Links:
- Mutual Exchange on “Anarchy and Democracy” (my contributions) (2017)
The most recent issue of Anarcho-Syndicalist Review includes an article by Wayne Price, “Do Anarchists Support Democracy? The Opinions of Errico Malatesta,” in which he once again takes up the defense of “democracy” as at least consistent with anarchist principles. A brief discussion of the article on the North American Anarchist Studies Association list picked up threads from the 2017 C4SS “Mutual Exchange” on anarchy and democracy.
Now, I will admit that I am not terribly concerned about what Malatesta believed about “democracy.” I suspect that, among the reasons that so many of us return so often to the writings of Malatesta, the kind of theoretical clarity and consistency called for in a case like this is not high on the list — or shouldn’t be, if we gave his often occasional work the specific kinds of respect that it deserves. I’m also not even going to try to conceal my increasing exhaustion with this particular debate, which, for all of the years that it has dragged on and all the ink and pixels spilled in its course, seems to underperform dramatically when it comes to producing clarity. But I don’t disagree with Wayne when he says, in this new essay, that:
In the current U.S.political crisis it is vital for anarchists and other radicals to be clear about their view of democracy.
So I am going to document at least some of what I said in the recent exchange on the NAASN list, in the form of one of those “one-sided conversations” that I have posted here from time to time. For the other “side,” Wayne’s essay seems like the strongest statement. Unless otherwise notes, the material I am responding to is from that essay.
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first response
This is not a time to be unclear about our opinion of democracy.
This is certainly true, but it would seem to me that being clear about democracy demands more consistency in its definition. Unless you are proposing an entirely novel sort of “democracy,” which won’t have much to do with our historical debates, it seems necessary to acknowledge that the subordination of minorities by majorities — or of marginalized groups by those who find themselves in the position to speak as “the People” — is precisely what democracy is, has been and is likely to continue to be. Nothing compels us to salvage democracy — particularly as we have anarchy as an alternative to both democracy and dictatorship.
Malatesta was against any kind of state, “neither for a majority nor for a minority government.” However, he did not see a stateless society as a heap of unattached atoms which might or might not choose to form temporary alliances. “Organization, which is, after all, only the practice of co-operation and solidarity, is a natural and necessary condition of social life….” (Malatesta 1984; p. 83) He argued against individualist-anarchists and anti-organizational communist-anarchists on this issue.
The [most significant] problem in these debates really seems to be a peculiar notion of “organization,” which, we might argue, is not the one that Malatesta is presenting here. If, after all, “organization” is indeed “only the practice of cooperation and solidarity,” then painting the critics of democracy, the historical anarchist individualists, even the contextually “anti-organizational” factions (communist anarchists in Malatesta’s day, critics of platforms (etc.) in the present as against organization is almost certainly a mistake or sectarian smear. This vision of “society as a heap of unattached atoms which might or might not choose to form temporary alliances” is maddeningly dismissive, but if you strip it of the obviously derisive bits (“unattached atoms”) and consider the dynamics of a meaningfully voluntary society, how much difference are you likely to find between the resulting relations and social relations based on “only the practice of cooperation and solidarity”?
If we don’t imagine that the critics of democracy are nincompoops who deny all social connection and won’t, by definition, “get things done,” we can take the bold step of imagining them — us, most people who would bother to embrace anarchism — as capable of practicing cooperation and solidarity, thus as capable and perhaps even prone to “organization.” And if the definition of “organization” as “only the practice of cooperation and solidarity” is indeed adequate — if there is no necessity of the interests of “the People” superseding those of individual persons — then we can leave democracy its pride of place as “better than dictatorship” and focus our own, anarchistic thought on how to foster the specific kinds of cooperation and solidarity that allow us to get done the things we need or desire to get done in a consistently non-governmental society.
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In Wayne’s first response, the points that I chose to respond to were:
- That my suggestion that “we can leave democracy its pride of place as ‘better than dictatorship’” is “dismissive of democracy;”
- That “radical democracy” can be defined as “collective self-management;”
- That my suggestion that “the subordination of minorities by majorities … is precisely what democracy is, has been and is likely to continue to be” somehow misrepresents what is essential to democracy; and, finally,
- That my suggestion that anarchists “focus our own, anarchistic thought on how to foster the specific kinds of cooperation and solidarity that allow us to get done the things we need or desire to get done….” invokes unknown principles and practices, while ignoring the available “democratic procedures for collective self-rule.”
Regarding the third point, Wayne has posted his response to me on social media already, so I’ll simply post that material, but, just so that the context is clear, here is the part of the original article that I was responding to when I made the claim:
The freedoms of minorities against majorities is an essential part of democracy. Freedom of religion, of speech, of reproductive choice, of “the pursuit of happiness,” are all minority — in fact individual — rights. The majority should not tell individuals or small groups what to do in matter which do not require collective action.
To be clear, what remains objectionable in this vision of political organization is that majorities only seem to be prevented from pushing around minorities “in matters which do not require collective action.” As loopholes go, the “necessity” of “collective action” seems a rather large one for anarchists to accept without considerable clarification. — Those who know my work on the rejection of the polity-form will understand the depth of my reservations, but I expect that is far from the only reason for anarchists to raise objections.
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second response
I am not being “dismissive” of democracy. Democracy is certainly worth of consideration. I am not even being dismissive of what I take to be either confused or opportunistic treatments of democracy, as the stakes seem to be too high for that. I am, after considerable consideration, a committed critic of democracy — a position that does not seem in any way undermined by the rather spectacular, ongoing failures of at least nominally democratic institutions all around us. So, if you meet me on the ground that I staked out in my response — the search for clarity on the question of democracy — dropping this potentially dismissive characterization of my critique as dismissal, we seem to be in limited agreement to begin here — you, me, and the ghost of poor old Malatesta, which must be tired of being dragged around by all of us these day — in admitting that democracy is better than dictatorship. Hopefully, we are all also in agreement that “better than dictatorship” is a strikingly low bar.
Is there anything about “collective self-management” that forces an embrace of “democracy” on us? In some ways, this feels like a step back from the earlier definition of “organization” as “only the practice of cooperation and solidarity.” Originally, the critique of the critics of democracy seemed to be that we couldn’t organize at all, because of some atomistic notion of social relations — and that critique seemed likely to fall the moment some actual person stepped in to fill the shoes of “critic of democracy.” And I guess I don’t see any reason to think that my consistent critique of democracy in any way prevents me from taking the step to “collective self-management,” provided there is nothing implied there beyond “the practice of cooperation and solidarity.” I don’t yet see any way in which I am forced to consider myself a proponent of democracy, despite myself, presumably because cooperation and solidarity demand or entail some core “democratic” values or practices, which would be “democratic” across some range of “libertarian” and “authoritarian” forms of democracy.
That core simply doesn’t seem to exist — or else it is an artefact of some still uncertain definition of “the People.” Through years of these discussions, no anarchist defender of democracy has even suggested any likely candidate for that fundamental element, which would cross the archy / anarchy divide.
To Shawn, “the subordination of minorities by majorities … is precisely what democracy is, has been and is likely to continue to be.” But what is this “subordination of minorities by majorities”? Suppose the members of an organization (a stamp collectors’ club or a steel factory’s workers’ council) have an issue. They meet to discuss it. Different opinions are raised. Maybe papers are written. There is a thorough discussion, perhaps for an hour, perhaps over days. All opinions are heard, everyone gets a say, all are heard. Minds are made up. Finally most of the association agrees on a course of action, while some do not agree. Those who disagree—the minority—do not find the popular opinion—the majority—to be so wrong that they would have to split. Since something must be done, the decision of most members will be carried out. On the next discussion, those who were in the minority here may well be in the majority. I deny that this is “subordination of minorities by majorities.” It is collective freedom—democracy.
Perhaps it is naive or unreasonable of me, but I would like to think that we could dispense with any equivocation about systemic subordination in anarchistic circles. It seems to me that, indeed, some defenders of democracy, in or adjacent to our circles, have been fairly clear about the presumed need for majority rule in all but name — Bookchin being the most obvious case here. If “something must be done,” and that something is important enough to make these discussion worth having, then this is precisely the moment in which we have to be ruthlessly honest and clear about what is happening.
If it’s an internal dispute in a stamp collectors’ club, then there are perhaps still issues that it would not be appropriate to simply paper over. Every organization that is structured as a polity or firm, with “collective interests” separated from and elevated above the interests of the various “members” of the association, constitutes a social hierarchy — and will demonstrate the problems we associate with hierarchical organization, though perhaps in ways and at scales that everyone will simply choose to tolerate. If anarchists actually posses a general critique of archic social organization, then any other conclusion would seem to compromise at least the clarity of the anarchist vision, while probably endangering the anarchist project.
As the stakes are raised beyond our circle of hobbyists, obviously the need for ruthless clarity increases as well. We have to acknowledge that in some of the cases where “something has to be done” — in the most literal, serious senses — none of the options are going to be particularly appealing. Treating the lifeboat scenarios and other extreme cases — the ones that might most seriously challenge the consistent anarchist critique — as manifestations of “collective freedom” seems like a particularly bad step. The occasions that seem to call most urgently for a winner-take-all vote, or anything similar, seem to be precisely those cases where we are most collectively unfree — where our options are limited and our capacity to alter our associations are equally so. These are the circumstances under which all but the most explicitly authoritarian systems are likely to fail, even by their own criteria. If we want to develop anarchy in practical terms, we surely can’t shy away from the fact that it too will have its failures.
This is really where the difference between archic and anarchic approaches seems clearest. If circumstances genuinely dictate that a “collective” — majoritarian — interest must win out over the interests of some “members” of that collective — circumstances also preventing reorganization at the collective level or simply raising the costs of that reorganization to the point where separation would be punishment — then, from an anarchistic point of view, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to deny that the social system in place has failed in some fundamental way. From a democratic point of view, where perhaps consensus exists as a kind of ideal, but some degree of subordination is simply normal, the question becomes more complicated. Committed practitioners of democracy can, of course, have very high hopes for the outcomes, but, again, it simply isn’t clear to me what “democracy” would designate if some degree of subordination of minorities was not considered acceptable, reasonable, often inevitable. There would seem to me to be two distinctly different social philosophies in play.
This idea that those who are a minority in one instance may be in the majority in the next is the reason that Bookchin cited for denying that his majoritarian system was majority rule — as if the protean nature of dominant classes in nominally “democratic” societies wasn’t already one of the keys to their durability. There are a lot of anarchistic questions to raise against it, but perhaps the most important issue is that not all majoritarian impositions are going to be equal in their effects — including their effects on the next deliberation or vote — which ought to lead us, I think, to the realization that the most important cases, those where it is most indisputably true that “something must be done,” are precisely the ones where the consequences of majoritarian imposition are the most threatening to the ongoing association.
So it seems to me that we’re left — in these cases where “something must be done” — with two approaches: an anarchic approach, which can do all of the consulting and compromising that the other approach is capable of, but which has to confront its failures as failures, and a democratic approach, which seems to have the means, and perhaps has the necessity, of normalizing certain kinds of failure as, well, “collective freedom.”
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I guess, first of all, I would want any self-proclaimed anarchist who didn’t want anarchists to focus on those specific kinds of cooperation and solidarity to explain to me in what sense they are an anarchist. The familiar “if not this, then what?” question seems strangely out of place in what is presumably an internal anarchist debate. Perhaps I would feel differently if it was clear what the “democratic” element of the proposed anarchist democracy really is. But it’s not at all clear. What seems clear to me is that I can do everything in the way of social negotiation and compromise that the champions of democracy can do — certainly everything that corresponds to the action of cooperation and solidarity alone, meaningfully voluntary association, mutual forms of “self-organization.” I’ll deny the need for or utility of “self-rule,” in the same way I would deny a place to “self-slavery.” There have perhaps been times and places where the notion served useful rhetorical purposes — as has been the case for “self-government,” “self-ownership,” etc. — but it doesn’t add any clarity here, unless it really marks a commitment to forms of social hierarchy that can presumably be justified because they are self-imposed. And, in that case, the clarity would only make my resistance greater.
It is a very minor insight to observe that, thanks to the complexities of our present subordination, anarchists will have to oppose the various kinds of archic social order that we reject with different degrees of urgency and different strategies of resistance. It’s a very important one, but really only the first step of many. It doesn’t — or shouldn’t — change the fact that the distance between “better than dictatorship” and an anarchism actively addressing all of the obstacles that it faces, the failures it will have to tolerate, etc. is enormous. If we have to get out in the streets with people whose commitments to free association don’t stretch much beyond a rejection of monarchy, well, that’s part of the nature of revolutions, which anarchists — Max Nettle among them — have long understood are not ideologically pure affairs. But that’s a problem, not a reason to neglect distinctions or recognize unavoidable failures as such.
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At this point, Kevin Carson dropped a link to his opening contribution in the C4SS exchange, “On Democracy as a Necessary Anarchist Value,” which inspired a few thoughts on the dramatically expanded definitions of “democracy” used by at least some of its anarchistic defenders.
third response
A few more thoughts, after Kevin’s intervention: As I understand the Graeberian defense of “democracy,” he attempts to identify the shared element that would connect the democracies recognized by western political philosophy with a variety of social arrangements generally excluded from that recognition and comes up wit something “as old as history, as human intelligence itself.” He suggests that “one could argue it emerged the moment hominids ceased merely trying to bully one another and developed the communication skills to work out a common problem collectively” — before judging such speculation “idle” and simply asserting the self-evident nature of this nearly ubiquitous “democracy.” This all seems like useful myth-making, part of the establishment of a usable past for Occupy and similar movements. There does not, however, seem to be any particularly strong reason to naturalize “democracy” as the name for this presumably fundamental principle, aside from its subversive potential within a struggle over models of “governance,” which also requires a broadening and naturalizing of “anarchism” in order to establish that connection.
As someone who has spent a lot of time wresting with the modern, more or less western intellectual history involved, some of what Graeber attempts in support of his “covert history of democracy” just doesn’t seem to hold together particularly well. To be fair, I suspect that he understood that some of what he was doing in his very rough sketch of “democracy” was as “idle” as the speculations about the deep past, and in roughly the same ways. And conceptual/rhetorical preferences are undoubtedly shaped by individual contexts, so I don’t particularly begrudge Graeber his particular appropriations of “democracy” and “anarchism” — concepts which, despite his objections, prominent individuals or factions to in fact come to “own,” to greater or lesser degrees, and perhaps must struggle to “own” within particular contexts and struggles — I see the effects of the confusion of the terms in the anarchist peer-education spaces where I spend some of each day, and can’t say that they are heartening.
There are certainly useful lessons in the intellectual history that Graeber introduces, one of which is the way that “democracy” — often as “the democracy,” “la démocratie,” etc. — did not refer to any particular practice, but to the masses, “the mob,” etc., sometimes even in contexts where that demographic (or specter) was considered a threat to “democratic” government. It is in that sort of context, I suspect, that we would most often find “democracy” and “anarchy” brought closest together in meaning. But in those contexts, it’s still a question of at least a three-way fight, in context of which there are important distinctions to be made between the various claimants to the label “democracy.” And that’s really the main thing that I think the various anarchist critics of “democracy” have in common. No one wants to simply attack or defend a word, which has been used in so many and such ambiguous ways.
After all, “democracy,” “anarchy,” “anarchism,” etc. are, first of all, just words, which can be made to represent concepts, provided they meet the demands of specific conditions of intelligibility, which will vary according to a wide variety of context conditions, many of which are entirely out of our control. An in-depth account of the uses of these terms would primarily reveal, I expect, how the conditions that determined their intelligibility have developed. But some of the lessons have to be pretty cautionary, when it comes to the practical, present questions of how to construct clear anarchist theory and engage in effective anarchist pedagogy. After all, the narrow account of anarchism’s development suggests that 185 years has not been enough to make the anarchist sense of “anarchy” easily intelligible in many contexts. The expanded account would perhaps suggest that the problem is more or less perennial. But at least “anarchy” seems to have been pretty consistently intelligible as a radical alternative to the status quo, once embraced as a positive project, while “democracy” seems most consistently intelligible as a “-cracy,” an “-archy,” a form of government.
The questions I keep coming back to are these: What does the project of achieving anarchy gain from association with “democracy”? What, if anything, does it lose if anarchists refuse that association? The underlying premises are that language is ultimately quite adaptable — that, in fact, few words enjoy a simple relationship to single, clear concepts, across existing contexts — but that the conditions of intelligibility, which set limits on the adaptations that we can successfully achieve, are largely established for and despite us. We can, for example, always attempt to repurpose the language of Greece or Rome to fit institutions very different from classical Greek and Roman institutions — but there will inevitably be various kinds of structural, systemic resistance. So, for example, we might find the use of “anarchy” promising in indigenous, non-western, and similar contexts — if only as a first step in exploring what is outside that particular framework of governance (itself a product of various reinventions, which might, in some contexts, have to be accounted for) — but might find that “democracy” if harder to make intelligible outside that framework.
I think that, in fact, we have found and continue to find that, in most cases, clinging to the language of “democracy” does not seem to produce clearer theory, more effective pedagogy, etc. Perhaps that is just a product of different contexts, but, if that is the case, I think that perhaps even simply the possibility that I am right in even a limited sense — and that other critics of democracy are not simple, as was suggested at first, social atomists — is not something to be waved off at a time when, as we all seem to agree, clarity on these questions is vital.
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