Defending Democracy: Dying Democracies East and West

               The transition from a government of rotating elected officials subject to the will of voters to autocratic government is a slippery slope. Once government officials begin to allow narrow interests prevail over policies that benefit the general public, the slide downwards into oligarchy, demagoguery, and the death of democracy can be rapid. 

               President Putin’s decision to disband the Russian government and begin a transition to new political system earlier this month appears to be one such step in the direction of the end of democratic governance. While holding regular elections in the post-Soviet era, Russia may seem to be an electoral democracy.

Yet the presence of elections, even elections certified as valid by international bodies, is never enough to guarantee democracy. Indeed, the presence of elections often hide different problems with democracy.

               When electoral democracies allow oligarchs to monopolize political systems, they run the risk that the oligarchs will decide they don’t want to give up power. In Russia’s case this year, Putin seems to be pursuing a permanent political post for himself. Permanent office for political leaders mean the death of democracy.

               Those who believe in Western European governance models and capitalist economies may assume that this problem is limited to the recent history of Eastern European experience with centralized socialism under the sway of the Soviet Union. For them, the trouble begins and ends with one country, Russia, or even more narrowly with a single individual, Vladimir Putin.

But many political theorists find that all centralized governments east and west are hampered by a larger, more generalized problem. This problem is sometimes known as the state of exception, to use the language of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt argued that any government system where leaders can declare exceptions to the rule of law risked ceding its sovereignty to individuals. In Schmitt’s view this weakness made the modern liberal state vulnerable to capture by individuals who pursued their own individual interests. Schmitt’s turn towards nationalist socialism in Germany in response to this flaw in democracies led him to support Nazi German policies. Others have responded to Schmitt's analysis of weaknesses in centralized democracies by turning away from political practices with centralized authority structures.

As Giorgio Agamben argued, this weakness of democracy is pervasive, and not limited to conservative states or European states or autocracies. The state of exception weakness suggests that all liberal democracies are vulnerable. These weaknesses are important in the United States as well, since many senior officials in U.S. administrative positions studied Schmitt carefully. They have also impacted the United States through the view of one of Schmitt’s followers, Friedrich Hayek, an important architect of present-day highly centralized economic policies known as neoliberalism.

Some have found this weakness at work in the rapid assertion of executive authority under the Bush Administration in the United States after 9/11, and in the Trump administration more recently.  While some have argued that the U.S. government is now an oligarchy and longer a democracy, it does seem clear at this point that Trump clearly does not believe he is limited by the rule of law.

One important weapon wielded to ensure subjection of the head of state to the rule of law in a constitutional democracy is the impeachment process. By placing this weapon in the hands of the legislative branch, those democracies which practice impeachment give the people's elected representatives a counter weight to the individual sovereign, the executive branch. In general concept, impeachment means the people can rule, rather than the monarch or dictator.

Keeping the balance of power tilted in the direction of the people takes hard work in all democracies. As Hakim Jeffries, Representative from Brooklyn, pointed out when he made the analogy with Putin in Russia explicit in his opening remarks to the U.S. impeachment process, this problem is found not only in the United States but also in Russia and Turkey and other nation-states that claim to be democracies.

Yet impeachment is not without its perils. Sovereigns can use legal arguments to provide a cover for those elected officials who support oligarchy and autocracy. As one Representative, Tom Railsback of Illinois, argued during preparations for the 1974 impeachment of President Nixon argued, “If the Congress doesn’t get the material we think we need and then votes to exonerate, we’ll be regarded as a paper tiger.” The risk of the current circumstances in the United States is that President Trump’s allies in the U.S. Senate will acquit him of wrongdoing, strengthening his chances of remaining in office for four more years. Demanding that a sovereign submit to the rule of law and then failing to enforce the demand would be devastating to any democracy.

History reminds us that four more years on a slippery slope may be a long ride downhill, from the foothills of democracy into the valley of autocracy. President Trump’s ally in Russia, President Putin, may be in the middle of demonstrating how to take a large nation-state on a long ride into the darkness of leaders without elections, government without rule of law, and a social order that does not respond to the will of the people.

If impeachment does not remove President Trump, there are many other weapons useful in reclaiming democracy from oligarchs, autocrats, sovereigns, and dictators. How-to handbooks at carrying out mass movements successful at removing oligarchs and autocrats from power in the past year have been presented this year in Lebanon and Algeria, to name just two struggles. Other how-to guides might be seen in street battles that have fought major national governments to a draw in China and France.  

Democracy is never handed to the people. They must fight to claim their governments as their own, to claim rule by the demos, rule by all, not rule by the few, rule by experts.

However the ongoing battle turns out over democracy and the rule of law in the United States, centralized democracies will retain their weakness for exceptions to the rule of law. So those who might want to defend democracy will continue to have reason to fight for rule by all, meetings to go to, and work to do.

The Rule of Law and the Magna Carta

Critics of assumptions that we live under the rule of law have come into fashion suddenly, with the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta this month. Nicholas Vincent of the University of East Anglia called the myth of “an English-speaking people, freedom-loving people who’ve lived with a degree of liberty and under a rule of law for 800 years “a load of tripe,” among other pungent criticisms. But where were these commentators when the British and the U.S. unloaded the weapons of rendition on detainees in the War on Terror or detention without trial on immigrants? Why is this discussion of the history of the rule of law occurring with little or no reference to the current crisis of the rule of law?

Subaltern Democracies: Zapatista Practices

The Zapatista movement of southern Mexico introduced their democratic practices to the world in L@s Escuelit@s or “Little Schools” this past August.  The Escuelit@ attracted over one thousand interested folks from all over the world and more attended by webcast, an auspicious beginning to the newest phase of the twenty-year-old movement.

While the Zapatistas are well-known for taking democracy to be central among both their demands and their practices, until recently not much was known outside the mostly indigenous movement participants about what democracy meant for them. With the prospect of ongoing Zapatista Escuelit@s over the next several years, it seems that what was known will increase rapidly.

“Las Escuelitas” | Autonomy, Chiapas - California

About Raúl Zibechi

(Vea tambien: Las escuelitas de abajo por Raúl Zibechi)

Zibechi’s comments below on the Zapatista movement’s newest phase builds on his extensive experience writing about and participating in Latin American social movements since the 1970s. After participating from 1969-1973 in the Uruguayan Revolutionary Student Front, he was forced into exile with many other activists in 1976. In the 1980s he began writing about Central American liberation movements for various newspapers in Argentina and Uruguay, and he now does political analysis for La Brecha (Uruguay), La Jornada (Mexico), and the America’s Program. He won the José Marti Journalism Award for his work as a journalist. He is also the author of several books, including two essay collections recently translated into English (Dispersing Power, 2010; and Territories in Resistance, 2012). 

The essay below was published shortly after Zibechi completed a program this past August 12-17 that the Zapatista’s call “Las Escuelitas” or “The Little Schools.” This program invited activists from all over the world to come to the Zapatista autonomously governed indigenous areas of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to observe and listen to the movement’s participants. Like much of Zibechi’s other writings, he combines penetrating observations of the ways movements of the poorest of the poor have been successful in resisting capitalist social exploitation and economic inequalities with precise use of sophisticated political theory to critique traditional social movement analysis. Woven into this short essay we find a recognition following Giorgio Agamben of the “concentration camp” character of modern life characterized by the attempted elimination of entire categories of citizens through permanent states of exception without failing to find room for liberated subjectivities in the renegotiation of Foucauldian power/knowledge relations in the classroom, the family, and political economy. Ultimately Zibechi argues as he has in his other writings (Territories, 204) for a rejection of the claim by Castells, Bourdieu and Wacquant, and Negri that the rural and urban poor excluded from capitalist social mobility lack social agency, instead making some very strong claims for major Zapatista innovations and successes in resisting the modern state, patriarchy, and neocolonial forms of knowledge. 

From The Schools From Below, originally published in In Motion Magazine:

There will be a before and an after the Zapatista school. A recent one and those that are to come. There will be a slow impact, diffuse, which will be felt in some years but which will impact the life of those below for decades. What we lived was a non-institutional education, where the community is the educating subject. Self-education face to face, learning with the heart and the body, as a poet would say.

It’s about a non-pedagogy inspired in the farming culture: select the best seeds, scatter them in the fertile ground and water the soil to produce the miracle of germination, that is uncertain and can never be planned.

The Zapatista schools, in which more than a thousand of us set foot in autonomous communities, was a different mode of learning and teaching, without classrooms or blackboards, without teachers or professors, without curriculum or grades. The real teaching begins with the creation of a climate of kinship among a multitude of subjects instead of dividing educators with power and knowledge from naïve students that need to be inculcated with knowledge. >> Read more

Street Democracy

Massive street demonstrations have recently proved very effective in another round of attempts to pressure elected governments to listen to popular opinion. While the mass protests of the past month may seem like another wave of popular movements comparable to the Arab Spring, they have spread to new countries, new regions, and new strategic goals.

IMF Loan Terms Attack the Democratic Legacy of the Arab Spring

With IMF officials visiting Egypt this week, negotiations have resumed on the terms of a bailout loan to address the Morsi government’s plummeting credit profile and foreign reserves. The IMF loan, if the agreement is successful, will come only with terms that demand reductions in social support spending following the classic lines of neoliberal economic policy demands. The IMF’s technical assistance to Egypt has repeatedly advised the government to trim energy subsidies and implement broader tax reforms, and investor tax reforms were also announced this week. Yet the investor-friendly policies and social support reductions are only part of the picture.

Egypt's subsidies are long-standing, many begun during the Nasser period but becoming essential when global commodity prices rose dramatically in the 1970s, and are now particularly urgent given Mubarak’s neoliberal policies and their impoverishment of a substantial portion of the population. Egypt spends close to 10 percent of its GDP on subsidies, and almost everyone agrees that the subsidies are not effective at reaching the poorest of the poor.

Populism or Democracy?

After the December, 2012 constitutional referendum in Egypt we find that electoral success may not translate into popular support. So how do democracies come to diverge from populism?

Democratic governments claim that the will of the populace is represented in government decision-making and policy. Yet historically democracy has had two broad variants. One variation, widespread until the early 19th century, was where ordinary people by force of numbers govern, so that democracy (sometimes known as popular democracy) is shaped by a relation between all the people and a form of government. A second now more commonly accepted form is where carefully selected representatives govern.  The claim of electoral democracies to full democracy is based on the second form, which unfortunately is now widely associated with democracy to the exclusion of the earlier and still popular sense.

Giorgio Agamben

Agamben, Giorgio: Agamben suggests the word democracy has at least two, distinct meanings that often get mistakenly conflated. First, democracy refers to the political agreements (such as a constitution, public law, social norms) through which the people organize and make collective decisions. Agamben calls this a “political-juridical” rationality—meaning this aspect of democracy refers to the creation of laws, and the constant revision of law, by the people of any given collective.