Left Populism, Why Not? (part two)
The Populist Moment by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jager (henceforth B+J) tells us three very important things about today’s overall Left. I presented those points in Left Populism, Why Not? (part one). In this article, I critique their main thesis and argument, in order to make the case that the left populist politics that predominate in today’s left are problematic. B+J’s book points the way to some things we can do to make them better.
Let me repeat the three points: first, that both the protest wing of today’s radical left, and the electoral parties that were built out of those post-2008 protest wave movements, share a politics that can be described as populist; second, that the distinguishing feature of left-leaning populist movements historically is that they “sought to secure political rather than economic democracy” (p6); third, that the left was most powerful when it organized itself into mass political parties, that fostered an entire ecosystem of mass participation popular organizations, that were linked politically and organizationally to the party/ies, and to one another.
Both the Protest Left and Electoral Left Are Populist. We (Pretend to) Seek Political Democracy Rather Than Economic Democracy.
I agree with all three points, and with most of the many insights made by B+J in their short but idea-packed book. My criticisms are about what they have chosen to downplay or leave out. They have given us a description, but they have not followed up on their observations to state explicitly what they find problematic with the politics that they describe. Perhaps this is simply an artefact of the fact that the book is intended as a political science course secondary text. My purpose is to think like an activist, and to draw conclusions from their analysis that are critical of left populism.
I will argue below that there are several things that B+J have downplayed or left out. I will try to extend their argument in each of these areas and thereby arrive at my own conclusions about left populist politics, and how we can improve on them.
THE POPULIST IDEA OF WHAT IS WRONG WITH TODAY’S LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES
The first and most important overriding characteristic feature of populist politics historically is that they “sought to secure political rather than economic democracy”. (p6)
The second defining (essential, invariably present) feature of populist politics historically, is that they represent “a ‘people’ of small property owners”. (p6)
B+J do not extend this point to highlight the fact that this feature – a left that cannot get beyond being a left that is of, by and sometimes even for the (educated) middle class -- is present in today’s protest and electoral left to the extent that the hegemonic politics of today’s overall Left is populist. Today’s left is deliberately self-limiting. B+J recognize this somewhat when they describe today’s left populist electoral parties as a “hybrid” of populist plus communist-socialist, as a left that is actually anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist etc but pretends “pragmatically” to be only seeking a more extensive political democracy.
Populist Movements Represent a ‘People’ of Small Property Owners. Can Today’s Left Get Beyond Its Educated Middle Class Core?
B+J also do not highlight the fact that left and right populist movements are both movements that are led by and claim to serve small property owners. For example it was true of both the People’s Party and the Ku Klux Klan in the United States in post Reconstruction Gilded Age late 19th century United States. Right populism today (as in the past) is the diametric and antagonistic opposite of left populism on virtually all substantive social and political issues, and on what they mean by a political democracy that has removed the ‘Bad Elite’ from control of the State. But to the extent that both are populist, they are movements that claim to represent a ‘people’ of small property owners, or indeed many in the working class who are owners of convertible-to-capital assets (second homes/cottages/properties, owned first homes, second cars, other consumer products that can be sold at a profit, investments).
The third defining feature of left populism is the public claim (whether privately believed or not) that the change from the Keynesian welfare state (reformist social democracy) model of capitalism that prevailed from 1946 to 1976 to the neoliberal model that has prevailed since then is not due to the inherent flaws of a capitalist system. It is due to government decisions to promote a different model of capitalism. The change in the model imposed by governments is said to be due to capture of the State by a Bad Elite, by a Caste of economic and political elites who serve the One Percent and hurt the Ninety-Nine Percent. “Capitalism and representative democracy were never populism’s prime adversaries; oligarchic corruption always was.” (p34)
Populists Claim that a Bad Elite Captured Control of the State and that Hurtful Economic Policies Were the Result.
B+J then say that this view of what is wrong with today’s liberal democratic states was not just the view of those in the electoral left parties like Podemos and Syriza. The same idea was shared by the post-2008 extra-parliamentary protest movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring) as “expressed in mottoes such as ‘We are the 99 percent’, ‘They do not represent us’, or ‘They call it democracy and it is not’. Their main targets were not capitalists and multinational corporations per se. Instead they attacked the unholy alliance between economic and political elites – the ‘caste’.” (p45)
B+J add what they argue is a fourth defining feature of today’s left populism, namely that the left (or at least the left of the left that leads major protests and that founded the new electoral parties) is only pretending to be populist, to seek only the reversal of elite capture of an otherwise okay liberal democratic state and capitalist economy.
In the 1946-1976 period, the industrial working class was large enough as a proportion of the population and well organized enough into unions and social democratic (and communist) parties to politically socialize most workers into a collective class consciousness and political ideology. Strong reformist social democratic parties could thrive. In many Western European countries this was paralleled by right of center parties who also had a highly organized ‘civil society’ linked to their party (a so-called Total Party) that socialized their voters, most commonly Christian Democratic parties oriented around the church. B+J call this Organized Democracy. They assert that the long-term decline of this system of mass membership (of loyal, generation to generation voters) and ideologically allied mass membership organizations has strongly contributed to a citizenry that thinks like “atomized individuals”. They can only be appealed to with pragmatic, ostensibly non-ideological arguments about good individuals and bad individuals. Pretending to be populist works.
The Founders of Left Populist Parties Pretend to Believe that We Can Return to Welfare State Economies by Reversing the Elite Capture of the State.
“[T]he antiestablishment rhetoric, the strong leadership, the plebiscitarian modes of decision, the direct channels of communication and the weak party structures are not specific to populist actors. Rather they characterize any new actor eager to thrive in our present environment… ‘Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers’ as the Arab proverb has it” (p38).
“The populist turn of the 2010s was no perfect replica of its Russian, US and Latin American predecessors. Rather four decades of declining turnout, plummeting party membership, discredited ideologies, and a generally atomized society had considerably changed the coordinates of political activity. Western democracies had endured a slow but steady process of disintermediation [as] the bodies (parties, unions, churches, clubs etc.) that used to link the citizens to society declined everywhere, thereby causing the extreme fragmentation and disorganization of the social groups to which the left used to appeal”. (p37)
“Populism is, then, simply one of the various species inhabiting this new political ‘ecosystem’ of disorganized democracy – alongside the new radical right and the liberal technocrats” (p38).
WHAT IS WRONG WITH PRETENDING TO BE POPULIST?
What is wrong with pretending to think that the main way to solve today’s social and economic and cultural problems is to reverse the supposed elite capture of the State, and thereby restore the Good Capitalism and the Good Liberal Democracy of the 1946-1976 era?
Neoliberalism is Not the Result of a Coup. It is What Private Capital Came to Believe that It Had to Have From Any Government, Right or Left.
My answer, put bluntly: Because it is not true, and having a mistaken analysis of the cause of a problem leads to mistakes in choosing an apt solution. Today’s liberal democratic states are not implementing neoliberal policies because those states were captured by a One Percent Elite or Caste. They are doing so because of new problems within the capitalist economic system, both nationally and world-wide. Liberal democratic states have always served the fundamental interests of capitalist property owners above all. What has changed is what those capitalist property owners need and want.
What they need and want right now is the neoliberal model of capitalism. The 2008 financial crisis may have been a crisis of the neoliberal model, but the rulers of almost all States have only doubled down on neoliberalism since 2008. The main change in their model thusfar has been for some Western State capitalists to try to hide this fact, and to rally popular support from those losing faith in them and their system, by adopting the political mask of right populism.
B+J know this. The left of the left mostly knows this. So what is the justification for pretending to be populist? Why do we tell the people and tell ourselves that all we can do right now, and all we need to do right now, is to either restore the political democracy of 1946-1976 (reverse the elite capture and revive “reformist social democracy”), or to greatly extend political democracy (by moving towards a democracy that is horizontalist and centered on participatory democracy, starting outside the State but also outside the similarly ‘elite-controlled’ institutions of the Economy and Society/Culture too), or both? B+J suggest three reasons, each of which flags a shortcoming in left populist politics that will be the subject of a future article.
Each reason begs one overriding question: Why is the left seeking political democracy in the State rather than “economic democracy” in society, when the left is actually primarily motivated by a desire to achieve changes in the social system?
The Left Wants to Change the Private Economy and Society, Not Just Have More Democracy in the State. But We Have Lost Faith in Socialism as the Basis of an Alternative.
The left is actually centrally concerned with inequalities, exploitations and oppressions that take place within Civil Society, within the economic and cultural systems of private society. The left used to have a vision of an alternative society that more or less corresponds with what B+J refer to as “economic democracy”, socialism (reductively this meant a worker-controlled State and public ownership, central economic planning and local workers control). But it no longer believes in this alternative, and it has not put anything in its place.
REASON #1: NOT ENOUGH INDUSTRIAL WORKERS TO HAVE A SOCIALIST MOVEMENT
The first justification for pretending to be populist is that building a socialist political movement required a working class organized into unions and other popular organizations led by an industrial manufacturing working class. But elite capture of rich Western states has resulted in transferring more and more manufacturing to cheap labour Global South countries. This has accelerated a preexisting demographic change in contemporary capitalism everywhere, where the relative weight of the manufacturing proletariat has continually decreased, contrary to what both revolutionary and reformist socialists had predicted in the early twentieth century. Reviving a political party that presents itself as socialist cannot succeed because the industrial manufacturing worker social base, that is a necessary precondition for any socialist movement, has become too small and disorganized in rich Western states.
The Left Pretends To Be Populist Because the Industrial Worker Base for a Socialist Movement Is a Constantly Declining Minority of the Working Population.
“[T]he deindustrialization and ensuing crisis of civil society of the 1980s [especially de-unionization] opened a void between citizens and states, while radically decoupling Western elites from [the trust of voters] in their own societies. Working-class people in particular stopped voting and abandoned political parties… While an internationally oriented working class had faced a nationalist middle class throughout the twentieth century, these categories had now switched sides: the working class became tied to national welfare states, while the middle class looked for the benefits in globalization”. (p9)
“In [theorist of left populism Ernesto] Laclau’s view, populism is the process by which a leader unifies popular demands based on their opposition to a common enemy, thereby constructing a ‘people’ against a power bloc… ‘Populism’, as vague as it might seem, still grows out of the same soil and is faced with the same challenge as socialism: how to build a coherent form of emancipatory politics based on heterogeneous social forces.
A majoritarian social bloc does not arise ex nihilo. Without being overdetermined by the relations of production, it is not completely independent of them either. Hence the political economy of populism: the harder it is to reduce political conflict to a binary opposition between capital and labor in the manufacturing sector, the less the industrial working class can regard itself as the key political subject for social transformation – and the more tempting a populist approach will be for the left. In the 2010s as in the late nineteenth or mid twentieth centuries, populism picked up social democracy’s slack in situations of extreme social fragmentation and disorganization. In terms of policies too, it worked as a functional equivalent of social democracy’s reformist agenda, expanding the scope of civil and political rights while laying the foundation for future welfare states.” (pp34-35)
Without a Strong Labour Movement That Can Withdraw Its Labour, the Left Lacks Enough Leverage to Win Against Capital and State With Just Non-Violent Protest.
Building a socialist movement that was a non-electoral movement, that relied mostly on the tactics of collective action (marches, rallies, strikes, civil disobedience etc), was even less likely to succeed. Such a movement would lack the indispensable leverage, the ability to impose real economic and political costs, that a large and organized industrial working class could provide.
“With no powerful institution like the labor movement to call upon, leftists were forced to take the battle to the electoral arena, thereby launching the true left-populist gamble”. (p45)
B+J have described the factual situation very well. Surely it begs an obvious question: Is it true that there cannot be a successful popular struggle to replace capitalism with socialism (at least to a major degree) unless the industrial manufacturing working class is a large and growing proportion of the population?
Most Workers Today Are Not in Factories. We Need to Analyze Where Capital Is Most Vulnerable to Workers Withdrawing Cooperation.
If the answer is yes, then the only way to have a socialist movement is to organize on a truly global level and headquarter the global socialist movement in those Global South countries where the manufacturing working class is still growing. All we can do in rich states is build a movement against the superexploitation of the working class in poor states and regions.
I think that the answer is no. We still can and should build a popular movement to move beyond capitalism, but we do not have to have an expanding industrial working class to do so. The decline in the relative proportion of capitalist profit-making economic activity coming from goods manufacturing everywhere (not just in rich Western states) is not the same thing as a decline in the proportion of the population that is exploited by capital. Economies and overall social systems everywhere are only becoming more and more enmeshed in capitalist social relations.
Perhaps the most important task facing the left is twofold: to agree upon a new analysis of today’s capitalism (that details how and where capital exploits labour, beyond just the setting of goods manufacturing factories); and, on that basis, to develop a new theory of what an egalitarian post-capitalist economy and social system might look like.
A new analysis of today’s capitalism will give us a new strategy (who to organize, in what social settings, around what demands and using what forms of popular organization and what collective action tactics).
The Socialism of Past Marxist States Is Not an Option. Let’s Re-Invent a Postcapitalist Economy that Guarantees Equal Access to the Means of Producing Wealth and a High Floor Standard of Living.
A new theory of an egalitarian post-capitalism will give us a new vision of the principles we seek to apply to create new institutions and to develop new policy solutions.
The new theory of the alternative can only be arrived at if we also give strong attention to drawing very explicit and public lessons from the history of past socialist movements and (Marxist-Leninist) socialist states and reformist social democracy governments. We do not want to repeat the disastrous consequences of past wrong political theory and ideology that we have yet to recognize and change.
REASON #2: WORKERS ARE NO LONGER POLITICALLY SOCIALIZED INTO A COLLECTIVE (CLASS) CONSCIOUSNESS
B+J offer a second justification for pretending to be populist: people in Western Europe, including working class people and those who could be their allies, no longer have a collective consciousness of what interests they objectively share with others in the same economic class or social category. They may share an identifiable collective identity with others, but that identity is a wholly individual and subjective one, a willed characteristic of the self more than a recognized result of the social structure. People who are systematically disadvantaged are understood to be so because of the prejudiced beliefs of, and the discriminatory treatments by, other individuals. The way to change that is to change the individuals through cultural change and persuasion. People think like “atomized individuals”.
The Idea of Collective Liberation of a Class of Workers No Longer Makes Sense to Workers. But They Can See How They Would Benefit as Individuals from More Political Democracy.
B+J argue that this was not the case, at least not to anywhere near the same degree, in the 1946-1976 period. A major reason why was that in that period the political party system in most Western European countries was an “organized democracy”. The major parties operated as siloed “total parties”, as separate social and political worlds for the people in their social base, made up of a dense network of popular organizations and activities linked to their party and its ideology. On the left, the core of the ecosystem was the socialist or communist party and allied labour organizations. On the right, the core was middle class societies based on religion, family, and patriotism. These total parties were able to politically socialize their social base into a collective consciousness of their group interests, and into a political ideology and set of policy preferences.
B+J imply that the ‘atomized individual’ thinking (not necessarily the same thing as the ‘everything is transactional’ profit maximizing individualistic thinking induced by capitalist social relations and ideology) can be changed. It will be possible in future to have new-style ‘total parties’, to revive a dense civil society of popular organizations and activities linked to a left-wing political party that will politically socialize disadvantaged groups into collective consciousness[es] and shared political ideology.
However, this is not yet possible. What we can do is pretend to be populist. This will let us win the votes needed to restore a reformist social democracy party of the kind that existed in 1946-1976, before the Clinton-Blair Third Way sellout to neoliberalism. Then we can work on creating a party with a politically linked civil society ecosystem. New-style total parties may be very different from the old ‘total parties’, but would achieve the same outcome in terms of collective consciousness and shared political ideology. One thing that can be done right away is to use the pro-democracy electoral mandate to justify “expanding the scope of civil and political rights while laying the foundation for future welfare states”. (p35)
How Do We Re-Create an Ecosystem of Left Politics Aligned Popular Organizations That Foster a Shared Progressive Ideology? The Key is to Have a ‘Left Flank’ Political Party that Makes That Its Top Priority.
We need a new term for ‘total party’ (coined by the pro-fascist political theorist Karl Schmitt in pre World War Two Germany to attack anti-capitalist and anti-fascist left parties with a well-organized mass base), but the idea is a good one. I suggest using the term ‘Mass Movement Party’ instead.
I have but one caveat. B+J talk only about creating one mass movement party, one that is a revival of the 1946-1976 “reformist social democracy” party. I think that we will need to build more than one left party, while always aiming for left parties to work in coalition in governments and in collective actions. We especially need to build what I refer to as a ‘left flank’ party, one that represents the more militant and systematic reform seeking left flank of popular organizations and struggles. (In periods of high polarization, it is possible that a single left party might be temporarily a good thing -- to coordinate mass resistance to extreme repression, or to coordinate the periodic reformist or revolutionary popular upsurges -- but only temporarily. Day to day, left parties will think differently and act independently of one another. But beyond this, the left should learn from history and always seek to rule, or lead major actions, in pluralistic coalitions.)
REASON #3: BECAUSE POPULIST POLITICS AT LEAST MAKES THE LEFT BETTER AT FIGHTING FOR MORE DEMOCRACY
B+J offer a third reason why it is okay for the left parties to pretend to be populist: because populism on its own, right or left, is a genuine demand for more political democracy coming from the grassroots. Populism is denigrated by the established liberal democracy state leaders because it is a genuine challenge to elite control (i.e. to their control) of the State.
A desire for more democracy may indeed attract many individuals to join a populist movement, on the right or on the left. But this is not the same thing as saying that the left populist approach to democracy -- let alone the Trump et al right populist one -- is a good theory (i.e. a diagnosis of what’s wrong and a vision of what’s right) or that it results in effective struggles for more and better democracy.
Does the Populist Theory of What is Wrong With Liberal Democracy Actually Lead to Better Understandings of What Reforms are Needed to Achieve Collective Self Rule?
Both right and left populist theories and practical movements lead away from struggles to democratize either State or society. For right populist movements this is deliberate for the leaders, and is acquiesced to readily by supporters. For left populist leaders and supporters this is because we have embraced a wrong theory of democracy, a populist one, that undermines our efforts to radically democratize State and society. That theory is based on an inaccurate reading of history, on what I will call ‘the myth of Athenian democracy’.
Unfortunately, B+J seem to have bought into the myth of Athenian democracy, and this leads to problems with their analysis of (a) the extra-parliamentary protest left; (b) electoral left populist parties; and (c) right populism in both electoral politics and protest politics.
I will only give the top line of my critique of B+J. Most of what they say about populism is excellent, and my purpose here is to draw lessons for the left, not to do a complete scholarly critique of the few flaws in their analysis. What I will mostly do is sketch out why and how a populist theory of democracy actually leads away from active struggles to democratize both society and State. I will argue that above all the left needs to (a) reject the myth of Athenian democracy, (b) in order to provisionally adopt what I will term a vision of full-fledged democracy as Lincolnian democracy (rule of, by and for the people), and (c) to use that theory to guide practical popular struggles to win what I call More and Better Democracy.
THE MYTH OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY IS THAT WE CAN RUN A SOCIETY WITH PERIODIC LEADERLESS MASS MEETINGS, AND LITTLE OR NO BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATION BETWEEN MEETINGS. IT IS A POPULIST MYTH BECAUSE IT CLAIMS THAT DEMOCRACY IS THE ABSENCE OF CONTROL BY ELITE INDIVIDUALS.
(1) ‘Athenian democracy’ is the vision of the ideal democracy that we on the left believe that we are working to achieve in society and are prefiguratively practicing within left organizations and events. Within today’s left protest movements, this is usually formulated as the ideal of ‘horizontalist participatory democracy’ (henceforth H+PD).
The Left Acts As If It Knows What the Ideal Democracy Looks Like – Horizontalist Participatory Democracy.
H+PD is referred to as Athenian democracy because of the claim that in ancient Athens all important deliberations and all important decisions were made in mass assemblies of all free citizens of the Athenian city state. Some people point to the same type of democracy allegedly practiced by the Kung and other ancient hunting and gathering tribes, or by the Iroquois or other North American tribes. Marxists will refer to the 1871 Paris Commune, or to the Soviets in 1905 and 1917 Russia, or to agricultural communes in China or to the way workers organized themselves when they occupied factories in post World War One Italy or in the USA in the 1930s. Baby boomers will refer to the worker factory occupations and student campus occupations of 1968 and the student power and Black power and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s, and argue that they practiced horizontalist participatory democracy.
(2) What is Horizontalist Participatory Democracy (H+PD) as a model of the ideal democracy that we want to prevail in the State in particular and in the society in general? How is it a populist vision of democracy?
H+PD is the idea that all important debates and decisions will take place in a face to face mass meeting of the entire group. There will be smaller groups meeting as committees overseeing the carrying out of specific tasks of one kind or another perhaps, or just ‘doing their own thing’ without respect to what the whole group is doing. But everything starts and ends with what I will call the One Big Meeting where, importantly, every individual member of the group has an equal chance to participate and to influence the outcome.
Participatory Democracy Athenian-Style Means That All Important Debate and Decision-Making Can Take Place in One Big Meeting.
The ‘participatory’ aspect is the fact of the One Big Meeting. The ‘horizontalist’ aspect is the idea of ‘no hierarchy’. More specifically, it means no formally recognized positions of leadership and no bureaucratic organization of the democracy in between meetings.
As B+J explain, a populist conception of democracy is one where there is as little distance as possible between The People and the Elite individuals who are assumed to always make the key decisions. For right populists, this means a Strong Leader who can read the will of The People Like Us and take action without being impeded by democratic norms or institutions infiltrated by the bad elites (at least temporarily, at least with regard to granting the policies that the people supporting a right populist movement want to be enacted right away). For left populists, this means transferring all important debate and decision-making away from any and all Strong Leaders, away from Elite individuals at the top of representative democracy structures and bureaucratic organizations.
Horizontalism Means No Formal Leadership and Little or No Bureaucratic Organization In Between Mass Meetings.
H+PD is clearly a left version of a populist democracy. It radically minimizes the amount of representative (indirect) democracy and maximizes the amount of participatory (direct) democracy. It radically minimizes the authority of any individual leader in the debate and decision-making processes, both in One Big Meetings and in committees of various kinds before and after those meetings. It radically minimizes the very existence of any structures for day to day carrying out of democratic decisions by bureaucratic organizations, which accord authority to elite individuals who hold specialized offices as managers or experts or workers with specialized knowledge and/or experience.
(3) ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ Hopefully, this is what most leftists will say whenever the sacrosanct common sense belief that is hegemonic in the overall left, that the ideal democracy that we seek to install in a liberated society will be Athenian democracy, horizontalist participatory democracy, is examined critically for even a very brief moment at some future broad left conference. What people will recognize is that none of the examples that I listed above are examples of an H+PD system of governance that existed to oversee economic or cultural or political or military or any other activity on a sustained basis.
The Left is Confusing the Kind of Democracy That Often Exists in the Earliest Days of a Popular Revolt With a Sustainable System of Governance That Regulates Social Activities Over Time and Space.
The Soviets and collectivized agriculture communes and worker occupations that led to worker-owned and operated companies and the civil rights and Black power organizations etc all failed to maintain a horizontalist participatory democracy way of doing the four phase process of governance: theorizing and problem analysis/framing; debating and deciding policy solutions; policy implementation and day to day management; and enforcement. This was not because some leaders ‘sold out’. It was not because a few individuals wanted to create permanent cushy jobs for themselves and get rich. It was not because the people as a whole suddenly turned against ‘revolution’. To the extent those things eventually happened it was as a much later consequence, not a cause. None of the spontaneous rebellion ways of doing things continued, because you cannot organize any complex division of labour type social activity with a simplistic Endless One Big Meeting and no accountable/replaceable leaders or bureaucratic organization (i.e. no specialized positions with different rights/authority and duties/tasks linked together in an overall production process) H+PD system.
All of the modern examples of apparent H+PD are examples of the kinds of democracy that exist in the earliest stages of a popular revolt or radical collective action, and only in those early stages. It is not even true for the earliest stages that all the important debate and decision-making (let alone the implementation and enforcement) took place in the participatory democracy setting. Small groups existed before, during and after even then, off stage from our images of these events. If you are a left activist, or have been one in collective actions that involved occupying a campus or a workplace or a public square, you will know from experience that much of the real debate and decision took place in small groups.
(4) In the rare circumstances where such actions were sustained over any length of time, or sought to spread more widely over more space, it is universally the case that the democracy that is created had to be based on a stringing together of representative democracy relationships – not a stringing together of H+PD ones -- between people delegated to do certain tasks and other groups and individuals in a complicated network or chain. It is not possible to govern any social activity based on endless One Big Meetings, if only because all of the activity to be governed takes place at a vast range of places in parallel at the same and different times.
There Is No Ready-Made Blueprint for a Full-Fledged System of Collective Self-Rule. Democracy Has to Be Invented By Diagnosing What Denies Self Rule and Trying Out New Arrangements.
The dirty secret about the emperor is that there is no such thing as a system of governance that works to oversee any society or organization on a sustained basis, even the smallest one that is limited to a single local physical setting, that is actually mostly a matter of face to face One Big Meetings, H+PD. Democracy is necessarily a matter of various links between nodes that are ones of some variant of indirect democracy, of delegation and report back. Even participatory democracy is lots of small groups, both in the meeting and outside of it.
It is high time that we on the left collectively recognized this, and rejected the myth of Athenian democracy, of the ideal democracy of the future being H+PD. It is important because the consequence of thinking that we already know how to further democratize any institution in the present society – just maximize H+PD – is that the left is doing little or nothing to wage pro-democracy struggles. We are doing very little to develop and promote a Left approach to democratization that can frame what is wrong with existing democracy in any particular context, and come up with reform solutions based on that vision.
(5) Why do we on the left so readily buy into the myth of Athenian democracy? Why don’t we work to develop a more sophisticated theory grounded in the lessons of experience, one that recognizes that most elements in any complex democratic structure are ones of delegation and accounting back, of communication and coordination, of clashes of interest and ideas and finding solutions that reconcile them – of mostly indirect democracy that always involves representation to and from somewhere else, even in our local face to face node?
All Democratic Systems, Even Participatory Ones, Are Mainly Made Up of Delegation and Reporting Back Relations Between Groups Dispersed in Time and Space.
We think that our approach to democracy is revolutionary, partly because we are confusing it with the ways of making decisions in moments of spontaneous rebellion that are revolutionary (or at least anti-authoritarian). Importantly, these instances of ‘participatory democracy’ are associated for most of us personally with the liberating experiences of being in a rebellion, in very large meetings and in even larger collective actions that make us aware that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves as individuals. We think of how our own consciousness (or at least our level of commitment) was radicalized by those experiences. We conclude that if we can establish One Big Meeting and One Big Protest experiences for the people we are seeking to win to the left, we will ‘raise their consciousness’. We will do so by prefiguratively performing a personally liberating instance of a future Democratic System based on the H+PD formula.
This is a category error. A system of democratic governance is something different. It is much more complex and spread over time and space. Parts of it have to be institutionalized and operated in accordance with explicit principles, basic laws, norms, organizational structures and procedures. Parts of it have nothing to do with structured ways of debating and deciding in elected legislative bodies. Parts of it have to do with phases of any democratic process that precede or follow the ‘debate and decide’ phase. All the work of research/review to develop theory and analyses that frame particular problems and their imputed causes precedes. All the work of enacting and enforcing the solutions decided upon follow.
Democracy Is a Set of Structured Ways of Regulating Social Activities. It is also the Right to Wage Struggles to Change the Decisions Made And/Or the Way That They Are Made.
(6) The idea of H+PD, of Athenian democracy, is a static picture of a single event, of One Big Meeting. It is completely unable to guide us in developing democracy as a struggle that takes place over multiple places and times.
Democracy is not just structures and procedures and techniques. It is also a constant struggle to do what I refer to as RRR (Rethink, Restructure, Redistribute), to transform unfree and unequal power relations and outcomes. Democracy is always conflictual, and therefore ultimately the opposite of anything institutionalized and settled.
There is a great deal of work to be done to theorize what this means. It is easy to accept the idea of democracy as opposition, critique, movement, conflict, protest when we are out of posts of power. It is more difficult to conceptualize for situations where we are in positions of power and we are trying to create and maintain a progressive social system that manages to maximize both struggle and unity, both opposition/challenge and debating/agreement.
On this subject, see my future post(s), especially the discussion of democratic processes that serve to recurrently rethink, restructure and redistribute with the goal of achieving ‘rule for the people’, better and better iterations of decisions that serve the general interest of all individuals equally over time.
(7) Democracy is also both a cooperative and conflictual process on an individual level. Democracy is a way of being with others in all contexts from the most informal and private/personal to the most formal and public. It is something that we want to encourage as a habit and as a repertoire of ways of working through conflicts with others.
The Longer a Participatory Democracy Meeting Goes On, or the More Such ‘Everyone Decides Equally’ Meetings Are Held, the More a Smaller Number of People Will Be Present to Make the Decisions.
Democracy is usually thought of as a right that groups of people are denied. It is certainly that. But democracy should also be understood as a duty of citizenship of any community or of membership of any organization. Most people will let other people take the risks and do the work (as long as they still get the benefits) even if they have the time and level of concern to participate. One challenge in building any democracy is to raise the level of sharing in the taking responsibility, risking etc that is involved in being an active contributor to a wider community.
One reason why One Big Meeting H+PD cannot be the base unit where all important debate and decision-making takes place is that endless meetings take up time and energy that most people (including the highly responsible, community oriented ones) in any community or organization will not have, given the demands of work, school, family etc. In addition, the actual process of democratic meetings may be exciting for the minority that are rivalling one another to be leaders, and to get their proposals adopted, but it is much less engaging for those who in practice are just there to listen and to vote. The longer that all debate and decisions take place in H+PD meetings, the more power transfers to a smaller and smaller number of individuals who are able or willing to attend.
Democracy is Collective Self-Rule. It Should Always Prevail Over the ‘Freedom’ of Individuals to Own and/or Control People and Things. But Individual Self Rule Is Another Matter. It Should Be an Equal Value.
(8) The H+PD Athenian myth conception of democracy is a naïve populist one that presumes that a democracy that is direct, where there is no bureaucratic organization or leaders to enable Elite Capture, will be superior to the existing liberal democratic capitalist State and Economy and Culture system, and will be readily embraced as such by The People. We think that we have an adequate theory of what democracy should be and could be as a system of governance as well as a process of struggle, but we do not. We think that our theory of democracy is very left – but it is actually very conservative in its consequences for waging radical challenges to the existing system of Western liberal democracy.
Holding on to the populist conception of democracy is preventing the left from taking up the task of developing a sophisticated theory of democratic governance and struggle that can be the basis for the left framing the problems of lack of democracy in clearly different ways from centrist liberals and the conservative right, and proposing consequently distinct solutions.
We Need a Theory of Democracy to Guide Radical Reform Struggles for More and Better Democracy. Lincolnian Democracy is a Good Start on Such a Theory.
(9) In a future post, I will present some of my own ideas about what a more adequate theory of the democracy we seek to build could look like, as well as suggesting examples of framings and solutions that could be the basis of left-led democratization movements. My starting point for a better theory will be my understanding of Lincolnian democracy as collective self government or self rule.
Rule of the people is Popular Sovereignty, the authority to make initial and final decisions that begins and ends all democratic processes.
Rule by the people is Participatory Democracy, which is understood as much more than just (large) face to face meetings. It is direct individual and group participation that makes a difference to outcomes in all of the many stages and aspects of ruling.
Rule for the people is understood as democratic struggles and structures that are created and recreated to arrive recurrently at better and better iterations of decisions that Serve The General Interest Of All Individuals Equally Over Time.
CONCLUSIONS
Borriello and Jager’s The Populist Moment provides great insights into today’s left. It suggests that, despite the fact that the left seeks major changes in the economy and culture, we have lost confidence in socialism or any other general vision as the alternative to the status quo. One symptom is that we have adopted a populist politics of seeking political democracy rather than ‘economic democracy’. I have suggested that this leads to at least three possible conclusions.
First, we need to stop lamenting the fact that our old conception of socialism no longer works for the public or for the left itself. It should be a central task to update our analyses of capitalism so we know where its points of vulnerability are, and to reinvent our ideas for a postcapitalist economy and society.
Second, we need to create Left Flank political parties (usually, but not necessarily always, separate from mainly electoral reformist social democracy ones) that give priority to building an ecosystem of left-aligned mass organizations and activities.
Third, we need to move past the myth of Athenian democracy, and recognize that we do not actually have an adequate theory of democracy to guide radical democratic reform struggles. See future posts for more on each of these points.