Translation: “Manifesto for DIRECT DEMOCRACY”
An open letter to politicians, magistrates and honest intellectuals
[This is a translation to English of the original text written in Portuguese by Marcus Brancaglione. This text has been written in the context of the current political-media-judicial circus happening in Brazil right now (2016). This was a tough one to translate; if someone catches any mistakes, please let me know!]
Considering the extremely urgent necessity to re-establish the political legitimacy, in light of the institutional war that is already rupturing the social order and undoing the democratic legal state, we propose the immediate execution of a referendum for new democratic elections.
1. The referendum must not only choose new representatives to serve at existing institutional structures, but representatives that will give institutional form to the already manifest people’s will; a will that is not only manifest in the streets but is also heard through the digital platforms that already constitute the new information society that is extinguishing the old institutional form, that archaic system of representation, through both obsolescence and revelation. Direct Democracy Now!
2. Representative democracy cannot be reduced to a mere “participatory”, consultative democracy. By “direct democracy” we understand the formalization of this new space of communication and of decision-making from citizen to citizen that becomes essentially a permanent, popular constitutive assembly, whose deliberations in the form of a living code of law will be the new source of legitimacy for not only the three powers of government, but for the republic itself.
3. Direct democracy is and shall be the permanent constitution of the republic and it will provide citizenship itself, giving the people an inalienable, collective decision-making power — both injecting demands and issuing resolutions on them — that will appropriately rest in the hands of every citizen and not in the hand of select legislators, jurists or executives.
4. Direct democracy shall effect itself as full citizenship, both by the generative power of demands for the negotiation of public interests and by the inalienable prerogative of citizens to approve or reject public policy and political arrangements.
5. Citizen sovereignty will legitimize itself expressly as resolutions that perpetuate the social compact, and no longer as tacit and fictitious agreements of violence monopolies, but instead as true societies of peace that express and continually reaffirm themselves by the exercise of emancipated citizenship in equal rights and duties over the common good, with a legal state that guarantees factual fundamental freedoms.
6. Society shall not only have decision power over the federation’s budget, but of formulating — both in terms of form and of quantity — the contribution that will be necessary to implement the social compact.
7. Society shall have not only control over financial resources, but over property, both public and natural, and the commons that belongs not to the state or to particular private parties but definitively to all of society, both as a duty to preservation and as a right to enjoy its income and social dividends such as basic income, equal to all the true proprietors of the national territory: the citizens.
These seven elements are not the foundation of a program, but the components of a new system, and the removal of any single one of them will compromise the balance of the necessary peaceful progress towards a legal state that is more democratic, and towards a freer republic. In other words, what is beyond extremely urgent and obvious every passing day: the equality of factual fundamental freedoms given as an isonomy of legal rights and authority over the common good.
Any less than that and we’re into demagoguery: an attempt to smuggle the old system into the new one. No. For full political and economic rights that are re-integrated into the new citizenship of the 21st century:
