Democracy: Exercises In Nonexistence

I think we all well understand this issue, and do so on a very intuitive level, but perhaps cannot see it in clear enough outline that we are disturbed by it, and perhaps moved to action. The issue is this: that the most profound and profoundly disturbing of ironies of American Democracy (so-called) is that its essential engines of social and material power (corporations, financial institutions, and all private enterprise) are radically and unapologetically UNDEMOCRATIC. No, they are ANTI-DEMOCRATIC—even interested in actively suppressing any movement towards a more democratic form of organization and expression. Except for a very narrow range, their activities are unconstrained and unfettered by any semblance of a democratic system of debate, negotiation and compromise.

It might come as a surprise to state it like this, but consider a private (or even "public") corporation: it is an entirely autocratic, hierarchical arrangement of persons driven by one overriding imperative (profit), where the majority of persons have no direct say in its daily operations, nor do they have recourse even to the most elementary structures of modern democracy (a representative body of elected officials legislating and enforcing policy to which the represented participants are themselves subject).

Somehow, of course, the acceptability of this autocratic structure of corporations is derived from a principle of freedom and private property; but the slide from individual freedom and private ownership, to a collective organization that negates that freedom (and ownership) for the majority of the corporate body itself is dubious at best, irrational (and inhuman) at worst. But the fact is that the corporation itself, being eventually constituted by an organized body of persons collectively participating in the work that is the corporation’s essence and foundation, moves through a process of transformation whereby what was originally a private exercise of freedom and private ownership (by the founder or founders) becomes a collectively "owned" thing no longer beholden to a single person with their singular interests, but to the whole which is its actual, working reality. In other words, from individual freedom and private property we arrive in a few steps at a concept of collective ownership and a system of organization and management which is a generalization of individual freedom, not a negation of it. It should, then, follow that no corporation could justifiably exist without a democratic structure in place as its operating reality. Yet, somehow, such does not and (with few exceptions) has not existed in the history of modern capitalist society. (The same analysis can be made, mutatis mutandis, for the other engines of American democracy: financial institutions and, in general, all private enterprise.)

What I have attempted to outline, in a somewhat abstract way, is so obvious that perhaps my abstractions obscure the fact. It's perhaps worth stating again, more plainly: does anyone find it utterly absurd that, in the most powerful democracy on the planet (supposedly), every financial, corporate or private institution with which we interact, and on which the democracy survives, save for government itself, is autocratic, hierarchically arranged, more or less authoritarian in nature and therefore radically anti-democratic? (We can make an argument that, of course, even government itself is only very imperfectly "democratic", if at all.) In other words: the U.S. (and many other putatively democratic states) is democratic in its political principles and ideals, but is radically anti-democratic in its actual material economic realities. One is tempted to say that the operating principle of modern democracy is the paradoxical dictum that says that: In order to be democratic in theory, you have to be anti-democratic in practice. This calls to mind one of Mark Twain's sadly funny witticisms: "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them"—adding to Twain’s unfortunate list, of course, democracy itself.

As a mere "employee" you have little say in the ultimate or final structure, functioning, or daily operating strategies of the business or corporation which employs you (this applies even to the "corporations" I work for: academia). Everything you do, every decision you make, is subject to final approval by someone who has absolute power to overturn the aforementioned at will, even arbitrarily. There is little anyone can do about it. There is no (again with few exceptions, which are narrowly defined when they exist at all) appeal board, no process of debate or reconsideration. There is even no system where you, as employee, participate in the creation of the policy structure to which you are subject (again with few exceptions which in every case are always themselves subject to the arbitrary whim of someone higher in the ladder of internal corporate power). There is always someone, or some very few persons, who have absolute and unchallenged (and even unchallengeable) power over the vast majority of the corporate body. Again, the same is true for financial institutions, and for all private enterprise whatsoever.

This is what many, even classical liberal, thinkers have called into question: not private property per se, but private ownership of something which must of its own nature become and remain a collective effort (which is most business conducted for the benefit, and with the help, of others). As soon as you, conducting your own labors, in the creation of something materially beneficial and useful for yourself and others, require the assistance of another, then that thing being created is mutually or collectively owned—by the same principle out of which you derive the sense that the thing on which you personally and solely worked is your own. If you work the land yourself, then it would be yours; if you require the assistance of others, then you must give to them a portion of its ownership, such that it then becomes owned by all who so participate in the work. It follows that very few things can be actually personally "owned". Of course, unless even the clothes on our backs and the table and chair I'm now using be considered shared and available for use at any moment, considered collective property, there must be some sense of a fair or just relinquishment (technically, dispossession) of collective ownership for personal possession and unchallengeable use. There must be some concept of personal (not necessarily "private") property. That should be a matter of a kind of contractual (mutual) agreement, mediated by fair exchange (thus the use of an abstract universal means of exchange: money). But, this dispossession must and should have limits; it should not and indeed cannot be extended to the means by which things are produced, a means which is by its nature a collective endeavor and therefore, by our earlier principle, a thing necessarily collectively owned. I may take possession of the chair and table I'm using (and the computer and so on ... all of my personal possessions which I acquire through fair exchange), but not the means to produce those things—that is not and can never be a "private" possession of mine, or of anyone else. So goes the same logic for the land: I can take possession of the fruits grown on the land, but those who work the land, and who are directly involved in the business activity as a whole that brings that fruit to table, are the "owners" of it.

There of course must be a differentiation of the labor into land-workers, those involved in harvesting the fruit, and the whole industrial process, and those who "manage" it; but if it is to be consistent with our requirement that it be radically democratic, then there must exist a representative council that acts, independently of the operations of the business itself, for the collective benefit of the whole corporate body, wherein no one interest (the manager or administrator, or the production workers, etc.) rises in power above any other, and where all share equally that power of corporate self-determination.

Of course, this is the elementary form of a kind of "anarcho-syndicalism" if we were to try and find a name for what I'm describing, as this could be the kernel of an entire society—where the "state" as such is nothing but a confederation of locally-administered corporate councils, with a very minimum of super-structure for the collective welfare of all (healthcare, civil defense, etc.).

The ideal of democracy is one not yet achieved fully and radically in any existing state on the planet earth, especially and sadly not in the U.S. This unfinished revolution is perhaps an impossible dream; but it is an impossible dream I believe in. It is the enduring legacy of the radical enlightenment in Europe; I believe it to have universal appeal, as it speaks to the inherent freedom and equality of all human beings.

This already absurdly lengthy post was meant to be a mere preamble to a long quotation from the text of one of Chomsky's lectures, delivered just over 50 years ago in 1970. It highlights the absurdities of modern democracies, where their material-economic foundations are themselves conducted and structured in such a radically anti-democratic way as to make the political-economic system as a whole profoundly irrational. But such is the way of the world...

To begin with, it is obvious that we can distinguish two systems of power, the political system and the economic system. The former consists in principle of elected representatives of the people who set public policy. The latter in principle is a system of private power, a system of private empires, that are free from public control, except in the remote and indirect ways in which even a feudal nobility or a totalitarian dictatorship must be responsive to the public will. There are several immediate consequences of this organization of society.

The first is that in a subtle way an authoritarian cast of mind is induced in a very large mass of the population which is subject to arbitrary decree from above. I think that this has a great effect on the general character of the culture. The effect is the belief that one must obey arbitrary dictates and accede to authority. And I think that in fact a remarkable and exciting fact about the youth movement in recent years is that it is challenging and beginning to break down some of these authoritarian patterns.

The second fact that is important is that the range of decisions that are in principle subject to public democratic control is quite narrow. For example, it excludes in law in principle the central institutions in any advanced industrial society, i.e. the entire commercial, industrial and financial system. And a third fact is that even within the narrow range of issues that are submitted in principle to democratic decision making, the centers of private power of course exert an inordinately heavy influence in perfectly obvious ways, through control of the media, through control of political organizations or in fact by the simple and direct means of supplying the top personnel for the parliamentary system itself, as they obviously do. Richard Barnet in his recent study of the top 400 decision makers in the postwar national security system reports that most have, I quote now, “come from executive suites and law offices within shouting distance of each other, in 15 city blocks in 5 major cities.” And every other study shows the same thing.

In short, the democratic system at best functions within a narrow range in a capitalist democracy, and even within this narrow range its functioning is enormously biased by the concentrations of private power and by the authoritarian and passive modes of thinking that are induced by autocratic institutions such as industries, for example. It is a truism but one that must be constantly stressed that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible. And a careful look at the matter merely strengthens this conclusion. There are perfectly obvious processes of centralization of control taking place in both the political and the industrial system. As far as the political system is concerned, in every parliamentary democracy, not only ours, the role of parliament in policy formation has been declining in the years since WWII, as everyone knows and political commentators repeatedly point out.

In other words, the executive becomes increasingly powerful as the planning functions of the state become more significant. The House Armed Services Committee a couple of years ago described the role of Congress as that of a sometimes querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance. And careful studies of civil military decisions since WWII show that this is quite an accurate perception.

Senator Vandenberg 20 years ago expressed his fear that the American chief executive would become the number one warlord of the earth, his phrase. That has since occurred. The clearest decision is the decision to escalate in Vietnam in February 1965, in cynical disregard of the expressed will of the electorate. This incident reveals, I think, with perfect clarity the role of the public in decisions about peace and war, the role of the public in decisions about the main lines about public policy in general. And it also suggests the irrelevance of electoral politics to major decisions of national policy.

Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect."

Addendum On A Controversial Thesis: private property does not exist.

Proof, by contradiction: suppose it did exist; then anyone could theoretically take claim on anything and everything—and so in the limit everyone owns everything, which is absurd (even if the criterion of ownership is that one “mixes their labor” with something—and here since the thing could be a person, all parents are property-owners of their children). Therefore all property is both non-private (social) and temporarily possessed, and must (and will) necessarily be transferred to another at some point in its existence or has already been received by (or taken over from) another.

Furthermore, the concept of private property tacitly assumes the existence of persons as islands of possession (“this is mine and not yours”), which is again absurd. Nothing I could possess (not even my own person) is not also brought into being by others—all production is inherently social, as all human beings are (as Aristotle says) “by nature” social animals. No society, no human; mutatis mutandis: no society, no property (where ‘property’ is a thing elevated to such by a creative act on something by a person).

Therefore since private property does not exist, capitalism can only exist without it. And so by a more direct if not more dogmatic route we arrive at Marx’s fundamental analytical determination: capitalism is ALREADY its own (determinate) negation. Any proper revolution merely takes what is already true implicitly (and as a contradiction of the system) and renders it explicit. Therefore revolution is explication...