This presentation aims to focus on the hegemonic discourse of the AKP, specifically its success in marginalisation of any oppositions through labelling them as anti-democratic. Then, I will attempt to underline the essential role of the class struggle for deciphering the constraints of that hegemonic discourse in its ability to put democracy and neo-liberalism together.

What we do in this paper is to critically evaluate the privatization performance of the AKP government. The actual sales and the resulting income generation (or loss) will be depicted in relation to the public sector budget requirements and the general macroeconomic atmosphere. We will take the “accumulation by dispossession” notion by D. Harvey as the backbone of the analysis and will dig into the specific example of TEKEL privatization to explore the peculiarities of the AKP era both in terms of judicial and economical transformations and their economical and political consequences.

The details of any particular concrete socialist democracy will unfold in the process of transcending a particular capitalism and building a particular socialism. With this cautionary comment in mind, certain general aspects of socialist democracy should present themselves already while still under the hegemony of capitalism, as necessary to be consistent with the socialist tasks of human liberation that are visible in advance as the negations of the limitations on the development of humanity which are imposed by capitalism.

As a very preliminary investigation (by this author) of socialist democracy, and motivated by the discussions going an concerning this among people and in process working to move beyond capitalism, this paper will consider 4 issues debated by those involved in today’s struggles for socialism

• The issue of the desire by the working class and oppressed for protagonistic democracy
• The issue of the capabilities of the working class and the oppressed for protagonistic democracy.
• Representative vrs. direct democracy
• Local democracy (especially as reflected in the workplace democracy advocated by champions of market socialism) versus working class democracy

(This list could grow to 5 or 6 by the time I finish the paper, or it might stay at these four for now)

PS – In this paper I will begin to use the term “protagonistic democracy,” where before I have always used the term “participatory democracy.” My vision of participatory democracy and that of most of its advocates always was the same as is now indicated by “protagonistic democracy”: that people would collectively control all aspects of their lives, and they would collectively initiate charges and continuities in society. The term “participatory democracy” leaves open the possibility that people could participate by actively supporting and even executing decisions made by some sort of group with extra voice in decision making. “Protagonistic democracy” implies in its name that this is not acceptable. What I see here is not a big issue to me, but a semantic change to what I consider to be a better term to project what I already had in mind, a term that has been thrown up exactly in the real world process of debating and fighting for this issue.

In the first part we will discuss the Marxian hope that capitalism will develop the productive forces in such a point that a post-scarcity society will be possible. It will be argued that the above Marxian hope is part of the discourse of the political economy that Marx was supposed to criticize. The whole point has already been made, in philosophical terms, by Baudrillard (1972, 1973) and Zizek (1999, 2007). We will try to substantiate this argument by showing the affinity, from an ethical and political point of view, of Marx with major ‘bourgeois’ thinkers (A. Smith, J.S. Mill, J.M. Keynes).

In the second part we will analyze Durkheim’s restatement of socialism. The cornerstone of the Durkheimian argument is that socialist economic reforms alone are doomed to failure because they don’t take in account the human desire for distinction. According to Durkheim, socialism must give priority to moral reforms teaching the individual to control his otherwise unlimited desires and his envy of the others. Economic reforms can support the moral ones, by creating a sentiment of justice in the members of a society, but they cannot be a substitute for them. It will also be argued that Durkheim’s notion of socialism is part of his Critique of the Political Economy, and more specifically of the ‘Manchester system’.

In the third part we will discuss the Durkheimian critique of socialism under the light of three recent socio-economic problems. The first one concerns the ecological limits of growth. The second one refers to the income-happiness paradox, that is, to empirical findings showing that (self-reported) happiness does not increase with the rising income. The third one has to do with the obsolescence of national accounts. The latter reflect the Weltanschuung of the industrial (‘Fordist’) society, and thus are ill-suited to measure the socio-economic performance in terms of intangibles and services that are characteristic of the post-industrial society. It will be argued that the ecological, moral and measurement limits of (industrial or material) growth ask for a new conception of the ‘good society’ that goes beyond the liberal and the socialist utopia, which marked the era of industrial capitalism.