EPILOGUE OF A SERIES.
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| Abstimmung an der Landsgemeinde, Adrian Sulc, 2006 |
According to Marx's dialectical history the conditions for a socialist revolution exist in the contradictions of a capitalist state. Tsarist Russia had only abolished serfdom in 1861 and was not on par or even close behind the leading industrialised capitalist states - Germany and the United Kingdom. Lenin recognised that the conditions did not exist and therefore developed the concept of the vanguard - groups of professional revolutionaries to operate much like missionaries to overcome the resistance of the proletariat. The seeds of destruction of the revolution were planted before the revolution ever happened. While the vanguards may have allowed it to take place by directing pre-existing but wholly different grievances in Tsarist Russia, they never removed false consciousness. They merely replaced the subject of intellectual inertia with that of another dogma. Hence the Soviet Union had a different elite and the population defended the political system of the new state, but it still had an elite and the people were obedient to that elite.
The key detail of the Soviet Union was that it was to be a free union of soviets - decentralised democratic councils of workers. To me, the side-lining of the soviets and the concurrent rapid political centralisation is key to understanding the authoritarian turn of the state. The balance of power shifted far toward the professional cadres and eventually to an individual (Stalin) by the 1930s. The 'excesses', as the Khrushchev reformers euphemistically put it, would never have happened had control over the vast state left the hands of the proletariat. As Ben Franklin might have put it had he been Russian in 1918: 'democratic socialism, if you can keep it'. Hard to establish and even harder to win back once lost.The revolution of the vanguard becomes the new state and subsequently the state of the vanguard. The institutions of the revolutionaries should no more last forever than the revolutionaries themselves. The revolution is a product of its time and cannot be expected to serve future generations. The United States has immortalised the Founding Fathers and the system of governance they developed - yet that system was designed to function in the late 18th century. The perpetuation of the elders' revolution is always the bedrock of the next revolution. You can see the same relationship between adolescent culture and that of their parents - tracing descent but evolving away from. The time comes when the soil must be turned over.
Representative democracy is a nineteenth century idea from a time when it was highly impractical to gather all the people together from far-flung lands to govern themselves. In their place sat a selected few whose job it was to meet for this very reason. Today there are two problems - that a few people are easily influenced by special interests who wield considerable power over vast states of several tens of millions of citizens, and that the means to decentralise political power and conduct direct democracy are believed to exist via modern electronic communication. Direct democracy prevents the capture and centralisation of authority by a few because it is held in common by all and decision-making is not neutered by parallel power structures. However, I maintain the paper-and-ballot-box approach is still the most transparent and reliable method of voting over any implementation carried via the internet or other communications network. I also do not believe any voting system is productive amongst an electorate of the multi-million. Certainly for direct democracy there must be face-to-face interaction between legislators in order to conduct debate, reach compromises, and ensure that no-one resides in an echo chamber.
We have such interaction in the system now because we elect a few representatives on our behalf who can meet, and the ancient Athenians had it because very few people were free citizens who could participate in direct democracy. A paucity of members is the common theme among all the mediaeval equivalents (the Germanic things, Slavic veche). There exists a limit on the number of people a person can maintain social relationships with, yet this number is particularly low unless a state was organised on the level of a village. Still, political representation is primarily by geographic location (the constituency) and yet time and again the local concerns of constituents are over-ridden by national concerns and party politics. Devolution is the answer and has been for some time.
The classical argument against direct democracy is 'tyranny of the majority'. The founders of the United States created a republic over a democracy for this very reason - acutely aware of the persecutions in the Old World which had led people to the colonies. In writing a follow-up to my essay on nationalism, it occurred to me that if the land is to be under a common sovereign and law, it therefore should have as few laws as possible to free it from majority (cultural) dominance. After all, the legislature is a hammer that sees every problem as a nail. Representatives like to paint themselves as the guardians of democracy and the system that installs them must be maintained to prevent the dangerous radicals from stepping across the threshold. It's true enough that First Past The Post prevents minority parties like the BNP from gaining seats, and GCHQ sucking up everyone's e-mails probably (as in the law of numbers) snatches at least one half-cocked possible act of terrorism. That said, the defence of democracy is not the responsibility of the people sitting on the green benches or the the people working in some intelligence agency underground data-gathering facility or the people in uniform in Afghanistan - it's the people. The Bolsheviks overturned a government using the force multiplier of firearms and that's always going to be possible. The Hitlerian capture of Germany was far more insidious because it waltzed right into power through the ballot box. Their thuggish origins and use of intimidation may look crude in comparison to our modern blinkered system of participation controlled by corporate and media interests framing all discussion. The point stands - you get the government you deserve, and it's your responsibility to guard against abuse. A Philosopher King is the best variety of monarch. Well, democracy would never fail if composed of a franchise of philosopher kings.
Some believe a constitution will hold off abuse, and the US constitution is rightly praised for the Bill of Rights holding off most executive and judicial assault and spelling out the limits on their powers. The problem with the UK's unwritten constitution isn't that it's unwritten, rather that it's assembled from fragments of convention, practice, and court rulings across the centuries. The lesson of British history is that fundamental rights have only been secured after state transgressions - you can see this post hoc approach in the rejection of involvement in Syria being primarily down to the shadow of Iraq a decade prior. It takes the revelation of abuse to prevent it happening again, then along comes an entirely new threat and we're back to requiring vigilance. Often someone raises the proposition of drafting a new and concise British constitution to tackle these shortcomings. However, I wouldn't for a moment trust one written by the politicians. The popular support of the elected government of the day is a pitiful thirty-odd percent on a two-thirds turnout at absolute best and party membership is on par with a reasonably large union of people with an odd hobby. The classic constitutions like that of the US were written by revolutionaries (even if the colonials in North and South America were land-owning bourgeois) supported by mass movements and, yes, armed struggle. Still, it didn't end there. Black Americans struggled (unarmed) for another century after the US civil war for their constitutional rights, and some sections of society are still reaching for theirs. You cannot expect deliverance, you must stand up for it.
Switzerland may be a tiny country, but a Swiss citizen has far more power than one amongst more than 250 million as a citizen in one of the superpowers. Who does it really serve to have a state as vast as the US or Russia or a unified Europe? The reason representative democracy at the multi-million level is so entrenched is because it serves the purposes of the true power - that which lies beyond national parliaments. The corruption is two-fold. On the one hand even the most powerful state can extend only limited power beyond its borders and so is at the mercy of free-moving stateless multinational corporations. On the other, the power exercised internally is without opposition as sovereignty is defined as having a monopoly on force. Thus, states are played off each other in a race to the bottom for corporation tax and political power fetches a tidy sum with every cycle of the revolving door. Even when there are elements of direct democracy present which theoretically bypass the interests of representatives, the other self-proclaimed guardian of democracy, the media, can still be brought to heel by corporate cash.
Revolutions always appear from an underlying problem. The Arab spring came out of seemingly nowhere after a single market trader in Tunisia committed suicide by self-immolation. Ordinary Russians weren't demanding the installation of Lenin as President, they were saying 'peace, land and bread'. No system survives if the core needs of the population are not present and the rate of unemployment is naturally one of the most tracked statistics in industrialised states. Mega Multinational X sets up shop in your country and comes to arrangement with government to acquire all manner of rebates and avoid all manner of taxes in exchange for keeping the proletariat occupied for eight hours a day. This is why all of politics has been reduced to 'managing the economy'. Politicians, then, aren't really the guardians of democracy - they're the guardians of employment. Elections then become votes for jobs. We return to serfdom, electing the lord that will keep the estate open.
The Divine Rights of Kings was thrown onto the ash-heap long ago in the West. The past few centuries have been about the path to popular control of the state - that it represent citizens and that it be accountable to the citizenry. While I've argued this can be taken further into direct democracy, the concept is more than a system of government. As multinational corporate entities have eclipsed national governments, the idea must be extended into the economic sphere. I'm not talking about the empowerment of becoming a 'consumer'. That is the keyword of the new problem. Politics now tries to engage with the citizen on a transactional model. Financial exchange is not democracy. Services are available for purchase from several businesses, but I cannot dictate how any of those businesses operate from this exchange. I would have to purchase a stake in the business to achieve that, and thus we see ability to participate is directly equivalent to financial ability. Government is not a business and business is not a democracy - what avenue is there then to for a citizen to grant consent in the social contract? It's either assumed, disregarded, or manipulated into existence.
So the absolute monarchs have returned in a different guise. Their allegiance to you or to the state ends with their allegiance to your personal fortune. The old protestant idea of material wealth being a sign of a virtuous earthly existence was warped into wealth as the sign of directly heavenly blessing (cf. prosperity gospel, American televangelism). Ultimately in a secularised form, an individual who has become wealthy through business (presumably legitimately) is considered to have qualification to speak and to rule on account of the direct blessing of the invisible hand of the free market. Hence, Mary Portas knows exactly how to fix the high street and the government gives her remit. The unbelievable inequality that exists globally cannot be looked back upon from the future as anything short of uncivilised on par with the slave trade. There exists enough food to feed the world without any need for boosting yields through genetic modification, yet the free market is completely unable to solve this problem because it completely defies the profit motive. It's the British government doing nothing over the Irish Potato Famine for fear of upsetting the markets all over again.
Economic prosperity under capitalism rests on eternally growing and opening new markets. Thus, the previous iteration of the iPhone must be thrown away in order to create new demand for the new supply. Supply no longer conforms to demand, for demand can be created. Consumption is deliberately ramped up again; not because you really needed it, but because you were manipulated into needing it, because they really need it. Growth has been kept going for the past century through general efficiency increases in technology (eg, automation) and labour (better nutrition, social security, etc), and also because the workforce was essentially doubled as women became a permanent presence in the last forty years. We have very little to show for this aside from shiny new phones, whereas certain billionaires have their own islands. The contradiction is that by becoming more efficient we necessarily remove inefficiencies - such as excess labour, so unemployment rises until they can be redeployed. Where this cannot be achieved, we have to create new definitions of property to create new industry. Total working days will soon increase again as governments raise the retirement age to stave off collapse of welfare systems - the same systems being financially starved as corporate profits drain through the borders. A complete overhaul of the global economic system is required that will redistribute this inequality, the same way we uphold one-man-one-vote today.
However, history records what happens when the peasantry was able to break from the soil and organise for social change. The existing political and economic structures will not survive thousands of millions of workers stepping out of the office able to live on half their current hours. It was the invention of agriculture providing a surplus of food that is thought to have enabled economically inactive castes to emerge in society. So too is the monarchical lifestyle of the so-called wealth creators founded on the work done by people making much much less than they. One way or another these changes must happen, and they will sweep away these elites when it is revealed they are the true inefficiencies.
The Soviet Union failed from its own theoretical malformation. Marxism, too, is often lumped in as a failure on the basis that it was the exact dogma of the Soviet Union, as if Jesus was a crackpot because of today's paedophile priests. The Soviet Union ironically destroyed one of the things the revolution got right - the ownership of the means of production by workers' councils, the titular soviets. The co-operative model is well praised, and recent UK governments claimed to have the John Lewis model in mind for the privatisation of Royal Mail (tellingly, the total employee shares were limited to 10% of the company). While the Soviets and their puppets stagnated under state command, Tito's Yugoslavia was economically healthy with a mix of small private enterprise and workers' control of industry. A Reaganite world-view would have you believe it's one or the other - complete freedom or complete subjugation. Rather, like so many things it isn't a binary choice than a spectrum of flavours. To put it another more classical way: thesis + antithesis = synthesis. As you wouldn't know from the media and the way he was co-opted, Martin Luther King Jr said:
Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of Capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.
Written 19th October, 7th November, and 10th November
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