It remains always necessary to
consider whether
¶
or not these given institutions truly serve to satisfy the demands of the
community, the people, and social movements. If they do not serve these demands, they
¶
need to be transformed
.
Chavez changed the Constitution at the outset of his¶ delegated exercise of power, as did Evo
Morales. That is, the package of
State
¶
institutions
(potestas)
need
s
to be
untied and
changed
as a whole
by conserving
¶
what is sustainable and eliminating what is unjust
-thereby creating the new.
¶
Power
( as potestas )
is not "taken" en bloc · It is
reconstituted
and exercised
¶
critically in
view of the material satisfaction of needs,
in fulfillment of the
¶
normative demands of
democratic legitimacy, and within empirical political
¶
possibility
.
But, to be clear,
without the
obediential exercise of delegated institutional power the world cannot feasibly be changed
.
To
attempt to do so is little more
¶
than abstract and apolitical 'moralism and idealism,
which
clearly results from¶ practical and theoretical confusions
. However, these quasi-anarchists do in-¶ deed remind us that
institutions become fetishized and always need to be¶ transformed, as Marx points out.¶ [20.1.3] On the level of strategic feasibility,
in order to change the world one¶ needs to rely on an extraordinarily healthy political postulate: that of the¶ 'dissolution of
the State."
This postulate can be put approximately as follows:¶
We must operate in such a way as to tend
toward the
(empirically impossible)
¶
identity of representation with the represented, in such a
way that State
¶
institutions become always increasingly transparent, effective, simplified,
etc.
¶
Such a condition would not, however, be a "minimal State"-in either the
¶
Right-wing
version
of Nozick
or the left-wing version
of Bakunin-
but rather a
¶
"subjectified State," in
which the institutions become diminished due to the
¶
increasingly shared responsibility by
all citizens
("We are all the State!").132 This¶ would need to proceed alongside the application of the electronic revolution in¶
order to reduce almost to zero the time and space required for citizen par,¶ ticipation, 133 in terms of collecting the opinion of the
citizenry to constitute a¶ consensus or carry out bureaucratic procedures. This would be a virtual State¶ with decentralized offices,
managed by Web sites, and the State of the future¶ would be so different from that of the present that many of its most bureau,¶
cratic, opaque, and bloated institutions would have disappeared . . . It would¶ appear that the State no longer exists, but it will be
more present than ever as¶ the normative responsibility of each citizen toward the others
. This is the¶ criterion of orientation that
follows from the postulate of the 'dissolution of¶ the State."¶
Studies prove that engagement with the government is critical to reform
success
Rootes
, Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements – School of Social Policy,
Sociology and Social Research @ University of Kent,
‘
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