Discomfort and Democracy
The other day at the protest we did a lot of chanting, including one that I favored over certain others: "This is what democracy looks like!" In light of my disgust with statist, institutionalized politics, I found this visceral affirmation of popular power gratifying. I see democracy as more than a recognizable structure of government, characterized by representatives and elections, but rather something to which rulers are subject, something they should regard with more than hokey reverance. In a system where a small elite exercise a sickeningly large share of day-to-day power in the world, democracy shouldn't be comfortable, neat, and safe to cordon off. It should be damn frightening to the establishment (the paramilitary presence indicates it is).
An essay I read at Against the War on Terror accurately frames my view: democracy has been turned into something safely moderated by politicians, institutions, and media. Too often our individual interests become aggregated by people for conveniently understood, rather than substantive, purposes - an apology for the status quo rather than a challenge to it:
This electoral democracy offers citizens the opportunity to vote various leaders in and out of office, but what it does not include is the capacity for individuals to maintain practical control over these structures and the outcomes they produce. A democracy that focuses almost exclusively on electoral politics has created a network of experts and strategists, who work to massage and shape the exercise of political voice. The recipient has no sense of what poll projections or horse race strategies amount to, but does develop the sneaking suspicion that politics has little to distinguish it from buying a car or choosing between retirement plans.
That general understanding of our political condition drove me to make the trek into the city, alone, and spend a few hours with strangers.
A Protest in Search of an Idea
And yet, in the cacophony of different agendas hollered, I couldn't help but feel a bit helpless at the protest. Right here was the most direct contact with the popular pulse I could get, but too often this voice reduced to virtual nonsense by the sheer outpouring of opinions. Democracy is great, but it rests upon the idea of a self-organizing population that can articulate an agenda around which to rally. Nothing could be further from the spirit of this rally.
It was almost a feeling of "everything not prohibited is compulsory" - as if I was there to support everything not "Bush" or "Allen". Which is fine in and of itself, but not an accurate representation of my heartfelt intentions. Indeed, the only thing which seemed heartfelt was the vague anger. Not even a genuine impression of authentic resistance was detected, really (for example, we should have been protesting that police presence as well - isn't that kind of power display as crippling a demonstration of authoritarianism as any?).
I'd be lying if I denied the bad taste it left in my mouth, because the narrow focus of what brought people out there was watered down in favor of an almost perverse inclusiveness. Everything was on display, from lack of funds for education and jobs, to local political issues, to Katrina, to the NSA spying program, to even some advocating "Old Dirty Bastard for president". While I don't have a problem with people advocating for those things, I think it's a bit disingenuous to use the war to elevate those issues (though, that too, is part of the character of democracy). Frankly, I was seeking a collective understanding of the urgency of the war, not some "outrage" around which I could move myself to anger.
I criticize an overly institutional conception of democracy, aggregating interests according to characteristics unconnected to substantive politics. Yet, this is as true of the protest as of the system I was protesting. To what strategy can we appeal in order to capture authentic ideas which make collective social transformation possible? Against the War on Terror's editors captured this disconnect perfectly:
The fact that participation is no longer tied to the possibility of social progress has created a second force in American politics: the obsession with doing, acting (what the editors of LiP magazine call "activistism"). This ethic says "do something," almost regardless of what that "something" is and what are its consequences. Such a passion for doing undercuts the value of ideas, purposes, or projects. It makes suspect the attempt to link action to a vision of the world as it should be, because action exists only in the moment, in the experience of doing. We see this trend in activisms of all kinds: consumer activism, shareholder activism, environmental activism, human rights activism, anti-globalization activism, etc., etc. All of these efforts share a single, basic message, which is to act or to protest in spite of whether you are entirely clear about your ultimate goals or even who shares those goals. It is this compulsion to "do something" regardless of political coherence that today creates such strange political bedfellows.
Recapturing a Popular Agenda
The appeal of the essay is the same that I have held since I started this blog: to discover a thread of truth in the disaster that is our political condition. Without this essential truth, any politics - radical or incremental - is reducable to process and "going through the motions". Protest movements are not exempt from this shallowness.
In our society, the vote, in effect, has become a Faustian bargain between citizen and leader. The citizen is begged to vote, only so he or she can disappear from the political stage afterwards. Just as importantly, it teaches us that politics is simply about the act of doing rather than any practical goals achieved by that act. It tells us that living a political life is just participating, "getting involved," instead of developing a set of coherent ideas that can form the basis for collective action and social change. Today, American politics is confronted by a decline of meaningful alternatives, and the activist ethic of "Vote or Die!" and "do or die" is no solution to this fundamental shortcoming. In fact, one can view the breathless call to engage as a product of this decline, and an attempt to conceal the emptiness of American politics under the mask of expended energy. This of course does not mean that politics should just be about thinking and discussing, but it does mean that right now the most pressing political need is to reimagine our collective choices. This can only be done if we interrogate the reasons and implications for action, and provide better accounts of what it is we are actually fighting for rather than just protesting against.
This is precisely what I think is necessary, and why I have always considered the online conversations in which this blog participates so important.
As the optimal consequence of substantive discussions, radical politics must strive to articulate these collective choices independent of practical outcomes. The goal must be to find a core value around which people can rally for specific changes. Indeed, our democracy suffers from a lack of overarching values - not in the sense that Christian right-wingers invoke, but in the sense that the organizing principles are too superficial.
I couldn't frame my embrace of anarchism any better, actually. To me, the movement for a stateless society is primarily concerned with identifying collective choices we ignore as a result of our subservient condition. To break out of the trap of coercive institutional society, we must discover ideas and form social movements in a manner expressly independent of the most superficial of all organizing principles: institutionalized violence, or rather, the State.
The character of this movement, therefore, cannot be accurately represented in yet another social ritual - which both protests and elections are. Only a reawakened understanding of individual responsibility and consciousness can form the athentic collective will we need to truly change things. This is dangerous unless a consensus exists about why we require the change, because otherwise the status quo will give us another cosmetic makeover. The most pressing need is a total recasting of politics, informed by a population comprised of individuals prepared for something that both looks and feels different and willing to sieze it.
Ultimately, that kind of introspection isn't publishable on a ballot or a placquard: it can only be achieved when we hold one another accountable. Properly understood, politics occurs everytime we interact with another human being, not in spite of any lack of coercion but, more powerfully, precisely because we abstain from the use of force. If that kind of politics sounds like the networks of cooperative endeavor upon which anarchism bases itself, and if it furthermore sounds like "building the structure of the new within the shell of the old", then you get what I'm saying.
The most pressing need is for a society in the original, essential, primal sense. Only our unique position in history makes that something radical.
Read this article
