Die Neue Zeit
19th June 2009, 05:03
Participatory Democracy and the Direct Democracy Question
"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people […]" (Karl Marx)
Inspired by Marx’s musings on the Paris Commune, awhile back I was fortunate to have found A Space for Participatory Democracy?, a blog by sociologist Mark Frezzo of the Florida Atlantic University. Notwithstanding elements of what could be perceived as an overemphasis on decentralization and stikhiinost, he noted the following:
For the moment, it is sufficient to not that participatory democracy attempts to move beyond the most significant debate in the history of the left – the debate between advocates of “reform” (social democrats favoring the parliamentary path to power) and proponents of “revolution” (communists favoring the seizure of the state apparatus). Notwithstanding profound differences in organization and doctrine, these two approaches – often termed “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” socialism respectively – share an emphasis on party politics and a vision of the state as the primary agent of social transformation.
Present in embryonic form at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 and reaching their mature articulations with the Great Schism in the working-class movement in 1919-1920, these two tendencies defined the trajectory of the left through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar reconstruction, and the peak of US hegemony (1945-early 1970s). However, things began to change in the crisis of the 1970s – a crisis that afflicted Keynesian welfare states in the First World, state socialism in the Second World, and developmental states – whether “bourgeois,” “non-aligned,” or “socialist” – in the Third World. As transnational corporations began to break out of the straitjacket of regulation (culminating in the post-Fordist regime of production), left and center-left parties began to give up on the Keynesian management of capitalism. Over time, the implementation of neoliberal policies created – as an unintended consequence, to be sure – a space for community groups, grassroots movements, NGOs, and other “civil society actors.” This is where the story became interesting. Stay tuned.
One of the central premises behind participatory democracy is parallelism relative to pseudo-representative organs, electorally representative organs, and even genuinely representative organs (again, representation as a concept will be elaborated upon later). For all the traditional emphases on “checks and balances,” parallelism is much more effective. A crude example of parallelism is the concept of dual power between increasingly delegitimized state institutions and alternative institutions. Historically, the WWI-era Provisional Government in Russia was in direct competition with workers’ councils, or soviets, for legitimacy.
Dual power, however, does not address parallelism relative to electorally representative organs, let alone genuinely representative ones. The parallelism of soviets and factory committees was not a form of dual power, since the former organs had just been legitimized by the Bolshevik-led provisional coalition government (provisional until the Soviet constitution of 1918). Add to the mix tenants’ block committees (as opposed to traditional homeowners’ associations), and one finds a much richer parallelism than the one presented by dual power.
The full range of parallelism enables a key observation by Marx on the Paris Commune to be realized once more: the combination of legislative and executive-administrative power within the same organ. Since politicians have proven to be no more competent than “the mob” in specific matters requiring technical knowledge (and in many cases less competent), this combination would abolish the legislative status quo that is based on the French verb parler (“to talk”): parliamentarism.
One key question posed by participatory democracy is the revival of direct democracy (made possible precisely by the existence of highly developed and proper political parties, not in spite of them, noted Kautsky). Said the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov in 1883:
The socialist revolution simplifies all social relationships and gives them a purpose, at the same time providing each citizen with the real possibility of participating directly in the discussion and decision of all social matters. This direct participation of citizens in the management of all social matters presupposes the abolition of the modern system of political representation and its replacement by direct popular legislation.
Although society has become too complex for the whole range of political decisions to be made by potentially time-consuming direct popular legislation, modern communication technology has made possible the revival of the ancient Greek body known as the Assembly, wherein any citizen (albeit exclusive of the female gender and the slave class status, but never exclusive of the remaining non-owners of property) was able to attend, make political speeches, and vote on decisions being discussed. The issues being discussed, of course, would have to be major ones, such as taxation levels and budgetary affairs (both discussed in Chapter 6), and even the age-old questions of war and peace.
The remaining range of political decisions would be left to specialized councils with combined legislative and executive-administrative power over their respective, parallel jurisdictions. How they are composed, and how the concept of representation must be redefined, is the subject of the next section.
The Demarchy Question
“I mean, for example, that it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected oligarchic, and democratic for them not to have a property-qualification, oligarchic to have one; therefore it is aristocratic and constitutional to take one feature from one form and the other from the other, from oligarchy that offices are to be elected, and from democracy that this is not to be on a property-qualification.” (Aristotle)
Notwithstanding radical republican objections (to be elaborated upon later), the “democracy question” cannot be fully resolved at all without going past Marx himself by giving due consideration to the question’s Greek origins. In his usage of the philosopher Immanuel Kant to read Marx and vice versa, Kojin Karatani wrote this profoundly true and important historical lesson in the Transcritique:
There is one crucial thing we can learn from Athenian democracy in this respect. The ancient democracy was established by overthrowing tyranny and equipped itself with a meticulous device for preventing tyranny for reviving. The salient characteristic of Athenian democracy is not a direct participation of everyone in the assembly, as always claimed, but a systematic control of the administrative power. The crux was the system of lottery: to elect public servants by lottery and to surveil the deeds of public servants by means of a group of jurors who were also elected by lottery [...] Lottery functions to introduce contingency into the magnetic power center. The point is to shake up the positions where power tends to be concentrated; entrenchment of power in administrative positions can be avoided by a sudden attack of contingency. It is only the lottery that actualizes the separation of the three powers. If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of a lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Complementing the Assembly in ancient Greece was the Council of 500, which served as the full-time government. This council was formed not by elections at all, but by the random selection of 500 citizens on an annual basis. Such citizens could be selected to serve only twice in their lifetime, for a grand total of two years! So much for non-participatory careerism and bureaucratic excesses!
The same principle of random selection was applied to the legal system, at the apex of which stood the historical high point of sovereign commoner juries, the judge-free People’s Court. The enormous size of the peasant-dominated People’s Court, anytime from 500 jurors to well over a thousand, served as protection against bribery. Elections were reserved mostly for generals, given the need for experience and specialized military knowledge.
A modern implementation of this kind of representation would be indeed on a statistical basis, as opposed to the blatant misrepresentation of age groups, gender groups, ethnicity groups, and certainly classes, all resulting from the bourgeois combination of universal suffrage and elections. The present misrepresentation is compounded by the time wasted on patronage, nepotism, and general questions of personalities – time that could have been better spent discussing and deciding upon issues. Although arguments can be made against pure random selection, they are ineffective against random selections based upon candidates meeting certain technical criteria. These qualified random selections would most certainly be applied to many specialized councils, such as one, for example, that has jurisdiction over an entire public health care system.
What about abusive officials in a modern demarchy, then? Contrary to potential claims by radical republicans, the ability to recall any official immediately is by no means the exclusive property of that oligarchic principle known as elections, since many bourgeois-capitalist states do not have this at all (and, in exceptional cases, limit it to the point of uselessness). It is in fact much closer to the concept of jurors collectively deciding upon a verdict. Also, this ability should be extended to jurors themselves and other legal officials since, as Marx noted, judicial bodies are less independent than depicted in the high halls of liberal idealism:
The judicial functionaries [are] to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges [are] to be [...] responsible, and revocable.
Non-Class-Based Approaches to Participatory Democracy
“That is why the merging of the democratic activities of the working class with the democratic aspirations of other classes and groups would weaken the democratic movement, would weaken the political struggle, would make it less determined, less consistent, more likely to compromise. On the other hand, if the working class stands out as the vanguard fighter for democratic institutions, this will strengthen the democratic movement, will strengthen the struggle for political liberty […] We said above that all socialists in Russia should become Social-Democrats. We now add: all true and consistent democrats in Russia should become Social-Democrats.” (Vladimir Lenin)
From Chartism in the Britain to working-class demands for universal suffrage to “all power to the soviets,” history has shown that the working class is in the best position by far to struggle for participatory democracy. One key aspect of the “battle of democracy” that is never fully discussed among “democratic theory” academics and other ultra-democratist non-workers who are fed up with so-called “liberal democracy” is the Chartist demand regarding legislator pay. Without this demand, political positions would be filled only by those of the propertied classes, namely the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune took this a step further:
From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage.
In hindsight, this was a primitive yet bold attempt at applying agency theory to the realm of politics and civil administration: aligning the interests of “agent” officials with the interests of the “principal” population as a whole by means of aligning standards of living. Nowadays, many public officials (and most politicians) have so-called “second jobs” (petit-bourgeois or even bourgeois business activities) that distance them from dealing with the population at large, and abuse their public expense allowances to the point of increasing them in disproportion to pay increases for ordinary workers at large. A modern alignment of standards of living should be based on the median standard of living for professional and other skilled workers, since the statistical mean allows a small minority of high earners to skew the number upward, and should take into consideration expense allowances and related issues.
On a more general note, other classes are not as enthusiastic about participatory democracy. As a class, coordinators prefer scientific management and social engineering. However, since these would-be technocrats share the same ownership relationship to the means of production as the proletariat, this class tends to be not so vocal about it, and in fact qualified random selections can partially realize their preferences. In the case of those who, on a class basis, do not develop society’s labour power and its capabilities, such mainly “middle-income” semi-workers form the demographic core of those who rant against “mob rule” (and even use the word “democracy” pejoratively in their rants) and praise liberal republicanism (as opposed to even radical republicanism), mainly because their ever-atomizing individualism inhibits them from politically interacting with society as a whole.
REFERENCES:
The Civil War in France by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm]
A Space for Participatory Democracy? by Mark Frezzo [http://www.envisioningdemocracy.net/2008/03/a-space-for-par.html]
Democracy Without Politicians? by Dave Zachariah [http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/Zachariah_OnDemocracy.pdf]
Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group by Georgi Plekhanov [http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm]
Politics by Aristotle [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0058&query=bekker%20line%3D%23175]
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani [http://books.google.com/books?id=mR1HIJVoy6wC]
Criminal Procedure in Ancient Greece and the Trial of Socrates by Douglas Linder [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/greekcrimpro.html]
The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm]
Ideas of Leadership and Democracy by Paul Cockshott [www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/leadershipconcepts.pdf]
"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people […]" (Karl Marx)
Inspired by Marx’s musings on the Paris Commune, awhile back I was fortunate to have found A Space for Participatory Democracy?, a blog by sociologist Mark Frezzo of the Florida Atlantic University. Notwithstanding elements of what could be perceived as an overemphasis on decentralization and stikhiinost, he noted the following:
For the moment, it is sufficient to not that participatory democracy attempts to move beyond the most significant debate in the history of the left – the debate between advocates of “reform” (social democrats favoring the parliamentary path to power) and proponents of “revolution” (communists favoring the seizure of the state apparatus). Notwithstanding profound differences in organization and doctrine, these two approaches – often termed “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” socialism respectively – share an emphasis on party politics and a vision of the state as the primary agent of social transformation.
Present in embryonic form at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 and reaching their mature articulations with the Great Schism in the working-class movement in 1919-1920, these two tendencies defined the trajectory of the left through the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar reconstruction, and the peak of US hegemony (1945-early 1970s). However, things began to change in the crisis of the 1970s – a crisis that afflicted Keynesian welfare states in the First World, state socialism in the Second World, and developmental states – whether “bourgeois,” “non-aligned,” or “socialist” – in the Third World. As transnational corporations began to break out of the straitjacket of regulation (culminating in the post-Fordist regime of production), left and center-left parties began to give up on the Keynesian management of capitalism. Over time, the implementation of neoliberal policies created – as an unintended consequence, to be sure – a space for community groups, grassroots movements, NGOs, and other “civil society actors.” This is where the story became interesting. Stay tuned.
One of the central premises behind participatory democracy is parallelism relative to pseudo-representative organs, electorally representative organs, and even genuinely representative organs (again, representation as a concept will be elaborated upon later). For all the traditional emphases on “checks and balances,” parallelism is much more effective. A crude example of parallelism is the concept of dual power between increasingly delegitimized state institutions and alternative institutions. Historically, the WWI-era Provisional Government in Russia was in direct competition with workers’ councils, or soviets, for legitimacy.
Dual power, however, does not address parallelism relative to electorally representative organs, let alone genuinely representative ones. The parallelism of soviets and factory committees was not a form of dual power, since the former organs had just been legitimized by the Bolshevik-led provisional coalition government (provisional until the Soviet constitution of 1918). Add to the mix tenants’ block committees (as opposed to traditional homeowners’ associations), and one finds a much richer parallelism than the one presented by dual power.
The full range of parallelism enables a key observation by Marx on the Paris Commune to be realized once more: the combination of legislative and executive-administrative power within the same organ. Since politicians have proven to be no more competent than “the mob” in specific matters requiring technical knowledge (and in many cases less competent), this combination would abolish the legislative status quo that is based on the French verb parler (“to talk”): parliamentarism.
One key question posed by participatory democracy is the revival of direct democracy (made possible precisely by the existence of highly developed and proper political parties, not in spite of them, noted Kautsky). Said the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov in 1883:
The socialist revolution simplifies all social relationships and gives them a purpose, at the same time providing each citizen with the real possibility of participating directly in the discussion and decision of all social matters. This direct participation of citizens in the management of all social matters presupposes the abolition of the modern system of political representation and its replacement by direct popular legislation.
Although society has become too complex for the whole range of political decisions to be made by potentially time-consuming direct popular legislation, modern communication technology has made possible the revival of the ancient Greek body known as the Assembly, wherein any citizen (albeit exclusive of the female gender and the slave class status, but never exclusive of the remaining non-owners of property) was able to attend, make political speeches, and vote on decisions being discussed. The issues being discussed, of course, would have to be major ones, such as taxation levels and budgetary affairs (both discussed in Chapter 6), and even the age-old questions of war and peace.
The remaining range of political decisions would be left to specialized councils with combined legislative and executive-administrative power over their respective, parallel jurisdictions. How they are composed, and how the concept of representation must be redefined, is the subject of the next section.
The Demarchy Question
“I mean, for example, that it is thought to be democratic for the offices to be assigned by lot, for them to be elected oligarchic, and democratic for them not to have a property-qualification, oligarchic to have one; therefore it is aristocratic and constitutional to take one feature from one form and the other from the other, from oligarchy that offices are to be elected, and from democracy that this is not to be on a property-qualification.” (Aristotle)
Notwithstanding radical republican objections (to be elaborated upon later), the “democracy question” cannot be fully resolved at all without going past Marx himself by giving due consideration to the question’s Greek origins. In his usage of the philosopher Immanuel Kant to read Marx and vice versa, Kojin Karatani wrote this profoundly true and important historical lesson in the Transcritique:
There is one crucial thing we can learn from Athenian democracy in this respect. The ancient democracy was established by overthrowing tyranny and equipped itself with a meticulous device for preventing tyranny for reviving. The salient characteristic of Athenian democracy is not a direct participation of everyone in the assembly, as always claimed, but a systematic control of the administrative power. The crux was the system of lottery: to elect public servants by lottery and to surveil the deeds of public servants by means of a group of jurors who were also elected by lottery [...] Lottery functions to introduce contingency into the magnetic power center. The point is to shake up the positions where power tends to be concentrated; entrenchment of power in administrative positions can be avoided by a sudden attack of contingency. It is only the lottery that actualizes the separation of the three powers. If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of a lottery should be deemed the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Complementing the Assembly in ancient Greece was the Council of 500, which served as the full-time government. This council was formed not by elections at all, but by the random selection of 500 citizens on an annual basis. Such citizens could be selected to serve only twice in their lifetime, for a grand total of two years! So much for non-participatory careerism and bureaucratic excesses!
The same principle of random selection was applied to the legal system, at the apex of which stood the historical high point of sovereign commoner juries, the judge-free People’s Court. The enormous size of the peasant-dominated People’s Court, anytime from 500 jurors to well over a thousand, served as protection against bribery. Elections were reserved mostly for generals, given the need for experience and specialized military knowledge.
A modern implementation of this kind of representation would be indeed on a statistical basis, as opposed to the blatant misrepresentation of age groups, gender groups, ethnicity groups, and certainly classes, all resulting from the bourgeois combination of universal suffrage and elections. The present misrepresentation is compounded by the time wasted on patronage, nepotism, and general questions of personalities – time that could have been better spent discussing and deciding upon issues. Although arguments can be made against pure random selection, they are ineffective against random selections based upon candidates meeting certain technical criteria. These qualified random selections would most certainly be applied to many specialized councils, such as one, for example, that has jurisdiction over an entire public health care system.
What about abusive officials in a modern demarchy, then? Contrary to potential claims by radical republicans, the ability to recall any official immediately is by no means the exclusive property of that oligarchic principle known as elections, since many bourgeois-capitalist states do not have this at all (and, in exceptional cases, limit it to the point of uselessness). It is in fact much closer to the concept of jurors collectively deciding upon a verdict. Also, this ability should be extended to jurors themselves and other legal officials since, as Marx noted, judicial bodies are less independent than depicted in the high halls of liberal idealism:
The judicial functionaries [are] to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges [are] to be [...] responsible, and revocable.
Non-Class-Based Approaches to Participatory Democracy
“That is why the merging of the democratic activities of the working class with the democratic aspirations of other classes and groups would weaken the democratic movement, would weaken the political struggle, would make it less determined, less consistent, more likely to compromise. On the other hand, if the working class stands out as the vanguard fighter for democratic institutions, this will strengthen the democratic movement, will strengthen the struggle for political liberty […] We said above that all socialists in Russia should become Social-Democrats. We now add: all true and consistent democrats in Russia should become Social-Democrats.” (Vladimir Lenin)
From Chartism in the Britain to working-class demands for universal suffrage to “all power to the soviets,” history has shown that the working class is in the best position by far to struggle for participatory democracy. One key aspect of the “battle of democracy” that is never fully discussed among “democratic theory” academics and other ultra-democratist non-workers who are fed up with so-called “liberal democracy” is the Chartist demand regarding legislator pay. Without this demand, political positions would be filled only by those of the propertied classes, namely the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. The Paris Commune took this a step further:
From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage.
In hindsight, this was a primitive yet bold attempt at applying agency theory to the realm of politics and civil administration: aligning the interests of “agent” officials with the interests of the “principal” population as a whole by means of aligning standards of living. Nowadays, many public officials (and most politicians) have so-called “second jobs” (petit-bourgeois or even bourgeois business activities) that distance them from dealing with the population at large, and abuse their public expense allowances to the point of increasing them in disproportion to pay increases for ordinary workers at large. A modern alignment of standards of living should be based on the median standard of living for professional and other skilled workers, since the statistical mean allows a small minority of high earners to skew the number upward, and should take into consideration expense allowances and related issues.
On a more general note, other classes are not as enthusiastic about participatory democracy. As a class, coordinators prefer scientific management and social engineering. However, since these would-be technocrats share the same ownership relationship to the means of production as the proletariat, this class tends to be not so vocal about it, and in fact qualified random selections can partially realize their preferences. In the case of those who, on a class basis, do not develop society’s labour power and its capabilities, such mainly “middle-income” semi-workers form the demographic core of those who rant against “mob rule” (and even use the word “democracy” pejoratively in their rants) and praise liberal republicanism (as opposed to even radical republicanism), mainly because their ever-atomizing individualism inhibits them from politically interacting with society as a whole.
REFERENCES:
The Civil War in France by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm]
A Space for Participatory Democracy? by Mark Frezzo [http://www.envisioningdemocracy.net/2008/03/a-space-for-par.html]
Democracy Without Politicians? by Dave Zachariah [http://reality.gn.apc.org/polemic/Zachariah_OnDemocracy.pdf]
Programme of the Social-Democratic Emancipation of Labour Group by Georgi Plekhanov [http://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/xx/sdelg1.htm]
Politics by Aristotle [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0058&query=bekker%20line%3D%23175]
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani [http://books.google.com/books?id=mR1HIJVoy6wC]
Criminal Procedure in Ancient Greece and the Trial of Socrates by Douglas Linder [http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/socrates/greekcrimpro.html]
The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm]
Ideas of Leadership and Democracy by Paul Cockshott [www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc/reports/leadershipconcepts.pdf]