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Title: What is Democracy? Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: democracy, Europe, history, racism, the State, United States Source: Personal communication with the author, August 9, 2009 Notes: See Sharp Press, 2004
We are told we live in the richest and most democratic country in the
world. Our rights include freedom of speech and religion, and freedom to
vote for our leaders. Our country possesses more wealth than any other —
more wealth in fact than much of the rest of the world combined. On TV
and in real life, we see Americans with huge houses, expensive cars,
plenty of state-of-the-art gadgets, and memberships to golf courses or
ski resorts.
But we all know that this is not the whole picture. It is more like an
advertisement. Though our neighborhoods are segregated, rich from poor;
white from black, latino, and Native American, few people are unaware
that most Americans do not live like the people on televised sitcoms.
People living in wealthy suburbs often encounter poverty in the cities
where they work for various corporations and government bureaus. People
living in impoverished areas are often forced to travel out to the
suburbs to work serving coffee to rich, white people.
Whether the economy is doing “good” or “bad,” millions of people are
unemployed, and unable to sell themselves for money to buy the things
they need. Many of the people who are employed work forty, sixty, eighty
hours a week, in grueling, dangerous, unhealthy, demeaning jobs just to
pay for a place to live, clothes to wear, food to eat, and medicine, for
themselves and their family. Meanwhile, their bosses, whose jobs are
easier and safer, make twice as much money, and the people who sit on
the boards of the corporations do no work and make millions. People are
turned away from hospitals even in emergencies, denied medical care
because they cannot afford insurance, even while insurance companies
make hundreds of millions of dollars, overcharging people and trying to
weasel out of paying for medical procedures they deem “non-essential.”
In this country of plenty, people sleep on the streets, dying in the
winter cold or the summer heat, while landlords hold onto vacant units,
waiting for the price to go up. And the police clearly have no problem
with beating or jailing homeless people who squat in vacant apartments.
Why does a large portion of the United States live in poverty, while
others have more money than they could ever use?
Poverty is not our only problem. Every day, racist police beat or shoot
people of color, and millions of people, especially blacks and latinos,
are rotting in prison, subjected to extremely long sentences and
horrible conditions for minor crimes that are often harmless. Women are
discriminated against, and often face violence and rape. Lesbians, gays,
queer and transgendered people also face exclusion, harassment, and
violence. Children are treated like sub-humans, without any rights and
forced to go to educational factories (“schools”) where they are
indoctrinated with many of the harmful myths of our society and taught
to accept the problems of our world as “natural.” Corporations are
cutting down our forests, driving plants and animals to extinction,
poisoning the soil, the rivers, the air, and poisoning people too, all
in the interest of profit. Our government starts wars that many people
oppose, and wins obedience from everyone else by using the media to tell
lies that lead to thousands of deaths.
But more certain than our awareness of all these problems is our
knowledge that we live in a democracy, and we can use our rights, and
our powers as citizens to make things right.
But what does it mean to live in a democracy? We are told that democracy
is different from a “dictatorship” in that the citizens of a democracy
take part in decision-making, whereas in a dictatorship all decisions
are made by a ruler or small group of rulers. However, in democratic
societies, most people are not members of the government, and they do
not have direct control over the decisions that affect their lives, but
still must abide by those decisions. The justifying rationalization is
that advanced human societies cannot function without government, and
therefore citizens enter into a “contract of the governed.” They assent
to follow the rules and honor the decisions of the government, and the
government in turn is obligated to protect its citizens and uphold the
common good.
Therefore, in a democracy, people who cannot become members of the
government because of limited governmental positions can instead vote
for their leaders, who are known as “representatives” because they must
represent the interests of their constituents or they will not be
reelected. Voting is thus the fundamental right within a democratic
state, and the state can only be considered democratic if the majority
of its citizens are afforded this right. The second most important right
is that everyone must have the opportunity to be elected to a
governmental position, to prevent the existence of a permanent or
hereditary elite. The perceived impossibility of allowing everyone to
participate equally in the functions of government is overcome by the
mechanism of the vote, whereby citizens can exercise their control over
government but minimize their participation, by choosing leaders who,
being dependent on election, must “serve” those they “lead.”
The elected representatives also vote on proposed decisions, with a
majority vote deciding the issue at hand. The purpose of majoritarian
decision-making, at least according to the mythologies of democratic
societies, is that rule by the majority solves the earlier injustices of
rule by an elite. On the other hand, majoritarian rule threatens the
rights of minority populations, especially within pluralistic societies.
To prevent mob rule, democratic societies also provide legal guarantees,
or “rights,” to that smallest of minorities, the individual. Thus, a
minority group may frequently have to accept decisions it does not
support, but at least the members of such a group will always enjoy a
guaranteed set of rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and
property, to sustain their basic dignity and well-being. If anyone’s
rights are infringed upon, they have the additional right to file suit
in a court of law and demand their rights be upheld.
To prevent government from becoming dictatorial, the different functions
of government are separated, and structural balances are created to
ensure that no branch of government accumulates a disproportionate share
of power. In a democracy, a police force is needed to protect
individual’s rights, particularly the rights to life and property, and
(in conjunction with the judicial branch) to punish those who do not
respect the decisions of the majority (laws) as expressed by the
legislative branch. To protect the sovereignty of the population, and to
defend their property rights in foreign countries, a military is needed,
though to prevent military dictatorship it is excluded from governmental
decision-making and enforcement (in articulating the liberal mythology,
we must utter a few outright falsehoods, ignoring the many domestic
breaches of posse comitatus throughout U.S. history, and the constant
use of the military to enforce government policy outside our borders).
The final issue is one of economics. Many matters of importance reside
not in the political sphere, but in the economic sphere. Accordingly,
democratic states exist hand in hand with free-market economies. In a
free market economy, everyone has the right (legally guaranteed by the
government) to own property, to sell their labor, to buy and sell
commodities, and to enjoy the profits of their labor and enterprises.
Legally speaking, everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, and
wealth will therefore be distributed to those who earn it, rather than
hoarded in the hands of an elite.
This, at least, is how democracy is said to work, almost exactly as such
in the mass-produced textbooks school children are forced to read, and
in occasionally more eloquent tautologies and clichés when regurgitated
by the learned commentators of news media and academia. Anything beyond
token analysis of how our democratic system actually works contradicts
the explanations of liberal mythology.
Of course, to many people, the democratic ideal is meaningless. American
democracy in particular goes hand in hand with the “free market,” which
means that the rich, white politicians in Congress and the White House
do not pass any law or take any action that would restrict the freedom
of the rich, white men in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street (the
politicians of yesterday and tomorrow) to make billions of dollars
exploiting their workers. And it is those workers who make up the
majority of the population. They certainly don’t have the opportunity to
vote for their bosses or to collectively decide the policy of the
company they enrich with their labor. If they did, they might vote to
give themselves a living wage instead of giving the CEO another $100
million raise.
Unless we belong to the richest 1% of the population with enough money
to buy land, a factory, or some other means of production, and to hire
less fortunate people to work for us and make us rich, our only real
option is to sell a significant portion of our lives to work making
somebody else rich. We are certainly free to choose, from a limited
range of options relating to our economic class and education, which
corporation to work for, but they are all very similar, because
ultimately the boss holds power over the worker, and the corporations
can exploit the workers for profit, but every practical way the workers
have to win a little fairness from the corporations has been
criminalized. Everything in this country has an owner, and everywhere we
go, for everything we use, we have to pay rent. All the activities
necessary to sustain life are taxed, so our survival is dependent on
serving the wealthy people who have the money to pay us. That is what is
meant by wage slavery. How absurd is it to talk about freedom and
democracy to someone who was born in a ghetto, or someone who just
immigrated to escape poverty or persecution, someone who never got the
opportunity for a good education and works eighty hours a week in
grueling, dangerous job with no dignity or respect just to afford
payments on a cheap hovel and a meager diet?
And what does democracy mean to people of color, who face profiling,
harassment, and violence from police, higher rates of poverty and
bleaker opportunities for education and employment? Are they truly
supposed to believe that the rich white politicians care about
representing their interests? And society is so used to seeing women as
second class human beings that problems like rape, harassment,
discrimination on the job, and socially enforced ideals of beauty that
lead to serious health problems, are not viewed as injustices relevant
to our democracy so much as natural aspects of human existence. In
reality, bosses and workers are not equal, rich people and poor people
are not equal, white people and people of color are not equal, men and
women are not equal, yet our expectations of democracy are so low that
few people consider these “social problems” as being relevant to the
affairs of our government. All we expect out of our democracy is the
right to vote and the right for middle class white people to be able
complain without being persecuted. Expecting anything more is
unrealistically idealistic, precisely because our government has rarely
delivered more than those few token rights.
So, our ultimate experience with democracy is this: once every few
years, we are given the opportunity to cast a vote for one of two rich,
white, Christian males, each beholden to corporate interests, and we
know our vote doesn’t really matter, but if we do participate it is
generally because we think one candidate won’t sell us out as quickly as
the other one. And the rest of the time, the fact that we live in a
democracy doesn’t really mean anything. We’re allowed to criticize the
politicians, but complaining doesn’t seem to change the fact that the
same mob is in power. And we are also free to complain about the most
prominent facet of our lives, our jobs, but of course if the bosses hear
us, they are free to fire us. Everyone knows we live in a democracy, but
in the face of racism and economic inequality, few people can say how we
are actually empowered under this system of government.
It is easy, however, to dismiss these claims of powerlessness and
recurring injustice by simply blaming the victims for being too lazy to
drag themselves out of poverty, or to make the democratic process work
for them, through petitioning, voting, letter-writing, and all the other
readily available methods, to cure the alleged injustice. Of course, it
would be more than a little ludicrous for the privileged, white pundits
who guide the nation’s opinions from their talk shows and opinion
columns to blame people born in ghettos for not overcoming racism and
poverty if they didn’t have at least a few historical examples of how
democracy can actually work to help people in need. But our history
books are full of examples of oppressed groups of people winning their
equality through the democratic process. Everybody knows the story of
Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, and as any
grade-schooler can tell you, this story has a happy ending, because
black people won their rights. In the face of age-old prejudices, the
democratic process prevailed. Or did it?
In fact, the democratic process had already succeeded in officially
defeating racism way back in the 19^(th) century, when our government
granted full legal rights regardless of race, on paper at least. And in
1954, a full decade before the Civil Rights movement was at its
strongest, the Supreme Court ordered the recognition of those legal
rights, in response to the tireless work, within legal democratic
channels, of the NAACP and other organizations. But still, there was no
real change in the race relations of America. All the reforms won
through the democratic process were symbolic. It was not until black
people took to the streets, often illegally, outside the democratic
process, that what we now know as the Civil Rights movement came into
full form. The Civil Rights movement used illegal activism (“civil
disobedience”) in tandem with legal pressure on the democratic process
to bring about change, and even then it was not until race riots
occurred in nearly every major city and more militant black
organizations formed that the white political apparatus started
cooperating with pacifist, middle-class elements of the movement, like
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
And what was the outcome of that political compromise? People of color
in America still face higher unemployment, lower wages, less access to
good housing and health care, higher infant mortality, lower life
expectancy, higher rates of incarceration and police brutality,
disproportionately lower representation in government, corporate
leadership, and the media (except as villains in Hollywood or culprits
on the TV-show COPS). In fact, Dr. Kenneth Clark, whose work on the
psychological effects of segregation on black school children was
instrumental to the Brown v. Board of Education victory in 1954, stated
in 1994 that American schools were more segregated than they had been
forty years earlier. White supremacy still exists in every arena of
American life.
What exactly did the Civil Rights movement achieve? Advancement into the
white-dominated institutions has been opened up for a very small number
of blacks, Latinos, and Asians, particularly those who embrace the
conservative ideology of the white-supremacist status quo, like Supreme
Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action or other
legal measures that alleviate racial inequality, or General Colin
Powell, who is willing to bomb people of color in foreign countries with
a total disregard for their lives. So, Martin Luther King is dead, but
his dream lives on in the disproportionately small handful of black and
Latino congresspeople, the one or two CEOs of color in the Fortune 500,
and the occasional television show that depicts well-off, middle class
black families like the Cosby’s, untroubled by police brutality or
economic exploitation.
The government has retained its white supremacist character, and more
importantly, it is more powerful now than it was before the Civil Rights
movement, because it has largely removed the threat of racial strife and
oppression-motivated uprising; a few token people of color rise to
positions of power, providing the illusion of equality, but populations
of color on the whole remain a cheap pool of surplus labor to be used
and abused by the system as needed. So when we consider how the
government actually responded to the Civil Rights movement, and what
sorts of changes have occurred in our society as a result, it becomes
apparent that the democratic process was more effective at rescuing
those in power from a potential emergency than at granting any real
relief or meaningful liberation to an oppressed group of people.
And it is not only minority groups who are ignored by the government.
Even in historical situations where the majority of the population
desires a change, it is the interests of the wealthy and powerful that
make the decision. Before the Reagan era, a majority of citizens were in
favor of government-provided welfare to help ensure that everyone had
access to a minimum of food, housing, and medical care. Then, over a
period of several years there was a concerted campaign by politicians
and the media (owned by the same corporations that were getting the
politicians elected through massive campaign donations), using
sloganeering, advertisements, manipulated statistics, and selective
coverage, to depict welfare-recipients as lazy drug-users taking a free
ride.
After this large scale propaganda campaign, a majority of Americans
polled said they opposed “welfare,” but curiously, they still reported
being in favor of a government-provided safety net to help ensure that
everyone had access to a minimum of food, housing, and medical care. The
media had programmed them to associate the word “welfare” with a number
of bad things, even though they supported the idea of welfare. The
politicians could claim they were doing the people’s bidding when they
dismantled welfare in favor of corporate profits, but in actuality, the
elite establishment worked very hard to make sure the people believed
what they wanted them to believe. The democratic consent was
manufactured from above.
The people with power and money decide which politicians get elected. A
person cannot be nominated as candidate to either of the two major
parties without having strong alliances within the party; therefore even
before a person can be considered as a possible candidate for election,
he (or sometimes she) has to appeal to those who are already in power.
And after a person has received the party’s nomination, being elected to
Congress or the White House is impossible without a huge advertising
campaign, which costs millions of dollars. Corporations and wealthy
individuals provide the majority of these donations, and they will only
donate to the campaigns of candidates who promise to serve the interests
of the wealthy. A politician who betrays her or his corporate backers,
for instance by supporting a law that would make employers pay their
workers a living wage, will not be reelected.
But even more integral is the fact that the media companies, which
inform every person’s opinions and decisions, are not public
institutions, but huge, conglomerated, private, for-profit entertainment
corporations, which own or are owned by corporations in other
industries. The corporations that make the products you buy in stores,
that make the weapons used in wars, the cars you drive, the gas you use;
the corporations that underpay their workers, destroy the environment,
pollute your air, buy off your political “representatives.” The
corporation you work for.
Furthermore, news corporations get their money from other corporations
buying advertisements, and they will represent the interests of those
corporations, and their rich, white CEOs, before they represent your
interests. What are the news corporations selling when they sell
advertising space? They’re selling you. So you buy what you’re told,
vote how you’re told, and exercise only the limited range of choices
they deem acceptable. Because they are not directly connected to the
government, this network of corporations (which provide you with almost
all of your information about the world) comprise the most effective and
credible propaganda machine in the history of the world.
One final, important fact is that the people who control the government,
the media, and the corporations are the same group of people. Higher
level politicians often come into office straight from careers in
powerful corporations, and after successful careers in elected office,
“serving their country,” they usually return to corporate life, making
even more money as corporate consultants, lobbyists, and executives. The
government doesn’t need to directly control the media, and the
corporations do not need to directly control the government, because
they are all in the same boat, and they are all serving the same
interests: namely, their own. After all, the politicians work for the
same people as the newscasters. They went to their ivy-league schools
together, they live in the same rich suburbs and gated communities, and
between sessions of Congress or before the filming of the nightly news,
they go play golf together.
Why is it that the rich and powerful are taken care of, while everyone
else gets token reforms that do not solve their underlying problems?
When exactly did our democratic government become so corrupted? The
answer is actually quite simple. It never became corrupted, because
democratic government has always existed to protect the interests of the
rich and powerful. Going beyond what is preached from the pages of
public school textbooks, and looking at the actual evolution of
democracy, we find that it is just another form of government on the
historical continuum from feudal kingdoms and constitutional monarchies.
Democracy is not a new product of popular struggle and demand for
equality in the face of tyranny. It is a direct evolution of earlier
elite institutions, created for, by, and of liberal elites in Europe and
America.
Throughout the history of post-Roman Europe, the move towards
constitutional and electoral forms was not the result of popular
struggle for liberation. On the contrary, democratic government was
formulated to appease the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, who desired a
coalition that would include the entire economic elite in the political
leadership, not just the monarch and subordinate bureaucracy. Democracy,
after all, is not a concept of the Enlightenment. The very term those
enlightened European and American statesmen chose to describe their
desired political system was borrowed from the ancient Greek
city-states, in which all property-owning male citizens had a voice to
influence the leadership. Of course, the lower classes were slaves and
not citizens, so only about 10% of the population could vote. In the
early city-states, there was little or no distinction between political
power and economic power, because the economic elite were, of course,
the beneficiaries of the power consolidated by the new political
structures they had created. As empires grew, large portions of the
economic elite — the aristocratic landowners — were frequently excluded
to some degree from the elite group holding power over and from the
centralized political apparatus. It was the struggle of the aristocracy,
and later of bourgeois merchants, bankers, and factory owners, to
reincorporate themselves into the political elite, that is the root of
the evolution of that political process we call democracy.
Now we see more clearly the evolution of democracy in the European
nation-states, often cited to have begun with the Magna Carta. That
famed document, and the legal rights and guarantees it established, was
created when King John of England, faced with the prospect of being
militarily deposed by the aristocracy, saw the wisdom in extending
political power to a broader section of the economic elite than had been
previously included, by guaranteeing rights to the major landholders,
and creating the precedent of a council of barons, or their
representatives, to advise and negotiate with the King.
Chancellor Bismarck, who unified Germany into a constitutional
democracy, was no populist. On the contrary, his reign was characterized
by harsh repression of progressive and radical elements, and a
single-minded, Machiavellian desire to strengthen the German state, a
task in which he succeeded to such a degree that within decades Germany
excelled from a collection of backward and disunited provinces to a
uniform nation-state that could single-handedly threaten the rest of the
continent. Bismarck knew that granting elections and constitutional
rights would only solidify the power of the German ruling elite, by
winning the loyalty of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy; exhausting or
co-opting the efforts of progressives who sought social change through
the electoral process; and marginalizing the radicals who rejected the
“democratic process,” thus eliminating the specter of resistance or
non-cooperation that marred the efficiency of many other European states
who were constantly trying to win the obedience of their oppressed
subjects. Furthermore, political and economic power, never being
redistributed, was already consolidated in the hands of the elite, who
could ensure that only their candidates were elected and only favourable
laws were passed, through a variety of legal or illegal means (legality
being a farcical issue here, as the police, historically part and parcel
of the monarchical apparatus, were not about to arrest their own
masters).
The sporadic evolution of democracy in Russia followed a path similar to
that of England and Germany, the main difference being that most of the
liberal reforms were repealed by a jealous tsar, unused to sharing his
power. The existence of a Russian parliament temporarily alleviated
popular unrest, but upon its dissolution, the subversive currents that
eventually led to the Bolshevik revolution resumed at force. The Russian
parliament, currently referred to as the Duma, in the 19^(th) century
was called, with a little more candor, the “Boyarskoe[1] Duma” (“Duma”
means “thought.” The “Boyars” were the Russian aristocracy). Leading up
to this, the Russian serfs were “freed” as a necessary step in the
democratic evolution. Of course they were not given the land they had
worked and on which they lived (and depended for survival); this land
stayed in the hands of the aristocracy, though the serfs would be
allowed to purchase about a third of it. Having been unwaged workers
with no money to buy the land, some of the “freed” serfs had to move to
the cities and engage in wage work in the new factories (coincidentally
a very convenient arrangement for the factory owners and the Russian
political elite, who required industrialization to remain a competitive
European power), while the other ex-serfs stayed in the country to work
as share-croppers for their former masters.
The early representative bodies in government, the forerunners of the
modern Congress or Parliament, from their beginning were meant to
represent the aristocracy, the property owners, the bankers, and all
other wealthy people who controlled the economic life of the nation.
Representation for the economic elite ensured that the political
leadership (formerly the monarch) that controlled the military, the
police, taxation, and other bureaucracies, would protect and serve the
interests of the wealthy. The singularity of the monarch was replaced
with a coalition of the elite, divided into political parties and
competing for influence, but above all collaborating at the fundamental
level to maintain control. The vote functioned to ensure that the party
with the most popular strategy for control could implement that
strategy, whereas previously the conservatism and obstinacy of a single,
unchallenged ruler might be less flexible in adapting to changing
circumstances.
As the vote gradually extended to all adult citizens (in step, not
coincidentally, with the rise of corporate-controlled mass media), the
vote also functioned to provide the illusion of equality, create a
release valve for popular discontent, and most importantly it maintained
the effectiveness of government control by favoring the political
parties that were most successful at duping the population, and winning
their obedience. The lack of true participation by the general
population is made most obvious by the fact that voters’ choices are
informed primarily by name recognition, party affiliation, and the
bombardment of superficial slogans conducted through advertising media,
as well as the fact that few voters can even articulate a factual
difference between the platforms of opposing candidates, much less a
critical analysis of their policies.
Bicameral legislature, a feature of U.S. and other democracies,
redeveloped in England, where the two parliamentary houses were named
with more straightforward honesty than would be permissible in modern
times. The House of Lords was quite plainly created for the
representatives of the aristocracy, and the House of Commons for those
without noble title — more specifically, for representatives of the
bourgeoisie, or upper-middle class. The exclusion of the majority of the
population, even from this lowliest house of parliament, becomes
apparent when one tries to find poor, working-class commoners among the
Members of Parliament, through the history of the House of Commons to
the present day. The exact same point can be made for U.S. Congress
members, whose average income prior to their election has never come
close the lowly average of the entire American population. Those few
representatives who do come from lower middle-class backgrounds
generally go on to high-paying positions as corporate consultants after
successful terms in Congress, and no politicians at the national level
come from the lower class, who make up the solid majority of the total
population.
This is by no means a recent devolution in American government. Some of
the founding fathers envisioned the role of president as that of king,
and suggested various majestic titles. Because at the time the majority
of people were illiterate, the elite could be much more straightforward,
and their comments are most illuminating. The Father of the
Constitution, James Madison, wrote that: “The minority of the opulent
[the wealthy minority] must be protected from the majority.” His friend
and fellow influential federalist, John Jay, said more plainly that “the
people who own the country ought to rule it.” The democratic revolution
in America was the successful attempt by the American economic elite to
seize political power from the British. The complaints about unfair
British taxation were the complaints of businessmen. When American
farmers, disappointed that their difficult economic situation did not
improve after the revolution, marched against the new American elite in
the state capitals in a number of rebellions, the Founding Fathers (who
were northern merchants, bankers, and lawyers, and the slaveholding
landowners of the south) reassembled to create a stronger, centralized
government that would protect the minority interests — that is, the
interests of the ruling elite.
The new Constitution created a number of structures and rights, rights
being the codified privileges of the elite[2]. An electoral system
allowed those who owned the land, the banks, and the factories to decide
which politicians would better represent their interests. As voting
rights expanded, elections also took on the function of testing which
candidate had the better populist rhetoric, the better strategy for
retaining the submission and loyalty of the general population. The
famed American balance of powers, a balance between judges, senators,
presidents and generals, is a ruling coalition among the elite. Freedom
of speech was and continues to be the freedom of members of the elite to
criticize governmental policy in order to formulate more effective
ruling strategies. Incidentally, free speech also allows any common
citizen to mutter what they will, though American history consistently
shows that people are not free from the threat of arrest and
imprisonment for unpopular speech if the authorities are afraid such
speech may have an actual effect, beyond that of breath wasted in idle
conversation.
In the liberal mythology, democracy is based on the idea that people
band together under the protection of a government, and enter into a
“contract of the governed.” But this is a contract which we may not
negotiate or decline. We are all born as subjects to one or another
state, “democratic” or otherwise, and should we object to our
subjugation, there is nothing we can do about it. Even if we have the
financial means to leave our country of origin (never mind the question
of making the government leave our homes), we have no other options: “No
Man’s Land” does not exist. If we do not have a practical choice to
refuse, our acquiescence is not consent, it is submission.
The fact is, the democratic process is designed to craft and maintain an
effective ruling coalition from among the elite; to win the loyalty of
the middle class by dispensing token rights and privileges; to prevent
discontent by creating the illusion of fairness and equality; and to
squelch rebellion by establishing an elaborate array of official
channels for sanctioned dissent, exhausting the energies of law-abiding
dissidents who jump through hoop after hoop — possibly winning some
minor concession, and denying legitimacy to those who step outside the
“democratic process” to directly cause the change they seek, rather than
partaking in the elaborate courting ritual designed to display their
loyalty in asking the government to consider their pleas. Once such
rebels can be portrayed as “illegitimate,” “reckless,” “impatient,”
“inconsiderate,” or “lacking respect for the democratic process,” the
government can safely deal with them much more harshly than they could
deal with those who still honored the “contract of the governed” through
their docility and submission.
Our closer analysis of this system we call “democracy” has led us to the
following hypothesis: at its base, democracy is an authoritarian,
elitist system of government designed to craft an effective ruling
coalition while creating the illusion that the subjects are in fact
equal members of society, thus in control of, or at least benevolently
represented by, government policy. The fundamental purpose of a
democracy, same as any other government, is to maintain the wealth and
power of the ruling class. Democracy is innovative in that it allows a
greater diversity of ruling class voices to advocate various strategies
of control, and “progressive” in that it allows for adaptation to
maintain control under changing circumstances.
The surest way to test this hypothesis is to observe historical examples
in which oppressed or underprivileged citizens of a democracy have
advocated their own interests, in contradiction to the interests of the
wealthy and powerful. If the liberal mythology concerning democracy is
correct, the oppressed will be fairly represented, political
representatives will advocate their cause, and some equitable compromise
will be reached between the privileged and the oppressed. If
progressives and other reformists are correct in their belief that the
system is fundamentally sound but corrupted through various causes that
can be solved with the appropriate legislation, then the wealthy and
powerful will receive unfair advantages in the legislative and judicial
processes set in motion to achieve justice. If our hypothesis positing
the authoritarian, elitist nature of democracy is correct, then the many
institutions of power will collaborate to divide the opposition, win
over reformist elements, and crush the remaining opposition to retain
control with whatever means necessary, including propaganda, slander,
harassment, assault, imprisonment on false charges, and assassination.
The more militant or radical elements of the 1960s struggle against
racial oppression provide an excellent example[3]. The racial inequality
at the time is solidly documented as being stark and pervasive, and many
organizations formed to overcome this racial oppression. The Black
Panthers, for one, demanded more than opportunities for middle-class
advancement. They wanted black liberation, a total social transformation
that would remove white supremacy from all aspects of life. In response
to police brutality, they also began advocating black self-defense. How
did the controllers of the democratic process react? In the late 1960s,
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, called them “the greatest threat to
the internal security of the United States.” Largely through an FBI
program called COINTELPRO, Black Panthers were harassed, slandered,
beaten, bullied, their communications were intercepted and tampered with
to cause factional splits. Their efforts, including food programs for
school children, were sabotaged; the FBI and local police bought
informers and placed provocateurs in their ranks, or repeatedly arrested
Panther organizers on baseless charges to make them place bail,
harassing them and draining their resources. Panthers were arrested and
convicted on fabricated cases. In one instance, a Black Panther was
imprisoned for over twenty years for murders he could not have
committed, having been hundreds of miles away in another city at the
time. He defended his alibi in court saying the FBI had bugs in the
Panther office he was working at, and the FBI tapes would prove his
whereabouts. In court, FBI agents lied on the stand and denied they were
conducting such surveillance, though they were later forced to release
records that showed the contrary. They had conveniently “lost” the tapes
for the days in question.
And when imprisonment was not enough, Black Panther activists were
simply assassinated. Over a two year period, twenty-eight Panthers were
killed (some of them shot in their sleep) by police and FBI. Even if the
Panthers were as violent and impurely motivated as the most rabid,
uninformed of their critics allege, why was the government’s treatment
(on local, state, and national levels) of a far more violent
organization, the Ku Klux Klan, so tolerant (and in many cases
collaborative)?
MOVE, another black liberation organization, based in Philadelphia, was
bombed by a police helicopter during a massive stand-off which resulted
in the death of a cop. Several of the MOVE members pulled out of their
house after the raid were beaten nearly to death by police. Eight MOVE
members were imprisoned, even though forensics evidence (much of which
was tampered with by police) suggested that the cop was killed by
friendly fire. More important than whether the cop was killed by one of
his own or shot in self-defense by MOVE members is the question of why
exactly police staged an armed assault on the MOVE house.
The American Indian Movement received similar treatment. Their members
were subject to harassment, assassination, and false imprisonment (their
most famous political prisoner being Leonard Peltier, who is serving a
life sentence for killing an FBI agent in a raid even when the
prosecution admitted they could never be sure who fired the fatal shot).
The use of violence by our democratic government against dissidents
continues into the present day. At the World Trade Organization meetings
in Seattle, 1999, when more protestors than authorities were expecting
mobilized and blockaded the summit, police responded violently, beating,
tear-gassing, and shooting rubber bullets at protestors and bystanders.
To disperse protestors who were locked down, they forced their heads
back, and swabbed pepper spray under their eyelids, and used other
torture-compliance techniques. All of this was caught on video, though
the national media ignored the police brutality and instead played clips
of protestors smashing windows, presenting this as the reason for the
massive police response, though the true chronology was reversed.
In summer 2002, DC police raided the Olive Branch Community, a
collective of politically active pacifists and anarchists, and evicted
the residents at gunpoint. In 2003 a man was arrested at the Atlanta
airport for holding a sign to protest the arrival of President GW Bush.
He was charged with endangering the president. A little later the same
year, anarchist Sherman Austin, webmaster of a successful website that
focused on the struggles of people of color, was sentenced to a year in
prison after another person posted a link to instructions on building
Molotov cocktails[4] on his website. For this crime, federal agents with
automatic weapons surrounded his house, broke down his door and dragged
him out of bed. Authoritarian violence and repression occur daily, too
frequently to name every instance. Let these serve as just a few
examples. The rest you’ll have to research on your own.
Some liberals who want to believe that the violence of the U.S.
government is only the result of corrupt police departments and not a
fundamental and necessary part of the system often idealize other
countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe, using their
ignorance of authoritarian violence in those countries as evidence of
the absence of such violence. With a little research, we find that the
democratic governments of Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Japan,
Italy, and other countries also use regular violence against dissidents.
The question remains: What is to be done? Unfortunately, too many people
adhere to the artificial constraints of the system, always choosing the
lesser of two evils, motivated only by a fear of the greater evil, as
though they were powerless to challenge the social framework and create
new alternatives (this realization of powerlessness within the
democratic system should be enough cause for people to revolt!).
Newsflash: there is nothing in the physical laws of the universe, nor
any rule governing human behaviour, that requires the world to be
dominated by a plutocratic elite exercising authoritarian and
exploitative control over everyone else. In fact, the majority of human
societies have organized themselves quite differently, often in
egalitarian forms, until European and American imperialism interrupted
every other cultural experiment and replaced them with our own, such
that nearly every country in the world practices representative
democracy and industrial capitalism, which are highly peculiar, entirely
Eurocentric, and largely maladaptive (except in terms of maintaining
control and exploiting value) forms of socio-economic organization.
Many progressives’ idea of envisioning new alternatives consists of
supporting Third Parties, as though the existence of third and fourth
parties has made European states any less oppressive. Ask the Roma if
the Green Party made any difference when they were deported wholesale
from Germany, more than forty years after the end of the Third Reich.
Ask the protestors in Genoa, who were lined up against a wall and beaten
until their blood and teeth decorated the concrete, what they think of a
parliamentary system. Other progressives favour what they consider to be
structural changes, such as Constitutional amendments, not realizing
that power does not exist on paper. Perhaps these reformists believe
that racial equality in the U.S. was achieved in 1868, with the passage
of the 14^(th) Amendment, or that the Civil Rights movement ended in
1964, with the Civil Rights Act. To correct their naïveté, they need
only spend some time in a prison or jail, and research how much
protection the 4^(th) Amendment has afforded this country’s drug
prisoners.
In the few instances when the democratic process has “worked,” the
system as a whole demonstrates no hesitation in ignoring reform laws
that contradict the interests of the powerful. Jimmy Carter, the most
liberal president the U.S. has ever seen (but hardly a saint, if the
experiences of the Cambodians, Indonesians, Haitians or others are to be
considered), banned by executive order several Vietnam-era
counter-intelligence programs that included torture and assassination.
Thanks to a conscientious officer at the U.S. Army’s School of the
Americas, we know that the military simply ignored Carter’s order, and
continued to teach these tactics. How many similar instances remain
secret?
In a society where power is so concentrated in the hands of a few, power
will defend itself. Do we really believe that if we elected a “decent”
president or Congress, all the self-perpetuating institutions of the
elite would simply acquiesce, and surrender their wealth? In countries
where the elected bodies of government ceased to represent the interests
of the powerful, the military and their corporate backers (the coalition
of the elite) conspired to overthrow the wayward portions of government
(in Chile, Venezuela, Spain, Congo, et cetera). Are the corporations and
militaries of Europe and North America somehow more pure? After all, it
is the Pentagon (or Exxon) that has sponsored many of these elitist
(often fascist or ultra-right nationalist) coups across the world.
The citizens of modern democracies are so paralyzed with an ingrained
fear of autonomous, direct action — taking the initiative to do things
ourselves and solve our own problems — that advocating revolutionary
overthrow of the present order seems tantamount to advocating the
apocalypse; however, the two essential actions we must take to free
ourselves are self-reliance and abolition of the present social,
political, and economic relationships.
We simply cannot keep waiting for other people to save us. It is our
reliance on Big Brother that perpetuates the wrongs of the system. Like
an unused muscle, our ability to take care of ourselves, make our own
decisions, govern our relationships with others, create voluntary
associations and build communities, solve our disputes, and above all
trust ourselves, has atrophied, but we must hone these abilities to
break free of the authoritarian domination that has ruled us for
millennia.
Secondly, we cannot continue to view equality — true equality — as an
extreme measure. It is the current system that is extreme, and we must
destroy every vestige of it to break free and prevent it from evolving
into a new disguised form. Government, in whatever form, is
authoritarian. Similarly, the counterpart of democratic government — the
“free-market” economic system, which never arose from or came in contact
with the mythical “level playing field” liberal economists envision to
justify their system, is another governing structure (relating to the
means of production and consumption, rather than the political
apparatus) that allows a certain amount of competition and participation
that has the appearance of fairness and openness but in reality is
designed to increase the efficiency of control over the means of
production while retaining that control in the hands of a group that may
be somewhat fluid in its membership but is still clearly an elite group.
In this free-market system, a very few people control the means of
production (the factories, the land, et cetera), making self-sufficiency
impossible. To procure the necessities for survival, and the commodities
for a culturally normal existence, everyone else must sell their
activity for a wage. The only way to correct the situation is to take
back what is stolen from us.
Production and decision-making need to be decentralized, and wealth and
power must be shared at the level of the community from which they
spring. State structures need to be dismantled, wealth and the means of
production must be seized from the few who control them, prisons broken
open, militaries destroyed. More intimate forms of oppression like
patriarchy and white supremacy must be exposed and challenged wherever
they persist.
The phrase: “easier said than done” is a gross understatement. Perhaps
the reason so many people continue to believe in the efficacy of petty
reforms, in the face of overwhelmingly contradictory evidence, is
because the enormous responsibility we face upon realizing that the
problems of our society are fundamental, not superficial, seems
impossible to fulfill. But we never know if something is possible until
we succeed. In the meantime, our concern is to find the most effective
strategies of resistance and organization.
Fortunately, the history of resistance is as long as the history of
oppression, so we have many examples to learn from. To improve our own
efforts at achieving revolution, we should examine how activists
throughout history have been effective in confronting power and
producing change and how they have been ineffective, while keeping aware
of their specific context.
In U.S. history, the labor union holds a traditional place as a vehicle
for revolutionary activity. In the early twentieth century, labor unions
offered a radical critique of social inequalities, and gave the nation’s
wage slaves the promise for a better life. Labor unions became a
powerful political force, gaining millions of members, organizing
strikes and protests, and also creating defense committees when police
began massacring striking workers. But though they succeeded in
diminishing several of the brutalities which workers faced, the labor
unions failed to fix the underlying social inequalities, and ultimately
betrayed the workers. Nowadays, most labor unions are small-minded
rackets with little real clout. One important factor in their failure
was the hierarchical structure of most labor unions. Hierarchy developed
so that elite groups could control larger populations. Accordingly,
hierarchical organizations are easily hijacked by the governments they
challenge. The unions were infiltrated and their leaders were co-opted.
The union leadership easily confused the interests of their organization
with the interests of the social struggle the unions had been created to
serve. Since radical union activities were severely repressed, union
leadership developed a more cooperative relationship with the
politicians and the bosses to ensure the survival of their union, and to
secure the continuation of their increasingly comfortable positions of
power. Radical unionists who could not be bought out were jailed, or
otherwise neutralized.
Another major weakness of most unions was their dismissal of race and
gender issues that were inseparable from economic issues. By refusing to
challenge racism, sexism, and xenophobia, and maintaining instead a
privileged, narrowly economic critique of capitalism, labor unions
became organizations for white men, losing the vital support of women
garment workers and domestic workers, black sharecroppers, and immigrant
factory workers. Their inability to criticize the white supremacist
aspects of capitalism allowed the bosses to maintain power by dividing
and disempowering the workers, scapegoating foreigners and emancipated
blacks for their poverty.
It was in part the desire of the major labor unions to be respectable
that led them to perpetuate the racist, sexist, elitist behaviours of
the power structure they originally sought to defeat. Their positions of
authority, and government negotiators, dangled the promise of power — of
comfort, dignity, and respect — before the union leaders, who eventually
forgot the causes of the social ills they protested, and instead relied
on the gratification of being accepted by society (high society) to numb
the symptoms. By disavowing compromise, using radical or militant
tactics, or challenging the racial and gender status quo, they knew they
would be ostracized by the government and villified by the media. So the
labor unions endeavored to become respectable in the eyes of the
mainstream, and because what is mainstream is determined by the media,
this meant appealing to the white middle and upper classes. In doing so,
the unions had to relinquish their greatest source of strength, the
determination of the oppressed to win their freedom, which often
manifests as a rage that is unseemly to those who have much to lose by
malcontents rocking the boat.
Despite the historical failings of labor unions, as long as wage work is
prevalent, across society and in the life of the individual, the
relationship between worker and boss will be an important nexus for
agitation. The Industrial Workers of the World, a union that seeks
worker control of the means of production and the ultimate abolition of
capitalism, has demonstrated a more resilient anti-authoritarian streak
than its contemporaries, which now do little more than provide rubber
stamps for the Democratic Party.
Recently, many activists fighting oppression do not affiliate themselves
with a single organization but work to expose and alleviate oppression
wherever it is felt the hardest. Often, privileged radicals wary of
reformism are reluctant to work for any cause without clearly
articulated, long-term, revolutionary goals, so they join more abstract
organizations that are nationally or globally, rather than locally,
oriented. However, poorer people and people of color do not have to go
outside their own communities to find brutalities and depravations that
need to be overcome. Accordingly, radicals from privileged groups will
be segregated from radicals of groups targeted by oppression. Middle
class, white male activists need to realize that reading programs, AIDS
clinics, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, battered women shelters,
copwatch programs and prisoner support groups, and other “first aid”
programs can be revolutionary, and more importantly, they are necessary
for the health and survival of oppressed communities.
Some national organizations, such as Food Not Bombs or Homes Not Jails,
combine efforts to directly treat symptoms of oppression with a radical
indictment of the power structures that cause these symptoms. Food Not
Bombs serves free meals in public places, inviting awareness of problems
like hunger and poverty, and questioning the causes of these problems.
Homes Not Jails squats and fixes up abandoned, condemned, or vacant
apartments, in violation of the “property rights” of the owners, to
provide homeless families with a place to live. By using illegal direct
action and civil disobedience, they illustrate how the legal system
protects the property owners at the expense of the poor, and highlight
the role of government and capitalism in creating and maintaining
poverty. A noteworthy detail is that these groups are organized in a
decentralized, non-hierarchical manner. Food Not Bombs, for instance, is
more an idea than an institution. Anyone, anywhere, can start a Food Not
Bombs chapter, without getting permission from the national headquarters
(there is none) or paying membership dues. Accordingly, members at each
chapter can adapt the Food Not Bombs model to local needs and
conditions, and without any institutional politics or national
conferences, members don’t waste any effort on organizational
maintenance, and can spend more time meeting local needs. However, since
Food Not Bombs is largely a product of privileged, middle-class white
activist circles, many chapters become stuck in a pattern of providing
the token weekly free meal and taking the struggle against hunger no
further. Most Food Not Bombs members are not personally acquainted with
hunger, and it seems that at least some of them have the idea that by
providing a service to poorer and oppressed people in the community,
they will “radicalize” them, create alliances and trigger critical mass,
and then everyone will rise up in revolution, in a vague and magical
sort of way. If, instead of sub-consciously faulting the oppressed (whom
they have been trained since birth to regard as ignorant) for not
enlisting in the struggle against “militarism” and “capitalism,” they
decided to continuously up the ante in the struggle against hunger,
beyond the one meal a week, they may perhaps find that there was no more
effective way at fighting capitalism, and in the meantime alleviating
the symptoms for those most hurt by capitalism, because capitalism
simply cannot function unless hunger looms as an imminent threat to
motivate people to slave away for another’s gain.
People who fight against oppression continue to face many problems
shortcomings in their methods. Obviously, we need to remain flexible and
responsive to our specific situation; there is no twelve step program to
revolution. But some mistakes are common enough that we can establish
patterns, and avoid them. To be effective, an organization or movement
needs to take several basic steps:
Challenging internalized oppressive and privileged behaviors, and acting
inclusively, without kowtowing to mainstream (and ultimately elitist)
opinions.
Identifying the fundamental nature of oppression within the system, and
providing a radical criticism or set of goals.
Basing the struggle in less privileged, more oppressed segments of
society, rather than trying to connect to a mainstream, middle-class
setting.
Organizing in a localized, non-hierarchical, decentralized, autonomist
manner, to promote equality and self-actualization within the group, to
create greater flexibility and adaptation to local conditions, and to
protect against state repression and infiltration.
To envision one utopian model for the entire world would be unrealistic
and culturally biased, not to mention authoritarian. Everyone should do
their own research and come to their own conclusions about what
lifestyle would be best for them. The minimum demand is that we should
tolerate no system that enforces one “correct” model over many people,
regardless of their willingness. History is full of (partially
suppressed) examples of other forms of organization that we can use in
determining what organization is best suited and most realistic to
fulfilling our current needs.
Each community should decide matters of social and economic organization
for itself, and join other communities in voluntary associations for
fulfilling needs that cannot be met by one community alone. In the
meantime, we all have much in common, and should fight together against
the globally generalized system of exploitation and control. Only by
destroying the system of oppression, in whatever form and name it takes,
and ending the continuum, can we clear the way for another struggle:
building societies that provide protection and subsistence without using
coercion or creating new systems of oppression.
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[1] The stem of this word is “Boyar,” the suffix is a possessive ending.
[2] The police regularly violate the “rights” of common citizens. Only
those who can afford expensive lawyers can correct the violation after
the fact. A simple evaluation of Supreme Court rulings, taking into
account the economic class of the plaintiff, demonstrates how partial
the Bill of Rights is.
[3] It should be noted that in addition to going after radical elements,
the FBI targeted even such pacifist reformers as Martin Luther King,
with harassment and libel, using cooperative elements in the media.
[4] Alcohol in a glass bottle with a rag plugging the opening, light rag
and throw.