The Death of the State

The Idea of the Democratic Community

 

As noted in Chapter 1, we have created states and we have created societies, but we have not created communities. Evidently, the modern nation-state, extending over thousands of square miles and including millions of people is not a community, even if legally speaking it is a state and historically speaking it is a nation. Still, the idea of community is not unequivocal. Indeed, it may refer to two very different sorts of social arrangements.

On the one hand, the idea of a community may suggest exclusivity and conformity. In this sort of community there will likely be a well-established and pervasive set of customs and mores which define both belief and a mode of life. These customs and mores will be enforceable without extensive use of legal coercion although likely, they will be reinforced and mediated by the mechanism of authority. In consequence of the pervasiveness of the mores, the degree of commonality will be high and the bonds of membership strong. But commonality and membership resting on these presuppositions will inevitably militate against the expression, let alone the cultivation, of individuality. Moreover, the exclusivity of the group will also likely reflect and be reinforced by antagonistic, even aggressive, relations with groups outside the community. But it is far from clear that this picture, typical of tribalism, religious communities and to some extent, the communities of ancient and medieval civilizations is either necessary or desirable. Of course, community in this sense will provide for its members a sense of fraternity and security and it will not be characterized by that alienation so prevalent in modern society. Nevertheless, it is hardly compatible with the ideal of freedom defended in this book.

There is another idea of community, an idea which is not only compatible with freedom but seems to be an essential part of it. It is the idea of a democratic community. Consider an association in which persons are in face-to-face contact, as before, but where the relations of persons are not mediated by “authorities,” sanctified rules, reified bureaucracies or commodities. Each is prepared to absorb the attitudes, reasoning and ideas of others and each is in a position to do so. Their relations, thus, are open, immediate and reciprocal. Further, the total conditions of their social lives are to be conjointly determined with each having equal voice and equal power. When these conditions are satisfied and when as a result, the consequences and fruits of their associated and interdependent activities are perceived and consciously become an object of individual desire and effort, then there is a democratic community.

Put another way, and in contrast to the previous picture of community, what is “common” and binds the aggregate together is not given or imposed, but is derived. It is not antecedent but consequent—a result of the recognition that with inevitable interdependence, there are mutually shared concerns and interests which may be mutually assented to and realized. Such an association would be a community because its members share openly in the values of their association and it would he democratic because, as moral and political equals, persons freely but conjointly determine the conditions of their lives.

In the democratic community, fraternity would thus not be based on the exclusiveness of conforming individuals, whether this conformity stemmed from inherited customs, orthodoxies, the interrivalry of clans or a combination of these.  Rather, fraternity would rest on a clear recognition by all that there are moral, spiritual and material values which accrue from an association in which all participate and in which each needs the other human being as a human being. In such an association, conformity might be replaced by a heightened sense of the social value of individuality wherein each self makes a distinctive contribution appreciated by others and enjoys in his own way the contributions of others.

The determination of the conditions of the lives of the members of a democratic community would, of course, require that social and economic power be jointly held. The point here is not to develop the conditions of cooperation economically considered, because in any society individuals do cooperate. Slaves cooperate with one another and with their masters, and so, too, do factory workers and their employers, urban dwellers and farmers, managers and salesmen. The point rather is to establish the conditions of Free cooperation where cooperation results not From the authority of chiefs, directors or governments, nor from the subordination of  the propertyless to the propertied, nor from the subordination of all to the exigencies of a system which though impersonal appears as a power independent of all those who participate with Marx, we can picture

. . a community of free individuals carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson [Crusoe’s] labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as a fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence.

The level of production, of course, will determine how much may be freed for immediate use, but in such a community, what is produced, how it is to be distributed and judgments regarding the duration of labor time versus leisure would be determined by the community itself.

It is important to see what such a community of free individuals does not mean. It does not mean state ownership of the means of production, for in the community envisaged, there is no state properly understood. Nor does it mean factory committees isolated from the life of the community or workers’ councils. For not only is the place of work but a segment of the life of the community — albeit an important one—and concerned only with preconditions of life, but as well, committees and councils acting for the workers remain centers of power mediating the relations of the participating association.

Here the actual organization of the Athenian polis and Aristotle’s analysis of it provides important clues.

The ‘”master institution” of a democratic community would be a regularly conjoined assembly composed of citizens defined so as to include every adult member of the association. It would have its councils and committees, but these would be merely magistrates in the Greek (and Rousseauian) sense. They would have no legislative or policy-making power, that being solely in the hands of the regularly assembled community. The role of magistrates would be restricted to administration and execution of policy as defined by the assembly

To prevent usurpation of the power of the community, magistrates would be appointed, chosen by lot or selected by general election and be immediately replaceable according to the judgment of the assembly. Further, the magistrates would not have authoritative power. They would literally be servants of the people rather than its rulers. The community could, of course, have laws and courts of law and the executors of law could have recourse to the machinery of legal coercion.

This raises the question of whether the assembled community can will anything it pleases, whether, for example, it can legislate a community religion, disfranchise a segment of its members or establish machinery for the control of belief.

In one sense, it can, for it is hard to imagine, compatible with its nature as a democratic community, checks against the wrongful use of its power. On the other hand, the difficulty raised is itself but historically relevant. Historically, the problem of “restraining” the people, lest they violate freedom, presupposed radical differences in the conditions of life of the members of society, a hierarchical society, and a notion of freedom which was tied to the institutions of private property. Where the masses are propertyless, “checks and balances” serve to protect “freedom”—the “freedom” of the propertied from intrusion by the propertyless.

Bills of rights, too, have been historically relevant. But they were designed as restraints upon government, where the governors were not identical with the persons being governed. Bills of rights presupposed that since the people themselves could not protect their freedoms against the power of government, it was necessary to embed in constitutions and in primary law legal means of protection and redress against this power.

But in a democratic community, these presuppositions do not obtain. Where all power is mutually held and the state does not exist, it seems that such checks would be unnecessary.

The conditions of freedom of free persons along with the common good is objective and discoverable. Although there are no institutional limits on what they can collectively will, there are moral limits. The existence of a democratic community would itself maximize the possibility that this good be discovered and that the community would use its power to enhance rather than to limit individual freedom. Indeed, if moral equals, collectively determining their fate in open communication, unencumbered by secrecy, misrepresentation, manipulation and propaganda, cannot discover their common good and enlarge the conditions of their freedom, then nothing and no one can.

 

The Real World and the Ideal of the Democratic Community

 

There is nothing novel in this restatement of a very old idea. Of course, it is radical in that it envisages a total change in the arrangements of contemporary societies. But ideals, even old ones, must be pressed to their limits. Accordingly, if one believes in freedom as self-realization and self-determination, if one believes in democracy as way of life, there is no stopping short of the ideal restated in these pages.

For defenders of the conservative moral ideal, outlined in the previous chapter, the implications of the ideal of freedom will be rejected, since for them the ideal itself will be rejected. But Utopian speculation has other problems to face. Some on the left may argue that the utopianism of these pages is idle because it is not tied to some dialectic of history and does not point to forces at work which display movement toward the realization of the ideal. But that question remains open between Rousseau and Marx, whether the forces at work will move us toward democracy or to newer forms of tyranny. Finally, others may say that the ideal of a democratic community may be abstractly persuasive, but that it is idle because it lies in the face of all the brute realities of modern societies In our advanced stage of civilization, so it will be argued, the realities of a social and economic order, complex beyond comprehension. The high degree of division of labor, the facts of worldwide and national economic interdependence,  and the realities of the imperatives of technology simply nullify the underlying assumptions of the democratic community. Thus, efficiency, productivity, the organization of complexity and the political unity requisite in conditions of modern social fragmentation demand the existence of the centralized state, the existence of bureaucratic and centralized administration over economic and social units and a willing acceptance by persons of those arrangements which make modern life possible, even desirable.

Nor is there irony in the fact that this sort of argument is often used by both the apologists of Liberal-Democracy and of Soviet-style State Socialisms, for both claim to believe in freedom and democracy.

We cannot here offer a full-blown refutation of this argument, but a few answers, at least, are required.

It is surely true that the democratic community presupposes radical decentralization—the dissolving of the dinosaur centralized nation-state and the disintegration of the monster institutional complexes of present day societies. It does presuppose conditions which would permit sell-management, but it is far from clear that this would require a step backward into time. On the contrary, it more accurately would require a step forward into the yet undecided future. There are several conceptually distinguishable but related questions. The first is the question of the “complexity” of social, political and economic relations.

These relations today are no doubt complex, but it is at least an open question whether most of the complexity is itself generated by centralization, bureaucracy and the inherent need of such structures to mystify. partialize and manipulate. It seems more reasonable to argue that it is because these relations are mediated by lines of authority and bureaucracy and set in an institutional Framework of exchange and commodity relations that they appear mysterious and unfathomable. Indeed, if they did not, their irrationality would not be tolerated for a minute. Consider one instance: ITT does provide us with telephones, but as if it is itself a sovereign stale, it is able to reap immense profits, influence foreign policy, manage the Justice Department, and indeed, in play no small part in the internal affairs of foreign sovereign nations. And much the same can be said of GM, Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, if we add to this the waste, manipulation and exploitation generated within the inner circles of our federal, state and local “public” bureaucracies, one can hardly wonder whether “complexity” is cause or consequent.

Moreover, there is a whole host of presently “essential” interrelated institutions which would serve no useful purpose in a democratic community. These include, for example, most of the assemblage of merchandising and selling organizations, the greater part of the advertising industry, the consumer researchers, public relations and human relations experts, credit institutions, insurance lawyers and agents, realtors, brokers, and many others besides. In socialist states, of course, some of these institutions are eliminated, but because these states remain centralized, others are replicated by functionally equivalent state bureaucracies, and still others are added to make the system operate.

Second, there is the question whether large size and autonomous technocracies are among the imperatives of the industrial system which provides the automobiles, refrigerators and televisions.

One must first notice that even if this claim could be sustained, it still leaves a choice between increased quantity of goods and an improved quality of life. One cannot determine a priori whether the people of the future might prefer to live better with much less. Contemporary experience suggests that discontent, alienation and powerlessness cannot be infinitely compensated with more goods. A democratic community which eliminated these deficiencies might well tolerate, even welcome, a loss of efficiency and productivity.

In any case, the dilemma seems to be largely spurious. It will now be generally admitted that there are limits to the economics of scale and that in many areas at least, modern industrial societies have long since passed these limits. But more important, there are many diseconomies associated with large size. There are, for example, the destructive effects on the environment of over-concentration. If industrial complexes were reduced in size through decentralization, the natural rehabilitative power of the environment would have a chance to work. At the same time, smaller size would permit the use of clean yet efficient sources of energy, including, e.g., solar furnaces, solar and wind generators, and geothermal energy installations. Moreover, decentralization would permit the use of untapped local resources of raw materials instead of exclusively exploiting those areas where large-scale operations make, economic sense at this point in time. Given the state of our environment and given the pressure being put on traditional sources of energy and raw materials, decentralization, for these reasons alone, has become an economic imperative.

Further, the ecological and social problems which attend that overcrowding of population which is fostered by industrial concentration would be minimized or altogether eliminated. The costs of attempting to engineer away the pollution caused by our cars, the costs of renewing slums and cities, of sustaining those vast bureaucracies which aim at ameliorating the ills of the urban jobless and those which seek to prevent that crime which is itself the creature of the alienation, anonymity and misery of our urban centers, are real costs. In no accounting the economies of scale can they be overlooked.

Finally, there are aesthetic diseconomies. No city whose existence attended the rise of industrialization has the beauty of the older cities and towns which were saved the assault wrought by industrial concentration. No industrial area has been able to accommodate that mixture of city and country which keeps persons in contact with the beauty of unspoiled nature. Although aesthetic diseconomies are more difficult to measure and to build into our evaluations, they are as real and as important.

Taken together, the foregoing considerations make the idea of the democratic community more than a vain dream, for if large-size, over-concentration and hierarchical structures are inherently anti-ecological, decentralization becomes a practical imperative— if mankind is to enjoy the continued existence of this weary planet.

The economic decentralization required for the creation of democratic communities does not, of course, presuppose that economic units, agricultural or industrial, be adequate to satisfy the needs of a national or even regional market. To be sure, given the assumption that they do this, the agri-businesses of central California and the steel complexes of Pittsburgh must be large. But it is precisely this assumption which must he rejected. Economic units, including farms and   heavy industries  could be  scaled—without loss of economies properly understood—to the dimensions of a democratic community in which what  is produced largely suffices to meet the needs of the community. An aggregate of organic communities could and likely would cooperate with one another. but as within each community this cooperation would be free rather than forced.

There is next the question of the organization and control of economic activity by technocrats. Contemporary conventional wisdom suggests that autonomous technocratic control is another imperative of advanced economics, socialist or capitalist. If true, self-management by the community is impossible. But the required decentralization itself contributes the resolution of this question.

Where the output of complexes is aimed to satisfy a national or even international market, there are inevitable consequences: The mobilization of resources, including capital, raw  materials and labor, is complex: the organization of highly specialized functions and the organization of literally tens of thousands of persons engaged in research, production and distribution are extensive. Accordingly, in such conditions, there is a need for tables of organization and authoritative management. But as before, decentralization simplifies these demands. In a democratic community, of course, there will still be a need for experts of various kinds, for engineers, technicians, researches and planners, but in contrast to modern society, these persons, like the magistrates of the community will be responsible to the community and not to autonomous corporate boards or party-appointed economic ministers.

This observation is the decisive one. As noted, it is often held that with the emergence of technology and the expertise which it demands, there is a requirement that technocrats be left to make autonomous decisions relevant to the management of their complexes. But this misrepresents the crucial issue. Today those who control the means of production need not and do not “understand” the intricacies of the specialized functions of modern production. They need not themselves be engineers, computer experts or industrial chemists, all rolled into one. In making their decisions they must, of course, rely on specialized expertise, hut what is crucial is that they frame the goals which their decisions- reflect. An expert may tell his superior or those ultimately responsible for the operation that something is impossible, or too costly relative to the benefits to be accrued and sacrificed, or that there are certain restricted options which are technically or practically possible. Ascertaining these facts may well be left to the experts. But in a democratic community, the decision as to which option is desirable is a political decision to be decided by those who will frame the goals and who will be affected by the consequences. It will not, as to say, be decided by the private governments of the liberal democracies, the colonel’s ministers of military dictatorships, nor the party bureaucrats pseudo-socialism.

There is one final objection against the existence of a democratic community. It is the objection that even if the foregoing practical obstacles could be overcome, the masses are simply unfit to rule themselves.

There are two points to he made. First, if one means by “the masses” those who are apathetic because they are impotent, selfish, narrow and competitive because they are isolated, frivolous and biased because they are manipulated, then of course, “the masses” ought not to rule. But the question then becomes: if persons were not impotent, isolated and manipulated, could they then rule themselves wisely? This question is the important one and it cannot be settled by research on voting behavior or by surveys of “mass attitudes.

The point is a general one: It was not mass behavior or mass altitudes which called into existence oligarchies rule. On the contrary, it was the appropriation of power and the many forms of hierarchical social arrangements under which persons have lived which explain the reputed “incapacities” which make masses unfit to rule. Indeed, democracy is a peculiar and unique historical phenomenon. If anything, historical evidence suggests that where democracies have existed, in ancient Greece, perhaps in the townships of curly America, and during several brief periods of revolutionary transition in Spain and in France, the opportunity to live democratically forced a competence and responsibility which shocked the enemies of democracy. It is, of course, a sad fact that democracy is too easily betrayed by its presumed defenders, and a particularly bitter irony that spontaneous democratic movements have as often been squashed by those who preach democracy as by those who are its explicit foes.

These remarks suggest a second point. There is a lingering suspicion that the argument from incompetence from both left and  center is more ideological than factual. On this, the defenders of the conservative moral ideal, discussed in the previous chapter, are at least consistent. The conservative believes in maintaining oligarchy because he disvalues democracy.  For him every body politic contains a nursery, a ruled class and a ruling class, and for him persons ought to be neither free nor equal. But for those liberals and Leninists who espouse freedom as self-determination and who espouse the values of democracy as way of life, it should be clear that present arrangements are incompatible with the high moral ideals of their political rhetoric.

No attention has been paid in this chapter to the potential liberating features of a technology put to human use. Nor has attention been paid to the historical conditions and strategies which might move us in the direction of a democratic community.

One thing, however, seems certain: There can be no politics without vision. It is important to have some grasp of where we are, but this is hardly sufficient. We must also have some idea of the direction in which we ought to go and this requires vision. The problem of “here” to “there” is the problem of transforming the present into the yet undecided future. Until our vision is the vision of a democratic community, then as Bookchin has put the matter, “there can be no separation of the revolutionary process from the revolutionary goal.” So conceived, democracy is a process, a process of permanent revolution in which the forging of the self-determined individual goes hand in hand with the transformation of hierarchical institutions into democratic and self-managed institutions. As so conceived, the democratic community is not merely an abstract ideal but a mode of action, a praxis, in which persons discover their social selves as they struggle against that consciousness which binds them to the existing social order and which they reproduce in the form of everyday life. Concretely, this means, at least, widening and exploiting that breach in the contemporary consciousness which, however unclearly, feels impoverished by the very system it helps to sustain. It means resisting authoritarian structures and subjecting them to pressures commensurate with the democratic ideal. It means generating new forms of collective action which are democratic and which can serve both to challenge the existing order and to prefigure the existence of increasingly democratic forms of social and personal life. Other visions can be imposed from above, but the democratic community must grow as a process in which the dissolution of the centers of power is at the same time the process in which individuals gain power over their lives.