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Title: Antinomies of Democracy
Author: Shawn P. Wilbur
Date: July 20th, 2017
Language: en
Topics: criticism and critique, critique, democracy, Direct Democracy, a reply, C4SS
Source: https://c4ss.org/content/49638
Notes: This piece is the twenty-sixth essay in the https://c4ss.org/content/49206][June C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium]]: “Anarchy and Democracy.” It is written in reply to [[https://c4ss.org/content/49379][contributions by Nathan Goodman,]] [[https://c4ss.org/content/49295 and Wayne Price.

Shawn P. Wilbur

Antinomies of Democracy

I thought I had pretty well had my say on the subject of democracy and

anarchy, but comparing the material I’ve written to the contributions

I’ve submitted, I see a couple of responses languishing among the

drafts. I also find that the real impasse in my exchanges with Wayne

Price leaves me considerably less than satisfied. So I want to take a

final opportunity to respond to what seems most and least promising in

the arguments for “anarchist democracy” and then, in the hopes of making

my original position a bit clearer, I want to attempt a Proudhonian

defense of what seems defensible in “democratic practices.”

I.—Principles and Rhetoric in Defense of “Democracy”

Several contributors to the exchange have made a point of talking about

the dangers of overreacting to the language of “democracy” or leaning

too heavily on etymology. Those are obviously useful cautions. Most of

us are familiar with the quibbles by which authoritarians of various

sorts attempt to use etymology against anarchism and expand the envelope

of “anarchy” to include their pet archisms. Precisely because those

rhetorical maneuvers are so familiar, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to

expect a bit of precision and theoretical substance from the advocates

of “anarchist democracy.” And those of us who see “democracy,” as we

understand it, across a very important divide from anarchy, may perhaps

be forgiven for a certain degree of caution and skepticism.

Clarity in the exchange requires dealing with both matters of principle

and matters of rhetoric. If “democracy” and “anarchy” are to represent

compatible projects, then it has to be clear how that works—and then it

seems necessary to explain why retaining the language of “democracy” to

describe anarchic relations is useful. I think that the exchange has

demonstrated that it is not particularly easy to do both.

In “Anarchism as Radical Liberalism,” Nathan Goodman makes an

interesting appeal for political and economic systems characterized by

“openness.” Using the work of Don Lavoie, he makes a brief but

intriguing case for glasnost as the defining quality of a “radicalized

democracy.” As I understand what is proposed, it seems this is a path to

anarchy of the sort I have rejected in my initial essay, but it seems to

be a good-faith proposal. Also the path from “openness” to anarchy seems

to have fewer clear obstacles than other nominally “democratic” options.

This seems to be a principled position with possibilities worth

exploring, but its “democratic” character seems in large part to be an

accident of the Cold War context. Goodman even quotes Lavoie as saying:

“The Russian word translates better into ‘openness’ than it does into

‘democracy.’”

I think Kevin Carson ends up in a similar place, though by a somewhat

different path. In his lead essay, “On Democracy as a Necessary

Anarchist Value,” he quickly dispatches the question of opposing

principles by simply equating “democracy” and “anarchy,” going on to

emphasize the goal of maximizing human agency. I can certainly agree

that at least one of the goals of anarchists should be to maximize

individual agency (although, given my emphasis on Proudhon’s theory of

collective force, it’s not hard to anticipate the complications I

expect), but, even with Carson’s lengthy explanation, I have a hard time

making any sense of the impulse to call anarchy “democracy.”

With his references to David Graeber’s work, I think that Carson

provides various pieces of an inclusive narrative according to which

“democracy” stands for something that is “as old as history, as human

intelligence itself”—and perhaps that something is even somewhat

anarchistic in its character. I understand the impulse behind Graeber’s

defense of a “democracy” that is not narrowly defined by a Western

philosophical canon. But, honestly, Graeber’s rhetoric is not

reassuring. When he claims that that “democratic assemblies can be

attested in all times and places,” or that “all social systems, even

economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a

bedrock of actually-existing communism,” I can’t help but think that the

keywords have been stretched close to the point of meaninglessness. And

it’s not because I think any particular political tradition has a

monopoly on useful political concepts and principles. It is rather

because my experience is that there are very few well-defined concepts

or well-wrought principles that are unchanging over time (let alone

stable through translation) and clear without substantial

contextualization and unitary in application. The socialism of 1834 and

the socialism of 1848, to take one example, were worlds apart. The

mutualism of 1865 and the mutualism of 1881 were perhaps just as

distinct. But la démocratie in France in 1848 and la Démocratie in the

same time and place were also distinct, the various organizations and

institutions that invoked the name of one or both were diverse in their

values, and the norms of a new chapter of political discourse were being

worked out on the fly, often in very close connection with the rapidly

changing fortunes of the Second Republic. I don’t know many political

terms that have not represented substantially different practices over

relatively short periods of time, and it seems to me that the twists and

turns of Graeber’s argument testify to the difficulties of claiming

“democracy” for this perennial (and possibly anarchistic) something.

Perhaps because it has not, in general, been thought of as something

that one practiced, anarchy seems bright, shiny and clearly defined in

contrast with virtually all of these other potential keywords. If there

is as much confusion about anarchy in many circles as there is about

democracy (or any number of other political concepts), the source of the

uncertainty seems different. After all, even the theoretically

sophisticated treatments of anarchy tend to differentiate the concept

from its popular connotations of chaos and uncertainty by attempting to

show what has been considered chaotic and uncertain in a different

light. Anarchist thinkers as diverse as Proudhon, Bellegarrigue,

Kropotkin and Labadie have all played with the relationships between

“anarchy” and “order,” most often suggesting that existing conceptions

might be flipped. But a reversal is different from an uncoupling of the

two notions and when we say that “anarchy is order” it is order, and not

anarchy, that we are asking people to redefine. So it is likely that

when we talk about anarchy, most people really know what we’re talking

about, but lack our positive feelings about the notion—and our critique

of the alternatives—and our optimistic sense of where it all might lead.

That poses a particular set of problems for those of us who want to

promote anarchy as a political ideal, which I am happy to take on, but

I’m not sure what advantage is gained by adding the different set of

problems posed by this vague, ubiquitous reconstruction of “democracy.”

In both of these cases however, while I disagree with the rhetorical

framing, I am at least sympathetic to the stated goals. I expect that

the societies envisioned are, in both cases, rather distant from my own

ideal, but both involve healthy progress in a decidedly libertarian

direction. If “democracy” is the best we can do—and even the sorts of

democracy proposed here seem pretty far removed at the moment—then these

are proposals that seem to glean what is best from democratic tradition

(broadly defined).

I wish I could say the same about my other democratic interlocutor,

Wayne Price, but his “Last Response” is not the sort of thing that

inspires confidence. I might seem ungrateful to take exception to its

agreeable tone. Price begins with what seems to be a mix of conciliation

and praise:

Shawn Wilbur is correct, I think, when he writes, “Price and I have

enough in common to have a useful conversation about anarchy and

democracy, and that we could start with something very close to a shared

political language.” Since I have a great deal of respect for Shawn as

an interpreter of Proudhon, let me try to state what may be common in

our views:

Unfortunately, what I actually said was this:

This ought to mean that Price and I have enough in common to have a

useful conversation about anarchy and democracy, and that we could start

with something very close to a shared political language. That we

obviously have not had a useful conversation requires some explaining…

And that paragraph was immediately preceded by this one, which explains

the “shared political language” in rather different terms than Price’s

attempt:

It seems to me that Price has made his own position clear. He envisions

a democracy in which minorities will, in fact, be subject to the

decisions of majorities. The silver lining he offers is that the

minorities will not be static, so we will not see the same sort of

oppression we see in more conventionally hierarchical societies. He

seems to see this relationship as just and legitimate, although it is

not clear whether he believes there is a political duty to assent to

some “will of the people” or whether he believes that there is some more

utilitarian justification. What seems clear enough, however, is that

this majority rule is not a failure in his mind. Given that apparent

fact, it does not seem out of line to attribute to Price some sort of

(still not precisely clarified) democratic principle—and one that

occupies a place on the political map awfully close to the one I

assigned it in my own account.

It’s hard to know what to make of the rest of Price’s response. He

spends a third of it speculating about “whether Shawn is saying that

this means that I am not a real anarchist,” lumping himself together

with a group of people for whom “radical democracy” does not seem to

have a uniform meaning, but not actually responding to my

characterization of his position.

Looking back over his contributions, however, it seems to me that my

characterization is fair enough and that, rather than shifting the

language of “democracy” onto relations governed by other relations

(openness, glasnost, maximizing agency, etc.), Price seems intent on

applying the language of “anarchy” to relations that are hierarchical

and governmentalist in principle. He is correct, of course, that we both

believe that “[a]t times it will be necessary to make collective

decisions using democratic procedures,” at least in the short run. But

the nature of his response—the mangled quotation, the failure to

clarify, etc.—make that “democratic” eventuality seem even more dire to

me. This is not, to be just a bit blunt, the sort of interaction you

want to have with someone whose pitch is basically “we’ll take turns

oppressing each other a little.”

But let’s not leave things there.

II.—“Self-Government” and the Principle of Federation

Let’s acknowledge that the points of agreement and disagreement among

the contributors here are complicated. For example, the “democratic

practices” that Price seems to approve, and I anticipate with some

dread, do not seem to be the characteristic practices of Graeber’s

perennial and ubiquitous “democracy,” and it might not be too great a

stretch to associate them, in that context, with “failure” in the sense

that I have done in my contributions. As the market advocates among us

are almost certainly aware, it is a common trope among Graeber-inspired

anarchists that people only turn to counting and calculation as a means

of organizing themselves when society (characterized in this view by a

basis in communism and informal democracy) begins to break down. And

that reading seems generally faithful to Graeber’s variety of social

anarchism, at the core of which is a faith that people can work things

out without recourse to mechanisms like market valuation or vote-taking.

When we shift our focus away from the questions of vocabulary and

rhetoric, our divisions look different. In order to wrap up my

contributions to this exchange, I would like to redraw the lines between

us in a way that accepts—within clearly defined limits—Wayne Price’s

contention that we are in agreement about the practical side of things.

Having proposed this new divide, I then want to undertake a limited

defense of democratic practices, including voting, in a way that draws

on Proudhon’s later works and, in a sense, completes the argument

against the democratic principle. This move is not just consistent with

the Proudhonian analysis I’ve been making, but is probably required by

any very serious application.

I want to avoid getting too bogged down in the details of Proudhon’s

final works, where we can find his own unfinished attempts to reimagine

institutions like universal suffrage and constitutionalism in

anarchistic terms. Those who are familiar with the approach in Theory of

Property will recognize that the recuperation of democracy is the

logical complement to the recuperation of property. For those unfamiliar

with that work, here is a key passage:

We have finally understood that the opposition of two absolutes

[property, the governmental State]—one of which, alone, would be

unpardonably reprehensible and both of which, together, would be

rejected, if they worked separately—is the very cornerstone of social

economy and public right: but it falls to us to govern it and to make it

act according to the laws of logic.

The “New Theory” of property depends on the recognition “that the

reasons [motifs, motives, impetus, justification] for property, and thus

its legitimacy, must be sought, not in its principle or its origin, but

in its aims.” On the basis of principle, property remains “theft,”

absolutist and “unpardonably reprehensible.” But as early as 1842, in

the Arguments Presented to the Public Prosecutor Regarding the Right of

Property, Proudhon had been exploring the possibility that the

equalization of property and the limitation of its scope might allow its

effects to be generally neutralized. As he embraced the notion of

antimony, and it became clear that this sort of counterbalancing was

perhaps the most promising means of at least neutralizing authority, the

doors were thrown wide open for the consideration of what other

institutions might serve as social counterweights. And it should be no

surprise that universal suffrage, constitutionalism and other existing

democratic practices were subject to similar attempts at recuperation in

Proudhon’s final works.

But in what sense could such a theory be anarchic or anarchistic?

Obviously, this is not the simple anarchy, identified as a perpetual

desideratum in The Principle of Federation, but if the effect is indeed

to balance and thus neutralize the authoritarian or absolutist elements

in various institutions—all of them still considered suspect in

principle—then perhaps we have anarchy as a resultant. It may not be

immediately obvious how a “governed” opposition becomes the “very

cornerstone of social economy and public right,” but it should be very

easy for us to identify anarchy with the combined effects of various

opposing forces or tendencies. The principle of anarchy is not

compromised by the fact that anarchy is inseparable from conflict. Like

the principle of authority, it is a response to that fact.

If any of this seems unfamiliar or outlandish, consider that what

Proudhon proposed for “property” was not significantly different from

Bakunin’s treatment of “authority” in “God and the State.�� In the

context of his quite thorough rejection of the principle of authority,

the way to avoiding “spurning every [individual] authority” is to treat

expertise as a matter of difference between individuals and not of

social hierarchy, and then to neutralize the potentially authoritarian

effects of that difference by balancing expertise against expertise.

It would be easy, at this point, to expand the analysis of Proudhon’s

final works and trace his own work towards the recuperation of at least

certain democratic practices, which we should probably understand as

complementary to the recuperation of property. But that would be a long

and convoluted tale. Instead, I would simply like to pick out one aspect

of Proudhon’s theory—his frequent use of the English term

self-government among the synonyms for anarchy—and propose the bare

outline how anarchic self-government might function in practice.

Let’s figure out how we might build a road, or undertake similar

projects, using the principle of federation and the sociology of

collective force. Readers can then determine whether the distinctions

that I have been proposing do or do not actually make a difference. I’ll

structure the sketch around four basic observations about social

organization:

The importance of specific decision-making mechanisms or

organizational structures to the organization of a free society is

almost certainly overestimated. If we are considering building a road,

then there are all sorts of technical questions to be answered. We need

to know about potential users, routes, construction methods, ecological

impacts, etc.—and the answers to all of these questions will

significantly narrow the range of possible proposals. We need to make

sure that the plans which seem to serve specific local needs can be met

with local resources, which will further narrow the possibilities. And

in a non-governmental society, there can be no right to coerce

individuals in the name of “the People,” nor can there be any obligation

for individuals to give way to the will of the majority—and this absence

of democratic rights and duties must, I think, be recognized, if the

society is to be considered even vaguely anarchistic—so new limitations

are likely to appear when individuals feel that their interests are not

represented by proposals.

The simplest sort of self-government, where individuals simply pursue a

combination of their own interests—including, of course, their interests

as members of various social collectivities—and the knowledge necessary

to serve them, will either lead to proposals that are acceptable to all

the interested parties or they will encounter some obstacle that this

sort of simple self-government appears unable to overcome. This second

case is presumably the point at which a vote and the imposition of the

will of the majority might seem useful. But what is obvious is that such

a resolution does not solve the problem facing this particular polity.

This sort of democracy is what happens when the simplest sort of

self-government—which is probably not worth calling government at

all—breaks down, and it involves relations that seem difficult to

reconcile with the notion of self-government.

But perhaps this very simple self-government revolves around the wrong

sort of self.

The “self” in anarchic self-government is neither simply the human

individual, nor “the People,” understood abstractly, but some real

social collectivity. The vast majority of Proudhon’s sociological

writings actually relate to the analysis of how unity-collectivities,

organized social groups with a unified character, emerge and dissolve in

society, but what is key for us to note here is that we are not talking

about abstract notions like “the People.” Instead, if we are talking

about a sort of social self-government, it would seem that the avoidance

of exploitation and oppression is going to depend on carefully

identifying real collectivities to which various interested parties

belong. While “the People” may find their mutual dependence a rather

abstract matter, the more precisely we can identify and clarify the

workings of specific collectivities, the less chance there should be

that purely individual interests undercut negotiations among the members

of those collectivities.

One of the important elements of Proudhon’s sociology is his recognition

that collectivities may have different interests than the strictly

individual interests of the persons of which they are composed. That

means that individuals may find themselves forced to recognize their own

interests as complex and perhaps in conflicts, depending on the scale

and focus of analysis. This may mean, for example, that there will be

hard choices between the direct satisfaction of individual desires and

various indirect, social satisfactions. But it should also mean that the

more strictly individual sorts of satisfaction cannot be neglected when

members are thinking about the health and success of the group. To the

extent that real collectivities can be identified, and decisions

regarding them limited to the members of those collectivities,

negotiations can be structured quite explicitly around the likely

trade-offs. To the extent that the health and success of the

collectivity depends on lively forms of conflict among the members (and

Proudhon made complexity and intensity of internal relations one of the

markers of the health—and the freedom—of these entities), then the more

conscious all members must be of the need to maintain balance without

resorting to some winner-take-all scenario.

It will, of course, not always be possible to resolve conflict by

bringing together a single collectivity. There will be issues that can

be resolved through additional fact-finding or compromises within the

group, but there will be others that call for the identification of

other groups of interested parties, whether in parallel with the

existing groups, addressing different sorts of shared interests, at a

smaller scale, addressing interests that can be addressed separately

from the present context, or on a larger scale, addressing issues shared

by the given group and other groups as well. We can already see how this

analysis leads to federalism as an organizing principle, but perhaps it

is not quite clear how and why these various groups might be

constituted.

The “nucleus” of every unity-collectivity is likely to be a conflict,

problem or convergence of interests. One of the consequences of breaking

with the governmental principle ought to be the abandonment of the

worldview that sees society always present as “the People,” a

fundamentally governmental collectivity always present to intervene in

the affairs of individual persons. While there might be a few

institutions of self-government that enjoy a perpetual existence,

anarchists should almost certainly break with the notion that that each

individual is obliged to stand as a citizen of some general polity

whenever called to account for themselves.

Instead, the principle of voluntary association and careful attention to

real relations of interdependence ought to be our guides. And the rich

sort of self-interest we’ve been exploring here ought to serve us well

in that regard. To abandon the assumptions of governmentalism and take

on the task of self-government is going to be extremely demanding in

some cases, so we might expect that individuals will desire to keep

their relations simple where they can, coming together to form explicit

associations only when circumstances demand it—and then dissolving those

association when circumstances allow.

Where existing relations seem inadequate to meet our needs and desires,

then some new form of association is always an option—and with practice

hopefully we will learn to take on the complex responsibilities

involved. Where existing relations seem to bind us in ways that stand in

the way of our needs and desires, we’ll learn to distinguish between

those existing associations which simply do not serve and those of a

more fundamental, inescapable sort—and hopefully we will grow into those

large-scale responsibilities from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

Conventions for the use of property, the distribution of revenue and

products, the mechanics of exchange, etc. can probably be approached in

much the same way we would approach the formation of a new workgroup,

the extension of a roadway, the establishment of sustainable waste or

stormwater disposal, etc.

Organization, according to the federative principle, is a process by

which we identify—or extricate—specific social “selves,” on the one

hand, or establish their involvement in larger-scale collectivities, on

the other, and establish the narrow confines within which various

“democratic” practices might come into play. If we are organized in

anarchistic federations, then we can expect that organization to be not

just bottom-up, but very specifically up from the problems, up from the

local needs and desires, up from the material constraints, with the

larger-scale collectivities only emerging on the basis of converging

interests. Beyond the comparatively temporary nature of the federated

collectivities, we should probably specify that we are talking about a

largely consultative federalism, within which individuals strive to

avoid circumstances in which decision among options is likely to become

a clear loss for any of the interested parties. If we are forced by

circumstances to resort to mechanisms like a majority vote, then we will

want to contain the damage as much as possible. But I suspect we will

often find that the local decisions that are both sufficiently

collective and divisive to require something worth calling “democratic

practices,” but also sufficiently serious to push us to confrontations

within local groups may find solutions through consultation with other,

similar groups. Alternately, if the urgency is not simply local—if, for

example, ecological concerns are a factor—they may find themselves

“solved,” not by local desires at all, but by consideration of the

effects elsewhere.

Taking these various observations together, it should be clear that I do

indeed believe that sometimes we will be required to fall back on

familiar sorts of democratic practices, but I hope it is also clear why,

in very practical terms, I believe that this will constitute a failure

within an anarchist society.

III.—A Note on Guarantism

I would be remiss if I did not very briefly return to Proudhon’s Theory

of Property and the proposal there, according to which “the opposition

of two absolutes,” each objectionable on principle, becomes “the very

cornerstone of social economy and public right.” In the previous section

I have obviously been attempting to sketch out a federated society in

which the balances struck would be between less objectionable and

absolute elements, suggesting a fairly well developed sort of anarchy,

in the context of which, a complex sort of consensus is the ideal. But,

as I’ve suggested, this is a demanding standard and other sorts of

balances might be struck. The clues in Proudhon’s late work suggest that

perhaps his recuperation of universal suffrage would have functioned in

a similar way to his recuperation of domain, and perhaps that it is not

simply the anarchistic “citizen-state” that would have functioned as a

counterweight to property. My reservations about Proudhon’s late theory

of property arise from the fact that domain is potentially a very

formidable power within society, but it is at least presented in those

works as a largely defensive element. My reservations about democratic

practices is that they are much more likely to be invasive and that, in

the presence of that potentially invasive power, various defensive

counterweights would likely have to be strengthened, if a real balance

was to be struck.