Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent

Edited by Rebecca Fisher

(Corporate Watch, £8)

With contributions from activists and academics from Britain and the US, this book engages with the issue that has so interested leftist thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Ralph Miliband and Alex Carey - the manufacture of consent in liberal democracies.

It centres on the fundamental problem of "creating legitimacy for capitalism," as Corporate Watch's Rebecca Fisher explains in the introduction. "How can an inherently and profoundly anti-democratic system contain and limit dissent and at the same time present itself as ostensibly 'democratic?'"

David Whyte insists that we need to "distinguish between what liberal democracy does and what it says it does" - obvious, one might think, although completely lost on all the mainstream journalists who continuously tell us the US and Britain invaded Iraq to promote democracy.

There's a characteristically clear and sharp analysis of the complicity of the liberal media in Britain's aggressive foreign policy from Media Lens, while Matthew Alford's application of Herman and Chomsky's "propaganda model" to Hollywood cinema is fascinating.

Fisher's own contributions are detailed and persuasive, especially her wide-ranging introduction and her critique of the little known Westminster Foundation for Democracy and its "democracy promotion" overseas.

But elsewhere, some chapters are overly academic and jargon-driven with a number of contributors completely dismissing the co-option and accommodation that takes place under ruling-class hegemony. That ignores the fact that while the elite may well maintain their position by making small concessions to popular pressure those concessions are nevertheless small but very real examples of progressive change.

US activist Edmund Berger ends up criticising proponents of nonviolent change such as Stephen Zunes and Gene Sharp and his chapter on the 2011 Egyptian uprising argues that the US government, through working at the level of civil society, was heavily involved in the overthrow of Mubarak.

That's a thesis which sits uneasily with the fact that the US was a key supporter of Mubarak for decades, a paradox the author does not engage with or explain.

This is a big, very dense book - one to dip in and out of rather than read from beginning to end and the contradiction between wanting to educate and inspire the general public to action while including inaccessible academic essays is never fully resolved.

Yet it focuses on an important topic that everyone interested in progressive change needs to grapple with and Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent is an important addition to the debate.

Ian Sinclair