America is living in a failing democracy. The Afro-descendant communities lack of representation in the making of political decisions. The lack of participation spaces for this and other vulnerable popular sectors is a perverse game of interests played by those holding the power provided by the oligopolistic markets. A neoliberal view I shared by the powers that be against the promotion of democratic spaces. In a world of smallholders, property itself would have little to fear from democracy, but with the oligopolistic development within the capitalist system, democracy became the Achilles heel of many liberals( Esping-Andersen, 1991, 86). For the Afro-descendant communities, democracy requires an inclusive, universal and participatory logic of collective nature, in which group participation and representation can play a role within the interests’ circles of diverse and heterogeneous people, as well as within the realities of various ways of social expression. In the world of ideologies, it is then necessary to ask whether democracy for the Afrodescendant communities would be a banner in the struggle for a socialist society. That ´ s why liberals are not willing to expand democracy, while " socialists, on the contrary, suspected that parliamentary democracy would be little more than an empty shell or, as Lenin suggested, a mere conversation between mannequins "( Esping-Andersen, 1991, 88). Contemporary Marxism holds the belief that social reforms were no more than a dike in a filled-with-gaps capitalist order. The latter could not, by definition, respond to the working classes’ desire for emancipation. Following this line of thinking, Liberals feared that full democracy would compromise markets and lead to socialism. Thus, freedom needs to defend the markets against political intervention. In such a logic, bourgeois democracy is seen as monstrous notion, since it conceals a decisive historical circumstance: to a greater or lesser extent in different latitudes, democracy was achieved and preserved against and despite the bourgeoisie. This notion pertains to another psychosocial level in the bourgeois domination over the Afro-descendant population, as part of the working class, but it faces a double difficulty. The bourgeois democracy cannot be gratuitously attributed to the bourgeoisie as historical conquest. It historically resulted from popular struggles against the domination of capital. And the adjective bourgeois is accidental as an accessory specification for a democracy fetishized as immutable value. This discussion leads to a series of challenges on how to strengthen democracy today in the given context related to the rights of the Afrodescendants. The starting point is the struggle for equality, social and political participation, and full representation of the excluded and invisible social forces in the current liberal and capitalist system. The democratization challenge in Latin America relies in the possibility of combining the institutional changes with the democratic practices and the strengthening of a new citizen culture( Jelin and Hershberg, 2006, 156). The democratic system in Latin America is not adequate to achieve such a combination, because there are perennial conflicts among interest groups and many spaces in dispute. The survival of democracy is as improbable as problematic within the economic diversity and the unfair social division in every sense. The key destabilizer is the extreme poverty correlated with extreme wealth. The diverse daily situations of poverty and inequality help us to understand the current panorama from a critical perspective regarding the Afro-
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