Proclamations for Popular Control
The State Versus Democracy
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal” — Jerry Rubin
The Dáil Versus Apathy
“Sure they’re all useless anyways”
In the lead up to the 2020 general election, this is what my mam said when I talked to her about voting, I’m sure you’ve heard similar. And you know what? She’s right.
There’s an inherent irony in the championing of democracy by western republics, in that these representative democracies don’t accurately represent the people.
For example, take cannabis legalisation in Ireland. Over 90% of the population supports medicinal usage[1] of cannabis, and yet there is no clear sign of this changing. Furthermore, the state-run trans healthcare system is in shambles[2], with no recognition of non-binary people[3], and hate crime legislation spends it’s time in an eternal holding pattern where it’s always “almost” here. Is it a coincidence that there are no trans TDs, with the only ethnic minority TD sitting in the Dáil being Tánaiste Leo Varadkar. This system is clearly broken, with more than 6% of the citizenry not identifying as white Irish, and a whole 18% of the population being made up of people from Irish Traveller, Black, Asian, European, etc.[4], where are all the Traveller, Black, Asian, Polish TDs? This rich assortment of people constituting 18% of the population gets represented by less than 1% of the Dáil: Leo Varadkar.
Definitions Versus Definitions
So what’s the ill here? How do we resolve this clear crisis in our democratic, governmental and political system?
First I want to set out some definitions; of politics, government, democracy and the state. This sounds like dull doddering about, but I assure you that by defining the words we use, we can more clearly discuss the issues at hand and come to equitable conclusions.
We’ll start with the easiest of these definitions, Democracy, which is simply defined as the process of (and philosophy behind) popular decision making[5].
Politics is also simply defined as the control over our community, and subsequent management of said community.
Despite the relative simplicity of this definition, I feel we should break it down a bit further and streamline it.
We can take “control and management” and package that into one recognisable word: “governing”.
The word “politics” itself is derived from polis, the greek word for “city”, and it’s use by the classical Athenians meant the direct governing of their city by its citizens[6].
So if we take all this and put it back together, using our modern outlook, we can take “politics” to mean the governing of our communities[7].
What is notable about this definition, as will become evident as we move into the next couple of definitions, is that it separates politics from the state and government. We’ll return to this in time.
We’re going to stick with the Marxist analysis of the definition of the state (we will be returning to Marxism and it’s applications), that being the state as a manifestation of class relations. Class breeds the state, and the state upholds the class hierarchies which created it.
Government is the ruling class which oversees the running of the state. A government is made up of statespeople[8] who perform statecraft. These statespeople come under many different titles: politicians, bureaucrats, presidents, dictators, royalty; but at the end of the day they all perform the same function while constituting a government: statecraft.
Representatives Versus People’s Politics
Upon the formation of a state, a government forcefully takes the role of politics. This role is taken from the people, who are perfectly capable of running their communities, and performed through this ruling class. On occasion, a state may allow a form of democracy to take place within the state between the people and the politics, with the government acting as a sort of intermediary between the people and politics.
This is what representative politics is, an intermediary democracy between the people and the politics. But why do we need this intermediary?
Proponents of this system usually claim that politics is simply too complicated to reasonably expect common people to participate in on a regular basis[9]. However, what this argument fails to see is that the complexity of politics is bourne from the existence of representative democracy and the capitalist state which it must uphold (this includes state capitalism).
It doesn’t take an entire class of people to rip our right to politics from our grasp and decide how our communities should be run for us, and moreover they don’t even do a good job of it!
Scandal after scandal, economic mishap after economic mishap, we can take to the streets, protest, shout from the top of our lungs demanding change, but ultimately, functionally, we’re sitting ducks until the next election cycle. Until then, we watch our communities fall into disrepair as we all know we’re not the government’s priority, and come the faithful day of an election, the same old story continues. People still starve on the streets, the town centre is derelict, still not represented. A vote for change is really just a vote for a fresh splash of lead paint.
I ask again, what is too complicated about running our communities? Why can’t we all gather, discuss, and then decide to legalise cannabis (or whatever the pressing issue happens to be that day?
We spend our lives in systems which are not our own: workplaces where we sell our labour for a fraction of it’s worth, apartments which we rent for the privilege to not freeze to death outside, and of course our communities, which are often run by people with no interest in listening.
So once more, why can’t we take power into our own hands?
Democracy is a virtue supposedly championed by these western representative states, so why can’t we democratise our workplaces, our land, and our communities? And this time we demand true democracy. For the people, from the people, by the people, politics taken back to where it belongs: the people.
Marxist-Leninism Versus Democracy
Well this sounds familiar: “Seize the means of production”! Maybe Marx was on to something with all that Socialism and Communism stuff…
Alas, this is where I make a much overdue return to the separation between politics and the state. Marx failed to make a distinction between politics and the state, likely due to the creation of his works coinciding with the rise of nationalism in Europe. Marx saw the state as the central focus of economic and political power, yet failed to demonstrate how a so-called “worker’s state” could viably exist, and so this gave rise to interpretations of Marx’s work, which itself in turn gave us Marxist-Leninism.
Leninism was the founding ideological force of the USSR, and so within the USSR under Lenin’s eye bred what Trotsky would go on to later call the “degenerated workers’ state,” under Stalin, which Trotsky claimed is the result of the workers’ democratic control being surrendered to a bureaucratic nightmare.
Trotsky was a firm believer in Leninism however, and failed to recognise that when workers aren’t in direct control on the system, the bureaucratic nightmare is inevitable.
This trend continues today, with Leninists and Trotskyists alike claiming it was the work of one man alone, Stalin, in manufacturing a brutal authoritarian regime without recognising that this regime was bred out of an already violent police state under Lenin, without recognising that the systems and mechanisms which allowed a demagogue to rise to power was itself created under the ideological guise of Lenin himself.
What these ideologies ultimately fail to recognise is that when the people are separated from the politics by a ruling class, no matter who this ruling class is made up of, be it workers, experts or a vanguard party, the state ultimately corrupts.
Any attempt at building a truly equal and democratic society must take this democracy seriously at every turn, from economics to politics. And so, to achieve this, any attempt at building this society must be anti-state in nature, as the state as an institution separates the people from the politics and from the means of production, and ultimately may allow for authoritarianism to take reign, as has happened in every attempt at a Marxist-Leninist society.
The State Versus Democracy
Politics has been separated from the people for so long, it might seem like representative democracy is the only form of governing our communities, but this simply is not true. We can make decisions for ourselves, and when we make the decisions, we will never not be properly represented, as we will represent ourselves.
True democracy, true politics, and true freedom as a result.
The state is directly opposed to democracy as it is built on the notion of separating the people from politics. If the only way to truly be represented is to represent ourselves, then the only way to be truly represented is without a state.
Notes Versus Sources
[1] Source: https://www.thejournal.ie/cannabis-ireland-poll-5437751-May2021/
[2] Sources: https://www.thejournal.ie/waiting-lists-for-trans-healthcare-in-ireland-5394843-Mar2021/ https://www.thejournal.ie/transgender-healthcare-crumlin-ireland-5351942-Feb2021/
[3] Source: https://www.teni.ie/gender-recognition/
[5] “popular decision making” might seem like three words carrying a lot of weight here, but it truly is that simple. By making decisions by popular demand, we are excising democracy. The concept of populism is something I want to explore more deeply, but right now it seems to me that populism begins to form at the final breaking point of representative politics, when the people sit at the precipice of demanding a more directly democratic system and the statespeople begin to rally against a “political elite” and claims to be capable of bringing politics back to the people. The ache here is that this can never happen through a national statesperson, as this would require the state and government to be actively dismantled.
[6] The definition of a “citizen” in the classical Greek city states, including in the mentioned Athens, was incredibly restrictive; excluding (to name but a few groups) women and a vast slave population. However, an argument can be made about how, while our current definition of a “citizen” is far less restrictive, it still aims to exclude vast swaths of people from participating in using the already restrictive ways of having a say in the running of government. That all said, the use of politics within Athens as a directly democratic society is still notable, if even to just a few.
[7] You can call these communities municipalities, neighbourhoods, towns, counties, etc., the concept is still the same, I’ll be largely using the broadest term, communities, when needs be.
[8] “Statespeople” is essentially what I’m using as a gender-neutral alternative to the far more patriarchal, yet far more often used, “statesman”. I admit that “statespeople”. I admit it’s much more of a mouthful, and can be confusing when first encountering without context (given the sheer dominance of “statesman”), hence why I felt this note was necessary.
[9] The irony of this argument, supposedly in favour of representative democracy, is that it flaunts the authoritarian contradictions within the system. It supposedly allows people to get on with their lives and vote when the time comes, but if we don’t attempt to try keep up with the actions of the government (or however many actions the government allows us to keep up with) how can the citizenry every manage to make an informed decision? Making this argument concedes that it is inherent to representative democracy to obfuscate and separate the people from making the decisions they want to make.
