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Title: Against Democracy Author: Grupos Anarquistas Coordinados Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: Spain, democracy, Operation Pandora Source: Retrieved on January 2nd, 2016 from http://againstdemocracy.blog.com/ Notes: Contra la democracia originally published 2013.
The bound pile of pages you hold in your hands is a small contribution
from the United Anarchist Groups to the fight against democracy, which
is the most widespread contemporary form of political domination (as the
primary and most sophisticated expression of the State), constituting an
authoritarian, buck-passing, submissive mentality, and the ideal legal
framework for the development of the capitalist economy, which is the
source of exploitation and poverty.
It is for these reasons, and faced with the disquieting demands for more
and better democracy from many sectors that have in recent years
increasingly begun to engage in protest and disobedience â demands that
almost always end up subsuming real and radical struggles â that for a
few years now we have been conducting a campaign against this dominating
and domesticating monstrosity referred to as democracy. These texts,
written by us, are part of that campaign. With them, we hope to make our
modest contribution to the enormous task of fighting the State,
capitalism and all forms of authority for a new world without domination
or submission â for Anarchy.
Rebellious greetings, and we hope you find our small contribution
useful.
United Anarchist Groups
Spring 2013
Democracy justifies itself based on certain principles that are no less
false for having been repeated a thousand times as truths, and its
justification is so internalized that even its opponents believe in its
principles. Considering how ingrained and immobile the idea of this
systemâs fundamental goodness is in the peopleâs thinking, change seems
impossible; nobody seems to be suggesting any other organizational forms
these days, or even other ways of life.
We daughters of democracy have been told that this is the best of all
regimes; our parents and grandmothers lived under a system where
coercion and repression were more direct, and now that it has taken on a
softer form, we are expected to accept it from birth. Why is it that we
are going to be a poorer generation than the previous ones, without
there even having been a war in between? The blame lies with the
irreparable transformations imposed by their system.
The system claims to be based on âfree association,â but it is not in
fact free, since from birth we are forced to be part of this regime and
have no possibility of choosing any other way of life. We do not âfreely
associateâ with the educational institutions, since other ways of
learning are prohibited. And thereâs no âfree associationâ involved at
work, because we donât control what we produce, decide our own working
hours, or have the unfettered right to organize with our co-workers.
Universal suffrage, a concept that has been exalted throughout history
as a great victory by ever broader segments of the population, in fact
brings itself into question conceptually upon closer examination: itâs
always been said that the vote is free, but in fact the choice is
limited, because consciousness is not free, but subject to the
propaganda of the ruling regime and the culture promoted by the groups
that are in power. It is also freedom-denying insofar as it reduces us
to merely giving our two cents, yes or no, or saying which party we
think should rule us, which denies us the possibility of developing
other possible ways of living together. And why is the ballot secret? Is
there no true freedom of speech?
In democracy we leave the defense of our interests, the satisfaction of
our needs, and the organization of human relations and life in the hands
of others. It is assumed that by voting we choose those who we think
will best represent our interests, but that doesnât fit with reality:
The political parties in fact only represent their own interests,
according to the rules they themselves establish, seeking to rise to the
heights of political and economic power so as to maintain their
dominance and influence over the rest of society.
Criticism of politicians is now almost universal; people have no more
confidence in their justice. The popularity of such criticism is only
proof of their personal and collective failure to resolve conflicts, and
of how unconvincing their act really is. The intent of the Law is
clearly economic in nature, bringing in money for the state, whether
with fines, labor reforms, or just the economic organization of society
itself, while at the same time it represses the people, cutting back the
freedoms it was supposedly there to defend (association, press,
assemblyâŠ) while spreading ever more broadly the threat of imprisonment
(such as the most recent highway code, etc.).
This is how we go from being human beings to being âcitizensâ (or
consumers, or users, or customers, depending on the sphere of life we
happen to be in), and have certain rights and obligations imposed on us
in accordance with that label, thus reducing us to political
commodities.
The fundamentalism of democracy is not only imposed within the
territories where it dominates; since capitalism needs to expand to
survive, it has to force itself into every corner of the planet,
everywhere imposing democracy, which is the best breeding ground for its
development. Military campaigns are undertaken unhesitatingly against
any territories where capitalism hasnât yet firmly taken root,
demonizing the local customs and culture to curry favor with the
attacking countryâs population. Thus they impose their way of life by
force, both inside and outside their borders, while selling a false idea
of freedom. No regime in history has ever had so many means of
repression and social control available to it.
Policies are made based on the needs of the market; in democracy, our
âchoice,â expressed through the vote, makes little difference, as the
same types of political measures are implemented whether the left or
right wing is in power.
At the present historical moment, the political leaders do not have
opposing interests, in spite of their labels; every one of them must
promote a State structure that fosters the growth of Capital, and
implement policies based on the needs of the market rather than on the
needs of the people. Indeed, in many cases the politicians themselves
are the direct beneficiaries of these policies, as they themselves are
part of the corporate class.
We all watched silently as the government pumped millions of Euros into
the banks while most people were out of work or facing eviction. Weâve
become accustomed to hearing news about corruption directly linking
economics to politics. With no mincing of words and not even a trace of
the usual deceit, Emilio Botin has said that âstarting at a certain
level of power, the relationship between business and politics is much
more direct than people think it is; theyâre only a phone call away from
one another, from cell phone to cell phone, without even any secretaries
involved.â Democracy is not based on the common interest; when the laws
are drafted, business interests rule.
For these reasons we conclude that democracy does not mean government by
the people for the people; it is merely the masquerade show cloaking the
dictatorship of capital.
IF WE BELIEVE THAT DEMOCRACY IS FREEDOM
WEâLL ALWAYS BE SLAVES
TEAR THE MASK OFF THE GREAT LIE!
CREATE ANARCHY.
Democracy is too vague and general a word, whose meaning often depends
only on what the mouth that happens to be uttering it has eaten by the
end of the month (if it has eaten anything at all). Paradise for a few,
an aspiration for many, and a hell for many more, what does seem clear
about democracy is that it is a form of government, and also a way in
which State Power is expressed.
Though there are many forms of democracy, both now and throughout
history, it has a particular creation story and historical process. All
the forms of democracy share a common philosophy and certain common
roots. At the risk of seeming unoriginal, we will now go through a brief
historical review to take a look at the origins of this very subtle form
of domination that nevertheless brutally subjugates us every day.
Democracy is based, in principle, on the adoption of a particular
collective process for making decisions, electing governments and
regulating societies. This is nothing new. Since prehistoric times there
have been councils, local gatherings and assemblies in human tribes to
decide matters of concern to their constituents. Even in the most
archaic times of monarchy, the king couldnât just casually make
decisions without at least consulting with some kind of counsel (whether
military, wise men, family chiefs or clan chiefs, etc.) and always had
to have some respect for tradition. What caused the change from one form
of decision-making to another, besides the hardly trivial appearance and
progressive institutionalization of Authority, was the degree of
systematization and organization of that authority.
Democracy appeared for the first time in the 5^(th) century, in the
Greek region of Attica. After the fall of the monarchy for unclear
reasons at the hands of a popular revolt, a new form of regulation and
government was imposed in Athenian society. Since these Athenian men (we
say âmenâ deliberately, since the new regime was organized exclusively
by and for native-born, free, property owning males) were convinced that
the old monarchical or aristocratic forms were not to their liking, they
implemented a new form of government, derived both from ancient communal
traditions and from the reform of existing institutions, expanding the
powers of certain bodies and limiting those of others. Thus a judiciary
was formed, with rotating membership; more importance was given to
community assemblies; the number of rulers increased, and their powers
and the duration of their mandate was limited; their power was balanced
by that of the observers and judges to attempt to reduce capricious
injustices, etc. The basic ideas behind this system are still in place
today, though theyâve degenerated significantly.
But before we proceed to explain the workings of democracy and its
evolution up to the present day, we must make an obligatory but
important etymological remark, accompanied by a historical clarification
without which the concept of democracy and its emergence in ancient
Greece cannot be fully understood, and at even greater risk of seeming
unoriginal, we must now analyze the word âdemocracyâ and its meaning.
Breaking a few myths and many historical and linguistic falsifications,
the word âdemocracyâ does not in fact come from only two words (demos,
supposedly meaning âpeopleâ and kratos, supposedly meaning âpowerâ or
ârule,â giving rise to the term ârule by the peopleâ). The word
democracy in fact derives from three words: demiurgi, or craftsmen,
geomori, or farmers, and kratos, or âStateâ (in ancient Greek â not
âpower,â a meaning it came to acquire later in the classical period for
political reasons, to justify the social order in place at the time).
From the merger of the first two words, demiurgi and geomori, the new
word âdemosâ was formed, a word invented in the classical era, and thus
a neologism, which did not exist when this socio-political order was
first created. So from a fusion of words referring to craftsmen and
farmers the word for âthe peopleâ was formed, to justify the new state
apparatus and prop up the social order it imposed. Clearly, then, âthe
peopleâ only refers to the craftsmen, merchants and farmers, and the new
regime was made for their benefit. Anyone who wasnât part of these
classes wasnât included in âthe people.â So in fact democracy doesnât
mean ârule by the people,â but âcraftsmenâs and farmersâ State.â
In the late 5^(th) century, these two social classes initiated a
rebellion against the Attican monarchy, and, in a tumultuous and hazy
era, by a process that is hard to discern and for causes that are not
very well known, overthrew it to establish the new model. But we should
make another clarification. Athenian society in the run-up to the
establishment of democracy consisted of three classes or social strata:
on top of the pyramid there were the Eupatridae, comprised of the
nobles, which was the class the monarch was from. Then came the Demiurgi
â these were the artisans and merchants (but not just ordinary artisans;
rather they were the master craftsmen and owners of the workshops, who
owned slaves and employed wage-workers, the managers of production and
trade in the service of the Eupatridae). Then came the Geomori or
farmers, i.e., the landowning, slave-owning farmers. These three classes
constituted the ranks of free men, and they were in turn subdivided
according to rank, wealth and social position. After these, at the
lowest level of the pyramid, were the Metoikos, who were the sons of an
Athenian father and a foreign mother (who were generally the employees
or assistants of the demiurgi and geomori); they were free men, but did
not have the same rights as free Athenians. The slaves were lower still.
And apart from them all were the women, who were not even considered
âpersons,â much less âcitizens.â
It is with these characteristics and in this context that democracy was
born. At first its form was crude; then, almost a century after its
founding, Pericles further improved it (and from that âimprovementâ
emerged a new type of regime called tyranny, the first dictatorial
state). The functioning of democracy was relatively simple. All
Athenians who had reached the age of majority (free, property-owning
males) met in the âagoraâ or public square, as the representatives of
their families (women, children and slaves), and there they would choose
a limited number of magistrates to serve a two-year term of office. Each
of these magistrates had a specific function. Some would be judges,
others would be governors, others would oversee the government, others
would be functionaries, etc. At these assemblies in the agora, which
were held relatively regularly, the property-owners would outline the
general direction to be taken by the politics and policy of the city,
and the governors would be in charge of putting their decisions into
practice; they had a good amount of flexibility, but had to stick to
whatever the assemblies decided. Most of the time they functioned by
simple referendum, or by choosing from among the proposals put forth by
the magistrates or the committees elected to handle some specific
matter. The referendums were fairly general, leaving the application of
decisions, procedures and timing in the hands of the government. What
the governors couldnât do was ride roughshod over the assembliesâ
decisions, or act too far outside the (quite broad) guidelines set out
for them. Of course, plots, conspiracies and manipulations were around
many centuries before democracy, and such ordinary political methods as
those could certainly be applied under democracy as well, to justify
just about anything. If any doubt or disagreement were to arise, then
recourse would be taken to ancient tradition, oracles, and priests
(which amounted more or less to the same thing) to âclear upâ the
uncertainty.
It should be pointed out that the magistrates, elected for annual or
biannual periods, were not paid positions, so only certain people could
hold them (after all, who could afford to neglect their activities or
their business for one or two years to serve the nation without breaking
the bank?).
This social âparadise,â built on the bloody backs of slaves and women,
was limited only to the fair city of Athens. In the year 435, Periclesâ
heyday, it was the largest city in the known world, with just over one
hundred thousand inhabitants (which would make this aberrant regime far
more workable than it could be in entire countries with tens or hundreds
of millions). For the rest there was only vassalage, as Athens was a
commercial and military empire which subjugated its neighbors and
defeated all its rival regional empires in long-lasting and bitter wars
(with its southern neighbors, the Lacedaemonians â known to posterity as
the Spartans â or its more distant Eastern neighbors, the Persians).
Over time Athens ruled over a real commercial, political and military
empire, organized into leagues and federations in which it imposed its
hegemony, an empire that stretched, even without the need for the
customary military invasions, all the way from Turkey to Girona and from
Slovenia to Tunisia.
The gradually increasing growth of authority and the increasingly brutal
solidification of power led to successive tyrannies, dictatorial state
forms given political justification and organized within formally
prescribed legal and political limits (unlike the old regime of the
Egyptian pharaohs, for example, which was justified by religion and held
unlimited power), and to harsh empires such as that of Alexander the
Great, whose successors would eventually force the glory of Greece to
succumb to its Western neighbors with the longer swords: Rome, which
also had its glamorous start with a democracy, in imitation of the
Greeks (though one that was even more authoritarian and corrupt), but
then got quite a bit out of hand.
Revolution
Since history is not linear but apparently cyclical, and is full of
âprogressâ and âsetbacks,â it seems that the epic saga of democracy
suffered two tough setbacks that turned its ship back toward more
dictatorial ports. The first was Periclesâ degradation of democracy, and
finally the coup de grace dealt to it by Alexander, who was as fond of
travel and conquest as he was despotic. With democracy buried in the
graveyard of politics, a clique of Latin men, with a republic that could
just as reasonably be considered to have been democratic, appeared on
the scene in the Mediterranean region and conquered much of the empire
of Alexander, who lived fast and died young. The powerful Roman
republic, which expanded militarily far beyond where Athens had gone,
never kept all the democracy just for itself; it imposed local governors
on everyone else, while requiring them to respect its style of
government. Shortly thereafter, in a plot twist that could have come
from the script of Star Wars, the Republic became an Empire, for the
centuries of centuries, with a legacy so durable that even after it
collapsed as the result of its internal decadence and the invasion of
barbarian tribes, it simply broke down into a mosaic of despotic
kingdoms, ruled by a hodgepodge of Roman law and Germanic customary law.
This was a great step backwards from the point of view of democracy,
which didnât get a new start until several centuries after the fall of
the Roman Republic, the last formal democracy of Antiquity.
Specifically, fifteen centuries after. In the 14^(th) century, various
city-states formed in northern Italy, as the result of commerce and
decomposition due to wars and other dirty tricks played by larger
kingdoms. In these city-states, an incipient commercial bourgeoisie,
which in spite of the distance was the heir to the geomori and demiurgi
of nearly two thousand years prior, came to establish a new regime
inspired by the democracy of yesteryear, with forms borrowed from the
communal councils of the medieval tradition, and above all, with the
most powerful Reasons of State. Jean Bodin and Niccolo Machiavelli wrote
two separate and important treatises on the organization of the State,
as new forms of democracy, based on merit and money, were being imposed
in some cities, where the government was establishing communal
assemblies with representation provided by elected potentates making
decisions on behalf of the people (and here already weâre getting all
too close to the way things are today).
And from that silt, swept down by the storm of empires and the early
absolutist States, came the democratic mud of the first parliament
worthy of the name, and historyâs first modern republic. After a
bloodbath ending in civil war, the United Kingdom of Great Britain
(which still didnât include Northern Ireland) gave its king â named
Charles at the time â a ticket to the former royal dungeons. And while
Charles was enjoying those last moments when he could still feel the
weight of the head on his shoulders, a fanatical Puritan âgentlemanâ
named Cromwell imposed the first and only English republic in 1649,
after a year of civil war in which he not eliminated not only the
monarchists, but also several other political factions advocating what
scholars have called âproto-communism.â
The first parliamentary democracy in the history of mankind was
cultivated in blood and gore, and established a system of census
suffrage to elect the hundred-odd members of the House of Commons (so
called because they were not nobles anymore but members of the gentry,
i.e., the commercial and farming bourgeoisie), which in turn would elect
the government, which would then choose the âpresidentâ of the nation.
This would come to be the inspiration and immediate historical
predecessor of the French Revolution, giving the bourgeoisie, whose
position was close to State power but formally separated from it, the
clout needed to demand its role within the State. The State, in turn,
accommodated more or less naturally to the new set-up, which mostly came
about as the result of its own decisions.
The stupidity only lasted exactly four years, since without even
allowing time for a second legislature to form, Cromwell staged a coup
and named himself Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England. There
then followed six years of dictatorship, in which Cromwell accumulated
all the powers that the king had previously held (except that, like the
Bolsheviks a few centuries later, he had the decency to refrain from
using that title, but picked another more appropriate one), in order,
paradoxically, to save democracy from itself. So much corruptionâŠ
The example didnât take, for the time being, and the English island was
soon back to its old ways, with the Netherlands giving it a democratic
restoration in the form of a dynasty, in the old style, i.e.: âbecause
Iâm better than you and have a bigger navy.â A new king, from the
dynasty of Orange, put a definitive end to Englandâs democratic
adventure and its consequences, and he set his sights on a small island
off the coast England, just to the left on the map. Ireland certainly
didnât like the way that ended up going. If youâre interested in
learning more about the dynasty and the Order of Orange, go ask around
in Derry.
Itâs funny how certain processes seem to repeat themselves again and
again in history, and how the middle classes tend to do the upper
classesâ dirty work until they finally get fed up and demand their share
of the spoils. And of course they demand that share quite
democratically, so that the businessmen end up in power instead of the
military. The middle class is always so altrustic⊠but things change and
become more complex, and only a hundred years later, the young overseas
colonies followed the example of their big brother England, establishing
a democracy that was quite similar, and also ended up becoming a world
power. Little wonder that the colonies copied the same philosophy.
Little wonder that after the restoration hundreds of Republicans were
exiled to America.
The colonial process in North America was designed by the English state,
but its execution was âoutsourced.â The colonial process was privatized,
and the Crown only took the fame and the taxes. But in those 13 colonies
east of the great lakes, it was the settlers who âruled the roost.â They
decided on their own forms of government, justice and social
organization, swearing allegiance and paying their taxes on time every
year to England, which only minimally interfered in the process. The
fact that in the collective imagination America was seen as a land of
freedom, where one could escape from tyranny (and where many
Cromwellians and âproto-communistsâ found refuge) encouraged the
creation of new ways of living and gave rise to some experimentation.
The recently developed ideas of political liberalism found a good
audience there. Derived from the English brand of Protestantism lite
(Republican, quasi-socialistic, and suspicious of state authority), they
welcomed the early theoretical outlines of a liberalism that was
anti-state but pro-private property.
Tired of more than a century of colonization in which they had not only
been doing the dirty work of exterminating the native peoples, but had
been paying extortionate taxes too, the colonies finally got fed up and
rebelled, led by a pack of rich landowners with hare-brained ideas (they
were distrustful of government, couldnât stand banks, and hated
monarchy, but advocated private property as the result of individual
effort and free trade). After six years of war, the United States of
America (the 13 colonies turned into the thirteen states of a Union in
the form of a federal government that ended up comprising fifty states)
declared their independence and organized the first modern democracy in
history.
And so a presidential republic with the form of a federation and a very
liberal constitution was born. What started as a kind of direct
census-suffrage democracy ended up degenerating into a system of
representation (as it must, especially when the so-called direct
democracy is supposed to be set up in places with hundreds of thousands
or millions of people). At first there were no political parties, and
open lists of representatives (congressmen) and Senators were elected
from among a handful of white, male, of a certain age, and propertied
(since the position was unpaid) candidates, based on votes cast by an
electorate of identical composition. The inspiration was drawn from
Classical Greece and the Puritan Revolution. The Constitution was very
liberal, and placed many limitations on the authorities, of whom its
framers were suspicious. But the republic was a presidential system, and
although the underdogs were given substantial leeway, Power, though
dispersed in various institutions, was too; everything was tied up
tight. The middle class of property-owning farmers and merchants, whoâd
done the dirty work for the English crown made up of nobles and military
brass, was in power again, and just as altruistic as ever. But this time
it wouldnât just be one little island; they would expand and expand,
increasingly restricting what freedom existed, already so limited and
spurious.
Though the U.S. led the way, another great bloodbath soon came about,
also inspired by political liberalism and theories about the social
contract, but this time in a âcontinental Europeanâ version (which
usually just means France, and sometimes Germany), to put this rebirth
of democracy in its proper place â and like the new Olympics, which
recycle the spirit of the old but are hardly the same, they brought a
certain value system to power. In a process that began at that time and
would last a century, the bourgeoisie dethroned the nobility, and they
dropped like dominoes â it was a process of the rebirth of the State
(sometimes even without the consent of the managers of that apparatus,
and sometimes plotted entirely by them). And so it was that after
killing a lot of people and going through various models of democracy
and types of government (from the parliamentary monarchy of the
Girondins to the republic of Jacobin terror), they at last firmly
enthroned the idealistic concept everyone has in mind when talking
abstractly about democracy, at least of the parliamentary type. In
short, they ended up with a government elected by male census suffrage
(though, all told, they did have a period of universal male suffrage),
ruled by a middle class of merchants and industrialists (for some fifty
years by this point they could no longer have been referred to simply as
craftsmen), complaining about how theyâd done the nobilityâs dirty work
for years. That little adventure ended with Napoleonâs coup dâetat and
the birth of another new empire. So much corruptionâŠ
Though the story has its variations, the democratic process is always
the same. The State gives in and the middle classes take over (by force
or with consent, as was the case of the other countries of Europe and
England in the 18^(th) century) to establish total government by
economy. Because if thereâs one thing that really differentiates
democracy â especially the liberal variant â from other historical forms
of government it is that it seeks to encompass each and every aspect of
life. Its tendency is to regulate everything, legislate everything, and
adopt standards of an economistic nature for that purpose; so democracy
makes capitalism possible, and capitalism can thus become autonomous,
becoming a key factor where before it had been âsimplyâ a means of
production, created by and in the service of the State.
Democracy does not offer freedom; at best it offers the degraded
possibility of its exercise. And it is always an oppressive possibility,
crushing the freedom of the process, quite often âanarchisticâ (such as
revolts against monarchy, tyranny or dictatorship, though not always
just that), which gave rise to it.
With the advent of liberal democracy, this would come to be reinforced
even further, with democratic oppression reaching unimaginable heights,
perfecting the machine of state domination, and mainly state-capitalist
domination, to an intolerable degree.
Stepping between the puddles from the last rainfall, down a rarely
travelled sidewalk, comes a slick crook strumming a guitar and reciting
an old song by Los Suaves. The ârainâ was a series of rebellions against
the nobility, the ârarely travelled sidewalkâ is political liberalism,
and the âslick crookâ is that bourgeoisie that often plays the
marginalized second-fiddle to Power but is so necessary to the
development of high state policy. In the nineteenth century, witnessing
the unstoppable rise of the commercial class and its capitalist economy
(which, driven by the bourgeoisie, went from being a âsimpleâ mode of
large-scale production, designed by the English State in the service of
its militarism, to being a global system for the production and
reproduction of commodities and commodified social relations), many
European states came to accept the corresponding new way of life, on the
basis of parliamentary democracy coupled with an industrialized economy,
tending towards a relatively free market. The nobility and the state
apparatus of the United Kingdom (Great Britain, and by this point
Northern Ireland as well) and a still (legally) disunited Germany made
their pact with the gentry and together imposed the new society. The
nobility of other countries, including France, especially the Eastern
European kingdoms, were more stubborn and recalcitrant, and had to be
made to yield to the march of progress and of two revolutionary waves
brought about by the people, but directed (as they almost always are) by
the bourgeoisie, in the name of the most jingoistic nationalism and the
free market⊠oh yes â and in the name of democracy.
It was a perfect combination, and it spread like wildfire. The
nineteenth century came to be known as the century of liberal
revolutions. But this term does not exactly describe rebellious masses
running lecherous kings out of their palaces with gunfire (which only
occured in less than a dozen countries), rather it refers to the fact
that once it acquired political power, however it acquired it (by
revolution, elections, by piggybacking, by invasion, by state reform,
etc.), liberalism imposed its economy, its political model and its new
way of life by blood and fire, a way of life that for the first time in
human history would be truly totalitarian, because it would extend
itself by any means necessary to every single layer of society. Thus was
the new project of domination designed, and there then arose the
contemporary liberal-bourgeois and democratic State, which would spread
itself homogeneously everywhere, drowning in suffering all other remnant
cultures, languages, and still-extant ancestral ways of life. The State
then centralized, based on an unprecedented cultural, linguistic,
religious and economic imposition. The new model was the France of the
19^(th) century: one centralized nation-state; one democratic and
bourgeois political power structure; one free market economy (wherever
possible); one culture, that of the Parisian bourgeoisie; one value
system, that of competitiveness and private property, considered sacred;
one education system, which imposed one language, Parisian French
(annihilator of dozens of others like Corsican, Lorraine, Breton,
Basque, Occitan, Catalan, Massilian, etc. â the list goes on and on).
Anyone caught resisting would be sent to the scaffold. The case of the
Kingdom of Spain is also a paradoxical one, with its pronunciamientos,
three civil wars, colonial rebellions, two Carlist wars and one
cantonalist war, a language that was imposed everywhere (Castilian) â
and hereâs a revealing fact: in a hundred years the number of people
killed by the liberal State amounted to a quarter of the number that the
Inquisition killed in five hundred years â just a quarter. A similar
course of events was to come to pass in Italy, with Garibaldi carrying
out unification via massacre, and the imposition of industrial
capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and the Tuscan-Florentine version
of the language.
So letâs take a look at the balance sheet for parliamentary democracy
and its little brother capitalism: tens of thousands dead, traditions
and customs destroyed, municipal councils disbanded, communal lands
fenced in, parcelled off and privatized, and the natural environment
ravaged by industrialization. It wasnât until the seventeenth century,
when capitalism arose, promoted by the state as a means of conducting
the large-scale production required to meet military needs, that Felipe
II finally had half of what is today Zaragoza province deforested
(causing the aberration known as the Monegros desert, where todayâs
youth attend so many summer music festivals) to build his famous Armada,
which couldnât make it across a canal on a rainy day.
So, after all these bloodbaths, with the ascent of capitalism in full
swing, in a world where democracy is expanding and becoming globalized,
we now arrive in the 20^(th) century, the century of the greatest social
inequality in the history of this strange species we call âhumanâ (in
âThe Matrixâ they say weâre not really like mammals, but more like a
virus, since we devastate everything around us, and when thereâs nothing
left we go elsewhere, these days to outer space). We had two world wars
fought for commercial interests and political ambition â that is, for
Power pure and simple â which crowned our great disaster, and
definitively cemented the world order. After World War II, a perverse
system was constructed on the basis of a false political and ideological
confrontation between two irreconcilable enemies, which at bottom were
simply economic competitors. Indeed, both defined themselves as
democratic (one parliamentary and the other popular) and both were
capitalist (one free market and the other state-capitalist). But nothing
in life lasts forever, as Heraclitus the Obscure once said, and this new
order also had to die; so at the end of the twentieth century one of
those two blocs â and we all know which â collapsed, losing out to the
competition. The liberal-democratic paradigm triumphed in spite of its
minor socialist setback. Meanwhile, of course, the blood of the
exploited and oppressed continued to water the wastelands of despair.
Some were simply killed off; others were first betrayed and then killed
off; but all were ultimately defeated by Authority. One by one, the
dreams of freedom of thousands of individuals, which surged forth from
nothingness to reach up even to the greatest heights of poverty, were
dashed to pieces. Thatâs what happens when you put your trust in
authority (whether aristocratic, bourgeois, proletarian, monarchical or
republican, capitalist or communist, democratic or dictatorial) instead
of relying on yourself and on the passion for freedom.
Such is the history of democracy, a history that has brought nothing but
hardship and misery in the guise of supposed freedom and well-being,
with which weâve been sold up the river. One of the most recent and
obvious cases: the kingdom of Spain. Libertad, libertad, sin ira
libertad [Freedom, freedom, freedom without anger], they sang, at the
end of a dictatorship imposed in 1936 by the Church and the Bankers, and
propped up for the long haul (actively or passively) by the world
powers, a dictatorship that only ended because the dictator died of old
age in his little bed. Radicals of every stripe, liberals, Christians,
communists, rightist Democrats, all gave us a social contract, which the
king calls idyllic; a fascistic parliamentary democracy (not much worse
than others, but certainly more grotesque and with less fashion sense â
a purely Iberian product), which has led us to right back to the very
same place we were at when liberal democracy first arrived on Iberian
shores (see what the worshipers of progress make of that observation).
But there is one slight difference: the desire for resistance and
freedom is conspicuous in its absence, and instead we now have the
fashionable form of good-citizen protest that demands that the state
behave properly, allowing us to consume without restraint, and have more
âfreedoms.â Does anyone still not realize that the State in general, and
democracy in particular, are not the solution but part of the problem?
When we talk about democracy, the idyllic world of classical Greece
appears in the mindâs eye: bearded intellectual men chatting civilly
under the Mediterranean sun, wrapped in white togas. But of course this
kind of thinking is far from the truth. The vast majority of people
living in the cradle of democracy lived in slavery, and the women were
entirely excluded from the decision making process as well. There, at
the grand source of the democratic idea, only property-owning males
ruled, and their power extended over all their property, including their
families and slaves (sound familiar?). The owners treated each other as
free and equal men, and each commanded and obeyed in turn. The polis was
no unnatural aberration; it was the culmination of the social
organization in place that allowed free men (and we emphasize that free
men meant propertied men) to live the good life.
But even this notion of a harmonious society has long disappeared with
the passage of time, and has nothing to do with todayâs democracy. What
we are suffering under today is the result of a specific historical
evolution that began with the creation of the modern State, which came
into being in the context of a particular time and place and within a
particular set of ideological paradigms. In the sixteenth century
Hobbes, Locke and a handful of other characters appeared, who elaborated
the theory of the social contract; shockingly, it is still around even
today. Civil society, which the Greek polis eventually turned into,
still occurs only among free men (property-owners), but there has now
appeared a new entity, the State, where free men were no longer equal to
one another. The State is an artificial creation, supposedly intended to
address the age-old phenomenon of primordial conflict, since of course
the natural condition of man is obviously the struggle of all against
all, where âman is like a wolf to manâ (please note the sarcasm). Thus a
vertical organization was imposed: one sovereign authority over the
masses of citizen-vassals. The new paradigm of what âsocietyâ means rose
up as a counterweight against nature, which was characterized as a
violent and oppressive force that preceded that great and civilized
phenomenon: politics. Thus, the triumph of society was the creation of
the modern State, which is simply the domestication of nature with
everything that that entails.
Then the bourgeois revolutions followed one after another: the English
Revolution, the independence of the United States, the French
Revolution⊠The construction of the State as we know it is the fruit of
a particular history, and we should not pretend to understand it without
considering the specific material and ideological development involved.
The modern State appears in connection with the Nation-State, with the
division of powers to provide checks and balances, and with a string of
inalienable rights and obligations. With the passing of the years, the
succession of wars and revolutions, and the consolidation of the welfare
state in the face of the Soviet threat, nothing has changed about the
substance or meaning of the modern State. Beyond a relative extension of
the limits of the Stateâs mission in the Welfare State context, or the
alleged participation of citizens in the formal functioning of the
democratic State, the only real purpose of all these variants of the
modern State is to continually try to maintain an artificial order built
against and on top of nature and the citizen-vassals, doing a balancing
act to keep up with the changing circumstances and exigencies of
history.
The institutionalization of the modern State, and in particular its
democratic form, led to the birth of âcitizenship.â Individuals would
thus cease to be individuals, and become part of a superior reality â
the State â which would provide them with security by preserving a
handful of their natural and inalienable rights, and neutralizing
tendencies that are harmful to the community. From this assumption three
key issues arise: first of all, what tendencies are to be considered
harmful to the community, and who decides that? Secondly, what measures
will be used to neutralize these harmful tendencies? And thirdly, these
supposed rights, which emanate from some authority superior to the
individual him or herself, only hold up when authority recognizes them
and deigns to grant them. The State defines what tendencies are harmful
to the community, grants the rights and guarantees them, decides what is
a right and what is not, and the State imposes or revokes such rights,
if necessary by force, because the State has the monopoly on force.
We survive under a system of domination. What we mean when we say this
is that our lives are subject to and conditioned by a multitude of power
relations arising from enormous, profound structures that can be
summarized as class, gender and race. These axes of inequality have
tangible bases.
These bases are material in nature, obviously, and if we think back to
the free men of the Greek polis, i.e., the property-owners and their
slaves, and then look at all the people today who work but still have
their lives constrained by worries about where theyâre going to sleep
and what theyâre going to eat, we can perhaps find some common ground.
In these times, when economic crisis seems to be all anyoneâs talking
about, itâs important to examine at the relationship between economics
and politics. We see democracy as the political facade of the economic
system called capitalism. We consider them to be two component parts of
the same machine, working together in a kind of symbiosis to ensure the
continuity of the status quo. The State caters to the financial needs of
the big companies and banks as needed, and hands out subsidies and aid
only insofar as they are indispensable to maintain the stability of the
economic system and protect social peace.
There are also legal, that is, ideological bases for this: if we look
back at any declaration of rights (and if we do so it is not to grant
them the slightest validity, but because they are explicit
manifestations of the ideas and intentions of Power) we see that not
only do they regulate what supposedly falls within the public domain,
such as political rights or the right to private property, but assert
control over all other spheres as well, including the so-called private
sphere. From the platform of the State, all relations are prescribed and
(de)limited: political, economic and personal.
These ideological bases perpetuate inequality, and all of us, vassals of
the State, relate to each other on that foundation: they prescribe,
define and justify patterns of social conduct. Democratic thinking is
what tells you what to do and what not to do, and how you should do it.
The State always meddles in everything, at any time and situation, and
democratic thinking is its guarantor. We think what the State and its
tools of control (school, the media, pressure from peers, family and
relatives) allow us to think. It is assumed that in a Democratic State
we are free to think what we want, but our imagination is trapped by the
imposition of a reality that is very concrete, and intimidated by fears
of marginalization or shame. Moreover, even if we do manage to think
something we arenât supposed to think, the State has still more
threatening tools to use if we ever try to do something about it: direct
repression, in all its forms (police, prisons, psychiatrists, juvenile
detention centers, and all the other institutions set up to protect
society from such harmful tendencies).
But in its contemporary forms, the modern State is no longer just
against and over individuals; it is lodged within those individuals as
well. Its power is now more subtle, less visible, and therefore more
dangerous. The State is not a structure located entirely outside of us;
it is neither an abstract entity nor a reality tangible only in terms of
material conditions or political institutions; it is a reality that
seeks to encompass everything, and whose order is present in (almost)
everything â a totalitarian reality in the crudest and most literal
sense of the term. We have to be conscious of it, challenge the State in
all its forms and at all times, dismantle it, destroy it⊠we have to
dare to imagine new ways of living and fighting against this reality
that restricts us.
This is perhaps the solidest of the myths on which democracy is built:
the majority, that abstract entity with unquestionable authority that no
one challenges or distrusts; the pagan god that democracy invokes when
it commits its crimes.
But does the quantifiable majority of the population really even count
in the parliamentary democratic system? We can look at a few examples to
help clear up this question; amongst them is the Spanish constitution,
that âunquestionableâ paradigm of democratic legitimacy that everyone
drools over, from the most orthodox leftists to the most recalcitrant
ultra-rightists.
From a review of the official data, during the constitutional referendum
of 1978, out of a registered population of 36.8 million inhabitants only
a total of 15.7 million expressed their agreement with this âmagna
cartaâ: that is, 40%. Thus, the quantitative majority, i.e., 21 million
people, did not agree, either because they abstained, voted against it,
or had no right to express their opinion. It is thus clear that this
constitution was voted in by a minority of the population of the Spanish
state, to which democracy has attributed sufficient value to consider it
ârepresentative of the general will.â
So, obviously, neither the majority of the population, nor even the
majority of the electorate (let alone the generations of people to come,
who hadnât even been born yet at the time of this consultation, or those
were already alive who may well have changed their minds, seeing whatâs
happened) actually gave the nod to this constitution. It is thus a
fallacy that the constitution must infallibly be obeyed and respected
because it is the expression of the will of the majority; in any case it
is obeyed because it is forcibly imposed and defended (and they donât
take its enforcement lightly, either) by the State security forces, the
judiciary and the prison system, among others. Identical cases could be
cited in regard to general elections, municipal elections, etc., because
in a democracy it is in fact always a minority of the âelectorateâ that
decides which party will be next to rule the country, and how much
parliamentary representation theyâll get. Because thatâs another thing:
we donât even elect the government or these people who flaunt its power;
we just choose the list presented by our particular party, and then that
party, elected by the largest minority of the electorate, will get into
parliament along with the other parties (elected by even smaller
majority-minorities) and from among all its representatives in
parliament, they will elect the president of the government (and he or
she will then form the cabinet). This is clearly a democratic oligarchy.
However, our opposition to this setup (supplemented in another section
below, where we examine the operation of the electoral law) shouldnât be
taken to mean that weâd accept democratic rules in some other
conditions; indeed, we are against the tyranny of the minority over the
majority (real or fictitious) as much as we are against the tyranny of
the majority over the minority. There are several reasons for this, one
being the fact that we are for the recognition of all interests, be they
majority, minority or individual: the law of majority rule does not
necessarily mean that the majority is right, and history can find many
examples of that. Another reason is that we refuse to be objectified as
percentages, on the basis of which our ârightsâ can be given to us or
taken away: we want neither rights nor duties â at most we might talk
about the needs, desires, interests, etc., we may have, but not about
permissions or obligations imposed upon us or granted to us. We arenât
willing to talk about the interests of the greater number, but about the
number of interests. We defend the collective, certainly â but also
individual freedom.
Faced with the indissoluble bond between democracy and deceit, we have
chosen to fight the democratic discourse (and practice) from the
position of an anarchist ethics, framed within the struggle against all
authority, whether democratic (parliamentary, participatory, popular
and/or direct), dictatorial, or otherwise.
Rights are concessions granted by an established power structure, i.e.,
that which the power structure permits those it subjugates to do. Duties
are impositions by that same power structure, i.e., what it obligates
people to do. Rights and duties thus function as a binomial, as
counterparts to one another. Given that the two pillars of democracy are
majority rule and the rights of the people, we can make several
observations.
One is that people do not have rights; rather they have vital needs. To
confuse rights with needs is a serious error originating in
authoritarian thinking. People need to eat, breathe, have shelter,
sleep, take pleasure, ⊠and if these needs are not met they may suffer
deficiencies and diseases. Nobody can grant us the right to life (at
most we can be given life or have our lives taken away) except in
authoritarian and/or domesticated forms of life.
Another observation is that those who have rights have to have duties;
as pointed out above, this is axiomatic. Every right implies that
someone else recognizes that you have it, and that someone will require
you to have duties in exchange.
Another observation is that in order to have rights you must be a vassal
(under a king), a citizen (under the rule of law, or a republic) or
subject of a democracy. Those who suffer under dictatorships also have
ârightsâ; so do children in schools, prisoners in jail, animals,
âminorities,â etc.
Another observation then emerges from the previous ones, namely that in
order to have rights you must be governed, and thus domesticated and
oppressed; in other words, those who have to be given rights are not
really free.
These observations lead us to conclude that whoever wants to be free
must fight for freedom, and furthermore cannot claim to have rights,
since freedom is not something that can be granted to you. Rights
necessarily prefigure authoritarianism.
âWhen the multitudes exercise authority, they are crueler than the worst
tyrant.â â Plato.
In this text we will attempt an analysis of the two primary laws that
influence and regulate the Spanish electoral system, provided under that
umbrella (sometimes so open and sometimes so closed, whichever happens
to be convenient) that we call the Constitution.
The first of these Laws is called the Political Parties Law (Organic Law
no. 6/2002 of June 27), which repealed Law 54/1978 of December 4, a
pre-constitutional law which, paradoxically, was much less restrictive
about the right to passive suffrage, even at a time when the role of
armed struggle was most deeply rooted in the revolutionary politics of
the period some refer to as the transition.
The current Political Parties Law was drafted with the use of vague
concepts with a heavy moral weight, granting the judge broad discretion
and power to legislate by his own jurisprudence; such is one consequence
of the enforcement of laws with no objective content placed in the legal
system through the subjective filter of an âinterpreter of the law.â The
problem is compounded due to the special nature of the Spanish
judiciary, because, as everyone is aware, the high courts of Spain
(Supreme Court and Constitutional Court) are little more than branch
offices of the two major parties.
We will focus, therefore, on the controversial article 9 of the
Political Parties Law, which is devoted to redundant lists of the kinds
of activities that can render a political party illegal. We will be
examining various aspects of this Law, starting with the clause stating
that the kinds of activities that render a party illegal must be
performed repeatedly and deliberately. With these words the legislators
seek to legitimize these legal provisions by giving them an air of
exceptionality, though the reality is entirely different, since
repeatedly engaging in political activities is fundamental to developing
a mature political position; otherwise it would be quite hollow. Thus,
in the explanation of the grounds for the Law, it is stated: âThis is
obviously not intended to prohibit the advocacy of any ideas or
doctrines, even if they fall outside of or even call into question the
constitutional framework. [...] The law does not punish isolated
behavior but the accumulation of actions that unequivocally demonstrate
a track record of the breakdown of democracy and offenses against
constitutional values and the democratic method.â In other words,
positions that call constitutional standards into question are
permissible on the condition that there are sufficient guarantees in
place to ensure they will not prosper. Any political position that goes
beyond the constitution will be declared illegal, unless, of course,
their political objectives are secondary and degraded. In other words,
dissolution is the only possibility.
Paragraph a) of article 9.3 cites the following as a typical activity:
âGiving express or tacit political support to terrorism, legitimating
terrorist actions to achieve political objectives outside peaceful and
democratic channels, or excusing and minimizing their significance and
the corresponding violation of fundamental rights.â What does it mean to
give tacit support? Either you support something effectively (albeit in
a veiled way- thatâs what evidence with probative value is for) or you
donât really support it at all. The use of this term is intended to
provide judges with a tool that can be used to ban a political party for
having any kind of political connections: if they have the same purpose
(e.g., independence), effective support can simply be inferred, whether
or not the two groups share the same methodology.
Paragraph b) of the same article makes it illegal to âback violent
action with programs and initiatives aimed at encouraging a culture of
confrontation and civil unrest linked to terrorist activity.â Is it even
possible to really practice politics without confrontation? It goes
without saying who benefits from such an insubstantial conception of
politics. As for links with terrorist activity, we have seen how easily
those can be created.
We could continue our analysis of this legal corpus, but its absurdity
is so blatant that all it takes is one reading. In short, and in light
of its effective application in court, it seems that this law has
reversed the burden of proof, to where the defendants are now
responsible for proving their innocence, since wording like this makes
it very hard to start from anything but a presumption of guilt,
violating the allegedly sacred principle of in dubio pro reo.
Having briefly exposed the problems surrounding the right of passive
suffrage, we will now focus on the operation of the electoral system as
regulated by Organic Law 5/1985 of June 19 on the General Electoral
System. It works through a system of electoral constituencies, linked
under the Constitution (art. 68.2) to the various provinces. Each
province has an initial minimum of two representatives (except Ceuta and
Melilla, which have one each). The remaining representatives (there are
a total of 350) are distributed among the provinces in relation to the
size of their populations, in a supposedly proportional manner. This
system of constituencies immediately presents certain contradictions
between equal voting rights and equal voting power. For example, there
are certain constituencies that are overrepresented (e.g. Soria, where
one seat represents 46,796 inhabitants) and others that are
underrepresented (as in the case of Madrid, where a single seat
represents 173,762 inhabitants). The consequence of this arrangement is
that a vote cast in one province may be worth up to four times a vote
cast in another. It should be pointed out that the alleged justification
for this distribution of constituencies by provinces is territorial
representation, but in fact the priciple of territorial representation
is supposed to be handled by the Senate (art. 69.1 of the Constitution).
Having clarified the matter of geographical distribution, we can now
explain the procedure by which seats are distributed in each electoral
district based on the results of the ballot count: the dâHondt law. This
law provides for arranging from highest to lowest, in one column, the
numbers of votes cast for each of the lists (discarding those which fail
to obtain more than 3% of the votes and are thus automatically put out
of the race for seats). Once they have been thus put in order, the
number of votes obtained by each list is divided by 1, 2, 3, etc., up to
the number of seats corresponding to each electoral district. The seats
are then allocated to the candidates who have obtained the highest
ratios in the table, following a decreasing order. To better explain
this process, letâs take a look at the example given in the Law itself,
in article 163:
480,000 valid votes are cast in one electoral district, which elects
eight representatives. Voting is divided between six party lists:
The first seat would be taken by party A, for having the highest number
of votes (168,000 votes). After winning the seat, the next ratio is
obtained by dividing by two and entering it into the second column.
Thus, the second seat goes to party B, for having the next-highest
number of votes (104,000). We then repeat the formula and divide that
number by two to get the ratio assigned to the next party. The third
seat goes once again to party A, because it has 84,000 votes, being the
highest number of the quotients (above the 52,000 of party B and the
72,000 of party C, which has not yet obtained any representation, and
has thus not been divided). The fourth seat then goes to party C, with
its original vote count of 72,000, which is now the highest, but will
have to be divided by two to obtain the next quotient. The result: party
A gets four seats, party B gets two seats, and parties C and D get one
seat each. But this distribution hardly corresponds to the actual
percentage of votes obtained by each group: 35% for party A; 21.7% for
B; 15% for C; 13% for D; 8.3% for E; and 7% for F. Looking at this data
it is clear that the majority parties are overrepresented to the
detriment of the minority parties. And what is the official story used
to justify this procedure? That itâs a formula that allows the formation
of majorities for smoother operation when forming a government, ensuring
a certain amount of stability (or discretionary power?) within the
executive branch, which would be harder to obtain if a government were
to be formed with a broad coalition of parties.
With this brief overview of the electoral process we have tried to
demonstrate the fallacy of the system of representation with which
political power is sustained and legitimized. In so doing, we seek
neither reform nor confrontation through democratic channels, as those
channels themselves rest on principles of inequality and injustice,
principles that are evident in their expression of a legal order imposed
by authority, since there is no other possible way to sustain and
legitimate this system besides obedience.
âConsider yourselves lucky, gentlemen, that your prejudices have taken
root in the hearts of the people, for they are the best cops youâve got.
Knowing the powerlessness of the law â or rather, the powerlessness of
force â youâve made them the most robust of your protectors. But beware:
all things must come to an end. What has been built by cunning and force
can be destroyed by cunning and force.â
Alexandre Marius Jacob.
Today more than ever, and especially in a democratic system, the old
saying, that leaders ultimately have no more power than what is given
them by public opinion, has particular relevance given that true power
(in terms of numbers, capacity, and because it doesnât work to give
orders if no one obeys) is in the hands of the governed, although they
almost never really use it. It is for this reason that all forms of
domination, of which the State is the most comprehensive â with
democracy its most developed expression to date â must, in order to
ensure their own survival, obtain the consent of those they dominate one
way or another. The central role in âwinning hearts and mindsâ is
traditionally reserved for propaganda (âtell a lie once, and itâs just a
lie; tell it a thousand times and it becomes the truth,â said Goebbels,
the infamous Nazi minister of propaganda).
In these times, under the system that currently subjugates us (or tries
to), we suffer under a dictatorship of propaganda and image, imposed by
what by now are classic structures of indoctrination (such as schooling
and education systems, the family, workplace discipline, law, and the
various sciences and medicine), by the mass media (business and
propaganda at once), which by constantly bombarding us with values,
morals, ideology, (mis)information, etc., constantly works to get us to
take the side of the system. But, not content with having us take a
position in their favor, domination seeks to make us participate in
keeping our chains well-shined, and gives another turn of the screw
added to the classic propaganda that all establishment structures use.
Now it makes us faithful followers of its system, simultaneously driving
forth and holding back our participation in it by creating a kind of
democratic fanaticism, which in our globalized world has replaced all
the old and near-obsolete patriotisms: citizenism.
With citizenism by means of the systemâs classic propaganda, a mentality
is instilled that defends democracy â but not as a system, rather as a
as a way of living in society; as a complex of values that are
considered respectable and desired by all. So, the good citizen,
ensuring Order and the proper functioning of democracy, does not for
example think that he or she is in fact upholding a system of relations
based on subjugation and inequality (i.e., when a representative,
senator or city councilman takes a chunk of our taxes and legislates all
over our work, telling us what we can and canât do from some far-away
office, or when a businessman exploits us for a handful of crumbs off
the table). No, these good citizens simply think they are working to
ensure a proper and harmonious coexistence for all. In other words, the
guy on the corner canât just take a piss right there on the sidewalk,
because it smells bad and is an uncivil thing to do; but the factories
we are practically forced to work in just to get a wage we can survive
on can go ahead and proudly dump the entire authorized amount of shit
right into the rivers (likely that will be the amount above which they
wouldnât be pretty to look at anymore, but generally it will just be
however much the company wants to dump), and the infinite numbers of
cars can go farting around the cities, grinding the ecosystem and our
lungs to dust, and no one challenges it at all. If anything, we might
file a democratic complaint with our local councilman, by filling out a
pretty looking light-blue form (sometimes it might even be bilingual).
Civility, which comes with such coupled and duly âempoweredâ concepts as
tolerance (tolerance of oppression, of course â but not of rebellion),
and non-violence (the non-violence of discontents, that is, since no one
complains about the existence of the Police, but at most will complain
when some particular cop goes too far), is in fact an internalization
mechanism for the systemâs propaganda, where people can get actively
involved but only so long as the existing order is maintained, since an
excess of political involvement can become dangerous, as it reflects
something that domination fears: autonomous initiative (although it
encourages that within certain parameters and to a certain extent:
entrepreneurial initiatives, etc.)
Civic-minded individuals cease to be individuals and become citizens,
regardless of their social status, how much they earn, where they live,
etc.; though it just so happens that the higher people are on the social
ladder the more âcivicâ they tend to be, and the more âsocial
conscienceâ they develop (and whether that âconscienceâ isnât worth
jack-shit or harmonizes perfectly with dominationâs designs doesnât
really make much of a difference). The citizen is the paradigm of the
new vassal, who collaborates in ensuring that everything will go
smoothly, neutralizing with a police-like attitude (always trying to
make sure everyone âgets alongâ) any possible change to the Order of
Things, or any rupture or dysfunction that might arise in âtheirâ fine
upstanding community.
Fundamentally, âcitizensâ are merely oversocialized beings, who defend
the system tooth and nail out of the fear and insecurity it instills,
terrified of their own possibilities and potential, terrified of taking
charge of their own lives, anxiously in need of someone else to guide
them, needing to have everything go the way it is supposed to,
submitting utterly to artificiality. Citizens are fearful creatures, who
abhor any explicit violence against this way of life because they do not
dare exercise any themselves, and because they fear that another way of
life might be possible; thus they end up becoming submissive followers
of the subtle violence of the state (in fact good citizens will declaim
against dictatorships, because with dictatorships the violence is more
brutal and less camouflaged; their power is not disguised, but directly
exercised, and that is their strength â whereas in democracies power is
blurred so that it can be better and more comfortably exercised).
With the rise of citizenism, subversion has a new enemy. If before we
had to fight the state, the laws, the police, capitalism, exploitation,
the bosses; today with citizenism we are up against the citizens
themselves (sometimes literally and physically). Of course, this
mechanism, serving the internalization of the propaganda system, this
pseudo-participation in upholding Order, tends to crack in times of
hardship when prospects donât look so bright anymore. And of course,
even the most patriotic good citizen may start to reconsider things when
theyâre looking at not being able to pay their bills at the end of the
month. But most middle class people manage to retain their status, and
generally itâs the ones whoâve had a fall on the social ladder that get
de-civilized (even though there are plenty âthankful belliesâ and
âbossâs petsâ out there, and they are often better at playing citizen
than the big industrialists). In any case, if citizenism and propaganda
both fail, thereâs always the glorious police force and their 100,000
brand-new rubber balls to keep right on spreading democracy.
âŠThe perceived autonomy of âthe politicalâ in western societies is one
of the key ideological dimensions of western modernity: we shouldnât see
it as an objective fact, but as a way of depicting power relations that
obscures their social foundations and the way they work in practiceâŠ
John Gledhill
Itâs not possible to analyze democracy without the full awareness that
it is profoundly interwoven with a value system that reinforces the
whole framework of domination. There is a moral legitimation for every
power relationship, and a moral legitimation for power itself. There are
ways of producing people who are willing to obey, trained to obey;
people who never question and do whatever theyâre told. They are
produced not in factories or workshops, but in modern families and
schools, which finalize a socialization process that is based on
submission, and the training of good, civic-minded, (self) silenced
citizens.
If we take a closer look at any of the declarations of rights (again,
not because we would concede them the slightest validity or legitimacy,
but because we see them for what they are: more or less explicit
manifestations of the ideas and intentions of Power), whether the
Spanish Constitution, the European, or the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, we see that beyond their proclamations of rights within,
say, the public sphere, such as political rights, or the right to
private property (this one of course is the focus of just about all of
the efforts of the State and its security forces), they also deal with
rights that have exclusively to do with the domestic sphere. In other
words, the State constructs, prescribes, and (de)limits not only
political, but also economic and interpersonal rights. Included among
human rights is the right to respect for oneâs privacy, marriage, and
family life. The Spanish Constitution recognizes the right of all men
and women to marry and create a family, and furthermore, in article
16.3, explicitly stipulates that âthe family is the fundamental and
natural elementary unit of society and is entitled to protection by
society and the State.â
This point is key: changes in the definition of what is public and what
is private â directly linked to changes in gender relations â can be
based on considerations related to the needs of the State. The real
reason for the legalization of gay marriage, for example, was on the one
hand the need to contain a reality that was establishing itself outside
of the normative prescriptions, and, secondly, to prevent the formation
of realities where Democracy would have no influence, and might thus be
in some way threatened. Itâs about control, containing any âdifferencesâ
within itself, and strengthening its image of inclusiveness and
tolerance.
In most cases the State sees no immediate gain from the subjugation of
interpersonal relationships, of women and children, or of families. Such
acts make sense only in the context of a broader analysis of how power
is constructed and consolidated: the well-ordered family serves as the
foundation of the well-ordered State. And however much the boundaries
between the domestic and the public spheres may fluctuate or shift, or
however much what is legally and socially considered a âfamilyâ may
vary, the fundamental concept remains. Whatâs most important is that
this natural and fundamental unit of society must remain just as natural
and fundamental as it is, just as unquestionable, and just as productive
of producers for State and Capital. Because in order to vindicate
political power, the standard of reference must appear secure and
stable, outside of all human constructs, simply part of the natural
order of things. Thus the public/domestic binary system, the family, and
the social process of gender relations are part of the very meaning of
power. And thus to question or modify any aspect of them poses a threat
to the entire system.
Either way, with the creation of the modern state via the French
Revolution, there appeared the idea of education administered by the
State for those cases where the family fails to do its job (certain
people always end up coming out different, and there are always those
strange families that donât quite fulfill the role assigned to themâŠ).
Until that time, education was reserved for the elites, and was
administered by the Church. With the nationalization of church property
in November 1789, education too was transferred to the State, and became
a key tool of social control (in the same way as it was when it was in
the hands of the Church, but in other directions). The primary objective
of compulsory schooling was to form new men, republican citizens trained
in the values of the new social order. Private education continued to
exist for the elite, who formed the cadres of the new system of social
organization. But all children were imbued with these new values and
socialized to fit the new political ideas, and the new schooling even
tried to integrate the various regions into a single national identity.
The formation of the Liberal State was closely linked to the development
of national education systems, as these legitimized and supported its
deployment.
The role of school remains the same today. There is still private
education for the elites â probably providing superior technical
education, with greater depth and more specialization â and education
for the masses, in the public schools. Whatever the case may be, school
remains the funnel through which all children must pass; and of course,
school also exists to provide parents a place to put their children
while theyâre at work, a kind of cold storage warehouse provided so that
the production of the system can continue uninterrupted and people can
make ends meet. Options for education without schooling are severely
limited, by economic needs on the one hand and by the State on the
other, which imposes itself with heavy legal and social pressure and,
above all, with the use of social workers. But it is also important to
mention that alternatives do exist, and there are support networks among
those who for whatever reason do not want their children to be subjected
to schooling.
At school, children learn such vitally important things for their future
lives as how to shut up when required to listen silently and not
complain, how to obey the teacher and the group, and how to limit their
impulses and needs. If anyone finds it even halfway logical to make a 6
year old child spend more than 5 hours every day sitting at a desk
instead of running, playing and exploring their limits, either they
donât remember what it was like to be a kid and have to go to school, or
theyâre a clear example of oversocialization. Itâs true that it may be
somewhat useful to learn to read or write, and that doing so may be
pleasurable; but there are a thousand ways of learning, and that
argument hardly accounts for the fact that in school what you mostly
learn is to obey and abide by the values of democracy, i.e., obedience,
resignation, how to have interpersonal relationships based on
competition, leadership, and submission, and the suppression of your own
potential and impulses and their replacement by whatever is socially
accepted and demanded.
And for children who donât manage to adjust to school, thereâs always
Ritalin, a medication derived from amphetamines and administered quite
often to hyperactive cases (i.e., kids who disturb the class because
they wonât sit still). This is of course the same treatment given to
adults, who are given drugs like Prozac if we are depressed or anxious,
and disturb those around us because we fail to appear happy and contentâŠ
Specialization is basically a model for the organization of agents
(human or otherwise) within the production chain, made responsible for a
particular segment in a given productâs production line. Inevitably,
these kinds of production lines donât have to be purely material; they
can also involve sectors within the world of ideas. Such is the case for
research and dissemination, which make up the preliminary and future
stages of the product itself.
Clearly the objective pursued through specialization is to optimize
economic processes by the division of labor. The philosophy behind all
this is that the more sharply delimited the element in which the
division of labor is organized, the more accurate and polished the
execution, and therefore the more profitable the product.
But this process is hardly foreign to social structures; much to the
contrary, it feeds them and is developed by them in a feedback loop that
has a major influence on society and its organization. Obviously, we
live in an eminently economic (capitalist) system, where most of the
rules are intended to ensure the appropriate framework for its
development, and to adapt said social structures to the economic system.
It follows that politics and the economic system are intrinsically
linked. And that, not without the help from government, they provide the
necessary substrate for the development of the global system and its
corresponding morphology.
So here we return to one of the basic facts of the existence of this
whole entanglement: specialization. Look around: people are all working
and growing in highly specific sectors. We have seen an increase in
specialists, because among other things new fields are being opened very
quickly, due mostly to the growth of technology. And so we see a new
feedback loop: technology-specialization.
The development of technology is obviously accelerating. It is well
known to all of us who live in this system that technological
advancement is now occuring at a rapid pace; this excessive growth in
technology can be explained by the growth (at similar rates) of
specialized techniques. Such growth means the generation of new fields
that have to be researched by new specialists, who in turn, thanks to
their very specific expertise, manage to delve even deeper into their
specialisms, generating even more specialized techniques that can be
exploited by technological processes and made available on the
capitalist market.
Weâve already discussed the way this relates to social structures and
politics: economic needs drive the political system to legislate in a
manner favorable to the formation of the proper substrate for its
development. And, completing this bijection, the political system feeds
off capitalism in order to maintain such a social order as will ensure
that the state of things will generally remain as they are, since thatâs
the best guarantee of the continued power supremacy of that social
stratum.
We are in a system where each of us handles only a very specific part of
the productive fabric. And as that specialization increases it creates
significant dependence, because without the contribution of so many
specialists, we wouldnât be able to access all those products whose the
urgent necessity is instilled in us by the marketing system. And people
become more and more isolated, in order to dedicate vast amounts of
their energy and vital resources to that little space in the wheel of
production theyâve found a spot in; and at the same time they become
more dependent, because they donât share all that time, effort and
learning. This gives rise to social structures with a high degree of
specialization/dependence everywhere within the system, thus creating
the need for ruling classes, specialists in governing. They are the
sediment specialization leaves on the democratic mentality, a mentality
that would fall apart if no one were specialized in steering it. That
sediment creates the need for comfort, blind faith, etc. â after all,
specialization legitimates buck-passing. And that amputates, dismembers
and dissects us as persons, making us useless as individuals, and our
uselessness empowers a system that feeds off all that
specialization/buck-passing/dependence, so as to get even fatter and
advance with ever more strength and supremacy.
Thatâs why we need self-management to oppose all this. A broad knowledge
of the surrounding world is vitally necessary in order to make
interconnections and conjectures about our specific specialisms based on
that broad knowledge, rather than just looking from one specialism to
another, which greatly limits our perspective and irreparably limits us
as free beings. We know itâs impossible to fathom the totality, or even
the generality, but we want no part of the exclusive. Because we are far
more than they condition us to be. Because life doesnât just boil down
to helping to advance some entity called The System That Must Be Served.
Because only by being aware of our natural limits can we break the ones
that are artificially imposed by the capitalist democracy used by
governments to stay in power for years and years.
If only we were able to put an end to the specialization and
fragmentation as individuals all that entails⊠If only we were able to
rise up against the established order, which reduces us to specific
fields of inquiry, and keeps us from expanding our arms, our lungs and
our minds⊠If we were capable of that⊠weâd start to notice all the
things they havenât let us be. Then weâd be able to go forth in freedom
and peace â until then, until we make it, we have to struggle.
Every system of domination is set up to benefit those who are in power,
so the way political life is organized will be limited to their terms,
and it will try at all costs to structure the operation of the social
system based on their interests; in other words, the primary objective
of political life is above all to make the system beneficial for those
in charge, both politically (by the effective imposition of their
authority) and economically (control of resources, dependence of the
population on the systemâs influence), seeking to increase their power
and influence and sustain the system over time. Capitalism exists to
make profit for the economic elites who run it, and the economic system
under capitalism is organized to obtain the greatest benefit for those
who have the most already, the big businessmen, because considering how
the context of economic decisionmaking is structured thatâs whatâs best
for all the markets involved. The political system, democracy (that is,
government by demagogues), is set up to control the population while
maintaining and expanding its model of domination through democratic
channels (when they even bother to lie) for the benefit of the bosses of
politics â the professional demagogues. Their intention is to get people
to do what they say, to get their orders followed; they want to make
both the government regime and so-called âsocial discourseâ to be
structured on the basis of terms they decide, so that âpoliticsâ is done
their way.
A distinction can thus be made between two power elites with
complementary interests, one political and the other economic. Given a
certain set of historical conditions, today the States with the greatest
economic power are democracies, so the democratic system has proved the
most favorable to the capitalistic development model, because it
conducts its legislative activities based on the needs of business and
facilitates the legitimation of the economic order, considering profit
at the cost of exploiting your peers and nature not as one of the vilest
crimes someone can commit, but as a right that only a select few out of
many can access.
Since the introduction of capitalism as an economic system and
development model on the global level, the progress of the various
States (the level of their development and competition with other
potential powersâŠ) has been guided by the need to bring in the greatest
possible profits to strengthen their own economies. The greater the
circulation of capital within a given nation, the higher the levels of
power it achieves in the great economy of the global market. The logic
that governs the development of a State is steady economic growth, i.e.,
where the goods and financial transactions that circulate or are
conducted within its borders go up in value, whether or not they
actually stay the same the whole time (housing, food, transportation,
income, wages, loansâŠ), responds to the suicidal dynamic of the
capitalist model, where the most important thing is to get the greatest
economic output from the objects being exploited, to produce the
greatest amount possible, and to sell as much and as profitably as
possible.
Banks, corporations, and governments are the protagonists in this power
game; they each have their own specific constraints, and acknowledge no
ethics other than the competitive market; they seek only to expand their
influence as much as possible and extract the most profit possible from
whatever they touch.
One example is the sale of arms and military resources. The only ones
who never lose the wars are those who produce and sell what it takes to
wage them.
Such respectable Spanish companies as Hispasat (which isnât only in TV
and telephone service), Indra (under the euphemism of ânew technologies
and suppliesâ), IberEspacio, RYMSA, and CESCE (an insurance company that
makes arms exports possible by guaranteeing payments, including them in
the external debt of the buying country) dominate that business; they
have an international presence, financed by the major banks and savings
institutions (BBVA, Caja Madrid, BSCH, Barclays, Caja Castilla la
Mancha, BBK, Caja San Fernando, Ibercaja, Banesto, Banco Sabadell, Banco
Pastor, Deutsche Bank). They also get state support in the form of
investments in R&D, among other more blatant contributions, such as
direct inclusion in military budgets, since they share the same
expansionist interests. But todayâs wars have more to do with the
economic context, with the possession and exploitation of natural
resources, than they do with territorial logic and the invasion of
neighboring nations.
The rulers of the world find it quite convenient to support this
controversial industry, that is, to collaborate in the production and
sale of as many weapons as possible, even if they may fall into the
hands of potential enemies â thus closing the circle so wars can
continue to be generated indefinitely.
This business sector has never had to face a crisis. Itâs always
profitable to invest in wars, destruction and death, especially when you
have on your side the greatest military power that has ever existed
(USA, NATO âŠ); some manufacture the weapons and others buy them â they
keep putting in the coins and the machine keeps giving out the prizes.
Not to mention that the companies that sponsored the massacres later get
the contract to rebuild what the conflict destroyed, making war even
more profitable and reinforcing the market system. To do this, the
states and global organizations themselves grant them âspecial rightsâ
to exploit people and resources in the region, contracts to rebuild
industries, and other concessions to help them hoard more capital and
democratize the infidels once the region has basically been rebuilt.
Another example is the limitless exploitation of natural resources, to
try and get as much profit as possible out of the environment, whatever
the impact, in keeping with the market logic that seeks only continual
and unlimited growth regardless of consequences: i.e., the destruction
of whole ecosystems and the depletion of resources to meet the raw
materials needs of the various industries.
Or the unstoppable construction of power plants (petroleum, thermal,
nuclear, hydroelectric, hydraulic fracturing âŠ) to satisfy the growing
demands of incessant industry and seek an escape from the threatened
energy crisis caused by the limitless use of oil to fuel industrial
production, and the maintenance of the current economic model of
infinite consumption, producing things only to use them up producing
more, producing things to be bought, used and thrown away, in order to
need to produce more to be able to buy moreâŠ
The rule of the market, protected by the laws of States (which support
it and on which it is based), has usurped control over so-called
ânatural resources,â resources that in fact are the planet itself, and
should be available to everyone. And it takes control over them in order
to sell them at ever increasing prices to those who do not have them and
are dependent on them.
These resources are mainly located in countries with destroyed economies
(South America, Central America, Africa and Asia), impoverished during
the development process of western markets, even though they are the
ones that produce the most raw materials for the developed economies.
The dynamic of the market is predatory; though it is obvious that energy
resources are being exhausted, the energy industry for instance
continues to increase production year after year â indeed, it is one of
the industries that most devastates the natural environment to supply
itself, modifying whole riverbeds (drying up entire regions that were
once naturally irrigated), permanently emitting polluting gases
(production never stops), and putting entire populations at risk from
potentially irreversible accidents ⊠Active in this sector are companies
such as Iberdrola, which manages various nuclear and thermal power
plants throughout the nation, as well as being involved in the
production and sale of natural gas, and has a presence in over 28
countries. It is controlled by the construction firm ACS (which is in
turn controlled by Corporacion Financiera Alba), and its shareholders
with voting rights, including BBK bank. Repsol YPF, meanwhile, is
involved in the extraction, refining, transportation and sale of oil and
gas. Its controlling company and primary shareholder is the very
versatile construction company (roads, housing, government buildingsâŠ)
Sacyr Vallehermoso (an affiliate of SCH bank), followed by La Caixa.
This company is present in 30 countries and is considered one of the oil
corporations with the greatest international weight; it is also the
largest private energy company in South America. It is one of the
companies most responsible for the destruction of the Amazon â one of
the most common causes of which is leaks in its pipelines â but itâs
also done plenty to contaminate the water and expel indigenous people
from their lands in Peru, and to invade protected areas under government
protection. Another of these companies is Endesa, which does business in
electric power, telecommunications and new technologies â it is
controlled by ENEL (an Italian company) and operates in 10 other
countries. They are to blame for much of the destruction of the Chilean
Patagonia. Then thereâs Gas Natural Fenosa, (owned by Repsol and La
Caixa), which is involved in the gas and electricity business and has
made plenty little faux-pas of the same type in Central and South
America. This system puts the fate of the planetâs resources in the
hands of such âresponsibleâ companies as these, with âethical valuesâ
that include grabbing all they can and profiting off it. Each year
industry pollutes more, since every year it produces more â what is
really intended by such ecological measures as the Kyoto protocol is to
allow them to continue polluting more and more, but just at a slower
pace. Their real interest lies in ensuring the continued growth of big
business, rather than preserving such conditions as might ensure the
continued habitability of the planet (Greenpeace, Green Party⊠all
invest in the stock market). Capitalism is unsustainable in every way.
Medicine, food, houses, clothes, entertainment, drugs, labor, sweatshop
conditions⊠If thereâs money to be made, anything goes. Allâs fair in
business, and every market has its context. The functioning of modern
societies requires that everything be made into a business, that
everything be recovered and absorbed into the market; everything has to
be made into a commodity, so that it can generate value according to the
terms imposed â a game where the winners are always the ones who have
the most power and crush the weak.
Governments, for their part, aside from ensuring their own interests,
are also allied with other systems of domination in this context â the
economic â guaranteeing their preeminence and ensuring mutual business
profitability for themselves and their partners. Itâs only natural that
what makes a state powerful is the movement of private capital
established within its territory, since international competition is
measured in such terms (aside from military power, allies, etc.) as can
estimate the profitability of some particular model of government or
other. This shows for whom the government really governs, and how the
laws it imposes favor the various power elites (not just the economic)
to which the rulers themselves belong, offering those who collaborate
with them the ability to operate under the protection of the law, since
theyâre the ones who make it.
Here on the Iberian peninsula there was an economic boom between 1970
and 1980 when the country was opened up to new markets after the
dictatorship; there were more jobs, but at the same time workersâ
movements were regaining their strength throughout the nation, thus
endangering big capital. Seeing the threat of adverse effects from the
situation, it acquiesced to the welfare state, a formula used in the
developed economies of Europe to achieve what is referred to as Social
Peace. They had to make workers believe that they too were getting a
share in the profits produced by the economic system, instead of seeking
means of redress more harmful to the markets such as revolution. To do
this, in their efforts to gain political influence, the unions sold out
all the workersâ demands, even the most ârevolutionary,â in exchange for
social benefits guaranteed by the state such as Social Security,
pensions, unemployment insurance, social welfare schemes, etc. The great
magnates thus were obliged to distribute a negligible fraction of their
profits, in order to keep the workers from rebelling. In this way they
managed to secure the consumer society by raising wages and giving a
greater role to the unions, as the official conflict mediators, and
making consumer goods previously only available to privileged minorities
more accessible (such as new technologies, trips to the Caribbean,
expensive cars, etc.).
As the 1990s approached, the working masses were more and more utterly
domesticated, and the threat of labor conflicts faded. With all the
terror generated by rising unemployment rates (the result of the decline
from that previous period of prosperity, where the markets hit their
peak), and their solidarity networks destroyed (replaced by the state),
workers started to see their fellow workers as competitors in the labor
market, and their goal became simply to keep their jobs, even at the
cost of their dignity. After being sold out by the unions, the working
class was divided and democratized. Thus began the era of neoliberalism
(globalization, offshoring of industry, interdependence of capital, new
technologies, etc.): the government no longer saw any reason to continue
assuming the wasteful expenses of the welfare state â the workers no
longer posed a threat, as the unions were playing their role quite well
â and so âausterityâ policies gradually began to be introduced (with
cuts to health services, pensions, education, etc.). Year after year the
various reforms in the labor market have followed a dynamic of reducing
these concessions to the population for the benefit of big business
(temp work, oppressive labor contracts, less job offers and more demand
for jobs, making it cheaper to get workers, etc.), making the conditions
of their exploitation ever more burdensome and reducing what once were
called rights fought for and won.
The functioning of the capitalist model periodically goes through stages
of crisis, in accordance with the various economic cycles: The Great
Depression of 1929, the first oil crisis (1973â75), the second oil
crisis (1980â82), the 1997 Asian Crisis, the Internet crisis of 2001
(the dot-com bubble), the Financial Crisis of 2008 (generated by the
housing bubble and the mortgage collapse) â all caused because things
themselves donât count, but only the value given them by the market. The
market tends to become saturated, since everyone wants to produce as
much as possible in order to sell as much as possible, until there comes
a time when people canât buy any more and the markets take a plunge,
dragging down whole economies due to their interdependence. While
waiting for new markets to expand into and exhaust again, the recourse
most often taken to get out of these crises is war, since wars rebuild
markets. And as the system goes through the successive stages of boom,
overproduction, crisis, stagnation and recovery until everything that
can be sold has been consumed, recourse is progressively taken to
privatization, budget cuts, reduction of employee dismissal costs, the
offshoring of industries (to countries where operating conditions are
more optimal for business), and other neoliberal policies.
The operation of this competitive economic model leads to the exhaustion
of all existing resources; it canât afford to start reducing production
in any industry in order to stop destroying the planet at an ever faster
rate (in spite of surpluses and cost overruns) since that would run
contrary to the dynamics of its functioning, and would likewise cause a
drop in the Stock Market, which would then have to recover, in order to
win back investorsâ trust by exhausting some new resource. Remember: you
canât eat money, its value is imaginary, and it is not a resource given
equally to all people since most fortunes are inherited or otherwise
stolen â so the fact that the fate of humanity is being decided based on
money and that it is an object of such intense desire is quite
worrisome.
Based on the growth of the various economic cycles at play in the
economy, the government decides on the economic policies that the whole
population will have to undergo, in keeping with the speculative values
handled on the Stock Market, those little numbers that scroll past at
the bottom of the screen during the news that we common mortals have no
ability to influence but nevertheless mark out our fate. The economic or
employment policies that end up imposed on us are determined based on
the profit or loss of the most influential companies, as shown in the
IBEX 35, the primary reference index for the Spanish stock market,
consisting of the 35 most powerful companies in the nation; as of April
2011 these businesses are as follows:
Abengoa, Arcelor Mittal, Abertis, Grupo ACS, Acerinox, Acciona, S
Amadeus, BBVA, Bankinter, Bolsas y Mercados EspanÌoles Criteria CaixaCorp
Endesa Ebro Foods EnagaÌs, FCC, Grupo Ferrovial, Gamesa, Gas Natural,
Grifols, International Airlines Group, Iberdrola, Iberdrola Renovables,
Indra, Inditex, CorporacioÌn MAPFRE, ObrascoÌn Huarte Lain, Banco Popular,
Red EleÌctrica de EspanÌa, Repsol, Banco de Sabadell, SCH Banco Santander
Central Hispano, Sacyr Vallehermoso, TelefoÌnica, TeÌcnicas Reunidas and
Tele5 Mediaset EspanÌa ComunicacioÌn.
Government policies benefit the market, but what benefit do the various
political groups draw from this relationship? The banks give out major
loans to political parties to finance their election campaigns, and then
forgive their debt; it is estimated that between all the parties in
parliament there are about 144 million euros owed to the banks, and
nevertheless, every time thereâs an election they keep getting new loans
â why would the banks so blatantly support the political parties if in
theory theyâre only interested in making money? The reason is that they
can thus obtain greater influence in the decisions imposed by the
politicians; most of the reforms put forth by the politicians benefit
big capital, such as the most recent labor reform (2011), the reduction
of employee dismissal costs, the new pension plan, the retirement age
being increasingly moved back, new conditions for collective bargaining,
the bailout of 2009 to revive the economy, with all those 30 billion
euros given to the banks that they then just kept (and hardly revived
the economy or anything), and other kinds of concessions, i.e., all
those times they looked the other wayâŠ
The government gives them permission to enrich themselves at our expense
and they in turn benefit the government. Indeed, they even have special
regulatory categories made available to them like SIVAC (Variable
Capital Investment Company), which offer big tax advantages to big
capital, major corporate business types (who have never done a day of
real work in their lives), where they pay less taxes since they move
more money, thus allowing them to float more capital and grow the
economy.
Another benefit they get from this arrangement is the presence in the
corporate world of influential politicians, who get jobs as âadvisorsâ
with major companies, and donât even need to have the slightest idea
about the things theyâre supposed to be advising on. These positions are
rewards (with guaranteed million-dollar salaries just for filling the
position, no need to do any actual work) given as payment for favors
done during their time in the political system:
Some examples of the faces that hide behind big capital
The March family: This family clan got its riches from smuggling, the
tobacco monopoly, and financing the Franco uprising (lucky for them the
fascists won). Banca March is the familyâs private bank, one of the
countryâs leading banking groups, which controls 34% of the shares of
Corporacion Financiera Alba, and is involved as a major shareholder in
many companies with a lot of pull in the markets (not just the national
ones) like Acerinox, Prosegur, Indra, Carrefour or the ACS group, which
invests in different economic sectors through other companies such as
Abertis (highways and infrastructure), Hochtief (construction), and
Iberdrola (energy), and owns plenty other spin-off companies (Dragados,
Urbaser, Clece, Continental Auto, etc.), while also holding controlling
interests in companies involved in the mass media, like the PRISA Group
(in Spain) and the HAVAS Group (internationally).
The Santander Central Hispano Group (SCH): Since 1909, the Santander
bank has been run by members of the BotiÌn family [a name which,
incidentally, translates to âplunderâ -tr.] which in 1986 bought
Bankinter, thus increasing their influence in the international markets.
Later, after the Mario Conde scandal (at Banesto, where he was convicted
of embezzling the bankâs money), the Bank of Spain, which at the time
was chaired by Luis Angel Rojo, ordered an audit of Banesto to sell it
at public auction; that bank ended up owned by Santander after it got a
loan from the self-same Bank of Spain for a bigger amount than it paid
for Banesto â in other words, it was given to them for free. In 2005, as
a reward for his favors, Luis Angel Rojo (after his time in office at
the Bank of Spain) was given an appointment as the independent external
advisor for Banco Santander (charging quite a chunk of change) without
even being a shareholder in the group, which is supposed to be a
requirement for getting appointed to that office â the same happened
when he was given the position of advisor to CorporaciĂłn Financiera
Alba. He died in 2011, at long last⊠With the acquisition of Banesto,
Banco Santander became a shareholder in Antena 3 TV station, which ended
up controlled by the Planeta Group (thanks to financial support from La
Caixa and Santander). In 1999, Santander merged with Central Hispano to
form SCH, thus gaining control of a large number of banks, corporations,
and mass media operations on the international level. In 2004, members
of SCHâs board of directors were external advisors at all kinds of
corporations:
Union Fenosa, CEPSA, FAES Farma (do you remember the hoax perpetrated
during the âswine fluâ epidemic of 2009 in order to sell more drugs?),
Inmobiliaria Urbis, Pescanova, IBM, Cortefiel, Indra (weapons),
Corporación Financiera Alba, Campofrio, Mutua Madrileña Automobile,
Telepizza, Grupo Televisa (the biggest television group in South
America), Auna, SICAV, M & B Capital Advisers, Group Masaveu, Inditex,
Grupo Matutes, Legal & General Group, Pearson Group, Glas Cymru, British
Land, San Paolo IMI, Assicurazioni Generali and Shinsei Bank âŠ
The man that runs this monstrous economic apparatus is Emilio BotĂn,
whose family members are scattered throughout tons of boards of
directors; this abomination has influence in over a dozen countries
(especially in South America). BotĂn and SCHâs board of directors have
often had charges brought against them in court, both at the Supreme
Court (the trial wasnât even held), and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutorâs
Office (for tax offenses), but all their cases have simply been
dismissed; they remain unpunished â could this perhaps have something to
do with their high position in society, since SCH is one of the banks
with the most weight in the international markets?
The PRISA Group: notably connected to SCH, its largest shareholder is
currently the American corporation Liberty Acquisition Holdings (owners
of the Fox channel in Spain and of major sports companies, and also
involved in oil, real estate, corporate business⊠real sharks, veterans
of the US stock markets), the Polanco family is the second-biggest owner
of its stock. Executives from various banks have sat on PRISAâs board of
directors, such as Juan Luis Cebrian (Bankinter), Isabel Polanco Moreno
(Banesto and SCH), Gregorio MaranÌoÌn y Beltran de Lis (SCH), the Del Pino
family (Banesto and SCH), though the presence of SCH has generally been
predominant. In 2004 the main links between the PRISA and SCH boards of
directors were:
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA): The BBV was founded thanks to
funding from the leading Basque economic oligarchy, the Neguri group of
families (Ybarra, ZubirĂa, Muguruza, Lipperheide, DelclauxâŠ), a business
clan controlled by the most powerful families in the industrial
landscape. In 1988 it merged with Argentaria bank, which quickly became
aware of the scams being run in the accounts of BBV, and finally the
President of Argentaria, Francisco GonzĂĄlez, who had shared the
presidency of BBVA with Emilio Ybarra (from BBV), ended up all alone as
president of the bank. But it wasnât like Ybarra had to go on
unemployment or anything; he became chairman of Vocento group (also
controlled by that same bank).
BBVA has a lot of weight internationally and is the main shareholder of
Telefonica, which is another of the primary investors in the arms
industry; it is even under close supervision now for non-compliance with
European treaties on arms sales (sales are fine, but you canât go over
their heads, since that hurts the markets). It controls the second
biggest bank in Colombia and the biggest in Mexico, taking advantage of
the permanent economic crisis in those countries, and was responsible
among others for Argentinaâs rampant capital outflow and its infamous
âcorralito,â which froze up the money in that countryâs banks. It was
also investigated by the FBI for its links with drug traffickers (money
laundering through the acquisition of Banco Ganadero, held by South
American drug profiteers, who couldnât explain where they got all the
money they had), by the Spanish Audiencia Nacional, and by the
Anti-Corruption Prosecutorâs Office (even though itâs fairly typical
behavior for banks, after all). It is well known that they have tax
havens spread across 13 countries with tax policies more favorable to
their interests, using different companies. The main shareholder of BBVA
is Manuel Jove, a founding member of FADESA Inmobiliaria, which is
involved among other things in the construction of tourist resorts in
Morocco, was responsible for the largest suspension of payments to its
workers in the history of the Spanish economy, and has also been accused
of money laundering (who doesnât like getting a little more profit than
they were supposed to get, after all?).
Vocento: Controls various different mass media: ABC, InversioÌn, El
Correo, QueÌ!, Diario Vasco, El Diario MontanÌeÌs, Diario La Verdad, Ideal,
HOY, SUR, Diario la Rioja, La Voz, El Norte de Castilla, El Comercio,
Finanzas.com, Colpisa, 10, alava7, teledonosti, bilbovisioÌn, tve, Punto
Radio⊠Together, PRISA and Vocento control over 50% of the mass media in
the country; the latter is controlled by BBVA, through the Ybarra
family. Vocento and PRISA both have net operating losses of millions of
dollars, so they need to partner with other companies and banks to
continue operating as businesses; even though theyâre not profitable in
terms of revenue, they are very productive when it comes to generating
another type of commodity: public opinion. Thatâs why they have come to
be controlled by the leading business groups, which do not allow the
broadcasting of any information that might be potentially damaging to
them (so no one can speak ill of them or their friends); their interest
in the mass media lies in its ability to form public opinion
(market-compliant democratic values) and to convey advertisements, and
they fund it more or less based on how much they sell.
In most cases, corporations function as enormous machines where the
bosses are no more than interchangeable parts that can be replaced if
they fail to perform. For this reason it would seem out of the ordinary
that they are often owned by familiesâŠ
People should know these things, but a lot of the information is
entirely obscured since a company can be controlled with less than even
5% of its shares, and ownership of under 5% doesnât have to be reported
to the stock market. There are also plenty intermediary and partner
companies that sit on boards of directors, or are part of different
companies operating under different names and indirectly controlled by
large corporations.
Since the global economic order is rooted in the capitalistic
competitive market, the development of modern societies is based on
unlimited profit, where everyone is out to take advantage of everyone
else and profit-seeking is considered a socially acceptable value, even
though it promotes exploitation and inequality. If we want to achieve
change in that sense, we have to overcome that mentality, attacking not
only the economic elites who benefit from this capitalist system, but
also the consumer society that feeds it and the unidirectional
development model it imposes.
In this life they have imposed on us, theyâd like to have us believe
that in order for things to go smoothly, for things to improve for us â
for a few of us to be saved! (it is calculated that 80% of the world
population goes hungry) â it is necessary for us to take on debt, take
out mortgages, work for them, and buy all kinds of things from them;
this is what weâve been told since we were small is called âquality of
life.â And so with our limited aspirations we go on keeping the machine
running; theyâve conned us into believing that the same rules apply to
everyone in this game, but thatâs a lie because some have more than
others do, and thus more power and impunity. Does anyone really believe
that people make those kinds of fortunes by actually working? Isnât it
more likely that in business you have to be âfortunateâ? Regardless,
people still accept this system, where the governed and exploited always
lose.
They can keep their markets and their little numbers! Nobody needs a
million complex systems, bringing various markets into relation with one
another based on incomprehensible economic flows and the interests of
abstract entities such as corporations and banks, in order to live. The
world does not belong to them just because they tell us so. We can
organize, and stop being dependent on their influence â although they
now arrogate resources to themselves with the protection of the law, we
can take them back because we are the ones who really need them, and
nothing, not even the law, can justify that some donât have enough while
others hoard and dominate. Life must be organized by the living, not by
nonliving things like the stock market or money. We can associate with
one another, among equals, without depending on the impositions of
others, and not even the law can stop that.
We can change our way of life, and go back to being human beings, rather
than alienated entities living on the crumbs of the market; we know we
can make whatever we need because we are are the ones who make it now â
all the work we do for Capital can be done instead for liberation. What
do we really need? Of course, we need houses, food, clothing⊠but we
donât need to pay for them. How can we live without money? Although it
sounds crazy because they have made us believe that it is essential for
life, our relationship with the world doesnât need to be organized by
money; we can act on the basis of our true needs, rather than always
scrambling to have more and more, and playing their game. Money is
hardly what keeps us rational and prevents us from going around killing
each other like crazy â quite the contrary; the fact that society is
structured on the basis of property ownership is what generates
competition and conflict situations; values such as cooperation,
solidarity and mutual aid that have nothing to do with how the world is
governed can nevertheless shape our lives and our relationships â and we
can have a world where everyone is equal, where it would be impossible
for anyone to impose on anyone else (since everyone would tell them to
fuck off), where we would all help each other instead of stepping on
each otherâs backs to climb the social ladder. Thereâs no real reason
for us to continue this suicidal life-dynamic, where we burn through our
days in imposed cycles (work-idleness-sleep); we can create real
alternatives to this situation, different self-managed projects that
actively seek to collaborate with one another, so that we never have to
use their filthy money or enter their dark temples of the commodity.
We wouldnât give a damn if all the markets crashed and ground to a halt
â we donât need them to live; weâd have our own resources and weâd be
the ones whoâd be managing them, as decided amongst equals, without
leaders, on the basis of what would best serve the interests of all, and
not just the interests of those who happen at the time to be the most
well-off.
The term âdemocracyâ has over the last century acquired a meaning beyond
its etymology or origin, which for the broad social base of western
societies associates it with a political system considered morally
positive, a representative system expressing the popular interest, and â
as a political system that aspires to be the only system in the world,
shared by the entire planet â as a universal system. The modern origins
of this concept, and of its extension to all forms of the State and
alternative opposition currents, are to be found in the political,
economic and military hegemony of the United States, a State whose
ideological basis is located precisely in a democratic revolution
against the monarchical Old Regime (its War of Independence). This
representative system, which together with the Napoleonic state
configured the political and military structure of modern states, came
to acquire an industrialist and liberal economic character after the
American Civil War. Already in 1917 the American President Wilson
addressed a congress of Detroit salesmen, saying that the United Statesâ
âdemocracy of businessâ had to lead a âstruggle for the peaceful
conquest of the world.â
Today the system of democratic values and ideology, the parliamentary
state structure, and the industrial economy are spread throughout the
globe; it is the prevailing government system in most of the worldâs
countries, with a few exceptions in the process of being converted manu
militari.
But democratic ideology is not just present behind the values that prop
up States; It has leaked out into the entire social body and has come to
be seen as well as the opposition, counterposition, or alternative to
the current model.
After the Second World War and the US victory, which implied the end of
European political-ideological systems, the liberal parliamentarianisms
of the US and its ally (or satellite) nations started calling themselves
The âDemocraciesâ Of The âFree World.â In turn, in light of this
linguistic imposition â granting superior moral value to the capitalist
political system â the nations of the âreal socialistâ state economic
centralization bloc under the guardianship of Russia, antagonistic of
course to the other bloc, also named themselves variously as âdemocratic
republics.â Even peripheral states, whose political systems could not
even with all the make-up in the world disguise themselves as
representative parliamentary systems, termed themselves âorganic
democracies.â
This demagogic usage of the term democracy also ended up adopted by
reformist thinkers and protest movements, which, particularly after the
fall of the Berlin wall, were leaving behind the old revolutionary
terms, aspirations and practices and, encouraged by the availability of
speedy new propaganda tools (with the popularization of radio, film and
television, low cost newspaper production), all rushing to conquer
public opinion.
Activities to build consciousness and rational thinking among excluded
social classes â a fundamental pillar of classical revolutionary
activity from socialism to any of the humanist social emancipation
currents â conducted by means of atheneums, social centers, libraries,
free schools, workersâ schools, cultural revolutions, etc. â aimed at
creating a rich, full humanity able to emancipate itself and build a new
society capable of total, free self-management (the only real substance
the term âdemocracyâ could possibly have), are now replaced by
propaganda strategies that seek organizational commitment based on some
kind of alternative or innovative concept of democracy, and underneath
it all are always only about pushing for minor reforms within the
Welfare State, if not the strengthening of the system of domination
itself. And of course, they too have to make their own use of the word
âdemocracy,â as the only guarantee of acceptance in a media-dominated,
consumerist society, deprived of culture and anchored in the consensus
of a âsocial classâ whose primary interest is now well-being, stability
and security, both economically and psychologically.
In any case, for large sections of the population the term âdemocracyâ
always evokes an abstract aspiration to social justice and equity, a
catchy slogan, which is successful almost every time at disguising the
controlling nature of those who seek to govern.
The new parliamentary left, much given to political intrigues within the
legalistic context in view of achieving higher levels of political
power, seeks, like its opposition in the government, to cast and recast
the term âdemocracyâ to find the formula that best suits the popular
mindset of the moment. Such is the case of the âanti-globalizationâ
movement, and its prescriptions for the reform of democracy like the
Tobin tax (named after the economist James Tobin from Princeton
University in 1971), promoted by international pressure groups like
Attac (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and
Citizen Action) that push for the regulation of financial transactions
in order to slow economic globalization, maintain the national
sovereignty of states, and reform institutions based on civil law and a
more participatory democracy, without ever challenging the capitalist
production system and the State themselves. Its promoters, most of whom
are well-known economists and policy makers, NGOs such as Oxfam (Oxford
Committee for Famine Relief), and members of the legal and academic
system, work to support state power and technological power, with them
as the technical managers.
This political trend that garnered so much attention at the
anti-globalization summits in the late 90s, and was hyped by the media
in order to conceal the confrontational, autonomous anti-capitalist
movements that were emerging at the time, is now back again among the
promoters of citizenist movements like 15M/Occupy Wall Street, for
example through the citizenist platform Real Democracy Now. They
petition the State for electoral reforms to benefit smaller political
parties, and propose worn-out nonsense like âe-democracyâ or
âcyberdemocracy,â where citizens would be permanently in contact with
politics through social networks, facilitating their participation in
the institutions (and in turn putting political power in constant
contact with each citizen). Social problems would be solved by enhanced
telematic social control, through proposals like âsmartâ cities (thatâs
the marketing term) under universal video surveillance, and alternative
energy systems in the hands of innovative private companies; in the
acceptance of the law as a personal morality and ethics by propagating
the ideology of citizenism; a âdemocratizationâ of the police forces
that would both prevent physical abuse and ensure the effective
enforcement of the law; and the total pacification of conflicts through
mediation and delegation to a corps of social services professionals.
Another face of anti-globalization, or rather another proposal for an
alternative democracy within the alter-globalist movement, is less
related to the big economists and legal thinkers, and has the backing of
major NGOs, religious charities and international institutions for the
defense of human rights. Its main ambassador is the intellectual and
well-positioned Hindu figure Vandana Shiva, who has roots in Western
academia, and is a firm advocate of a mix between technology, science
and environmentalism. This âalternative,â given plenty recognition by
the international political establishment through the Nobel Prize and
various awards from the United Nations, proposes, under the banner of
âearth democracyâ or âecological democracyâ (among other confusing
terms), a return to economic localization, gender-related changes in
political institutions in favor of women, and inclusive multicultural
legislation, more stringent environmental laws under the supervision of
NGOs, and national sovereignty based on regulated organic farming in
contrast to the international markets and agribusiness corporations, and
is particularly against the genetically engineered agriculture pushed by
private corporations, without denying a positive value to biotechnology
itself, as long as it is in the hands of independent scientists with
altruistic values. She is an advocate of âecofeminism,â a term created
in the 70s that sees inherent democratic and ecologist attributes in
women, and proposes institutions run by women as a guarantee of
democracy, thus establishing in place of the patriarchy â the sole
cause, according to these theories, of the evils of capitalism â a new
matriarchy, which would ensure management based on justice and social
welfare (since the values of care and reproduction that they associate
with women, and that capitalism would take on when directed by this new
social class, are already in a power struggle with the old patriarchal
order of the traditional financial bourgeoisie).
At all times she defends what she calls âeconomic democracy,â i.e., a
capitalist economic production system, but a local one, based on small
farmers and cooperatives, and the strengthening of a supranational
institution in charge of ensuring democratic legislation and thus
guaranteeing world peace and stability, proposing that the UN further
develop its mechanisms of control and be no longer limited by the veto
of the dominant countries.
This current has gained momentum in the World Social Forums, attracting
much of the extra-parliamentary left, environmental and social-welfare
associations and NGOs, and sectors of small-plot farmers or cooperative
farm workers, as well as sectors within academia and public aid milieus
who are dependent on state subsidies and are constantly fighting with
governments about how those funds are managed.
On the other side of things, from sectors that currently hold political
power, we have recently been hearing some new, âsocial democraticâ
proposals. Their alternatives for the achievement of what they call
âtrue democracy,â which has still not yet been achieved (alternatives
that are obviously located within a progressive and developmentalist
ideology), would also come from new capitalist socio-economic models.
This system, which has been defined as a âmixed system,â contains
elements of Marxist economic theory and the practice of real socialism
in the Soviet Union, mixed with liberal capitalist ideology. This trend,
which since the 50s has been known as the âthird way,â or in Spain since
the XXXV Federal Congress of the PSOE as the ânew way,â is advocated by
high political and economic spheres, and its main popularizers have
included heads of state such as Tony Blair (UK), Bill Clinton (USA),
Lula da Silva (Brazil), Michele Bachelet (Chile), Gerhard Schröder
(Germany), and Zapatero (Spain)⊠With its proposals to move towards a
limitless, deregulated, free and decentralized market, supported by
planned and centralized state policies, they argue that States can
effectively guarantee social welfare, since with their policies wealth
(their concept of wealth, that is, i.e., greater comfort and consumption
capacity) will soon overflow and be attained by all levels of society.
Their proposed alternative to the current model is based on the
observation that the economic system is now globalized and beyond the
control of States â they see this as the cause of social inequalities.
They are strong advocates of supranational institutions like a European
Central Government, and the investment of public funds in
developmentalist mega-infrastructure, which is today running major
deficits, like the European high-speed rail project, the Kyoto-protocol
sustainable energy investment plans, scientific and technological
research and development programs, etc. Its biggest opponent in the
reorganization (crisis) of the political-economic order is the
neoconservative proposal of the New Right âliberal democracy,â trotted
out by propagandists such as Pio Moa, IntereconomĂa [a right wing TV
station âtr.] and think tanks (private economic research companies
lobbying the government and the business class) such as Aznarâs FAES.
They advocate a capitalism with no restrictive limits, in exclusively
private hands, with no regulation by States, based on the âtrue libertyâ
of citizens in accordance with the social Darwinist concept of the
survival of the fittest. They follow the assertions of ideologues like
Milton Friedman, where corporations and the family are considered the
pillars of moral and social welfare, and the free market constitutes the
guarantee of economic progress in society.
The extreme fascist right, now merely residual but still latent, also
adorns itself with the word âdemocracy,â coming up with new political
formations such as âNational Democracy,â or its heir in terms of program
and strategy, the deceptive populist strategy of the Tea Party, which
presents itself as a democratic alternative to bipartisanship; in Spain
we see this in the âUnion Progress and Democracyâ party run by Rosa
Diez, which is often found lurking around social movements.
But obviously, not all alternatives to todayâs democracy that use the
term âdemocracyâ come from sectors proposing a reformed capitalist
system. Sectors of the intellectual left also adopt this term to make
their essentially Marxist programs more digestible. So there have
appeared such concepts as âparticipatory democracy,â âsocial democracy,â
âsocialism for the XXI century,â etc.
Among anarchists or philo-anarchists too, there has arisen an interest
in using the term âdemocracyâ in order to bring a new anarchist
discourse to the broad culturally-deprived social sectors. The concept
of âdirect democracyâ was reworked in particular by Murray Bookchin back
in the 1960s, bringing back both the popular communal tradition of town
councils or traditional municipal bodies, and the tenets of classical
nineteenth-century anarchism from the pens of authors like Proudhon or
Bakunin, leading voices of civil resistance and non-violence such as
Thoreau, and integrating them all into new participatory institutional
political proposals. Bookchin defined his model as âlibertarian
municipalism,â and it was developed within a current that also emerged
in this period called âsocial ecologyâ: a communalist ideology with
origins in anarchism and environmentalism, which defines the natural
social model of human beings as one of a community integrated with the
natural environment, since nature is a decentralized, self-regulating
natural order organized in networks, free of any authority.
Libertarian municipalism, as a leading political theory of the cultural
and experiential revolution of the 1970s (hippies, beatniks,
back-to-the-landers, civil disobedience, etc.) tried to contribute a new
vision to the anarchist movement and/or libertarian movement, contrasted
to classical anarchism and marxism, asserting that the motor of
revolution is not to be found exclusively in the workplace or the class
struggle but in daily life and in social and cultural life, and that the
management of the economy is not just a matter of trade unions and
workersâ associations but should be up to the whole community
(self-management).
The model Bookchin proposed could be implemented immediately (the model
doesnât take the repressive offensives of States into account, since
this was a movement developed in an era of the Rule of Law) with
communities or communes acting by consensus in popular assemblies â
âdirect democracyâ â making decisions not only of an economic nature,
but also political, cultural, or about conflict management, production,
services, etc. Different communities or municipalities would join
together in a confederation, and would come to form a power to parallel
the state itself. According to these theories, this would inevitably
result in a rupture between the nation state and the people without the
need for any confrontation. This model would thus serve an educational
function for the rest of the population, and the moment of revolutionary
rupture would arise once large sectors of society have been organized in
this way, constituting a de facto popular self-government, leaving the
nation-state reduced to a bare minimum and finally disappearing. Without
denying its theoretical and practical contribution, this theory, with
its pacifist origins and its ambiguity about any social engagement
beyond the educational, has now been taken up at present by certain
sectors on the left that participate in government politics,
particularly in local and municipal elections; it is part of the
ideology of some green parties, and of the rising cooperatives movement
of recent years, groups that even accept financial subsidies from the
state and defend developmentalist technological proposals.
In his later years, Bookchin himself ended up moving away from the
anarchist currents and defined himself instead as a communalist,
dropping the issue of confrontation with the state entirely, and having
running ideological arguments with individualistic and revolutionary
sectors.
The term âdirect democracyâ is associated by many scholars with
traditional forms of self-government or community decisionmaking, in
some cases using a show of hands (the âdictatorship of the majorityâ)
and in others making decisions by consensus. Originating in the Athenian
agora, i.e., the assembly of non-slave males who decided on the
questions arising in the Greek polis (âpoliticsâ), one can find several
examples from medieval Europe are that are still alive today, despite
attacks by the various monarchies. In some municipalities of Castile,
people still hold what are called Open Councils, or neighborsâ
assemblies, where decisions are made in plenary sessions that are open
to all residents who have registered to vote, to manage the communal
land and the collective budget, and to set up collective projects
(âhacenderasâ), although currently this model is limited to a handful of
towns with less than 100 inhabitants, and their decisions are subject to
regional legislation. In the Basque Country, these councils are called
the Batzarre (Assemblies).
In nineteenth century Switzerland there was a special interest in
recovering these models from the medieval tradition; they were applied
in the form of referendums in parliament and in the constitution itself,
and since then participation in Swiss political life has retained a
popular element. But today direct democracy only still exists in two
Swiss cantons, where the people gather in the square or in the
countryside once a year to decide on budgets, and approve laws and
constitutional reforms. In Iceland the original tradition of the
Althing, or âAssembly of Free Men,â created in the tenth century,
continues to have influence even today, strengthening community feeling,
and enabling the political and social upheaval experienced in recent
years on the island.
In North Africa, tribal models that political analysts refer to as
direct democracy are still maintained, kept alive in regions such as the
Algerian Kabylia.
The aarsh (sovereign communities), self-governed through the thaymaath
(village assemblies), organize with one another in what are called
âcoordinationsâ and remain the organizational basis for continuous labor
insurrections against the state (particularly the insurrections of 2001
and 2004, or Black Spring). In the Arab world this model is known as the
Jemaah or assembly.
In Libya since 1977 these were theoretically normalized as the official
form of government, and called the Jamahiriya, based on what were called
the âPeopleâs Congresses,â though in practice state power was in the
hands of the military apparatus headed by Muammar Gaddafi.
In the rest of Africa the name âtraditional direct democracyâ has often
been used to refer to the Village Councils made up of the heads of
families (in Equatorial Guinea these have been formalized since 1981,
and the community is not allowed to elect its members; there, the
repressive state apparatus is now based on these Councils).
Interestingly in 1981 the first black mayor in all of France, Kofi
Yamgnane, from Togo, imported this system to the small Brittany town of
Saint-Coulitz, establishing what was called the Council of Elders, in
order to revitalize what he saw as âparticipatory democracy.â Yamgnane
would become the French Secretary of State.
The concept of direct democracy is also advocated and implemented by
armed revolutionary movements in peripheral countries of the West, which
have undergone an evolution of their organizations from Marxism-Leninism
or Maoism 70s to the autonomist and assemblyist positions of the 90s and
2000s. To assemblyist forms drawn from old cultural traditions existing
all over the world, such as the above examples from Europe and North
Africa, its theorists have added the Western concept of âdemocracyâ in
order to garner international sympathy and obtain institutional
recognition for the organizations that support them.
Beyond the programs implemented by their organizations and leaders,
which most often just perpetuate various forms of Power, large sectors
of the world population currently continue to practice forms of
assemblyist self-government and communal economic systems, in most cases
in the midst of continuing armed conflicts that have lasted centuries.
Abdullah Ocallan, leader of the Workers Party of Kurdistan, took up the
concept of direct democracy inspired by libertarian municipalism and
social ecology for the whole Kurdish movement in a proclamation
delivered in 2005. Ocallan Abdullah named his model âdemocratic
confederalismâ to bridge differences with Bookchin. His proposal seeks
to avoid conflicts involving the territorial boundaries of nation-states
or ethnic and religious differences, and thus to promise a model for
peace and social equality in the Middle East, a social organization
based on partial autonomous structures, such as councils of youth,
women, the diaspora or migration, regional councils, etc., which would
take on more and more social, cultural and political tasks until finally
they would break the peopleâs dependence on States. The overall
organization is called the Confederation of the Peoples of Kurdistan,
and it has its own guerrilla military organization.
In Mexico, starting with the armed insurrection of 1994, the EZLN
(Zapatista Army of National Liberation) has opened the way for the
creation of civil assembly structures, first called Aguascalientes,
later called Caracoles, and then Councils of Good Government. The
Zapatista theoreticians and spokespersons say they are fighting for
âdemocracy and freedom,â through a model of equality and fairness not
only for their communities but also for the entire country and as an
example to the whole world and the universe (âthe Intergalacticâ), where
political parties are marginalized and temporary representatives,
elected by the peopleâs assembly, act according to the concept âLead by
Obeying.â
In using the terms âdirect democracyâ and âcommunity democracy,â they
say they are merely taking up a concept that already existed long before
in their worldview: âAnother word came from far away to name this new
government; and that word gave the name âdemocracyâ to this road of
ours, traveled since before words could walk.â (taken from an EZLN
statement).
As we can see, the term âdemocracyâ has very different meanings
depending on where or in what social sector it is used. Perhaps it is
such a broad and subjective term that it canât really be abstractly
defended or categorically despised (since the word is often draped over
demands and conflicts that contain the dignity of the struggle against
injustice and for freedom), but it must always be analyzed critically,
because in most cases it is simply the mask used by Power, or some form
of Power, to perpetuate itself.
And in such cases, we should have no moral qualms whatsoever about
unmasking, attacking, and destroying it, to open the field to new
definitions, which are always contained as such within the acts and
realities of the self-management of the people, and the aspirations of
individuals.
Human beings, because we are social animals, need other people to live
and a place where we can be nourished, take shelter from the cold, and
develop inwardly, since consciousness is a characteristic inherent in
our species.
As anarchists, we are often asked how we would organize society with no
political leaders and no state institutions. We cannot answer this in a
closed-minded manner, since the very idea of organizing a society runs
contrary to the anarchist ideal.
In other words, anarchism is not so much a political doctrine as it is a
way of life based on three basic points: freedom, respect and
responsibility. We are not afraid of the freedom of others; we do not
believe that âman is a wolf to his fellow man,â as Hobbes said, nor that
competition drives âhumanityâ to progress, causing everyone to make
their best effort. We simply think that given equal conditions people
are able to organize without anyoneâs arbitration, and without being
directed by anyone. This idea does not at all mean that we are all
equal; we love differences, and no two beings are equal anywhere in the
universe. We do not wish to homogenize anything, or to impose on anyone
what their life should be, and simply do not want anyone to impose on us
either.
Throughout history a variety of organizational models and historical
experiences have reflected the Idea [1] quite well; but unfortunately
the rule of money leaves ever less room for any form of life that fails
to meet its criteria, and is able to subjugate, regulate, or even
genetically modify (mutate) anything and everything that does not fit
into the destructive vortex contained within whatâs called âprogress.â
Recent examples that have arisen in many places throughout Spain are
those of the open council, or the communitarian forms of work that we
have been seeing in many towns for harvesting crops, sharing pastures,
or cleaning roads and ditches; there the common good is first and
foremost, with horizontal relationships and camaraderie, subject to
norms set by the people themselves for the smooth execution of their
work.
Obviously we donât believe that no problems will ever arise in these
relationships, but the mechanisms to resolve them must be consistent
with the peopleâs way of thinking. We have nothing but contempt for
bourgeois justice, where a handful of well-paid professionals devote
themselves to judging the rest of society based on codes that they
create to uphold their own interests.
Conflict resolution must be an essential part of human relationships
themselves, without delegating that responsibility to people outside the
conflict. The conditions that are currently in place have led to the
degeneration of relationships among people, making us competitive with
one another, infantilizing us, and alienating us. In short, itâs never
been so easy for us to be enslaved, so we have to remove all of the
causes behind it, both physical and mental.
Social justice is a basic cornerstone of healthy relationships between
individuals where there are neither exploiters nor exploited, nor profit
extracted at the expense of others. Today the privileged classes tell us
that the way of life they have created must be kept exactly as it is,
because it is the best of all possible worlds; meanwhile they
deliberately ignore how all that supposed prosperity is actually built,
and the consequences that it entails for the planet and other groups of
human beings: the systematic plundering of raw materials, the
irreversible alteration of landscapes, the pollution of water, land and
air, and the enormous masses of displaced, subjugated, and dead people
left in the wake of the ruling classesâ much-vaunted âprosperity,â based
on war and theft, and justified by a condescending moralism that decides
what is good and what is going to be made good â since everything else
is directly eliminated.
The individual is the root at the basis of the way free people, i.e.,
people with the capacity to make their own decisions, function amongst
themselves. Each individual is free to do as they please as long as it
doesnât harm other individuals. Then come relationships with your group,
or groups based around shared interests. Depending on the needs of each,
or the magnitude of the work that needs to be done, these groups can
coordinate with others to meet their needs (to exchange products, hold
festivals, do work, have experiencesâŠ), and thus always uphold the
principles of individual and collective freedom.
Weâll try to clarify things a bit more in the following sections:
Economics can be understood as the management of resources to satisfy
needs. Since thousands of interpretations can exist, as many as there
are persons in association with one another, weâll only look at a few
ideas. On the one hand we want the abolition of private property,
because it is the basic principle of inequality: âFrom each according to
his ability, to each according to his needâ; âAll is for all.â These
days, in a world that puts more value on what you have than what you
are, these phrases may seem unreal. However, if you treat people with
solidarity and respect, thatâs the best guarantee that youâll get a fair
deal too, as most of us can observe from our friendships.
We also want to re-examine how the value of commodities is understood,
and abolish the concept of economic profit, so things would start to
have value as what they are. We want to see a society where we pool our
efforts and the product of those efforts, without attempting to
accumulate in view of some possible future speculation.
In other words, if one group of people has apples, another has melons,
and the other has collected mushrooms, we would much rather see sharing
amongst them all than exchange between them individually: everyone puts
whatever they have on the table, and takes whatever they need. We want
each community to have the highest possible degree of self-sufficiency,
so that society can stop squandering energy and offshoring
responsibility to all the other beings on this planet. All this is what
we mean by the concept of SELF-MANAGEMENT.
Anyway, there are already plenty interesting writings out there about
economic theories rooted in cooperation and responsibility,[2] so weâll
leave it at that.
Justice. No jails, no policemen, no judges; every problem that arises we
resolve amongst ourselves, with no passing the buck. Each situation and
each person is unique, and we cannot create a universal law nor would we
wish to do so. The universal bourgeois value system is a fallacy; states
infantalize their citizens by appearing before them as a father
punishing their bad behavior, and thereby perpetuate their social model.
In communities where there is no State, it will be up to the community
itself to decide how to settle each situation that arises, always
seeking understanding and justice in the true sense of the word, seeking
to resolve conflicts themselves, not take revenge or propagate fear.
As we do not believe in nations or borders, we see no reason for the
existence of armies to defend or attack, and we hold that the
disappearance of these historical aberrations is indispensable for
freedom on earth. The abolition of the state-capital binary would not
mean the disappearance of all violence from the world, but it would get
rid of the kind of violence that States create in their desire to
dominate, impose and rob others. The defense of free communities, which
is always necessary when there are real threats, must once again come to
be the responsibility of their members, doing away with sadism and
humiliation and ceasing to perpetuate the figure of the warrior as
specialist in violence. Self-defense is a basic part of the preservation
of freedom. Historical experience has shown how important it is to be
prepared to confront the enemy, as undesirable as it may be to do so.[3]
The revolution begins within yourself, so we have to try to keep our
minds constantly alert, and on par with our objectives. That is, if we
want to live in a world where we can grow in freedom, we have to be
consistent. We must not act in an authoritarian manner with others, and
must avoid behaviors that reproduce the things weâre fighting against.
It is of the utmost importance that we keep trying to improve ourselves
every day, and rid ourselves of such deeply ingrained influences from
society as egocentrism, consumerism, omnipotent rationalism, the worship
of science as absolute truth, submission to the empire of technology and
cyber-relationships; these are realities we have to confront. We have to
try to re-establish simpler relations between ourselves and our
environment, since it is obvious that in the current state of domination
we live in, the total energy-dependence of almost all our actions makes
us all the slaves/benefactors of the pillage of the planet in the name
of human progress.
anarchists
On December 16^(th) 2014, Operation Pandora was unleashed. The Stateâs
security forces burst into different houses and squats in Barcelona and
Madrid, and eleven anarchist comrades were kidnapped.
This kidnappingâand it couldnât have been done any other wayâwas
coordinated with the media, who helped justify and legitimate it with
heart and soul, spreading the news that the police had carried out an
operation against international anarchist terrorism. This kidnapping of
eleven comrades set off a multitude of rallies and demonstrations that
same day in different citiesâMadrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Zaragoza,
for exampleâthousands of people coming out in solidarity with the
kidnapped comrades and showing rage and hatred towards the Stateâs new
repressive operation against the libertarian movement.
Two days later, on December 18, the news came to light that Judge Javier
GĂłmez BermĂșdez, with an ample repressive history behind him, ordered
pretrial detention without bail for seven of the eleven comrades, in so
doing giving greater media and political justification for the
repressive campaign. We have to remember that this new repressive
operation is closely related with the still-open repressive case against
the anarchists MĂłnica and Francisco, who have already spent a year in
pretrial custody, in isolation, and to remember that the torturer Javier
GĂłmez BermĂșdez was also responsible for
imprisoning those comrades. The persecutor Javier GĂłmez BermĂșdez
justifies the pretrial detention of these seven comrades with such
compelling reasons as âthere are indications that support the hypothesis
that they are part of coordinated anarchist groups with terrorist endsâ
and that âthey seriously upset the public peace.â However, as
anarchists, we are not going to play the game the System imposes on us,
the game of concepts, assessments, guilt, innocence or âinvestigationâ
processes; as anarchists, we recognize neither their Justice, nor their
Law, nor, of course, their Public Peace; not only do we not recognize
them, but we fight them and we declare war on them without quarter.
Weâre not concerned with what our kidnapped comrades did or didnât do or
say; we donât recognize the categories of âinnocentâ or âguiltyâ imposed
by the System, categories that only make sense when recognizing and
legitimizing the Law and the Judicial System.
It seems that, in the police searches, numerous copies of a book called
Contra la democracia were found. This book attempts to provide tools of
reflection and debate for those who oppose democracy, that mythicized
and deified system that we are all obligated to venerate and defend,
given that if we donât, we run the risk of ending up with our bones in
the Stateâs dungeons. However, we know that democracy is precisely the
following, the same story once again: repression and incarceration of
all those who raise their heads and fight daily for the destruction of
all Authority and the construction of a new world that works based on
horizontality and mutual aid, in which all vestiges of Power have
disappeared.
Democracy is, necessarily, prison, the police, pistols and bombs, wage
labour, schools as centres of indoctrination and distortion,
psychiatrists, merchandise, the Parliament, government and domination as
a form of âorganizingâ society...; democracy is simply one more way that
the State and Capital, the dominant minority, have of administering
their system of oppression. Itâs because of this that, as anarchists, we
declare war against democracy and any other system of domination and
Power; itâs because of this that we fight and will continue to fight the
âpublic peaceâ mentioned by the torturer Javier GĂłmez BermĂșdez, the
public peace of jails, of wars, of unemployment, of wage and labour
exploitation, of hunger, of misery, of evictions, of consumerism, of
beaten and expelled migrants, of arrests and police torture, of the
hundreds of women killed at the hands of machismo and patriarchy, of the
representation of our lives in the hands of a minority by means of the
vote and parliamentarianism, of that false life of cardboard and money
whose goal is for us to forget and for us to accept our alienated,
submissive, and empty lives.
Itâs because of this that yesterday, today, and forever we will struggle
day to day against the State, Capital and all forms of Authority, even
if they are dressed up in the suit of democracy. Itâs because of this
that it is undeniably clear and certain to us that we will defend our
kidnapped comrades with tooth and nail, that we will unleash that which
always scares the State so much: anarchist solidarity, that is to say,
mutual aid and direct action against the Enemy and its institutional
tools and frameworks. This new repressive blow is not going to put the
brakes on the struggle, but just the opposite: we will continue on the
path we have set forth on, we will strengthen and organize ourselves
even more so as to continue and magnify the everyday struggle against
the system of oppression and domination that we suffer permanently and
daily. We will construct a new world, where not a trace of Power
remains, in which there will be neither dominators nor dominated,
neither condemned nor persecutors, persecutors like Javier GĂłmez
BermĂșdez.
INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST SOLIDARITY!
FREEDOM FOR ANARCHISTS IN PRISON!
DEATH TO THE STATE AND LONG LIVE ANARCHY
Early afternoon on Wednesday April 1^(st) 2015, the judge of the
National High Court Eloy Velasco, remanded in prison 5 of the 15
individuals arrested on Monday 30^(th) March during the police operation
named Piñata. 24 others were arrested during the 17 raids, which took
place in Madrid, Barcelona, Palencia and Granada, for âdisobedience and
resistance,â who were then subsequently released.
10 of the prisoners (three from Barcelona and seven in Madrid) were
released on conditional bail under judicial supervision (passport
confiscation, ban on leaving the territory, and to sign-on every 15
days). They remain accused of belonging to GAC.
The five remanded are all charged with participating in a terrorist
organisation (of an âinsurrectionist-anarchistâ orientation, extol the
newspapers) or the offense of âcriminal organisationâ under Article
570bis of the Criminal Code, with the aggravating circumstance âof
subverting public order and seriously disrupting the social peace.â The
name of this organisation is the Coordinated Anarchist Groups (GAC),
which is accused of âpromotion and the coordination of sabotage,â
including 113 ATMs in February 2015, and to be possibly linked to
incendiary attacks against the BasilicaâPillar Cathedral in Zaragoza
(for which MĂłnica and Francisco have been remanded in preventative
detention for over a year) and the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid
(February 7^(th) and October 1^(st) 2013 respectively).
The material items cited by the judge were those found during the raids,
such as; âmanuals for making explosive devices and guerrilla tactics,â
camping gas canisters, âphotos of police and police stations,â
âself-defense manuals and techniques to avoid surveillance,â âtechnical
devices for encrypted access to wifi to render web browsing anonymous.â
In short, literature, lots of literature as per usual, while Velasco
boasts about having imprisoned âGAC leaders from Madrid, Barcelona and
Palencia.â The comrade from Madrid, Enrique âKike,â accused of being the
national pseudo-leader of GAC, had just been released from prison on
January 30, with other co-defendants of the previous operation, Pandora.
The four others made headlines as being âresponsible for the financial
apparatus, propaganda and direct actionâ of the GAC or that of âhead of
the GACâ in Madrid and Palencia. The state looks at its ugly face in the
mirror, and onto comrades without masters or slaves, projects its own
characteristics made ââup of hierarchies, leaders and specialisation. In
total, this is the third police investigation in over a year under the
pretext of attacks attributed to coordinated anarchist groups, and the
number of raids now stands at around thirty, with the indictments now at
at least 28.
As they exited the judgeâs office, a gathering of around sixty people in
solidarity unfolded, at which journalists were notably singled out with
shouts of âscavengers.â A new solidarity gathering was held in Madrid on
Wednesday 1^(st) April at 9pm, at the square Tirso de Molina, with a
call-out that clearly states the reason: âSolidarity. Mutual Aid. Direct
Action. Death to the State and long live anarchy.â During the demo
yesterday [March 31^(st)] in the same place, four people were arrested
and clashes with cops resulted in twelve minor injuries (eight of them
cops).
NEITHER INNOCENT NOR GUILTY,
FREEDOM FOR ALL!
FOR OFFENSIVE SOLIDARITY!
detained
October 28^(th) 2015: A police operation began at 7AM this morning
raiding several homes and properties in the neighborhoods of Sants,
GrĂ cia, Clot and Sant Andreu de Palomar in the city of Barcelona and
Manresa. The police action was ordered by the National Court and is a
continuation of Operation Pandora, which led to the arrest of ten
comrades and the preventative imprisonment of seven of them last
December. Among the properties searched were Revoltosa social center on
Rogent street in the Clot neighborhood and the lâAteneu Llibertari de
Sants on Maria Victoria street where ten police vans were in attendance.
When the news was leaked, dozens of people demonstrated in solidarity
and took to the streets of Sants marching behind a banner in support of
the detainees. Minutes later as the demonstration reached Masnou street
two vans of riot police arrived and proceeded to violently suppress the
demonstration.
Searches also took place at a house on Perill street in the neighborhood
of Gracia, a house in the neighborhood of Santos and other private homes
in Sant Andreu de Palomar. Police made a total of 9 arrests. At every
place police raided they encircled the whole street and impeded the free
movement of the neighborhood. In details leaked to the press by the
police they revealed that the operation led to the arrest of 9 people
for the alleged crime of âbelonging to a criminal organization with
terrorist aims.â
November 11^(th) 2015: If last week we awoke to 9 comrades arrested in
Barcelona and Manresa, of which one has to stay in prison and the rest
have been released pending trial in an extension of Operation Pandora,
and the extension of preventive prison to MĂłnica and Francisco,
yesterday, November 4, we awoke to a new blow. In this case, Operation
Ice in which 5 comrades from the Straight Edge Madrid collective have
been arrested. Again the state hits.
The allegations against them are belonging to a criminal organization
with terrorist aims, damages and apology of terrorism.
The henchmen of the Information Brigade of the National Police say they
have found material for making explosives, gunpowder and bomb-making
manuals.
It alleges them responsible for the attack with incendiary devices
against four bank branches in Madrid as well as other actions in
Barcelona. In addition, as has become customary, they are accused of
relations with GAC (Coordinated Anarchist Groups).
In this case, they have seized documents and propaganda concerning
Anarchist groups, for them a confirmation of their coordinated
relationship with them, referring specifically to the comrades arrested
last March 30 in Operation Piñata.
So it goes in the Spanish state, operation after operation still beating
us.
But whatever they do they will not get us to stop fighting.
FREEDOM FOR ANARCHIST PRISONERS!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE REPRESSED!
INNOCENT OR GUILTY, JUST ANARCHISTS!
DEATH TO THE STATE AND LONG LIVE ANARCHY!
[1] The Idea is the term the historically used by anarchists to refer to
their ethical principles.
[2] Texts [in Spanish] on self-managed economy can be found at ekintza
zuzena and alasbarricadas.org.
[3] We recommend reading about the Spanish revolution of 1936 and the
collectivist experiences that occurred across the country at that time,
or the makhnovist revolution in the Ukraine, which created free
communes, suppressed in blood and fire by the Bolsheviks.