When we on the left see a problem, be it in society or within our own movements, the solution that keeps coming at or near the top of the list is ‘More Democracy’. But when pressed to spell out what we mean more specifically, we add words like ‘direct’ or ‘participatory’ or ‘consensus-seeking’ or ‘deliberative’, and then fall silent. Our shared conception of democracy, even when confined to the level of general principles, and not applied to an actual problem, is vague and even simplistic.

This is a problem in two ways. First, the tendency to a ‘one answer fits all’ and ‘one size fits all’ means that our quick and ready answer of ‘More Democracy’ is covering up the fact that we don’t actually have a solution (and are not doing the work of detailed analysis to get one).

Second, we don’t really agree among ourselves on what distinguishes a progressive democracy from real existing Western liberal democracy. This means we don’t agree on what to defend in existing democracy when it comes under attack from the further right (The whole democratic system? If not, what parts? If yes, how do we defend the whole thing while making clear what parts we find problematic?). This means that we do not yet even agree on the foundational principles of a distinctively left position, that can guide the work of analysis, invention and debate, to start working out much more specific alternatives related to solving specific problems.

Taylor Says That Democracy is the Constant Enactment of an Ideal of Self-Rule

The preface and first chapter of Astra Taylor’s thought-provoking study, Democracy May Not Exist. But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (Metropolitan Books, 2019) help us to spell out both the principled differences, and areas of overlap, between left and liberal views of democracy. Taylor’s central thesis (which we will discuss in a future post) is that democracy is not ever a finished product or system, but is both a never-attained ideal and a continuous activity of enactment and re-enactment. For Taylor, the core of democracy is ‘self-rule’ (demos means people, kratos means rule or hold power – which is not quite the same thing as self-rule). It is an ideal that guides activity towards realizing the ideal, without ever being attained and solidified into a durable-on-its-own system.

A key reason is that democracy is an attempt to work out the tensions between a host of other goals that we wish to attain. Taylor sees these goals as a series of paired principles that contradict one another in any practical application, and thereby require constant negotiation and navigation. One binary set is freedom versus equality, and they are ones that we will highlight in this post.

THE MYTHS AND THE FACTS ABOUT DEMOCRACIES BUILT ON EXCLUSION AND INEQUALITIES

Western society liberals, notably in the United States, see their mission as the spreading of ‘Freedom and Democracy’ everywhere. This pairing is actually sealed in the name for what they are championing. Liberty and Democracy equals Liberal Democracy. They do not often talk about ‘Equality and Democracy’, let alone Egalitarian Democracy, and for good reason. Both today’s Western democracies and earlier democracies are in fact grounded in the principles and practices of systematic exclusion and inequality. Progressive democracy is based on maximizing inclusion and systemic equalities. As we will see, this is because, while progressives support many aspects of liberal democracy, we also give priority to categorically different types of both freedom and equality.

Liberals Talk A Lot About Freedom and Democracy. Not So Much About Equality and Democracy. For Reasons.

Take for example Athenian democracy from roughly 594BC to 322BC. The democracy was based on the exclusion of both the slaves living within the city-state and all those non-citizens living outside it who were thereby the object of conquest in war and enslavement. The high point for democracy in Ancient Athens was also a high point for its imperial conquests, and this is no accident. The democracy bonded the citizens together as what we today would all an ethnic nation to sacrifice together for success in war. See Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005) for many examples throughout history of the drawing of insider/outsider boundaries to create a distinct democratic state that wars against the excluded, the outsiders. Athenian democracy also co-existed amicably with various systemic inequalities within the city state, not just slavery but also inequalities of class and gender and race, among others.

Take the United States today as well as Britain and other Western style democracies. The United States democracy that was codified in the 1787 Constitution was explicitly grounded in the total exclusion of indigenous peoples, and in the legalized system of slavery for mostly Black Africans within the state. The premier justification for the constant process of conquering and dominating other states and peoples to expand the American Empire is the civilizing mission of spreading ‘Freedom and Democracy, American Style’. Indeed, the empire began with the ‘settler colonies’ that killed off most of the indigenous peoples, and then conquered peoples to its South and West as it expanded to become the 50 United States of today.

The Very Imperfect History of Democracies To Date Is Our History Too. Left Democracies Have Been Very Problematic.

In all of the Western democracies, the full rights of citizenship were only ceded gradually, starting by restricting them to men with a sufficient level of private property and wealth. It took a long time to figure out how to formally include people of all levels of wealth and income, and from all social categories, but to still ensure that the democracy was effectively controlled by the top echelons.

The left cannot be smug about this history, because it is our history too. We want a different democracy, one that is based on inclusion and equality, but our attempts to do so in history have often failed to be demonstrably better, and in many respects have been worse. We cannot ignore either the history of left democracy (reformist and anarchist as well as revolutionary) or the history of liberal democracy, if we want to avoid repeating the negative aspects of both. We have a lot of work to do to reinvent the left vision of democracy, and to develop specific proposals for institutions and procedures that will actually achieve better results.

Supporters of the Western liberal democracy model admit that it took time for the formal exclusions of categories of people from full citizenship rights to be overcome, but argue that they have now largely been overcome (They generally do not concede or address the exclusions based on fighting outsider nations economically and militarily to push them down, in order to enable their own nation to move higher up within the hierarchy of states and peoples that constitute the [American] Empire.)

Liberals Admit That Earlier Liberal Democracies Were Based On Exclusions. But They Do Not Usually Admit The Still Present Exclusions of War and Empire.

Liberals (and most conservatives) see Western liberal democracy as based on two types of freedom (sovereign freedom based on private property, and civil liberty) and two types of equality (equal citizenship rights and treatment under the law, and equality of opportunity based on a market economy). They also mostly oppose or deprioritize a third type of freedom (what I term liberation freedom) and a third type of equality (equality of results), precisely the ones that a left democracy would prioritize. And, as already noted, when freedom comes into conflict with equality, they will generally downplay equality of any kind in favour of the two liberal freedoms. (Actually the left is also more concerned with winning freedom (liberation) than with equality per se -- although the freedom that the left prioritizes is equality-inducing, while the two liberal freedoms are on balance equality-reducing.).

TWO TYPES OF LIBERAL FREEDOM AND THE LEFT GOAL OF LIBERATION FREEDOM

Let’s look first at the liberal and left freedoms. Astra Taylor interviewed many people for her book as well as for her documentary film What Is Democracy?. She asked them what democracy meant to them. The answers given by what appear to be mostly highly educated Americans are particularly revealing. “A political science major told me that she doesn’t value democracy much. ‘The phrase that inspires me,’ she said, ‘is the American Dream and that ability to climb’. Opportunity mattered to her and her friends more than inclusion. I expected them to see democracy and capitalism as mutually reinforcing; instead they perceived the two to be at odds in key respects: democratic demands, whether for progressive taxation or for more liberal immigration policies, would diminish their social and economic distinction [achieved through a capitalist free enterprise economy and ‘meritocratic’ channels to obtain credentials]” (p4).

What Is Democracy? Freedom. What Is Freedom? Freedom of Choice in a Capitalist Economy and Upward Mobility.

Most others said they valued democracy, but added that democracy meant one thing to them above all else – freedom. “The people I met usually defined freedom as the chance to exercize choice and get ahead… No one, not a single soul in the United States or elsewhere [that Taylor interviewed], told me that democracy meant [producing more] ‘equality’” (p17). “While equality was recast as a threat to liberty, freedom became reduced to the right to be left alone – what some philosophers, following Isaiah Berlin, call negative liberty, or ‘freedom as non-interference’”, including interference by decisions made by democratic bodies (p16). What it mostly means is non-interference with the unequal authority, power, status privileges, wealth and income that someone already has.

Taylor cites sociologist Orlando Patterson’s formulation of the three main types of freedom presented in his Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (Basic Books, 1991):

(1) SOVEREIGN FREEDOM is the right to do what one pleases to other individuals or groups.

In pre-capitalist and early capitalist societies, the power of the sovereign or monarch was an absolute unconstrained freedom to rule over others who were conceived of as subjects. Within a kingdom, the private owners of land, industry and resources typically had the sovereign freedom, grounded in property ownership, that was exercized over propertyless labourers of various kinds, including slaves and serfs and small-owner peasants and wage labourers.

In more developed capitalist societies from the 19th century on, liberal democratic institutions were established, and gradually became more liberal democratic. The French Revolution established a new idea about sovereign freedom as it applied to the public sphere of government. Sovereignty now lay with the citizens as a whole, and the rulers in the government derived their legitimacy from their apparent representing of the popular will.

The Freedom of Monarchic Sovereigns to Rule Over Subjects Is Gone. But the Freedom of Private Property Owner Sovereigns to Rule Over Their Subjects Is Unchanged.

However, the old idea of sovereign power continued in the private sphere of society. The capitalist owner of a business (means of production and/or distribution) continues to have the legally recognized freedom to do as s/he pleases with their employee subjects – except to the degree that governments adopt laws and enforce regulations that explicitly limit that freedom (which is usually not too much).

Historically, men have had sovereign freedom to treat their wives and daughters as they see fit within the family without outside interference. Patriarchy and male domination in virtually all institutions continues today, but social movements and democratic legislation have cut into this unconstrained freedom. Ditto systemic privileging of the power and interests of dominant ethnic groups over racialized others. The freedom of the dominant group is at the expense of the unfreedom of those subjected to their power and authority.

(2) CIVIC FREEDOM is the capacity of every citizen of a nation-state to participate in all aspects of liberal democratic government.

This freedom to participate in all aspects of the democracy, and thereby to exert some democratic power, is mostly as voters in free and fair periodic elections. But it is also as candidates for office, or participants in electoral politicking, or as members of voluntary associations that are free to oppose and criticize the government and to do advocacy (including peaceful protest) and lobbying for their interests and views.

Personal Freedom Is Liberation From the Exploitation And/Or Oppression By Those With Sovereign Freedom.

(3) PERSONAL FREEDOM is freedom from subordination to the sovereign freedom of dominant social groups who use their freedom to exploit and/or oppress you.

In other words, Patterson defines personal freedom as liberation from exploitation and/or oppression, hence I prefer the term of LIBERATION FREEDOM.

Liberal democracy favours all three freedoms but, when push comes to shove, and the sovereign freedom of private property owners in a capitalist market economy clashes with the achievement of liberation freedom, they tend to favour the sovereign freedom over the liberation freedom, or at least they do not actively push for the latter to the point where it significantly hurts the former. The justification for this is generally that a liberal democratic state must respect the autonomy of the private sphere of society. So they are for many types of liberation, but they remain as neutral referees that stand back and let the two sides in the liberation game compete to see who wins what. Social engineering (intervening on the side of the oppressed or exploited) is something to be avoided, because it leads to authoritarianism and to top-down imposition of social change.

The Rule of Law Is Intentionally Blind To The Fact That Individual Citizens Are Both Different and Unequal.

Liberals also support the second type of freedom, civic freedom. Indeed it is almost always what they have in mind when they use the term ‘democracy’ in the expression ‘freedom and democracy’. The word ‘freedom’ in that phrase mostly refers to the sovereign freedom of people in a capitalist free enterprise market economy to compete and to maximize profit and to achieve upward mobility.

TWO TYPES OF LIBERAL EQUALITY AND THE LEFT GOAL OF EQUALITY OF RESULTS

Let’s look at the three main types of equality.

(1) EQUALITY OF TREATMENT of all citizens under the law (the ‘rule of law’), without regard to their actual differences.

Difference refers to social characteristics (occupation/class, gender, ‘race’, sexuality, age etc) or social standing (level of wealth, income, power or authority in the economy or private society) or purely individual nature (family background, health, abilities and disabilities, personality, religion, politics, leisure activities, personal goals and ambitions etc).

(2) EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY is the right of all citizens to compete freely with others in the various ladders of opportunity in the economy and society, and to do so without being unjustly discriminated against because of their social characteristics, social standing or individual nature.

Equality of opportunity differs from equality of treatment because it is the right to upward mobility, the right to rise up as high as one’s individual ‘merit’ and effort will take one. It is the right to be unequal as the outcome of a fair competition. Equality of treatment mostly means that the courts and government agencies should be willfully ‘blind’ in the creation of laws and policies and in their application. It means paying equal attention to the rights of every citizen and treating everyone the same (as if they were not actually not only different but also unequal).

For Liberals, Equality of Opportunity Is Only Possible If There Is a Market Economy. A Welfare State Can Fill In the Gaps.

Equality of opportunity aims much more for equality in competing for positions and socio-economic outcomes in the economy and the rest of private society, not just in the public sphere of creating and applying governmental laws and policies. This may mean creating welfare state type ‘equal social start’ (e.g. public education and health) and ‘equal social insurance’ safety net type government programs. Such liberal policies aim to enable people from disadvantaged backgrounds to ‘compete on a level playing field’. The goal is not to create a high floor let alone any kind of ceiling, to make the range of social and economic circumstances that people start with, and end up with, more equal. It is to remove some of the biases and obstacles to an equal competition in various snakes and ladders games. The goal is to arrive at an inequality, a set of winners and losers, that is fair and is seen to be fair.

(3) EQUALITY OF RESULTS means (working towards) organizing society based on the principle of ‘From Each According to Their Abilities, To Each According to Their Needs’.

This will take a very long time to achieve as a real alternative system because there are tremendous constraints in terms of sufficient resources, let alone ways of thinking. And the left’s goal is to do this on a world-wide level, so it will likely require an actual lowering of standards of material consumption for many of us in the rich world (not just the rich and corporations) – a hard sell. In the short term, this means twin institutions/policies of PRO-ACTIVE REDISTRIBUTION and REDRESSING OF SYSTEMIC INEQUALITIES.

A Policy of Redistribution Will Aim Mainly At Achieving a ‘High Floor’ Standard of Living Worldwide.

Mostly, PRO-ACTIVE REDISTRIBUTION aims to fund a high floor of basic standard of living for all. Maybe there is a need for a legislated ceiling for personal income (five times the basic level, ten times, higher?) but that will hopefully mostly take care of itself because of the need for progressive taxation etc to fund the floor. (This proposal is neutral/silent on the redistribution of ownership and control of capital, land, natural resources, labour, coercive weaponry and trained forces, the media and schools and professional societies that produce dominant cultural and scientific ideas etc).

So there will be inequalities. But this is all in order that everyone will be motivated and rewarded, by the opportunity to improve the living standard of themselves and their immediate family, to do the amount of work ‘from each according to their abilities’ to produce and distribute the required needs-meeting goods and services. There will be a guaranteed basic level of living for everyone, but it will also address various special needs that differentiate individuals. Hence the needs met for each individual will be individual, and in that sense unequal too (how to gauge that fairly is a challenge too).

And, as Marx wrote (pp41-42), once our basic needs are adequately met, we need to organize our economy so that people only need to work as much and as hard as is required to meet the basic needs of everyone – in order to maximize personal freedom to not work, but to engage in creative and fun activities. This means ending capitalism which has an imperative to maximize profit and accumulate more capital wealth. Capitalism and imperialism are incompatible with building societies of maximum leisure and personal time around the world. (This leaves unsolved the issue of what you do to organize an economy that goes beyond producing the necessary goods and services to producing to meet people’s wants and desires.)

A Policy of Redistribution Will Aim Mainly at Achieving a ‘High Floor’ For All. It Will Take Lots of Working at a Job By Most of Us To Produce The Amount of Goods and Services To Achieve That. But the Goal is Also To Work Less, So We Have More Time To Create and To Play.

REDRESSING OF SYSTEMIC INEQUALITIES means working consciously to address the problems of inequality at both ends, working both at the level of causes and consequences. Affirmative action is an example of a policy applied at the level of consequences. Working on causes means doing the work of regularly studying all of the social processes and typical behaviours that generate the inequalities, and then coming up with specific solutions and ways to get people to support the resulting changes. All of this is very difficult to make work. We all tend to think of ourselves as innocent (indeed as victims, although no one likes the word) rather than perpetrators, as disadvantaged rather than advantaged etc. Every benefit we have was earned and we will tend to want to defend the institutions that produced those ‘deserved’ benefits for us (ignoring how the benefits are always to at least some degree at the expense of lack of benefits, or even actual hurts, for others).

This means that there will still be hierarchies of positions and ladders of opportunity in any economic or political or social organization. There will be inequalities in power and authority and income and other rewards in different occupations and social positions. There will be divisions of labour, so that people still do specialized tasks. We may be able to reform these structures to make them more compressed in distance from top to bottom. We may be able to weaken the effects of hierarchy on unequal power and authority, and create procedures of democracy that countervail. We may even be able to genuinely replace certain organized (hence hierarchical and horizontally specialized) structures with culturally valued and ‘spontaneously’ respected typical activities of ‘self-rule’. But this will take place over an extended period of future human history. If we can even achieve something like a long arc moving towards ever-increasing justice and equality (sped up by periodic ‘revolutions’) we will have accomplished a lot.

Policies Like Affirmative Action That Redress Systemic Inequalities Will Be Seen As a Threat By Many Non-Elite People.

I could now run through the standard list of left criticisms of the types of freedom and types of equality preferred by liberals (the first two in each of the listings above), but I am confident that you already know what they are and share them. And I have also already presented them in ways that makes the shortcomings of each apparent. Put simply, liberal freedoms and equalities do not address the inequalities and unfreedoms (the oppressions and exploitations) that are created in the private institutions of economy and society (and further developed by states).

Liberal democracy is something the left will fight to defend in general from attacks from the right. If history is any guide, we will fight to defend it more vigorously than most liberals. But we should do so by highlighting the freedoms and equalities that the left wants to build into a future society. We want a state and an overall society that are more free and more equal, as well as more effectively democratic, than any real existing [liberal] democracy is today. Let us take seriously the need to do the work of analysis and imagining, debating and testing out of very specific proposals for ‘democracy’ that are Taylored (I couldn’t resist the pun) to each specific problem that we are trying to solve.

POSTSCRIPT: AVOIDING A DANGEROUSLY NAÏVE KUMBAYA APPROACH TO DEMOCRACY

This series of articles about a left approach to democracy, and how we act in relation to ‘real existing liberal democracy’, leaves out a tremendous amount of context. Western liberal democratic states are dictatorships. All states are. Indeed (almost) all private economic and social institutions are somewhere on the spectrum from authoritarian to dictatorial too. A democratic political system exists in a good way to the extent that it modifies those dictatorships so as to constrain the ‘sovereign freedom’ of those with dictatorial (or at least authoritative) power, and the resources to back it up.

I am sharply critical of the present tendency of too many excellent activists and movement organizations to give priority to acting out prefigurative perfect processes of democratic debate and decision-making. A major reason for the critique is that it substitutes for building less perfectly democratic organizing structures that get us out in mainstream society organizing the masses of people to push for democratization of the state apparatus and of private economy, culture and society institutions. The ends does not justify the means, but getting to some actual social changes is more important than our purity of process in getting there (there is a balance to be continuously reconsidered and remade).

Prefigurative Democracy Is Important. But Being Effective In Organizing the Mass of People To Democratize State and Society Is More Important.

Another major reason for the critique is that those who are at the top of the state and society will use (and always have used) whatever coercive force they deem necessary to defend their interests and the institutions and policies that legitimate and maintain it. You can build up utopian colonies and countercultures of ‘self-ruling’ artists and intellectuals for as long as you like (or left wing electoral parties or radical mass organizations and political organizer groups) if the rulers do not feel that their rule is in any way significantly undercut in the short term, let alone threatened in any kind of basic way. However the capacity of rulers in the economy, culture and state to use coercive means (ranging from laws and policies that they ensure are enforced to more explicit uses of force), and their triggering to deploy it, is not any less in a state that is democratized in various ways than in one that is much less democratized.

(It is certainly true that there is less frequent, widespread and extreme use of coercion against progressives in rich Western countries than in other countries, at least since the Second World War. Some of that is due to accumulated institutionalized ways of resolving conflicts of interest more or less peacefully. But most of it is because there haven’t been movements that have threatened the system and the rule of the private society and state ‘dictators’ and their world system.)

We Forget At Our Peril What Happened To Liberal Democracies Before the Second World War. We Cannot Be Naïve About How Repressive Elites Are Willing To Be Today.

It all comes down to what the public will do when coercive means, soft through to hard, are deployed to enforce the interests of dominant groups at the expense of things that most people value, or can be persuaded to value highly enough to sacrifice to obtain or maintain. We all know this, at the very least subconsciously, and through our experience of life. Except that some of us in relatively comfortable circumstances, in countries with relatively free and democratic political systems, can be lulled into the liberal and conservative narratives that Western liberal democratic states are at a higher level of civilization and evolution than those ‘undemocratic’ societies that are their neo-colonies.

This leads us to another set of issues that are even more problematic for the left. How do we take away the dictatorial power of those who stand in the way of systemic social changes? How do we do it without ending up with a system that is at best a ‘new, improved’ dictatorship, and given the recent history of Marxist-Leninist states, more likely a system that may accomplish a lot of positive changes, but does so by creating an even more dictatorial one-party state? How do we respond to brutal repression and still succeed in keeping the level of violence as low as possible?

All of these issues provide context for any discussion of what the left should promote in order to win more democracy. In theory, we could peacefully build ourselves a perfect set of democratic institutions. But as our parents and grandparents experienced, it can also all be taken away in an instant, if we do not simultaneously pay attention to all those other issues of ‘context’.