Anti-Democratism

The high school and student movements of November and December 1986, and the strikes that followed in December 1986 and January 1987, gave practical demarcations back their natural hegemony over theoretical differences. But as these movements were only the beginnings of historical action without any real conclusion, it was the attitude towards them, rather than the immediate orientations, that was the cause of the differences.

On the one hand, there were those who were prepared to listen to what these movements had to say and to respect their rhythms, and on the other, those who wanted above all to take advantage of these social reactions to apply their slogans and rigid analyses, (Many of these people seem incapable of imagining that their theoretical “enlightenment” gives them no advantage in principle over individuals who suddenly break the routine of submission and inertia, even to contest something as partial as a university reform project).

They give the impression of finding assurance of their “radicality” only in denouncing everything that happens. Nothing is equal to their extreme demands, among such “radicals”, some of whom even systematize this pose by proclaiming that they are thus “criticizing democracy”. It's time, then, to analyze this “anti-democracy” that takes itself for a supreme refinement of radicalism. The unpleasant nature of the subject justifies abandoning the “tone of proximity” for this time: only a polemical tone is appropriate for what has no possible relationship of overcoming with this society.

It is astonishing to see the extent to which the aplomb of anti-democrats goes hand in hand with a total ignorance of the concrete history of the various forms of democracy. Criticism of modern “parliamentary democracy” would have wide application to countries such as India, Nigeria and Brazil.

Radical” anti-democratic positions do not stem from a general historical analysis, but from a justification of spontaneous attitudes. It is these attitudes that must be described if we are to criticize the conclusions of these anti-democrats.

Their first distinctive feature is an avowed contempt for any form of discussion: like the militants, they explain that it's always too late to reflect and consult. In their view, any deliberation is necessarily harmful when it comes to defining the content and meaning of an action, since then we can only lose ourselves in pointless palaver and miss opportunities for action. Without ironizing at length about the paradoxical mania of these great subversives for chattering themselves endlessly about the details of the most confused theories, it's certain that this state of mind has some practical reasons for communicating itself: there are so few people who still know how to discuss effectively that there are even fewer to believe in the possibility of debates where words and deeds would correspond.

These anti-democrats therefore claim to want to “act instead of talk”, but this usually leads them to an activist and impotent confusion, with a pronounced taste for the fait accompli process, which bears some relation to the practice of all organizational specialists. The most coherent logically reject the category of “manipulation”, no doubt hoping to erase a reality with the word that designates it: they cannot and do not want to understand that this is a means of secret and impersonal exercise of power, and that it is therefore the weapon par excellence of all forms of bureaucracy (a category they also erase from their vocabulary, or empty of any concrete meaning). To justify themselves, they are led to develop paralogisms, the stupidity of which is closely linked to the contemporary degradation of language. To hear them tell it, there is only one form of “democracy”, which is reduced to a multifaceted superstition induced by the “domination of capital”. From the moment when individuals have to discuss in order to reach agreement, all would already be lost, since this would mean that they are separated by an alienation that prevents them from acting in an organic union beyond words.1 By using words as if they were signs triggering unmitigated affects, anti-democrats are actually participating in the general degradation of language, and are locking themselves into an attitude that is symmetrical with dominant unreason. The latter asserts, for example, that anyone who does not respect the established rules of the social game is not acting “democratically”: anti-democrats fall for this lie by simply reversing its terms: all “democracy” would be reduced to this established rule and limited to the technique of a formal, mechanical vote count.

This mirrored confusion manifests itself again on a question that is rarely openly addressed: the basis of their argument (when they produce one) is that they would like to maintain a minimal space for dissent and react against unanimism. They don't want to understand that the fear of division of the social body (or of a community of struggle) has to do with the times, and not with some vague reference to the idea of “democracy” (the very possibility of division is, moreover, the hallmark of any democracy). Rather, the “unanimist mentality” is the product of a situation of crushing social defeat, the mechanisms of which are still active. Anti-democrats condemn any collective action that includes a moment of discussion, because they see in it the reason for its failure (and if it succeeded, it didn't go “far enough” anyway, etc.). Any social movement that escapes the framework of established institutions is faced with the question: where does the circle of discussion involving the acts of the movement end? It goes without saying that this delimitation is of a practical nature: such a movement can only agree to divide itself over that which does not dissolve it. But this cannot be determined by a “reasoned” discussion, because such a process of direct democracy is born in unconsciousness, to uncover its reasons. Its birth is therefore not itself “democratic”; it cannot be discussed, it just happens. With their dogmatic rigidity, anti-democrats cannot understand that a qualitative leap must follow, and that the process then faces an inevitable alternative: to move on to a conscious stage, or to disappear into the game of various manipulations. Basically, “anti-democrats” pretend to resolve a living contradiction on paper in order to get rid of it. This attitude of incantation meets with little correction, for the reason that they want to believe that consciousness is already given, crystallized, frozen in their miraculous theory2 , which is posited in competition with this unanimism. Their tragedy is not that the established order can achieve materially what their theories despair of attaining, but that their poor vaticinations enviously mime what makes it strong. They would like every social movement to be disciplined and oriented towards the meaning they assign to it. They remain deliberately blind to what differentiates a spontaneous social movement from a limited organization or group.

Any process of generalized discussion is therefore seen as a source of weakened will. The “anti-democratic” vision in fact implies that the essential is considered beyond discussion, i.e. that the revolutionary process must obey such objective determinations that the proletarians embodying it would be forced to follow its path. Any contradiction is thus seen as absolute or devoid of all consistency, and there is no acceptable compromise in anything: reality must be totally rational, and theory will be all the more right the more it seems to abuse the evidence of facts. The “science of the world” is therefore given (or better still, revealed), and understanding reality can in no way be the product of a process of multiple dialogues involving action, i.e., constituting a moment when decision-making, made visible to all, would allow original solutions to be implemented, after the stakes have been explicitly exposed3 4 . Behind the idea of a revolution accomplished “without phrases” lies the naïve belief that everything depends on impersonal, irreversible measures. In fact, what matters most in a revolution is the emergence of many revolutionary individuals, i.e. people capable of facing the unexpected, innovating and improvising lasting solutions in changing circumstances. But our anti-democrats almost never imagine what is the presupposition of such pragmatism: liberation and the reign of freedom are not identical moments (when they suspect such a truth, they fall back into the Marxist rut of “transition period” theories).

Anti-democratic theses almost always reflect a hatred of individuals and freedom, categories which are also generally (see note 1) simply denied by our anti-democrats, to be replaced by that of community and determinism, where all hierarchies are grey. Their anti-councilism systematizes their hatred and disdain for any process of spontaneous, deliberative assemblies formed by workers or proletarians outside institutional control. The anti-democrats' main argument is that such a process in itself offers no guarantee of revolutionary victory. In their geometric vision, where the binary reasoning of exclusive yes and no reigns, such a process is therefore doomed to failure. The secretly religious mentality of these anti-democrats is clearly evident here: they don't want to see that the council form (whose genealogy leads to all the culminating moments of European revolutions) is a condition, not a guarantee, of liberation.5 This anti-councilism also has the enormous weakness of not being able to conceive of anything about the revolutionary process, and of leaving it to the opacity of the future to find the remedies for this unpleasant world in which we survive. Not knowing what content to propose or anticipate, they theorize its necessary absence, tending towards a kind of theoretical nihilism, in which all concepts are in turn “overtaken” by new and increasingly breathtaking discoveries. Since their fundamentally deterministic conception of history prevents them from believing in the existence of moments of historical creation, we are led to conclude that they are convinced they hold the right line, of which they know nothing, but which will one day enlighten the proletariat, who cannot fail to come to them.

All this is obviously indicative of an elitism that dares not speak its name, and pretends to disguise itself under the old argument of historical necessity. So you'd expect these people to seek to manufacture small competing parties claiming a monopoly on the vision of the critical totality. Herein lies the peculiarity of modern history, which has so mistreated all forms of militant specialization, and which therefore deprives anti-democrats of the support of their ambition. Unable to believe in the monolithic Party, they are forced to take the path of its construction, only to turn away from it again and again, oscillating between two unacceptable behaviors. Unable to abandon the habits that are the leaven of bureaucracy, they nevertheless stop in their tracks with more or less sudden bursts, and deny ever having begun such dubious undertakings. Their maneuvering is always without means.

All that remains is for them to compete for the abstract image of a critical totality, by which they claim to summarize and surpass all previous subversive theories, seeking to appropriate their prestige, failing to actually discuss or understand them. This is why they are almost always engaged in stormy and futile disputes, their mutual antagonisms providing them with that nourishment which gives them an illusion of existence: unable to link their criticism of this world to the surface of current events, these smug contemplators prefer to talk about their essence, and fighting among themselves over these phantoms, they believe they are fighting against the whole world. The inconsistency of their quarrels is betrayed by the incredible fact that they can never clearly name the origin of their differences, and must accuse each other of being the most devious form of modern counter-revolution.

For them, “theory” boils down to a war on words, because as good sectarians, they are incapable of understanding, discussing or admitting any discourse that doesn't pass under the caudine forks of their language tics6 7 . This fetish for words, whether positive or negative, reflects an overwhelming inability to adapt to the passage of time. The semblance of coherence in their assertions is ensured by the postulate that there is only one enemy, “capital”, which has commanded all of human history and encompasses all phenomena of domination (a category they also sometimes reject, substituting that of exploitation)8 . This substitution of terms is important, as it points to the basis of their absolute deterministic vision of history (only what had to happen happened): by reducing history to material production alone, they intend to reduce all social phenomena to a single “contradictory” economic process, which would turn the world into a nightmarish harmony, the terrible side of which would ensure that a complete and automatic reversal would inevitably occur one day. Those among them who admit that human history cannot be reduced to production alone, nevertheless reduce all social phenomena to a production/reproduction dichotomy, where the latter is read in terms of the former. That's why, despite all their tribulations, they remain convinced that their poor, evanescent theory will deliver the keys to human history, past, present and future. They still harbor the fervent hope that one day they'll be able to speak with unquestioned authority on behalf of that “invincible” power that others imagined before them, but in which they still want to believe - the meaning of history. Their unfortunate Leninism, metamorphosed into abstract and increasingly disembodied forms, seems incapable of ever overcoming its constitutive defects, and is instead strengthened by all the denials inflicted on it by reality. This is why it must be understood as an ideological system enabling its bearers to resist the world while at the same time becoming part of it, and not as a system of knowledge preparing and reinforcing action against it. The “anti-democratic” theories that emerged in the 1970s represent, at best, an involution from the theories developed in the fifties and sixties, which had accompanied a return to social critique in action. These “anti-democratic” theories will no doubt be counted among the minor aberrations of our time. In any case, their future is inversely proportional to that of emancipation movements.

Appendix

This theorized anti-democracy is endowed with an obstinacy that the current decadence of reason does not fully explain. In fact, it is based on certain aspects of a relatively ancient tradition that originated in Bordiga's analyses of the decade and twenties of this century. Without going into detail, it suffices to say that they served to recuperate the anarchist critique of parliamentarianism, purging it of its anti-hierarchical aspect, in order to integrate it into a body of Marxist doctrine, which itself was to serve to justify a very specific organizational practice: organic centralism (the “democratic centralism” of the Bolsheviks being judged as an imperfect solution to the problem of organization). This “Bordigist” current, catalyst of the Italian Communist Party in 1921 (which, with the exception of the German KAPD, was the “most left-wing” of all the parties to emerge from the decomposition of the Second International), was also behind the two most restrictive conditions for membership of the CI (their concern was to exclude all tendencies suspected of reformism or anarchism), and never had anything to say about the bureaucratization of the Russian party.

The Bordigists criticized Moscow for turning the CI into an instrument of the Russian state: in their view, the opposite should have been the case. This explains why they tried to create internal opposition during its inexorable degeneration into tyranny. This erroneous tactic (criticisms of the CI had already been voiced before 1921, and the repression directed against the Kronstadt revolt and the Makhnovist movement in the Ukraine could leave no doubt in a lucid mind), was sanctioned by Bordiga's exclusion in 1926, and the deliquescence of this current in the Italian Communist Party, a current that survived, albeit with difficulty, in Italian political emigration to France and Belgium. Until 1945, these people saw the USSR as a degenerate workers' state, and differed from the Trotskyists only in their much more pronounced sectarianism (which saved them from making many mistakes, but they did no better or worse than the councilist currents of the German-Dutch left, who had not needed to theorize the rejection of “anti-fascism” to stand on a ground alien to political maneuvering between the wars and during the Second World War). This strange criticism of “anti-fascism” already stemmed from an abstract condemnation of unanimist reactions. Interestingly enough, Bordiga himself had some doubts (which disappeared among his followers) about this, and he wasn't sure whether the victory of the counter-revolution provoked by fascism, or its mere threat, depended on class-on-class tactics (applied in 1921 in Italy by a nascent Communist Party) or its opposite, that of the “Popular Front”. The reference point of the Bordigist currents, which over time became almost as varied as the Trotskyist tendencies, especially in Italy, was always that each group saw itself as the exclusive nucleus of the proletarian party that would one day be reborn. Its absence was enough for them to proclaim that there was no revolution (as in Spain in 1936 or Budapest in 1956).

So they never criticized Bolshevik anti-democratism, even though unlike Trotsky they had not directly participated in building the power of the Russian bureaucracy. The concern of Bordiga and his followers was to set aside the principles governing revolutionary action, so that it no longer depended on the immediate contingencies of class struggle. This explains why Bordiga's texts have a typically mystical resonance: for them, revolutionary theory was born in one fell swoop in 1847 (with the Communist Manifesto), and they consider revolutionary only those currents that see it as a revelation. This goes hand in hand with their presentation of their theory as “the only science of history”: like all Leninists, they profess a deterministic vision of the world all the more so because they are convinced that their theory holds the keys to it. Armed with these keys, which resemble and have the same quality as the talismans of so many other charlatanisms, they claim to speak with authority in the name of this power, which is all the more irresistible for being so impersonal. Unlike the Trotskyists, they disdain to present themselves as candidates for the “leadership of the world proletariat”, because they are convinced that they are its ontological and “organic” leaders.

But the flow of time is merciless to such sectarian conceptions, i.e. those cut off from history. The course of events has corresponded so poorly to their forecasts that the various currents emanating from Bordiguism have sooner or later had to take this into account, if only in a veiled way. After 1945, for example, they analyzed the Russian regime as state capitalism and sought to understand it solely in the categories of Marxist critique of political economy. These benevolent functionaries of theory thus retreated into a ponderous commentary on the analysis of “value” so as not to have to speak of the bureaucratic phenomena they had before their eyes. It goes without saying that this worldview has always supported a fairly prosaic organizational practice. We need only quote Humbert-Droz, who was the unsympathetic “eye of Moscow” in the early 1920s, but whose remark has that “carat of truth” of which a certain cardinal spoke, to get an idea of their barely disguised elitism: “The International,” a close friend of Bordiga's told me, “is now on an anti-communist line, and it is the duty of certain leaders, when they see a serious deviation, to refuse to be disciplined. Some comrades are predestined, so to speak, to be leaders, and Bordiga, like Lenin, is one of them. Party discipline cannot be applied to these men in the same way as to other party members. Their historic mission is to apply it, but not to follow it” (Humbert-Droz, Dix ans au service de l'Internationale communiste). It's quite remarkable that, with such principles, these ‘Bordigists’ committed neither infamies nor notable indignities (apart from the lacklustre cuisine of the narrow sects in which they vegetated for decades). It seems that these doctrinaire prisoners of a few ideas had retained qualities of humanity and personal probity, typical of the old workers' movement, qualities to which, despite difficult times, they generally remained faithful. In this respect, they were not consistent bureaucrats, which explains why their history presents certain sympathetic traits, independently of their errors. Their modern successors, whether continuators or renovators, obviously lack this dimension, which depended on being rooted in the kind of social community from which the old workers' movement drew its strength. The link between this Bordigaist tradition and today's neo-Bordigists lies in a reference, generally repressed, to a group that published the journal Invariance in the 1970s, and which explicitly sought to update Bordiga's theories. The source of this approach was in fact a discreet attempt at Marxist recuperation of the critical theories produced in the fifties and sixties (by Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the Situationist International) as well as certain older analyses that anticipated the latter (notably in the texts of Theodor Adorno). Remarkably, the deterministic and anhistorical postulate, which took on an economistic aspect in Bordiga, was ultimately maintained by Invariance thanks to a transposition to a supposedly anthropological and in reality vitalist terrain. This transfer involved the simultaneous abandonment of all reference to class struggle and the proletariat (the new reference to the “human community” as the community of the species reduces social mechanisms to biological determinisms and expresses in a caricatural way the sorry truth of the Bordiga economist).

• 1Whether we reject “democracy” in the name of “community”, “class” or “the individual” (seen as “sovereign”), the approach is always the same: first, we make an absolute of a category, independently of its practical determinations, and then denounce anything that threatens its purity. The reference to the “individual” does not necessarily protect against such errors: rather, the criterion lies in maintaining a nuanced conception of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
• 2It is worth noting a strange convergence between these anti-democrats and certain currents influenced by themes put forward by J. P. Voyer, whose origins are nevertheless very different: by considering that any definition of a project belongs to “politics”, and must therefore be excluded, the former tend to make the apology of a movement developing without consciousness of itself, and therefore not needing a moment of lucid definition of its goals. It would be logical for this type of current to eventually come to explicitly condemn assemblerist processes and autonomous social movements that do not correspond to this vision of an unknowable social struggle. The likelihood of such an evolution is reinforced by the fact that their demagogy about “the poor” assumes a function analogous to the rhetoric of various Italian workerist currents of the sixties and seventies, based on categories such as the “mass-worker”, the “social worker”, the “precarious” or the “unsecured” (it's always a question of finding the subject of history, or its most active core, etc.). As far as the “voyeurist” variants are concerned, however, it's worth noting that they tend to present “the poor” as a class of negation, which can only with great difficulty lead them to a sustained organizational practice analogous to that of neo-Leninist researchers of the “revolutionary subject”. These “voyéristes” still have the meagre advantage of coherence over the ultra-leftists, since the former justify in advance the decomposition that must follow all their actions, and which should conclude all the reactions of the “poor”. They tend to preemptively transfigure all failures into secret successes.
• 3Our anti-democrats obviously don't want to know that the demand for the absence of all rules is one of the characteristics of totalitarianism: the word “totalitarianism” is also erased from their vocabulary, or used in an extreme sense. In their eyes, any social regime in existence today is “totalitarian”. They don't even know how to make the elementary distinction between the manifest totalitarianism of “real socialist” regimes and the latent totalitarianism of so-called Western “democracies”.
• 4Of course, any democratic process of this kind also serves to keep conflicts at bay by resolving them before they become exasperated within the movement. But for those who believe that open conflict is the only acceptable expression of contradictions, mediating differences through discussion seems a particularly impure solution. They get away with asserting that a radical movement shouldn't have any internal contradictions anyway.
• 5It's quite remarkable that this principled anti-councilism obliterates all the concrete characteristics of the revolutionary movements that have taken place over the last three and a half centuries: (a) The genealogy of this form of revolutionary organization leads to all the most radical moments of the great European revolutions (from the appearance of the Niveleurs in the New Army of the English Revolution, through the Parisian sections of Year II, to the famous Paris Commune, not to mention the Russian Revolution of 1905 or the European revolutions born of the First World War). This form, which has become even more complex, can be found in the Hungarian revolution of 1956. Traces of it can also be found in various lesser-known human revolts (such as the one in the Kenguir camp around 1955, so remarkably described in Volume 3 of Gulag Archipelago), as well as in the Iranian revolution (which in 1979 was driven by a generally underestimated assembly movement: see Peuples méditerranéens no. 129, October-December 1984). In fact, it seems that the more a population is atomized, the more it must, in order to react, move towards the recreation of deliberative and sovereign assemblies. (b) The council form was first social and political before being an emanation of production structures (see, for example, in O. Anweiler's book how the council was created in the French-speaking world). Anweiler's book on the creation of the first council in Russia in 1905). Even in 1917, councils (of workers and soldiers) had an essential social importance (in Russia, unlike in the rest of Europe, the councils seem to have controlled and organized city supplies for a time, which the Bolsheviks were quick to put an end to). Neighborhood councils played an essential role, while factory councils, focused on production, failed to reorganize it during the winter of 1918. But this failure, which occurred before the outbreak of the civil war that irreversibly crushed the revolutionary flow and from which anti-democrats sometimes draw arguments, was at least in large part the fruit of sabotage by factory owners and the Bolshevik party, which intended to rule everything.
• 6Their phobia of the word “self-management”, whatever the context, which originally simply meant “self-administration”, is also revealing.
• 7Even today, we come across a number of “sincere” anti-democrats who will be offended by the present developments. But by remaining trapped in the logic of an “idea”, these followers only add their well-meaning confusion to the layers of bad faith of those they so naively imitate.
• 8Adorno had remarkably analyzed this kind of behavior, in Minima Moralia: “To deduce the universe from a principle in order to put it into words: this is what he does who, instead of resisting power, hopes to usurp it”.