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Title: Democracy Author: Monsieur Dupont Date: 2005–2006 Language: en Topics: AJODA, AJODA #60, democracy Notes: Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #60, Fall/Winter 2005–06, Vol. 23, No. 2.
Every time an anarchist says, “I believe in democracy,” there is a
little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”
— JM Barrie (Peter Pan 1928)
The guilt-ridden, double-checking tenets of democracy bother all
fragments of radical opinion like a haze of late summer midges but the
anarchist milieu seems especially prone to tolerating, even embracing,
this maddening visitation...
The cyclical return within the milieu to the tenets of democracy is
conducted by those who in other elements of their own analysis
understand that it has nothing to do with either Greek ideals or power
to the people and that in reality it consists of little more than a
parade of cattle-prodded common senselessness, more LA Arnie than
Athenian Socrates. These revolutionaries state explicitly in their most
lucid moments the determinate relationship between capital and its
political administration but it seems that even this is not enough and
the temptation to refer back to the democratic form as an ideal is
irresistible.
Democracy is a specialised form of political domination deployed as a
universal objective value, it is set in place as a political end or
ideal for society by an elite whose real power over society is not
political at all but is grounded in an all-pervasive economic
exploitation.
At the level of detail in direction, policy and law, the state’s
democratic practice is presented as somehow objective and final because
of the overly involved process that has led up to it, in reality however
the grounding of such a process, from its original conception to its
execution, is contained within the bounds set by economically imposed
scarcity. And the constriction of distribution is set by the party of
capital as it pursues its own interest.
Let us take for our example the founding of the National Health Service;
it has become the example par excellence, albeit a lonely and aged
beacon of the glories of social democracy. If we take the NHS as our
example, and we tick the boxes of its effectiveness in genuinely
improving proletarian health and also the ongoing usurpation of the idea
of public services by the commodity, if we accept all that but still
retain our critical attitude then the questions we set are these: a) if
the NHS was a concession of the dominant class, a maximum quantity it
was prepared to give up, then what was it intended to prevent; b) what
is the functionality of healthy workers for the bourgeoisie; c) what
other policing, stratifying, organisational functions does it perform in
the bourgeoisie’s domination of society? If we critically situate the
function of the NHS within the wider strategic intentions of the ruling
class then we see that our gains have never really belonged to us. And
what goes for the NHS is equally applicable to education, employment
rights, social wages, political inclusion and to all of the benefits of
democracy.
Democracy is concerned with a degree of reflexive administration of the
social body but the social body is not self-defining, it is determined
by the commodity form. This means the administrative institution only
has power enough to intervene in what already exists.
Democracy and its product therefore serves the party of capital on many
levels but always as a disguise to its exploitative social mechanism.
The only voices, the only ideas, that have ever appeared within
democracy’s register, and this despite the representational claims of
these voices, the only voices ever raised within the democratic schema
are bottom line bourgeois. Thus a function of democracy is to restrict
the appearance of what can be said and to portray this restriction as
all that can be said — one of the secondary consequences of this
restriction has been the enclosure and subsequent devaluation of many
political reference points. For example tyranny, dictatorship, and
totalitarianism lose practical application to lived reality when
established democracy facilitates the deaths of twenty thousand people a
day from starvation, causes the just-like-that deaths of ten thousand
civilians in a war against Iraq, inflicts a death every minute because
of its trade in small arms, and above and beyond all these and other
mere details, imposes the systematic binding of billions of human beings
to capitalist production. The democratic ideal does not state that life
must be reduced to labour function nor does it say that most people will
exist without any hope of owning the product of their labour.
Democracy itself is a euphemism for capitalism, as in “Britain is a
democracy,” and from this original mystification follow others.
Democracy grants itself the right to take hold of and dictate the
meaning of concepts like freedom which becomes freedom of speech, or
freedom of the ballot box, and equality which becomes equality of
opportunity, or equality before the law. In these cases, and many more,
a universalist aspiration is honed down to the point that it mutely
serves the narrow interest of the dominant class and accelerates the
hold on society of that class’s tightly defined form of ownership, a
form that is always carefully withheld from the democratic horizon.
In other words, what is most fundamental to the scene, who owns it, who
dictates its character, is always absent from all legitimised engagement
with and conventional reflection on the scene.
The most radical democrats seek to establish what they call real or
direct democracy, which they say will bring all socially occurring
phenomena within the scope of the proposed popular assembly. In one
bound they forget, in that endless oscillation that is chronic to the
left, the objective influence of big money on the solutions they propose
even after their own efforts to point out the specifics of such
instances as examples of the problem of the present.
The left enthusiastically investigates the mutual benefits enjoyed
between the political party in power and its corruption by capital;
observe its glee as it exposes the Republican Party’s allocation of
re-build contracts in Iraq (what else did it expect?) but then carry its
conclusions no further; it learns no lessons and seems pathologically
incapable of connecting the specific to the general. It neither
speculates on the likely manipulation by capital of the assemblies it
favours nor does it consider for one moment the current influence
capital has on its own pro-democracy line, which, lets face it, has a
very convenient path-of-least-resistance quality to it. That
cringeworthy Michael Moore-style blab, those American flags on peace
demonstrations, “we are the true guardians of democracy,” “we are the
real patriots” as if such mystifications weren’t also fragments of the
real, true problem.
Radical and direct democrats seem ever-doomed to forget that the form
society takes is not finally determined by public opinion, but by the
ownership of property. The surface of opinions and of subjective values,
even if regimented into a mass movement, are no opposition at all to the
force of property ownership. Such movements press the button marked
“have your say,” but it is connected to nothing, they are “making
themselves heard” down the phone but the line is cut, they are “standing
up for what’s right” but their feet are in quicksand. The petitions and
lobbyings and protests and pressurings are so many open doors to empty
rooms.
The labyrinth of participation turns out to be a fetish of alienated
consciousness, “getting involved” is specially designed to convince the
unwary that their concern is special, that this time they’re really
making headway against all precedence of the circumlocution office, and
that really, really change is very close now, ah but they aren’t and it
isn’t — and if, as the radicals have diagnosed, this democracy is one
sign of a fundamental economic alienation then it would be a strange
medicine indeed that recommended its treatment by means of a blanket
application of its symptom.
It seems that democracy occurs as a sublimated politics when the
alteration of property ownership is forbidden. It is promoted as a form
of political compensation for the cost to society of the original
prohibition. It states that everything else, everything that doesn’t
refer to ownership, is up for discussion, and yet we now see that even
this limited remit must be continually revised — property is vulnerable,
its needs change constantly, it requires constant care and protection.
So, if it is now established that democracy at its heart is a trick to
distract attention from economic domination of one class by another then
it is unlikely that any popular assembly in any imaginable circumstance
could defend itself against non-explicit manipulation from hidden
forces, factions, splinters and so on (the contrary: the more open and
honest the assembly is towards the citizenry the more responsive it is
to hidden influence). I also do not see how any given democratic
institution could prevent at least one degree of alienation opening up
between itself and the social body, and in that unspoken space who knows
what lurks?
Democracy cannot dismember capitalism.
If you are tempted to throw up your hands and demand what is to become
of us, I’d reply only that the radical overthrow of ownership must come
before the setting up of any political institutions — first make power
explicit, then human beings can organise themselves accordingly.
The anarchists have recently fallen into a trap of attempting to
formalise the constellation of discussion, disagreement, consent,
legitimation, delegation, and so on under the rubric democracy; the
reason for this is several-fold. For one it is the unthought-out
application of a systematically impoverished vocabulary — what other
words are there for people instituting themselves, as the end for their
activity? For another the milieu wants to reassure a wider
anti-capitalist protest movement which is supposedly mystified or
intimidated by it.
MD has written long and self-importantly on the self-deception of the
anti-capitalist protesters so it is enough here to say that I do not
think this essentially reformist movement is so very worthy of the
milieu’s tender considerations. Anti-capitalism is an endless shading of
opinions one into the other but basically it is a protest of the
bourgeoisie against itself, a movement of and for social reform which
nevertheless wishes to preserve its own economically derived class
privilege of speaking to, and being heard by, government.
The anti-capitalists legitimise themselves by castigating unrealistic
pro-revolutionaries and claim that they speak for the urgently poor. The
accusation of irrelevance and unreality hurts and the anarchist milieu
hides its face in shame, concluding that it has no licence to instruct
the poor in the illusions of self-determination, anti-imperialism, and
democratic political reform which it is decided must be the baggage of
their liberation. In response to reformist bullying the milieu tacitly
falls into line, in its aims and principles it adds other politically
weighted oppressions to its class analysis, and swallows whole the
leftist agenda. In this the milieu is wrong. It not only can but must
extend its critique far beyond the easy target of America and “big
business.” In its analysis it must include the recuperative part played
by those false and essentially conservative solutions to America that
are proposed by the left, all of which are easily contained by the
commodity system. The stated aspirations of the anti-capitalist movement
are not identical to the interest of the world’s poor; what we are told
the poor want is what has been formulated for them as an alternative to
the present and whilst the worst-off’s rejection of present conditions
is sharp and instinctive their commitment to the alternative blueprint
is more shaky. Nevertheless their democratic representatives do not
cease in their pushing forward of these aspirations to fair trade and
democracy, and that says it all.
It is no miraculous feat of prophecy to predict that many if not all of
those involved in the current protest movement will end up as future
entrepreneurs and politicians of the establishment. Such is the history
of political protest. The French, American, and Russian revolutions, and
even the protests of the Sixties all disguised self-interested,
economically based, ambitions behind a Birnham wood of slogans for
universal emancipation.
Many energetic and independent souls have entered democratic politics
saying they were going to bring the practice of democracy into line with
its alleged ideals. All have ended instead by adapting themselves to
what existed before them. The English rebel MP Diane Abbott, famous only
for castigating her New Labour colleagues for sending their children to
private schools, ends by sending her kid to a private school. I don’t
criticise her, it’s inevitable, the political class are separate, her
kid would certainly be a target, and the nature of privilege is that you
can choose to escape what the rest of us have no choice in. Those who
attempt to reform privilege from within end up as its beneficiaries. So
it is no surprise when, for whatever reason, democratic ambitions are
proclaimed within the anarchist milieu and these
we-don’t-mean-it-in-the-same-way-they-do self-described anarchists
conclude their ignominious career by proposing anarchist intervention in
the electoral process (as the former editor of Green Anarchist did in
Freedom 9/08/03). When anarchists declare themselves democrats for
respectability’s sake, so they can get on better at university research
departments, so they can tap into a shared and honourable left
tradition,-so they can participate in the global forum, when they crown
their decomposition by saying, “we’re democrats too, we’re true
democrats, participatory democrats” they ought not be surprised at how
enthusiastic democracy is to return the compliment, and of course to
extract its price. Those who sign their names soon find themselves
falling silent on a spray of other matters to which democracy and the
force behind it are secretly hostile, and of that invisible bouquet
class is the big, bold, blousey one.