By Yavor Tarinski

The speech by Marco Rubio at the Pnyx in Athens was an appropriational feat typical for conquerors, as well as a far-right call for more nationalism and war. The US secretary of State attempted to appropriate place and time in the name of domination and imperial ambition.

On the one hand, he targeted the temporal dimension of Ancient Greece by appropriating its legacy as property of the US. He refused the historic reality of it being part of the wider Mediterranean world of antiquity and closely interwoven with Eastern civilizations of the past. Instead, he placed this legacy at the service of contemporary US imperialist ambitions in the Middle East, creating an artificial rift that supposedly exists since ancient times between “the West” and “the East” — intended to justify war, destruction, genocide.

On the other, Rubio’s choice of a venue targeted the spatial dimension of the Pnyx — the place where the public assemblies of the democratic period of Ancient Athens were conducted. While plagued by patriarchy and slavery, the Athenian polis for couple of centuries developed a conceptual and institutional framework that allowed its management to be undertaken by a public assembly in which all citizens (free males) had the right to participate. This deliberative institution was inspirational for the emergence of similar face-to-face organs of the people in later revolutions, in which political participation was universalised for all genders and refuted slavery altogether.

Contemporary parliamentarism, within which Rubio’s current official position is situated, has nothing to do with the tradition of the popular assembly, but is instead a descendant of another tradition — that of oligarchy, as it emerged in Ancient Sparta or the Roman Republic. The advent of parliamentarism in the early modern period was perceived by the then emerging new elites as a tool to narrow the liberatory horizon of the toiling masses to the electoral field of representation in a hierarchical non-deliberative setting. Furthermore, the political tendency to which Rubio belongs — that of the far-right — is the main opponent to the popular passion for self-management.

Filled with irony and cringe-worthy, the speech was meant not as a serious historic exploration, but as a declaration of “civilizational superiority” of US imperialism, directed toward both “friends” and “foes”. For anyone serious in standing for universalist values of democratic autonomy and self-determination, as manifested throughout history time and again in communities in all corners of the world, the speech of Rubio was nothing short of a further commitment to a vision of perpetual war, nationalism, authoritarianism, exclusion etc.

In short, a vision that must be opposed if we are to have a livable future on this planet.

by Yavor Tarinski

Politics is not the business of specialists. There is no science of [politics]
~Castoriadis1

One of the main arguments against direct democracy is that people en mass lack the knowledge, expertise, and skills to run their whole society collectively. On the basis of this anti-democratic fallacy the supporters of the current oligarchic model of representation agree on the conduct of elections but refuse any form of more direct involvement of the populace with political decision-making. According to this logic the most that ordinary people can be entrusted with is to choose the best among society to rule them. But if democratic tools are even mentioned — like public assemblies or sortition — then the supporters of oligarchy argue that the mass of people lacks what is needed to run their life in common.

This anti-democratic slander is nurtured by the dominant system as the latter, despite parading as “representative democracy” is in fact inherently oligarchic, of a particularly aristocratic type. Modern-day support for more technocratic involvement with politics stems from a concept that originates in ancient Greece — namely, Aristokratíā or Aristocracy. It is a model of government based on inequality, where the áristoi (or the best) get the authority to rule over the populace. One of its notable supporters in the ancient Greek world was Plato, who advocated for the reigns of society be undertaken by the “best,” meaning philosophers who are both wise and virtuous. The technocrats of today argue basically for the same thing — that governments be run by people with a whole bunch of diplomas and titles that certify their cognitive superiority over the rest of us.

This line of argumentation is, of course, completely fallacious as politics concerns the everyday life of ordinary people, rather than a specific scientific field. It has to do with people collectively determining the rules under which they want to live together — how power and resources are being distributed, what rights there are for individuals and communities, etc. These are all issues that are of practical and moral nature, with no single correct response. It is up to the political choice of the people who consist society to decide how they want to live their life in common, rather than allow one or a group of experts dictate the correct way.

This brings us to a crucial distinction between what the ancient Greeks called technē (technical skill) and praxis (action in the everyday human realm). The former has to do with the mastery of craftsmanship and technic processes, such as the production of complex machineries or the conduct of surgery, while the latter indicated public deliberation on passing judgement and making decisions according to collectively upheld values. This distinction is underlined by Aristotle in the following manner:

All art [technē] is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves). Making and acting being different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting… action and making are different kinds of thing. The remaining alternative, then, is that it is a true and reasoned state of capacity to act with regard to the things that are good or bad for man. For while making has an end other than itself, action [praxis] cannot; for good action itself is its end.2

The distinction between the two is evident from the way crises are managed by technocrats. Take for example the European financial crisis that began on 2009. Governments across the EU framed it as an issue that requires exclusive economic and financial skills, and thus, a task to be vested to technocrats. But the problem is that this crisis is not an exercise in some textbook. It has real-life implications for all layers of society, and each decision taken bears the burden of inflicting suffering and pain on the most vulnerable sections of the populace. No economic model can deliver justice to those who are about to get hit the hardest, since its not an issue of economic, but rather of political character. It has to do with democratic deliberation between all those effected in coming to a solution that will be attentive to their everyday experiences.

While vital for human progress, expert knowledge cannot supplant grassroots political deliberation. Experts can and should provide explanation for different social and natural phenomena and calculate what the outcome of a given policy may be, but it is up to the social whole collectively to decide whether this or that policy is in accordance with its values, whether it is just or unjust, regardless of the expected outcome.

Politics also has to do with the experience of decisions taken and policies enacted, which in itself is a process of production of political knowledge. Rather than a narrow expertise in a given field, it has to do with an overall comprehension of ways of living, which does not derive from textbooks or the scientific method but by daily experiences that are unique for each and every member of society. In this line of thought philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis suggests that:

The politician, according to these premises, would have to be the Incarnation of Absolute and Total Knowledge. No technical specialization, however advanced, entitles its possessor to master areas other than his own.3

In short, there can never be an expert of everything that can be entrusted with the rule of society. But even if in some sci-fi alternative universe such a thing was even possible, it could still not be also the bearer of everyday experiences of each and every individual that consists the collective whole. Castoriadis insists that:

Competence is, almost by definition, restricted in its scope. Outside of his/her particular sector, or of the particular process which s/he knows, the technician is no better equipped to take a responsible decision than anyone else. Even within his/her own field, his/her viewpoint is often limited. He/she will often know little of the other sectors and may tend to minimize their importance although these sectors have a definite bearing on his own.4

The legitimacy of direct democracy stems exactly from the realization of this simple truth. It is a just form of social organization because it disseminates power not in accordance to knowledge, but in accordance to the extent policies affect our shared lives. As policies will determine our collective goals and values, it is only logical that all members of society get to participate in their crafting. The foundational basis of direct democracy then is the equality of political voices, rather than the inequality of expertise. Mikhail Bakunin warns of the dangers embedded in the latter approach:

there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realized in a single man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto: but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralize him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself.5

The common toiler is the living embodiment of the plurality of the social whole. They consist of the range of needs, perspectives, and ways of living life that the political system must abide to. It is through this plurality, and the deliberation that arises from it, that values, significations, and norms emerge that regulate social relations as seen fit by those who consist society, rather than elites whose privileges have detached them from the many.

For philosopher Jacques Rancière there is no natural or divine principle (ἀρχή) on which society must be grounded when it comes to politics since the very ground for the power or ruling is that there is no ground at all.6 He suggests that:

it is possible to establish a list of governments based on the respective titles to govern. But a single government will be missing fr om the list, precisely political government.7

This absence of titles is indicative of the pluralist essence of politics. The constant exchange of experiences and the deliberation between different worldviews is what constitutes a political community, as opposed to a blood-tied clan or an all-controlling uniform totalitarianism. And it is the project of direct democracy, with its decentralization of power and mass participation in decision-making, that best suits and nurtures this social pluralism.

If today our societies are feeling detached and plagued by alienation, and if risky decisions and endeavors are constantly being made that empower and enrich the few while endangering the many, it is exactly because the current oligarchic model constantly stifles the innate social pluralism. Because of the dominant top-down structure, it is only the narrow interest of the elites that gets to be enforced through the guise of national unity or the “invisible hand” of the capitalist market. As political theorist Hélène Landemore suggests:

The flaws in our current democratic models come from their being excessively, rather than insufficiently, elitist and epistocratic. It is because electoral democracies only empower a fraction of their population that they fail to deliver good policies and, in turn, breed both authoritarian and populist backlashes.8

The viability of the project of direct democracy, however, is not confined within the fields of political theory or speculation of the ancient past. Throughout history there have been numerous examples of people-power in practice. While minorotarian, their examples radiate stark inspiration to all those that dare to imagine a more just world. Nowadays the two most notable examples in the direction of a direct-democratic society are the revolutionary experiments of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the democratic confederalist communities of Rojava. In both cases, while expert knowledge plays an important role in developing different fields of social life, the final decision is always left to be made collectively by the grassroots.9 These societies have come to the realization, and have given it an institutional expression as well, that politics is not a matter of expertise held by few technocrats, but a capacity that emerges when people en masse engage directly with managing the public affairs that shape their life in common.

Ultimately the issue boils down to the following, if humanity is to avoid social and environmental collapse it is up to its constituents to give way to the innate social plurality through the political architecture best suited for this — the project of direct democracy. It is not a matter on speculating whether people can directly and collectively in social-wide decision-making, we already know they can do it and there is a plethora of examples for that. The question is how to make the majority believe in its direct-democratic capacity — this is the greatest issue before us.

References:

1 Cornelius Castoriadis, Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Castoriadis (New York: Continuum, 2011), 11.

2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, book VI, chap. 6, Internet Classics Archive, MIT, accessed November 18, 2025, https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.6.vi.html

3 Cornelius Castoriadis, “On the Content of Socialism: Part Two (From the Critique of Bureaucracy to the Idea of the Proletariat’s Autonomy),” 1957, in Socialisme ou Barbarie, reprinted on the Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1957/socialism-2.htm

4 Cornelius Castoriadis, “Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society,” 1972, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/archive/castoriadis/1972/workers-councils.htm

5 Mikhail Bakunin, “What Is Authority?” (1871), in Bakunin’s Writings, Marxists Internet Archive, accessed November 18, 2025, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm

6 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010), 50.

7 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 45.

8 Hélène Landemore, “Defending ‘Open’ Democracy,” Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Pennsylvania, accessed November 18, 2025, https://amc.sas.upenn.edu/h%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-landemore-open-democracy

9 Bance, Pierre. “Autonomy Institutions in Chiapas and Rojava: What Lessons?” Peace in Kurdistan Campaign, January 19, 2022. Accessed November 19, 2025. https://www.peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/autonomy-institutions-in-chiapas-and-rojava-what-lessons/

On Why Politics Is Not About Expertise, but Belongs to Everyone was originally published in Orobo Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Yavor Tarinski

The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches.

~John Dewey[1]

One of the main pillars of contemporary oligarchies worldwide is the institution of elections. Every leader and government, regardless of how liberal or authoritarian, claims its ascendance to power through some kind of electoral process. Elections are considered as “the democratic means” per se — if a system is based on elections, then it supposedly is a “democracy”.

The supporters of this view see in electoral processes a means of sustaining popular sovereignty, while avoiding what they see as a danger of popular self-rule — i.e., rule by the incompetent. But as philosopher Jacques Rancière underlines, there is an “evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: government comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.[2]

Electoral processes tend to nurture antagonism and competitiveness, rather than cooperation and dialogue. They give way to a certain anthropological type — the power-hungry political demagogue. Rather than concerned with resolving public issues and problems, it focuses on “winning” elections. The very essence of politics is radically altered in elections-based systems — with their content being emptied of any substantial deliberatory essence and replaced with a lifestylish approach that focuses on candidates — their ways of life, the tricks they pull on each other, etc.

Ultimately, the main agenda that drives the action of the electoral anthropological type is that of opinion polls. Candidates must learn what and when to say things that will be liked by the largest amount of people, so that they can get ahead in the race. The result is a type of craft where electoral competitors outbid each other, play dirty, and resort to all sort of tricks in order to win. This becomes the main occupation of people involved in electoral competitions for office. Because of this political scientist James S. Fishkin suggests:

Candidates do not wish to win the argument on the merits as much as they wish to win the election. If they can do so by distorting or manipulating the argument successfully, many of them are likely to do so. Representatives elected through such processes are looking ahead to the next election while in office.[3]

This attracts specific narcissist and psychopatic type of attitudes, because of which John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright suggest that elections, and particularly national ones, too often attract the wrong kind of candidate.[4] These traits are not limited to electoral systems alone, but to all top-down bureaucratic organizations, such as corporations. Or, as author Matt Little insists, selfish, insensitive individuals invariably dominate hierarchical organizations.[5]

Once elected in parliament, politicians become part of the political elite, which grants them certain privileges over the rest of society, as well as direct access to economic elites. Thus, once in the halls of power, they develop interest in preserving the status quo, and very soon even those with modest background forget where they came from. Psychologist Dacher Keltner writes that those in power may be the very people most blind to the problems of powerlessness, poverty and inequality[6], with self-absorption and insensitivity to the experiences of others inevitably following the attainment of authority.

Anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon describes his first-hand experience of the inner workings of parliamentary life, after becoming a member of the French Parliament in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848:

One has to experience this isolation called a national assembly to understand how the men who are the most completely ignorant of the state of a country are nearly always those who represent it.[7]

In a similar line of thought, Trinidadian anti-colonial thinker CLR James writes:

The moment you vote and give your power to some other people, they begin to represent themselves or other interests, not the interests of the people.[…] Once you put them there, they acquire, not through malice, not through vice — I am not speaking of the wickedness of men here at all, but from the objective circumstances they acquire a life of their own which is separate from the life and the interests that they are supposed to serve.[8]

But even when such shortcomings are recognized, still an argument persists that nonetheless electoral oligarchies are efficient enough to get jobs done. While societies most certainly manage to function under such regimes, it is questionable, to say the least, of how efficient electoral antagonisms really are. Political parties employ whole armies of staff, whose goal is winning elections. In the same time, billions are spent on election campaigns, often by the super wealthy, in order to excercize influence over political life.[9] Because of this, Gastlin and Wright conclude that ongoing partisan activity often amounts to a tremendous waste of human and financial resources, which are spent not on articulating principled policy and values but instead on posturing, strategizing, fundraising, and advertising.[10]

Even if inherently top-down decision-making institutions are removed and replaced by a multilayered system of direct democracy, electoral processes must also be omitted from the new setting. If local assemblies continue conducting elections for filling positions in administrations and coordinative regional councils, we run the risk of pertaining the same negative traits as described above. While certain tasks require highly skilled knowledge and experience, like surgeons, pilots, and mechanics, and thus the election of those most suitable for the job, others, like various administrative positions, that require simply overseeing the implementation of decisions already made by grassroots institutions, are best left to an ancient method of selection — that of drawing lots.

Choosing by lot, or sortition, was the process through which the ancient Athenians, during the democratic era, appointed their magistrates and administrators. Aristotle suggested that it is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.[11] Contemporary voices also point at this direction, like Gastlin and Wright, according to whom sortition has a straightforward rationale as a democratic process of self-government.[12]

It’s a method that is based on absolute equality, as it clearly places administrative tasks beneath grassroots deliberation. Choosing by lot implies, in one way or another, that all members of society will engage in collective decision-making, stripping political elits of their authority. This creates an environment where there is no competition in the political sphere (which has its implications for all the other social spheres as well), and instead, the principle of radical equality reigns. Thus, rather than electoral competitions for power, a more suitable method is that of leaving the implementation of decisions already taken by the grassroots, to chance — that is, to choosing by lot. As political scientist Dimitri Courant suggests, when using sortition, only chance distinguishes us, so we remain equals.[13]

Barbara Goodwin, author of the utopian novel Justice by Lottery, also advances the idea that choosing by lot helps preventing the emergence of elites, writing:

There are, I think, good reasons for believing that a degree of rotation, or even the use of a modified lottery principle, in the allocation of public office would have an ameliorating effect on political institutions. It would prevent the formation of elites — or, rather, undermine existing elites — and produce a wider dispersal of political knowledge, which would surely be desirable.[14]

In the process of choosing by lot, in contrast to electoral procedures, there are no “winners” and “losers”. No one gets to speak on the name of anyone else. It is chance that gets someone to a given administrative position, while real power lays at the participatory institutions of the grassroots. In one such truly democratic setting there is no space for the cocky attitudes of parliamentarian majorities that tend to polarize society into camps. If anything, campisam dulls the imagination by getting people taking sides on the basis of a given “political identity”, rather than critically reflecting on public affairs. We can agree with Montesquieu, when suggesting that the suffrage by lot is a method of electing that offends no one, but animates each citizen.[15]

Ultimately, choosing by lot is inherently more compatible with direct democracy, than say elections, because of a very basic element — that it presupposes the absence of titles when it comes to dealing with politics. Different forms of aristocratic and oligarchic top-down forms, like elections, presuppose that the ruling class is consisted of “the best” among society, bearers of various titles that bear “proof” of this. The democratic project reverses this. It implies that everyone, regardless of skills, knowledges, etc., is not only allowed, but encouraged by the whole social setting, to take active part in decision-making. Choosing by lot follows this logic, as anyone can be selected by the sortition process. In this line of though philosopher Jacques Rancière insists that the scandal of democracy, and of the drawing of lots that is its essence, is to reveal that [the title to govern] can be nothing but the absence of title.[16]

Choosing by lot is also indispensable for drafting administrations that resemble the whole population. Elections often reproduce various prejudices and tropes that are hard rooted in people’s imaginary. Because of that most electoral bodies nowadays are dominated by older white males. Sortition tends to overcome this, as it draws proportionately from the populace, creating administrative council bodies that are micrographs of society. Dimitri Courant puts it very accurately:

If we want representatives who look like the represented, we shall choose sortition, for the democratic ideal of “government by the people.” If we prefer socially distinct elites (an aristocratic view), we shall choose election.[17]

Choosing by lot also follows the self-educational pattern set by face-to-face assembly democracy. In general, as Gastlin and Wright suggest, every form of citizen deliberation has built into it an educational component.[18] By getting common people to directly participate in political processes, it tends to nurture the emergence of genuine civic culture. Instead of politics dominated by political dynasties with party backing, who dominate electoral processes, popular assemblies and sortition create conditions for the broadest possible participation. Because of this Cornelius Castoriadis writes that the designation of magistrates through lot or rotation in most cases ensures participation by a great number of citizens in official tasks — and knowledge of those tasks.[19]

Overall, choosing by lot offers many advantages over electoral processes. But the main advantage is that sortition is inherently democratic, while elections bear the seeds of oligarchic rule. Choosing by lot, along with rotation, short mandates, and the institution of popular assemblies and councils, paves the way for the establishment of radical equality that encompasses all spheres of human life. It is hopeful that, despite of efforts by the ruling classes and party functionaries on both the Left and the Right, the demand for sortition has resurfaced in recent years thanks to social movements like the Nuit Debout in France.[20] And this is indicative — no party bureaucrat or person with authority will agree to willingly give up hers privileges that derive from electoralism. It is up to the grassroots to self-institute a framework that will allow for equality to thrive.

References:

[1] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Chicago Gateway Books, 1946), 207.

[2] Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 42.

[3] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 81.

[4] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 6.

[5] Matt Little, “Will the Disordered Always Rule Us?” New Compass. September 26, 2022. Archived January 23, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230123114511/http://new-compass.net/articles/will-disordered-always-rule-us.

[6] Matt Little, “Will the Disordered Always Rule Us?” New Compass. September 26, 2022. Archived January 23, 2023. https://web.archive.org/web/20230123114511/http://new-compass.net/articles/will-disordered-always-rule-us.

[7] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un Revolutionnaire (1849). [available online in English at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-joseph-proudhon-parliamentary-isolation]

[8] CLR James, Modern Politics (Oakland: PM Press, 2013), 33–34.

[9] Anna Massoglia, “Outside Spending on 2024 Elections Shatters Records, Fueled by Billion-Dollar ‘Dark Money’ Infusion.” OpenSecrets, November 6, 2024. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/11/outside-spending-on-2024-elections-shatters-records-fueled-by-billion-dollar-dark-money-infusion/.

[10] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 7.

[11] Paul Demont, “Allotment and Democracy in Ancient.” La Vie des Idées, December 13 201. https://laviedesidees.fr/Allotment-and-Democracy-in-Ancient.

[12] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 9.

[13] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 238.

[14] Barbara Goodwin, Justice by Lottery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 38.

[15] Montesquieu, The Complete Works of M. de Montesquieu Vol. 1 (London: T. Evans, 1777). [available online at https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/adef20182019/chapter/montesquieu-on-sortition-voting/]

[16] Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 47.

[17] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 233.

[18] John Gastlin and Erik Olin Wright, Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (London: Verso, 2019), 13.

[19] David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 278

[20] France 24. “Loi Travail et Nuit Debout: Quatre Nuits Place de la République.” France 24, April 4, 2016. https://www.france24.com/fr/20160404-loi-travail-nuit-debout-quatre-nuits-place-republique.

By Yavor Tarinski

To guarantee revolution, it is not enough for the mob to be armed or for them to have expropriated the bourgeoisie: it is necessary for them to destroy the capitalist system entirely and to organise their own system. They must be able to combat the ideas put forward by Stalinist and reformist leaders with the same vigour with which they attack capitalist individuals and the leaders of the bourgeois parties.

~Camillo Berneri[1]

A complex of critical issues, ranging from rising income inequalities, climate crisis, growing militarization, etc., have led many to discuss the need of revolution. But what does this term signify? For far too long it has been used by demagogues and charlatans who try to push their own projects under a “revolutionary” banner. It suffices to remember that Donald Trump’s election was described by some as revolution, as was the case with Brexit. People, like billionaire tech moguls Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have too been described as revolutionaries. We can assert with certainty, that there has been an effort by ruling elites and managerial classes to hijack the term revolution, along with other crucial terms, such as democracy.

In perspective, this concept has nothing to do with the emergence of a new technology or some upheaval within the current order. It goes deeper than that. Revolution signifies the radical reshaping of societal order, a new outset, or as Hannah Arendt puts it, revolutions are the only political events that confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.[2]

In this sense it is ridiculous to speak of the election of a new politician as a revolutionary event. It might be a very significant one, but it does not present society with a radical rupture with the old order — it is in no way a new beginning. Power continues its top-down flow, with governing institutions remaining intact. Thus, it is important to recognize that revolutions have their institutional dimension, in the sense that they signify the emergence of new set of institutions, that differs radically from the existing ones, allowing for the thorough alteration of the political architecture of society — the new beginning Arendt talks about.

Following this line of thought Cornelius Castoriadis suggests that revolution does not mean torrents of blood, the taking of the Winter Palace, and so on, but rather, it means a radical transformation of society’sinstitutions.[3] This approach asks us to examine every revolutionary effort from the way it attempts to restructure power relations, instead of limiting its scope to single individuals, groups, or even single social fields (like the economic one). From this it follows that replacing given ruling elite with another cannot in no way be considered a revolutionary event, since the institutional framework that sustains power inequalities (separating society into “rulers” and “ruled”) remains.

Revolutions and grassroots institutions of radical equality

The emergence of a new institutional framework for equal redistribution of power is a characteristic trait of revolutionary events, and can be detected in all major revolutions.

We observe it, for example, in the American Revolution. Even before it broke out, life in many colonies — most notably in New England — was shaped by town hall meetings that allowed to populations to deliberate and decide on public affairs in face-to-face assemblies.[4] With the beginning of the Revolution these and other remarkable revolutionary institutions became the backbone of the uprising. A network of revolutionary committees and assemblies emerged at every level of society. Historian Agnes Hunt notes that these county committees … were tenacious of their local supremacy and stood as a complete barrier against any attempt at centralization which must precede any practical exercise of independence in a central executive.[5] Unfortunately, after independence from England was gained, the local bourgeoisie class used its influence and wealth to depart from the decentralized network of popular institutions of self-governance, and instaurate instead a centralized polity under the guise of “confederation”, so that it could mask its counter-revolutionary move.

During the French Revolution it was the tens of sections that had dotted Paris — the city in which the more radical of the sans-culottes were located. These meeting spaces became participatory institutions that realized in practice the concept of popular sovereignty, which as Albert Soboul observes, was not an abstraction, but the concrete reality of the people united in sectional assemblies and exercising all of their rights.[6] Exemplary for the spirit of this popular strife towards direct democracy was the declaration issued by the section de la Cite in November 1792, according to which every man who assumes to have sovereignty [over others] will be regarded as a tyrant, usurper of public liberty and worthy of death.[7] But unfortunately, these institutions of popular sovereignty were suppressed by the counter-revolution of the emerging new ruling classes, which sought to cement their grip on power, and thus, reestablish an oligarchic institutional framework.

The Haitian Revolution — one of the most overlooked moments of revolutionary history, which however was of highest importance due to its definitive role in the abolition of slavery and the universalization of human rights — also saw the emergence of institutional expression of popular self-government. During the heyday of the uprising in many places were formed what has come to be known as organs of the people.[8] These indicated the development of an extensive set of democratic practices centered around popular assemblies, where former slaves deliberated on public affairs with sagacity and energy.[9] Although supportive of the rebel leader Toussaint and his forces, these grassroots organs were by no means controlled but him, remaining an independent force.[10] Nonetheless, the administrative class, which formed in parallel to the ‘organs of the people’, ultimately managed to take hold of power, thus stifling the deliberative institutions of the people and established instead an authoritarian central government.

In the process of the Russian Revolution too, an innovative form of self-rule emerged in the form of the soviet — or the popular council. Countless such institutions sprang amidst the uprising — workers’ councils, peasants’ councils, and soldiers’ councils — functioning as a grassroots alternative to top-down rule. These new democratic forms of self-organization arose spontaneously and quickly flourished independently from the existing political parties, managing public affairs on day-to-day basis, thus inspiring working people around the world for the potential of a more just society.[11] But like the cases examined above, this social effort at radically reorganizing power relations, too was prevented by a group — in this case the Bolshevik Party — replacing the old despotic monarchy with a new authoritarian state. Thus, the revolutionary spirit was once again lost.

But no other revolutionary event was as focused on the question of power as was the Spanish Revolution. It was there that a popular uprising against a fascist coup saw large swaths of Spain’s population organize its day-to-day functioning on the basis of direct democracy.[12] Ordinary people managed production, distribution, and other aspects of their life in common via dense network of assemblies and committees. Cities, towns, and villages formed democratic confederation, whose functioning was administered by revocable delegates of the people. This revolutionary moment was viewed as such a threat to hierarchy in general, that both fascists and Stalinists attacked it from both sides.[13] It was because of this that the revolutionary attempt at radical equality of the Spanish Revolution was crushed.

All these revolutionary events achieve incredible feats — the laboring masses managed to put an end to oppressive institutions such as absolutist monarchism and slavery, but were prevented to further empower the people by the forces of counter-revolution. Nevertheless, it is not the destiny of all revolutions to be overturned; there are cases of revolutionary efforts that survive throughout the years and deepen popular autonomy — these being the social revolutions initiated by the Zapatistas and the people of Rojava.[14] In both cases we have populations that have historically experienced the most raw and oppressive essence of the Nation-State — being repressed politically, economically, and culturally for centuries. Highly disillusioned with top-down power, both of these societies, separated by lands and oceans, embarked on building autonomous confederations of self-managed municipalities — systems that reassure and deepen the horizontal flow of power, thus spreading radical equality to all aspects of life.

The Essence of the Revolutionary Project

If the history of revolutions has anything to teach us, it is that when the opportunity appears, there will be those who will use it to elevate themselves into position of power. The danger of political centralization is always present. Because of this it is the duty of revolutionary movements to be on the lookout for authoritarian tendencies and always strive towards the greatest decentralization and participation.

If we agree that the essence of a genuinely revolutionary project is the radical redistribution of power through a new institutional framework, then it is a necessity that hierarchical modes of organizing are criticized, dismantled, and actively resisted. In this regard Castoriadis suggests that the revolutionary movement must organise a systematic struggle against the ideology of hierarchy in all its forms, since both the objective and the means of all revolutionary activity is the development of the conscious and autonomous action of the workers.[15]

Revolution is not about people being liberated by someone else, but to liberate themselves. The revolutionary moment is a rupture with the logic of top-down rule that is initiated by the autonomous action of the people en masse. In this sense revolutionary liberation, as Murray Bookchin implies, must be a self-liberation that reaches social dimensions, not “mass liberation” or “class liberation” behind which lurks the rule of an elite, a hierarchy and a state.[16] Not on behalf of the people, but by the people and for the people.

The essence of any meaningful revolutionary project is then twofold: it is directed against every form of hierarchy and domination, while also advancing its own set of institutions that allow for the broades possible self-empowerment of all members of society. One such definition of revolution gives us hints to what day-to-day activity can contribute to the mounting of revolutionary potential. A good definition of revolutionary activity is offered by David Graeber, when suggesting that:

revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations — even within the collectivity — in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.[17]

Faced with crises that bear dire consequences for humanity and nature, there is a need of a radical, revolutionary change, that will offer a new beginning. But such a drastic change can only be based on and initiated by the autonomous action of the grassroots. Furthermore, this activity must develop into specific institutional framework that will refute hierarchy and domination, while advancing mass participation and radical equality. Anything short of this is nothing more than continuing on the current suicidal trajectory.

[1] Camillo Berneri: Class War in Spain: The Writings of Camillo Berneri 1936–1937 (Sanday: The Cienfuegos Press) [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/camillo-berneri-frank-mintz-class-war-in-spain]

[2] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1965), p21.

[3] Cornelius Castoriadis: The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (anonymous translation, 2003), p113. [available online at https://www.notbored.org/RTI.html]

[4] Murray Bookchin: The Third Revolution: Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, Vol I [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-third-revolution]

[5] Agnes Hunt: The Provincial Committees of Safety of the American Revolution (originally published in 1904; reprinted by New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1968), p153.

[6] Albert Soboul: The Sans Culottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government, 1793–1794 (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1972),p95.

[7] ibid.,pp.95–6.

[8] Sudhir Hazareesingh: Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (London: Penguin Books, 2021), p147.

[9] ibid.,p223.

[10] ibid.,p155.

[11] Suzi Weissman: ‘The Russian Revolution and Workers Democracy‘ in Against the Current, №188, May/June 2017 [available online at https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/4975.html]

[12] Gaston Leval: Collectives in the Spanish revolution: Detailed account of worker-controlled agriculture, industry and public services in revolutionary Spain during the civil war. (London: Freedom Press, 1975). [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gaston-leval-collectives-in-the-spanish-revolution#toc22]

[13] Ronald Radosh, Mary Habeck, & G. N. Sevostianov (eds.): Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp171–207.

[14] Petar Stanchev: ‘From Chiapas to Rojava: seas divide us, autonomy binds us’ in ROARmag at https://roarmag.org/essays/chiapas-rojava-zapatista-kurds/

[15] Cornelius Castoriadis: ‘Redefining Revolution’ in Solidarity Pamphlet/44 [available online at https://libcom.org/article/redefining-revolution-cornelius-castoriadis]

[16] Murray Bookchin: ‘Spontaneity and Utopia (1967–1968)’ in Post-scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Rampart Press, 1971). [available online at https://www.panarchy.org/bookchin/spontaneity.html]

[17] David Graeber: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago:Prickly Paradigm Press), p45.

By Yavor Tarinski

When the revolution happens, you’re going to have to be in the streets.

~Marcus Baram[1]

Nowadays there is a lot of talk about digital, or e-democracy — focusing on online participation. There are even talks of a so-called Appocracy — civic participation being channeled through smartphone apps. Many see in such means an exit from the deepening crisis of representative “democracy”.

Often the reason people give, when engaging with such proposals, is valid — people globally are indeed mistrustful towards professional politicians and tend to increasingly absent from the rituals of political representation (such as elections). The problem comes with what they propose as alternative. The logic behind the supposed digitalization of democracy is based on the misunderstanding of political participation as passive activity, such as consumerism. The very rhetoric that often surrounds these e-alternatives suggests so: their proponents often speak of how easy it is, of how little effort it takes, and that “you can do it from your sofa”. A rhetoric that is strongly reminiscent of online shopping that promotes laziness and boredom. In other words, it places politics in a wrong equation.

In societies dominated by bureaucratic entities like nation-states and capitalist markets, the economic sphere takes central stage, while the political one, is subjugated to a secondary level. Bureaucracies, creating a stratum of professional managers, claim monopoly on the management of public affairs, thus leaving the rest of society (i.e. the great majority) with only option the prioritization of economic activity. Only a tiny ritual is sustained, in the face of elections, being held once every four or five years, so that the system maintain a sense of legitimacy.

Of course, bureaucracies never rest solely on this one ritual. In addition to it they develop different means for manufacturing public consent — like mainstream media propaganda, conformist pop culture, etc. — so that what currently exist be perceived by the general public as the only viable option.

But the ultimate strength of the status quo is in its physical power and control over public life. In its essence every State is a police State as the monopoly on violence is its main feature. Because of that social ecologist Murray Bookchin insists that even “limited government” will invariably lead to unlimited government, as this is the logical outcome of the role of power as a corruptive mechanism.[2] If the means of manufacturing consent fail at some point, then every State resort to raw violence.

In order to maintain control over society, the bureaucratic apparatus constantly works towards limiting the popular access to, and activity within, public spaces. Philosopher Jacques Ranciere observes this in the way State mechanisms respond to problems and issues that appear within spaces that are widely accessible — like streets, parks, or squares. He observes that in such cases, the main tool of state power — the police — cuts off the area and to every passing person responds with “move along, nothing to see here”[3]. There is a twofold meaning between this phrase. On the one hand, it suggests that such spaces are mere passages for the citizens. On the other, that there is only one force that is allowed to control life in common — the bureaucracy — while people’s curiosity and urge to help should be suppressed.

The project of direct democracy, being a socio-political system that is incompatible with the Nation-State-Capital complex, implies radical change to people’s relations to physical space. As philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis suggests:

Direct democracy certainly requires the physical presence of citizens in a given place, when decisions have to be made. But this is not enough. It also requires that these citizens form an organic community, that they live if possible in the same milieu, that they be familiar through their daily experience with the subject to be discussed and with the problems to be tackled. It is only in such units that the political participation of individuals can become total, that people can know and feel that their involvement will have an effect, and that the real life of the community is, in large part, determined by its own members and not by unknown or external authorities who decide for them.[4]

It can be suggested that by reconfiguring the architecture of power, direct democracy strive at the greatest possible justice. In this sense it seeks to allow for every person to have the right to participate in deciding on matters up to where our choices impinge on others, but from there on, others should have their own self-managing say. This comes to ensure a universal opportunity to every person to take equal responsibility and active part in crafting the path their community is going to take. In short, it seeks to integrate political participation with everyday life and experiences.

When citizenship is separated from space, time and direct participation, then it becomes a dangerous tool for those in power. In such cases, when the authorities face local resistance to their plans in one geography, they may seek for a national vote, asking people through the whole of given national territory to express opinion. Given that the government has incomparable economic and media advantage over local social movements, it is not difficult for it to sway popular opinion in its favor, so that it can continue with its project despite topical disagreements and claim it acts on behalf of the people.

This is exactly the case with AMLO’s supposed leftwing government in Mexico and its megaprojects that threaten indigenous territories, including of the Zapatistas. Established protocol in the country suggests that such grand projects that will profoundly alter given geography should follow after consultations with local populations. But in this case among the affected locals were the well-organized Zapatistas that know what the effects of economic growth are for the grassroots and for nature. AMLO knew that he cannot convince them to accept his plans, so he went straight ahead to conducting national consultations. This meant giving vague promises for prosperity from these megaprojects to people throughout the vast territory of Mexico, who knew little of the context of the affected localities, as well as weren’t going to experience directly any of the negative effects — destruction of natural environment, enforced displacement of communities, making impossible traditional lifestyles. Because of this AMLO’s government managed to get what it wanted — an outcome of 89.9% in favor.[5] But the well-organized Indigenous National Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Government Council (CIG), both backed by the EZLN and multiple organizations across the country, made clear their opposition to these and other mining, touristic, agroindustrial and infrastructure projects that threaten indigenous communities and territories, thus far managing to protect them from the appetites of the Mexican government and their corporate friends.

Direct democracy is tightly knit with reclamation of physical space, rather than with vague notions of national belonging. This was particularly exhibited during the so-called movement of the squares, which began with the Arab Spring, and continued with the Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, etc. The core of this global movement was citizens reclaiming public spaces (and public squares in particular) as part of building real democracy. It was in these spaces that new institutions were set up in the form of popular assemblies that directly challenged the legitimacy of parliaments and transnational technocracies. Although the internet played crucial role in mobilizing and coordinating hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the movement nonetheless revolved around the practice of reclamation, followed by processes of public deliberation that radically infused social imaginaries with visions of a different future. And it was because of this that governments more often than not responded with brutal force, trying to erase any trace of self-instituting. As John R. Parkinson writes:

while a growing proportion of political communication uses digital means, the things that are communicated involve real people who take up, occupy, share, and contest physical space. Often, those who deny the importance of physical space confuse the medium and the message: by focusing on the means of communication, they overlook what is communicated.[…] The digits encode narratives and pictures of contests over physical space, performed by flesh-and-blood people. What was coordinated and communicated […] was not virtual, but the prolonged and mass occupation of public space by citizens.[6]

Digital tools could be indispensable for a system based on direct democracy. It could help in deepening confederal relations between self-governed communities. But what it can never achieve is replace face-to-face decision-making on local level, since the democratic perspective is rooted in the justice of being able to participate in what concerns you directly, to the extent it concerns you.

Direct democracy’s relation to physical space implies that there is organizational decentralization. The separation of politics from spatiality, on the other hand, indicates the opposite — it presupposes that there is a center of power that mediates the questions that are being put for vote, and manages the implementation of taken decisions. One such perspective is democratic only in words, since direct democracy is not only about voting, but also actively participating in the drafting of questions that are being asked and their implementation. This implies replacing one central power-center with numerous decentralized decision-making institutions that emerge from, and are self-managed by local communities. But in order to void society descending into parochial localism such dispersed self-governing units need to be interconnected by confederal means. Murray Bookchin describes confederalism as:

a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities. The members of these confederal councils are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies that choose them for the purpose of coordinating and administering the policies formulated by the assemblies themselves. Their function is thus a purely administrative and practical one, not a policy making one like the function of representatives in republican systems of government.[7]

Direct democracy also rests on developing culture of civic deliberation where opinion and voices are respected and patiently heard. And such can be achieved in face-to-face setting, rather than a purely digital and faceless one. We have seen over and over again that when people are hidden behind avatars, they worry little about how they are perceived and how they treat the other side. This has developed into a toxic environment where one writes her monologue and/or make fun of others. When a person is not physically present, it cannot pick up on body language, cannot be physically attacked, often cannot even be personally identified because of the use of online identities, and thus can get away with casting the other as a one-dimensional opinion carrier rather than a flesh-and-blood person with feelings, goals, and interests.

The physical presence of participants — people who live in the same community and share everyday experiences — allows for more in-depth and nuanced deliberation than remote or online methods, first and foremost, because it implies that one will not only express his or her’s opinion, but will also have to sit through meetings and listen to that of others. Assemblies that take place in physical setting create a shared experience and a sense of civic identity among participants. This shared experience can help build social cohesion and strengthens the democratic process. Face-to-face interactions among neighbors (people from similar milieu) enhance communication, build trust, and foster a sense of accountability among citizens. Live deliberation also predisposes for a more focused and dedicated conversation, while online one can be more easily disrupted by various factors, such as notifications, multitasking, and even temptation to browse the web. On the whole, face-to-face assemblies allow for more dynamic and engaging deliberation.

Physical space plays central role in the project of direct democracy. The latter, it can be suggested, is unthinkable without the former and any attempt at separating the two leads to the loss of both of them. This, of course, does not mean that digital technologies don’t have important role to play — because they do — but only that they cannot replace face-to-face deliberation. Instead, they have to be used to support and strengthen the reclamation and recreation of public space in the physical world, so that a coherent alternative to the dominant system be developed.

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/TheRevolutionWillNotBeTelevised.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiwutq4nf2BAxUBi_0HHZuaB9oQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0fYtQbERdQsIWKNCbu_ut6

[2] Murray Bookchin. “Interview with Murray Bookchin” in Reason (October 1979) [available online at https://reason.com/1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/]

[3] Davide Panagi: The Political Life of Sensation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p121.

[4] Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings Vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp98–99.

[5] www.telesurenglish.net/amp/news/Intellectuals-Artists-Back-Zapatistas-Against-AMLOs-Projects-20190116-0039.html

[6] John R. Parkinson. Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp1–2.

[7] Murray Bookchin. “The Meaning of Confederalism” in Green Perspectives Vol.20 (1990) [available online at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-meaning-of-confederalism#toc3].

The “democracies” is just the conventional term for that bloc of states. Internally, the democrat is an enemy

~Jacques Ranciere[1]

Language is a powerful tool. This holds true for politics as much as for any other aspect of social life, if not even more. And there is one specific term that has been used left and right by ruling elites, as well as by grassroots social movements. I am speaking, of course, about ‘democracy’.

It is really impressive what the range of regimes and contexts that use this term are. In fact, almost everywhere you are situated around the planet, you most probably are told that you live in some sort of democratic system. Everything seems to be ‘democratic’ in some way and, as Cornelius Castoriadis suggests, even when a corporal with 10 machine guns and 20 jeeps somewhere around the world tires to seize power wouldn’t do it without first declaring that he wants to establish some sort of democratic regime[2].

First of all, there is the so-called representative democracy, which today has come to be perceived as the default form of ‘democracy’, where people’s political participation is limited to the election of a governing body once every four years. There are also systems with greater citizen input, often referred to as participatory and deliberative democracies. In these, except of the occasional elections, people get to vote also at sporadic referendums etc. There even are regimes that go under the name of “democratic monarchy”, where along with elected governments there still functions a monarch. And finally, we have direct democracy, where communities and even whole societies function on the basis of radical equality and the absence of hierarchical structures.

And here a very logical question emerges: how can all these models, so diametrically opposed to each other, all go under the banner of ‘democracy’? The simple answer is that most of these examples, except for the last one, have nothing to do with anything even remotely democratic. Instead, it is the ruling classes that have taken an advantage of a term that once emerged from the grassroots and stood for the revolutionary restructuring of society. As a result, a false sense of popular empowerment is given, since the constant usage of ‘democracy’ is intended to remind people that they supposedly are “in charge”, despite the fact that they barely have any input in the management of public affairs.

The idea of ‘democracies’ as opposed to democracy is to suggest that as long as there is some form of electoral processes going on, then the people are in control of the steering wheel: they don’t have to seek further empowerment but to elect ‘more suitable’ rulers. This, of course, is completely false since the election of representatives, from its very nature, presupposes some kind of vertical form of governance (and thus the retaining of the bureaucratic State), where the majority of people are excluded from directparticipation in the management of public affairs.

It is well known that the citizens of Ancient Athens, where the concept initially emerged, meant something radically different from what we have today. Although the Athenian society of that time was plagued by slavery and patriarchy, with slaves and women being excluded from political life, it nonetheless underwent a revolution that saw the establishment of democracy, or self-management by the citizenry. For the Ancient Athenians such as Aristotel, there was clear distinction between a democratic system and elections for representatives — the former was based on popular assemblies and sortition, while the latter was viewed as the building block of oligarchy. Although critical of democracy, Aristotel underlined its grassroots character: A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well off, being in a majority, are in sovereign control of the government, an oligarchy when control lies in the hands of the rich and better born, these being few.[3]

This understanding of democratic politics as popular self-management continued throughout the ages. 18th century thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were well aware of the difference between democracy and representation: for him, when a government lays in the hands of the whole people or of a majority of them then we have a democratic society, while aristocracy or oligarchy is when the government is restricted to a small number of citizens (i.e. representatives).[4]

Similar was the stance on the issue of other prominent figures of that period like the man of the revolutions Thomas Paine. He too made distinction between representation and democracy, understanding that in its original form the latter stood for a society governing itself without the aid of secondary means.[5]

Arguably the moment when this clear distinction between democracy and representation became blurred was in the 19th century, with the publication of Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. In this work the author positioned electoral processes at the heart of democratic politics: Long before the appointed day arrives, the election becomes the greatest, and one might say the only, affair occupying men’s minds.[6] This sets the tone for a confusion that will serve ruling classes and demagogues in the years to come, while deluding the revolutionary project.

In the 20th century Lenin will continue blurring the innate antagonism between electoralism and democracy. He goes as far as to suggest that we cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions.[7] This force him to accept statecraft as inevitable and seek the essence of revolution in the economic sphere alone, since the political one, and with it the top-down flow of power, doesn’t have alternative.

This type of thinking proceeds to this day. Many prominent thinkers, like Marxist economist Richard Wolf, continues this tendency of equating our current representative oligarchies with democracy. For Wolf we do live in a political democracy because there are elections for government (which supposedly empowers people politically), which leads him to the conclusion that we also need to bring elections for employers to the work place, so that we can also empower people economically:

there’s a democracy in the way you reside — your home, your neighborhood — because you vote for the people who are mayor or senator or governor. But you don’t vote for your employer.[8]

Of course, there still are voices that make the crucial distinction between electoral statecraft and democratic self-management. Such examples include people such as British economists Cockshott and Cottrell, who emphasize on this stark opposition:

Parliamentary government and democracy are polar opposites. Democracy is rule by the masses, by the poor and dispossessed; parliament, rule by professional politicians, who, in numbers and class position, are part of the oligarchy.[9]

Unfortunately, the confusion has prevailed, leaving such voices in the margins. This has created a twofold problem. On the one hand, it serves the interest of the ruling elites as it offers an ideological veil that obscures the hierarchical character of the dominant bureaucratic system behind narratives and iconic processes of popular pseudo-participation. In this way an attempt is made to instill and maintain a feeling among society that, in a way, we are all complicit in the actions of our governments since it was us that have elected them. No matter how minor or insignificant our input really is — we voted, therefore we participated and are somewhat co-responsible for the actions of those elected in power. Of course, this logic is completely fallacious, since as Castoriadis suggests, people are not free even on election day, as the deck is stacked, the pseudo-options are predetermined by parties — and, what’s more, they’re empty.[10]

On the other hand, this confusion obscures the alternative to what we have today in terms of systemic form of social organization. By suggesting that we already have a system that empowers people politically makes us blind for the existing power discrepancies. Thus, the political field is abandoned and instead fixes are being sought in the economic, cultural or other fields alone. This leads to a dead end, as there cannot be popular empowerment in any separate sphere in a top-down setting that separates society into layers of small elites with authority and overwhelming disempowered majorities. While struggles in each of these single fields are of great importance and contribute to the wellbeing of us all in the ‘here-and-now’ and can often increase our space and time for movement, there cannot be a revolutionary change unless we overturn the very skeletal structure on which modern societies are built — meaning radically altering the existing power-relations and decision-making processes on society-wide scale.

This is where democracy comes in. From its inception until today it comes to suggest that when it comes to the rules that mediate our life in common, every single one of us can and should participate equally in their shaping via grassroots assemblies. And when decisions should be coordinated on a larger scale, encompassing more than one self-managed community, then revocable delegates get chosen via lot to attend confederal coordinative councils and cantons. In this way it is further ensured that power remains at the grassroots, because as Jacques Ranciere explains:

We should distinguish between delegation and representation. In a democracy, logically enough some people will carry out certain activities on other people’s behalf. But the delegate plays her role only once, which is not true of representatives. Drawing lots was once the normal democratic way of designating delegates, based on the principle that everyone was equally capable.[11]

Thus, a radical change is offered that entails the radical restructuring of all fields. With bureaucracy and elite-rule gone, it is up to all members of society to directly alter the rules and limits that give shape to collective life. It is ridiculous to think, for example, about economic inequality in one such setting, because as Murray Bookchin has suggested, economic processes will be absorbed by the political sphere:

The economy ceases to be merely an economy in the strict sense of the word — whether as “business,” “market,” capitalist, “worker-controlled” enterprises. It becomes a truly political economy: the economy of the polis or the commune. In this sense, the economy is genuinely communized as well as politicized. The municipality, more precisely, the citizen body in face-to-face assembly absorbs the economy as an aspect of public business, divesting it of an identity that can become privatized into a self-serving enterprise.[12]

One such radically egalitarian and participatory perspective is viable only if we liberate our imaginary from all the burden of domination — including electoral representativity. As long as we find ourselves incapable of thinking about democracy beyond elections we will be running in circles — wondering why those we have elected turned into a distinctive class with its own interests that go against those of the overwhelming disempowered majority. This last point is becoming increasingly evident to people everywhere around the world, as a result of which abstention rates are soaring almost everywhere.

But this growing refusal to engage in electoral spectacles can lead either to further political cynicism, or it can lift the ideological veil of ‘democracies’ and show representativity for what it really is — a basic pillar of oligarchy and elite-rule.

It is the latter case that will allow for egalitarian and communal perspectives to emerge, offering a vision of the total abolition of political representation and its replacement by the direct and unmediated participation by all through grassroots institutions (such as popular assemblies and councils of revocable delegates) in shaping social life. What we can do from today is to insist persistently that there are no countless types of ‘democracies’: if there is any form worth of the name democracy, it is the one that renders domination of humans over other humans and over the natural world obsolete.

[1] Giorgio Agamben (ed.): Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p77.

[2] http://www.athene.antenna.nl/ARCHIEF/NR01-Athene/02-Probl.-e.html

[3] Aristotle: The Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p1290.

[4] Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract (Jonathan Bennett, 2017), p33.

[5] https://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/c2-03.htm

[6] https://www.crf-usa.org/election-central/de-tocqueville-america.html

[7] Lenin: Collected Works, vol. 25 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing

House, 1964), p424.

[8] https://ctxt.es/es/20160427/Politica/5729/richard-wolff-democracy-cooperatives-mondragon-self-directed-enterprise.htm

[9] Cockshott & Cottrell: Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993), p159.

[10] Cornelius Castoriadis: A Society Adrift (Not Bored, 2010), p220.

[11] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3142-representation-against-democracy-jacques-ranciere-on-the-french-presidential-elections?fbclid=IwAR1jrGejMFEthMfuV5ZBFM7S13V0AAooh1ToK1AXGg10YVss7nRI5lhg7Bc

[12] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-community-ownership-of-the-economy

By Yavor Tarinski

Without action, all pleasure, all feeling, all knowledge is nothing but a postponed death.

~Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz[1]

How come that different styles of self-help and esotericism have gained so much popularity? One of the reasons is the very political architecture of our contemporary societies. The conditions of oligarchy (rule by the few), under which we currently live, not only does not provide the spatial dimensions for people to practice politics and influence public affairs, but they also actively resist mass political involvement — what French philosopher Jacques Ranciere has termed Hatred of Democracy. In one such institutional setting, one can act only as an atomized individual, and not as a citizen that is actively and passionately involved in the collective management of society. And since our societies are structured around exclusively oligarchic lines — i.e. national-statist and capitalist ones — it is no wonder that there has been a diachronic retreat to various kinds of esoteric individualisms.

This trend is especially evident in times of crisis.[2] In conditions of war or economic hardship people are pressed by worsening living conditions, but the political architecture of their oligarchic societies does not provide them with the means of developing a collective response to the problem in hand. They can (and often do) seek collective solutions from outside the system, but the mainstream approach, heavily promoted by various systemic actors, is directed towards “everyone-for-himself” attitudes. A characteristic motto of this atomized worldview can be found in the following lines by Samuel Smiles, the 19th century ‘founding father’ of the self-help genre: Heaven helps those who help themselves.

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin traces the emergence of similar type of thinking back in Ancient Greece too, when Alexander the Great began to destroy the city-states, and the Stoics and the Epicureans began to preach a new morality of personal salvation, which took the form of saying that politics was unimportant, civil life was unimportant.[3]

Oligarchies tend to inspire acquiescence with one’s lot, insisting that there is nothing that can be done in the social realm. Thus, an exclusively individualistic perception of freedom is encouraged. A type of mindset that is very well defined by Isiah Berlin in the following passage: If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.[4]

Freedom becomes an individual affair, something that must be attained by each and every one on his or her own. Becoming free is detached from political deliberation, and instead is equated with submission and passivity. This is arguably the mindset of every type of heteronomous society. Such is the case, for example, with religions such as Christianity, which discover, as Hannah Arendt suggests, in free will a non-political freedom, which could be experience in intercourse with oneself, and was therefore not dependent upon intercourse with the many[5].

This understanding of freedom as a passive and atomized affair, one can argue, is a logical product of the oligarchic restriction of decision-making in the hands of narrow elites. But the very idea that one can be free in his “inner world”, while he reminds unfree in the social realm, is grossly fallacious. Freedom certainly implies the development of individual consciousness, unburdened by heteronomous dogmas and illusions, but it also prompts radical decentralization of power and universal equality. And since the latter two are deeply political values, profound thinkers like Arendt have suggested that there is no actual freedom without politics; It simply could not exist[6].

Being free, thus, must be understood as being politically active. It means that one has the possibility to participate in the creation and alteration of the rules and norms that frame our life in common. And of course, such a political participation cannot take place within an oligarchy, since the latter’s main feature is depoliticizing the great majority. Instead, it can only be realized in a directly democratic project, based on certain spatiality that allows for the exercise of genuine participatory politics.

It is in this line of thought that Arendt suggests that political freedom begins only in action, […] [it] is not ‘inner freedom’; it cannot hide inside a person. It is dependent on a free people to grant it the space in which actions can appear, be seen, and be effective[7]. In a similar fashion, another important thinker, Cornelius Castoriadis insists that true politics, to the extent that these have ever existed, belong to praxis.[8]

No matter how much yoga one does, or how much self-help literature one reads, these can’t really help one get hold of his or her destiny. At most, they can get her acquiescent with her position, but not altering it. The same holds truth for the freedoms offered by economically centered systems such as capitalism. The latter suggests that it provides an economic freedom, i.e. being free to consume. And while one can select among various products on a given shelf, without a proper political freedom, one cannot challenge the short-term profit motive, economic growth doctrine, atomizing consumerism, and all the other features of our modern system. Thus, it cannot really be called freedom at all.

Being free must be understood then, as being politically active in a specific type of democratic institutional setting. For Arendt, human freedom is not merely a matter of metaphysics; it is a matter of fact, as are the automatic processes within and against which it always asserts itself[9]. Because of this she suggests that without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance[10].

There is a direct link between political action and the creation of suitable institutions. To act, one can suggest, means to take active part in the instituting processes of society. It is only then that freedom can be asserted. But it also implies that radical equality between the participants is being instituted, since the action of each and every person holds the same weight. In this line of thought Arendt underlines that:

In action, beginning and performance merge into each other, and, when applied to politics, this means that the person who takes the initiative and thus starts to lead must always move among those who join in to help him as his peers, and neither as a leader among his servants nor as a master among his apprentices or disciples. This is what Herodotus mean when he said that to be free was neither to rule nor to be ruled, and that therefore men could only be free in ισονομία, as democracy was originally called, in being among one’s equal.[11]

Thus, the political architecture of freedom consists not only in the protection and security of the individual, but also his active engagement in the decision-making and instituting processes that frame the rules and norms of our life in common. In one such framework, the equality of the citizens, Castoriadis writes, is not only the passive equality before the law, as promoted by the proponents of liberalism, but also the active general participation in public affairs.[12]

There are suitable institutions that have emerged in multiple historic moments, such as in Ancient Athens, Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War, the Hungarian Revolution, etc., that are based on and can further nurture political action. I refer here to institutional forms like general assemblies and popular councils that give space for broad public deliberation. Castoriadis describes this setting in the following manner:

Participation materializes in the ekklesia, in the Assembly of the people, which is the acting sovereign body. All citizens have the right to speak (isegoria), their votes carry the same weight (isopsephia), and they are under a moral obligation to speak their minds (parrhesia). Participation also materializes in the courts. There are no professional judges; virtually all courts are juries with their jurors chosen by lot.[13]

In one such direct democratic system there are no ready blueprints or premade solutions, but only the space for political action. But it is through action, individual as well as collective, that everyone in society can be free. Freedom is not the absence of restraints, something that could potentially lead to excessive behaviors and imposition of the stronger over the weaker, but the possibility of each and every member of society to equally participate in the management of their life in common.

Such freedom is not given, and neither is attainable on our own. It requires collective and coordinated acts. It is social creation that requires passion, as well as patience. All the modern short-cuts (such as self-help, esotericism etc.) are tools that can give us an illusion of being free in an unfree world. Actual freedom, is nothing short of genuinely democratic action.

[1] Isaiah Berlin: The Roots of Romanticism (Oxford; Princeton University Press, 2013), p64.

[2] https://link.medium.com/TY1mgaW52ob

[3] Isaiah Berlin: The Roots of Romanticism (Oxford; Princeton University Press, 2013), p44.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), pp51–52.

[6] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), p45.

[7] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), p59.

[8] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p150.

[9] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), p72.

[10] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), p34.

[11] Hannah Arendt: The Freedom to be Free (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), p74.

[12] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p275.

[13] David Ames Curtis (ed.): The Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p276.

The Spatial Dimensions of Citizenship as an Antidote to Mob Rule

By Yavor Tarinski

The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It has always been true that the mob will greet “deeds of violence with admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever.

-Hannah Arendt[1]

Among opponents of direct democracy there is this reoccurring argument of it being prone to the so-called “mob rule”[2], as if the people, once empowered, will most probably turn into a mob. But this line of thought, deeply submerged into oligarchic imaginary, is highly fallacious and deceptive. There are certain reasons because of which the people can degrade into mob, and Hanna Arendt’s work can provide clarity into distinguishing the former from the latter, as well as alternative civic routs that can lead to the emergence of an active citizenry instead.

The Characteristics of the Mob

Arendt begins with stating that it is fundamentally wrong to regard the mob as identical with rather than as caricature of the people.[3] It is only one possible form of the latter, and not its supposed “inner-self” that waits to be unleashed. Instead, Arendt suggests that the mob, with its “enlarged tribal consciousness”, resembles much rather a “race”,[4] which is an extreme and totalitarian-leaning identity that the people can take. As such it is inherently attracted to violence. In this sense, we can suggest that the mob is anti-political, as it, according to Arendt, attempts to substitute power for strength.[5]

It is only logical then that the mob will search for and stand behind the “strong man,” the “great leader”. This is a characteristic of great differentiation from another tendency that large swaths of people have exhibited during all great revolutions — that of the fight for true, direct participation. If the second is an expression of genuine social life, then, according to Arendt, the former expresses the hate for society from which the mob feels excluded.[6]

The authoritarian tendency of mob mentality is enforced by a mixture of gullibility and cynicism, which has proven so effective for the rise of totalitarian movements. Arendt points at how totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.[7]

Ultimately, mob mentality is all about thirst for authority. What unites all those who constitute mob-like movements is, for Arendt, the promise that each of its members could become such a lofty all-important walking embodiment of something ideal if he would only join it.[8] She characterizes correctly such authoritarian tendencies as the underworld of the bourgeois class,[9] where everyone is ready to exploit popular anger and desperation in order to get herself/himself into power.

The Mob and the Plebiscite Republic

Nowadays we have often heard of authoritarian leaders speaking of direct democracy, when trying to underline their mass popularity. What they really mean however has nothing to do with any genuine form of democratic experience, as this would indicate the unmediated involvement of every single member of society in public affairs. Instead, Arendt suggests, they advance the procedure of plebiscites (or referendums), which is an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob,[10] as it rests upon people responding en masse to pre-formulated questions and then leaving those in power to implement in practice their own interpretation of the result.

The referendum is not a new addition to the political arsenal of authoritarian movements. 19th century politician Paul Déroulède, one of the founders of the French nationalist Ligue des Patriotes, envisioned a “plebiscite republic”, where the president will be elected into power by universal suffrage, and the popular will would be expressed through “legislative plebiscites”.[11] In one such setting at the core of the system is not the direct popular deliberation, but the head of the nation, whose decisions, at times, are brought in a manipulative manner to the public for ratification.

It is clear that in this case there is no genuine form of citizenship present. Instead, we have a system based entirely on mob mentality, where an authoritarian movement, with an utmost devotion, elevates its leader, with the hope that each of its individual members will get a grip of at least a little bit of privilege over the rest of society. The usage of plebiscite in such cases comes as an ideological cover of a semi-totalitarian experiences, and has nothing to do with democracy.

Beyond the Mob: Creating Spaces for Citizenship

The problem with our current political system, with its alienating and passive form of governance, is that it provides certain preconditions for potential degradations of the people into mobs. Unfortunately, however, it does not do the same with the elevation of people into citizens — a vital element for direct democracy. Citizenship must be understood as the exact opposite of mob mentality: if the latter indicates the lowest human drive towards centralization of authority in the hands of a certain section of society, then the former is the sweeping distribution of power among all and the establishment of a political architecture of radical equality. It is an inseparable ingredient for freedom as a political phenomenon, whose roots can be traced back to the emergence of the Athenian polis and the first germs of direct democracy.

Arendt explains that the current regime of representative parliamentarism (today fallaciously dubbed representative “democracy” — an oxymoron) could not save the people from lethargy and inattention to public business, since [it] provided a public space only for the representatives of the people, and not for the people themselves.[12]

In other words, with the exception of the ruling class, the rest of society has no access to the political processes that shape the direction their society is to take. One might object, by pointing to electoral procedures that usually take place once every several years, reminded by the famous words of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that in such regimes people are free only during the election of members of parliament.[13] But there is a more than convincing correction to that thought offered by Cornelius Castoriadis, according to whom the subjects of such regimes are not free even on election day, as their decisions have been prescribed by political parties, the propaganda industry, and other factors long before their visit to the ballot box.[14]

For Arendt, citizenship is something that is practiced[15], and as such it requires a proper public space. According to her, danger for the emergence of authoritarian tendencies emerges from settings, such as the one we have today, where certain degree of liberty is given to the people in their private capacity but there is no space established for them in their capacity of being citizens.[16] In this sense, political participation is spatially limited, since it is not universally valid, but becomes reality only when a majority of the people applies it. The active practice of citizenship by the people in the public affairs of their communities provides them not only with the experience of public freedom, but also with a sense of political and genuinely civic agency.

A suitable space where the people can act, and turn into, active citizens are the institutions of direct democracy, such as the popular council and the public assembly. For Arendt, councils are the best instruments for breaking up the modern mass society, with its dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political mass movements.[17] Such popular democratic institutions are invaluable for the creation of vital citizenship as they are the only political organs where party membership plays no role whatsoever, and are in fact spaces for people to act without intermediaries. It is for this reason, as Arendt notes, that the councils of direct democracy will always be in conflict with parliaments as well as with ‘constituent assemblies’, for the simple reason that the latter, even in their most extreme wings are still the children of the party system.[18]

Unlike others who, from fear of the rise of the excessive mob, seek to erect even more barriers to keep the masses from political power, Arendt concludes that the only remedies against the misuse of public power by private individuals lie in the public realm itself.[19] In other words, the best solution to authoritarianism is the establishment of a political setting in which all members of society have an equal share in power and can collectively put limits to excessive and oligarchic attitudes.

Conclusion

Much time has passed since the publication of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism back in 1951, but the danger of authoritarianism is still present. The liberal oligarchic environment of the current representative regimes provides fertile ground for the emergence of mob-like tendencies that advance totalitarian projects and autarchic leaders. But such authoritarian movements are not an inevitable form of the people. Instead, they are a by-product of a system that denies the right to genuine political participation to the vast majority of society. It is this state of generalized disempowerment that drives the emergence of mobs. An antidote to such totalitarian tendencies is the creation of genuine public space, where a spatiality is provided for the emergence of another form of the people — that of the citizen. The exercise of citizenship, according to Arendt, is one of the best antidotes to authoritarian attitudes. It is only by means of direct political participation, that is, by engaging in common action and collective deliberation, that citizenship can be reaffirmed and political agency effectively exercised.

[1] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p307

[2] https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/413142-the-united-states-is-not-a-democracy-and-it-wasnt-meant-to-be-one

[3] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p107

[4] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p238

[5] Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p203

[6] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p107

[7] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p382

[8] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p249

[9] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p337

[10] Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Harcourt, 1973), p107

[11] Jean-Yves Camus & Nicolas Lebourg: Far-Right Politics In Europe (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2017), p12

[12] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p230

[13] Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

[14] http://www.athene.antenna.nl/ARCHIEF/NR01-Athene/02-Probl.-e.html

[15] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#AreConCit

[16] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p245

[17] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p271

[18] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp255–256

[19] Hannah Arendt: On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p245

By Yavor Tarinski

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

-Noam Chomsky[1]

Nowadays the terms democracy and capitalism have often been used almost as synonyms. This interchangeability has penetrated not only the official political vocabulary but also social imaginaries. Many who feel oppressed and/or exploited by the current system tend to blame both concepts.

A significant part of the Left also participates in this terminological equalization, because it wrongly interprets democracy simply as a process dedicated to the guaranteeing of rights and liberties. But even so, philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis suggests that those who believe this are still wrong because the emergence of rights and liberties was not an occurrence in the interest of capitalism[2]. According to him, these rights and liberties were demanded at the outset by the struggles of the underprivileged, as well as of the inhabitants of the newly emerged free towns. Furthermore, he notes that these rights and liberties do not correspond to the “spirit” of capitalism: the latter demands, rather, the Taylorist “one best way” or the “iron cage” of Max Weber. The idea that they might be the political counterpart of and presupposition for competition in the economic market is equally false. When we consider the inner tendency of capitalism, Castoriadis continues, we see that capitalism culminates in monopoly, oligopoly, or alliances among capitalists.

The truth is that democracy, in its authentic direct form, has nothing to do with capitalism and is in fact at odds with it. James Madison, one of US’s Founding Fathers, seems to have been aware of this when saying that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property[3].

Capitalism as an Engine of Inequality

Democracy is a system of radical political equality. Hannah Arendt defines it as a political system that guarantees civil and political rights while allowing all willing citizens direct participation in government[4]. It places politics in charge of all spheres of social life. It is clear that this is not the system we have today.

Capitalism, on the other hand, nurtures social antagonisms that lead to social inequalities, and its proponents often openly defend inequality as a natural aspect of human nature[5]. In doing so, it places economics as a separate and supreme field of human interaction.

In a capitalist setting, people are pitted against each other to compete for resources, space, and time. It is not only economic classes competing with each other, but also people from similar social milieu. And where there is antagonism there always are winners and losers. Steven W. Thrasher concludes that the disparities in wealth that we term “income inequality” are no accident, they happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.[6] Furthermore, researchers D. B. Krupp and Thomas R. Cook suggest in a study that social inequalities are being amplified by local competition[7], which is the cornerstone of free-market economics.

Anthropologist Jason Hickel exemplifies the way economic inequalities create and strengthen power discrepancies in the following way:

Every additional dollar that goes to the rich adds more to their power, and the richer they are, the more power it adds. Why? Because the more distant the new money is from any given need threshold, the more it is available to be spent on power. The relationship between income and power is, in effect, an inverse logarithmic relationship. Plus, we need to account for the fact that the more money the rich spend on power, the more they inflate its price, pushing power ever-further out of the reach of the poor.[8]

Furthermore, although capitalism has often been presented as a non-bureaucratic system, in reality, it functions in a strictly hierarchical top-down manner. Iranian sociologist Jacob Rigi explains that:

labour is still compartmentalized in closed spaces and is managed despotically by representatives of capital. While small select group of workers may enjoy partial autonomy the total labor processes is centralized by managers who integrate the work of separate workers into a total cooperative work process. […] Individual producers do not choose their tasks, or the pace, time and place of their work. In other words the work process is micro-territorialized both spatially and temporally.[9]

In fact, bureaucracy was strengthened by the rise of capitalism. The latter was actually very dependent on bureaucratized structures and it thus nurtured them. Anthropologist David Graeber finds out in his research on the Utopia of Rules that market reforms always increase the total number of bureaucrats, as was the case with the Reagan administration, for example[10]. Social ecologist Murray Bookchin points to another historic example of this trend by claiming that we in the United States 200 years ago started out with the notion of limited government — virtually no government interference — and we now have a massive quasi-totalitarian government.[11]

Democracy as a Project of Equality

As noted above, direct democracy (as the only real form of democracy), follows completely different logic from capitalism. It is a political project that strives at radically redistributing decision-making power equally among all members of society. In doing so, it directly attacks all other forms of inequality, as citizens undertake directly the management of all social spheres via public grassroots institutions. Instead of competition, it implies cooperation and equal participation.

Noam Chomsky underlines this stark difference:

democracy […] means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.[12]

By placing all power equally in the hands of all people, direct democracy abolishes the separation of the different spheres of social life. Judiciary, legislative, economic, cultural, and other issues are all discussed and decided upon in the public sphere by the empowered citizenry. It is the people collectively deciding the rules, norms, and limits of all their social activities and can alter them whenever the majority deems it necessary.

In this line of thought then, Bookchin suggests that democracy politicizes the economy and dissolves it into the civic domain[13]. In the democratic project, according to Bookchin, “property” is integrated into the commune as a material constituent of its libertarian institutional framework, indeed as a part of a larger whole that is controlled by the citizen body in assembly as citizens” not as vocationally oriented interest groups.[14]

Unlike economistic notions like ”nationalization” and ”privatization”, both implying the separation of the economy from politics, direct democracy advances the subjugation of economic activities (along with all other social spheres) to the political institutions of self-management. According to Bookchin, the economy ceases to be merely an economy in the strict sense of the word ”whether as “business,” “market,” capitalist, “worker-controlled” enterprises and instead the citizen body in face-to-face assembly absorbs the economy as an aspect of the public sphere[15]. From this follows that in the project of direct democracy it will be more appropriate to speak of “municipalization” of the economy.

Conclusion

We have to understand that democracy, in its true meaning is something much more than a mere procedure that can be used within other social systems. Conducting referenda once in a while, while maintaining the separation of power from society via nation-states and/or capitalist markets, does not make one regime more democratic. It may give it a more humane face, but it remains an oligarchy (society ruled by a small minority) nonetheless.

As long as there are centralized and bureaucratic entities, regardless of their ideological mantle, we cannot talk of democracy. It is only when the people — as demos — self-empower themselves and begin self-instituting their collective co-existence that we can begin seeing the seeds of a democratic society.

As Castoriadis suggests, rotation in office, sortition, decision-making after deliberation by the entire body politic, elections, and popular courts did not rest solely on a postulate that everyone has an equal capacity to assume public responsibilities: these procedures were themselves pieces of a political educational process, of an active paideia, which aimed at exercising — and, therefore, at developing in all — the corresponding abilities and, thereby, at rendering the postulate of political equality as close to the effective reality of that society as possible.[16]

Only by conceiving democracy as a holistic project that we can understand that it is not only incompatible with capitalist relations and statecraft, but it requires their complete abolition. As Prof. Dr. Wolgang Merkel concludes, capitalism and democracy follow different logics: unequally distributed property rights on the one hand, equal civic and political rights on the other; profit- oriented trade within capitalism in contrast to the search for the common good within democracy; debate, compromise and majority decision-making within democratic politics versus hierarchical decision-making by managers and capital owners.[17] It is up to all of us collectively to make the choice of the 21st century — democracy or barbarism.

References:

[1] Z Magazine (May 1998).

[2] Cornelius Castoriadis: The Rising Tide of Insignificancy: The Big Sleep (unauthorized translation, 2003): pp350–351.

[3] James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay: The Federalist Papers: The Classic Original Edition (New York: SoHo Books, 2011): p. 26.

[4] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1558/crit.v12i3.396?journalCode=ycrh20

[5] https://www.gisreportsonline.com/is-economic-inequality-a-bad-thing,politics,2459.html

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/05/income-inequality-policy-capitalism

[7] D. B. Krupp & Thomas R. Cook: “Local Competition Amplifies the Corrosive Effects of Inequality” in SAGEJournals Volume: 29 issue: 5 (2018): pp824–833.

https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/default+domain/10.1177/0956797617748419-free/full

[8] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-05/inequality-metrics-and-the-question-of-power/

[9] http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/invited-comments/a-new-communist-horizon/

[10] https://www.salon.com/test3/2015/03/05/i_found_myself_turning_into_an_idiot_david_graeber_explains_the_life_sapping_reality_of_bureaucratic_life/?fbclid=IwAR0SXKDal3xd4z2aqgYMV1FjxBzG8MyDpBXNy-iChZZz43b0b8Sx1DBh2EM

[11] http://reason.com/archives/1979/10/01/interview-with-murray-bookchin/

[12] Noam Chomsky: Language and Politics (California: AK Press, 2004): p138.

[13] https://libcom.org/library/municipalization-murray-bookchin

[14] https://libcom.org/library/municipalization-murray-bookchin

[15] https://libcom.org/library/municipalization-murray-bookchin

[16] Cornelius Castoriadis: The Rising Tide of Insignificancy: The Big Sleep (unauthorized translation, 2003): p349.

[17] Wolfgang Merkel and Sascha Kneip (eds.): Democracy and Crisis: Challenges in Turbulent Times (Berlin: Springer International Publishing, 2018): p253.

The Imagination is a weapon. Those who don’t use it die first.

-Goblin Slayer in Episode 2, Season 1

Animes have always been charged with social and political messages. The recent series of Goblin Slayer (GS), directed by Takaharu Ozaki and based on the novel written by Kumo Kagyu and illustrated by Noboru Kannatuki, does not make an exception. Furthermore, its political symbolism seems abreast with the current age of social struggles against oppression, which refuse to accept grand narratives or engage in representative politics. One can argue that GS deals with urgent matters and draws important political lessons that can be valuable for contemporary social movements. Others have already attempted to analyze this show, but seem to not have grasped in depth its emancipatory politics.

Few words regarding the plot

The world of GS is inhabited by magic and mythical creatures like elves, dwarves, lizardmen, goblins, gnomes, trolls, demons etc. Some of them coexist with humans in peace, while others are terrorizing and threatening them. For this second category is being formed the adventurer’s guild, an organization that strives to protect society. The two main characters of the show are the Priestess and Goblin Slayer that have dedicated themselves to fighting goblins, and during the episodes are being joined by other adventurers.

The question of Scale

GS can be interpreted as an analysis that delves into the question of what scale activists and social movements should pursue when fighting oppression and injustice. Whether they should enter the field of electoral politics on national and transnational level and engage in “epic” and spectacular “battles” of central political character, or maintain their struggle on grassroots level and fight domination in everyday life, even if this means enduring mundane and/or dangerous activities. Currently we have been seeing this question to be central with the French “Yellow Vests”, that have been urged by politicians and experts to elect their representatives and negotiate with the Macron government, while the activists of the movement themselves refuse to enter the spectacle and hierarchies of National politics.

The season 1 of GS seems to be dealing, to a certain point at least, with that matter. Situated in the fantasy genre, where usually the heroes of the story have to face an epic threat that threatens to destroy the world, the present animation turns this narrative on its head. The main character (who remains anonymous and faceless throughout the season) refuses to take on the grandiose threats to the dominant order, like the Demon Lord, and focuses solely on slaying goblins. Throughout the episodes of season 1 we constantly hear references to the former, but his actual presence is not being felt. Instead we hear of his appearances in the capital (the supposed power center of the GS universe). Even the way he is being slayed — by some characters of insignificant role to the plot and in a scene of under a minute length — comes to represent the insignificance this supposedly epic threat has on the everyday life of people.

The goblins, on the other hand, are being constantly ridiculed by the adventurers for their insignificancy. They are supposedly weak enemy that terrorizes communities, located on the periphery of society. When slayed, they do not bring prestige, status or glory. On the contrary, if one is being killed by them, this could bring shame. But their parasitic and oppressive presence is being constantly felt throughout the season. We often hear of raped or kidnapped girls, robbed or killed peasants, and pillaged communities. Even when the Goblin Lord appears in episode 11, he is not some generic threat, but a specific one with concrete social consequences. And this is the reason why the main characters have decided to fight only them.

Goblins, in the context of the show, can be understood as exploitation, discrimination, sexism, etc: these forms of domination and oppression, which are present in almost invisible way (often consciously hidden from the public by the ruling authorities) in contemporary everyday life. The Demon Lord, on the other hand, represents the realm of electoral spectacle. The importance of the conflicts that take place in it is often blown out of proportion. They are being presented as epic battles with existential character, but which are not actually felt by common people in their everyday life. A real world example is the electoral battle between the centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine le Pen, narrated by mainstream (and not only) media in terms of “Good versus Evil”. And although the supposed hero defeated the villain, the life in France remained precarious, just as the goblins in the GS universe continued to torture people and communities even after the defeat of the Demon Lord. Thus the social movements in France, just like the GS main characters, had to continue their struggle against everyday injustices and exploitation, culminating in the uprising of the “Yellow Vests”.

Goblin Slayer is supposedly presented with the option to escape all the slaying and return to rural life, but he knows that if he remains inactive, goblins will sooner or later disturb the peace of him and those around him. Furthermore he himself is a victim of theirs, with his sister being slaughtered when he was only a boy. He knows that the people on the periphery of society will always be tormented by goblins, so he cannot neither give up, nor engage in the epic battles of the capital. Similarly, many activists remain active on grassroots level and continue to struggle against oppression, refusing to enter the realm of electoral spectacle, where they will remain politically toothless in the face of injustice.

Bureaucracy and Narcissism

The GS universe appears heavily bureaucratized. Adventurers have to go to the headquarters of the adventurer’s guild for quests, in order to get ranked and paid. Furthermore, the names are of generic character — Priestess, Elven Ranger, Hero, Scout, Sword Maiden etc. — that indicates their combat skills, rather than personality. Even the world outside the guild is not spared by this bureaucratization: the childhood friend of Goblin Slayer is simply called Cow Girl (which conveniently fits with her lifestyle — she lives and works in her uncle’s farm).

In this bureaucratic environment narcissist behavior is being encouraged and nurtured. Adventurers seek quests that will help them elevate to higher rank and economically profit, while mockery towards lower ranking characters is an often occurrence. In this system fighting goblins is just not worth it. Although they are the menace to society that is actually being felt by common people, adventurers avoid dealing with them since this will not bring them prestige and elevate them in the guild’s hierarchy (and there is always the risk of messing up and getting killed by them). Instead we constantly see characters in expensive equipment and high status boasting about their achievements in quests that does not have real effect on society. This highly reflects the narcissist attitude members of political parties, NGOs and other bureaucratic organizations adopt. The status in such organizations means economic and political power and becomes an end in itself, like celebrity politicians who avoid mundane and tiresome tasks, while boasting with achievements, which have no real effect on the oppressed and exploited.

The Goblin Slayer, on the other hand, transcends this narcissist attitude and the bureaucratically imposed roles. At the season’s finale he rallies other adventurers around humane values like trust and mutual aid. Even Guild Girl (the main staff of the Adventurer’s Guild) breaks the bureaucratic rules and helps Goblin Slayer’s egalitarian request. He continues his struggle against goblins, knowing that this will not elevate his rank in the guild’s hierarchy nor his economic wellbeing. The bad shape of his equipment is constantly being remarked by other adventurers, while his sword skills are being questioned due to his refusal to engage in more “prestigious” quests. But as a victim of goblin violence himself, he is conscious of the threat that they represent, even to the elite ranks (whose fear of them is being revealed by the Sword Maiden, the defeater of Demon Lord, in Episode 8), and that sooner or later, one will have to face them.

His character could be understood as a metaphor for the thousands of grassroots activists that refuse to act according to the rules of the nation-state and the capitalist system, fighting instead oppression and injustice “from below”. Goblin Slayer represents this enraged multitude that is the biggest victim of the structural violence of the dominant order. Although at times we see him without helmet, his eyes remain hidden until the very end of the season, something which comes to suggest that his personal identity is of no particular importance to this struggle, since he is not some superhero but an everyday person — one among the crowd. Goblin Slayer is even depicted, in the very end of episode 12 as just another pawn they could find anywhere else. What makes him different (or even heroic) however is his decision to not allow the gods roll the dice, and to take his destiny in his own hands. By being described simply as pawn, which however could decide to defy his tormentors and transgress his predetermined role, the show suggests, everyone can join the fight against oppression, regardless of their personal strengths and weaknesses, and most certainly, without the need of specific expertise or superior skills.

Conclusion

The GS series carry a powerful political message for us today. Fighting the injustices that torment us cannot be done through the mechanisms of bureaucracy and electoral spectacle. If we get tangled with high status and wealth, the show suggests, we will become too comfortable with our position and too afraid to face the real incarnations of oppression. Social movements seem to be learning this lesson too. From the Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, throughout the Indignados and Nout Debout, up to the recent “Yellow Vest” mobilizations, growing amount of people are deciding to face their problems in a horizontal manner, instead of relying on representatives or cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms. They seem in line with the show on the idea that the only way to improve our lives is to do it on grassroots level — to get our hands dirty. There will not be a single epic battle, just as there won’t be a grand revolution, after which a happily-ever-after scenario will follow. Instead, GS suggests, life is a struggle. Forms of domination, discrimination and exploitation will be trying to sneak upon us and our communities even when we have supposedly installed a more just system (one without Demon Lord). The history of humanity is filled with examples that support this suggestion.

Just like the Goblin Slayer continues, day after day, to kill goblins, so we too must continue to organize democratically and face oppression in a patient manner. Even if at times such an approach might seem mundane, tiresome or lacking of fame and glory, it surely is a recipe for long term improvement of the human condition.