The article offers a good survey of more democratic forms of people power drawing from both contemporary and historical examples. On the other hand, it seems at times laced with naive ideas about change as illustrated here:
If participatory budgeting is to be a tool for genuine democratisation of society, the citizens must be given decision-making power over the entire or at least a large part of the municipal budget, and the process must be a bottom-up process where the sovereign power lies with the citizens in the assemblies. Local authorities must be willing to give away power to the residents in the assemblies, and there is a need for decentralization of power from national and international levels to the municipal and local levels. [my emphasis]However, the author redeems herself later in the article with statements like this:
A radical direct and participatory democracy will not be handed down to us by the elites, but has to be struggled for by ordinary citizens and social movements.The major flaw in this essay is the glaring omission of the economic system that has integrated within it all elements of formal representative democracy, so that the major players of the former now thoroughly control the latter. She only makes rather oblique references to capitalism. Thus, she also ignores the damage done to people's political consciousness about taking responsibility for their lives while learning to submit over the past several centuries to the rule of capitalist ruling classes, and many other class ruled societies before them.
Although the dream of classless societies and authentic democracy has not been extinguished in the human race, such class rule experiences has left many with a submissive and passive relationship to authorities and a weak belief in their own power. Hence, the challenge for activists is the development of a liberatory social consciousness within a system that demands obedience and conformity to ruling class norms and commitment to its values.
