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Title: What Does Democracy Mean? Author: CrimethInc. Date: April 30, 2012 Language: en Topics: democracy Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2012/04/30/poster-series-what-does-democracy-mean
Our forebears overthrew kings and dictators, but they didn’t abolish the
institutions by which kings and dictators ruled: they democratized them.
Yet whoever operates these institutions—whether it’s a king, a
president, or an electorate—the experience on the receiving end is
roughly the same. Laws, bureaucracy, and police came before democracy;
they function the same way in a democracy as in a dictatorship. The only
difference is that, because we can cast ballots about how they should be
applied, we’re supposed to regard them as ours even when they’re used
against us.
Democracy doesn’t just mean public participation in making decisions. It
presumes that all power and legitimacy is vested in one decision-making
structure, and it requires a way to impose those decisions. As long as
anyone might defy them, there have to be armed personnel to regulate, to
discipline, to control.
Without police, there would be anarchy: people would act on their own
initiative, only implementing decisions they felt to be in their best
interest. Conflicts would have to be resolved to the mutual satisfaction
of all parties involved, not suppressed by a gang with a monopoly on
force.
Democracy presumes a line between participants and outsiders, between
legitimate and illegitimate. Only a fraction of the men could vote in
ancient Athens; the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Citizenship still
imposes a barrier between included and excluded, shutting over 10
million undocumented residents out of the decisions that shape their
lives.
The liberal answer is to expand the lines of inclusion, extending rights
and privileges until everyone is integrated into one vast democratic
project. But as long as all power must flow through one bottleneck,
there are bound to be imbalances and outsiders. The alternative would be
anarchy: abolishing centralized power structures and all the borders
they impose. Without borders, people would only live and work together
of their own free will, flowing freely between communities without
top-down control.
Those who don’t accept the authority of the state must be isolated, lest
their disobedience spread to the rest of the population. We’re told that
prisons protect us, but the only constant since their invention has been
that they protect the state from those who might threaten it. In
practice, by breaking up communities and fostering antisocial
tendencies, they only endanger us—even those of us who aren’t behind
bars.
Without prisons, there would be anarchy: people would have to work out
conflicts directly rather than calling in the authorities, and it would
no longer be possible to sweep the inequalities of this society under
the rug.
Democracy presumes transparency: a marketplace of ideas, in which
decisions are made in the open. Of course, in an unequal society,
transparency puts some people at risk—the employee who could be fired
for expressing the wrong opinion, the immigrant who fears
deportation—while the powerful can feign transparency as they make
back-room deals. In practice, political transparency simply equips
intelligence agencies to monitor the populace, preparing reprisals for
when dissidents get out of hand—and what government could maintain its
authority without intelligence agencies?
Without surveillance, there would be anarchy: people would say and do
what they really believe in. Those who defend centralized power fear
nothing more than privacy—the keeping of secrets—which they call
conspiracy.
Democracy means constant competition. Just as corporations contend for
resources in the marketplace, politicians and governments vie for power.
When power is centralized, people have to attain domination over others
in order to determine their own destinies. Those in power can only hold
onto it by waging war perpetually against their own populations as well
as foreign peoples: hence the National Guard troops brought back from
Iraq to suppress domestic protests.
As long as we remain at a distance from our own potential, being
governed rather than acting freely, being represented rather than acting
on our own interests, people will seek power over each other as a
substitute for self-determination. The alternative is anarchy: a world
in which people fight only for themselves—not for empires, flags, or
gods—and conflicts cannot produce hierarchy and oppression.
We have to be tireless in our critique of democracy, as the alternative
people in this society intuitively fall back on against the excesses of
capitalism. The more unpopular this is, the more important it is that we
do it. Private property and government are the two great sacred cows of
our age—the ones for which our lives and the earth itself are being
sacrificed—and challenging the ways they monopolize legitimacy is one
project, not two. They are two heads of the same beast; they cannot be
beaten separately. –Nightmares of Capitalism, Pipe Dreams of Democracy