“There is No Democracy Without Direct Democracy”

The organization “The General Strike” aspires to mobilize approximately 11 million people committed to coordinating a massive work stoppage. The magic number of 11 million equals 3.5 percent of the US population – a figure that organizers argue will be large enough to transform the US power structure and give workers the agency to shape the national destiny with heretofore unprecedented scope. But what would the strike stand for? There is no set of demands, no concrete goal elucidated on “The General Strike” website. The values of “decentralization, dissent and diversity” are listed along with the rather abstract hope to “dismantle the master’s house.” Is there a way to offer a concrete means to dismantle the master’s house, to name the actual tool of deconstruction?

The first thought that comes to mind is that a general strike would be aimed at Trump – either demanding that he be removed or forced to observe legal and constitutional constraints. It should be obvious, however, that no legal guardrails prevented Trump from seizing complete control of the government in the first place. US political institutions have allowed him and his thugs to eagerly chip away at a welter of legal protections. Trump has carried out illegal arrests and deportations and there isn’t a reasonable person among us who can’t imagine themselves or their neighbors being taken into custody and locked in detention with no due process, no habeas corpus, no access to legal services, and only the predatory intentions of the Trump system to decide their fate. Opposing Trump is a worthy thing to do, but removing him would do nothing to dismantle the master’s house. The idea that Trump is a tumor on an otherwise healthy organism is obviously nonsensical. Trump is the ultimate Darwinian product of the primordial political soup of American politics.

We might assume that only so called undocumented immigrants will be Trump’s target, but once people succumb to the notion that limited persecution ought to bring a sigh of relief the gig is up. Fascism has been notoriously wide ranging and easily provoked, targeting, in its various nationalist regimes across recent history, journalists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Socialists, intellectuals, sexual minorities, immigrants, trade unionists, various ethnicities, alcoholics, the mentally ill, the handicapped, the unemployed and the incarcerated. The wholesale protection of all victims of fascist scapegoating ought to be central to the organization of future strikes, boycotts and protests but a piecemeal assemblage of grievances on behalf of each targeted group does not truly address the scope of our national distress. The overarching, existential anxiety of our times revolves around power, and the disenfranchised status of ordinary people. Any movement that fails to confront the nexus between so called representative democracy and inequity is sure to fail.

There have been two broad categories of political resistance during my lifetime – those with specific, clear goals and narrative consistency, and those that have been decentralized, amorphous, spontaneous and short lived. The civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement belong to the former, the occupy movement and the George Floyd protests belong to the latter. The civil rights movement sought to secure voting rights, integration and institutional protections against racist violence, while the anti-Vietnam War movement simply protested colonial military intervention and atrocities in Southeast Asia. The “Occupy” and George Floyd actions featured “bottom up” passion, huge numbers in the street, but both lacked a sustainable and clear vision. This begs the question – can a political movement have both a unifying aspiration and decentralized, grass roots passion? If social protest is the means to oppose Trump’s fascism, how can such a movement connect to larger themes? Any resistance premised on the backward aspiration to reinstall the Democratic Party to its former stature will achieve absolutely nothing. The nostalgia for old school neocons like Reagan or the Bush family will offend most potential activists.

In some vague and uncertain way, most anti-Trump protesters have the idea that ordinary people ought to guide political policy, but the term “direct democracy” has been so unfailingly suppressed in public consciousness (particularly in the US) that the vast majority of us have never even heard of it. We know that our system is rotten, corrupt and despised, but we collectively share a fog of ignorance about how to replace it. Here is George Monbiot on the issue of direct democracy:

“An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.”

Two strains of toxic, destructive corruption have been baked into electoral/representative “democracy” – the certainty that the vast majority of elected officials will either come from or represent the interests of the privileged class, and the understanding that seekers of elective positions are disproportionately comprised of individuals with narcissistic, anti-social tendencies. The former can be easily confirmed – some 50% of US congressional members hold Ivy League diplomas – while the latter is the subject matter for a growing body of academic research.

Several years before Trump emerged as a political force, Harvard psychologist, Martha Stout, offered this warning:

“Yes, politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”

The reason that politics exerts such magnetic force upon sociopaths remains speculative, but clearly few fields offer ambitious, self-obsessed seekers so much attention, power, wealth and admiration as politics – a field making relatively few demands upon its luminaries. Politics requires little self-discipline and only modest talent. Those burdened with monstrous egos, but lacking the wherewithal to be a concert pianist or an NBA point guard have a platform for public adulation generally reserved for those blessed with insane gifts. The combination of ambition and mediocrity creates a hell storm – a petri dish to nourish “the banality of evil.”

We now confront apocalyptic climate conditions in which fate rests in the hands of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer and their appointees. We are locked in an Orwellian loop of absurdity in which those tasked with the life or death struggle to lower greenhouse gasses receive campaign donations from Chevron. An utter lack of principle is a virtual requirement for high office, and as long as we elect leaders via the ballot, sociopaths will eagerly trade their humanity for power.

Monbiot makes the argument that direct democracy would transfer the locus of power and influence from oligarchs and corporatists to the masses, but he does not address the narrative issues. It has been possible to mobilize public passion against war, police violence, climate, and even against the amorphous transgressions of Wall Street, but how do masses of people organize and take action on behalf of an abstraction? Can people be outraged and inspired to demand that democracy be redefined and the structures of government be dismantled and recreated? Can people gather in the streets with the understanding that representative democracy is the cause of war, police violence, environmental collapse and poverty? Indeed, one ought to see representative democracy as a front for capitalism. The issue confronting us is overwhelmingly one of narrative inadequacy. People are outraged by contingencies, but largely unaware of the root causes. We gather in enormous numbers to protest police brutality, but never offer a whimper of distress about the political structures that enable police violence.

Direct democracy has never been a rallying cry for mass activism, nor has it had significant support among leftists. This may be changing according to South African Marxist sociologist, Michelle Williams, who has written that direct democracy has become a central focus among some factions within Marxism. Williams writes:

“While democracy is a contested concept that often incorporates very different notions of social change and control, with various actors and processes, twentieth century liberals and Marxists tended to focus on representative and vanguard democracy respectively, largely ignoring the importance of direct and participatory democracy.2 Bertrand Russell (1946: 14) pithily captured the central distinction: the Western understanding of democracy ‘is that it consists in the rule of the majority; the Russian view is that it consists in the interests of the majority’. Neither tradition emphasised government by the people. The bifurcation of democracy into representative democracy versus vanguard democracy severely limited the debate on democracy in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, political movements are attempting to transcend this dichotomous view of democracy and have placed direct and participatory democracy at the centre of alternative, emancipatory visions of the future through meaningful deliberation and participation in political and economic life by ordinary citizens.”

There are many theories and models of direct democracy, but the unifying principle animating it requires that common, ordinary people, rather than elected proxies, make all important decisions. This might involve public referendums to decide whether or not to legalize abortion, or it might require that ordinary citizens, selected by lottery, form citizens’ assemblies authorized to make important decisions (for example) on medical care, low income housing and military budgeting. A deliberative body chosen by lottery (sortition) would manifest the inherent diversity of the public – people living in tent cities, members of sexual minorities, people saddled with medical debt, factory laborers, teachers, artists, musicians and palm readers would all have the same access to the deliberative process as a billionaire’s son with a Harvard law degree. It goes without saying that tokenism, identity politics and racism would be washed away within systems of direct democracy. The media, relieved of the mandate to brainwash voters, might be free to pursue journalistic principles of honesty. The Ivy League, no longer tasked with turning overly privileged prep school grads into political leaders would be free to…uh…educate students. The serendipitous ripples of direct democracy would be unimaginably liberating.

While direct democracy may not have the narrative ballast currently needed to inspire passionate action in the street, it is not wholly without public support. Extinction Rebellion has demanded that climate mitigation policy be delegated to a “citizens’ assembly” chosen via sortition. The Sortition Foundation of the UK has proposed that The House of Lords be replaced with a House of Citizens chosen by random selection. George Monbiot references Belgium author, David Van Reybrouck’s suggestion that both The House of Lords and the US senate (a relic of slavery, giving disproportionate power to reactionary, rural communities) be replaced by “people’s assemblies.”

Marxist economist, Richard Wolff – reflecting Michelle William’s assertion that direct democracy has become a hot topic in Marxism’s renewal – argues that the relationship between a communist factory employer and a factory worker is, like the capitalist/worker dichotomy, inherently undemocratic:

“It follows that socialists’ self-criticism—that actually existing socialist systems fell short of their standard of real democracy—may be linked crucially to those systems’ retention of the employer-employee relationship at their economic core.”

Wolff proposes that factories be organized around principles of classlessness – that workers themselves should make all the decisions regarding working conditions and production. The model of the “worker’s co-op,” as Wolff envisions it, takes two classes and compresses it into one. Wolff has argued that real democracy does not exist if the work place is sequestered as an exceptional space run by authoritarian values.

This brings me full circle to the potential power of “The General Strike.” If 11 million people are to mobilize and make demands, what demand truly addresses the issue of fascism, war, inequality, poverty, medical neglect, and lack of housing. A revolutionary movement has to have a revolutionary goal – the overthrow of the corrupt, rotten structures of end stage capitalism and the replacement of decayed structures with new, responsive institutions. The organizers of The General Strike boldly proclaim the intention to “dismantle the master’s house”, but what will they replace it with?

If direct democracy, sortition and people’s deliberative assemblies do not seem to be sexy enough to inspire mass protest, then it becomes the task of writers on the left to give these concepts a narrative makeover. I recall marching at anti-war rallies in the 1960’s and chanting “power to the people.” Little did I know in my youth that political ideas with roots in ancient Athens had addressed that chant with specific, philosophical arguments.