From: "Peter Jovanovic" <peterzoran-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: AUT: anti-democratic decision making was : IWW...
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 2004 07:39:33 +1100


hi all

>From Wildcat UK: 
http://www.againstsleepandnightmare.com/wildcat/democracy-talk.html

__________________________________________

[This is the text of a introductory talk which was given to two discussion 
meetings held in London and Brighton in 1993. It’s been typed up and made 
available to the communist public due to massive popular demand….]

Against Democracy

The purpose of this little talk is to convince you that revolutionaries 
should oppose democracy in it all its forms.

Before we go any further, I want to get the argument about the use of words 
out of the way. A lot of people will agree with a lot of what I’m saying (or 
will think that they do!) but will say “Ah, Yes, but what you’re talking 
about is bourgeois democracy. What I mean by democracy is something quite 
different.” I want to suggest that when people talk about “real” or 
“workers’” democracy in opposition to bourgeois democracy, in fact they do 
mean the same thing that the bourgeoisie mean by democracy, despite 
superficial differences. The fact that they chose to use the word democracy 
is actually far more significant than they claim. This is why it is 
important to say “Death to democracy!”. A less obscure analogy might be that 
of the word “development”. Third Worldist lefties will generally say that 
they are in favour of development. When you say “Isn’t that what the IMF 
want?”, they’ll say “No, we want real development”. When you talk to them a 
bit more you find out that in fact they do want the same as the IMF… it’s 
just that the IMF have got a more realistic understanding of what it means.

My basic contention here will be that however much you claim to be against 
property (as Lenino-Trotskyo-Stalinists do) or even against the state (as 
anarchists do), if you support democracy you are actually for property and 
for the state.

What is Democracy?

In the most general terms, democracy is the rule of rights and equality. 
It’s pretty easy to see that this is capitalist. “Rights” implies the 
existence of atomised individuals in competition with each other. It also 
implies the existence of the state, or some quasi-state form of authority, 
which can guarantee people’s rights. “Equality” implies the existence of a 
society in which people can have equal worth – that is, a society based on 
abstract labour. Democracy is often defined as the Rule of the People – the 
People always being understood as a mass of atomised citizens with rights.

On a very abstract level you can say that capitalism is always democratic. 
You can say that democracy expresses the essence of capital – if you like 
putting things in those sort of terms! – that equality is just an expression 
of the equivalence of commodities.

Marx made the ultimate abusive comment about democracy when he described it 
as “Christian”:

“Political democracy is Christian inasmuch as it regards man – not just one 
man but all men – as a sovereign and supreme being; but man in his 
uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, man just as 
he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to 
the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the entire organisation of 
our society – in a word, man who is not yet a true species-being. The 
sovereignty of man – but of man as an alien being distinct from actual man – 
is the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity, whereas in 
democracy it is a present and material reality, a secular maxim.”

Marx, On the Jewish Question

So what are the practical consequences of all this?

The most common ways that the democratic counter-revolution expresses itself 
in the class struggle is around the questions of class power and the 
organisation of that power.

By “class power” I mean the recognition of the fact that we are in a class 
war situation and that to advance our side in that war and ultimately win it 
we have to ruthlessly crush and exterminate our enemies. Obviously this 
implies despotic power in itself. You can’t respect the rights of a cop if 
you beating him to death! If a trade union leader tries to address a meeting 
and we respond by shouting him down or dragging him off the stage and 
kicking his head in, it’s absurd for us to say that we believe in freedom of 
speech. “The revolution will not be televised” – nor will it be monitored by 
Amnesty International…

In the same way that we don’t grant rights to our enemies, nor do we ask for 
rights from our enemies. This is obviously a complicated issue because, in 
practice, it’s often difficult to distinguish demanding something and 
demanding a right to it. I won’t try to deal with every aspect of this 
question. I’ll just look at the Right to Strike as an example. In general, 
as I think Hegel said, “for every Right there is a Duty”. So, for example, 
you have the Right to travel on public transport and a Duty to pay your 
fare. The right to strike implies that workers are allowed to peacefully 
withdraw their labour in return for respecting public order and generally 
not doing anything to make the strike effective. What else can it mean? 
After all, a right is something granted by law – you can hardly approach a 
cop and ask him to protect you while you burn scab lorries.

I think that, in general, demands for rights are an expression of the 
weakness of our class. Instead of saying to our enemies “if you lay a finger 
on us you’ll get your fucking head kicked in”, or even just kicking their 
heads in anyway, we tend to say “please respect our rights, we don’t really 
mean you any harm”. Of course, our class is in a weak position, and there’s 
no magic answer to this. But I think one step we can take is to recognise 
that middle-class do-gooders who campaign for rights are not on our side – 
even if some of them are nice lefty lawyers who sometimes get us out of a 
lot of trouble…

What I’ve said so far probably isn’t that controversial. What I have said so 
far concerns excluding certain categories of people. Wanting to exclude 
people from democracy is perfectly compatible with being a democrat – it’s 
amazing how many liberals will say that they unconditionally support freedom 
of speech and then suddenly change their minds when if someone says “well, 
what about fascists then?”.

More controversially, I now want to talk about democracy “within in our own 
ranks” – that is, amongst proletarians in struggle. The usual “workers’ 
democracy” argument, for example, will say “OK, we don’t have democratic 
relations with the bourgeoisie but amongst ourselves there should be the 
most perfect equality and respect for rights.” This is usually seen as a way 
of avoiding bureaucratisation and domination by small cliques and ensuring 
that as many people as possible are involved in a particular struggle. The 
idea is that if people are allowed the right to speak, the right to vote 
etc., then you can just go along to a meeting and immediately be part of 
this democratic collectivity and so immediately be involved.

What does democratising a struggle mean in practice? It means things like:

1) Majoritarianism – Nothing can be done unless a majority agree to it.

2) Separation between decision making and action – Nothing can be done until 
everybody has had a chance to discuss it. This can be seen as analogous to 
the separation between the legislative and executive arms of a democratic 
state. It’s no coincidence that discussions within democratic organisations 
often resemble parliamentary debate!

3) Embodiment of the view that no one can be trusted – Democratic structures 
take the “war of all against all” for granted, and institutionalise it. 
Delegates always have to be revocable so they won’t pursue their own hidden 
agenda which, of course, everyone has.

All of these principles embody social atomisation. Majoritarianism because 
everyone is equal and usually has one vote. The separation between decision 
making and action because it’s only fair that you should consult everyone 
before acting – if you don’t you are violating their rights. A particularly 
obnoxious example of the third thing – embodying the view that no one can be 
trusted – is the demand for “Faction Rights” put forward by Trots. Usually 
they call for this when some organisation is trying to throw them out. What 
this right amounts to is the freedom to plot and conspire against other 
members of what is supposedly a working class organisation. Obviously, no 
genuine communist organisation could ever entertain any idea of faction 
Rights.

It is probably the second of these principles which is the most important 
and which needs to be stressed here.

These democratic principles can only stand in complete opposition to the 
class struggle since, by definition, the class struggle implies a break with 
social atomisation and the formation of some kind of community – however 
narrow, transient or vague this may be.

Major events in the class struggle almost never begin with a vote or with 
everybody being consulted. They almost always begin with action by a 
determined minority who break from the passivity and isolation of the 
majority of proletarians around them. They then try to spread this action 
through example rather than through reasoned argument. In other words, the 
division between decision making and action is always being breached in 
practice. Right-wing populists (and a few anarchists) complain that 
trouble-making activities are organised by self-appointed cliques of 
activists who represent no one but themselves… and, of course, they’re 
right!

The miners’ strike in the UK in 1984-5 provided many inspiring examples of 
how the class struggle is anti-democratic in practice. The strike itself did 
not start democratically – there was no ballot, no series of mass meetings. 
It began with walk-outs at a few pits threatened with closure, and was then 
spread by flying pickets. Throughout the strike there was an unholy alliance 
of the right-wing of the Labour Party and the RCP (Revolutionary Communist 
Party) saying that the miners should hold a national ballot. The most 
militant miners consistently rejected this, saying things like: “scabs don’t 
have the right to vote away another man’s job” – which is a democratic form 
of words but I think you will agree that the attitude behind it certainly 
isn’t. On occasions, members of the RCP were quite rightly beaten up and 
called “Tories” because of their support for a ballot.

There were also numerous examples of sabotage and destruction of Coal Board 
property, often organised by semi-clandestine, so-called “hit squads”. 
Obviously, such activities, by their very nature, cannot be organised 
democratically – whether or not they are approved of by a majority of the 
strikers.

Community of Struggle

A concept which I’ve already used here, and which I’m quite attached to, is 
“community of struggle”. Obviously, a question which will be asked is: “If a 
community of struggle doesn’t act democratically, then how does it act?”. 
There is no simple answer to this, except to say that the basis of action 
will be the trust and solidarity between the people involved and not their 
supposed equality or rights. For example, if we want to send someone as an 
emissary (well, I don’t like the word “delegate”) to spread the struggle we 
wouldn’t insist on them being voted for by at least 51% of the meeting or on 
them carrying a mobile phone so we can recall them at a moment’s notice and 
replace them with someone else. We would insist on them being trustworthy 
and reliable – one trusted comrade is worth a thousand revocable delegates! 
Of course, there would be a large political component to this trust – we 
wouldn’t send a member of the Labour Party because their political views 
would automatically lead them to act against the interests of the working 
class.

Communist Society

Finally, I want to say a few words about the implication of all this for the 
nature of communist society.

The idea of communist revolution as a vast democratic reorganisation of 
society is a very strong one, even within political tendencies which we 
think might have something going for them. The council communists (such as 
Pannekoek) literally saw the workers’ councils as parliaments of the working 
class. Even the Situationists had serious hang-ups about democracy – talking 
about “direct democracy” and so on. If you read “Enragés and Situationists 
in the movement of the occupations” you’ll find them making various claims 
about how their actions expressed the democratic will of the Sorbonne 
Assembly while it’s obvious that they were continually breaking with the 
decisions of the assembly or just asking it to rubber-stamp the things that 
they’d done.

In general, it’s no coincidence that people who advocate democracy also tend 
to advocate self-management – that is, taking over chunks of this society 
and running them ourselves. The connection is a simple one – communism is 
about transforming social relations, not just about changing the political 
regime, which is what the democrats want to do.

In the case of the council communists, self-management was pretty obviously 
what they were about. With the Situs it was more a case of them not making a 
real break from their self-managementist origins.

Another example of this kind of problem might be the concept of “planning”, 
which I know a lot of people are quite attached to. To me, “planning” 
implies that we all get together and decide what we are going to be doing 
for the next 5 years and then we go away and do it. This sounds like another 
example of fetishising the moment of decision-making. So, as communists, 
that is to say: enemies of democracy, I think we should be very suspicious 
of the concept of planning. As opponents of social-democracy we need to 
reject democracy every bit as vigorously as we reject socialism.




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