Liberal democracy is limited democracy. Let’s fight for democracy instead. That will be the theme of a series of articles, starting with this one.

I start from the fact that today’s left has a disastrously wrong policy and strategy on democracy. It is a two track policy of supporting Western liberal democracy on the one hand, while branding the left as standing for The Solution to all our current woes in the form of deliberative and participatory democracy, consensus decision-making and Horizontalism on the other. The actual result of this two track policy is a pessimistic acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s claim writ large, that There Is No Alternative (Social System) to Western capitalism and imperialism, and hence no realistic short or medium term alternative to Western Liberal Democracy.

Margaret Thatcher Has Won. The Left Has Given Up on Proposing an Alternative to Western Capitalism and to Liberal Democracy.

I will argue that the left should adopt a different two track policy and strategy-tactics to win the democracy that all parts of the left (and indeed many non ruling elite people outside the left) can agree is the kind of democracy that we would want to build, if we had the power to build it. Put simply that is Athenian democracy, or what I define as “the direct rule of all of the people significantly affected” by a particular set of decisions in particular social locations. As a matter of fact, theorists of all political stripes from left to right agree on what the definition of democracy is, and it is Athenian democracy. The difference between left theorists and liberal and conservative ones, is that the left sees democracy as the goal to work towards, while the others consider that its dangers outweigh its advantages, and are against it.

The promoters of Western liberal democracy in particular are very explicit in stating that there must be three major limitations on democracy (see below). I will argue that the left should reorient our campaigns for democracy, away from the current endlessly backpedalling acceptance of Lesser Evil Western liberal democracy as democracy, to a policy of going on the offensive and raising demands for reforms that go beyond all three fundamental limitations, and towards Athenian democracy.

Spoiler alert: Athenian democracy is not participatory democracy, which is but one of many ways for people to rule ‘directly’. Setting the goal of building towards ‘direct rule by all of the people significantly affected’ by a set of decisions means something different and more complex, something that we mostly have to invent. See the second and third articles in this series (ZZZ and XXX).

REALITY CHECK: EVEN ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY WILL NOT BRING POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Before sketching what my proposal for a different two track policy on democracy is, let me do a reality check. Even if the Greek gods granted us full-fledged (Athenian) democracy tomorrow as our legitimated political system for public affairs decision-making, we the people would have neither the power nor the authority to change the world for the better (or not enough to prevail). Political democracy is a set of procedures that relate to one part of one part of society, namely the government part of the overall State. The left wants a democracy that applies, albeit necessarily in many different ways that fit each application, to all institutions in society – but that is a much wider issue. Athenian democracy was merely a political democracy, restricted to government as part of a State.

Democracy Is Not ‘The Solution’ to Unequal Economic, Political, Military and Ideological Power.

As the sociologist Michael Mann has argued, there are four main forms of effective power (where power is defined by Max Weber as ‘the ability to realize one’s will even against the resistance of others’) – economic, cultural, political and military. Progressive change is about transforming all four forms of power relations between sets of individuals (i.e. between categories of people, between social groups). Changing who and what is the government part of a State is a small subset of these unequal power relations that are at the core of all social structures.

All of the institutions in society, from the most apparently informal and personal through to the most formally prescribed and coercively enforced, are constituted by some mix of the four types of power. In this article, I will highlight the importance of at least neutralizing to a degree the power exercized over the people (and mostly against the left) by four sets of individual and collective actors -- Capital (mostly economic), State (mostly military), Government (mostly political) and Ideology (mostly cultural). Unless the power of the elites and privileged social groups that dominate in those four power systems is significantly countervailed (neutralized), there will be very little progress in moving towards direct rule by all of the people.

It is not a metaphor but a very well-grounded historical generalization that the principal form of Private social (power) relations throughout more than two millennia of human history is that of Master and Slave, and it remains the basic logic of unequal and unjust private social relations today. The logic can be reduced operationally to Ownership Enables Power/Control Over the Owned, whether the owned are persons or resources or technology, or, as is most often the case, a combination of all three (Persons using Technology and Resources to Produce Value for the Owner).

Ownership of Workers, Women, Racial Minorities, Colonized Peoples and Nature Is the Basis of a Ruling Class.

Capitalist owners of means of production buy workers and have total control over them during the working day as ‘wage slaves’. They have the right to all of the value of the goods or services that they produce. Similarly, patriarchal (sexist, male dominated) social structures used to be literally based on ownership of the body and person of women by fathers and husbands. The structures have loosened up significantly, but the same basic logic and power relation exists today. Systemic racist structures and policies oppressing African-Americans also used to be literally based on ownership of the body and person of African Americans in slavery and then legal segregation. While they have been lessened, the same basic policies of discriminatory treatment, exclusion, segregation and repression persist. Peoples everywhere have been conquered and colonized, meaning that they have had their lands and the people in those lands owned and controlled by the colonizers. Humans have for the most part acted as if they were the Owners of the rest of Nature. We have shown little compunction in forcing it to produce value for us in ways that destroyed and killed.

The left seeks to put an end to all of these unequal and unjust master-slave and owner-owned private power relations. It is these social relations that are foundational to what liberals call Civil Society, the private and individual realm that stands in supposed contrast to the public and obligatorily collective realm of the government and the rest of the State. (Neo)liberals sanctify capitalist markets as the source of all freedom. They lionize ‘civil society’ as the key dynamic element in liberal democracy. What most people think of when they hear the term is its narrow political science meaning, referring to voluntary associations that advocate for interests and ideas, and are thereby seen as the source of criticism and innovative ideas that make a government responsive to the people’s interests. Liberals fudge the difference between this idealized notion, of the free individuals innovating and advocating in an autonomous realm away from the coercive Leviathan State, and the social structures of capitalist markets and patriarchy and other power relations privately contracted between different categories of individuals. Both are civil society.

‘Civil Society’ Is the Zone of Private Ownership of People and Things. It Is Neither Mostly Free Nor Democratic.

Liberals are completely right when they say that Civil Society has decisive power in a liberal capitalist democracy. But what they downplay is the master-slave relations within civil society. They downplay the radical difference between the ‘sovereign freedom’ (freedom to exercize the absolute authority of a sovereign) of the master social groups and individuals that dominate in the various structures of private society (what I would refer to as the ‘ruling classes’, social classes/categories which are not just based on economic ownership but on all forms of ownership aggregated) and the lesser freedom of the subordinated. I will refer to these individuals and groups of masters as the ‘private rulers’ or the ‘rulers of the private economy and culture’ institutions.

My point here is that achieving a more radical and complete political democracy addresses only one sliver of power relations in liberal capitalist society. It will be central to my critique of the currently dominant left stance on democracy that there is a profound naivete about power, and where power lies, that is necessarily implied by that approach (I don’t assert that people are actually that naïve, only that the current approach to democratization neglects the need for what I term a Strategy for Power, beyond just achieving perfect procedures of democratic decision-making).

What is the Left’s ‘Strategy for Power’? It Used to be to Take the State Power Out of the Hands of the Private Rulers.

The socialist lefts of the past had strategies for winning power in civil society. With the partial exception of some anarchists (partial because they were obsessed with the State, and their strategies aimed to withdraw from the State, and to build what amounts to a counter-State), all of the strategies included ‘winning State power’ (by election or popular uprising) and then using State power to protect the left government from being attacked and repressed by the mobilized anti-left forces of the private rulers.

Today’s left has rejected the idea of winning ‘power to the people’ by getting control of the State and using it against the private rulers, to the extent needed to transform the economic and cultural institutions of society. We have put nothing in its place. We have no realistic Strategy for Power, no ideas for how to at least reduce the vulnerability of progressive movements winning power and changes within a range of civil society institutions to violent repression, and divide and conquer ideological manipulation, and simple buying off, by the private rulers. Winning more participatory democracy or consensus decision-making or Horizontalism is completely orthogonal to, completely separate from, having a Strategy for Power that protects the very possibility of moving closer to an Athenian political democracy.

A NOTE ON MY STRATEGY FOR POWER (so far): I have argued that the left should emulate the Mount Pelerin Society Hayekian neoliberals, and Billy Graham evangelicals, and early twentieth century socialists and communists, and build a massive network of thinktanks, media, schools, camps, weekend retreats and training courses, clinics of professionals and others providing (free) goods and services, festivals of the arts and sciences and social sciences, and sports and games of all sorts that educate activists and supporters of progressive issues in the core organizing principles of a new social system. To do this the left needs to come together in political conferences and spell out their basis of unity. Right now we should be capable of a unity that is confined to the organizing principles for a new society (see XXXX and YYY). The left is made up of all sorts of specific movements and organizations that will differentially ‘interpret and apply’ the principles that the overall left can agree upon.

Let’s Unite the Left Around the Principles for a New Society. Then Build Left Flanks Everywhere to Interpret and Apply the Shared Vision.

We need only do two key things: first, agree on the principles as a specification of our ‘core theology’ or vision of a future society, that we will interpret and apply locally; second, commit to building a ‘left flank’ within all of the activist and mass organizations that we work within. However formally or informally a particular left flank grouping might be, the people in it would adhere to the core left principles. They would lead in doing the work of agitation, education and/or organization-building (what I have termed AEO work) to ‘raise consciousness’ about the very distinctive left insights into societal problems and their causes and possible solutions. In this set of articles, I refer to this as ‘track two work’. This is not yet a strategy for power, but it is a precondition to studying, debating and deciding upon one.

THE PESSIMISM-BASED TWO TRACK APPROACH OF TODAY’S LEFT TO (LIBERAL) DEMOCRACY

Democracy is the central focus of a large proportion of left-led protests everywhere, both as a demand raised to governments and as the internal process of the left itself.

One reason for this is that democracy everywhere is under obvious threat from the ethnonationalist far right. A somewhat less obvious reason is that democracy is being gutted by liberal centrist governments who have been the main architects of world-wide neoliberal market fundamentalism. In both these situations, it would seem to make sense that the left would ally with liberals and any others to ‘defend liberal democracy’.

Defend Whatever is Democratic Against the Right. But Then Lead Campaigns for ‘More and Better Democracy’, not for Western Liberal Democracy.

The general stance of lefts in most places has been to ‘defend democracy’ in two ways. First, to protest that both neoliberal centrist and ethnonationalist rightist regimes (or supposedly left regimes like China) are radically degrading whatever liberal democracy used to exist, and to call for it to be restored (or, in poor countries, for the rhetoric to be matched by actual application of liberal democracy as it exists in rich Western states). Second, the left seeks to put front and center, in its messaging and in the ways that it organizes its internal meetings and protest events, the leaderless consensus-seeking participatory democracy that supposedly would be the core organizational principle for all institutions in a liberated society.

I think that both of these stances are highly problematic. The stance of defending liberal democracy, and/or pressing for more of the liberal democracy that rich Western states used to have, and that the left in poor countries would like to have for the first time, necessarily implicates the left in defending the free enterprise capitalism that is an indispensable basis of liberal democracy in both theory and practice. It even ends up aligning the left with The West, with US imperialism and its allies, in its economic and military wars with the likes of Russia and China, where it claims to be championing a liberal democracy that is allegedly an invention of The West and a core value of a superior Western Civilization.

Choosing to make leaderless consensus-seeking participatory democracy the dominant element in the left’s ‘brand’, and indeed the determining factor in its proclaimed ideology and political stances and in and its actual strategy and tactics, is profoundly mistaken for a long list of reasons, some of which will be taken up in upcoming articles in this series (see list below). The most important problem for the left’s approach to democracy is that it is a left-wing sounding figleaf. That figleaf covers up a disillusioned middle class liberal stance of accepting that the only democracy achievable right now in society, outside of the counterculture of left-leaning social movements, is Western liberal democracy.

The Left Is Bogged Down in Acting Out a Pure Ideal of Participatory Democracy That Empowers a Few Activists and No One Else.

My argument in this series of articles will be that the left should abandon its de facto two-track policy. Track one of the current policy is modeling a pure process of democracy in the left’s internal operations and many left-led events. Track two is accepting the inevitability of operating within the limits of Western liberal democracy ideologically and politically. Resigning ourselves to liberal democracy’s inevitability (so we get to the point of accepting that Western liberal democracy IS democracy, and that those that oppose it, on no matter what basis, are ‘against democracy’) happens because today’s left is profoundly pessimistic about the very possibility of radical social change, and more specifically demoralized because we no longer believe in a vision of what an alternative social system would look like.

Today’s left, even the left of the left, is mostly unwilling to say clearly that is against both capitalism and Western imperialism, and wants to replace them with a different social system (although we do criticize liberal democratic governments vigorously for their failure to live up to their own ideals when they implement uber-capitalist neoliberal policies and get involved in particular Western imperialist wars). Virtually all liberal democratic governments and theorists of liberal democracy are themselves very clear that capitalism is the indispensable foundation of liberal democracy. The left accepts that There is No [Systemic] Alternative to Western capitalism, imperialism and liberal democracy, TIN[S]A.

Let’s Spread Democracy to All Institutions in Society, Private and Public.

The left should have a different two-track policy. Track one: We should unite whoever can be united to win More and Better Democracy (i.e. whatever moves us towards what people of all political persuasions agree is Democracy – although liberal and conservative ideologues do not think it is workable or desirable -- ‘direct rule BY all of the people’). ‘Whoever can be united’ means to include people who do not necessarily support any of the rest of our New System social change goals.

Track two: We should build Left Flanks within activist and mass organizations everywhere (people who do support our New System social change goals on the level of broad principles at least). Those people will do the Gramscian counter-hegemony consciousness-raising work of agitation, education and organization-building. They will initiate debates and campaigns that win public opinion support for laws and policies that are ‘FOR the general interests of all of the people’ (even the most perfect Athenian democracy is only BY the people).

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS LIMITED DEMOCRACY IN THREE MAJOR WAYS

Liberals from John Locke to today’s political theorists are very explicit on one point, that liberal democracy is not and must never become Athenian democracy, direct democracy by all of the people, certainly not if the democracy legislates to undermine the ‘sovereign freedom’ of those who own people and things. Liberal theorists are forthright that liberal democracy is not and will never be full-fledged democracy. We should make that point about liberal democracy repeatedly as well.

Liberal Democracy is Consciously Designed to Serve the Rulers of a Capitalist Economy. We Can Do Better.

Liberal Democracy is quite deliberately a Limited Democracy. For liberals, democracy must be Limited Democracy in three major ways: First, liberal democracy is limited because the government must serve the interests of private property owners, of Capital, and the capitalist economic system seen as the zone of freedom and the foundation of individual freedom. This is encoded in the basic laws to be upheld by the courts and ceded to by all elected governments as the limits of their legislative powers. A liberal democratic government is Limited Government that must above all preserve the freedom of privately contracted social relations and not interfere unduly with their outcomes.

Second, liberal democracy is limited democracy because liberals believe that there is no need for non-State institutions (the ‘civil society’ of mostly economic and ideological institutions) to be democratic for the society to be a liberal democracy. What is necessary is that the non-State institutions of society be truly private (outside the State) and modernized (because they operate like some kind of market) and ‘free’ (ostensibly voluntary associations between individuals).

The most obvious example of where liberals do not require, or indeed seek, democracy is in all private corporations and other capitalist economic organizations (except for unions!). But they do not either require more than a very limited degree of democracy (limited to the representatives of the minority social group that rule using Roberts Rules of Order type procedures in their own boards and committee meetings) in mostly ideological (and ideology-shaping) institutions – such as lobbying groups, political parties, social movement organizations, NGOs, media, the arts, science, entertainment, churches, families, professions, universities, primary and secondary schools.

In Liberal Democracy, the People Do Not Rule. Governments Do. The State Does. Capital Does.

Most of these basically undemocratic structures (undemocratic because they are ruled by a minority social category) get legitimated as ‘free’ by declaring that they are lawfully constituted according to their own ‘freely chosen’ laws (culture of values, beliefs and norms that organize the institution so that it is functional in accomplishing its declared purposes). These are the institutions that manufacture ideologies and socialize people into acceptance of them, including the ideologies that not only justify but actually organize systemically unequal gender and ethnic-racial and religious and sexual relations. What matters most for making the society liberal democratic is that these economic and ideological institutions are valid exercizes of freedom of choice by people freely associating to achieve some private interest, whether or not there is any democracy. And governments are liberal democratic to the extent that they allow themselves to be influenced by the interests and ideas articulated by the (not necessarily democratic) Civil Society organizations.

Third, liberal democracy is limited by being indirect and intermittent (i.e. limited to the people periodically choosing their own legitimated political rulers, to electing a government that commands the rest of the State to enact and enforce its decisions under a constitution and the rule of law). Liberals believe that direct rule by all the people is not just impractical but is also not desirable. It is governments that should rule, not all the people significantly impacted by a decision (the left’s alternative principle), as long as all the people in the nation state or subregion get to decide periodically who the government is.

Freedom to Speak and to Organize Opposition Are Fundamental. But Private Capital Owns Most Media and Oppositional Activity is Regulated by Police and Courts That Serve the Upper Class.

The government must be elected in ‘a free and fair election’ and this requires the existence of a set of institutions that make this achievable – (1) a ‘free press’ and ‘independent judiciary’ enforcing the ‘rule of law’, which are respectively deemed free and independent insofar as they operate outside the control of the current government; (2) freedom of association for all citizens, including those who are outside the current governing majority, to campaign for their ideas and interests in order to have people closer to their ideas and interests win the majority in an election.

In practice, freedom of association, and especially association that leads to strong leftward pressure on the State or Capital, is often limited or even denied to certain actors, but at least it is understood as a right of citizens and that is important. It is not a problem for liberals, or for liberal democracy, that almost all of the media, including the internet and social media controlled by Big Tech, is owned by capitalists or that the judiciary is recruited from a very narrow section of the upper and upper middle class. The independence that is required for both media and courts is mainly limited to independence from the current governing party (coalition).

Here are the issues that will be addressed in the remaining articles in the series:

#2: More on Democracy versus Liberal Democracy. How organizing campaigns for More and Better Democracy is different from and better than both the left’s current two track policy and the approach of past (socialist) lefts. (MMMM )

#3: Why Participatory Democracy will be an indispensable part of the full-fledged (Athenian) democracy we are working towards, but it will nevertheless be a particular technique that will only work in a limited set of applications. (TTT )

#4: Organizing meetings that are ‘Consensus-Seeking’. Where it can work well, and where it is a hindrance to democratic debate and decision-making. (KKK )

#5: Why ‘Horizontalism’, although it is supported by many because it claims to address important problems in the functioning of real existing democratic processes, is a reactionary idea that needs to be fully critiqued and rejected by the left. (HHH )

#6: Ideas for More and Better Democracy campaigns that address the first limitation (that liberal democracy must serve the fundamental (long-term) interests of the private rulers of the economy and culture). (III )

#7: Ideas for More and Better Democracy campaigns that address the second limitation (that non-State economic and ideological (cultural reproduction) institutions need not be democratic, only ‘free’). (JJJ )

#8: Ideas for More and Better Democracy campaigns that address the third limitation (that the role of the citizenry is limited to one that is indirect and intermittent, to elect a government to command a State that then rules over them). (LLL )