Category: Democracy

Assembly

I said, perhaps, far too little about Hardt and Negri’s Assembly when I finished reading it a few months back. Since then, I have read Todd Gitlin on Occupy, della Porta on Social Movements in Times of Austerity (Polity, 2015), and Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.

One theme is the performative nature of assembly: how it can create the collective that proposes to make a political statement/intervention, and (even more) how it can create the kind of community to which those who assemble aspire. The assembly is “prefigurative.” That is the term that is used. It is the change it wishes to see in the world.

My skeptical objection has been consonant with most responses to anarchism: a) how does the assembly propose to produce/gather the resources that would make it sustainable?; b) is the assembly scalable? If it proposes itself as a model of the desired polis, then how does it grow to accommodate much larger numbers of members/participants?; and c) what kinds of structures, organization, leadership, communications, and other infrastructure must be created in order to maintain the assembly over the long haul? Occupy was completely parasitic on the “larger society” it was trying to secede from—or was it overthrow? Occupy was dependent on goods made in that larger society, monetary donations coming from that society, as well as on the expertise (medical, technical) that larger society, through its educational system, imparted to certain individuals.

An assembly, in other words, is not a society—and to claim that somehow it represents an alternative society seems to me disingenuous, extremely naïve. It is one thing to say that Occupy modeled modes of relationship that we wish could be more prevalent in our lives. It is quite another to claim Occupy modeled an alternative to mainstream society. To use Judith Butler’s terms, Occupy did not provide the grounds for a “livable life.”

But Gitlin and Butler both point us toward what seems to me a much more productive way to think about assembly. They both stress that democracy as a political form is deeply dependent upon assembly—and that the current assault on democracy from the right includes a serious impairment of rights to assembly. Vote suppression has gotten most of the press when it comes to attending to the ways that our plutocrats are trying to hold out against the popular will. But the anti-democratic forces are also determined to limit opportunities for assembly.

Let’s do the theory first. Democracy rests on the notion of popular sovereignty. In the last instance, political decisions in a democracy gain their legitimacy through their being products of the people legislating its own laws for itself (Kant). The fact that such things as a ban on assault rifles and increased taxes on the rich are (if the polls can be believed) supported by a large majority of Americans, but impossible to enact in our current political system, seems a good indicator that we do not live in a democracy—a fact with which most of the Republican party seems not only very comfortable with, but determined to sustain.

Because the final arbiter is supposed to be the popular will, there will always be a tension in democracy between the representative bodies of organized government and the people. That tension leads to repeated critiques of representative government and calls for “direct” or “participatory” democracy (dating all the way back to Rousseau). It also leads to the oft-repeated worry/claim that democracy only works on a small-scale. A large scale democracy (and what is the number here?; probably anything over 100,000 citizens or so) will inevitably depend on representatives to carry out its political business—and thus, in the eyes of direct democracy advocates, inevitably fail to be truly democratic. Elections are too infrequent—and not fine-grained enough (what, exactly, are the voters saying?) to provide sufficient popular input into specific decisions. Add the many ways in which elections are manipulated and you quickly get politicians who are only minimally accountable to the populations they supposedly represent. The electoral system is gamed to insure that position (office) and all its privileges and powers are retained by incumbents—or by the party currently in power.

How to make politicians accountable? One device is plebiscites, which have some kind of appeal. Let the people vote directly on matters of interest to them. The problem with plebiscites is that they are a favored tool of the right—and produce (in many cases at least) what is best called “illiberal democracy” or (to use Stuart Hall’s term) “authoritarian populism.” The blunt way to say this: never put rights to a vote.

Liberal democracy (or constitutional democracy) actually tries to place certain things (usually called “rights”) outside of normal democratic decision making, out of the give and take of ordinary political conflict/wrangling/compromise. Some things are held apart from the fray, are guaranteed as the rules of the game (basic procedures), as the lasting institutions (the court system, the legislature, the executive), and as the basic rights enjoyed by all citizens (civil liberties). The constitution also established the “checks and balances” of a liberal order—such that no particular person, office, or governmental institution possesses absolute power. Power is distributed among various sites of government in an attempt to forestall the ever present danger of its (power’s) abuse. The use of plebiscites is, thus, authoritarian, precisely because it bypasses this constitutional distribution of power through the appeal to the direct voice of the people—thus authorizing the executive to act irrespective of what the courts or legislature has to say.

SO: if one is committed to a liberal polity as well as to a democratic one, the notion of “direct democracy” is not very appealing. The “tyranny of the majority” is a serious concern—as my home state of North Carolina has repeatedly demonstrated throughout its history of Jim Crow and in its recent 61% vote in favor of an amendment to the state constitution against extending the legal protections of marriage to same-sex couples. In a liberal society, the popular will is to be checked, to be balanced by other sites of power, just as any other form of power is.

Of course, in any system, there comes to be a place where the buck stops. As critics of the Constitution—the anti-Federalists of the 1790 debates over ratification—pointed out from the start, the structure of the US government lodges that final power in the Supreme Court. That is why we are such a litigious society; the final arbiter is the Court—a fact that is deeply problematic, and which has led, in our current deeply polarized moment, to the Republicans resting their best hope for defeating the popular will on controlling, through the appointment of right-wing judges, the Court.

Some theorists of sovereignty insist that it can never be distributed, that it can only be exercised when it emanates from one site. Despite the outsized power of the Supreme Court in our system, I think it vastly overstates the case to say the Court is the sole site of power in our polity. Justifying that claim would lead me in another direction, one I won’t take up here. Suffice it to say that I favor a constitutional amendment that would limit Supreme Court judges (and probably all federal judges) to one 25 year term. That way we would be spared having our fates in the hands of 80 year olds (a true absurdity) as well as randomizing when a position on the Court came vacant in relation to which party controlled the Senate at that moment. The amendment would also state that the Senate must make its decision about the President’s nominee within six months—or forfeit its “advise and consent” powers if it fails to act in a timely fashion.

But: back to assembly. Butler, I think very usefully, suggests that assembly in a democracy is an incredibly important supplement to the legislature. Here’s the basic idea: the people’s representatives can, because of their relative freedom from direct accountability, do things that various segments of the population disagree with. The first amendment ties “assembly” to a right to petition the government. The text reads: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Thus, assembly is tied to the notion of “the people” having another means, apart from the actions of its representatives, of expressing its opinions, desires, will—and that alternative means is expressly imagined as a way of expressing displeasure with the actions of the government. It is in the context of “grievances” that we can expect the people to assemble. In this way, the right to assemble can be seen as a partial remedy to the recognized ills of representation. The people, by assembling, embody (the terms here are Butler’s) democratic sovereignty and make it “appear” (utilizing Arendt’s notion of politics as the “space of appearances). After all, the will of the people (the ultimate ground of democracy) is invisible unless it takes the corporate form of assembly since even, as Benjamin Anderson’s notion of “imagined community” makes clear, an election is a virtual, not visible and actual, manifestation of the popular will.

Assembly, then, is democracy in action (note the Arendtian stress on action)—and would thus seem to be as essential (perhaps even more essential) to democracy than voting. It is when and where the demos comes into existence. It is democracy visible—and hence its deep appeal to contemporary writers from Hardt/Negri through to Butler, writers who are all appalled by democracy’s retreat in the face of technocratic, plutocratic neoliberalism.

Gitlin documents in the last chapter of his book all the various ways—starting with union busting and moving through the use of “permits” for demonstrations to keep demonstrators far away from the people they are demonstrating against to the criminalizing of assembly itself (as not “permitted” in the double sense of that word) to a closing down of public spaces to certain political uses—that the right to assembly is currently under assault, an assault that parallels the various efforts to curtail voting rights. Our overlords fear the assembled people—and are doing their best to erect obstacles to such assembly.

Thinking of the Chartists, I am also sorry that the nineteenth century connection of assembly to the presentation of petitions (a connection the first amendment also makes) seems to have been lost. All those virtual petitions each of us is asked to sign on line every day are pretty demonstrably useless. But what about 100,000 (or more) people marching to the Capitol and calling on the Senate Majority Leader to come out and take from the hands of the people a petition? Great political theater if nothing else—and a vivid demonstration of the collapse of democracy if that politician refuses (as I suspect would happen) to engage with the people he claims to serve. Face-to-face is much harder to ignore than what comes to you across the computer screen.

Still, and obviously, I don’t think assembly is the be-all and end-all of politics, for all the reasons I keep on banging on about. But Gitlin and Butler have made me much more attuned to the possibilities and resources that assembly can—and does—possess for a left wing politics.

Occupy Anarchism

“A kind of anarchism of direct participation has become the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements in America in the last half century. There is a lineage even longer. Decision-making by consensus is of Quaker inspiration, as if to say: Speak and listen, listen and speak, until the spirit of the whole emerges. In its recent incarnation, anarchism is not so much a theory of the absence of government but a mood and a theory and practice of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time—at least until the first frost.” Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (NY: HarperCollins, 2012; pp. 80-81.)

“There was a graver problem with leaderlessness than the fact that it made it awkward for outsiders to know who to speak with. By rejecting leadership continuity, the movement remaining in motion, mobile, able in principle to adapt to new circumstances. But it also rejected the formalities, even the informalities, of accountability. When it made mistakes, it didn’t know what to do about them. It was prone, in difficult hours—and all movements, like organizations and marriages, have difficult hours—to thrash around” (Gitlin, 103-104).

[I]n keeping with the movement’s anarchist, antiauthoritarian thrust, there was a strong sentiment that, as naturalist Garbiel Willow told a New York Times reporter, ‘Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond.’ Demands conferred legitimacy on the authorities. Demandlessness, in other words, was the movement’s culture, its identity” (Gitlin, 110).

“The movement’s great majority rightly understood nonviolence not as negation, the absence of destruction, but as a creative endeavor, a repertory for invention, an opening, an identity. . . .Certainly, the tactics can grow stale with repetition, but committed and creative practitioners can renew it. The Occupy movement has been, so far, a seedbed of creativity. Its future rests in no small part on whether it can continue to learn from experience, deepen its tradition and funnel it into new soil” (Gitlin, 127-29).

“Communities governing themselves in assemblies. . . . The radicalism of the core movement helped explain what baffled so many observers—the absence of formal demands and programs. As a guiding principle, what the radicals wanted was direct democracy. It would have been absurd to demand that the authorities create direct democracy. The authorities have everything at stake in resisting such a demand. If you were going to have direct democracy, you had to launch it yourself, directly. You had to infuse the spirit of do-it-yourself with world-changing zeal, and vice versa. Political-economic decisions were too consequential to be made by anyone but all the persons concerned—the stakeholders, to use the current lingo. The radical core wanted a world run not by exclusive committees but by assemblies of the people” (Gitlin, 133, 138).

“The Occupy movement wanted to win reforms and to stay out of politics. At the same time.

Movements are social organisms, living phenomena that breathe in and adapt to their environments, not objects frozen into their categories while taxonomists poke and prod them. The come, go, mutate, expand, contract, rest, split, stagnate, ally, cast off outworn tissue, decay, regenerate, go round in circles, are always accused of being co-opted and selling out, and are often declared dead. If they are large, they contain multitudes, and contradict themselves. Outsider movements struggle to finesse these tensions, to square circles, striving to hold into their outsider status while also producing results” (Gitlin, 141).

So, if economic life is to be made substantially fairer and more decent, and plutocratic power is to be reversed, an enduring movement is essential. Such a movement may not be sufficient—it isn’t humanly possible to know that—but surely it is necessary. Occupy’s thrust is popular, which is essential, but popularity itself does not change the world.

What does? In the longer run, both institutional change and changes of heart and mind. The movement needs structures that flex and learn, train leaders, generate actions, recruit supporters. It needs to be a full-service movement—one that invites participation at many levels. For overmortgaged and underwater home-owners, it needs campaigns to corral the banks that have them in lock. For the civilly disobedient young, it needs appealing direct actions. . . . Whoever oyu are, it needs to prmotoe activities tailored to you.

In the medium run, say five years, networks of activists—the inner movement—need to devise an infrastructure that sustains them, recruits them, focuses their intellectual and strategic life, generates sustained pressure on power, keeps movement tensions manageable, and not least, make significant progress toward driving money out of the political system” (Gitlin, 165-66).

“Historically, coalitions of outer-movement and inner-movement groups have accomplished what individual groups could not” (Gitlin, 208).

I don’t want to belabor this material. Gitlin wrote his book in the spring of 2012, when Occupy was still alive—if on life support. I will let his comments speak for themselves, with only three observations of my own.

It is striking the extent to which Occupy captured the imagination of the left. Its fragility—and its inability to make a dent on the plutocracy it was trying to disrupt—were obvious from the start. Yet the left is so starved for any kind of “movement” that it took up Occupy as a savior. Gitlin bends over backwards to be sympathetic, even as he repeatedly points out all of Occupy’s flaws. His sympathy is to be applauded, not sneered at. But this ember cannot be stoked into a fire. There just wasn’t enough there—and never was.
The point about inner and outer movements is well taken. Some serious pressure from the left on the Democratic Party is sorely needed. So the dilemma remains: when should the radical left stand firm, when should it fall into line behind the Democrats. Disdain for electoral politics is suicidal, as the triumph of Trump shows. But being continually blackmailed by the threat of “their being worse” is a formula for snail’s pace progress.
So the only answer is to organize, to build larger and stronger coalitions. Anarchism is no help in that case. Assemblies are fleeting if they are not constituted as institutions. The people governing themselves in assemblies is a useless, even frivolous, goal. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s a happening, not a politics—and is of a piece with the gestural politics that is so delicious to the avant-garde.

Neoliberalism as Reactionary

Yesterday’s post worried the question of (in Lear’s words) whether there is “any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts”? Seeking the answer in psychology, in some persistent, albeit not universal, set of motivating impulses (ambition, the quest for status, envy, and resentment) is one way to go.

Another possibility is to refuse to personalize things in that way—and to look instead to structural causes. That path is suggested by Hardt and Negri’s insistence that neoliberalism is reactionary. (I am reading their latest tome, Assembly [Oxford UP, 2017].)

Here’s my reconstruction of the argument: The Keynesian welfare state compromise worked well enough from 1950 to 1965, but the social upheavals of the sixties revealed the deep discontent produced by capitalism even in its most benign form. Neoliberalism—starting with Reagan and Thatcher—was a direct move to reign in the students, union workers, and other malcontents who had shaken things to the core in the 60s. Turning the economic screws down tighter went hand-in-glove with various strategies to diminish democratic input, heighten the power of elites, and demonize both dissenters and those who agitated for continued and even increased welfare (such as provisions for health care).

This analysis has more than a little plausibility going for it. Oddly, it is not accompanied in Hardt and Negri (who, when all is said and done, are Marxists) with an economic analysis focusing on the economic woes of the 1970s. Certainly, it is true that today’s conservative economists are continually refighting the wars of the 70s, where inflation is the dragon to be slain—despite the fact of almost non-existent inflation for over twenty years now. Similarly, the zombie of the welfare queen and, more generally, of the undeserving poor has proved unkillable—perhaps even more as the danger conservatives must continually work against than as a figure in the public imagination. Neoliberalism is the set of nostrums meant to control the hungry masses who are coming after the plutocrat’s and the nation’s wealth.

Ironically, of course, the traditional fear that in a democracy the masses will plunder the public treasury has been turned on its head over the past forty years in America—and around the globe. It is the rich, through privatization primarily but also through the state abetting more predatory business practices, that has plundered the collective wealth of the nation. Hardt and Negri are good on this score, even if their way of describing it—namely, as “extraction of the common”—is rather different than mine.

In short, don’t look for the evil in men’s hearts—or even for the errors their passions lead them into. Look instead to whom they identify as their enemies, what they understand as the threats to their well-being. It’s a conflict ridden world—and the key is to see where and how the lines are drawn. Then identify on which side someone stands.

Still, what happened in the 1970s beyond the counter-revolution against the radical forces of the 1960s? What produced inflation accompanied by stalled economic growth—the combination that led to the belief on the part of many elites that the largesse of post-war Keynesian state was no longer sustainable? Yes, there were tax revolts etc., just the niggardly refusal to pay the bill any longer. So we could say that cutting off the funds led, predictably, to a recession caused by a lack of demand—in other words, a classic capitalist downturn. When you don’t pay the workers enough, when you extract excessive profits that immiserate the many, you end up with a crisis of over-production and need to shut down the factories for a while, which means laying off the workers, which impoverishes them even further, and thus deepens the crisis because demand is depressed even further. The classic viscous circle.

But that doesn’t explain inflation, which (just as classically) occurs when too much money is chasing too few goods. Inflation should be the result of under-production. Except—and here comes the rub. The other source of inflation is the result of open, globalized trade relations as contrasted to the kind of closed system analysis that explains inflation through under-production. Inflation in a globalized system occurs when the national currency no longer buys as much on the world market. The “oil shock” meant the American dollar went into the tank. In 1972, a three week visit to England and Scotland (not counting the airfare) cost me $200. Yes, I was doing it on the cheap, but still . . . Another three weeks in England in 1978 cost me $1200. The change in the almighty dollar was that drastic and that fast.

The eventual response to this shift in America’s position in the global economy was to outsource manufacturing to other lands and to have America concentrate on finance capital rather than industrial capital. Neoliberalism—and its imperatives—can’t be understood without taking this transformation into account. Here, again, Hardt and Negri are useful. And maybe even help to answer a puzzle that goes back to the hard hearts of our Republican legislators.

The puzzle is a familiar one: if capitalism depends on consumers to fuel continual growth (i.e. if capitalism is always in need of new markets or in ways of exploiting existing markets more efficiently), then why does capitalism, especially in its neo-liberal and globalized form, seek so relentlessly to drive down wages. It’s the opposite of the Henry Ford principle of paying his workers enough so they could buy his cars. It takes the soft-hearted liberals from FDR to Bernie Sanders to save capitalism from the fate Marx predicted for it.

BUT . . . maybe the logic of finance capital makes that view of things a misunderstanding of the forces currently in play. Finance capital is not seeking profits from people buying produced goods. Instead, finance capital finds its profits in ROI (return on investment). Think of how private equity firms work. They swoop in to buy up a company, they then use those company’s assets to take out loans, and then (in many cases) drive the company into bankruptcy because of that high debt. The game here is not to get people to buy things. They just need people (usually other financial institutions) to buy debt. The profits are the result of “extraction,” as Hardt and Negri say. So long as someone places a value on something, that thing can be leveraged—and money made. Who needs consumers? Who needs the people? It’s just a self-enclosed world of financial dealings, only related in incredibly abstract and distant ways to anything “real.”

This might seem far-fetched, but Hardt and Negri offer a great example: gentrification. Properties in the most desired cities—New York, Vancouver, London, San Francisco etc.—spiral upward in price not just because people wish to live there, but also because they are seen as both safe and incredibly lucrative investments. Money just chases money, with nothing “real” (except perhaps the “upgrades” to granite countertops and glass brick showers) changing. Of course, such spirals lead, inevitably, to bubbles and collapses. An odd term: bubble. Because you can’t know it’s a bubble because it isn’t a bubble until the moment when confidence collapses, when the hive mind decides everything is overpriced. Overpriced in relation to what? There is no measure, no standard, beyond that mysterious collective sense of what is sensible. Of course for most of us—those not in 1% or 5%–“sensible” prices were left behind four or five years ago.

Critiques of speculation as disconnected from anything real are as old as the Tulip craze and the South Sea Bubble of the 1700s. As is the use of debt—both taking it on and forcing it upon others—to gain wealth. (If we believe David Graeber, debt goes back 5000 years.) What seems to distinguish neoliberalism is the orientation of capitalism (and of the political, legal, and social institutions that enable it) away from production of goods and towards the profits to be made through finance. In other words, financial speculation was always there—but social and political policy was not constructed to aid and abet it since the conventional wisdom remained that the production of goods was the primary road to wealth—both personal and national.

Trump offers a good case for how hard it is to think about this shift. The man never produced a single thing in his life, yet seems to think that wealth comes from the production of goods. He even seems to think that he has produced some things. In any case, his rhetoric is all about restoring prosperity through a return to industrial capitalism. But most of his actions (his anti-immigration policies are an exception here) are directed toward enabling finance capitalism. In other words, the full import of the shift hasn’t registered yet for many people.

A full-scale economic determinism, then, would tell us not to look for motives for hard-heartedness within the Republicans, but look instead to the changed nature of capitalism to explain their actions. Causes are external, not internal. The masses—defined here as those with no money to invest—are no longer relevant to prosperity, so should be ignored on that account. And if democracy can be contained, then the masses need no longer be feared either. The legislator will prosper by knowing who his true master is: not the voters, but the plutocrat.

So, for the determinist, neliberalism is reactionary in another sense: it is a reaction to this shift from industrial to financial capitalism.