on the eve of the seizure
of state power by the combined force of workers and peasants) Lenin
was
extending himself to the limits of his intellectual powers as a
professional revolutionary. The withering away of the state, sometimes
regarded as a marginal curiosity, loomed in Lenin’s mind as the most
important factor.

“All power to the Soviets” means all power to democracy. Lenin saw
that
this, his own slogan, was not enough. Lenin saw that the revolution,
with democracy as its immediate necessary but not sufficient
condition,
would have to transcend democracy. He saw that the coercive power of
the majority that was about to execute the Russian Revolution, would
itself have to be revolutionised.

The next five to six years that passed until Lenin’s death in 1924
became both a struggle for democracy, and also a double struggle
against democracy. After Lenin’s death, both democracy and freedom
were
checked and dominated by a static force, the proletarian state.

Lenin, almost single-handedly, and battling his own self-contradictory
impulses, was aiming beyond democracy. All the other major figures,
including Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, and not only
Stalin, were proceeding towards the solidification of the proletarian
state power.

Contrary to myths popularised by their class enemies, democracy and
freedom were not altogether eliminated from the Soviet Union. If that
had been the case, very little would have been possible under the
socialism that they had. But because of the restriction of democracy,
and also because of their failure to transcend democracy, the Soviet
Union eventually fell.

Disruption by a rigid element

What happened to the Soviet Union was the disruption of a stable
chaotic system by the introduction of a rigid element. This
terminology
will be more fully explained below. Suffice it to say that any return
to democracy, as well as the necessary transcendence of democracy,
will
have to involve an understanding of self-balancing non-state social
systems, so that disruptive remedial interventions are never again
imposed.

An attempt to understand this is also an attempt to make a better,
more
fully-developed and adequate revolutionary template even than
Lenin’s
in “The State and Revolution”. The late Cyril Smith argued that
Lenin
and particularly Trotsky lacked the philosophical theory to cope with
the demands of the revolution. Lenin was the best prepared in this
regard, and Trotsky was one of the worst prepared, according to Smith.
Stalin, writing his own job-description as the General Secretary of
the
CPSU, did what came naturally not only to him, but also to those
around
him.

Wrote Smith (in Chapter 2, “How the Marxists buried Marx”, Marx at
the
Millennium, 1998):

“…when Stalin erected his massive historical road-block to
communism,
he exploited to the full every weakness contained in the outlook of
Lenin’s party. Unless we investigate these defects as thoroughly as
we
can, it will prove impossible to find our way through. …Lenin and
Trotsky, as well as other leaders of the International, struggled to
find a theoretical framework within which to tackle the terrible
economic and social issues facing the Soviet state. …‘Marxism’, as
they
understood it, already formed a barrier, walling them off from Marx
himself.”

Lenin and Ron Press: Beyond democracy

Ron Press, engineer, communist, and unsung hero of the South African
liberation struggle, passed away on 5 November 2009. While looking for
material on the late Cde Ron, I came across an essay of his on the
Internet. Like Cyril Smith, Ron Press had identified a gap in the
theory of the Russian revolutionists. In “New tools for Marxists”,
1994, Press wrote:

“Unfortunately as with all previous summations of human experience,
the
sum was codified and turned into a rigid dogma. …One reason was that
the sciences which were and are the powerhouse of rational thinking,
had not yet developed the tools to deal with the problems of
uncertainty, complexity and chaos.”

“I submit that we are still on the same treadmill and it is no
longer
good enough. We need to grasp the new developments in the study of
complexity, chaos theory, and non-linear mathematics. We must not set
up more and bigger committees. Central government structures must be
subservient to and act at the behest of the organizations of the
people
and no longer try to know it all and control.

“It is time to stand back and with the latest tools developed by
humankind to take a new look at forms of organisation.”

“Dictatorships take it upon themselves to organise society for the
good
of the dictatorship. They impose stasis. “Socialism” under the
guidance
of the CPSU imposed stasis for the good of the people. In the
beginnings of building socialism in the Soviet Union the Party acted
as
the exchange system between the nodes (for example the Soviets the
trade unions etc.). It however became not an instrument for exchanges
but for bureaucratic control. Without free exchange the system
relapsed
into stasis.”

“The greater the bandwidth and the greater the speed of
communication
between nodes of society the greater the possibilities of necessary
changes being accommodated and stasis being avoided.”

“…stasis means the inevitable sudden crossover into chaos and
collapse.”

“…if there is a lesson to be drawn from the study of complexity it
is
that a complex system, given a very “simple” goal (in our case the
well
being of humankind) develops its own best methods of operation and
organisation. Solutions emerge from the system itself. Imposition of
solutions by committees …are incapable of any but makeshift temporary
periods of stability followed by periods of violent chaos.”

“In the Soviet Union the …system was destroyed by restricting the
bandwidth of communication, and making one node all powerful.”

Smith and Press are both reaching towards systems that stabilise
themselves without authority or, in other words, systems that remain
stable without the benefit of anything resembling a “state”.

Actually-existing stateless systems

It has always been difficult for revolutionaries to conceive of the
“withering away of the state” as anything more tangible than
“News from
Nowhere”, or as other than a vanishing point which, while defining
our
perspective, is fixed at infinity and will therefore never be reached.

But in fact, as one would have to expect if one accepts Ron Press’s
mathematics, there are many systems which have always operated without
a “state”.

The most obvious of these is literally right under your nose:
Language.

Language can be modified by any of its countless users without
permission. Language is stable, and so stable that it practically
defines humanity. Yet it has no authority guiding it. It is stable,
but
not static or chaotic. It has been with us since the dawn of humanity.
It is robust.

Coming up to date, the Internet is another stateless system. Billions
of nodes communicate freely. Bandwidth increases. As it does so, the
system becomes more, not less stable.

Is this a “market” theory? Are we speaking of the notorious
“hidden
hand” by another name? No. The problem with the bourgeois market is
precisely that it is not free. It never was a free market and could
not
possibly have been. It got progressively less free, until now it is an
open sham riddled with blatant, hypocritical monopoly.

In this respect, the bourgeois world is as “Stalinist” as the old
Soviet Union was. Actually, Stalinism is not a phenomenon that can be
defined in relation to one “prime evil” person. The urge to make
“one
node all powerful” is a bourgeois urge. It is the urge towards
monopoly.

Language and the Internet are not market systems; nor are they
evolutionary systems of selfish genes or of selfish “memes”. They
are
not democracies. There is no majority rule. They are free-willing
systems in which “the free development of each is the condition for
the
free development of all” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist
Manifesto, 1848). They are commonplace and normal. They are the
“commons”. They are actually-existing communism. They are the
primitive
communism that never went away. They are the living example of how the
“Subject of History” can be, and already is to this extent,
materialised.

Another example of a stateless system is the Critical Pedagogy of
Paulo
Freire; and there are many more. A taxonomy of stateless systems is a
possibility, and would be a boon to those who must wrestle with the
state.

The dry-stone wall

“Remedial” work on a dry stone wall is a good illustration of the
disruption of a stable chaotic system by the introduction of a rigid
element.

A dry-stone wall is a compression structure built of free stones
stacked in such a way that any settlement will tighten, and not loosen
the wall. Such walls, made of materials found in situ, can last for
hundreds of years, given a small amount intelligent maintenance. But
the wrong sort of maintenance can destroy the wall.

The loose capping stones at the top of the wall are crucial. They lock
the structure together at its apex, but because they are free, they
are
apt to be dislodged from time to time.

Ill-advised people quite frequently cement the capping stones, hoping
to save themselves the trouble of replacing the ones that occasionally
fall. This prevents the capping stones from settling their weight upon
the wall as it slowly subsides. This in turn allows the next layer of
stones to become loose and fall, causing a hole to develop which will
grow over time until the wall is completely breached.

Rule 6.4

The pivotal rule of the SACP’s constitution is Rule 6.4. It states:

“Members active in fraternal organisations or in any sector of the
mass
movement have a duty to set an example of loyalty, hard work and zeal
in the performance of their duties and shall be bound by the
discipline
and decisions of such organisations and movement. They shall not
create
or participate in SACP caucuses within such organisations and
movements
designed to influence either elections or policies. The advocacy of
SACP policy on any question relating to the internal affairs of any
such organisations or movements shall be by open public statements or
at joint meetings between representatives of the SACP and such
organisations or movements.”

This rule means, for example, that in any South African trade union
congress, or in the deliberations of the ANC, for another example,
different SACP members can often be found lobbying on opposite sides
of
a question, or lobbying for different, rival candidates for office.
Communication between nodes is free; bandwidth is opened to the
maximum.

As a direct consequence of this, the SACP’s relationship with the
ANC
is stable, and yet it develops. Another consequence is that the SACP
continues to grow. It is now 96,000 strong.

In the now-defunct Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) there was
no
such rule. Party advisory committees would lay down a “line” on
resolutions, and back particular candidates, and woe betide any Party
member who defied the Party whip. There were always some. Expulsions
and bitterness followed. The introduction of a rigid element disrupted
what could have been a stable chaotic system. The Party remained
small,
and it was distrusted by others in the mass movements, as a
conspiratorial sect. The CPGB collapsed.

The way to “sustainable growth” in politics is clearly the way of
the
SACP’s Rule 6.4. The tighter control exercised by the CPGB led to
stasis and then to chaotic collapse.

Reform or Revolution?

Bourg (French), burg (Afrikaans and German), and borough (English and
Scottish) are all words, or parts of words, indicating towns. These
are
typically the towns that grew up under the rule of rural feudalism in
Northern Europe from after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West
(around 450 AD), until the beginnings of bourgeois state power (around
1500 AD), and later still, from the end of the 18th century, the
dominance of capitalism proper. These towns are the historic cradles
of
the bourgeoisie, who get their name thereby (i.e. bourgeoisie = town
people).

Hence municipal government is the continuation of very old forms of
government created by the bourgeoisie, for the bourgeoisie, in the
interests of the bourgeoisie, and this is reflected in Peter
Latham’s
book.

When the bourgeoisie rose up, combined together, and over-ran the
feudal power, it created a state power at national level that was
somewhat of a reflection of the bourgeois experience at city level,
but
which also grew to compete with the local democracy, until, now that
the bourgeoisie has grown to the monopoly scale at national and even
international level, municipalities are more and more obliged to serve
national and international monopoly corporations.

The exertion of monopoly bourgeois over local bourgeois power is a
theme that can be clearly discerned within Peter Latham’s narrative.
The story is not merely a contest between the working class and the
bourgeoisie conceived as a monolith, but is also one of changing power
relations within the capitalist ruling class.

The proletariat gained electoral control of local authorities here and
there throughout the 20th century in Britain but they were repeatedly
oppressed by the bourgeoisie (e.g. in Poplar, Clay Cross and
Doncaster)
through central government power.

How could anyone ever think that the bourgeoisie was going to allow
its
own creation, its cradle, and its refuge, to be possessed by the
working class and used against it? Class power does not change hands
this way. To “win the battle of democracy” (Karl Marx’s and
Frederick
Engels’s phrase from the Communist Manifesto, 1848) is what must be
done, but it cannot be done in literal, status-quo, bourgeois terms.

This problematic is to be unpacked in the SACP’s as yet unpublished
(in
its final form) approach to “building working-class hegemony on the
terrain of the National Democratic Revolution”, debated at its
Special
National Congress in December, 2009.

One must answer Rosa Luxemburg’s question: “Reform or
Revolution?” The
history of democracy, including local democracy, cannot merely be
accepted as a tragic series of “if onlys”, of missed opportunities,
of
setbacks, of picking up small gains and of defending minor powers won.

Reforms are good (just as democracy is good), but reforms are not
enough (just as democracy is not enough). Only revolution can secure
the interests of the working class in particular and of humanity in
general. “Service delivery protests” are not revolutionary. They
are
cast within the logic of reformism, clientism and corporatism. The
“service delivery protest” speaks back to monopoly capitalism in
the
language taught to it by monopoly capitalism.

The usefulness of this book to South Africans

I would strongly urge South Africans to read this book. I do not know
of any better one. I would go so far as to say that the book is
indispensible for South Africans.

The whole book shows that we as South Africans have re-entered the
local council democracy stakes at an exhausted stage. This folly
resembles what Frantz Fanon (in Pitfalls of National Consciousness,
“The Wretched of the Earth”, 1963) said of the African
bourgeoisie:

“In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial
countries
identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West.
We
need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at
the
end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance,
the
fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth.”

If not for this book of Peter Latham’s, one might not be able to see
from our present standpoint that the South African post-CODESA, post
1994-election local authority set-up conforms with the most extreme
monopoly-capitalist degeneration of municipal democracy. In local
democracy, South Africa is beginning at the end of it.

What one can see in the British case and in other examples throughout
this book, is the gradual development of the features of corporatist
local government such as: executive mayors; outsourcing of services by
tenders; Public-Private Partnerships; Private Finance of
Infrastructure; Quango-isation of services to unaccountable NGOs; the
neutralisation of representative democracy and the reduction of the
number of representatives in relation to the population; the
hierarchical professionalisation of councillors; and the co-option of
unelected bourgeois elements into positions of authority.

Without this book (or another one like it, of which I do not know any)
one would not be able to understand where these ideas came from, or
who
benefits from them. They are so out of keeping with the
democratisation
of South Africa after its national liberation from the un-democracy of
apartheid, that one could otherwise think that they had dropped from
space.

The book therefore provides an answer to the question: Why did South
African local democracy jump from the apartheid frying-pan into the
corporate-monopoly-capitalist fire?

In my opinion, having read this book, the answer to this question is
that monopoly bourgeois power was able to prevail through conscious,
concerted effort, using models of organisation taken ready-made from
overseas, and especially from the UK, or from the USA via the UK.

At the same time, neither the liberation movement nor the
revolutionary
party had a cadre of individuals that were ready to counter this
corporatist charge. It took them by surprise, sometimes in the guise
of
class-neutral “modernism”, and in the case of many, perhaps the
majority, of ANC local-authority comrades, it seduced them so
thoroughly that they became active missionaries for this
anti-democratic type of local government.

Like many colonial situations of earlier times, South Africa has
become
in many ways “more Catholic than the Pope”. Bourgeois things
happen
here that other bourgeoisies only dream about. South African local
authority reforms go further than, but along the same
monopoly-bourgeois lines as, those of the British models that they
copy.

In South Africa:

The ratio of councillors to voters, at about one to three thousand, is
worse than Britain’s. See the table at the bottom of this review for
comparative figures given by Peter Latham in his book.

Councillors are paid, rendering them dependent and careerist, and on a
competitive hierarchy of pay so that some are “more equal than
others”.

Managerial “training” of councillors is designed to eliminate the
political ones by “failing” them.

Quangos are being developed from ward level upwards in the form of
Ward
Committees, School Governing Bodies, and Community-Police Forums.
These
bodies are not mass democratic organisations. They are sponsored and
patronised from above. What made us to think that the ANC and the SACP
needed to be “helped” in this way to make local democracy work?
The
answer is that these are the prototypes of quango authority as seen in
Britain.

The other part of that prototype is the world of NGOs, academic
centres
and faith-based charities that poses under the name of “Civil
Society”
or otherwise “Social Movements”. These structures are less than
democratic and utterly fixed. These are a deliberate barrier over the
road to “stable chaos” and the withering away of the state. They
are
parts of the state.

All the other characteristic, reactionary, post-modern features
described by Peter Latham have also been parachuted into South Africa.
These include executive mayors, outsourcing, privatisation, PPPs and
PFIs.

Instead of this terrible reversion to anonymous authority, dancing to
the tune of monopoly capital, it is time to remember the Paris
Commune,
Soviets, Organs of People’s Power, Bolivarian Circles, the UDF at
its
height, trade union locals, street committees, and all the examples of
revolutionary self-government in history, including those of
Mozambique
and Guinea-Bissau, and the legacy of Amilcar Cabral and Thomas
Sankara.

Lenin on the main features of the Paris Commune

Cyril Smith schematises Chapter 3 of Lenin’s “The State and
Revolution”, the chapter that deals with the Paris Commune, thus:

1. The standing army was to be suppressed and replaced by ‘the armed
people’.
2. The people’s representatives were to be elected by universal
suffrage, subject to recall at any time and paid the wages of a
workman. Judges were also to be elected.
3. Instead of an executive, inaccessible to electors, ‘the Commune
was
to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative
at
the same time’.
4. Local communes would take over many of the functions of the central
government.

While Lenin himself quoted from Karl Marx’s book, “The Civil War
in
France”, as follows:

"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by
universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and
revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally
working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class....
The police, which until then had been the instrument of the
Government,
was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the
responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were
the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the
members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at
workmen's wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of
the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high
dignitaries themselves.... Having once got rid of the standing army
and
the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government,
the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual
suppression, the power of the priests.... The judicial functionaries
lost that sham independence... they were thenceforward to be elective,
responsible, and revocable."

Dual Power is multiple power

The first soviets were founded in 1905 at Ivanovo and St Petersburg in
Russia, as organs of local democracy.

The National Democratic Revolution (NDR) means first and foremost:
democratisation. This is not ipso facto national (central) but it must
also be local. Nor is it ipso facto confined to the national democracy
whether of parliament or the municipal councils. By the way,
parliamentary democracy in South Africa needs serious attention, too.

Since 1990, and in COSATU’s case since 1985, the ANC, SACP, and
COSATU
affiliates have extended active democracy to millions of people in all
corners of the country. But there are still major deficiencies.
Organisation of women, who as such are more than 50% of the
population,
hardly exists. The ANC Women’s League is only a junior ANC, for
women,
yet it is jealous, and will not allow other women’s structures to
flourish. The ANC has no rule 6.4.

Organisation of old people hardly exists. The ANC has started a
veteran’s league exclusively for those with 40 years’ continuous
membership of the ANC. This will not help at all to organise the old
people of the country to become free-willing historic subjects as they
should be.

Local organisation of workers hardly exists. There is no mass
working-class counterpart to the ANC Branch, Zone or Region.

Street (or block, or area) committees, open to all, declared for years
past as policy by the ANC and by the SACP, do not exist.

On 7 November 2007 SACP General Secetary Dr Blade Nzimande published,
in Umsebenzi Online, an article called “Dual power - The living
legacy
of the Great October Revolution”. Here is part of that article:

“When Lenin and the Bolsheviks advanced the slogan of all power to
the
soviets in 1917 they saw in these spontaneously formed local councils
of worker power the seeds of an alternative state. The bourgeois
state,
with its “façade of multi-party, parliamentary democracy” and a
“liberal” constitution, was to be replaced by a different state,
soviet
power. The soviets of 1917, like the soviets that emerged in the 1905
Russian revolution, bore many resemblances to the spontaneous popular
structures of the 19th century Paris Commune that Marx and Engels had
studied and celebrated as harbingers of a different kind of
proletarian
state. They were characterised by various forms of direct and
participatory democracy. Elected representatives and officials were
revocable by popular assemblies and none was paid more than the
average
wage of a worker.

“Between February and October 1917 in Russia a dual power situation
increasingly developed – with the bourgeois “liberal” (in
practice, not
so liberal) parties controlling the Parliament/Duma and the key organs
of state, with an alternative centre of power developing in the
soviets/councils of workers and soldiers – in working class
neighbourhoods, in factories, and barracks. It was these alternative
self-organised centres of power, influenced largely (but not entirely)
by the Bolsheviks that were a critical locus of power in the October
Revolution.

“But although the state that emerged from the October revolution
came
to be described as “soviet”, it increasingly bore less and less
resemblance to the spontaneous organs of localised working class power
on which it supposedly rested. …The “soviet” state became
increasingly
bureaucratic, hierarchical, centralising, authoritarian, and staffed
by
a self-reproducing elite of apparatchiks.

“Marxists were not wrong to recognise in the organs of popular power
that emerged spontaneously in the Paris Commune and in the Russian
revolutions of 1905 and 1917 a critical revolutionary reality and a
key
component of any future socialist state. But we tended to see these
organs as the totality of socialist state power and as
“alternatives”
to, and abolishers of, the bourgeois state and “its” associated
institutions – a separate standing army, courts, parliament, etc. In
practice, in subsequent decades in the Soviet Union, bureaucratic
state
power displaced participatory and direct democracy.

“What is beginning to emerge in, for instance, the Venezuelan
revolution, what has always been at least an important residual
reality
in the Cuban revolution, and what is latently present in our own South
African reality is a new conception of dual power. This is “dual
power”
not as a transitional reality, but as a permanent feature of an
anti-capitalist revolution. Here organs of popular power co-exist
with,
buttress, check and balance other apparatuses of progressive
democratic
power (an army and police force, the administrative apparatus, a
parliament). Organs of popular power need to act as a constant
counterweight against the dangers of bureaucratisation, elitism,
corruption and corporate capture that constantly beset the state
apparatus, including a socialist state apparatus. These tendencies
need
to be constantly abolished. But localised organs of popular power,
practising more direct and participatory forms of democracy, also have
limited capacities to run a modern socialist economy, or, in
isolation,
defend the country against imperialist destabilisation.

“The point is not that the one locus of progressive power should
abolish the other, but that they should act to complement each other -
as was seen, for instance, in the combination of armed forces, popular
militias and mass mobilisation in the very rapid defeat of the 2005
imperialist-inspired attempted military coup against the
democratically-elected Chavez government.

“Here in South Africa, we developed strong “soviet” traditions,
organs
of popular power, a legacy of self-governance, in the midst of our
struggle – particularly in the 1980s. These traditions have not
evaporated.”


Way forward

There is no “zero sum game” as between Democracy and Freedom.
Democracy
must be born and then must die for freedom, but this is not a paradox.
It is an organic development. South Africa must have more democracy,
precisely so that it can be able to go beyond democracy.
Appendix 1: South Africa is worse than Britain

Local Government Scale and Representational Ratio
Source: Table 6.3 of Peter Latham’s The State and Local Government


Population
(millions)
Councils
(number)
Average
population
Councillors
(number)
Persons per
councillor
France
60.7
36,782
1,650
515,000
118
Sweden
9.0
290
31,000
46,240
195
Austria
8.2
2,380
3,440
40,570
201
Germany
82.4
12,434
6,630
198,000
418
Finland
5.2
444
11,710
12,400
418
Greece
10.7
1,033
10,360
18,600
573
Italy
58.1
8,101
7,170
97,000
597
Spain
40.3
8,180
4,970
65,000
623
Belgium
10.4
589
17,660
13,000
800
Portugal
10.6
309
34,300
9,000
1,200
Netherlands
16.4
467
35,120
9,600
1,713
Denmark
5.4
98
55,000
2,520
2,142
Britain & N. Ireland
60.8
433[a]
140,000
20,990
2,900
South Africa
approximately
3,000
Ireland
4.0
88
45,000
744
5,375

[a] includes City of London and Greater London Authority
Source (Europe and Britain): Wilson and Game, 2006, p. 263; House of
Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, 2009b, p. 190.
South Africa: IEC and EISA web sites (own calculation)


Appendix 2:

Diagram from Ron Press’s “New Tools for Marxists” showing free
exchange
between nodes:







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Posted By DomzaNet to Communist University on 1/05/2010 03:37:00 PM

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