Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone – Astra Taylor

This is an impressive book – its immensely readable but at the same time teases out some of the contradictions at the heart of a very complex idea.

Each chapter looks at a different tension within the concept of democracy – freedom/equality, conflict/consensus, expertise/mass opinion, inclusion/exclusion, and so on. It’s a good approach, not only because these are well understood complexities in democratic thought and practice, but also because it allows Taylor to explore why democracy is always changing’; why it’s a contested ideal and never finally captured.

This is a left-wing take on the ideal of democracy, and it argues for greater economic equality as a pre-requisite for democracy, as well as more inclusivity and the need for a vigilant, active citizenry. She wants democratic socialism, she says. But at the same time, she’s also aware of the compromises needed for running modern democracies, not least the problems that political parties bring, and the way that lobbyists provide professional politicians will easy solutions. It’s a wise book, as well as an impassioned one, and that itself is a tricky combination to pull off.

One of the novel elements of this book is that Taylor has gone out and spoken to people of all kinds about what democracy means to them, and she intertwines this with democratic history, politics and theory to show the tensions in the ideal. As she says:

“I placed the insights of school children, doctors, former prisoners, workers and refugees alongside the likes of Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Madison, and Marx.”

And that’s interesting too. This might not be the case for Astra Taylor, but it’s noticeable that as discontent, anti-liberal tendencies and populism have become stronger over recent years, there seem to have been more works of political theory that have gone out and talked to people. I’m thinking, for example, of Zizi Papacharissi’s After Democracy, or Stephen Coleman’s How People Talk about Politics.

In the end, though, Taylor arrives at the view that the current manifestation of democracy in countries like the US is too dominated by inequalities, prejudices and exploitative elites to serve its people well. And, because democracy allows for contestation, we don’t know where we will be headed. So she argues we need to engage in a struggle to create “a democracy that has never been tried and is not yet in our sights.”

What we owe each other – Minouche Shafik

This is a serious book – I mean, obviously, in that it addresses serious issues. But serious too in its proposals. It suggests a new social contract, setting out the principles guiding our economic rights and responsibilities as citizens, and together they would make for a very serious, sensible, hard-working citizenry.

Shafik looks at key areas where citizens should have rights and responsibilities: education, health, work, old age and future generations. In each she looks at how different countries around the world have reached a settlement between the state and citizens. How healthcare, education or security in old age is provided, and how it needs to change given new realities like an ageing population, falling birth rates, new technologies, the changing nature of work, and so on.

She sets out three principles to guide a rethinking of the social contract:

⁃ That the state should provide a minimum of security for everyone’s health, education, income and old age.

⁃ There should be maximum investment as can be afforded in creating productive citizens who can contribute for as long as possible to society and the economy.

⁃ Risks should be better managed and more fairly distributed across society.

Shafik sees nation states as inevitable, depleting resources as part and parcel of our world, and current demographic and technological trends as a reality to be faced. So she’s presenting a liberal vision within this realist context.

There’s lots of good stuff in here – ideas like everyone having an educational fund they can spend later in life, a focus on supporting education for all in the first 1,000 days of life, and an exploration of how to treat future generations fairly.

At the heart of this new social contract she is proposing is work – to pay for all the support we need to provide for ourselves and others, people need to be productive; working In efficient jobs and beyond current retirement ages, particularly as people will begin to live longer.

And I guess that’s indicative of where the main reservation to this way of thinking comes in for me – the whole approach takes our current status quo as a given and works from there. Which is fine, but inevitably ends up saying that what we need is productivity, growth and hard work. And, in addition, it says that it’s ok for developing countries to be further behind in their offer to citizens than more developed ones; though she does discuss addressing global inequality fleetingly, it’s not a big part of this.

The contrast that came to mind reading this book is with Fully Automated Luxury Communuism by Aaron Bastini – effectively a social contract based on the end of scarcity, radical equality and a lot of hope. Bastini thinks our future could be a technology-driven utopia where people work minimal hours and live free lives thanks to the abundance of goods in the world.

Whereas Bastini’s vision is idealistic and not fully thought-through, Minouche Shafik’s is hard-headed, realist, very considered. It’s hard to fully get behind either, but for very different reasons. In the end, you can tell Shafik’s ideal of a social contract is the work of a policy maker and former deputy head of the Bank of England. It’s weighty and many of the ideas could work, now. But it feels like it lacks the radical imagination around which a political movement could be built.

Democracy is always a struggle…

“The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention and struggle. Through theory and practice, organisation and open rebellion, protecting past gains and demanding new entitlements, the inspiring potential of self-rule manifests, bit it remains fragmentary and fragile, forever partial and imperilled.”

Astra Taylor, Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone

The Hatred of Democracy – Jacques Ranciere

There’s something very appealing about a political thinker who takes positions that stand in such stark contrast to standard schools of thought, even radical ones like Marxism or anarchism. It makes it harder to read, to understand – especially if their style of writing is complicated and often obscure like this! – but able to hit you with unexpected insights.

That’s exactly what I found with Ranciere’s short but dense book. It’s a look at why politicians, elites and intellectuals have disdain for democracy, and is a meditation on what we should mean when we talk about democracy.

He does this partly through reflections on contemporary politics, but mostly by looking at Athenian democracy and Plato’s views in particular.

The hatred of democracy he identifies is a double-blow:

“Either democratic life signified a large amount of popular participation in discussing public affairs, and it was a bad thing; or it stood for a form of social life that turned energies toward individual satisfaction, and it was a bad thing.”

Instead Ranciere draws on what he sees as the core of the Athenian democratic tradition – the drawing of lots to determine who governs, pointing to the fact democracy resides in this radical idea, not the autocracy or elite rule that we get from representative democracy.

For Ranciere, as for Athenians, democracy is not so much a set of institutions or processes, but a realisation that nobody has the right to rule, or, to put it another way, if anyone can rule then everyone can.

He easily defends radical democracy against the standard critique of it, that government needs elites to rule:

“The drawing of lots was the remedy to an evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: governments comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.”

When you look at modern politics – from Trump and Bolsano style populism to the professional politician class to technocrats, you can see exactly his point. One echoed by the like of David Graeber, for example, in his Democracy Project, or Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics.

There is a slow comeback of the idea of rule by lot in the form of citizen assemblies, but this is niche at the moment, just tinkering at the edges of our politics. As Ranciere says, democracy as lots has been the subject of a forgetting.

On the whole we have allowed democracy to become synonymous with elites vying for power, and lost any sense of the real meaning of democracy – a radical equality where everyone can rule, no matter what.

Participation and Democratic Theory – Carol Pateman

Can a book about workplace democracy written in 1970 help us understand some of our democratic problems today?

Pateman’s short book begins by taking issue with the approach to democracy that became dominant, both in actually existing democracies and as an ideal in democracy theory, after the events and instability that led to the rise of fascism and the Second World War: representative democracy, in which competing elites vie for the votes of an otherwise passive and inactive public.

She argues against the hegemony of this model, and instead for greater participation in democracy – in particular for greater workplace democracy. There are three arguments she makes which are worth drawing attention to.

First, why workplace democracy is needed. She argues it’s for two reasons. One is that people – and she always refers to ‘men’ – spend a lot of their time at work, and so if people are to have control or autonomy in their lives, they need democratic control at work. The other is that participating in democracy at lower levels will create citizens who have the experience, interest and skills to participate in democracy at a national level.

Today, with the likes of Trump, Macron, Merkl, Orban, Modi and countless other elites who win majority of votes every few years to take power and then govern with little citizen involvement, the need for politically educated citizens who are active in politics is more relevant than ever. In fact since this book was written new terms like ‘spectator democracy’ and ‘monitor democracy’ have been coined to refer precisely to this disconnect between elites and citizens.

Second, she points to different types of democracy in the workplace. She distinguishes between partial participation (where workers have minimal control over their day-to-day work), full participation (where workers are involved in top-level decisions), democratic participation (where workers have equal power in decisions) and faux participation (where workers are rubber stamping management decisions).

In our time, fifty years, later this argument is even more resonant. Work is still a major part of people’s time, and as companies and as companies have expanded, the gig economy become more prevalent and the role of unions declined, the lack of control people have at work has arguably decreased. This is despite the fact that more and more businesses have started to talk about employee engagement and other forms of what Pateman would call faux, or at best partial, participation.

Finally she talks about the relatively unknown experiment in workplace democracy that took place in 1960s Yugoslavia, an attempt to give workers control. It was an extensive system of democracy in which workers controlled state enterprises through a series of councils, sometimes for enterprises as a whole, sometimes for departments or sections of the enterprise. It was early days for the Yugoslavian system when she was was writing. This state-led mass worker democracy is hard to imagine today, but it serves an example that it’s possible, even if it was far from perfect – though there are other better instances today, like the network of worker co-ops in Spain, Mondragon.

Of course, this book has limitations today, not just in its example of Yugoslavia. Women in particular are given little time in the book, both as industrial workers themselves or domestic labourers who make it possible for the men to go out and do the industrial work. Fifty years on, Pateman – a feminist political theorist – would probably have written a different type of book in this respect.

The other limitation – or question at least – is about whether workplaces should be the focus for democracy, if we want to educate citizens and give them control. They’re certainly one, but there are other aspects of life where people are affected by power – in their housing, local neighbourhoods, their home life, their healthcare, for example. Many of these are quite local and suitable for participatory democracy of the kind Pateman talks about. In fact, I’ve recently been reading Murray Bookchin on confederalism who makes precisely this point. For him, like Pateman, we need participatory democracy in popular assemblies, but he thinks these need to extend way beyond the workplace to give people control over all aspects of their lives, from the places they work to their local neighbourhoods and the economy as a whole.

All this is to say that fifty years later much of what Pateman suggests is right – we need to supplement representative democracy with something more participative, but it might need to go beyond the workplace and extend in to more of everyday life.

Psychopolitics – Byung-Chul Han

A work of critical theory that addresses in sometimes obscure and sometimes spot-on accuracy the way that contemporary neoliberalism controls our emotions and working lives, and hints at what freedom might look like.

In some ways, this is less an essay than a set of short inter-connected analyses, but one theme runs through many of them – the contrast between Foucault’s ideas of a disciplinary society and biopolitics, where the state acts to control the population, and our modern malaise where, through capital’s use of big data, we actively submit to the wants of business, consumption and work.

Consumption

Part of this, he says, is that consumption under neoliberal capitalism works at emotional level, making us feel like we want to be particular kinds of people, which are defined by the brands we use, the products we use, the selves we portray on social media, the constant communication that dictates the kinds of people we are. We don’t need the state to police us, we police ourselves and one another through likes and trolling and online spats, making us into conformists, a mass of sameness.

Work

And part of it is about working life under contemporary capitalism, where we are becoming 24 hour workers, constantly marketing ourselves on social media. That’s because, he says, our character not just our labour is what most people have to sell now. This despite the fact that automation, AI and data are making human labour more superfluous than ever, with many of the tasks humans have typically performed being done digitally or by non-humans now.

Freedom

The task, Han says, is to challenge the pervasiveness of neoliberalism. That’s where freedom can be found, and he points to two ways.

One is being involved in activities that are “the Other of Work: a wholly other force that no longer serves production or admits transformation into any kind of workforce at all.. from something altogether unproductive.

“True happiness comes from what runs riot, lets go, is exuberant and loses meaning – the excessive and superfluous. That is, it comes from what luxuriates, what has taken leave of all necessity, work, performance and productivity.”

The other is from finding and playing the role of the ‘idiot’ – someone who stands on the outside of the mass of communication, information and self-definition circulating.

“In light of compulsive and coercive communication and conformism, idiotism represents a practice of freedom…. The idiot is a modern day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today… it is more urgent than ever.”

Fully Automated Luxury Communism – Aaron Bastini

This was a much-hyped and subsequently much-criticised book from Bastini, one of the leading activists behind Novara media and a big supporter of the Corbyn campaign over the last few years.

It’s basically a vision of a communism for the near future, a rationale for why it can happen now, and ideas of a strategy for how we get the there. It’s also a well-written book – practical, using Marx and theory well without overdoing it, and easily digestible, something you can’t say for a lot of academic-like political thought.

It’s a vision of a better society and economy based on everyone having all their materials needs met so they can lead a life free from external control. He wisely doesn’t set out a blueprint for the arrangements, but at it’s heart will be creating a different economic system in which wealth is distributed equally somehow and where people have access to universal basic services (not an income notably), like health, education, transport, housing and information. All of our basic needs will be met, allowing us to live more autonomously and creatively.

The rationale behind this is what sets Bastini’s vision out. He argues that unlike in Marx’s time, or any time prior to now, we’re on the edge of an era of post-scarcity, when all our material needs can be met because of technological and scientific innovations – from big data, robotics and automation, to lab-grown meat, to harnessing green energy, to space mining. We’re at a cross-roads he says: either all these developments can be used to line the pockets and give power to the rich, or they can be shared for the benefit of all.

So we need a political strategy, he says, to make this happen. He’s not very specific about what this ought to be, other than siding with the theory of left populism developed by Chantal Mouffe which is similar to that adopted by Corbyn and Sanders. And specifically we can start to shift things toward a luxury communism now, by resisting global capital and creating strong local economies, supporting the creation of worker co-ops and other non-capitalist businesses, and trying to get universal basic services in place.

It will take time to get to Fully Automated Luxury Communism, because the political will and the technology is not there, but we need to start down the road of making it happen.

I have to say that, despite the criticisms of this book that I’ve seen, I was impressed. It was refreshing, both in it’s thinking about technology and post-scarcity, and it’s straightforward and practical style. Many of the criticisms, typically, were of things it didn’t do – like elaborated a thorough political strategy for bringing about luxury communism, or talking about identity. What would be fairer is to say that Bastini has started something with this book, something that needs to developed and worked through.

A few things for people to think through further jump out at me:

The basis of the vision is a kind of hedonistic view of freedom – people should have the freedom to do what they want. This is a useful foundation for luxury communism, not least because it appeals to people beyond left-activist cliques, but is it enough? Should we be aiming for a society in which individual freedom is seen as the end to work towards?

There needs to be a more thoroughly developed strategy for bringing about luxury communism – worker co-ops and local economies are fine, but hardly going to bring about a new order. Especially when administered from the top as a statist rather than people-led bottom-up movement. A left populism needs a narrative and party that can go beyond core supporters and appeal to working class and middle class agnostics. And ideas about universal basic services seem like a pretty old-school idea in the context of space mining and mass solar energy.

And the question of how you maintain technological development once capitalism has been despatched is also important – the answer might well be that state-led innovation has always end will continue to lead tech developments. But how will it be ensured that the state or whichever bodies exist continue to develop technology to ensure post-scarcity continues? Is this utopian, or is new thinking on technological and scientific progress needed?

Which is all to say this is an interesting, ambitious and creative piece of political writing, with a vision that is appealing even if it needs more people to do more work to fill it out.

“fascist techniques are identical everywhere: the presence of a charismatic leader; the use of populism to mobilise the masses; the designation of a base group as victims (of crises, of elites, or if foreigners); and the direction of all resentment toward an ‘enemy’. Fascism has no need for a democratic party with members who are individually responsible; it needs an inspiring and authoritative leader who is believed to have superior instincts.”

Rob Reimen, To Fight Against this Age

Isabell Lorey – State of Insecurity

State of Insecurity is a theory heavy but often thought provoking book on contemporary capitalism and the nature of work.

Her basic argument is that precariousness – financial and existential insecurity – is part of modern capitalism and reinforced by government policy around welfare and pensions. It’s not just migrant workers and younger generations that are in a state of precarious work; everyone in and out of work have insecure and precarious coditions now that short term contracts, temping, zero hours, portfolio careers, a contracting state and the like have become the norm.

Drawing on Foucault’s idea of ‘governmentality’ she suggest this isn’t simply imposed on people from external forces (the state, businesses etc) but that people govern their own behaviour and conduct in light of this precariousness. Hence in a workplace, solidarity – if it ever existed – has been replaced by people developing their reputation and personal brand so as to compete with others for promotions in insecure jobs. The cultivation of this way of conducting yourself in public, where you are always in some ways working, is even stronger amongst freelancers, whether they chose the freelance option or not. For them, the division between work and leisure breaks down.

Finally, though, she sees – again following Foucault, this time his idea that power always creates resistance – that precariousness is not all bad: it creates problems but also the possibility of alternatives. She draws attention to movements of precarious workers who are identifying what they have in common and creating networks and movements to support themselves.

The book is big on theory and light on practice, which makes it an insightful analysis of the current situation for those with a good grasp of social theory, but doesn’t really provide the examples needed to bring things alive and help us understand what’s at stake and what different forms of resistance we might see.

The utopia of rules – David Graeber

There are so many thought-provoking ideas and new analyses in here that it seems wrong to summarise it for fear of missing some out. In just over 200 pages Graeber makes you think differently about technology, democracy and bureaucracy – and also feel slightly better about being inept at filling out forms.

The Utopia of Rules is really a collection of five discursive essays on the theme of bureaucracy. It says a lot about Graeber’s style, I think, that it’s easier to pull out some of the overarching themes of the book as a whole than do so for each of the essays separately. So, here are some.

His premise, his basic argument if you like, is that ‘we live in a deeply bureaucratic society’, so much so that we can hardly see how bureaucratic it is and struggle to imagine things being any other way. Importantly, this isn’t just government bureaucracy but more commonly the bureaucracy of large corporations and the relationship between the two.

This is most evident in our assumptions about technology. He asks the really interesting question: why have none of the technological development fantasised about in the 50s and 60s (flying cars, part time work for all, robots that think and act independently) come to pass? His argument is that the funding and direction for research and development has become increasingly focused on creating processes to administer our current economic, social and political arrangements, thus creating, in fact, a more complex bureaucracy. Grand schemes to change the world or do something radical with technology largely came to a standstill when the space race ended.

Bureaucracy, ironically, is also part of what we have come to think of as freedom. While many of us fantasise about living in a world unshackled from bureaucracy – and in an excellent few pages Graeber dissects the mass appeal of fantasy fiction like Lord of the Rings in this regard – in reality we tend to view arbitrary power held by others as an impediment to our freedom and bureaucracy, conversely, as a way to limit arbitrary power because it standardises everything.

But he also points out elsewhere in the book that bureaucracy also creates unequal power relations, with those who know and enforce bureaucratic processes in a stronger position than those following them. He refers to ‘interpretive labour’ as the additional work that those with less power are forced to do, using examples like the CEO or Minister who is able to make any pronouncement they like, with his or her staff then having to work hard to understand what that is, carry it out and smooth things out with other people. The person at the job centre or completing their performance appraisal or trying to get insurance is in a similar position.

He discusses in this respect why it is so easy for an otherwise intelligent person to making mistakes on forms. The reason is that people are so busy with the task of interpretive labour, working out what is required, which hoops need jumping through next and so on, that there’s no brain-space left for the mundane job of filling in a form in the right boxes.

What he points out, too, is that bureaucracy is so effective in creating this sense of worry because, when it comes down to it, the paperwork and inequality inherent in bureaucracy is backed up actual violence. This might be the law coming down on you for failing to get car insurance, or one step removed, being sacked from your job for not completing the performance appraisal paperwork correctly and thus becoming unemployed and poor.

And all this, he points out, is quite ridiculous. Not only does bureaucracy limit our possibilities, create inequalities and rely on the implicit threat of force. As the title of the book implies, Graeber also points out that ‘all bureaucracies are to a certain degree utopian, in the sense that they propose an abstract idea that real human beings can never live up.’

In highlighting these few things from David Graeber’s excellent book I’m just scratching the surface. There is so much to these essays. The novel ideas, of course, but also the style, which provides simple explanations of complex theories with occasional stories about himself to bring it alive. Some of it I’m not entirely sure of. He often refers to developing a left critique of bureaucracy which I think unnecessarily limits the possible audience for some of the insights in this book. And similarly he occasionally lets a rather conspiratorial view of a state acting in the interests of capital creep into his reading of certain situations. But nevertheless this is one of the best and most thought-provoking pieces of political analysis I’ve read in a long, long time.