TWO PERSPECTIVES ON DECENTRALIZATION

Abstract

There are two quite distinct perspectives on decentralization; one sees decentralization primarily as a rearrangement of functions, powers and resources within the different tiers of the State while the other sees it as a means of “rolling back” the State, as part of a process of submergence of the State within the people. This second perspective views “dissolution” or a “withering away” of the State as a condition for human freedom. The first perspective sees decentralization as a means of making the existing State more “efficient”; it believes in short in an affirmation of the existing State. The second believes in a negation of the existing State. The prefix “democratic” is suited only to that “decentralization” which is informed by the second perspective. Democracy essentially means that the people control their own destinies collectively; it entails the disappearance of all opacity in the social arrangements within which they live. A genuine democracy therefore has two requisites: first, the economic arrangement within which people currently live, the capitalist system, which is a “spontaneous” self-driven system, characterized by a set of immanent tendencies that operate independently of human will and consciousness, must give way to an alternative arrangement that does not have this “spontaneity” and that is malleable enough to be governed by the people’s collective political intervention. Therefore, social ownership of the means of production becomes an essential pre-requisite for democracy. The second pre-requisite arises from the fact that even in a society that has instituted social ownership of the means of production, a new form of alienation can well arise if State actions are not based on collective intervention on the part of the people. Authentic democracy, where the people assume the role of collective subjects, requires not just a transcendence of capitalism but also a transcendence of the State in any form, its dissolution in society instead of being an entity standing above it. Democratic advance consists in a movement in the direction of this dual transcendence. And in so far as panchayats potentially represent a dissolution, however partial, of the State, its submergence, at least in an embryonic form, in society, decentralization can constitute a democratic advance if that facilitates the formation of class organizations working towards the transcendence of the “spontaneity” of the capitalist system.