💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › crimethinc-democracy-the-patriotic-temptation.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:27:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Democracy: The Patriotic Temptation Author: Uri Gordon Date: May 26, 2016 Language: en Topics: anarchy, democracy Source: https://crimethinc.com/2016/05/26/democracy-the-patriotic-temptation
Like most political words, democracy is an “essentially contested”
concept—its meaning is itself a political battleground. What political
ideologies do, as mass patterns of political expression, is to
“de-contest” or fix the meaning of such concepts and place them in
particular relationships. The term “equality,” for example, can mean
equal access to advantage (liberalism), equal responsibility to the
national community (fascism), or equal power in a classless society
(anarchism). On such a reading, there is no way objectively to determine
the meaning of such concepts—all that exists are distinct usages, each
of them regularly grouped with other concepts in one or another
ideological formation.
I would therefore like to suspend the discussion of the appropriate
conceptual understanding of democracy, and instead ask about the
strategic choice to employ the term. Is it worthwhile for anarchists to
de-contest “democracy” in ways that point towards statelessness and
non-domination? Two arguments follow. The first is that anarchist
invocations of democracy are a relatively new and distinctly American
phenomenon. The second is that the invocation is problematic, because
its rhetorical structure and audience targeting almost inevitably end up
appealing to patriotic sentiments and national origin myths.
Historically, democracy was not a word that anarchists tended to use in
reference to their own visions or practices. A survey of the writings of
the prominent anarchist activists and theorists of the 19th and early
20th century reveals that, on the rare occasions on which they even
employed the term, it was used in its conventional, statist sense to
refer to actually-existing democratic institutions and entitlements
within the bourgeois state. Democracy meant representative government,
as opposed to monarchy or oligarchy.
Proudhon clearly viewed democracy in these terms. In chapter 1 of What
is Property he wrote:
The nation, so long a victim of monarchical selfishness, thought to
deliver itself for ever by declaring that it alone was sovereign. But
what was monarchy? The sovereignty of one man. What is democracy? The
sovereignty of the nation, or, rather, of the national majority… in
reality there is no revolution in the government, since the principle
remains the same. Now, we have the proof to-day that, with the most
perfect democracy, we cannot be free.
The issue for Proudhon is sovereignty as such, and not the question of
who or what legitimates it. In chapter 7 of The Philosophy of Poverty he
also objects to any “system of authority, whatever its origin,
monarchical or democratic” (Proudhon 1847). At no point does Proudhon
distinguish between “real” and “so-called” democracy; the term simply
stands for government by representatives.
This approach persists through the anarchist tradition. Bakunin in
Statism and Anarchy (1873:178) attacks Marxists who “by popular
government… mean government of the people by a small number of
representatives elected by the people… a lie behind which the despotism
of a ruling minority is concealed, a lie all the more dangerous in that
it represents itself as the expression of a sham popular will.”
Alexander Berkman sounded a similar critique in the Mother Earth
Bulletin of October 1917:
The democratic authority of majority rule is the last pillar of tyranny.
The last, but the strongest… the despotism that is invisible because not
personified, shears Samson of his passion and leaves him will-less. Woe
to the people where the citizen is a sovereign whose power is in the
hands of his masters! It is a nation of willing slaves.
Finally, Malatesta (1924) also treats “democracy” only in terms of a
system of government:
Even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority
that rules and imposes its will and interests by force… Therefore, those
who really want ‘government of the people’ in the sense that each can
assert his or her own will, ideas and needs, must ensure that no one,
majority or minority, can rule over others; in other words, they must
abolish government, meaning any coercive organisation, and replace it
with the free organisation of those with common interests and aims.
In all of these cases, there is no attempt to align anarchism with
democracy, or to construe the latter on any terms other than those of
conventional representative institutions. The association between
anarchism and democracy makes its appearance only around the 1980s,
through the writings of Murray Bookchin.
Bookchin’s disavowal of anarchism towards the end of his life is
irrelevant here, since his statements regarding democracy had remained
consistent since the late 70s, when they were couched in terms of a
strategy recommended to anarchists. Echoing Martin Buber’s critique of
the expansion of the “political principle” of top-down power and
centralised authority at the expense of the “social principle” of
horizontal and spontaneous relationships (Buber 1957), Bookchin sees the
only promising avenue for resistance in “a recovery of community,
autonomy, relative self-sufficiency, self reliance, and direct
democracy” on the local level, fostering “social institutions that by
their very logic, stand in sharp opposition to increasingly all
pervasive political institutions” (Bookchin 1980). This vision is
clearly one of an anarchistic localism, based on “free popular
assemblies,” “collectivization of resources,” and strictly mandated
delegation of administrative coordinators. The question remains,
however: should this arrangement be promoted with the language of
democracy—albeit direct and participatory? What is the appeal of such
language in the first place?
Essentially, the association of anarchism with democracy is a
two-pronged rhetorical maneuver intended to increase the appeal of
anarchism for mainstream publics. The first component of the maneuver is
to latch onto the existing positive connotations that democracy carries
in established political language. Instead of the negative (and false)
image of anarchism as mindless and chaotic, a positive image is fostered
by riding on the coattails of “democracy” as a widely-endorsed term in
the mass media, educational system, and everyday speech. The appeal here
is not to any specific set of institutions or decision-making
procedures, but to the association of democracy with freedom, equality,
and solidarity—to the sentiments that go to work when democracy is
placed in binary opposition to dictatorship, and celebrated as what
distinguishes the “free countries” of the West from other regimes.
Yet the second component of the maneuver is subversive: it seeks to
portray current capitalist societies as not, in fact, democratic, since
they alienate decision-making power from the people and place it in the
hands of elites. This amounts to an argument that the institutions and
procedures that mainstream audiences associate with democracy—government
by representatives—are not in fact democratic, or at least a very pale
and limited fulfilment of the values they are said to embody. True
democracy, in this account, can only be local, direct, participatory,
and deliberative, and is ultimately achievable only in a stateless and
classless society. The rhetorical aim of the maneuver as a whole is to
generate in the audience a sense of indignation at having been deceived:
while the emotional attachment to “democracy” is confirmed, the belief
that it actually exists is denied.
Now there are two problems with this maneuver, one conceptual and one
more substantive. The conceptual problem is that it introduces a truly
idiosyncratic notion of democracy, so ambitious as to disqualify almost
all political experiences that fall under the common understanding of
the term—including all electoral systems in which representatives do not
have a strict mandate and are not immediately recallable. By claiming
that current “democratic” regimes are in fact not democratic at all and
that the only democracy worthy of the name is actually some version of
an anarchist society, anarchists are asking people to reconfigure their
understanding of democracy in a rather extreme way. While it is possible
to maintain this new usage with logical coherence, it is nevertheless so
rarefied and contrary to the common usage that its potential as a pivot
for mainstream opinion is highly questionable.
The second problem is graver. While the association with democracy may
seek to appeal only to its egalitarian and libertarian connotations, it
also entangles anarchism with the patriotic nature of the pride in
democracy which it seeks to subvert. The appeal is not simply to an
abstract design for participatory institutions, but to participatory
institutions recovered from the American revolutionary tradition.
Bookchin (1985) is quite explicit about this, when he calls on
anarchists to “start speaking in the vocabulary of the democratic
revolutions” while unearthing and enlarging their libertarian content:
That [American] bourgeois past has libertarian features about it: the
town meetings of New England. Municipal and local control, the American
mythology that the less government the better, the American belief in
independence and individualism. All these things are antithetical to a
cybernetic economy, a highly centralized corporative economy and a
highly centralized political system… I’m for democratizing the republic
and radicalizing the democracy, and doing that on the grass roots level:
that will involve establishing libertarian institutions which are
totally consistent with the American tradition. We can’t go back to the
Russian Revolution or the Spanish revolution any more. Those revolutions
are alien to people in North America.
Cindy Milstein’s formulation in her article “Democracy is Direct”
(Milstein 2000) works directly to fulfill this program by seeking to
build on American origin myths:
Given that the United States is held up as the pinnacle of democracy, it
seems particularly appropriate to hark back to those strains of a
radicalized democracy that fought so valiantly and lost so crushingly in
the American Revolution. We need to take up that unfinished project…
Like all the great modern revolutions, the American Revolution spawned a
politics based on face-to-face assemblies confederated within and
between cities… Those of us living in the United States have inherited
this self-schooling in direct democracy, even if only in vague echoes…
deep-seated values that many still hold dear: independence, initiative,
liberty, equality. They continue to create a very real tension between
grassroots self-governance and top-down representation.
The appeal to the consensus view of the American polity as founded in a
popular and democratic revolution, genuinely animated by freedom and
equality, is precisely intended to target existing patriotic sentiments,
even as it emphasises their subversive consequences. Milstein even
invokes Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when she criticises
reformist agendas which “work with a circumscribed and neutralized
notion of democracy, where democracy is neither of the people, by the
people, nor for the people, but rather, only in the supposed name of the
people.” Yet this is a dangerous move, since it relies on a
self-limiting critique of the patriotic sentiment itself, and allows the
foundation myths to which it appeals to remain untouched by critiques of
manufactured collective identity and colonial exclusion. While noting
the need not to whitewash the racial, gendered, and other injustices
that were part of “the historic event that created this country,”
Milstein can only offer an unspecific exhortation to “grapple with the
relation between this oppression and the liberatory moments of the
American Revolution.”
Yet given that the appeal is targeted at non-anarchist participants,
there is little if any guarantee that such a grappling would actually
take place. The patriotic sentiment appealed to here is more often than
not a component of a larger nationalist narrative, one that hardly
partakes of a decolonial critique (which by itself would have many
questions about the Western enlightenment roots of notions of
citizenship and the public sphere). The celebration of democracy in
terms that directly invoke the early days of the American polity may end
up reinforcing rather than questioning loyalties to the nation-state
that claims, however falsely, to be the carrier of the democratic
inheritance of the colonial period. This is especially poignant in the
context of the recent wave of mobilization, which displays precisely
this mix of quintessentially anarchist-influenced means of organization
and action, and distinctly patriotic and nationalist discourses—from the
Egyptian revolution’s embrace of the military, through the Jeffersonian
sentiments pervading the Occupy movement, and on to the outright
nationalism of the Ukrainian revolution.
There is, indeed, one reason to question this concern—namely, the
democratic and nationalist sentiments that have been expressed by
movements with which anarchists have good reasons to sense an affinity.
The most prominent of these are the struggles of communities in Chiapas
linked to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in southeast Mexico
and the revolutionary movement in Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. Both have
not only employed the language of democracy to signify a decentralised
and egalitarian form of society, but also an explicit agenda of national
liberation. The Kurdish movement has publicly endorsed Bookchin as a
source of inspiration. Does this mean that anarchists are wrong to
maintain active solidarity with these movements? My answer is “No”—but
due to a crucial difference that also vindicates the general argument
above. It is not the same thing for stateless minorities in the global
South to use the language of democracy and national liberation as it is
for citizens of advanced capitalist countries in which national
independence is already an accomplished fact. The former do not appeal
to patriotic founding myths engendered by an existing nation state, with
their associated privileges and injustices, but to the possibility of a
different and untested form of radically decentralised and potentially
stateless “national liberation.” To be sure, this carries its own risks,
but anarchists in the global North are hardly in a position to preach on
these matters.
Thus we return to the main point: for anarchists in the USA and Western
Europe, at least, the choice to use the language of democracy is based
on the desire to mobilize and subvert a form of patriotism that is
ultimately establishment-friendly; it risks cementing the nationalist
sentiments it seeks to undermine. Anarchists have always had a public
image problem. Trying to undo it through the connection to mainstream
democratic and nationalist sentiments is not worth this risk.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Over 14.
In Pointing the Way (New York: Harper). Reprinted in Anarchy 54.
and Vernon Richards. In The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles
1924-1931 (London: Freedom, 1995).
Aspirations (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
Tucker. (New York, NY: Humboldt, 1890).
Benjamin Tucker (Cambridge ,MA: Wilson, 1888).
(St. Paul: Coughlin, 1978).