Excerpt from Anarchism
and Its Aspirations by Cindy Milstein
These days, words seem to be thrown around
like so much loose change.
“Democracy” is no exception.
We hear demands to democraticize everything from international or
supranational organizations to certain countries to technology. Many contend
that democracy is the standard for good government. Still others allege that
“more,” “better,” or even “participatory” democracy is the needed antidote to
our woes. At the heart of these well-intentioned but misguided sentiments beats
a genuine desire: to gain control over our lives.
This is certainly understandable given the world in which we live.
Anonymous, often-distant events and institutions—nearly impossible to describe,
much less confront—determine whether we work, drink clean water, or have a roof
over our heads. Most people feel that life isn’t what it should be; many go so
far as to complain about “the government” or “corporations.” But beyond that,
the sources of social misery are so masked they may even look friendly:
starting with the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone of “caring” capitalism to
today’s “green” version, from the “humanitarian” interventions of Western
superpowers to a “change we can believe in” presidency.
Since the real causes appear untouchable and incomprehensible, people
tend to displace blame onto imaginary targets with a face: individuals rather
than institutions, people rather than power. The list of scapegoats is long:
from Muslims and blacks and Jews, to immigrants and queers, and so on. It’s
much easier to lash out at those who, like us, have little or no power. Hatred
of the visible “other” replaces social struggle against seemingly invisible
systems of oppression. A longing for community—a place where we can take hold
of our own life, share it with others, and build something together of our own
choosing—is being distorted around the globe into nationalisms,
fundamentalisms, separatisms, and the resultant hate crimes, suicide bombings,
and genocides. Community no longer implies a rich recognition of the self and
society; it translates into a battle unto death between one tiny “us” against
another small “them,” as the wheels of domination roll over us all. The
powerless trample the powerless, while the powerful go largely unscathed.
We are left with a few bad choices, framed for us by the powers that be.
Slavoj Žižek termed this
“the double blackmail.” He used this concept in relation to Yugoslavia in the
late 1990s: “if you are against NATO strikes, you are for [Slobodan]
Milosevic’s proto-fascist régime of ethnic cleansing, and if you are against
Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order.”1
But this choiceless choice all too easily applies to many other contemporary
crises. Global economic recession seems to necessitate nation-state
interventions; human rights violations seem to call for international
regulatory bodies. If the right answer, from an ethical point of view, lies
outside this picture altogether, what of it? It’s all talk when people are
dying or the climate is being irreversibly destroyed. At least that’s what
common wisdom purports, from government officials to news commentators to the
person on the street.
Even much of the Left can see no other “realistic” choices to control an
out-of-control world than those that are presented to us from on high. Given
this, the leftist horizon narrows to what’s allegedly achievable:
nongovernmental organization or global South participation in international
decision-making bodies, or for that matter, Left-leaning heads of state in the
global South or a Barack Obama in the global North; or the rectification and
greening of the wrongs of capitalism. These and other such demands are bare
minimums within the current system. Still, they are a far cry from any sort of
liberatory response. They work with a circumscribed and neutralized notion of
democracy, where democracy is neither of the people, by the people, nor for the
people, but rather, only in the supposed name of the people. What gets dubbed
democracy, then, is mere representation, and the best that progressives and
leftists can advocate for within the confines of this prepackaged definition
are improved versions of a fundamentally flawed system.
“The instant a People gives itself Representatives, it ceases to be
free,” famously proclaimed Jean-Jacques Rousseau in On the Social Contract.2
Freedom, particularly social freedom, is indeed utterly antithetical to a
state, even a representative one. At the most basic level, representation
“asks” that we give our freedom away to another; it assumes, in essence, that
some should have power and many others shouldn’t. Without power, equally
distributed to all, we renounce our very capacity to join with everyone else in
meaningfully shaping our society. We renounce our ability to self-determine,
and thus our liberty. And so, no matter how enlightened leaders may be, they
are governing as tyrants nonetheless, since we—“the people”—are servile to
their decisions.
This is not to say that representative government is comparable with
more authoritarian forms of rule. A representative system that fails in its
promise of, say, universal human rights is clearly preferable to a government that
makes no such pretensions at all. Yet even the kindest of representative
systems necessarily entails a loss of liberty. Like capitalism, a grow-or-die
imperative is built into the state’s very structure. As Karl Marx explained in Capital,
capitalism’s aim is—in fact, has to be—“the unceasing movement of
profit-making.”3 So, too, is there such an aim underlying the state:
the unceasing movement of power making. The drive for profit and the drive for
power, respectively, must become ends in themselves. For without these drives,
we have neither capitalism nor the state; these “goals” are part of their
inherent makeup. Hence, the two frequently interlinked systems of exploitation
and domination must do whatever is necessary to sustain themselves, otherwise
they are unable to fulfill their unceasing momentum.
Whatever a state does, then, has to be in its own interests. Sometimes,
of course, the state’s interests coincide with those of various groups or
people; they may even overlap with concepts such as justice or compassion. But
these convergences are in no way central or even essential to its smooth
functioning. They are merely instrumental stepping-stones as the state
continually moves to maintain, solidify, and consolidate its power.
Because, like it or not, all states are forced to strive for a monopoly
on power. “The same competition,” wrote Mikhail Bakunin in Statism and
Anarchism, “which in the economic field annihilates and swallows up small
and even medium-sized capital . . . in favor of vast capital . . . is also
operative in the lives of the States, leading to the destruction and absorption
of small and medium-sized States for the benefit of empires.” States must, as
Bakunin noted, “devour others in order not to be devoured.”4 Such a
power-taking game will almost invariably tend toward centralization, hegemony,
and increasingly sophisticated methods of command, coercion, and control.
Plainly, in this quest to monopolize power, there will always have to be
dominated subjects.
As institutionalized systems of domination, then, neither state nor
capital are controllable. Nor can they be mended or made benign. Thus, the
rallying cry of any kind of leftist or progressive activism that accepts the
terms of the nation-state and/or capitalism is ultimately only this: “No
exploitation without representation! No domination without representation!”
Direct democracy, on the other hand, is completely at odds with both the
state and capitalism. For as “rule of the people” (the etymological root of
democracy), democracy’s underlying logic is essentially the unceasing movement
of freedom making. And freedom, as we have seen, must be jettisoned in even the
best of representative systems.
Not coincidentally, direct democracy’s opponents have generally been
those in power. Whenever the people spoke—as in the majority of those who were
disenfranchised, disempowered, or even starved—it usually took a revolution to
work through a “dialogue” about democracy’s value. As a direct form of
governance, therefore, democracy can be nothing but a threat to those small
groups who wish to rule over others: whether they be monarchs, aristocrats,
dictators, or even federal administrations as in the United States.
Indeed, we forget that democracy finds its radical edge in the great
revolutions of the past, the American Revolution included. Given that the
United States is held up as the pinnacle of democracy, it seems particularly
appropriate to hark back to those strains of a radicalized democracy that
fought so valiantly and lost so crushingly in the American Revolution. We need
to take up that unfinished project—of struggling for “a free life in the free
city,” in contrast to accepting “the state” as the only form of government, as
Peter Kropotkin argued in his book of the same name—if we have any hope of
contesting domination itself.5
This does not mean that the numerous injustices tied to the founding of
the United States should be ignored or, to use a particularly appropriate word,
whitewashed. The fact that native peoples, blacks, women, and others were (and
often continue to be) exploited, brutalized, and/or murdered wasn’t just a
sideshow to the historic event that created this country. Any movement for
direct democracy has to grapple with the relation between this oppression and
the liberatory moments of the American Revolution.
At the same time, one needs to view the revolution in the context of its
times and ask, In what ways was it an advance? Did it offer glimpses of new
freedoms, ones that we should ultimately extend to everyone? Like all the great
modern revolutions, the American Revolution spawned a politics based on
face-to-face assemblies confederated within and between cities.
“American democratic polity was developed out of genuine community life.
. . . The township or some not much larger area was the political unit, the
town meeting the political medium, and roads, schools, the peace of the
community, were the political objectives,” according to John Dewey in The
Public and Its Problems.6 This outline of self-governance did
not suddenly appear in 1776. It literally arrived with the first settlers, who
in being freed from the bonds of Old World authority, decided to constitute the
rules of their society anew in the Mayflower Compact. This and a host of other
subsequent compacts were considered mutual promises—of both rights and
duties—on the part of each person to their community—a promise initially
emanating out of newfound egalitarian religious values. The idea caught on, and
many New England villages drafted their own charters and institutionalized
direct democracy through town meetings, where citizens met regularly to
determine their community’s public policy and needs.
Participating in the debates, deliberations, and decisions of one’s
community became part of a full and vibrant life; it not only gave colonists
(albeit mostly men, and albeit as settlers) the experience and institutions
that would later support their revolution but also a tangible form of freedom
worth fighting for. Hence, they struggled to preserve control over their daily
lives: first with the British over independence, and later, among themselves
over competing forms of governance. The final constitution, of course, set up a
federal republic not a direct democracy. But before, during, and after the
revolution, time and again, town meetings, confederated assemblies, and
militias either exerted their established powers of self-management or created
new ones when they were blocked—in both legal and extralegal
institutions—becoming ever more radical in the process.
Those of us living in the United States have inherited this
self-schooling in direct democracy, even if only in vague echoes like New
Hampshire’s “live free or die” motto or Vermont’s yearly Town Meeting Day. Such
institutional and cultural fragments, however, bespeak deep-seated values that
many still hold dear: independence, initiative, liberty, equality. They
continue to create a very real tension between grassroots self-governance and
top-down representation—a tension that we, as modern-day revolutionaries, need
to build on.
Such values resonate through the history of the U.S. libertarian Left:
ranging from late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century experiments in utopian
communities and labor organizing; to the civil rights movement starting in the
mid-1950s; to the Black Power, American Indian, radical feminist, and queer liberation
movements’ struggles for social freedom as well as the Students for a
Democratic Society’s demands for a participatory democracy in the 1960s; to the
anarchist-inspired affinity group and spokescouncil organizing of the 1970s’
antinuke movement; and then again with the anticapitalist movement’s mass
direct actions in the 1990s and early 2000s. In both its principles and
practices, antiauthoritarian leftists in the United States have been inventive
and dynamic, particularly in the postwar era. We’ve challenged multiple “isms,”
calling into question old privileges and dangerous exclusions. We’ve created a
culture within our own organizations that nearly mandates, even if it doesn’t
always work, an internally democratic process. We’re pretty good at organizing
everything from demonstrations to counterinstitutions.
This is not to romanticize the past or present work of the libertarian
Left; rather, it is to point out that we, too, haven’t lacked a striving for
the values underpinning this country’s birth. Then and now, however, one of our
biggest mistakes has been to ignore politics per se—that is, the need for a
guaranteed place for freedom to emerge.
The Clash sang years ago of “rebels dancing on air,” and it seems we
have modeled our political struggles on this. We may feel free or powerful in
the streets or during building occupations, at our infoshops, and within our
collective meetings, but this is a momentary and often private sensation. It
allows us to be political, as in reacting to, opposing, countering, or even
trying to work outside public policy. But it does not let us do politics, as in
making public policy itself. It is only “freedom from” those things we don’t
like, or more accurately, liberation.
“Liberation and freedom are not the same,” contended Hannah Arendt in On
Revolution. Certainly, liberation is a basic necessity: people need to be
free from harm, hunger, and hatred. But liberation falls far short of freedom.
If we are ever to fulfill both our needs and desires, if we are ever to take
control of our lives, each and every one of us needs the “freedom to”
self-develop—individually, socially, and politically. As Arendt added,
“[Liberation] is incapable of even grasping, let alone realizing, the central
idea of revolution, which is the foundation of freedom.”7
The revolutionary question becomes: Where do decisions that affect
society as a whole get made? For this is where power resides. It is time that
we rediscover the “lost treasure” that arises spontaneously during all
revolutions—the council, in all its imaginative varieties—as the basis for
constituting places of power for everyone.8 For only when we all
have equal and ongoing access to participate in the space where public policy
is made—the political sphere—will freedom have a fighting chance to gain a
footing.
Montesquieu, one of the most influential theorists for the American
revolutionists, tried to wrestle with “the constitution of political freedom”
in his monumental The Spirit of the Laws.9 He came to the
conclusion that “power must check power.”10 In the postrevolutionary
United States, this idea eventually made its way into the Constitution as a
system of checks and balances. Yet Montesquieu’s notion was much more
expansive, touching on the very essence of power itself. The problem is not
power per se but rather power without limits. Or to press Montesquieu’s concept,
the problem is power as an end in itself. Power needs to be forever linked to
freedom; freedom needs to be the limit placed on power. Tom Paine, for one,
brought this home to the American Revolution in The Rights of Man:
“Government on the old system is an assumption of power for the aggrandizement
of itself; on the new, a delegation of power for the common benefit of
society.”11
If freedom is the social aim, power must be held horizontally. We must
all be both rulers and ruled simultaneously, or a system of rulers and subjects
is the only alternative. We must all hold power equally in our hands if freedom
is to coexist with power. Freedom, in other words, can only be maintained
through a sharing of political power, and this sharing happens through
political institutions. Rather than being made a monopoly, power should be
distributed to us all, thereby allowing all our varied “powers” (of reason,
persuasion, decision making, and so on) to blossom. This is the power to create
rather than dominate.
Of course, institutionalizing direct democracy assures only the barest
bones of a free society. Freedom is never a done deal, nor is it a fixed
notion. New forms of domination will probably always rear their ugly heads. Yet
minimally, directly democratic institutions open a public space in which
everyone, if they so choose, can come together in a deliberative and
decision-making body; a space where everyone has the opportunity to persuade
and be persuaded; a space where no discussion or decision is ever hidden, and
where it can always be returned to for scrutiny, accountability, or rethinking.
Embryonic within direct democracy, if only to function as a truly open
policymaking mechanism, are values such as equality, diversity, cooperation,
and respect for human worth—hopefully, the building blocks of a liberatory
ethics as we begin to self-manage our communities, the economy, and society in
an ever-widening circle of confederated assemblies.
As a practice, direct democracy will have to be learned. As a principle,
it will have to undergird all decision making. As an institution, it will have
to be fought for. It will not appear magically overnight. It will instead
emerge little by little out of struggles to, as Murray Bookchin phrased it,
“democratize our republic and radicalize our democracy.”12
We must infuse all our political activities with politics. It is time to
call for a second “American Revolution,” but this time, one that breaks the
bonds of nation-states, one that knows no borders or masters, and one that
draws the potentiality of libertarian self-governance to its limits, fully
enfranchising all with the power to act democratically. This begins with
reclaiming the word democracy itself—not as a better version of representation
but as a radical process to directly remake our world.
