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Title: Democracy Means Bureaucracy Author: CrimethInc. Date: August 16, 2018 Language: en Topics: democracy, bureaucracy Source: Retrieved on 17th June 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/08/16/new-posters-about-democracy-in-english-and-swedish
Broadly speaking, democracy and capitalism were stabilized throughout
the 20^(th) century via the progressive inclusion of populations that
had previously been excluded from the privileges of voting and property
ownership. This began with women’s suffrage and the Fordist compromise,
continued through desegregation and the end of the European colonial
empires, and concluded with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Since then,
almost the entire world has been integrated into neoliberalism, an
economic system premised on the ceaseless concentration of capital in
fewer and fewer hands at the top, and a race to the bottom for
wage-earners. Now that it is a worldwide system, there are fewer
opportunities to draw in resources with which to continue expanding the
pyramid scheme.
Between ecological catastrophe and growing inequality, the average
participants in globalized capitalism no longer have cause to expect an
ever-improving quality of life. State governments are dismantling the
programs that once served to offset the vicissitudes of the market,
feeding every resource into the fire in order to keep their economies
competitive as the crisis accelerates. Contemporary democratic
governments preside over an increasingly invasive security apparatus
intended to preserve order at any price.
In 2010–2014, a wave of movements around the world proposed to solve
these problems with a more participatory democratic model. Yet those
movements ended in new dictatorships in Egypt and elsewhere in the
global South, while they were reabsorbed into representational politics
in Europe and the United States—most notably in the cases of Syriza and
Podemos. As these efforts reached their limits, a new generation of
far-right and outright fascist politicians used the democratic process
to gain power: Golden Dawn in Greece, Donald Trump in the United States,
Alternative fĂĽr Deutschland in Germany, the Lega Nord in Italy, and the
Swedish Democrats in Sweden.
In much of the world, faith in democracy is collapsing. The New York
Times reports that in 2017, only 18 percent of Mexicans surveyed said
they were satisfied with democracy—a sentiment reflected around much of
Latin America. Those who understood democracy as promising liberty,
equality, and universal fellowship are discovering that representational
politics serves to maintain the old concentrations of power. In this
regard, it is a lot like capitalism: it rotates the figures that appear
at the apex of power while rendering inequality itself structural and
permanent.
Dissatisfaction with democracy will not necessarily produce more
inclusive or liberating alternatives. Aiming to preserve the status of
traditionally privileged demographics as neoliberalism generates new
instability, various nationalists and authoritarians are proposing new
criteria for exclusion from political participation, including
citizenship, religion, ethnicity, and gender. All of these already have
a longstanding history as dividing lines in previous iterations of
democracy.
Narrowing down the number of people who are granted rights and
privileges within the prevailing order will undermine all the mechanisms
that stabilized capitalism and democracy up to this point. This will
almost certainly generate new revolts. The question is whether these
revolts can coalesce around new models of decision-making and power
relations that do not consolidate control in the hands of the few.
It’s up to us to show how capitalism and democracy have failed to
deliver the dignity and self-determination their proponents promised and
to propose alternative ways of organizing our lives, lest we leave the
field of critique to proponents of even more authoritarian systems.
For an academic study of the anarchist critique of democracy, we
recommend Markus Lundström’s Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy:
The Impossible Argument.
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Our forebears overthrew kings and dictators, but they didn’t abolish the
institutions by which kings and dictators ruled: they democratized them.
Yet whoever operates these institutions—whether it’s a king, a
president, or an electorate—the experience on the receiving end is
roughly the same. Laws, police, and bureaucracy came before democracy;
they function the same way in a democracy as they do in a dictatorship.
The only difference is that, because we can cast ballots about how they
should be applied, we’re supposed to regard them as ours even when
they’re used against us.
The more people are governed by a given democratic system, the fewer can
actively participate in the decision-making. To function on a mass
scale, democracy requires formal processes, protocol, credentials, and
so many levels of representation as to effectively exclude most people.
The result is a tremendous expenditure of resources—caucuses,
conventions, forums, registration, paperwork, lobbying, electoral
campaigns—just to maintain the façade of public participation.
Without all this red tape, there would be anarchy: we would participate
directly in the decisions that shape our lives. Instead of petitioning
the authorities or waiting on the arbitrary edicts of government
agencies, we could experiment with solving our problems together on our
own terms.