The Trouble with Democracy: An Anarchist View - Jeff Shantz

There is a saying, popular in anarchist circles, that “elections are the means by which we choose the sauce with which we will be basted.” For anarchists there is a deep problem with claims of representation made by any political leaders. Quite simply no one can truly represent anyone other than themselves except in some “best guess” approximation of other people’s interests. The limited access to politics sought by many social movements, whether through representational or policy reforms, for many anarchists, are at base, re-affirmations of one’s consent to be ruled, to have crucial decisions managed for them.

Moving beyond the status quo and effecting real social change requires, in part, a refusal to participate in dominant social relations. Anarchists call for a refusal to surrender people’s collective power to politicians or bosses. Instead, they seek to re-organize social institutions in such a way as to reclaim social and economic power and exercise it on their own behalf towards their own collective interests. They seek an alternative social infrastructure that is responsive to people's needs because it is developed and controlled directly by them. This is a social framework in which decisions regarding social and economic relations are made by the people affected by them.

Such an approach takes a firm stand against the authority vested in politicians and their corporate masters. It also speaks against the hierarchical arrangements that exemplify major institutions such as workplaces, schools, churches, and even the family.

DO-IT-YOURSELF DEMOCRACY
Reinventing democracy and what is meant by democratic practice has been a key concern of contemporary anti-globalization movements. Experiments with participatory forms of democracy provide living examples of people managing their lives without relying on state representatives.

As only one example, one might readily refer to the direct action street demonstrations, from Seattle to Prague, that have garnered contemporary anarchy so much attention. The famous “this is what democracy looks like” chant, which captured the public imagination during the big anti-globalization actions and has gone on to become a regular, even overused, feature of almost every action since, has always contained a double meaning. On the one hand it is a public condemnation of what passes for democracy under capitalist liberal democracy, in which fundamental decisions impacting billions of the world’s inhabitants can be made by a handful of rich men in luxury hotels surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by paramilitary forces. On the other it is an expression of activists’ understanding that the means by which these undemocratic processes are confronted and impede must be built on a participatory and egalitarian basis. Democracy is not what is happening in the luxury suites, parliaments and marble conference halls. It is the far messier, even dirtier process, that is happening in the gutters and potholes of the streets outside. As Graeber (2004: 84) suggests, against the dismissive tone of anarchy's critics: “This is why all the condescending remarks about the movement being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and this organization was the movement’s ideology.”

Rather than rejecting “democracy,” anarchists offer visions of a participatory democracy which permeates all spheres of life (including the workplace, schools, the family and sexuality). In the spirit of Howard Ehrlich’s “anarchist transfer cultures,” contemporary anarchists call for a proliferation of “free” spaces, places and practices which refuse capture within the rigidly mapped territories of States and legal authority. These “autonomous” realms of thought and action emphasize inclusivity, openness, and fluidity, against the temporal and spatial confinement of States.

Contemporary anarchists are also keenly aware of the dangers of majoritarian opinion in nurturing oppressive relations. Majoritarian democracy, in its origins, a military institution after all. Indeed, we gain some important insights into the military character of representative democracy if we look into the origins of the term “democracy” itself. Coined as a slur by its elitist opponents, the word actually means the “force,” or, even more, the “violence” of the people: kratos rather than archos (Graeber, 2004: 91). This is the worried vision of a populace in arms. Graeber notes that Machiavelli reverted to this sense of democracy in his “modern” notion of a democratic republic.

Majoritarian democracy only emerges where two factors coincide. These factors are, first, the sentiment that people should have equal say in group decisions and, secondly, that there exists an available coercive apparatus by which those decisions can be enforced. Graeber (2004: 89) notes that it has generally been quite unusual in human history to have both at the same time: “Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will.” Looking at available anthropological evidence suggests that every known human community has employed some form of consensus practice to arrive at group decisions. With one caveat: “every one, that is, which is not in some way or another drawing on the tradition of ancient Greece. Majoritarian democracy, in the formal, Roberts Rules of Order-type sense rarely emerges of its own accord” (Graeber, 2004: 86-87).

One might ask why it is that, throughout the world, relatively egalitarian communities have preferred to practice some form of consensus decision-making. The most straightforward answer is that in a face-to-face community it is much easier to find out how most members of the community would prefer to act, than to work out ways to convince, or compel, those who do not want to go along.

Participatory democracy, of course, can be messy, chaotic, slow and unstable. Anarchists are not afraid of any of these outcomes and, indeed, seem to accept them as acceptable trade-offs for the ability to take part in and carry out the fundamental decisions that affect ones’ lives. They are certainly preferable to the perhaps more convenient, but also more dangerous, alternative of being told what to do.

Indeed, representative democracy, especially where it is confined to a two-party system, as in the US, is partly a reflection of the dull conformity of consumer capitalism, which constrains desires in the permitted realm of market circuits. As a creative response anarchists defend pluralism and diversity in social relations encouraging experimentation in living and disdaining censorship. Not believing in the possibility of one “correct” response to questions of authority and power, anarchists encourage people to develop multiple alternatives through consideration of the specific conditions with which they are confronted.

The issue is not to make democracy “more representative:” The problem is rather that it is too “representative” in the first place.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press