Is a ‘Social Movement Society’ the Way to Win Democracy?
Democracy is front and center in left-led social justice struggles, most certainly in the internal process of all progressive groups when they carry out extraparliamentary protests. It is also something that virtually all political ideologies, on the right as much as on the left, claim to support. Hence the very meaning of democracy is highly contested, and everyone is for their version of it. It is very important for the left to get clear on three things: (a) what it means for us to defend whatever is ‘democracy’ in existing regimes; (b) what others (both liberals and rightists) are claiming is ‘democracy’ that is not, and how we can expose it as such; (c) what exactly we are advocating as ‘democracy’ in current struggles and in a future society.
Both Left and Right Claim to be the True Defenders of Democracy
Conservative party led political regimes across the world are marked by their accommodation to the proto-fascist nationalist Right, and by their direct assault on ‘liberal elites’ and on the major institutions of liberal democracy – elections, the power of legislatures relative to executive power and the Leader, an independent judiciary, a free (liberal or left oppositional) press etc. Their mainstream rivals are Joe Biden type centrist liberals and social democrats who support a continuation of a socially liberal version of globalized neoliberalism, and claim to be the defenders of liberal democracy against authoritarian populism.
In the late 1930s and Second World War, the left set aside the struggle to replace capitalism with socialism (and to end imperialisms and colonizations). We did that in order to support the Western capitalist states upholding the ideals of liberal democracy against the fascist states who wanted to get rid of liberal democracy. We do not appear to be close to having to make a choice like this, for many reasons. The most likely war will be between the USA led Western alliance and China, and it is likely to be mostly an economic and ideological one for the near future. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly necessary that we get clear on what elements of existing liberal democracies (and indeed non-liberal ones) we can and will defend, what elements we mostly criticize and expose, what alternatives to liberal democracy we also need to oppose and expose, and what the left version of democracy is that we are advocating as an alternative. All states and all non-left political forces will be claiming that they are promoting ‘democracy’ (and so we should set aside our differences and support their ‘side’).
Joe Biden says ‘Support the USA, Support Liberal Democracy’
This post engages with the argument and proposals in Donatella della Porta’s book ‘Can Democracy Be Saved?’ (Polity Press, 2013). She provides a concise summation of the literature that defines what liberal democracy is and how it came to be historically in Western states. She then sketches a critique of real existing liberal democracy, and presents the two key principles for a reformed and improved liberal democracy: a democracy that is both participatory (direct) and deliberative (seeking a Jurgen Habermas style ‘consensus based on reasons’, rather than majority rule).
These two principles are of course also the two that are at the core of the internal democratic processes that today’s left actually seeks to practice in all mass protests, meetings and movement organizations. My critique of della Porta is also a critique of the hegemonic practices of internal democracy by today’s left. Actually, my critique will not be a full critique of those processes. It will be an argument that the left needs to shift its emphasis away from constructing a perfect prefigurative internal democracy towards developing its theoretical analysis and practical demands for democratizing the economy, society and State. We need to give less priority to perfecting our (internal democracy for activists) means and give much more priority to achieving our ‘power to the people’ ends.
Della Porta Proposes A Democracy Based On Debate in Social Movements
What is liberal democracy? Is the left version of democracy mostly a continuation of and improvement upon liberal democracy (more and better)? Or is it mostly a break from and a replacement of liberal democracy because it is part of a systematically different society? And if it is partly preserving the democratic elements of liberal democracy, and partly rejecting and replacing them with different elements, what is to be preserved and what is to be removed and what is to be built as a qualitatively different alternative?
Della Porta provides some answers to these questions. She distinguishes between narrow procedural theories that tend to be justifications of the existing American/Western European political institutions (“You want to be a liberal democracy? Well just copy our exact constitution, laws and procedures”) and normative theories (or the Abe Lincoln ideal of ultimate sovereignty and decision-making ‘of, by and for the people’ whatever the procedures may be). She puts forward her version of a normative theory that could extend and improve real existing liberal democracy, one that she acknowledges is really just articulating into a coherent theory what todays left social movements are trying to practice.
Della Porta’s proposals amount to formalizing and legalizing a role for the ‘civil society’ of voluntary associations articulating interests and identities that plays a crucial role in both the theory and practice of liberal democracy. Civil society is both outside the State and autonomous from control by the State. Its role in liberal democracy is central, regardless of whether you define liberal democracy as a set of constitutionally prescribed and protected procedures, or as a set of normative principles that can be realized in a variety of systems (not just the British-American one). Della Porta’s proposals are to allow for a formal role for the citizenry organized into voluntary associations that practice a participatory and deliberative democracy.
DELLA PORTA ON ‘WHAT IS LIBERAL DEMOCRACY?’
Robert Dahl wrote the classic texts for the USA political system based procedural theory of liberal democracy. For Dahl the fundamental characteristic of democracy is “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals” (della Porta p13). Leaving aside for now the distinction between (elected) government and the overall State, there are two key normative principles here. There is the one of ultimate sovereignty lying with the people, or more precisely the adult citizens who are allowed to vote, expressed by the obligation of the government to be responsive to the preferences of the citizens (both as voters and as people freely associating with others to raise claims to the government to attend to their interests). And there is the idea that all citizens are considered to be political equals, with the exact same rights and powers as citizens regardless of their specific individual characteristics (e.g. ‘One adult citizen, one vote’ but also ‘Anyone can be President’).
Dahl: A Government that Responds to the Preferences of Its Citizens is Democratic
Della Porta paraphrases Dahl putting the same idea into three points:
“A government capable of responding to the preferences of its citizens should guarantee that each is able:
1. to formulate their own preferences;
2. to present them to their fellow citizens and to the government via recourse to individual and collective action;
3. to ensure that their preferences are ‘weighed equally in the conduct of the government, that is, weighted with no discrimination because of the content or source of the preference.’ ” (Dahl 1971 p2 in della Porta p13).
Those are the ideals, but Dahl argues that they will only be realized in practice if there is a set of procedures that can ensure that the government actually is responsive to all citizens equally. Della Porta paraphrases further:
“For these three conditions to be achieved… eight constitutional guarantees must be in place:
1. the freedom to form and join organizations
2. the freedom of expression
3. the right to vote
4. the right to compete for support and votes
5. eligibility for political roles
6. alternative sources of information
7. free and fair elections
8. institutions that make the government dependent on the vote and other forms of expression of political preferences.” (p13)
Realistically Democracy is a Renewable Contract That Merely Limits the Pre-Existing Power of the Rulers of Economy, Society and State
Della Porta then argues that normative theories of liberal democracy are different because they emphasize that democracy must be, as Lincoln famously declared, “of, by and for the people”. But I would say that Dahl actually incorporates that formulation in his theory. What della Porta seems to be arguing is that a normative approach stresses the necessity of ‘civil society’ outside the State, and not a government of elected representatives, being the central place where democracy should take place. That is the only way to ensure that the decisions are in fact from and by and for the people.
This is especially true according to della Porta because globalized neoliberalism has changed real existing liberal democracy in three ways: power within elected governments has shifted from political parties and legislatures to the executive branch led by a charismatic Leader; power has shifted from nation state organizations to International Government Organizations; power has shifted from governments to markets. The result has been a radical loss of legitimacy of elected representative institutions and the key support institutions of a free press and independent judiciary. Only a revitalized civil society of voluntary associations that is given a direct and greatly increased formal role in decision-making and in surveilling the government implementation of laws and policies can save liberal democracy from its right-wing enemies. (See a discussion of Della Porta’s analysis of these three trends in my earlier post, Why is Liberal Democracy on Life Support Everywhere? ).
Della Porta puts her approach to liberal democracy a second way by aligning herself with what might be called a realist historical theory as articulated by Stein Rokkan, Charles Tilly and Barrington Moore: liberal democracy is a succession of Social Contracts that limit the pre-existing power of those who already rule in civil society (in the economy and all other social structures) and in the State. Hence democracy within any society, but more specifically liberal democracy in Western states, is realistically not rule of, by and for the people. It is a set of constitutionally prescribed rights and powers and institutions that recognizes that the rulers, those with pre-existing unequal power in civil society and State, will always do most of the ruling but that the people will both have regular input (in elections, as voluntary associations) and will be protected from the arbitrary actions of the rulers by court-enforced laws, media and the like.
Social Movement Society (SMS): Democracy Should Mostly Be Done Directly by Citizens Outside the State
The analogy with a contract between unionized workers and their employers is apt. No contract is final. The workers have to fight for a new one every several years. Sometimes it gets on balance better than the last one and sometimes it gets worse. In between contracts, workers and their union fight to have the promises in the contract actually implemented. The contract is the democracy. The contract is a set of agreements between rulers and ruled. Only the employers rule in the final analysis. But the workers can modify and redirect the decisions of the rulers law and policy-wise. Indeed in some contexts they can actively participate in tripartite (employer-union-State) co-management (an elected left-wing government would be an analogy here). Above all they are protected to a degree against arbitrary actions by rulers against them and/or their interests.
DELLA PORTA PROPOSES A ‘SOCIAL MOVEMENT SOCIETY’ DEMOCRACY
Della Porta is proposing a new Social Contract in which autonomous voluntary associations practicing ‘consensus based on reasons’ deliberation and participatory democracy have a strengthened and formalized role in providing inputs to government decision-making. This is ‘realistic’. It fits squarely within the theory that liberals have about the role that ‘civil society’ should have in a liberal democracy. Nevertheless, like union contracts, it still has to be fought for and won as a set of constraints on the unequal and arbitrary pre-existing powers of the rulers in economy, society and State.
What della Porta is proposing is very much exactly what is hegemonic in the left flank of the broad left, in the extra-parliamentary protest left. In the US and Western European states, and indeed most states today, a ‘new left’ has existed since roughly 1956 (when the US civil rights movement began its high period, when Khruschev denounced Stalin and Western communist parties collapsed, when social democratic parties around the world rejected replacing capitalism with socialism as a long-term goal). Support for all forms of socialism (revolutionary, parliamentary and anarchist) continued to exist (especially for the Third World socialism of the Vietnamese, Cubans and Cultural Revolution Chinese), especially in the high point of the 1960s wave in 1968 and afterwards. It continues among a large number of activists today. But the left today is not advocating socialism as an alternate economy, society and State.
Today’s Left is Modelled on the Early Civil Rights Movement in the USA
What we have instead is an Extraparliamentary Social Movement Left that is modelled directly on the early U.S. Civil Rights Movement in multiple ways. Tactics aim at non-violent civil disobedience disruption, but the disruption is mostly carried out from outside the mainstream institutions of society where the mass of people live and work (with the singular major exception of universities). The leverage comes not so much from any actual disruption of the functioning of capitalism or the State, but from an ideological disruption of ‘business as usual’, from actions that are spectacular enough to force media attention to the different ideas and issues being raised.
Like the Martin Luther King led wing of the civil rights movement (as distinct from the Black Panther Party led movement that succeeded it in the high 1960s in and around 1968), the extraparliamentary left is not proposing an alternative social system but is seeking inclusion within the existing one, albeit a significantly reformed one, in a new and improved Social Contract.
Belief in socialism as the alternative (or rather in a Rainbow Socialism society that replaces not just systemic capitalism but systemic racism, sexism, homophobia etc) is a private belief held by many activists, but (outside those who participate in the pro-capitalist social democratic parties like British Labour or call for an American social democratic party while participating in a corporate liberal one, the Democrats, as DSA and Jacobin magazine do) it is not public as a goal. It is not expressed in the slogans and demands of the left led coalitions, even the anti-capitalist ones. It is not the overriding strategic goal that shapes their tactical means.
There is a big elephant in the room, namely the fear of repeating movements leading to a Marxist-Leninist (or ‘Stalinist’) state like the Soviet Union or China. To a much lesser extent there is fear of repeating co-opted social democracy, but even anarchists mostly end up voting for those ‘lesser evil’ parliamentary labour parties, even for corporate liberal ones like the Democrats in the USA.
Activists Often Believe Privately in a Rainbow Socialism, but It is Not Part of Our Public Politics
This is the topic for another post, but the huge hole that is left by removing socialism as the long term goal of the left has to be occupied by something. It seems to me that what the left of the left has put in its place is a utopian conception of Democracy as a Process, of a mini-society in which people can freely organize into separate Social Movements around various Collective Identities and speak their pain and make their demands for change to the rulers of real existing liberal democracy, of real existing capitalism and imperialism. And this Civil Society is withdrawn from the State and withdrawn from the institutions of the economy and society, while putting pressure on the rulers in these institutions from the outside through attention-grabbing protests.
The part that I will take up in a later post is the resulting confusion of means and ends in which carrying out the perfect prefigurative democratic process becomes more important than using tactics that actually disrupt capital and the State from the inside. Such a strategy of disrupting profit-making and surveillance/repression would require giving priority to educating and training organizers to ‘go out to the people’, to educate and train them to be leaders in struggles waged from the inside. When we do the thinking, analysis and debating to get ourselves clear on the outlines of the Alternative Society we are fighting for, then we would be able to present the people with a coherent set of Positive Solutions, not just a List of Problems. We would spend a lot more time educating ourselves and the citizenry about what the Left Stance is on everything, and how it contrasts with the stance of the neoliberal Center and the openly Reactionary Right.
This Civil Society with a Prefigurative Utopian Democratic Process functions for those who are anarchists as a strategy to build a counterculture of alternative institutions to which more and more people from mainstream society can gradually be won to join. For radical reformers this Civil Society functions closer to what della Porta seems to be proposing, as a way to raise demands to the State to enable left-led social movements to routinely have input to State decisions. They would be granted the status of speaking for some section of the people, because they engage masses of people in consensus-forming participatory deliberation like the Participatory Budgeting experiments that the Workers Party of Brazil led in cities in the early 2000s (for an early formulation of this approach see David Meyer’s The Social Movement Society: Contentious Politics for a New Century, Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).
Democracy as Prefigurative Process has Filled the Vacuum Left when Socialism Ceased to be Our Goal
Before I list some problems that I have with della Porta’s approach, and hence with the hegemonic approach in the extraparliamentary new left, let me be clear that I see this as the most advanced part of the left, and as the starting point for achieving a better and more influential left in the future. It is the left that I have participated in and studied and taught courses about since the early 1960s. Participatory and deliberative democracy are good ideas, and will be central to any future liberated society and to a lot of what we do in the present. In fact they could even be said to be spontaneously present in every revolutionary setting (by which I mean every revolt or strike or sit-in or whatever that disrupts capital and/or State as well as the systems that organize sexism or racism or homophobia) going back to at least the French Revolution.
Liberated spaces do emerge in such moments of Revolt and challenge. The experience of them is liberating, and stimulates optimism and a strengthened desire to fight for a liberated future, because it has given you a taste of what the alternative could be like. But making politics about trying to recreate such moments is not a strategy or tactics for changing society. It will happen in moments of revolt without leftists having to try to induce it. Setting goals and organizing to win power in the existing economy, society and states is something apart from this.
THE POSITIVES OF THE SMS IDEA
Let’s start with the positives with della Porta’s Social Movement Society (or SMS) plan. It is a version of a solution to the problem of how to engage in left politics that is simultaneously outside the State and mainstream institutions (and hence less pressured to be co-opted, more able to be radically critical) and inside them (and hence hopefully both able to win short-term pragmatic concessions and less likely to be violently repressed).
Second, most people will see SMS as an improvement on the classic stances of the socialist left. Revolutionary Marxists (and Marx himself) favoured building mass democratic organizations ‘before the revolution’, and even engaging in electoral politics where that was available (but it mostly wasn’t in the places where Marxist revolutions actually took place). But Marxist groups in rich countries since at least the 1960s mostly defaulted to rejecting liberal democracy as simply bourgeois democracy (so no need to attempt to improve it), justified their Leninist structures as necessary for (class) war, and tended to dismiss prefigurative politics with a mantra of ‘wait for after the revolution for that’. (This is a bit of a caricature, but the tendency to such a position was there, more extreme in some groups than others). SMS aims to improve liberal democracy, it takes a Realist history of Social Contracts position, it is not worried that it will further legitimate the capitalist etc social system of which the political system is a part.
Reformist (parliamentary, Bernsteinian) socialists had a strategy of working entirely within the limits of bourgeois (liberal democratic) legality, while pushing against those limits non-violently and legally with trade unions and other mass organizations tied to the social democratic electoral political party. They hoped to achieve socialism through winning elected governments that would introduce structural and policy reforms that would incrementally build socialism in place of capitalism without arousing a repressive response from the capitalist class and their supporters in the general population. By 1956 they gave up on the goal of replacing capitalism, and by the 1990s the Tony Blair Third Way position of standing for a ‘kinder, gentler neoliberalism’ prevailed.
The SMS Idea Beats the Marxist, Social Democratic and Anarchist Ideas for Winning More Democracy
Left socialists took a position closer to the revolutionary Marxist one, notably in building an entire counter-society of working class organizations (e.g. in Red Vienna, the SDP in Germany) and putting the stress on building up the extraparliamentary wing as fighting organizations that pushed past the legalistic limits. But the predominant social democratic stance has been one of inducing political passivity and non-militancy in its extraparliamentary organizations, especially in unions, with a pathological fear of having its electoral chances undermined by class struggle that raises social tensions. (They are right about this of course, just as the revolutionaries are about needing less than perfectly democratic structures that can survive repression. Voters do not like class struggle, they do not like racial struggle or gender struggle or any other kind of polarization that seems to threaten social peace and backlash resulting in fewer (liberal) democratic liberties).
The SMS approach can be seen as an improvement because, at least in theory, it is premised on a complete disconnect between autonomous social movements and a pro-left parliamentary party. Or rather, it seems to want to avoid the problem with electoral parties damping down extraparliamentary militancy by creating electoral parties like Podemos or Five Star Movement where (individuals who are both party members and activists in) the social movement organizations dictate to the elected members what to do through frequent polls and direct democracy referendums.
The SMS approach can also be seen as an improvement on the classic anarchist position. The anarchist strategy for achieving a post-capitalist egalitarian society is to withdraw from both the State and from mainstream institutions and to build a Counter Culture of Alternative Institutions. There is no need to engage in the State or to try to replace it with a revolutionary socialist one, but only to undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of the people and to win them one by one to withdrawing culturally and practically from the social system. In practice, of course, most anarchists both before and after the Second World War have been militants in workplace and community based struggles, while trying to live prefiguratively in a counterculture.
Anarchists bring the struggle against ‘authoritarianism’ and against all forms of status hierarchy viewed through the lens of authoritarian dominance to the fore. Sometimes the lack of faith that reforms can be won by participating in government, or political revolutions can be won with ‘authoritarian’ parties leading them, leads a few anarchists to despair and terrorist tactics. And classic anarchism is an ideology that is tailor-made for those who choose to change the world culturally by being radical artists, rather than being ‘politicos’, which is a perfectly legitimate choice for an individual to make.
The Biggest Knock on Anarchism is that It Has Never Won a More Progressive Regime Anywhere
The biggest knock on anarchism is that it has failed to win any kind of new social and political regime (through either revolution or an elected reform government) that lasted more than a very short time in any place on earth at any time. The SMS approach enables anarchists to pursue their ‘counterculture building social movements only’ strategy while linking up with radical reformers like della Porta who want the social movements to also contribute legally sanctioned regular inputs into governmental decision-making from outside the State.
SOME PROBLEMS WITH THE SMS IDEA
The main goal in writing this post is to explain della Porta’s insights into what liberal democracy is (the realistic history of Social Contracts between rulers and ruled approach). Also to elaborate her SMS proposal that is built upon a key insight about liberal democratic theory and ideology (the latter being what the rulers of capitalist states with liberal democratic political systems repeat endlessly in their public writing and speech in order to ‘win the battle of ideas’ with critics of their social system). That idea is the concept of an autonomous sector of voluntary associations articulating interests and identities, Civil Society, that provides inputs to the political parties and legislatures. Left led social movements can demand that they be included as legitimate actors with status in that autonomous public space. And they can model the alternative society we seek by organizing masses of people into participatory and deliberative structures.
The problems with the SMS proposal will consequently only be briefly listed, and returned to at a later date:
-- There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that such a system will ever be accepted and implemented, even by an elected Podemos type government, if it results in real challenges to the power of rulers in the State or economy. A consultative relation that increases the legitimacy of the rulers and their State in a period where neoliberalism has shredded that legitimacy, yes. But not one where State actors are obliged to respond directly and constructively to the proposals of social movements that infringe seriously on the interests of capital and other dominant social groups. At best this would lead to Podemos type political parties that start off trying to be directed ‘from below’ by their mass membership that is also active in social movement organizations, and end up fairly quickly being new and slightly improved social democratic parties. Anarchism would quickly morph into reformism, for the best of pragmatic reasons of winning at least some changes that benefit people in the short run under the existing social system.
There is No Chance that Rulers will Concede an SMS System Unless Our Disruptions Oblige them to Do So
The bottom line is that civil rights style extraparliamentary social movements since 1956 have only ever been able to win widespread change in cultural ideas held by individuals (and after the end of the 1960s wave, with the postmodern cultural turn this radical limitation became rationalized as a good thing), not significant changes in the power of capital in the economy or its control of the State (ditto dominant racial groups, genders etc). Hence people are less racially prejudiced or gender prejudiced etc, but systemic structures and practices of racism and sexism that are useful to capital and to other dominant social groups have only been moderately weakened. And systemic capitalism and globalizing neocolonization have increased in power and cultural dominance geometrically in the past 40 years of neoliberalism. The SMS proposal – and parties like Podemos – are an attempt to ‘bring politics back in’ and this is a good thing. But the SMS approach remains caught in the logic of ‘Change the Culture and the Rest Will Follow’. It does not provide any new solutions to the problems of how to actually disrupt systematic power relations in the economy, society and State.
-- There is no agenda here for left alternatives to the constitution, laws, and procedures within the State itself, that are always inherently biased to favour specific interests (see Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, Princeton University Press, 2019). It is okay to defend and extend liberal democracy but a left platform for further democratizing the liberal democratic state needs to provide for better procedures, laws and rights, not just better input of interests and ideas.
Why Not a Movement to Change the Constitution, Laws and Procedures of Liberal Democratic States?
This is especially obvious when it comes to the coercive apparatus of the State that administratively applies the democratically chosen laws and policies coercively (you don’t have a choice about obeying them) and which deploys laws, courts, prisons, armed forces and police to repress. The left needs a whole set of policies directed at the goal of reducing the degree of arbitrary or special interest directed coerciveness in the State. Black Lives Matter is a recent movement that is doing just this. This is really a whole separate issue from democratic government for the non-coercive part of the state. To be fair to della Porta, she is very much aware of all this, and is in fact one of the world’s leading researchers into protest policing and violence by ‘both sides’ in political conflicts. But it is not part of her SMS proposal.
-- Left led social movements are not the only social or political movements or interest groups or voluntary associations that are part of Civil Society. The left may argue that it represents the ideas and interests of ‘the people’, but so will the neoliberal Center and the proto-fascist Right and the associations that they lead or ideologically influence. At best we seek to gain a greater representation of social groups who are mostly left out of the regular system of interest group lobbying and efforts at changing public opinion.
-- The participatory and deliberative experiences that activists have in major popular Revolts are consciousness raising, and exciting, and a liberating taste of the alternative that gets many to devote the rest of their life to at least some amount of activism or support for activism. To be frank, it is the secular version of ‘getting religion’. But democratic processes are ultimately boring and draining. A large proportion of the people we want to mobilize have less time away from work and family than college students or single (or male) liberal professionals to go to long meetings. But mostly, the sheen of the democratic process wears off pretty quickly. This is one way to state the iron law of oligarchy. All of us in co-ops or communes or trade unions or any SMO know this. After a while, only a few people are left to do the lion’s share of the day to day activist work, including the democratic meetings. And as for the Brazilian Workers Party style participatory budgeting meetings, people who participate in an ongoing basis do so because there is going to be a practical material payoff, the winning of some changes that better the lives of their community. We will not win people to Endless Democratic Process. We will win them to Changes in Their Lives.
Black Lives Matter Leads the Way in Challenging the Coercive part of the State: the Laws, Courts, Prisons, Armed Forces and Police
I urge you to read della Porta’s book for an incisive review of liberal democratic theory as it relates to social movements, and for a significant discussion of the participatory and deliberative democracy alternatives. Democracy is very much at the core of what today’s left is all about. We need to get into serious debates about what our left version of democracy is, as well as what our critique of centrist liberal and Rightist versions of democracy are, and what we want to do to defend and extend certain elements of real existing liberal democracy while exposing and changing others. Della Porta is a good place to start.