Democracy: The Miracle Waiting for Us
If this is a dry-run for climate and ecological breakdown, Covid-19 makes one thing clear: we are gravely unprepared. To avoid the exponential worsening of ecological collapse, we will need a miracle.
A few months ago, Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam was talking to a room of climate activists about what to do next. To avoid exponential ecological collapse, the breakdown of our food systems, the mass displacement of peoples, water shortages, and war, “we will need a miracle,” he said.
This was a bleak time for the movement, and it is perhaps worse now. The coronavirus has revealed the deep fragility of our society. The community response is incredible but, if this is a dry-run for climate and ecological breakdown, Covid-19 makes one thing clear: we are gravely unprepared. Hallam’s closing words ring truer now than ever before.
Facing up to this reality feels impossible because the problems are so systemic. There is not one cause but a tight, complicated web of relationships slowly killing us all—and the marginal first. To think of the climate crisis is to think of a hundred other related crises, to feel overwhelmed, paralyzed and detached.
The unifying thread between these multiple crises is the relational crisis. Charles Eisenstein, mathematician-turned-philosopher, captures this brilliantly in Climate—A New Story, writing, “respect for nature is inseparable from respect for all beings, including the human. [...] Climate change, therefore, calls us to a greater transformation than a mere change in our energy sources. It calls us to transform the fundamental relationship between self and other.”
Seeing it this way, as a crisis of relationships, joins the dots. It connects why the movements for a better world often feel bitter and divided, why people feel powerless and alone, and why queer communities (as Aletta Brady, Anthony Torres and Phillip Brown express here), violently crushed for breaking binary gender roles, create communities “rooted in love and care for each other and the environment around us”. It also implies that the way out of this wreckage won’t just be a Green New Deal or carbon net-zero by 2025, but will require a radical renewal of how we all relate to each other.
This might sound feeble to the hard-headed: we don’t have time for vague exhortations to love one another more. So, what actual steps can we take to heal our relational crisis? In this moment, our hope lies in reviving our radical democratic history and building a new democracy. This cannot be the stunted democracy we’ve come to accept. It cannot be meaningless consultations, stale focus-groups or spot-test referenda. For our new democracy to allow this miraculous healing, it must include everyone, constantly recreate itself, and allow us to act together now.
***
None of this will be news to some. Anyone in any of the recent radical democratic movements has felt the miraculous promise of democracy. Some collectives, from the Zapatista revolt in the 1980s, to the alter-globalization movement in the 1990s, have been tirelessly trying and championing new forms of democracy. Their progeny, Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and Seattle’s Capitol Hill Organized Protest now, reincarnate a rich, almost dizzying legacy of ideas. It is these that can crack open our dull idea of democracy.
Democracy by definition varies, but whatever we call it—participatory, consensus, direct, deliberative—democracy in its essence, according to David Graeber, “is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive.” (emphasis mine). Crucially, he adds, it also includes “the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.”
Graeber, one of the founders of Occupy Wall Street, arguably the 21st century’s most high-profile radical democracy movement, knows of this hard work first hand. Occupy saw our systemic dysfunction as a product of a lack of participation. Its answer was to embody an entirely new way of being together. Organizing in mass public assemblies, with sparse leadership structure and using new fair, inclusive facilitation methods enabled huge numbers of people to operate in a profoundly collective way. The movement’s constructive embodiment of this new mode of being spread like wildfire across the planet.
One story from Britain’s Occupy London captures the magic of the moment. Told first by Tim Price, it came to me via Jamie Kelsey-Fry; it is a story of a man named Danny. As thousands of activists descended on his home of seven years, Danny, one of London’s rough sleepers, found himself in the middle of Occupy London. Throwing himself into helping, Danny’s life was transformed by his new friendships. Normal relationships were up-ended.
In his own words: “I’d go in the tea tent and I’d sit with a paranoid schizophrenic, a banker, a runaway, a professor and a tranny and we’d all have something in common. [...] I wouldn’t have done that before Occupy. But now the picture was bigger. I was finally in it. Connected, affecting others.” His jarring reference to a transgender person is not to be left out of this picture. It shows a reality of disconnection and misunderstanding that is inevitably our starting point and will be profoundly challenging. What offers hope here is the new connection and the enormous common ground a severely dispossessed and alienated person can experience in these settings.
A real democracy promises profound connection and the possibility of love across social divides. Jeremy Gilbert calls it the ‘democratic sublime’: an overwhelming feeling of collective joy which raises all of our agency to be actors in the world. This feeling is transformative. The self aligns with a collective and becomes greater for it. It can feel like “the moment when a meeting is as thrilling as a good party” or, if we can overcome the stifling, individualistic culture that shapes meetings as we know them, it might feel like “when the party seems as potentially meaningful and significant as a good meeting”.
***
Despite all this, many have criticized Occupy. Self-described revolutionary Micah White, author of The End of Protest, writes, “an adherence to the ideology of prefigurative anarchism [...] blinded many founding Occupiers in New York City.” This critique is repeated often, more or less to the same point: “the movement could never move toward legitimate sovereignty, political negotiation and a transfer of power.” It was, they say, too focused on experimenting with new ways of relating to each other at the expense of a coherent political strategy.
This critique is part of a long tradition of constructing a false binary between these two attitudes. In Freedom is an Endless Meeting, sociologist Franscesca Polletta explores a century of participatory social movements in North America and finds the same criticism leveled at each of them. Polletta breaks this binary. She shows plenty of examples of the strategic effectiveness of an egalitarian, participatory social movement. When everyone is involved in shaping the direction of a social movement inimitable bonds of trust and commitment are made, and a movement is much more likely to last longer. Just as importantly, mass participation widens the pool of creative and innovative tactics, and all social movement theorists, including White, agree that movements need to be inventive to survive.
As well as the strategic advantage there is also a strong case to be made for the mobilizing power of democracy. Chantel Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau make the powerful point that “despite their relegation by neoliberalism, democratic values still play a significant role in the political imaginary of our societies.” And they are right, ‘democracy’ as a term has little specific content, but it is a rallying cry for ‘Western’ values. The trick, in Mouffe and Laclau’s words, is to “reactivate” its “critical meaning” in order “to subvert the hegemonic order and create a different one.” Or in other words, to make democracy sexy again. This is something like what Drillminister, a rapper from South London, is doing: resuscitating democracy to mean the end of voicelessness, loneliness, and abandoning others.
The scene is set for more of this. Covid-19, and the economic depression to come, leaves us poised between a radically transformed society based on care or a radically controlled society based on fear. And, in the United Kingdom at least, the stage for a democratic revolution was being set before the corona crisis. Since 2011 ordinary people across the United Kingdom. have been reclaiming their local councils to serve their communities. Somerset’s town of Frome paved the way, and Flatpack Democracy, the chronicle of their success, has become a catchphrase for the movement. Combine this with the democratization of the economy—as championed by Transition Town—in the form of cooperatives, time banks, community land trusts and participatory budgeting, and you have a serious alternative. But so far this movement has been slow, and if you’re terrified about the suffering inflicted by our current system, it may well feel inadequate.
***
Which leads us to one of the most important questions about building a radical democracy: how will you take power? For many, winning state power is a tempting course. The state seems to have control over everything that matters. You could change things fast. But, even if you could win state power on a radical democratic platform, which recent examples show you can’t, it is not the kind of power you would want. John Adams helped found the modern US federal government to keep the mob at bay and control the “horrors of democracy”. State power dominates, coerces and colonizes. But many well-intentioned radical democratic interventions have fizzled because of an aversion to instituting any kind of power. Occupy, for all its strengths, is perhaps one of them.
Writing in 2017, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer help here. In their book Assembly they write “it is possible and desirable for the multitude to tip the relations of power in its favor and, ultimately, to take power—but, crucially, to take power differently.” This ‘differently’ they come to define as the creation of ‘nonsovereign institutions’. Unhelpfully—and predictably for Left academics—they barely elaborate on what this means. They do say that these institutions would not dominate their participants, nor enforce the kind of false unity that the nation-state does. These are “not institutions to rule over us but institutions to foster continuity and organization, institutions to help organize our practices, manage our relationships, and together make decisions.” It is up to us then to craft these institutions out of specific needs.
Social movements make good playgrounds for this crafting. In Extinction Rebellion they use the Peoples’ Assembly model for mass collective deliberation and sortition—lottery selection—councils for difficult decision-making. For reaching consent in working groups, they operate a sociocratic model where responsibility is clearly delegated and decision making is distributed. More recently, the uprising over the killing of George Floyd and systemic racial injustice is incubating new forms of democracy too. In the autonomous zone of CHOP, in Seattle, we see Peoples’ Assemblies being used to create demands and the formation of democratic cooperatives to distribute resources. The more that these experiments flourish, the more fertile the ground for systemic change.
And as CHOP, formerly CHAZ, seems to be aware of, we will need everyone, beyond the ‘radical’ enclaves of ‘autonomous zones’, for this to work. What’s clear from Hardt and Negri’s distinction is that the state forces membership. A democratic society cannot do that.
To have mass participation in whatever kinds of nonsovereign institutions we build, we need to see democracy as the end in itself, and not just a means to solving a particular issue. This means listening, building trust and connecting across divides. As Mouffe and Laclau observe about the ‘extreme left,’ they are “insensitive to people’s effective demands. Their anti-capitalist rhetoric does not find any echo in the groups whose interests they pretend to represent. This is why they always remain in marginal positions.” Take this seriously and we can turn the tide from authoritarian populism and have no more Rust Belts turn to Trump or a Red Walls ’fall.’
Progressives often fail here. We act in ways that mimic the classic neoliberal myth that people cannot have power because things are too complicated and experts are needed. What we end up with is a scenario similar to an over-controlling parent, sheltering their child from the outside world and then using their tears to justify why they cannot go out and play. It is quite reasonable that the child grows up to be fearful, mistrustful and incapable of play. The climate and ecological crisis, and to an extent the coronavirus, demands everything of these mistreated children as well as their nail-biting parents. And even then, we will need a miracle.
***
Roger’s phrase has stuck with me because it was uncanny to hear XR’s hard-headed grand strategist talk of miracles. You get the same sense of bathos reading Hannah Arendt’s The Promise of Politics. Here, the unflinching Eichmann chronicler faces up to the twin threats of totalitarianism and nuclear war with dreams of miracles. And she gets away with it. To her, they are ubiquitous and powerful things: they are anything that “bursts into the context of predictable processes as something unexpected, unpredictable, and ultimately causally inexplicable.” They are impossible, unworkable things before they occur, and spectacular events after.
We might consider our moment a crisis of the miraculous. It is strange even to talk of them. Miracles belong to superstitious times when we didn’t have the tools to map our mechanistic world. This follows the fact that for decades nothing has interrupted the onslaught of capitalism. Now this deadly virus has. And although it certainly is not the miracle we need, the proliferation of mutual aid, the total rethink of care work, the grounding of planes en masse, are.
According to Arendt, humans have “a most amazing and mysterious talent for working miracles. [...] the normal, hackneyed word our language provides for this talent is ‘action.’” We act, we work miracles. We act together, we amplify that. That’s why what happened to Danny and thousands of others in Occupy is a miracle. That’s why what’s happening in Seattle is a miracle.
Geophysically we are entering a time of the miraculous, and it will require a miraculous response. We must leave behind the expected, predictable and explicable routes to social change. This is the real demand and promise of radical democracy. It is a miracle to create the conditions for all other miracles to occur. It is the miracle to produce all miracles. And there is no one else but ourselves here to do it, together.
Greg Frey is a writer interested in art, politics, and humans who do more than expected. You can find more of his work at openDemocracy, Novara Media and Minim.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of a delightful article, if we may say so. You can help make more of these by donating a small amount to The Trouble. Most of your money goes directly to paying authors. None of it goes to profit or advertisers, because we are a non-profit and we don’t believe in that stuff.