Defend Democracy: Building Social Groups to Strengthen Democratic Power

                The warnings about a surge towards autocracy in the United States, Europe, Turkey, and the Philipines have turned from a steady stream to a flood in the past year. But there is much we can do to build stronger centers for democratic power.

Democracy comes from the people, not from governments. So organized communities can hold governments accountable and pressure them to become more democratic.  Popular movements successfully pressing for democratic practices and freedoms fill the past half century of Latin America’s recent history in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Bolivia, and beyond.  Protestors in Belarus this summer have shown how popular protest can pressure elected leaders who put their personal interests above those of the country. Successful popular movements have overthrown presidents in Burma, Argentina, and Egypt and changed policies in many other nations.

               The study of weaknesses in autocracy by Gene Sharp, who explored resistance movements in India, Panama, Poland, Chile, and Thailand, found multiple centers for democratic power. These centers of power include not only government bodies but also many non-governmental groups and institutions. While many are familiar with major non-governmental institutions that claim to promote democracy, such as mass media, political parties, watchdog organizations, unions, churches, and economic bodies, not all recognize the importance for democracy of less formal social groups.

Increased involvement in such informal social groups is an important way that we can strengthen the structural base for a free democratic society. Neighborhood councils, sports clubs, student groups, cultural associations, musical groups, or other common interest groups: any group that knits people together in ways that can be activated when democracy needs to be defended. Such groups might form in urban (reading groups; community garden groups), suburban (sewing groups; youth groups; permaculture groups), or rural settings (small farmer associations; cooking clubs).

Many such groups have formed during the pandemic as communities develop mutual aid resources for meeting needs that governments won't address. The Movement for Black Lives and other supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement actively bring people together in new ways to practice joyful ways of being together.

Getting to know others in these group settings resists autocracy because it brings people together. Authoritarians must divide to conquer. So building relationships with those unlike yourself weakens authoritarian attempts to divide.

Participating in informal groups is also an important tactic for keeping democracies healthy, in the view of the historian Tim Snyder who has studied Nazi groups in Europe.  Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people is one of his twenty points for protecting democracy. Another one is “stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust.” Building trust with people you do not customarily befriend is an important part of defending democracy.

Protecting institutions that counterbalance executive power or bring hidden activities to light is also important in protecting democracy.  Supporting an independent judiciary, investigative journalism, and other pillars of democratic governance will strengthen democracy.

When democracy suddenly seems at risk these organizations will emerge as needed, or they can be formed before needed to defend democracy. When Pakistan tried to force courts to support the government, lawyers came out in force  in 2007 to keep the courts independent. When economic experts in Argentina tried to close the banks so that the World Bank could be paid its debts, a massive explosion of neighborhood councils and street organizations emerged (complete with homemade musical accompaniment) in late 2001. Many of these organizations remain at work to exert pressure on their government to remain democratic to this day.

When subjects do not obey, rulers have no power. While activists in some thirty countries have used this approach to resist dictators and overthrow oligarchs, theorists such as Michel Foucault have found that power is not monopolized by those who seem to have it. Jacques Derrida argued that centralized institutions like governments depend on a sleight of hand to trick people into giving up their own agency.

If autocrats do take power, Gene Sharp and others will still be around to help those of us who want democracy back. There is even a phone app on Sharp’s work! And there are many other ways to advocate for democracy when an elected national leader goes rogue and tries to turn an electoral government into a single-party autocracy.

Social division is an autocrat’s best friend. So joining groups with new friends and building trust knits society across divisions. Gayatri Spivak invites us to practice democracy by listening effectively to those with whom we do not identify, so we can build trust with subalterns over the long term.

Friendships and organizations can reach across national borders. So “Learn from others in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends abroad” in the words again of Tim Snyder. Reaching out internationally builds bridges from the local to the global, work that may provide resources if needed.

These actions will hinder the one-party state, which often emerge from two-party or multi-party electoral systems. Remember that many dictators were once brought to power by elections: Duvalier in HaitI; Ahmed Sèkou Tourè in Guinea; Mussolini in Italy; Hitler in Germany.

History will show whether elected leaders active today will prove to be autocrats in the making: Duterte in the Philippines, Erdogan in Turkey, and Trump in the United States. But the time to act is now.

The future is ours to make. Make it with friends new and old, in organizations large and small, networked locally and globally.

Mass Assembly and the Political

Mass assemblies are important sites for political action, yet they often are represented as if they are secondary to established political institutions. Political activists and theorists have begun to reconsider their importance with the major successes of assemblies in Argentina in the first decade of the new millennium, in Tahrir Square protests in 2011 and 2013, in the 2011-12 Occupy movement in North America and Europe, in the 15-M or Indignado movement in 2011 Spain, and in recent anti-austerity movements in Greece and other nations.

Mass assemblies were common historically and are still found all over the globe in our own day, yet in particular their present-day actions are often overlooked by activists and theorists alike. Sometimes known as the village or tribal council, the townhall meeting, the neighborhood association, or by other names, large gatherings of people together to make decisions about their own lives are as old as any other form of politics.

Particularly when these meetings make important decisions, they present a site for democracy or rule by the people. In some recent reconsiderations, however, mass assemblies are considered only in more limited instances when mass protests claim to speak for the people to the liberal or autocratic nation-state. Disagreement about whether mass assemblies are sites for political decision-making or simply sites for expressing political views to the nation-state is one of the central debates in these recent theoretical rethinking of the mass assembly.

Outside of electoral defeat and armed movements or coups, mass protests seem to be one of the few ways to produce regime change. Even when elected leaders attempt to ignore the public statements of massed protestors, as recently seen in Egypt and Argentina the assembled populace may still overthrow governments and make known their will.

In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Assembly (2015) and Judith Butler’s Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), the narrow focus on mass protests assumes that the political is only carried out by the nation-state, or even that democracy can only take place when addressing the liberal electoral nation-state. Yet many activists in social movements increasingly called horizontal movements practice what they call democracy using mass assemblies in venues and locales well beyond the limits of the nation-state. Theorists are also responding to this understanding of democracy as possible in sites Other to the nation-state, such as Rodrigo Nunes in his 2014 publication, Organization of the Organizationless, and Joe Parker in his Democracy Beyond the State: Practicing Equality (2017).

Unlike much writing in political theory, many of these recent theoretical reconsiderations of mass assembly takes as their main audiences the general public. Rodrigo Nunes’s Organization of the Organizationless (2014) is an important theoretical intervention in debates about how decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations succeed. For Nunes, decentralized democratic organizing can resist the ingrained tendency in many to return to centralized, vertically organized structures by following specific practices in certain key areas: running and documenting meetings; decision-making; and actions. By diffusing information frequently, providing equal access to resources, and frequently rotating tasks (including leadership), Nunes argues that the power that tends to collect around a limited number of individuals can be persistently redistributed. Rather than assuming democracy is only found in one type of organization, he argues that democracy instead is a practice permanently open to different future forms that must constantly move between the determined character of “horizontalism” and the indeterminate, the unknown of decentralized open space.

Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini focus on assembly-based horizontalist structures found throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century in their They Can't Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (2014). Recognizing the increasing alienation from elected leaders in many nation-state, they document the mass assemblies used in environmental defense assemblies and towns in Argentina, Zapatista autonomy in Chiapas, the Occupy Plataforma (housing defense) movement in Spain, and assembly movements in Greece. Sitrin is well-known for documenting the assembly and other horizontal practices in post-2001 Argentina in her earlier books, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and Everyday Revolutions. Their analysis focuses on ways that the mass assembly reshapes individual subjectivity in its rejection of electoral leadership institutions.

Unlike Nunes and Sitrin/Azzellini, Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) centers her theoretical reflections on mass protests. Butler turns away from politics as monopolized by political parties and governments to analyze the power of embodied, assembled collectives to both make statements and produce conditions that provide for the most vulnerable in society. As many governments have followed neoliberal policies taking corporate profits as more important than the survival needs of “the people,” mass assemblies have become key leverage points where the collective body can reclaim the political for equality and the interdependence of the common good. This is a major shift in thinking about the political, for the mass assemblies in Butler’s view not only sever relations with extant regimes but also install new conditions for the political and new rights, such as “the right to appear” or “the right to persist” and survive as a living, vulnerable being.

In breaking with the assumption that government policies are the primary site for expressing the popular will, Butler provides the important recognition that policy makers are often captured by narrow interests that do not serve the common good. Since this is a central problem in electoral democracies, this break makes it possible to question the effectiveness of electoral governments at representing popular opinion and the popular will. In moving away from liberal individualism and towards collective rights and embodied political claims outside those of the nation-state, Butler questions widely held assumptions about social contracts, individual rights, and territorial nationalisms. As even elected governments worldwide demonstrate again and again that they would prefer to protect small group interests, particularly those of the wealthy, rather than those that are vulnerable, populist parties and mass assemblies have begun to grow in strength and effectiveness.

While Butler does not respond to Nunes or Sitrin, she does draw on Jason Frank’s Constituent Moments (2010) and John Inazu’s influential Liberty’s Refuge: the Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (2012) to argue that mass gatherings can displace the nation-state. Mass assemblies do so as an embodied source of authoritative statements by “the people” with significance well beyond individual rights of assembly or free speech. Butler also follows Hagar Kotef’s important attack in Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (2015) on the liberal mechanisms and technologies for surveilling and managing mass mobilities, practices that are supported by Hobbes and Locke in early theories of democracy and by Mill and Habermas in the twentieth-century. Assemblies in the views of these commentators and historians provide alternatives to those who wish not only to make their views known but to establish conditions under which all may survive and persist.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt are skeptical that assemblies can provide lasting solutions and durable social structures in their 2015 book, Assembly, without an established leadership. Negri and Hardt assume that assembly-based movements without the centralized leadership structures that they support do not endure, cannot respond quickly to urgent developments, and cannot draw on sophisticated technical resources. Yet in these criticisms of horizontal structures, Negri and Hardt fall into many of the mythologies used to dismiss assembly movements among social scientists who cannot conceive of politics outside the nation-state. As Francesca Polletta has shown in her important study of assembly movements in the United States civil rights era, Freedom is an Endless Meeting, these myths hold only when the social scientist or theorist ignores such influential organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or Students for a Democratic Society. In their assumption that self-governance institutions require technical experts at the helm, Negri and Hardt also perhaps unwittingly reproduce the views of Joseph Schumpeter and F.A. Hayek, the founders of neoliberalism that Negri and Hardt criticize elsewhere in their book.

Negri and Hardt’s theoretical proposal is to subordinate leaders to the assembled multitudes, to make them servants who operate the machinery of government for the self-organized masses. Hardt and Negri emphasize the desire of the multitudes for not only abstract freedoms and equality but also concrete well-being and wealth, relations of access and use for all. In approaching the political in its relations with the economic and the social, Hardt and Negri foreground the importance of production and the growing commons. Ultimately their book develops a proposal to construct organization without hierarchy and create institutions without centralization, a major break with modern political logic.

While Hardt and Negri do not respond in a substantive way to the other theorists discussed above, they clearly take as their primary opponent those who would dare attempt to organize without an established leadership at the helm. Given the importance of leaderless movements for events in Argentina, North America and Europe, Hardt and Negri show their allegiance to the vertical hierarchies that established leaders implant into any organization.  Some long-established communities and organizations centering on assembly practices have determined that the best balance of horizontal equality with vertical relations installed by leaders is achieved with frequent rotation of leaders. While this may prevent any individuals or small groups from establishing entrenched positions needed for clientelism and other common political problems, it also disrupts the rule by experts that Hardt and Negri seem to support. 

This may be why Hardt and Negri overlook the many durable organizations that have taken assemblies as their base: the Workers Landless Movement in Brazil, the small farmer global network known as La Via Campesina, and other organizations. While they mention in passing the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, who use assembly practices as one anchor for autonomous government (with the EZLN military as the other anchor), Negri and Hardt’s overall argument does not respond to the decade of Zapatista success at a decentralized assembly-based social movement.

Hardt and Negri point out that electoral politics is an institution that is coming to an end. In their view representative systems are enduring a crisis brought on by decisions of elected leaders to turn their backs on the middle classes in favor of neoliberal domestic policies of austerity and budget cuts. As voter alienation increases, far right populist movements have gained electoral successes in many electoral democracies.

 
Mass assembly-based institutions provide an important alternative to increasingly conservative electoral modes of democratic practice. The debates seen in Nunes and Sitrin and Butler and Parker’s writings on mass assembly modes of political decision-making show what the future holds beyond electoral democracy. As nationalism’s claim to “the people” weakens, other politics are possible. These works show that not only are mass assemblies possible, but they are already at work all over the world.

Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy points out that democracy now means (or signifies) a number of totally different things: politics, ethic, law, civilization—and therefore means nothing.

Chantal Mouffe

Much of democratic thought, especially liberal and deliberative forms of democracy, is dependent upon, and emphasizes, consensus and majority rules. But according to Mouffe, consensus oppresses differences--in race, opinions, class, gender, etc.--by forcing conformity according to similarities with, most often, the privileged groups in any society. Because of the ubiquity of power—the tendency for the majority to rule the minority—and the plurality of values in any given society, decisions are never neutral or purely democratic; they are always excluding, privileging, and determining according to certain criteria. It is therefore impossible to achieve the proposed aim of liberal and deliberative democracies: fully inclusive rational consensus.

Jean-François Lyotard

In contemporary politics, the word democracy most often connotes ideas like government, state, human rights, law, etc. It is often perceived as a system or meta-narrative designed to organize and order differences hierarchically according to the majority rule (aggregative democracy), or particular “(I)deas of reason,” such as freedom, patriotism, human rights, nationalism, justice, etc.

Jacques Derrida

Most basically, Jacques Derrida's thesis is that enactment of a democratic political state must, in some fundamental ways, undermine the very principles of democracy upon which it is founded. The paradox of democracy is this: democracy is, by definition, necessarily always open to it’s other, to non-democracy. Democracy, as the direct will of the people, contains the possibility that you could actually vote for the end of democracy. If democracy is truly democratic, then it must be open to the democratic election of a new form of government, or the democratic cessation of democracy. The alternative to democracy, or criticisms of democracy can be held within democracy. Democracy thus only and always exists in and as this tension between its idea and its realization.

Alain Badiou

Building on Plato’s two theses about democracy, Badiou suggests democracy can be viewed as both a form of government (the state), and mode of subject-construction (the democrat). But, according to Badiou, the fundamental question at the heart of the democratic government—at heart of all of its state structures—is “of what objective space, of what settled collectivity, is democracy a democracy.” In other words, over what constituency does democracy govern? His answer: (D)emocrats. Therefore, since the democrat is at the heart of democracy-as-government, Badiou suggests we look for democracy at the subjective impact of this state rather than at its objective state status; he proposes a shift in focus from the legal framework of democracy to the democrat.

Gyatri Spivak

"...an acceptance of radical vulnerability..." - Gyatri Spivak

Jacques Ranciere

Rancière, Jacques: Rancière believes democracy is neither a governmental or societal structure. Rather, it is the underlying principle which makes both possible.  For Rancière, democracy is the equality at the heart of inequality. Democracy, equality, is the underlying condition of politics, and not a goal or structure to be attained.

Wendy Brown

Brown, Wendy: The word democracy means only that “the people” rule themselves, that the whole rather than a part or an Other is politically sovereign. However, as Brown points out, this definition does not necessarily entail “representation, constitutions, deliberation, participation, free markets, rights, universality or even equality.”

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.