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Title: Beyond Democracy? Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: democracy, analysis, Harbinger Source: Retrieved on 6th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/beyond-democracy
text courtesy of special agent Rolf Nadir
Nowadays, “democracy” rules the world. Communism has fallen, elections
are happening more and more in those poor underdeveloped third world
nations you see on television, and world leaders are meeting to plan the
“global community” that we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody
happy, finally? For that matter—why do less than half of the eligible
voters in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother
to vote at all?
Could it be that “democracy,” long the catch-word of every revolution
and resistance, is simply not democratic enough? What could be more
democratic?
No they can’t. Being president means holding a hierarchical position of
power, just like being a billionaire: for every one president, there
have to be millions of people with less power. And just as it is for
billionaires, it is for presidents: it’s not any coincidence that the
two types tend to rub shoulders, since they both come from a privileged
world off limits to the rest of us. Our economy isn’t democratic,
either, you know: resources are distributed in absurdly unequal
proportions, and you certainly do have to start with resources to become
President, or even to get your hands on more resources.
Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that
wouldn’t help the millions of us who inevitably don’t, who must still
live in the shadow of that power. This is an intrinsic structural
difficulty in representative democracy, and it occurs on the local level
as much as at the top. For example: the town council, consisting of
professional politicians, can meet, discuss municipal affairs, and pass
ordinances all day, without consulting the citizens of the town, who
have to be at work; when one of those ordinances inconveniences or
angers some of the citizens, they have to go to great lengths to use
their free time to contest it, and then they’re gone again the next time
the town council meets. The citizens can elect a different town council
from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the
interests and powers of the class of politicians as a whole will still
be in conflict with their own—and anyway, party loyalties and similar
superstitions usually prevent them from taking even this step.
If there was no President, our “democracy” would still be less than
democratic. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, our system
purports to operate by majority rule, with the rights of the minorities
protected by a system of checks and balances—and this method of
government has inherent flaws of its own.
If you ever happened to end up in a vastly outnumbered minority group,
and the majority voted that you must give up something as necessary to
your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it,
does anyone really believe in recognizing the authority of a group
simply because they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule
because we do not believe it will threaten us—and those it does threaten
are already silenced before we can hear their misgivings.
No “average citizen” considers himself threatened by majority rule,
because each one thinks of himself as having the power and righteous
“moral authority” of the majority: if not in fact (by being so-called
“normal” or “moderate”), then in theory, because his ideas are “right”
(that is, he believes that everyone would be convinced of the truth of
his arguments, if only they would listen sincerely). Majority-rule
democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were
clear, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course
of action—without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the
dictatorship of the herd. But such is not always the case—even if “the
facts” could be made equally clear to everyone, which is obviously
impossible, some things simply can’t be agreed upon, for there is more
than one truth. We need a democracy that takes these situations into
account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well
as the ascendancy of the privileged class…
…and the protection afforded by the “checks and balances” of our legal
institution is not sufficient to establish it. The “rule of just and
equal law,” as fetishized today by those whose interests it protects
(the stockbrokers and landlords, for example), does not protect anyone
from chaos or injustice; it simply creates another arena of
specialization, in which the power of our communities is ceded to the
jurisdiction of expensive lawyers and pompous judges. The rights of the
minorities are the very last thing to be protected by these checks and
balances, since power is already reserved for those with the privilege
to seize it, and then for the lumpen majority after them. Under these
conditions, a minority group is only able to use the courts to obtain
its rights when it is able to bring sufficient force upon them in the
form of financial clout, guileful rhetoric, etc.
There is no way to establish justice in a society through the mere
drawing up and enforcement of laws: such laws can only institutionalize
what is already the rule in that society. Common sense and compassion
are always preferable to adherence to a strict and antiquated table of
law, anyway, and where the law is the private province of a curator
elite, these inevitably end up in conflict; what we really need is a
social system which fosters such qualities in its members, and rewards
them in practice. To create such a thing, we must leave representative
“democracy” for fully participatory democracy.
Freedom is not a condition—it is something closer to a sensation. It’s
not a concept to pledge allegiance to, a cause to serve, or a standard
to march under; it is an experience you must live every day, or else it
will escape you. It is not freedom in action when the flags are flying
and the bombs are dropping to “make the world safe for democracy,” no
matter what color the flags are (even black!); freedom cannot be caught
and held in any state system or philosophical doctrine, and it certainly
cannot be enforced or “given” to others—the most you can hope is to free
others from forces preventing them from finding it themselves. It
appears in fragile moments: in the make-believe of young children, the
cooperation of friends on a camping trip, the workers who refuse to
follow the union’s orders and instead organize their own strike without
leaders. If we are to be real freedom fighters, we must begin by
pledging ourselves to chase and cherish these moments and seek to expand
them, rather than getting caught up in serving some party or ideology.
Real freedom cannot be held on a voting ballot. Freedom doesn’t mean
simply being able to choose between options—it means actively
participating in shaping the options in the first place, creating and
re-creating the environments in which options exist. Without this, we
have nothing, for given the same options in the same situations over and
over, we’ll always make the same pre-determined decisions. If the
context is out of our hands, so is the choice itself. And when it comes
to taking power over the circumstances of our lives, no one can
“represent” us—it’s something we have to do ourselves.
If the freedom so many generations have fought and died for is best
exemplified by a man in a voting booth, who checks a box on the ballot
before returning to work in an environment no more under his control
than it was an hour before, then the heritage our emancipating
forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a
sham substitute for the true liberty they lusted after.
For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the
musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous,
seemingly effortless cooperation, they actively create the sonic and
emotional environment in which they exist, participating thus in the
transformation of the world which in turn transforms them. Take this
model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other,
and you would have something qualitatively different from our present
system: a harmony in human relationships and activity, a real democracy.
To get there, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal
expression of freedom and participation.
No one can represent your power and interests for you—you can only have
power by acting, and you can only know what your interests are by being
involved. Politicians have made careers out of claiming to represent
others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy. Now,
inevitably, they have become a priest caste that answers only to
itself—as politician classes have always been, and will always be.
Voting is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we
can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society
through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them
prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our
communities to these politicians in the same way that we leave
technology to scientists, health to doctors, living environments to city
planners and private real estate developers; we end up living in a world
that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have
acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and
specialists hold on setting the possibilities.
The fact is we don’t have to simply choose between presidential
candidates, soft drink brands, competing activist organizations,
television shows, news magazines, political ideologies. We can make our
own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own
delicious beverages and action coalitions and magazines and
entertainment, we can create our own individual approaches to life that
leave our unique perspectives intact. Here’s how.
What are the democratic alternatives to democracy?
Radically participatory democracy, also known as consensus democracy, is
already well-known and practiced across the globe, from indigenous
communities in Latin America to postmodern political action cells
(“affinity groups”) in the United States and organic farming
cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy,
consensus democracy is direct democracy: the participants get to share
in the decision-making process on a daily basis, and through
decentralization of knowledge and authority they are able to exercise
real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy,
consensus democracy values the needs and concerns of each individual
equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, then it is
everyone’s responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to
all. Consensus democracy does not demand that any person accept the
power of others over her life, though it does require that everybody be
willing to consider the needs of everyone else; thus what it loses in
efficiency, it gains tenfold in both freedom and goodwill. Consensus
democracy does not ask that people follow a leader or standardize
themselves under some common cause; rather, its aim is to integrate all
into a working whole while allowing each to retain her own goals and
ways of doing things.
In order for direct democracy to be meaningful, people must have control
over their immediate surroundings and the basic matters of their lives.
Autonomy is simply the idea that no one is more qualified than you are
to decide how you live, that no one should be able to vote on what you
do with your time and your potential—or for that matter how the
environment you live in is constructed. It is not to be confused with
so-called “independence”— in actuality, no one is independent, since our
lives all depend on each other (“Western man fills his closet with
groceries, and call himself self-sufficient”)—that’s just an
individualist myth that keeps us collectively at odds. The glamorization
of “self-sufficiency” in the present cutthroat-competitive society
really constitutes an attack on those who will not exploit others to
“take care of themselves,” and thus functions as an obstacle to
community building.[1] In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy is a
free interdependence between those with whom you share a consensus, with
whom you act freely (i.e. without waiting for permission or instructions
from anyone else) in order to cooperatively establish self-management of
the whole of life.
Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. For autonomy to be possible,
every aspect of the community from technology to history must be
organized in such a way that it is accessible to everyone; and for it to
work, everyone must make use of this access.
Autonomous groups can be formed without necessarily establishing a clear
agenda, so long as they offer the members ways to benefit from each
others’ participation: the CrimethInc. Collective, the Dada movement,
and knitting circles of the past and present all offer evidence of this.
Such groups can even contain contradictions, just as each of us does
individually, and still serve their purpose. The days of marching under
a single flag are over.
Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the
encroachments of others who do not believe in the rights of individuals
to govern themselves, and expanding the territory of autonomy and
consensus by doing everything in their power to both destroy the
structures of coercive societies (including those of representative
“democracy”) and replace them with more radically democratic structures.
For example, it’s not enough just to block or destroy highways that are
creating noise and air pollution; you also have to provide free
transportation by means such as communal bicycles and community repair
centers, if you want to help others replace the
competitive/authoritarian relations of car dependency with
cooperative/autonomous means of transportation.
Autonomy means direct action, not waiting for requests to pass through
the “established channels” only to bog down in paperwork and endless
negotiations. Establish your own channels. If you want hungry people to
eat, don’t just give money to some high-handed charity bureaucracy; find
out where food is going to waste, collect it, and feed them. If you want
affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a
bill—that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take
over abandoned buildings and share them, and organize groups to defend
them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want
corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they
bought to put limits on their own masters; find ways to work with others
to simply take the power from them: don’t buy their products, don’t work
for them, sabotage their billboards and buildings, prevent their
meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered.
They use similar tactics to exert their power over you; it only looks
valid because they bought the laws and social customs, too.
Don’t wait for permission or organization from some outside authority,
don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Act.
Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without
any particular group holding authority. Such a social structure sounds
utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient.
International mail and railroad travel both currently work on this
system, to name two examples: while the individual postal and
transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate
together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another,
without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the
process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree on enough issues to be
able to work together within one collective should still be able to see
the importance of being able to coexist with other groups. For such a
thing to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of
cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations—but
that is exactly what we are proposing.
In a social arrangement which is truly in the best interest of each
participating individual, exclusion from the community should be threat
enough to discourage violent or destructive behavior. It is certainly a
more humanitarian approach than authoritarian means such as prisons and
executions, which corrupt the judges as much as they embitter the
criminals. Those who refuse to integrate themselves into any community
and reject the assistance and generosity of others may find themselves
banished from human interaction; but that is still better than exile in
the mental ward, or on death row, two of the options which await such
men today. Violence should only be used by communities in defense, not
with the smug entitlement of post-divine judgment with which it is
applied by our present injustice system. This applies as well to the
interactions of autonomous/consensus groups with the “outside world”
which does not yet abide by cooperative or tolerant values.
Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by
reorganizing or dividing the groups. Often individuals who can’t get
along in one social configuration will have much more success
cooperating in another setting, or as members of parallel communities.
If consensus cannot be met within a group, that group should split into
smaller groups who can achieve it internally—such a thing may be
inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions
ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power and
ruthlessness at their disposal. All the independent communities will
still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must
somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…
…that’s the most difficult part, of course. But we’re not talking about
just another social system here, we’re talking about a total revolution
of human relations—for that is what it will take to solve the problems
our species faces today. Let’s not kid ourselves—until we can achieve
this, the violence and strife inherent in non-consensus relations will
continue, and no law or system will be able to protect us. The best
reason to transcend representative democracy is simply that in consensus
democracy there are no fake solutions, no easy ways of suppressing
conflict without resolving it, and thus those who participate in it must
learn to coexist without coercion and submission and all those other
nasty habits we are so tired of in our present society.
The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your
friendships and love affairs, when they are free from power relations
and cooperation occurs naturally. Take this model, and expand it to the
whole of society— that is the world “beyond democracy” for which the
heart cries out today.
It seems a challenging prospect to get there from here… but the
wonderful thing about consensus/autonomy is that you don’t have to wait
for the government to vote for them to apply these concepts—you can
practice them right now with the people around you, and benefit
immediately. Once put into practice, the virtues of this way of living
will be clear to others; they need no pointing out once one is
experiencing them firsthand. Form your own autonomous group, answering
to no power but your own, and create an environment in which you chase
down freedom and fulfillment for yourselves, if your representatives
will not do it for you—since they cannot do it “for” you. From such
seeds, the real democracy of the future will grow.
Next time we state our demands and grievances and they refuse to
acknowledge them, saying “just be thankful you live in a democracy,”
we’ll be ready to respond: That’s not enough! …and know clearly what we
want instead, from our own experience.
Whoever they vote for, we are ungovernable!
20,000 channels is not enough.
[1] The politicians’ myth of “welfare mothers” snatching the hardworking
citizen’s rightful earnings from him, for example, divides individuals
who might otherwise unite to form cooperative groups with no use for
those politicians.