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Title: The Regime of Liberty Author: Jesse Baldwin Date: June 13th, 2017 Language: en Topics: liberty, democracy, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, mutualism Source: Retrieved on 7th August 2021 from https://c4ss.org/content/49334 Notes: This piece is the seventh essay in the https://c4ss.org/content/49206
The relationship between democracy and anarchism is undoubtedly a
contentious one.
In his work The Principle of Federation,[1] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon makes
it clear that democracy has an important legacy to respect. Because
Proudhon declared that Universal Suffrage was above The Republic, he had
to evaluate the character of democracy in ideal terms. Proudhon
categorized democracy as a “regime of liberty” related to its
evolutionary successor — anarchy:
“We know the two fundamental and antithetical principles of all
governments: authority and liberty.
Regime of Authority:
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the
non-division of power.
Regime of Liberty:
The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the
division of power.”[2]
Oppression comes in all forms. Any exercise of liberty can, in certain
conditions, succumb to tyranny. Even if we, as anarchists, stand in
opposition to democracy, it would be a mistake to consider it tyrannical
in its own right. Compared to monarchy and communism, democracy stands
firmly on the side of liberty. Proudhon was keen to emphasize this
point. Far from advocating democracy, however, he held his ground and
asserted the principles of anarchy. While anarchy and democracy share
important characteristics, Proudhon was careful not to reduce anarchy to
democracy.
For Proudhon, democracy was a tool “…to dissolve, submerge, and cause to
disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system,
by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing, and suppressing, one after
another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the
Government or the State.”[3]
This was the basis upon which Proudhon justified his entry into
government. In his time, the democratic republic was a new, untested
system. He saw untapped potential in the constitutional division of
powers, and sought to extend its logic to anarchy.
Two hundred years later, we have a different perspective on democracy.
To modern anarchists, Proudhon’s attempts at reform may seem obviously
absurd and doomed to fail. But that is a lesson we have learned over the
centuries. What cannot be denied is that although democracy is not
anarchy, democracy spawned the very idea of anarchy.
If there is any relationship between democracy and anarchy, it is a
causal relationship. We owe our entire tradition to democracy: an
important history that should not be ignored.
Some of our fellow travellers have taken this principle in a different
direction. Communists, for instance, would like to institute a direct
democracy: a system where people get to participate in a consolidated
decisionmaking process. They grasp Proudhon’s criticism of
representative democracy, but ultimately confuse the stars reflected in
the pond for the night’s sky. Proudhon made his definition of democracy
clear: government of all by each. Clearly, he considered direct
democracy to be its purest form.
Proudhon’s critique of democracy requires effort to unravel. It is woven
within his theory of property, and it is through understanding this
theory that we can understand his opposition to democracy.
In the spirit of Proudhon, anarchists are confronted with the problem of
property, and we have to ask ourselves some fundamental questions. To
what degree should society be divided into parcels of private property,
and how much of it should be put into the hands of the community? Should
private property exist at all? What about public property? These are
central questions with which Proudhon spent his life wrestling. He
sought to balance the interests of community and property such that
their spheres of influence overlapped, but neither took precedence over
the other.
Democracy disrupts this balance and places society under the
unaccountable domain of community. An individual’s means of survival
thus came to depend entirely on one’s reputation with one’s neighbours.
It is, as Proudhon said, the rule of all by all, which includes every
individual involved in that sum.
It is under this condition that Proudhon proclaimed that community, too,
is theft. Yet never, in any of his works, did he declare that community
is liberty. This is despite the fact that, just as he famously declared
that property is theft, he also declared property to be liberty.
Community was just as much of a problem—an enigma—as property itself.
“Property is theft” when it is privileged. When we divvy up all the
returns on the factors of production, we essentially make a calculation
error. The joint-operation of production (or what Proudhon called “the
unity-collectivity” of workers) is not accounted for when workers are
paid an individual wage. This is similar to Marx’s theory of surplus
value, and the interplay between the two ideas is striking. One
principle unites the two: if property is allowed to be dominant, the
regime of liberty suffers.
“Property is liberty” when labour controls its own product and
individuals are sovereign over their means of survival. This is a
counterbalance to the absolutist domain of community. If this dimension
of property becomes a totalizing force, the regime of liberty suffers
again.
We can say that pure democracy threatens to make the domain of community
universal, while capitalism likewise threatens to make the domain of
property universal. Under both regimes, liberty suffers. Anarchy is
neither capitalism nor communism. It is self-government; the absolute
sovereignty of the individual.
We should not desire a society where every good is bought and sold under
the cash nexus. Neither should we desire a society where one’s access to
resources is determined by one’s neighbour’s good will.
This dichotomy needs a resolution, and that resolution is Proudhonian
mutualism.
The traditional enemy of anarchists is the governmental state: an
all-encompassing monolith holding a privileged monopoly on power and
violence over its subjects. As anarchists, it is therefore only natural
to see its demise as our absolute goal and objective.
While this is admirable, it ignores the underlying social dynamics that
create institutions like the state. We should instead focus our
attention towards the deeper issue: that of authority in general. This
means that we have to address the problem of social capital: the power
that an individual or group commands by means of charisma, reputation,
manipulation, and overall excellency at maneuvering within social games
of power. This means that anarchists are just as concerned about the
high school bully as we are about the State, and abolishing the State is
not the definition of our politics but its incidental conclusion.
We can scale this analysis to the problem of democracy. When we ignore
the underlying power dynamics that create monoliths like the State, we
place anarchy at risk. If power is a projection—a shadow on the
wall—then it is a distinctly social one. It’s a kind of posture, and it
requires the right know-how, the ability to pull the right strings to
manipulate the right people. We might call those who excel at these
activities “sociopaths.” If that is true, then we have to ask a hard
question: who excels in democracy? The rough-around-the-edges
entrepreneur with creative ideas or the charismatic sociopath who works
around the clock to bend his peers to his will?
When we reduce anarchism to democracy—when we settle for direct
democracy as something just good enough—we ferment the conditions for
higher-level structures of authority. Acquire enough social capital, and
you can make a populace do anything; you can reinstate slavery,
feudalism, capitalism, or whatever flavour of oppression you desire.
Every anarchist society has unlimited democratic power in reserve, but
it only remains anarchist based on its refusal to use this democratic
power. Anarchy leads to democracy, but democracy does not lead to
anarchy. This presents a peculiar problem: what social force could
minimize the democratic power of an anarchist society? Isn’t
consensus-based decisionmaking the inevitable outcome of people coming
together to solve problems?
We have other tools at our disposal, and they are important to consider.
We hold in our arsenal the mechanisms of markets.
The market carries with it a liberatory potential that remains largely
untapped by any society to date. If democracy is unity-in-collectivity,
then the market is a unity-in-difference. A person can build a
reputation and refine their craft on merits above and beyond their
pre-existing holdings of social capital.
It is admittedly true that markets can fall into a similar crisis:
having the wrong kind of reputation will ruin your enterprise. However,
markets provide mechanisms beyond social posturing for people to forge
their own lives; they offer opportunities for people to prove themselves
to society based on the quality of their work. Markets give people the
right of economic exit from the absolutist domain of community, just as
the community gives people the right of exit from the cash nexus.
Critical to the survival of anarchy is mutualism: the balance of
property and community. The market cannot be free without the commons,
and the commons cannot be free without the market.
Let anarchy, not democracy, be the principle of society lest our
revolutionary joy turn to ashes in our mouths.
[1] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Principle of Federation.
[2] Ibid., Chapter Two.
[3] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, A General Idea of the Revolution in the
Nineteenth Century: Fifth Study