Democracy and Colonialism: Misnaming Democracy

 

            If democracy requires social equality, than nations that participate in the clearly unequal social structures of colonialism may only make false claims to democracy. This problem plagues not only earlier forces of global empire, but also nations in the present who retain colonial territories.  Nations in the present who successfully invade other nations only to leave them in ruins after an extended occupation, like the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, effectively also practice new forms of colonialism.

           Colonial practices enforce their inequalities through brutal means, including killings, torture, displacement, and destruction of the social and cultural institutions of the colonized. Equality is impossible, since the colonized are not allowed to govern themselves, denied both sovereignty and autonomy by the colonizer.

Yet colonialism also degrades the colonizer’s society. As Aimé Césaire wrote in 1950, “First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to …violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that …each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact…a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, …at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged…a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery.” (p35-6) Degraded, violent, racist, infected, violating agreements, and poisoned does not make for a healthy society of equals.

How can France, England, and the United States be seen as model democracies when they still practice colonialism?  France retains colonial territories in thirteen territories, including French Polynesia and French Guiana, while England fought a recent war to retain the Falkland Islands and continues to rule Northern Ireland.

The United States practice of settler colonialism means not only that Guam, American Samoa, and the Hawaiian Islands are colonies in the classical sense, but so is its mainland territory. As Audra Simpson has argued, the “gift of democracy” to Indigenous peoples criminalized Indigenous life as it lays claim to Indigenous peoples as citizens of the United States. Robert Nichols has documented how forcing citizenship onto Indigenous communities in Canada resulted in unequal relations violating Rousseau’s social contract.

Even the classical Greek forms of democracy to which many European theorists looked for democratic models also practiced slavery and contributed to the spread of Greek empire in the Mediterranean.  Pericles, the king who supported the Athenian assembly’s power and weakened the aristocratic wealthy, also embarked on imperial conquests that denied freedom to all. And if later Greek philosophers supported democracy, Aristotle was also advisor to Alexander the Great, conqueror of Athens and the Achaemenid Empire, who Aristotle advised to “be a despot to the barbarians.”  How can a democratic body also support slavery and despotism?

Colonialism and imperialism also erode the effectiveness of democracy in the colonies of European democracies even after liberation, as in India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. Assumptions that democracy is a European invention that successfully installed equality hide the multiple modes of unequal social relations under electoral governments North and South. These social inequalities are seen not only in continuing wealth inequalities, a sign that capitalism is not an engine of equality but a system of wealth hierarchies closely tied to modern national governance systems.

As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, non-European societies who adopt European electoral democracy as their governance model must address the unequal historical conditions that colonialism left them before they can expect to enact democracy.  This suggests that the failure of as India, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil to transform the unequal relations of power and authority in their territories left by their colonizers makes democracy impossible for them (p20).  The colonial bourgeoisie that replace the colonizers after liberation protected their own advantages and access to power rather than practice egalitarianism.

The failure of electoral democracies to live up to their promises of equality is not only true of European governments and their settler colonies, but also true of nations of the global south.  The long-standing inequalities of the electoral government of India, often lauded as the “world’s largest democracy,” means the government has never succeeded in becoming a democracy. The assumption that democracy requires equality is only true in abstract principal. Unequal power relations cannot be ignored. 

These abstractions and erasures come from assumptions that European political systems, such as the modern nation-state, are good for all.  That is why many nations in the global south retained parliamentary systems, court systems and legal codes, and other aspects of their colonizer’s political regimes. That retention can only be a form of Eurocentrism, a Eurocentrism that repeats the racism and ethnocentrism of colonialism and imperialism.  

Ultimately, the alternative social systems that electoral democracies have attacked are an important resource for finding ways to practice equality.  In order to carry out democratic transformations of social relations of power, communities and regions can put democratic practices beyond those of the state to work.

Other Democracies: Mutual Aid and Benefit Organizations

               Protecting communities and aiding vulnerable members of communities becomes a high priority in times of conflict and disaster. Some even say that the duties of protection and aid for the vulnerable are the highest priorities for political bodies, such as governments, local neighborhoods, and grassroots organizations. Yet few elected democracies and organizations make this their highest priority.

Benefit organizations often make equality possible in practice that is impossible under electoral democracy and other political structures that promise equality but rarely deliver. In exchanging equal say in decisions, what some call horizontalism, for shared resources distributed according to need, benefit societies produce more equal social outcomes for those in need. They also educate their communities about how to put equality into practice. Easy to form when many people work together with shared interests and goals, mutual aid and mutual benefit organizations have a long history and an active presence today.

As modern governmentality has come to emphasize the surveillance and enforcement of behavioral norms over care for the population during the past several centuries, governments often lose sight of what many see as their primary purpose: protection and aid for citizens. As enclosure and industrialization forced people off the land where they could care for their own basic needs and displaced them into urban settings, people turned to each other when employers and governments did not ensure their safety and welfare. As governments come under the sway of the wealthy and of other narrow interests, then they put profits before people.

               These changes over past centuries have meant that many governments take their own self-preservation as a higher priority. As a result, some governments put protecting the leaders and administrators of nation-states before protecting the common person and before ensuring the care of vulnerable populations. This priority reversal can be seen when government leaders enter conflicts unnecessarily where many citizens die, especially conflicts without direct threats to the nation-state. It can also be seen when disaster strikes and the government does not care effectively for those affected or, worse, takes advantage of disasters to implement policies opposed by its citizens.

In times of disaster and conflict, those social sectors that have not found governments reliable turn to other means to protect and care for their community members. As governments fail to serve all members of their populations, communities may seek out other ways to manage their own affairs. Some of those other means include benefit organizations and mutual aid societies, organizations that practice a specific form of democratic self-governance known as democracy from below or direct democracy.

Benefit societies and mutual aid organizations are often seen as a type of communalism, long-established practices that experiment with attempts to find better ways to live while providing concrete benefits to participants. By sharing not only resources but also conviviality, these organizations provide an ethics that is missing from capitalism and electoral democracy. In educating their members and encouraging shared social norms, they may provide a sense of community that prioritizes sharing over private gain. By practicing reciprocity rather than charity, they provide important sources of belonging and mutual care that differs from the benevolence found in twentieth-century charities and twenty-first century non-profits and non-governmental organizations. While less functionally specific than cooperatives, communal movement have often been a resource for those who wished to escape oppressive conditions and find liberation.

What are today called “benefit organizations” are a very old type of organization, perhaps as old as government itself. They generally form when social networks take action to care for a population, whether an occupational group, an ethnic or religious group (often under attack from other social sectors), a town or regional community, or other social groups that determine it is time to act to care for their shared interests. In this sense, “benefit organization” or “mutual aid” are more general terms for self-government or for autonomy or even for what many refer to as “sovereignty” or “politics.”

While some associate mutual aid with European organizations, this type of collective care has a long history in other regions, such as Asia and Africa. While some schools of thought and economic practice, such as libertarianism, anarchism, and some schools of socialism, have tried to claim mutualism as their own, others find the practice of caring for the vulnerable in society to be broader than any specific sectarian interest. Organizations from communities using approaches as varied as Indigenous autonomy and cultural revitalization movements, landless workers, slum dwellers, and other urban subalterns have worked collectively to protect and care for their community members.

Benefit orders and mutual aid societies were commonplace in much of the world until the modern welfare state and for-profit corporations and nation-states began to compete for their members. Many of their features have been taken over by for-profit entities, such as insurance companies and health-care companies, and by non-profit organizations like credit unions and religious charities, so some modern benefit societies now take these forms. The penetration of the modern, centralized nation-state into local governmental affairs was another major competitor for benefit organizations, and their failure to effectively care for the basic needs of all may be seen in the flourishing of organizations like Reclaim Our Homes and Habitat for Humanity, two of the best-known benefit organizations in the United States. The transnational donor structures of civil society organizations and international non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross and Red Crescent are a distorted form of benefit societies on a global scale, often transforming private resources into mechanisms that care for vulnerable populations based on a charity model rather than by building reciprocal relations. The continuing presence of mutual aid organizations is also seen strongly in Europe, where they still supplement health care for many.

Today these organizations go by many other names, many of which are familiar: labor or trade unions; credit unions; immigrant hometown societies; friendly societies and secret societies; self-help groups; coworking communities, and many others. Rural communities in the Global South and pre-capitalist guilds and neighborhoods have long put mutual benefit practices into place as a way to engage community members. In urban communities where the unemployed and others abandoned by the nation-state have come together to serve their own needs also practice mutual aid and benefit in such forms as social centers and unions of the unemployed.

Mutual aid community organizing often emerges in post-disaster circumstances, and the current corona virus pandemic has inspired many to suggest mutual aid as an important resource. These spontaneous organizations have emerged also in times of political struggle, as in resistance to slavery, the Tienanmen Square Protests of 1989, and the Los Angeles uprising of 1992. Already established benefit organizations, such as the Village Movement in the Untied States, have already begun to respond to the corona virus, for example. New mutual organizations have also emerged in response to the pandemic in the United States and other locations.

Benefit societies can also be formalized through charters, incorporation, and other modes of communal or governmental recognition. Many benefit societies currently active were established a century or more ago, and have incorporated to carry out their activities, including Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Columbus, and Teachers Life. While some of these groups have very long roots, they remain a significant force in the twenty-first century with some 9 million members and about $400 billion dollars (US) in assets in the United States alone.

               While the language of benefit societies and mutual aid may not be familiar to all in our day, that is because the nation-state and for-profit and non-profit organizations have eclipsed them in public awareness. When the European health-care industry and the American Association of Retired People and other mainstream organizations advocate joining or starting your own mutual aid group, however, then what might seem like an antiquated organizational model has clearly entered the mainstream.

               If you wish to practice equality, it is as easy as volunteering with the Village Movement or Habitat for Humanity, participating in a hometown organization, becoming a union or credit union member, or joining other mutual aid groups near you. When the inequality of centralized hierarchies like private corporations, non-profit organizations, or nation-states are recognized as generators of the inequality they disavow but cannot avoid, then perhaps more people will form benefit organizations to meet their basic needs and protect themselves and vulnerable groups. It would  be easier to find ways to practice equality when not impacted by major threats like natural disasters, wars, and pandemics, but times of stress and high risk for many is precisely when mutual aid organizing takes off.

Embodying Equality: Realizing the Democratic Imaginary

When does democracy fulfill its promise of equality? For some communities, democracy means putting up with unequal economic policies, with elections that don’t represent all, with barriers for some to social power, with police brutality targeting certain social groups, and more. So how can democracy come to something other than reinforcing entrenched inequalities?

Danielle Allen argues in her reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence that equality has been overrun with other goals. Elected officials and powerful corporate officials frequently argue that freedom must trump ethics and other values, often in ways that serve their own narrow interests rather than the interests of the entire political body.  

The U.S. Constitution was one reason why equality has never been realized in the United States, and may never be realized.  Even when a democratic nation goes to war with itself in an attempt to produce equality, as in the U.S. Civil War or the Mexican Revolution, equality is often the first casualty when the conflict ends. The outcome of the promise of equality in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War is well-known, and some have argued that the Jim Crow South has spread to infect the entire nation in the present day. The wealth gap that has characterized Mexican society since the Revolution is one type of physical evidence that electoral promises of land reform and the uplifting of the poor were not fulfilled. As Fanon warned, even wars of national liberation have not succeeded at producing equality of social elites and the general populace.

Why do many U.S. citizens continue to see their home as a place of equality? The African American artist Sonya Clark deployed her own woman’s body to interrupt business as usual this summer, mopping the floor of a Philadelphia museum by hand where the U.S. Declaration of Independence is inscribed. Embodying the long history of domestic work as the most that African American women could hope for in the United States, Clark’s performance piece reminds us that employment in the United States not only never was equal but may never be equal across racial differences.

Since wages for the same work still differ based on gender and race, since domestic violence against women continues without abating, since sexual violence against women continues to pervade nearly all societies, since police violence against women of color continues without reserve, embodying equality is no easy task.

Many experts would agree with Sonya Clark when it comes to economic inequality. A major recent study of the history of tax payments has documented how tax policies over the past half century in the United States have unequally benefitted the wealthy. For the authors, both academic economists, that means that even a nation that claims to be at the forefront of world democracies can be practicing policies that produce injustice.

The economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that capitalism produces inequality in his well-known critique, Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013. His new book on capitalism includes many specific policy solutions to economic inequality that would force the superwealthy to share the wealth society produces. Capitalism and the spread of neoliberal poison have spelled the near-death of the ethics of sharing, if we focus not on individual virtuosity but on social attitudes and policies.

What would it take to embody equality? How can we do that as individuals? How can entire societies and nations put such abstract ideas into practice? Giving attention to the concrete evidence of women’s bodies is one way to interrupt pie-in-the sky abstractions like “equality,” according to Gayatri Spivak.

So when Sonya Clark works with the gendered and racialized working body to interrupt business as usual, it becomes possible to interrogate democracy as we know it. Clark’s clearing away of the dust of unequal history also allows her audience to imagine the new forms that democracy must take if equality will ever become anything more than the seductive work of flim flam artists, of elected leaders, and of others unable to pursue the general interest.

Other Democracies: The Yellow Vest Movement in France.

The protests against austerity policies in France that blossomed into the Yellow Vest movement in November, 2018 present challenges to those who still carry faith in electoral democracy.  While initially centering on fuel taxes, participants also are demanding raises to the minimum wage and the rollback of recent tax cuts for the wealthy and other pro-business policies.

Like other protests by the poor against pro-business policies that have bloomed across the world for decades, these protests against fuel price rises push back against neoliberal economic policies.  Although the Macron government argues the fuel price tax increase was to move the French economy towards a greener economy, French truck drivers, secretaries, care workers, and others with no room in their budgets are forced to pay costs they cannot bear. This is the cost of living in an electoral state where the leadership is not interested in popular opinion, but in its own narrow interests.

The history of policies generous to the rich and attacking the poor in France and many other economies worldwide often produces protest from the poor. But when do electoral democracies listen to the poor?

The difference of the Yellow Vest movement in France from many other protest movements is its lack of a center. This is a structure for democratic demand that does not replicate the centralized hierarchies of electoral governments, an organizing tactic that produces other politics. The turn away from centralization and towards openness to many constituents and viewpoints characterizes many political practices, what we term “Other Democracies.”

Commentators who are only familiar with centalized organizations assume that the Yellow Vest movement will be overtaken by already established political parties. This shows that commentators are not familiar with non-party movements, and can only conceive of politics in the narrow terms offered by electoral party policits. Yet the Yellow Vest movement has refused to align itself with established political parties, since they recognize the danger of participation in a centralized system tilted towards social elites.

The success of French democracy hangs in the balance of this struggle over public discussion.

Other struggles in Europe against neoliberalism, such as the Greek anti-austerity movement of 2010-2015 and the 2011 indignado movement in Spain, have shown the costs of allowing a popular movement to morph into political party activism. Austerity policies have continued apace after both of these movements were captured by political parties, and the pressures on low-wage workers, the unemployed, the disabled, and even the middle-class have not been reduced significantly.

One strategy of the privatization and wealth redistribution upwards policies known as neoliberalism or austerity is to attack public spaces. Presenting private spaces, such as shopping streets, mini-malls, and megastores, as gathering places for the public makes it more difficult for the public to do the important business of discussing urgent concerns. These privatized spaces displace citizenry roles to make roles as consumers more central in the life of the public.

The yellow vest movement members claims on traffic circles as meeting places revived the important activity in any democracy of a discussing those topics of concern for citizens.  When austerity policies remove safety nets ensuring all can meet basic needs and place intense pressures on the public, citizens would respond in any full democracy with discussion of how to meet basic needs and reduce the stresses of a lack of resources. So discussions in open, public spaces become important on a time frame driven not by parliamentary elections but by increasing pressure on the poor.

Macron’s attempts to reclaim public discussion and manage it to serve his own interests is an attempt to disrupt competing claims to represent the public’s interest by the Yellow Vest movement.  The smear tactics of sending in thugs and vandals to reduce public support for the Yellow Vest movement is an old tactic found since the nineteenth century in France (275-80), when the wealthy began using thugs to divide the poor and prevent mass movements.

Outside Europe similar struggles have led to different outcomes, as when multiple presidents were thrown out by popular meetings in public places in Argentina of 2001 and when the South Korean president was removed from office in 2017. Certainly Macron is aware of the high stakes, and will do whatever he can to remain in office.

Perhaps the greatest fear of those in command of electoral political systems is that they will lose their monopoly on the claim to represent the public. As Michel Foucault argued (271-88), unexpected associations of groups in horizontal solidarity is a major threat to the modern regime that enforces individuation in an effort to interrupt horizontal solidarities. Such horizontal solidarities were very successful in Europe between around 1780 and 1848, demanding accountability of political leaders to widespread concerns and changes in unequal distribution of wealth and political power.  These horizontal solidarities also attempted to disrupt actions of the wealthy that were harmful to common people, such as labor exploitation and the theft of family wealth through financial markets.

Democracy can thrive only when the urgent concerns of large social sectors are addressed by political leaders.  Yet electoral democracies in Europe and beyond have shown for decades that they are more responsive to the interests of the few than to the interests of the many. That is why structures for democratic practice other than the electoral state have long received wide support, even if these movements are overlooked by news commentators and policy experts.