Towards a Critique of the Democratic Form (Draft) B. York

8/12/2019 Towards a Critique of the Democratic Form (Draft) B. York

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Towards a Critique of the Democratic Form (DRAFT) B. York

This is What Democracy Looks Like 1

Chanted throughout the recent Occupations, this slogan could have been understood in

two ways. The first, ironically, as protesters shouted amidst the pepper-spray,concussion-grenades and general police brutality i.e. this is what [their]democracy lookslike. Alternatively the slogan could have been understood as an affirmation of thecollective action that emerged from the general assemblies where every voice of theprotest could be metaphorically heard, i.e. this is what [our] democracy looks like. Onceagain democracy has been forcefully posited as a question.

It seems relatively easy to launch a critique of their democracy, the democracy of the 1%,as it clear to any with eyes to see that it is a democracy in name only with barely a traceof democratic content, where sovereign rights are routinely abused, political participation

is effectively denied and a plutocratic elite increasingly rule with impunity, that is to say, itis no democracy at all, or so it would appear.

But what seems to be the universal demand for real democracy, the democracy of the99%, is in essence a demand for bringing the formal structure of democracy in line with itspresumed true content. However, neither the form nor the content of real democracy isin any way self-evident. The pre-supposition that drives both the reformist and the radicalvision of the democratic demand is that the form of democracy has a relative autonomyindependent of the actual content. Democracy in this view is a supra-historical ideal formto which competing social relations can be inserted. The reformist demand is to fill the

form with the content of a true majority where every individual voice is equal without thedistorting influences of money and class, or the prejudices of race, gender, ethnicity etc.

With the assumption of autonomy of form, one can envisage a progressive move towardsthe real content of democracy as laws are passed to limit influences not derivedexclusively from the sovereignty of each individual. By way of the historic struggles toextend rights, the formal or ideal democracies posited by the democratic revolutions of the18thcentury, come progressively closer to expressing the actual social content ofuniversal self-rule.

A more radical critique of bourgeois (really existing) democracy asserts that classrelationships in the capitalist sphere of production are so powerful and so entrenched in

the mechanisms of state power as to preclude a real democracy without thesimultaneous destruction of those same class relations. That is, democracy is understood

as operating within the strict limits of capitalist productive relations and is subsumed bythe military and economic power of the ruling class. Such a position, insofar as it posits amore radical critique, further suggest that the essential function of really existingdemocracy within capitalism is principally an ideological one, to pacify or mobilize themasses to support the capitalist state itself and to foster the illusion of self-rule, theobjective content which is to ensure the mass participation in their own subordination and

exploitation. Real democratic demands can be met within limits but such limits couldnever be exceeded without democratic rights being immediately annulled through the use

of emergency powers, anti-sedition or anti-terrorist laws. In other words, the limits of


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bourgeois democracy are strictly determined by the mode of production and balance ofclass forces. There will never be a referendum to eliminate exploitation.

What both of these critiques have in common, the reformist and the radical, is to conceivethe form of democracy as an autonomous, supra-historical empty vessel that, in one case

will eliminate all class content, and in the other will change the class content according tothe present balance of social forces. In the first case, with a gradual and progressiveexpansion of democratic rights without limits and in the second, with a revolutionaryrupture that will take the form of a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat. That is to saythat proletarian democracy is not part of a continuum with bourgeois democracy but itstotal negation. However, the form of democracy, with appropriate modification, remainsuntouched.

The democratic demand is in fact among the central points of convergence across theentire political spectrum within the movement itself. From insurrectionary anarchists to

right leaning populists, each with their own ideology, the demand for real democracy isthe lingua franca of the movement. This should give us pause when we consider that in

addition to this strange and untenable unity that the aggressive extension of democracy isalso the poison tip of western imperialism, from the nation building in Iraq to the NAFTA.President Clinton was himself the most ardent in insisting that free trade is theprecondition for true freedoms in a democratic society and that democracy is thenecessary condition of free trade.

We have many ideal democracies, each filled with a different content: the libertariandemocracy of absolute sovereign rights of the individual; the proletarian democracy with

exclusive rights of the exploited class; or the neo-liberal democracy of buyers and sellersetc. Democracy, it appears, is the uncontested natural form of all expressions of self-rule.

But, such self-rule always has a class content, that is to say that democracy is a subjectthat always has a predicate that delineates and excludes: bourgeois democracy,proletarian democracy, union democracy etc. The question for both the reformist and theradicals it seems is not for or against democracy, but rather what will be the social contentof the universal supra-historical form of self-rule?

However, the question of a real democracy is more complex than it first appears. As apolitical form democracy is posited by discordant ideologies with opposing class interestsas the universal pre-supposition for human emancipation. But a revolutionary critique of

democracy cannot end with a critique of its social and class content alone, it mustquestion exactly what is pre-supposed, that is, we must ask why emancipation must take

the form, if indeed it must, of democracy? Further, we must ask the correlate question, ifthe democratic form proves to be problematic, even an obstacle, is there a non-democratic praxis that is at the same time non-authoritarian and equally emancipatory?

In exploring the question of the democratic form, we take as our starting point thematerialist doctrine that social being conditions consciousness, a consciousness that in

turn conditions social being and human praxis. Consciousness is not a gift of the Gods,but something that emerges from the totality of human activity. The relationship between

consciousness and praxis is not one of a mono-logical singular determination but rather acomplex set of reciprocal determinations that always generate an excess of effects.


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Specifically, there is always some praxis that escapes consciousness and someconsciousness that is beyond or in excess of praxis. The importance of this is to keepbefore us the mechanism in which social being not only generates concepts but alsogenerates the forms that structure those concepts, yet forms that do not themselvesnecessarily appear as concepts.2 Marx and Engels, for example, asserted that the modes

(forms) of production condition the legal, political, cultural life of every society, Even if thisconditioning does not directly appear in the society!s self-concept, it is a conditioning thatcan appear through replicating one form of social being into a parallel, but distinctlydifferent form of social being. For example, the form of economic activity can influence thestructure of religious practice and the religious practice itself can in turn animate economicactivity. One is not conceptually the product of the other, but it is not difficult to findhomologous forms or structures in each, as Max Weber did in his discovery of theprotestant work ethic. All of this is to state, as a premise, that the democratic form is theproduct of a specific historical moment from which a specific form of social being madepossible its appearance. The democratic form is not neutral but has a distinct class bias.

In his critique of democracy, Jacque Camatte asserted that democracy was a form of

political domination and social organization that emerged only after social groups had losttheir organic unity with community.3Its appearance coincided with the moment that menwere separated from the ancient communal bonds as a means of uniting what had beendivided, moreover as a specific form of class rule that necessarily included anauthoritarian state to maintain its power. Athenian democracy ruled a relatively stablestate for nearly one hundred and fifty years in the fourth century BCE and, by anystandards; its history is a rather astonishing social and political phenomenon. It isimportant to take a look at the Greek experience if we are not to fetishize democracy as a

supra-historical naturalized-- form of self-rule common to all social formations that seekto reinforce egalitarian communal bonds. That is, if we are to understand that democracy,

like all expressions of culture, is a specific expression of a particular historical moment.

Greeks, Property and Silver Coins

Etymologically democracy combines the ancient Greek dmos,commonly translated aspeople, withkrtos meaning force or power andarche meaning rule, leading, orbeing first. However, dmos had a different meaning than commonly understood today.Dmos referred originally to a region or subdivision of Attica that was later to become the

basis of citizenship that enabled one to participate in the democracy. In other words,Democracy was founded on a particular form of inclusion defined by what was excluded,

those outside of the dmos. Athenian democracy was the rule of a small percentage ofthe populous, never including more than 20% of the total, excluding slaves, freed slaves,women and foreign born. Later the definition was restricted to include only males of pureAthenian lineage, over 20 years of age, who had served in the military. Citizenship inancient Athens was based on very specific identity of blood, geography, and state service.It was not, as the modern translation of dmos would imply, derived from the universal

rights of the sovereign individual. The common criticism of Greek democracy was ofcourse its limited participation but the system that developed to insure the full participation

of this identitarian minority was truly astounding and worth understanding.


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Historical accounts and documents of Athenian democracy presents us with the spectacleof a general assembly or ecclesiswhere all Athenian citizens were eligible to participate,typically with 6,000 participants or more. A quorum for important votes was 6001! All wereeligible to speak and decisions, including the decision to go to war, were made by a showof hands and carried by majority rule. In theory this could include from 30,000 to 60,000

voting participants! The complex structure of Athenian democracy was designed tominimize the functioning of a permanent executive branch and to safeguard against theconstant threat of political corruption. The courts were equally democratic and werecomposed of magistrates drawn by lots with a jury of at least 501 members. Again, voteswere by a show of hands and majority rule. It was an impressive organization and by mostaccounts, seemed to function with relative stability. In principle, the ecclesishad absolutepower over all political decisions without restrictions, and could have, had they chosen to,redistributed all wealth and eliminated the class divisions within the citizenry. Yet, theynever did, nor is there evidence that such ideas were even proposed within the ecclesis.But the Athenian concern with potential corruption was equally balanced with a concern to

maintain social divisions based on wealth. We would certainly not call this a bourgeoisdemocracy, as there was no recognizable bourgeoisie, yet it is clearly an anti-aristocratic

form of self-rule where wealth of a particular kind, not family lineage, is the basis ofpolitical right. Here we will begin to understand Camatte!s reference to the loss of organiccommunity, where wealth as private property was the first level of abstraction in thecitizen!s identity.

The Athenian citizenry was divided into four classes according to clearly definedquantities of wealth: pentakosiomedimnoi,hippeis, zeugitae, and the thetes. The lowestorderthetes--was a class of property-less manual laborers or craftsmen. The zeugitae,

to which the hopelite farmer belonged, was a new class that made its appearance for thefirst time as small independent property owners who may have owned a few slaves and

produced a surplus that was exchanged on the market. The hippeis and thepentakosiomedimnoi were the wealthier classes ranging from moderate to extremewealth. The specific measure of wealth was a quantity based on an annual income ofbushels of dry or wet goods (grain, wine, olive oil) or its equivalent in drachmas: over 500for the pentakosiomedimnoi, between 300-500 for the hippeis and 200-300 for theZeugitae. While all four classes could participate in the Ecclesia, only the two upperclasses were eligible to participate in the Boule, a council of 500 that acted as a steeringcommittee for the Ecclesis. There were numerous other structural strategies that weredesigned to protect the division of wealth similar to the restrictions on Boule participation.

Magistrates, chosen from the upper classes, had to swear upon taking office, thatwhatever anyone owns before I enter this office he will have and hold the same until I

leave it. The jurors themselves had to swear, I will not allow private debts to becancelled, nor lands or houses belonging to Athenian citizens to be redistributed. Therewere many such organizational safeguards throughout the entire existence of ancientdemocracy, safeguards that guaranteed the continued division of the citizens into distinctclasses on the basis of a measureable quantityof wealth.

It appears at every turn that the rich Athenians acted in exactly the same way as the richtoday in manipulating democratic forms so that there would be little to no threat to the

social structure and its division of wealth. But manipulation of the structure of democracycannot explain why the lower two classes never threatened the social order of Athenian


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society in the age of direct democracy. Formally they had the rights and the power to doso. Arguments that the lower class Athenian citizens were essentially bought-off inmuch the same way that poor Southern whites were bought-off by the honor ofwhiteness are certainly useful in explaining the loyalty of the lowest class of thetesto thepolis, but what such arguments cannot explain is why such inclusion/exclusion takes the

democratic form. The privileging of one section of the population over another can appearin virtually any form of governance. The explanation for the appearance of the democraticform lies elsewhere, it is to be found in the emergence of two unique historic phenomena:the hopelitefarmer/warrior whose identity was inseparable from his private property andsilver coinage as This is the principle medium of exchange, i.e. specifically in theappearance of a new mode of production and distribution. not to assert a mechanisticcausality between baseand superstructureas in certain expression of orthodox Marxism,but to assert the materialist linkage between forms of social being and forms ofconsciousness. Many factors were involved in the formation of Greek social organization;it is our intention to highlight only two of them that seem fundamental for understanding

both the origins of the democratic form and more importantly the limitations of that form.

The ancient Greeks are known for many innovations that set the stage for the uniquedevelopment of the West: urban concentrations as autonomous city states or poleis,philosophy, theatre, geometry, advances in architecture, an advanced system of writing,and of course democracy and the democratic ideal, indeed the very concept of thepolitical itself was a Greek invention. What are seldom mentioned among the Greekinnovations are, the new concept of private property centered on the hoplitefarm and thesubsequent invention of coinage and its wide usage.

The hopelitewas a class of small independent farmers who had total property rights overtheir own farms, who were usually wealthy enough to own a few slaves and could supply

their own armor as a member of the Athenian infantry. While we normally think ofdemocracy as an urban phenomenon, some historians have argued that the democraticpolishad its true origins in the productive units of the rural hopelite.4 By the end of the so-called dark-ages (1200-800 BCE) in Attica, following the complete collapse of Mycenaeanpalace economy, an economy that once depended on the subordination of masses oflandless peasants, it is estimated that 2/3 of the land was divided into small farmsprivately owned by the hoplite. These farms, called klros, were autonomous and highlyproductive economic units, engaged in intensive agriculture, owned by a single family withthe help of a few slaves who typically worked side-by-side with the head of household.

The majority of the klroswere modest in size, averaging around ten acres, and, up to thefounding of the democratic polis, never exceeded seventy-five acres. In other words, the

hoplitewas a socially egalitarian class, autonomously producing a surplus of agriculturalgoods (particularly olive oil) in a decentralized system that increasingly relied on fluidmarkets for exchange and accumulation. They jealously defended their klrosand wereby nature anti-aristocratic, and anti-monarchal and always keen to avoid the accumulationof power by a non-agricultural class. The defense of their own social position was militarilyexpressed in the creation of the famous hoplitephalanx that was to become the dreaded

backbone of Greek infantry. Membership in the phalanx was reserved for hoplitefarmerswho were wealthy enough to provide their own amour. It is important to note that the

phalanxexcluded the lower class Greek citizens or thetes who were only allowed ancillarymilitary support and who later became the oarsmen for the powerful Athenian navy.


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What begins to emerge is a very different vision of Greek culture from the common imageof an urban class of slave owners who indulged in the world of pleasure, war andphilosophical speculation entirely divorced from the world of work. The democratic polisdid not emerge from the rational speculation of the perfect society but grew out of the

determination of the hopliteto defend his property and productive autonomy. In fact, atthe time of Solon!s reforms (594 BCE) Athens was not a democracy but a timocracy(ruleof landed property) with clear political criteria based on land ownership. This form of landownership was virtually unique in the ancient world, where absolute property rights andproductive autonomy put each in direct competition with every other. The agrarian poetHesiod urged farmers to strive against one another ensuring through hard work that youmay purchase someone else!s land and not have another purchase yours. This systemof private land ownership created an intense sense of competition between citizens asHesiod continues, the potter is at odds with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman,the beggar is jealous of the beggar and the singer of the singer.5The hard work and

proper management required of the household farm was understood as the veritablefoundation of Greek culture and we might add the origins of word economy from the

Greek oikonomiameaning household (farm) management. But, the fiercely individualistichopliteunderstood that the only protection of their small family farm from both externaland internal threat was the protection of all family farms, moreover they understood thatthe freedom guaranteed by the rights of private property and autonomous economic unitswas antithetical to a communal ethos. It was out of the essential need to create an ethoscapable of defending to the death the private holding of each, that the Athenian poliswasformed and along with it a whole separate sphere of human interaction called the political.

The very source of western political thought as well as the political as a separate sphereof social activity has its specific origins in the effort to counteract the centrifugal

tendencies of private property with the centripetal force of political organizations based onconceptual abstractions, i.e. the universal and equal rights of the citizen. The evolutionfromtimocracyto democracy occurred as Athenian society developed into a morecommercial culture money wealth rather than landed property-- had the effect ofreinforcing the definition of each citizen as the separate and singular possessor of rightsunified by the abstract definition of those rights. That is, irrespective of the actualownership of property or the actual wealth of any, each had the right to own propertypotentially. Without this right, all property would be under threat. It is significant, evendecisive, that in Solon!s reforms, he specifically forbid the ancient practice of placing ones

self as collateral for a loan, a practice that had resulted in thousands of Athenian citizensfalling into debt slavery; henceforth, only property could stand as collateral for loans. The

citizen could never again be enslaved without first losing his political right to citizenship.At this moment the very essence of Athenian identity landed propertyis separated fromthe political sphere to the purely economic sphere and becomes universallycommensurable, that is to say, commercially exchangeable, forever free to float throughthe social body in exactly the same way (form)--though decisively separated--as anautonomous and universal right. One can lose ones property but never the abstract right

to own property. To use Sismondi!s metaphor, commerce separated the shadow fromthe body, and introduced the possibility of owning them separately.6 Henceforth, the

divided self will be defined as a citizen and divested of his real individual life and filledwith an unreal universal.7The individual will be identified as part of an abstract


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community quite independent of the organic (material) ground upon which real lifedepends. The political becomes an autonomous sphere of power while the economy doesits work in the shadows. The foundation of democracy requires just such a separationallowing each individual to be the owner of an abstract right: the right to citizenship, theequal right to own property and equal right to vote. It is for this reason it would not be

incorrect to place democracy at the very threshold of the original division between thestate and civil society, a relationship which Marx compares heaven to earth.

When the political state has attained its true development, man leads a double life,a heavenly and an earthly one, not only in thought and consciousness, but inreality, in life: one life in the political community where he considers himself acommunal being, and one life in the civil society where he functions as a privateperson, regards other people as a means, degrades himself to a means andbecomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state is spiritually related tocivil society in the same way as heaven is to earth.8

In nearly two-thousand years the bond between private property and universal rights has

never actually broken, it appears everywhere because the subsumption of the individualinto a universal abstraction, separated from the actuality of property ownership or, moregenerally, the concrete conditions of his real life, is the essence of right. This relationshipappears either in formal division of rights or self-consciously as when the enlightenedRousseau could write on the very threshold of democracy!s rebirth, the right of privateproperty is the most sacred of all rights of citizenship and even more important in somerespects than liberty itself.9The right to own property is the fundamental right that givesform to all rights-- the right to own rightsand is the absolute pre-requisite of all

democracy.

But, the ownership of private property and the division between the state and civil societyis but one part of the story of democracy!s appearance in ancient Greece. The other wasthe wide spread usage of silver coinage for commercial exchange. While ancient coinagewas developed in several places in the world, only in Greece did it coincide with absoluteproperty rights, thus giving those essential rights the form of a real abstraction in everydaycommodity exchange. The social bond formed by the circulation of silver coin was tobecome the ugly birthmark of western civilization. The linkage of the circulation ofcoinage to the formation and stability of democracy is not a theoretical leap made bymodern analyses, it was indeed recognized as such by the Athenians themselves.

The drachmwas the principle denomination of the Greek coin and literally means

handful in reference to a handful of grain to which it was originally equated. Preserved inthe nomenclature is the evolution of political power in the Athenian polis,first based onland ownership, then the quantity of produce from the land and finally the wealth from anysource expressed in drachm equivalent. This not only represents a move away from theorganic expression of power but the evolution of power increasingly expressed as a pureabstraction, from land, to grain, to its symbolic equivalent in money.

In the Greek polisthere was a commonly understood association with the word coinage,

nomisma,and the concept of fair distribution between citizens and between citizens andthe state.10Nomisma(coinage) and nomos(law) indeed have the same root. There was


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in fact a link between the growing circulation of silver coinage and the anti-aristocratic,anti-elitist tendency in Athens. To have an idea of just how close this association actuallywas we quote a passage in Demosthenes!speech Against Timocrates:

I want to narrate to you that also, which they say Solon once said when he was

prosecuting someone who had proposed a bad law. For it is said that he said to thejurors, when he had presented the rest of the prosecution, that the law exists forvirtually all cities, if anyone debases the currency, that the penalty is death. Andhaving asked if the law appeared to them also to be just and good, when the jurorsassented, he said that he himself considered silver coinage to have been inventedby private individuals for the sake of private exchange, while he considered laws tobe the currency of the city (nomisma ts pels). And indeed it was much morenecessary for the jurors to hate and punish any man who debased the currency ofthe city and introduced counterfeit than if some did that to the currency of privateindividuals. And he added as proof that the wrongdoing of the one who debases

the laws is much greater than that of the one who debases the silver currency, thefact that many cities though they openly use silver currency mixed with bronze or

lead, are safe and suffer no harm from this, but men who use wicked laws or allowthe existing laws to be debased have never yet survived.11

This lengthy quote is simply to demonstrate just how closely associated were theconcepts of currency and law, coinage and right in the Greek mind, good laws and puresilver coinage manifested a good citizen body.12Silver coinage in many ways, though notexplored here, offered a model for life in the polis, indeed one historian suggests that,pure silver coinage helped to constitute the imaginary community of citizens who use

it.

13

Man himself could be distinctly defined by his relationship to silver. The Greek wordfor slave, for example, is argurrtoi andliterally means, bought by silver. The slave

could be actually and conceptually substituted by a quantity of silver just as the citizencould be conceived as a set of rights. That the commercial world and circulation of silverwas coming to mediate all human relationships in Athenian society was well expressed bytitle character in Meanander!s comedy The Malcontentwhen helaments, I had watchedhow friendship had become no more than a commodity with a calculated profit margin.14

Moreover, the wide spread use of coinage is itself indicative of an economy boundtogether by the constant flow of commodities through the social body, a society largelydefined by the complex movement of goods, both internally and externally, a society

governed by the perpetual buying and selling by private individuals. Silver mines nearAthens made the coinage plentiful, meaning that everything a private individual could

exchange could be made through the mediation of coin, the symbolic and universallycommensurable quantity of value. Marx referred to this mode of exchange as a realabstraction, that is, an abstraction that does not arise from thought but rather throughsocial action. Understanding the concept of a real abstraction is a crucial moment inunderstanding the materialist assertion that social being determines consciousness,specifically how formsof social being can determine formsof consciousness. Alfred

Sohn-Rethel, in his under appreciated analysis in Intellectual and Manual Labor: ACritique of Epistemology, explains the relationship between the abstract and concrete in

the act of exchange.


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Commodity exchange is abstract because it excludes use; that is to say, the actionof exchange excludes the action of the use. But while exchange banishes use fromthe action of people, it does not banish it from their minds. Therefore while it isnecessary that their action of exchange should be abstract from use, there is alsonecessity that their minds should not be. The action alone is abstract. The

abstractness of their action will, as a consequence, escape the minds of the peopleperforming it. In exchange, the action is social the minds are private. Thus, thisaction and the thinking of people part company in exchange and go different ways.15

For Sohn-Rethel, the emergence in ancient Greece of this relationship was the historicmoment that the labor of the intellect could be socially experienced as being independentof the material praxis of labor. The money-commodity as a value "exists nowhere otherthan in the human mind but it does not spring from it. Rather it is purely social incharacter, arising in the spatio-temporal sphere of human interrelations. It is not people

who originate these abstractions but their actions16

As a universal measure of value anda symbolic token of exchange, value is experienced as an abstract universal that is real.

Though entirely dependent on the social act of exchange, it now appears that value itselfhas an autonomous existence that emerges from its own being. Every single day, everytime a commodity is bought or sold, the reproduction of this abstraction takes place withthe immediate transference of the concrete specificities of the commodity to theuniversally commensurable form of value in the silver coin.

Sohn-Rethel begins his analysis by accepting the seminal insight of Kant in his beliefthat the basic constituents of our forms of cognition are preformed and issue from a priori

origin, but he was wrong in attributing this pre-formation to the mind itself engaged in thephantasmagorical performance of transcendental synthesis a priori locatable in neither

time nor in place. Kant!s transcendental subject shows features of striking likeness tothe exchange abstraction in its distillation as money He emphasizes further that ourtheory is directly concerned only with questions of form, forms of consciousness andforms of social being.17 Social being in Athens was gradually coming to be characterizedby the private selling and buying of commodities, a praxis that was socially centrifugal innature (each to his own advantage) yet centripetally held together by the universality ofvalue expressed in the actual exchange of silver coins. Value, as a universal abstraction,held the same position in social reproduction as law held in the democratic definition ofthe citizen who possessed the universal right to own property potentially, irrespective of

the actual conditions of life, of his real individuality.

What we are asserting, following Sohn-Rethel, is that the social praxis of commodityexchange generates a transcendental surplus that shapes the basic form of cognition andthe subsequent deployment of power relationships structured by those forms, the principlefeature of which is the radical separation of consciousness from its natural grounding inpraxisand poesis, doing and making. Consciousness henceforth becomes theontological ground of truth, a truth that is discovered through the autonomous play of

concepts that has the power to impose form on the perception of experience itself. Sohn-Rethel goes so far as to assert, that the real abstraction operating in exchange

engenders the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern science.18

Reality now exits only in its (abstract) essence and can only be revealed/produced in


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cognition or the logos not in the concrete singularities of nature, of creation or of socialintercourse. From this trajectory one finds in the actual moments of social or naturalphenomena only epiphenomena, thus the rich multiplicity of being is necessarilyextinguished in order to subsume all existence beneath the concept; all singular objects ofuse express their reality in the universal essence of exchange value; all human

individuality extinguished beneath the universal essence of a right, a value or an identity.19

As an initial conclusion we want to assert that the democratic form has its origins in noother place than private property and the circulation of the money-commodity. In addition,this form of social being generates a surplus that in its turn gives shape to the ontologicalground of western civilization. The Greeks initiated a radical separation in which the worldbecomes object to the human subject, henceforth thinking the world through categoriesthat Heidegger identifies as mathmata,20or that which can be known in advance of itsappearance. Nature appears to modern science as a set of mathematical relationships

because the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of all entities. Heideggerreminds us of the words above Plato!s academy, Ageometrtos mdeis eisito!Let no one

who has not grasped the mathematical enter here. Though only embryonicallydeveloped, this originary trajectory sets in motion what Heidegger was to conceive as aproductivist metaphysics that was responsible for both the remarkable achievements ofthe West along with the its nightmarish course towards technological self-destruction andwe might add the totalitarian political systems which did not seem problematic forHeidegger.21Of course we do not want to suggest that the application of the mathmatais wrong. It has demonstrated itself as an extraordinary tool, but rather that it is radicallyincomplete, and preemptively degrades other forms of knowing that are essential to a

radical reformulation of human praxis, without which man himself becomes the standingreserve or raw material for technological proliferation. (This will be the subject of another

text). We do want to insist however that there is a profound link between the technologicalworldview--in which today we can anticipate only its nightmare-- and the abstractions ofpolitical theory upon which the democratic form is based. A crude rendering of this idea isto define democracy in purely quantitative terms or simple arithmetic: the total number ofrights baring citizens, divided by two plus one equals absolute power over life and death.Worse still is the necessity of reducing all democratic decisions to singular propositionsthat can only allow affirmation or negation, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

Although ancient Greek democracy was the first and perhaps the best example of direct

democracy ever practiced, it was nevertheless limited both in its actuality and in its theory.It never reached beyond a highly restricted minority nor did it ever posit itself as a

universal system of self-rule, that is to say, it never attained universality. Democracy hadto wait another two thousand years before it remerged in its more abstract and universalform. We will argue that its universality is directly linked to the birth of capitalism and inparticular with the evolution of labor as wage labor. However, modern democracy did notemerge as a mode of emancipation from the horrors of capitalist expansion but a politicalmode of first dominating labor and then absorbing labor into the machinery of production

to satisfy the demands of capital. While the Greeks sought a positive community that wascapable of overcoming the possessive individualism by willfully creating a political ethos,

the modern world has driven the individual into isolation and existential despair whilesubsuming him into the totalizing structures of late capitalism. Modern democracy is less


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an ethos than a specific technology of power that weakens rather than strengthens, thatentraps rather than liberates, that divides rather than unifies.

This assertion will of course offend the professional teleologists who see in every popularrevolt the seeds of a future democracy. But, it is important--even essential--to distinguish

those moments in which the oppressed masses posit democracy directly out of their ownstruggles from those moments that the democratic ideology imposes its logic ontocommunitarian struggles that may have nothing necessarily democratic about them. Herewe want to oppose communitarian to democratic, one seeks to establish or defend theorganic bonds of community and the other seeks political domination with the assistanceof an ideology that has it roots in class division and ultimately in the capitalist value-formitself.

Capital, Commodities and Labor

The rebirth of the democratic project two thousand years after the fall of Atheniandemocracy was the result of a long, complex and at times tortuous process. This complex

story will not be fully explored here, however, we want to assert the following: First, thatthe rebirth of democracy functionally served to liberate capital from feudal constraints andlater to subjectively integrate labor into capitalist reproduction in what Marx refers to aslabor!s real subsumption to capital. Secondly, that bourgeois (representative) democracyis not a lower form of democracy awaiting the higher form of worker!s democracy or realdemocracy as many Marxist theoreticians would assert,22but rather the politicalexpression of the value-form that reinforces the subjective transfer of value, in particularthe valorization of labor power itself. Thirdly, that when proletarian or popular struggles

takes the democratic form as its mode and its political objective, it reinforces the divisionsbetween the abstract individual and his social being, or man divested of his real

individual life and filled with an unreal universality. And finally, we want to show thatdemocracy is NOT a defense against various forms of totalitarianism but is its verysubstrate, whether of a dictatorial personality or one structured by technological control.

It is important to make a crucial distinction between the democratic subject as heappeared in Athens in the fifth centre BCE and the emerging modern subject as heappeared at the end of the feudal period. The modern individual subject found its clearestformulations in the seventeenth century theoretical works Grotius, Pufendorf andHobbes23cumulating perhaps with John Locke. These thinkers were opposing divine

rights theory with a resurrection and elaboration of natural rights theory. The Greekcitizen!s identity was inseparable from his being as a member of the polis.It was in the

polisor the political community that the individual found meaning and definition. The veryidea of a solitary life was unthinkable even theoretically for the Athenian citizen. Withoutthe polis, man would have no purpose and no identity beyond that of a barbarian. To beseparated from the poliswas a living death. In fact the word idiot comes from the Greekword idiota meaning one who does not participate in the polis. Contrary to this, theseventeenth century concept of the political subject is radically transformed and bares

little resemblance to his Athenian ancestor. The new and emerging concept of thesovereign subject was based on a radical individualism where man was understood as

the possessor of a set of natural rights that were bequeathed by nature itself to eachindividual. The concern was to organize society in such a way as not to infringe upon


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these individual rights but to protect them from unnatural, i.e. social, interference. In otherwords, the starting point for the Athenian was the integrity of the polis, which alone gavemeaning to the individual. Contrarily, for the modern subject the starting point was thesovereign individual in a state of nature that owned his own person and needed to beprotected from any and all encroachments on his rights.

We can see in these theoretical developments the continued importance of privateproperty as grounding for the new ideas of sovereignty. However, there is a new elementthat appears in the works of Locke and others of this period; it is the crucial element oflabor. The importance of labor will become evident if we look at Locke more closely. JohnLocke (1632-1704) is widely known, as the father of liberalism and some would say themodern conception of the self. His most important works are his Two Treatises ofGovernment, A Letter Concerning Toleration andAn Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding.He wrote against slavery, for religious toleration, a new attitude towardsthe education, an uncompromising defense of the sovereign rights of the individual, and

that governing can only rest on the consent of the governed. It was perhaps Locke whowas the most important theoretical influence in the drafting of the American Declaration of

Independenceand the framing of the American Constitution.

It is interesting to note that while Locke was championing individual sovereign freedomsand toleration he served as Secretary of the Board of Trades and Plantations as well asSecretary of the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas. He was one of six men whodrafted the Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas, which established a feudalaristocracy that had absolute rights over their slaves. In addition he was a major investorin the slave trades through the Royal African Company, a defender of English enclosures

and an advocate of the displacement of Native Americans from their lands.

What seem to be appalling contradictions at first glance will be easily explained if weunderstand his labor theory of private property and the importance of labor in his, andothers of his age, definition of the sovereign subject. Locke is perhaps the best exampleof the schizophrenic morality of the emerging bourgeoisie, a schizophrenia that waseventually invade the whole of modern capitalist society. We can begin by reproducing anoft-quoted section of the Second Treatise.

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every manhas the property of his own person. This no body has any right to but himself. The

labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.Whatsoever then he removes out of a state that nature hath provided, and left it in,

he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and therebymakes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state natureplaced in it, it hath by his labor something annexed to it, that excludes the commonright of other men. For his labor being the unquestionable property of the laborer,no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where thereis enough and as good left in common for others. 24

Locke!s sovereign subject is now defined by the laws of nature and most importantly

includes the body and the potential force of the body or labor power. A closer look atLocke!s theory however does not necessarily conclude that this labor is exclusively the


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labor of ones own body, it can also include setting to work the labor of others through thepurchase of labor power in the form of wages, or under certain conditions, slavery itself.Locke was acutely aware of these relationships, so much so that he understood the newform of labor as the veritable definition of man. After once touring the Lancashire district inEngland he wrote, the children of the laboring people are an ordinary burden to the

parish and usually maintained in idleness so that their labor is also lost to the public tillthey are 12 or 14 years old. He concluded that children should be put to work at the ageof three with a belly full of bread supplemented in cold weather by a little warm water-gruel. Not surprisingly, Daniel Defoe, after touring the same district sometime later,reported that he was delighted to see four-year-olds working in the cotton industry andfinding useful employment! Neither Defoe nor Locke saw children in these observations,but rather idleness, burdens, and lost labor or rather we should say quite simply, theycould see only labor which is in their view the essence of the human subject. In Defoe!sRobinson Caruso, considered among the first modern novels, the protagonist carriescivilization within himself, (in radical contrast to the Athenian subject) which is expressed

through the proper organization of his own labors and the labor of others, thereforeactivating the highest calling of the sovereign subject and the very foundations of

bourgeois society.

Bourgeois political theorists are wont to dismiss Locke!s comments on child labor, hisinvestments in human trafficking or his other commercial interest as the residues of hisage entirely independent of his higher philosophy. But Locke lived in the period of one ofthe greatest social dislocations in history, what Marxist!s typically refer to as the age ofprimitive accumulation. We won!t catalog the degree of suffering that early capitalismcaused, but it was characterized by a radical disciplining of labor, through destruction of

productive autonomy, first by the enclosures of common lands--the veritable basis ofcommunity cohesion and material security--the increased subordination of women to the

social patriarchy expressed most violently in the witch-hunts,25the implementation of PoorLaws that forced the impoverished into a wage-labor relationship including crippling childlabor and of course commerce in human trafficking and the aggressive confiscation ofnative lands. Locke and his ilk were not only observers but also active participants in all ofthis. Their emerging democratic philosophies are direct expressions of the need forabsolute security of private property, of accumulated capital and above all the need forfree-labor. The sovereign subject who is the irrevocable owner of his own person(including his own labor) was NOT a step in the direction of freedom and liberty, but ratherthe philosophic weapon used to justify the confiscation of the common!s and native lands.

Locke!s hands were soiled in this bloody story.

The democratic premise is in fact based on the concept of the self as the privateproperty of the self. Even among the more radical and egalitarian of the age, thisaxiomatic idea was foundational to the promotion of a more just society. Richard Overton,English Leveller and pamphleteer wrote To every individual in nature is given anindividual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for everyone as he ishimself, so he hath a self property, else could not be himself.26Bourgeoisie theoreticians

would of course tell us that these ideas emerged to protect the individual against thetyranny of the absolute power of kings and aristocrats, but what is rarely mentioned is that

these same ideas were used to protect the individual against the tyranny of thecommons! Locke himself supported the enclosures and justified the confiscation of native


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broad strokes we would propose two phases for the development of modern democracy.The firstphase was to secure the power of capital against all feudal residues: rights,obligations, privileges and commons. This corresponds to what Marx refers to as theformal dominationof capital over labor in which the labor process itself is unaltered by thecapitalist social relations. In this phase capitalist exploitation is characterized by the

extraction of absolute surplus value: intensifying work, pushing wages down tosubsistence levels, extending the working day, employing child labor, etc. In addition, theexpansion of capitalism in this period is dependent upon the absorption of new labor fromoutside the capitalist circuit incorporating craftsmen and peasants into the wagerelationship. In this phase we can place the English Civil War, the American and FrenchRevolutions, the Latin American revolutions, the unifications of Germany, Italy and Japanas the principle moments of democratic ascendance.

The second phase would correspond to what Marx refers to as the real dominationofcapital over labor or the real subsumptionof labor in which the actual labor process is

transformed by the technical reorganization of the work place and the commensurateincrease in productivity. This phase is characterized by the extraction of relative surplus

value. The increase in productivity associated with relative surplus value essentiallydecreased the value of consumption goods for the proletariat thus cheapening the cost oflabor itself. Henceforth, wages become a variable or relativequantity in the reproductionand accumulation of capital. From this point forward capitalism establishes a systemiclinkage between the reproduction of the proletariat within the capitalist circuit and thereproduction of capital itself. With the real subsumptionof labor all elements of social lifeare eventually integrated into capitalism and given shape by the value-form.28Thisincludes the political forms of workers!representation, the integration into the credit

system, the creation of a world market, the subordination of education, science and socialwelfare as well as the colonization the leisure time and psychic life of the proletariat

through the relentless search for value. In this phaseroughly from the 1880!s to the thirddecade of the 20thcenturywe see democracy as one of the principle tools to integratethe proletariat into the capitalist cycle of accumulation. Through the gradual and cautiousexpansion of the voting franchise, universal suffrage becomes a reality only in theimmediate aftermath of the First World War or later.29 This represents, not a victory forworker!s rights, but the total integration of the working class into the state apparatus andthus the closure of an alternative horizon for human emancipation outside of thedemocratic/political framework, a framework that has its raison d!etrein the preservationof property and the free flow of commodity exchange.

In the formal phase of capitalist dominationthe era of the democratic revolutions and the

capture of political power by the bourgeoisiethe principle task of the constitutional statewas to liberate the economy from the plethora of archaic encumbrances, and reconfigurethe bonds that hold society together through individual rights and constitutional law. AsMarx writes,

The establishment of the political stateand the dissolution of civil society into

independent individualswhose relations with one another depend on law, just asthe relations of men into the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege

is accomplished by one and the same act.30


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However, what may appear to be step in the direction of emancipation ushers in a newform of abstract domination. In the transition from the feudal to the new political statedominated by the system of exchange,

the ties of personal dependence, of distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in

fact exploded and ripped up or as members of an estates etc. In the moneyrelation, in the development system of exchange individualsseemindependent(this is an independence which is at bottom merely an illusion, and it is morecorrectly called indifference), free to collide with one another and to engage inexchange within this freedom; but they appear thus only for someone whoabstracts from the conditions, the conditions of existencewithin which theseindividuals enter into contact The definedness of individuals, which in the formercase appears as a personal restriction of the individual by another, appears in thelater case as developed into an objective restriction of the individual by relationsindependent of him and sufficient unto themselves. . These external relations are

very far from being an abolition of "relations of dependence!; they are rather thedissolution of these relations into a general form; they are merely the elaboration

and emergence of the general foundationof the relations of personal dependence.Here also individuals come into connection with one another only in determinedways. These objective dependency relations also appear, in antithesis to those ofpersonaldependence in such a way that individuals are now ruled byabstractions, where as earlier they depended on one another. The abstraction, oridea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those materialrelations, which are their lord and master.31

What is crucial about this lengthy excerpt from the Grundrisse, is as follows. The rule ofabstraction is nothing more than the ideological appearance of the real abstraction of free

exchange between autonomous individuals, which Marx calls the actual conditions ofexistence.The essence of this abstraction is the separation (dissolution) of civil society--where every individual meets every other as buyers and sellers under the form of ageneralized dependence--from the collective political identity and political power itself.The separation is made possible by the generalization of capitalist market relations. Justas the money abstraction casts a shadowy veil over the real conditions of production andthe extraction of surplus value, the political abstraction of democratic rights of theindividual subject casts its veil upon the real conditions of life in civil society. It is importantthat we see that the general expression of the abstraction emerges from the actual

conditions of life and not from the eternal and progressive movement towards idealfreedom. Nor is it the case that hard won freedoms are perverted by the external rule of

the bourgeoisie but rather that the form of these freedoms are themselves the necessarycondition of capitalist social relations. That is, they grow from inside of the emerging formof class domination. This leads to Marx!s summary judgment that The real content ofbourgeois freedom is therefore at the same time the most complete suspension of allindividual freedom, and the most complete subjugation of individuality. Bourgeois freedomhas historically meant only one thing, the freedom of capital. 32(original emphasis)

It is important to note that throughout the period of primitive capital accumulation the

elaboration of classical political theory and classical economic theory developed hand inhand, if not the same writers, then within same intellectual milieu. One of the principle


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features of both political and economic theory was the conviction that society was movingin a progressive direction towards higher and higher levels of enlightenment and materialwell-being. In the economic world this was envisaged as a move from the country to thecity, rural to urban, from handcraft to manufacture, from barter to commerce and so on.This same evolutionary scheme was imposed onto political theory as the transition from

tyranny and slavery, to aristocratic domination and serfdom, and finally to the rule of lawand individual rights. Moreover, these two evolutionary schemes were irrevocably linked,i.e. rural small handicraft production was associated with the lower stage of politicaldevelopment and vice versa. It is not to deny that there are strong correlations that canbe identified, but the assertion of a necessary evolution and progressive directionality wasan ideological weapon of the first order on the part of capital itself. Inevitably, such aweapon privileged the abstract concept of rights over the organic social anchoring ofcommunity, the real conditions of life. Therefore, when popular resistance to therevolutionary bourgeois ideology emerged, it was only the political ideology itself that wasconsidered in the evaluation of their reactionary nature and not the actual lived experience

of those who resisted.

As an example of the kind of opposition that emerged in the period of formal domination,i.e. before the whole of social being is subsumed into capitalist social relations, one couldpoint to the virtual civil war in southern Italy after Italian unification, where opposition drewits sustenance form pre-capitalist social relations. Referred to as the Brigands War, forover a decade tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of peasants and villagerswaged a tenacious struggle against the new constitutional state in the name of the oldBourbon monarchy. It was easy to dismiss this resistance as the reactionary residues ofa less developed stage of culture and economy. The brigands themselves cared little for

the abstract promises of freedoms and rights now guaranteed by the constitutional state ifit could not protect their lands. It meant only the destruction of a way of life, of their

communities. They saw only an enemy that was armed with bayonets and thePiemontese tax code. The enlightened armies of the bourgeois state exterminated wholevillages of peasants to ensure they could enjoy the freedoms guaranteed by law. Butclassical political theory would assert that this was the reaction of a doomed class destineto be dragged into the modern world by the natural forces necessity. But, historically,peasants in a state of resistance will grab whatever ideology enables them to standagainst the centralization of power, and the forcible integration into a commercial andmoneyed economy. Whether it is behind the banners of the Virgin or Bakunin it is not theideology alone that is important but the reproduction of life itself.

Many examples of this kind could be cited. It is a complex territory and each case is

unique but the important lesson to take from these moments is the role that the rule of lawand the democratic form plays in flattening the resistance of people who place the realexperience of life, with all its complexity, ahead of abstract theories of social evolution, ofmobilizing one segment of the exploited population against another by creating politicaland even teleo/metaphysical identities. The teleological vision of political progresstowards universal rights and the democratic state reflects perfectly well the necessary

evolution of the capitalist economy whose very survival depends on continual progress inproductivity and accumulation. The autonomy of ideology was forced upon all who

resisted. Specifically political identities were imposed on entire populations with disastrousconsequences that eventually came to include the formation of totalitarian regimes and


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genocide. The resistance to the constitutional state has its origins in the refusal to dividelife, to alienate oneself from community and indeed from nature itself. 33

If we can in fact distinguish the real basis for resistance from its ideological substitute itleaves us with the question that Marx posed,

But do not all revolts without exception break out from isolation of men from thecommunity? Does not every revolt necessarily presuppose this isolation? Wouldthe Revolution of 1789 have taken place without the isolation of French citizensfrom the community? Its aim, in fact, was to end this isolation.

But the community from which the worker is isolated is of a quite different naturefrom and quite different dimensions than the political community.This community,from which his own labor separates him, is life itself, physical and intellectual life,human morality, human activity, human enjoyment, the human community.

Human life is the real community of men. Just as the isolation from this body is

more complete, more painful more to be feared, more contradictory than is isolationfrom the political community, so too is the removal of this isolation, and even apartial reaction, a revolt against the same, are tasks all the more infinite as man ismore infinite than the citizen, and human life then political life. However painful theindustrial revolt may be, it conceals within itself the universal soul: political revoltmay be never so universal but it hides a narrow-minded spirit under the mostcolossal form. 34

We have seen that a social revolution maybe considered to be from the standpointof the whole because even if it only occurs in a factory district, it is a protest of men

against degraded life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the realindividual, because the community against whose separation from himself theindividual reacts, is the real community of man, the civic community.

The political soul of a revolution, on the other hand consists in the endeavor of theclasses without political influence to abolish this isolation from the community andfrom the government. Their standpoint is that of the State, an abstract whole, whichexists only in and through its separations from real life, which is unthinkable withoutthe organized antagonism between the general idea and the individual existence of

man. Consequently a revolution of political souls organizes a ruling clique insociety, in accordance with the limited and doubly-cleft nature of these souls, at the

cost of society35

Pointing out the dangers and inadequacies of the political revolution, Marx acknowledgesthe absolute necessity of such a revolution due to the form that capitalism itself takes, butit aim is not to reproduce a better political form but to cast it off, its goal is destruction ofthe form.

without a revolution, socialism cannot be enforced. It requires this political act so

far as it has need of the process of destruction and dissolution. But where its


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organizing activity begins, where its proper aim, its soul, emerges, there socialismcasts away the political hull.36

Before Capitalism fully subsumes labor into its system of reproduction, its struggle fordomination takes on a primarily political military complexion; this is to say its domination is

exogenous. But, gradually, it succeeds in political domination and henceforth seeks todominate through absorption into the productive mechanism of the value form itself. Thismeans on the economic level that the labor process is transformed through thedestruction of all forms of autonomy, the total separation of work from nature and thecomplete subordination of labor to both the machine and abstract time units. In thepolitical sense, this subordination is expressed in the total sublimation of the concretelived existence into abstract political categories: political parties, unions, associations,demands for rights and recognitions that can only be ensured by the state itself. This isnot to say that the demands of workers were not specific and concrete to their actualconditions but that they do not exist as demands until they are transformed into levels of

abstraction that can be formulated within the democratic form. All of the politicalcategories are categories that take on the complexion of law which are exclusively

guaranteed by the state.

Since the moment the bourgeoisie attained political dominance, varying from country tocountry, democratic ideology was one of the principle tools used to pull the workingclasses into a position of containment. If we trace the gradual expansion of the votingfranchise in the constitutional states we will see that the expansion of the franchisefollows the course of capitalist expansion and the generalized subsumption of labor tocapital. This is to say that expanded democracy poses no danger for capital as long as

the working class posits it principle struggle over the proportion of relative surplus value.Of course the use of such tool requires a degree of political artistry. But, it was a tool that

was understood quite well and early on. Speaking in 1831 at a parliamentary debate onextending suffrage, Prime Minister Charles Grey said, The principle of my reform is toprevent the necessity of revolution I am reforming to preserve not to overthrow. The1832 reform bill extended the franchise from 450,000 to 650,000 out of a population of14,000,000. The story of progressive enfranchisement continued well into the 20thcentury until the integration of the working classes was so total as to pose virtually noobstacle to capital. It s principle function was to ensure that the resistance was alwaysposited in a political form that presupposed the preeminence of an enforcing and legallybinding state apparatus. 37

The chairman of the British Labour Party, J. McGurik, expressed the logic perfectly in

1919 when he wrote in opposition to immediate industrial action, We are eitherconstitutionalist or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists, if we believe inthe efficacy of the political weapon (and we are or why do we have a Labour Party?) thenit is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turnaround and demand that we should substitute industrial action.38It is at this stage thethat the transition becomes complete insofar as the struggles no longer take the form of

resistance to capital as an outside force that seek to impose its domination from above.The working class now struggles entirely within the mechanism of capitalist reproduction.

Its own advance is understood as dependent on the continual advance of capitalistproductivity, its struggles are entirely subordinated to the struggle for relative surplus


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For Pashukanis, The legal subject is the abstract owner of commodities raised to theheavens.40 The legal subject, -- as one who possesses universal equal rights and is theguardian of commodities--is the essential embodiment of the economic categories thatenable the continual transformation and metamorphosis of value from one form toanother. All existence must be subsumed beneath a universally equivalent form, both as a

value and as a right. But, as Marx pointed out in the Critique of the Goethe Program

Equal right is a right of inequality in its content like every right. Right by its naturecan only consist in the application of an equal standard insofar as they are broughtunder an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only To avoid allthese defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.41

In other words, right, like value, succeeds in obliterating all sensuous reality andsubordinating the subject to quantifiable equivalent relations. Real individuals in liberatedsocial relationships, no longer subordinate to the law of value, cannot be made

quantifiably commensurable through the dictates of value or political right.

At this point the reader may well concede that democracy practiced in the context ofprivate property relations, of class divisions, wage labor and money/commodity exchange,is in fact an expression of the value form, i.e. capitalist domination; moreover that it is nota stepping stone towards a true and universal democracy. But what of workers!democracy? Can there not be a democratic form that explicitly rejects all capitalist socialrelations to express the will of all? In order to answer this question (and we will attempt toanswer it in the negative) we will need to look at real historical examples of workers!democracy, the general social conditions that animate the democratic form and the

relationship between the democratic practice and the minimal objectives of humanemancipation.

There is a tendency to gloss over the meaning of democracy as somehow inclusive of anyand all collective social activity or decision-making processes. Such glossing ismisleading as it fails to make clear the distinction between communitarian processes thathave historically been found everywhere in an infinite variety of forms, from thoseprocesses that are purely modes of deploying power. All democraciesreally existingdemocraciesdo have qualities in common. In essence, all democracies are conceivedas a specific mode of distributing power within a community. All democracies aredesigned as systems of self-governing, structured by group identities of

inclusion/exclusion. All democracies require a mode of enforcement (usually with relativeautonomy) of the majority over the minority and must be based on the equality of

sovereign subjects---each member with a single vote. The critical points in this minimumcharacter of a democracy are the abilities to use coercion to enforce the compliance of theminority or of single individuals to the decisions of a quantified majority and the right todetermine the inclusion and exclusion of group subjects in the process. Without the rightof coercion and without the right to determine inclusion/exclusion we are no longer talkingabout democracy.42 Coercion requires a coercive apparatus that wields a degree of

independence from the majority of decision makers; otherwise the democratic processwould be harbinger of continual civil war. Moreover, such coercive autonomy would

require a state apparatus to give legitimacy to the use of violence, a state apparatus


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legitimized and derived, as per Marx, from an abstract universal. That is, democracy as apolitical form presupposes the state.

Is this true only of bourgeois democracy, or is workers democracy of a different form?

Form, Ideology and Identity

With the founding of the European social democratic parties, the proletariat attempted togain progressive reforms (fighting over the share of relative surplus value) with the aim ofgradually taking over the state as the final step towards the triumph of socialism. Theirprinciple tactic was the ballot, believing that the continual growth of the proletariat wouldensure an eventual capture of the majority to which the capitalist interests would becompelled to submit. Wilhelm Liebknecht, leader of the German Social Democratic Party,hailed the destruction of the German peasantry stating, every new smokestack hastensthe victory of socialism. The success of the SPD was inseparable from the growth and

success of capitalism itself. Its development and integration into the German state was tobecome the model for all subsequent mass parties in the industrialized countries,

including the Fascist and Nazi parties. These parties could claim ideological hegemonyover their membership, could mobilize public demonstrations of the masses whennecessary, had a party organization and machinery capable of enrolling members,collecting dues, ensuring ideological homogeneity and of course developing a cadre ofleaders and specialists who swam like fish in the waters of democratic politicscoordinating parliamentary and municipal representatives across the whole of Germany.By the time of the Stuttgart Conference in 1907 the SPD had over 1,000,000 membersand more than 4000 paid workers. A French delegate attacked the SPD in this way: you

have now become an electoral accounting machine, a party of cash registers andparliamentary seats. You want to conquer the world with ballots the whole of German

Social Democracy has become bourgeois! 43Another observer at the same conferencenoted, It was shown not that Social Democracy was conquering city and state, but on thecontrary, that the state is conquering Social Democracy. The SPD had becomedependent on the credit worthiness of the state as it entered into the management ofvalue production through the control of labor discipline. The wealth produced within theparameters of the German state was understood as the veritable source of all continualreforms. Therefore, to protect the German state was to protect social democracy itself.The catastrophe of August 1914 definitively demonstrated the critics of the SPD correct associal democracy mobilized the working class to defend the fatherland in its hour of

need. Indeed, the slogan one man, one vote, one gun was direct link between thedemocratic form and imperialist war as patriotism replaced internationalism to become an

ideology of mutual slaughter in the preservation of capitalism.

Volumes of ink have been spilled trying to explain how pre-war social democracy wasable to guide the proletariat to act against its own self-interests, indeed, towards self-destruction. We won!t review all of the variations in explanation that range fromreassessing the trajectory of capitalism, underestimating the role of a conscious

vanguard, as well as the not grasping the dangers of reformism, opportunism,nationalism, imperialism, tactical mistakes etc, etc, etc. Rather we will look at the role the

democratic formwithin the condition of the real subsumptionof labor to capitalplays inthe subjectivation of the working classes to bourgeois forms of individuation, or how the


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gilded cage of democracy encloses revolutionary aspirations to the impotence of asongbird.

Late 19thcentury capitalism entered a phase of both extensive and intensive expansionthat spread the reach of capital across the globe at the same time that it mobilized

productive forces via science, technology, and greater concentrations of population, newforms of labor organization and the general homogenization of the social imaginary.Capitalism was not only producing an endless stream of commodities but was for the firsttime beginning to produce subjectivities, that is ideologies. Of course all societies producesubjectivities and ideologies, as all societies produce use-values, but what was new wasthat capitalism was now producing ideologies in the much the same way as steel wasproduced, ideologies that increasingly resembled the abstraction of exchange value. Ascapitalist social relations penetrated deeper and deeper into the social body it was anatural evolution that the social imaginary44aligned itself with social praxis, a praxis thatwas enforced by the needs of capital.

As was pointed out above, the modern abstractions of political ideology could find little

fertile ground among those working class communities that were still embedded in pre-capitalist economic structures, or even those whose memories were structured by pre-capitalist formations, that is to say that the nature of work, of community life and the socialimaginary were intertwined in the concrete singularities of being.45What was new in thecapitalist social formation was the dis-embedding of all these organic links that had nowbecome autonomous abstractions, as Marx expressed it, with capitalism all that is solidmelts into air. Man!s active life could now only be mobilized by first alienating hispotential power as wage labor and thus homogenized as abstract social labor. His self-

perception was no longer linked and dependent on the concrete labor of his real lifeactivity, but rather on the real abstraction of wage labor mediated by money. In essence

this means that the new mode of subjectivation occurred through the separation of the"ria(contemplation) frompoesis(making) while subordinating praxis(doing) to the former.46

In the political arena, to activate ones own power individually requires the subsumtion ofthe concrete conditions of life to the abstract generalities of political ideology. An abstractalienated ideology is the very coin of democracy and is produced through a division oflabor by specialists who have no necessary links to real conditions of life as experiencedby the working classes.47 The mass production of political ideology comes to bereassembled as a mode of consumption, a mode of identity and the only mode through

which political praxis is mobilized. The very fact of its autonomy means that the socialimaginary is less and less the outgrowth of the savoir vivreand the savoir fairof the

working classes, whose loss over the power of poesisis the very essence ofproletarianization, and more than ever comes to be formed by the manufactured ideasthat embracing ever more extreme metaphysical/teleological forms.

Orthodox Marxism itself was not immune to the bourgeois forms of expression. Theanarchist Erich Mhsam, who understood that the form of ideological production on the

part of the SPD was a replication of the formation of German capitalism itself, coined heterm Bismarxism to describe a productivist/statist Marxism whose function was the

integration of the proletariat as a loyal opposition rather than a revolutionary challenge tocapitalism. What gave these ideologies the power to mobilize the masses, to swing them


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wildly left and right, to pacify them or to incite them to take up arms, was the democraticform, a form that privileged the abstract universal over concrete singular, the ideologicalover the of poetic. In modern capitalism, life activity itself is born of an abstraction viawage labor and democracy reinforced the abstraction by channeling resistance along theaxis of the democratic form. In essence this move compelled the working classes to

abdicate its actual power in favor of a class of intellectual specialists whose currency andeventual monopoly was the command over ideology.

The abstractions of democracy are in full conformity with the abstractions of capitalistforms of production. It is for this reason that we assert that the democratic form is the verysubstrate of totalitarian modes of power, indeed of fascism itself. The privileging ofabstract identities within a framework of social alienation and the disengagement ofideology from the socially poetic activity of the working classes, is the ground from whichgrows democratic mass politics, advertizing, hyper-consumerism and totalitarian forms ofcontrol. Whether these totalitarian modes of control take the form of a great leader, a

party or technocratic control may be determined by historically specific conditions but thesocial logic that enables the continual metamorphous of power is hidden in the capitalist

value-form itself. This simple and infinitely reproducible social formation that reduceseach individual subject to the bearer of an economic character mask is the irreducibleand immanent social logic that is not subject to modification for the simple reason that forvalue to posit itself in the present it must posit its identical offspring--its own growth--in thefuture. The hunger of capital (value) has already devoured the unborn. The democraticform as a reflection of the value form impresses its stamp on anything it touches.

The objections will of course arise that this all may be true for Greek democracy, for the

democratic revolutions of the 18

th

and 19

th

centuries, it may be true for the expansion ofthe franchise to include the working classes in the 19thand 20thcenturies and it may be

true for the SPD and all the working class parties of the Second International who werevictims of a bad teleology, but surely democracy is the natural form for the revolutionaryworking class in the act of struggle against capitalism.

Examples of proletarian democracy are few and far between, existing as flashes in theheat of struggle only to be crushed, dissolved, exhausted or eventually recuperated intosafe channels of opposition. The singular example of proletarian democracy that not onlyled a struggle but also was a sustained attempt at self-governance was the RussianRevolution and the establishment of the worker!s Soviets. Of course the Paris Commune

and the Barcelona Insurrection in 1936 also give important experiences of worker!sdemocracy but both existed entirely under a state of siege limiting the lessons to be

derived from these experiences. But it is the Soviet experience that reveals the problemsof worker!s democracy.

The Soviets or worker!s councils have been hailed as the natural form of worker!s self-rule, and the purest form of direct democracy that has ever existed. Yet this puredemocracy succumbed to a totalitarian form of one party rule in quick order, not from

external forces, but from within its own activity. Maurice Brinton documents very well theascendance of Bolshevik power within the Soviets and subsequent loss of workers

control.


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The Bolshevik vision of democracy and socialism was revealingly articulated by Lenin inhis article of 1917 Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?

When we say workers!control, always associating that slogan with the dictatorshipof the proletariat, and always putting it after the latter, we thereby make plain what

state we have in mind if it is a proletarian state we are referring to (i.e. thatdictatorship of the proletariat) then workers!control can become a national, all-embracing, omnipresent, extremely precise and extremely scrupulous accountingof the production and distribution of goods.

Without big banks socialism would be impossible of realization. The big banks area "stable apparatus!we need for the realization of socialism and which we shalltake from capitalism ready made. Our problem here is only to lop away that whichcapitalistically disfigures this otherwise excellent apparatus and to make it stillbigger, still more democratic, still more comprehensive A single huge state

bank, with branches in every rural district and in every factory that will already benine-tenths of a socialist apparatus (emphasis added)48

Not only does Lenin directly link the growth of democracy to the excellent apparatus of avast banking system but perhaps more importantly he establishes in this text a barrier toworker!s control itself via the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is, worker!s control canonly be mediatedon the Bolshevik model-- via the proletarian state by way of ideology,an ideology over which the Bolsheviks quickly attained a monopoly. The Bolshevik andthe soviet idea of worker!s control, articulated perfectly by Lenin as a vast omnipresentaccounting system of production and distribution of goods, is in keeping with Lenin!s well

known definition of socialism as electrification plus soviets. But wresting control of themeans of production (the technology) from the bourgeoisie cannot be a step towards real

liberation or control on the part of the working class if the mode of production (socialrelations) is not radically altered. Capitalism is not a function of the greedy capitalist orthe dogmatic commissar, but rather the social relations shaped by the law of value. It isthese social relations that must be exploded and this is not a function of ideology butrather returning the primacy of savior faireto the working classes. The democratic form,the omnipresent political structure of the Lenin!s dictatorship of the proletariat, guaranteesthat it is the abstraction of ideology that rules supreme. And it is the rule of the abstractover the sensuous that is the essence of both the capitalist mode of production anddemocracy itself.

Lukcs positively developed this perspective with his concept of totality as the principle

category of the Marxist critique of capitalism. For Lukcs, capitalism was a totality thatcould only be opposed by another totality that was embodied in the consciousness of theproletariat, not in its direct activity but as expressed in it non-reified form of the party.49One form of consciousness articulated by an intellectual class as representatives ofcapital, according to Lukcs, confronts another form of consciousness articulated byanother intellectual class who represent the historical interest of the proletariat. When the

principle conflict occurred in the realm of ideology then praxisis fully subordinate tothe"ria with poesis simply subsumed as a form ofpraxis. In spite of Lukcs!brilliant

critique of alienation he nevertheless ends by subordinating the sensual, the concrete andthe singular side of human knowledge to the abstractions of ideology.


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Helmut Reichelt appropriately refers to this phenomenon as the persistence of thegeneral in relation to the value form:

What is thus constituted is an inverted world in which sensuousness in the widest

sense as use-value, labor, exchange with nature is demoted to a means ofthe self perpetuation of an abstract process that underlies the whole objectiveworld of constant change. [] The whole sensuous world of human beings whoreproduce themselves through the satisfaction of needs and labor is step-by-stepsucked into this process, in which all activities are in themselves inverted. Theyare all, in their vanishing appearance, immediately their own opposite: thepersistence of the general.50

Just as use value and concrete labor are helpless before the power of abstractions ofvalue, so to does savior vivreand savior fairefall before the omnipresence and

generalities of democratic ideologies.

The suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 by the Bolshevik controlled sovietsdemonstrates with particular clarity the tyranny of ideology and deployment of theoreticalidentities. The principle justification for the suppression was based on an elaborateteleological construction of social identities. In Trotsky!s own words:

Only an entirely superficial person can see in Makhno!s bands or in the Kronst

Documents

Towards a Critique of the Democratic Form (Draft) B. York