Dialectical reasoning instructs that any idea, practice or institution, once taken too far, eventually creates the seeds of its own destruction. This can be both negative and positive.
We have seen Barack Obama’s hope transformed into the racism of the Tea Party, and the authoritarianism of Hosni Mubarak and others begin to yield to popular political expression.
Whilst we understand the logic however, the one variable over which we have little control is the question of timing. We are always chastened by the reminder that “a system can last for one thousand years and yet collapse in a day”. It is this unpredictability that makes history, and life itself, exciting.
I have deliberately thrown the Obama electoral victory into the same boiling pot as the Egyptian revolt, because they are both products of the same objective conditions. The same holds true of the Tea Party counter-revolution, and the Mubarak conservative reaction to the demand for democratic expression.
We in the Caribbean need to understand their connection because, though we like to believe otherwise, our existence is subject to the same material realities.Since the late 19th century, Karl Marx had isolated the productive material base of society (its mode of production) as the critical variable that explains man’s political relations. It is the productive base of the industrial revolution that had created the material conditions for the rise of political democracy, away from the feudal and slave based political systems which were then dominant.
In much the same way that the conveyer belt of the factory had given rise to the conveyer belt of representative democracy (the elections queue), then so will the current digital revolution result in the smashing of familiar modes of political practice. All existing political institutions will yield to digital revolution, and mere representation will be replaced by more participatory forms of political engagement.
Barrack Obama understood this clearly. This is why those who reduce his election to the “election of America’s first black president” miss the real meaning of his victory. He was the first to build a presidential campaign around the new technologies of our digital age.
It is for this reason that these are “youth” revolutions and also represent broad coalitions of all types of political interests whose normal links with each other are often tenuous. It is Facebook connectivity applied to the political stage.
Similarly, those who gloat over the Egyptian revolt as a victory of democracy (in its narrow sense) over authoritarianism are also in error. These movements represent not only a revolt against authoritarianism, but also against the built-in exclusionist features of representation.
Those who are eager to freeze Caribbean democracy in its representative form should take note. The political revolution of the digital age is here. And as Junior Gong had predicted, “it is being televised”.
Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus specialising in analysis of regional affairs.