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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.

Monsieur Dupont

Democracy

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.

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.