from democracy to freedom

from democracy (democratic admin et al) to freedom

From Democracy To Freedom (2016) by crimethinc

via 36 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-from-democracy-to-freedom]

notes/quotes:

3

Democracy is the most universal political ideal of our day. George Bush invoked it to justify invading Iraq; Obama congratulated the rebels of Tahrir Square for bringing it to Egypt; Occupy Wall Street claimed to have distilled its pure form. From the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea to the autonomous region of Rojava, practically every government and popular movement calls itself democratic.

And what’s the cure for the problems with democracy? Everyone agrees: more democracy. Since the turn of the century, we’ve seen a spate of new movements promising to deliver real democracy, in contrast to ostensibly democratic institutions that they describe as exclusive, coercive, and alienating.

Is there a common thread that links all these different kinds of democracy? Which of them is the real one? Can any of them deliver the inclusivity and freedom we associate with the word?

Impelled by our own experiences in directly democratic movements, we’ve returned to these questions. Our conclusion is that the dramatic imbalances in economic and political power that have driven people into the streets from New York City to Sarajevo are not incidental defects in specific democracies, but structural features dating back to the origins of democracy itself; they appear in practically every example of democratic government through the ages. Representative democracy preserved all the bureaucratic apparatus that was originally invented to serve kings; direct democracy tends to recreate it on a smaller scale, even outside the formal structures of the state. Democracy is not the same as *self-determination..t

*aka: itch-in-the-soul

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

To be sure, many good things are regularly described as democratic. This is not an argument against discussions, collectives, assemblies, networks, federations, or working with people you don’t always agree with. The argument, rather, is that when we engage in those practices, if we understand what we are doing as democracy—as a form of participatory government rather than a collective practice of freedom—then sooner or later, we will recreate all the problems associated with less democratic forms of government. This goes for representative democracy and direct democracy alike, and even for consensus process..t

any form of democratic admin – a cancerous distraction

Rather than championing democratic procedures as an end in themselves, then, let’s return to the values that drew us to democracy in the first place: egalitarianism, inclusivity, the idea that each person should control her own destiny. If democracy is not the most effective way to actualize these, what is?.t

nothing we’ve tried to date has gotten to the root of problem

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

As fiercer and fiercer struggles rock today’s democracies, the stakes of this discussion keep getting higher. If we go on trying to replace the prevailing order with a more participatory version of the same thing, we’ll keep ending up right back where we started, and others who share our disillusionment will gravitate towards more authoritarian alternatives. We need a framework that can fulfill the promises democracy has betrayed..t

framework: as infra ness

In the following text, we examine the common threads that connect different forms of democracy, trace the development of democracy from its classical origins to its contemporary representative, direct, and consensus-based variants, and evaluate how democratic discourse and procedures serve the social movements that adopt them. Along the way, we outline what it would mean to seek freedom directly rather than through democratic rule.

This project is the result of years of transcontinental dialogue. To complement it, we are publishing case studies from participants in movements that have been promoted as models of direct democracy: 15M in Spain (2011), the occupation of Syntagma Square in Greece (2011), Occupy in the United States (2011–2012), the Slovenian uprising (2012–2013), the plenums in Bosnia (2014), and the Rojava revolution (2012–2016

4

What Is Democracy?

What is democracy, exactly? Most of the textbook definitions have to do with majority rule or government by elected representatives. On the other hand, a few radicals have argued that “real” democracy only takes place outside and against the state’s monopoly on power. Should we understand democracy as a set of decision-making procedures with a specific history, or as a general aspiration to egalitarian, inclusive, and participatory politics?

“What is democracy?”


“Well, I was never very clear on it, myself. Like every other kind of government, it’s got something to do with young men killing each other, I believe.”

– Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

To pin down the object of our critique, let’s start with the term itself. The word democracy derives from the ancient Greek dēmokratía, from dêmos “people” and krátos “power.” This formulation of rule by the people, which has resurfaced in Latin America as poder popular, begs the question: which people? And what kind of power?..t

need to try something sans any form of people telling other people what to do

These root words, demos and kratos, suggest two common denominators of all democracy: a way of determining who participates in the decision-making, and a way of enforcing decisions. Citizenship, in other words, and policing. These are the essentials of democracy;..t they are what make it a form of government. Anything short of that is more properly described as anarchy—the absence of government, from the Greek an- “without” and arkhos “ruler.”

again.. need to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

Common denominators of democracy:

  • a way of determining who participates in making decisions
    (demos)
  • a way of enforcing decisions
    (kratos)
  • a space of legitimate decision-making
    (polis)
  • and the resources that sustain it
    (    oikos)

oikos ness we need: oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space

Who qualifies as demos? Some have argued that etymologically, demos never meant all people, but only particular social classes. Even as its partisans have trumpeted its supposed inclusivity, in practice democracy has always demanded a way of distinguishing between included and excluded. That could be status in the legislature, voting rights, citizenship, membership, race, gender, age, or participation in street assemblies; but in every form of democracy, for there to be legitimate decisions, there have to be formal conditions of legitimacy, and a defined group of people who meet them..t

democratic admin actually steeped in us & them ness.. 99 and 1 ness et al

and again.. legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

5

In this regard, democracy institutionalizes the provincial, chauvinist character of its Greek origins, at the same time as it seemingly offers a model that could involve all the world. This is why democracy has proven so compatible with nationalism and the state; it presupposes the Other, who is not accorded the same rights or political agency.

The focus on inclusion and exclusion is clear enough at the dawn of modern democracy in Rousseau’s influential Of the Social Contract, in which he emphasizes that there is no contradiction between democracy and slavery. The more “evildoers” are in chains, he suggests, the more perfect the freedom of the citizens. Freedom for the wolf is death for the lamb, as Isaiah Berlin later put it. The zero-sum conception of freedom expressed in this metaphor is the foundation of the discourse of rights granted and protected by the state. In other words: for citizens to be free, the state must possess ultimate authority and the capacity to exercise total control. The state seeks to produce sheep, reserving the position of wolf for itself.

By contrast, if we understand freedom as cumulative, the freedom of one person becomes the freedom of all: it is not simply a question of being protected by the authorities, but of intersecting with each other in a way that maximizes the possibilities for everyone. In this framework, the more that coercive force is centralized, the less freedom there can be. This way of conceiving freedom is social rather than individualistic: it approaches liberty as a collectively produced relationship to our potential, not a static bubble of private rights.[1]

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

endnote 1: “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of others, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” –Mikhail Bakunin

none of us are free ness

Let’s turn to the other root, kratos. Democracy shares this suffix with aristocracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, plutocracy, and technocracy. Each of these terms describes government by some subset of society, but they all share a common logic. That common thread is kratos, power.

What kind of power? Let’s consult the ancient Greeks once more.

The sort of force personified by Kratos is what democracy has in common with autocracy and every other form of rule. They share the institutions of coercion: the legal apparatus, the police, and the military, all of which preceded democracy and have repeatedly outlived it. These are the tools “made for any tyrant’s acts,” whether the tyrant at the helm is a king, a class of bureaucrats, or “the people” themselves. “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people,” as Oscar Wilde put it. Mu’ammer al Gaddafi echoed this approvingly a century later, without irony: “Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.”..t

need a nother way sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

In modern-day Greek, kratos is simply the word for state. To understand democracy, we have to look closer at government itself.

7

Monopolizing Legitimacy

As a form of government, democracy offers a way to produce a single order out of a cacophony of desires, absorbing the resources and activities of the minority into policies dictated by the majority. In any democracy, there is a legitimate space of decision-making, distinct from the rest of life. It could be a congress in a parliament building, or a general assembly on a sidewalk, or an app soliciting votes via iPhone. In every case, it is not our immediate needs and desires that are the ultimate source of legitimacy, but a particular decision-making process and protocol..t In a state, this is called “the rule of law,” though the principle does not necessarily require a formal legal system.

need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

This is the essence of government: decisions made in one space determine what can take place in all other spaces. The result is alienation—the friction between what is decided and what is lived.

Democracy promises to solve this problem by incorporating everyone into the space of decision-making: the rule of all by all. “The citizens of a democracy submit to the law because they recognize that, however indirectly, they are submitting to themselves as makers of the law.” But if all those decisions were actually made by the people they impact, there would be no need for a means of enforcing them.

What protects the minorities in this winner-take-all system? Advocates of democracy explain that minorities will be protected by institutional provisions—“checks and balances.” In other words, the same structure that holds power over them is supposed to protect them from itself.

How much do you buy into the idea that the democratic process should trump your own conscience and values?

This is a problem for anyone who wants to make conformity with the law or with the will of the majority into the final arbiter of legitimacy.

“Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?”

– Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

only if sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

ie: imagine if we ness

9

The Original Democracy

Greater equality among male citizens apparently meant greater solidarity against women and foreigners. The space of participatory politics was a gated community.

We can map the boundaries of this gated community in the Athenian opposition between public and private—between polis and oikos. The polis, the Greek city-state, was a space of public discourse where citizens interacted as equals. By contrast, the oikos, the household, was a hierarchical space in which male property owners ruled supreme—a zone outside the purview of the political, yet serving as its foundation. In this dichotomy, the oikos represents everything that provides the resources that sustain politics, yet is taken for granted as preceding and therefore outside it.

These categories remain with us today. The words “politics” (“the affairs of the city”) and “police” (“the administration of the city”) come from polis, while “economy” (“the management of the household”) and “ecology” (“the study of the household”) derive from oikos.

police ness and oikos ness..

if we legit try ie: bachelard oikos law .. police/coercion/people telling other people what to do et al.. becomes irrelevant s

if we try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. we see the dance of individual and whole/community

Democracy is still premised on this division. As long as there is a political distinction between public and private, everything from the household (the gendered space of intimacy that sustains the prevailing order with invisible and unpaid labor) to entire continents and peoples (like Africa during the colonial period—or even blackness itself) may be relegated outside the sphere of politics.

Fortunately, ancient Athens is not the only reference point for egalitarian decision-making..t A cursory survey of other societies reveals plenty of other examples, many of which are not predicated on exclusivity or coercion. But should we understand these as democracies, too?

that we are so obsessed with decision making is a sign of our sickness.. we need to let go of that assumption.. and try curiosity over decision making (aka: itch-in-the-soul).. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

“Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”

– David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

fragments of an anarchist anthropology

10

In his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber takes his colleagues to task for identifying Athens as the origin of democracy; he surmises that the Iroquois, Berber, Sulawezi, or Tallensi models do not receive as much attention simply because none of them center around voting. On one hand, Graeber is right to direct our attention to societies that focus on building consensus rather than practicing coercion: many of these embody the best values associated with democracy much more than ancient Athens did. On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense for us to label these examples truly democratic while questioning the democratic credentials of the Greeks who invented the term. This is still ethnocentricism: affirming the value of non-Western examples by granting them honorary status in our own admittedly inferior Western paradigm. Instead, let’s concede that democracy, as a specific historical practice dating from Sparta and Athens and emulated worldwide, has not lived up to the standard set by many of these other societies, and it does not make sense to describe them as democratic. It would be more responsible, and more precise, to describe and honor them in their own terms.

rather.. both same song.. neither getting to the root of problem

That leaves us with Athens as the original democracy, after all. What if Athens became so influential not because of how free it was, but because of how it harnessed participatory politics to the power of the state? At the time, most societies throughout human history had been stateless; some were hierarchical, others were horizontal, but no stateless society had the centralized power of kratos. The states that existed, by contrast, were hardly egalitarian. The Athenians innovated a hybrid format in which horizontality coincided with exclusion and coercion. If you take it for granted that the state is desirable or at least inevitable, this sounds appealing. But if the state is the root of the problem, then the slavery and patriarchy of ancient Athens were not early irregularities in the democratic model, but indications of the power imbalances coded into its DNA from the beginning.

11

Representative Democracy—A Market for Power

“.. the same State functions and attitudes have been preserved essentially unchanged.”

– Randolph Bourne, The State

12

Laws, courts, prisons, intelligence agencies, tax collectors, armies, police—most of the instruments of coercive power that we consider oppressive in a monarchy or a dictatorship operate the same way in a democracy. Yet when we’re permitted to cast ballots about who supervises them, we’re supposed to regard them as ours, even when they’re used against us. This is the great achievement of two and a half centuries of democratic revolutions: instead of abolishing the means by which kings governed, they rendered those means popular.

“A Constituent Assembly is the means used by the privileged classes, when a dictatorship is not possible, either to prevent a revolution, or, when a revolution has already broken out, to stop its progress with the excuse of legalizing it, and to take back as much as possible of the gains that the people had made during the insurrectional period.”

– Errico Malatesta, “Against the Constituent Assembly as against the Dictatorship”

The transfer of power from rulers to assemblies has served to prematurely halt revolutionary movements ever since the American Revolution. Rather than making the changes they sought via direct action, the rebels entrusted that task to their new representatives at the helm of the state—only to see their dreams betrayed.

The state is powerful indeed, but one thing it cannot do is deliver freedom to its subjects. It cannot, because it derives its very being from their subjection. It can subject others, it can commandeer and concentrate resources, it can impose dues and duties, it can dole out rights and concessions—the consolation prizes of the governed—but it cannot offer self-determination. Kratos can dominate, but it cannot liberate.

the real problem is not the intentions of politicians; it is the apparatus of the state itself.

Competing for the right to direct the coercive power of the state, the contestants never question the value of the state itself, even if in practice they only find themselves on the receiving end of its force. Representative democracy offers a pressure valve: when people are dissatisfied, they set their sights on the next elections, taking the state itself for granted. Indeed, if you want to put a stop to corporate profiteering or environmental devastation, isn’t the state the only instrument powerful enough to accomplish that? Never mind that it was state that established the conditions in which those are possible in the first place.

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.”..t

– Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

need to try a nother way

13

The dollar and the ballot are both mechanisms for distributing power hierarchically in a way that takes pressure off the hierarchies themselves.. *opposition tends to reenergize the political system from within rather than threatening it..t

*any form of re ness does that

15

On one hand, if direct democracy is just a more participatory and time-consuming way to pilot the state, it might offer us more say in the details of government, but it will preserve the centralization of power that is inherent in it. 

One of the most robust versions of that vision is digital democracy, or e-democracy, promoted by groups like the Pirate Party. The Pirate Party has already been incorporated into the existing political system; but in theory, we can imagine a population linked through digital technology, *making all the decisions regarding their society via majority vote in real time. In such an order, majoritarian government would gain a practically irresistible legitimacy; yet the greatest power would likely be concentrated in the hands of the technocrats who administered the system. Coding the algorithms that determined which information and which questions came to the fore, they would shape the conceptual frameworks of the participants a thousand times more invasively than election-year advertising does today.

*thinking legit free people wouldn’t be about decision making et al.. need to facil curiosity over decision making

– Deserting the Digital Utopia

“The digital project of reducing the world to representation converges with the program of electoral democracy, in which only representatives acting through the prescribed channels may exercise power. Both set themselves against all that is incomputable and irreducible, fitting humanity to a Procrustean bed. Fused as electronic democracy, they would present the opportunity to vote on a vast array of minutia, while rendering the infrastructure itself unquestionable—the more participatory a system is, the more ‘legitimate.’”

oof

16

But even if such a system could be made to work perfectly—do we want to retain centralized majoritarian rule in the first place? *The mere fact of being participatory does not make a political process any less coercive..t As long as the majority has the capacity to force its decisions on the minority, we are talking about a system identical in spirit with the one that governs the US today—a system that would also require prisons, police, and tax collectors, or else other ways to perform the same functions.

*seat at the table ness as cancerous distraction

*Real freedom is not a question of how participatory the process of answering questions is, but of the extent to which we can frame the questions ourselves—and whether we can stop others from imposing their answers on us..t The institutions that operate under a dictatorship or an elected government are no less oppressive when they are employed directly by a majority without the mediation of representatives. **In the final analysis, even the most directly democratic state is better at concentrating power than maximizing freedom..t

*huge huge huge

ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it

ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition

17

When we identify what we are doing *when we oppose the state as the practice of democracy, we set the stage for our efforts to be reabsorbed into larger representational structures..t Democracy is not just a way of managing the apparatus of government, but also of regenerating and legitimizing it. Candidates, parties, regimes, and even the form of government can be swapped out from time to time when it becomes clear that they cannot solve the problems of their constituents. In this way, **government itself—the source of at least some of those problems—is able to persist. Direct democracy is just the latest way to rebrand it.

*yes yes.. any form of re ness ends up in same song.. so cancerous distraction

**any form of democratic admin

endnote 7: The objection that the democracies that govern the world today aren’t real democracies is a variant of the classic “No true Scotsman” fallacy. If, upon investigation, it turns out that not a single existing democracy lives up to what you mean by the word, you might need a different expression for what you are trying to describe. This is like communists who, confronted with all the repressive communist regimes of the 20th century, protest that not a single one of them was properly communist. When an idea is so difficult to implement that millions of people equipped with a considerable portion of the resources of humanity and doing their best across a period of centuries can’t produce a single working model, it’s time to go back to the drawing board..t Give anarchists a tenth of the opportunities Marxists and democrats have had, and then we may speak about whether anarchy works!

needs to be via mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. no prep.. no train

ie: org around a problem deep enough (aka: org around legit needs) to resonate w/8b today.. via a mechanism simple enough (aka: tech as it could be) to be accessible/usable to 8b today.. and an ecosystem open enough (aka: sans any form of m\a\p) to set/keep 8b legit free

18

Those who try to retain government without the state are likely to end up with something like the state by another name.

same song ness

The important distinction is not between democracy and the state, then, but between government and self-determination. Government is the exercise of authority over a given space or polity: whether the process is dictatorial or participatory, the end result is the imposition of control. By contrast, self-determination means disposing of one’s potential on one’s own terms: when people engage in it together, they are not ruling each other, but fostering cumulative autonomy. *Freely made agreements require no enforcement; systems that concentrate legitimacy in a single institution or decision-making process always do.

*huge.. decision making (no matter how free/legit it seems) is unmooring us

It is strange to use the word democracy for the idea that the state is inherently undesirable. The proper word for that idea is anarchism. Anarchism opposes all exclusion and domination in favor of the radical decentralization of power structures, *decision-making processes, and notions of legitimacy. It is not a matter of governing in a completely participatory manner, but of **making it impossible to impose any form of rule..t

*dang.. see.. your ‘anarchism’ too is same song

**aka:  sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

19

If the common denominators of democratic government are citizenship and policing—demos and kratos—the most radical democracy would expand those categories to include the whole world: universal citizenship, community policing. In the ideal democratic society, every person would be a citizen, and every citizen would be a policeman

oi.. not ideal.. not diff.. citizenry ness and police ness.. cancerous distraction

*At the furthest extreme of this logic, majority rule would mean rule by consensus: not the rule of the majority, but unanimous rule. The closer we get to unanimity, the more legitimate government is perceived to be—so wouldn’t **rule by consensus be the most legitimate government of all? Then, finally, there would be no need for anyone to play the role of the police..t

*oi oi .. same song

**oi.. public consensus always oppresses someone(s).. so still a form of people telling other people what to do

“In the strict sense of the term, there has never been a true democracy, and there never will be… One can hardly imagine that all the people would sit permanently in an assembly to deal with public affairs.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract

Obviously, this is impossible. But it’s worth reflecting on what sort of utopia is implied by idealizing direct democracy as a form of government. Imagine the kind of totalitarianism it would take to produce enough cohesion to govern a society via consensus process—to get everyone to agree. Talk about reducing things to the lowest common denominator! If the alternative to coercion is to abolish disagreement, surely there must be a third path..t

ie: the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. only way to see the dance dance

*Perhaps the answer is that the structures of decision-making must be decentralized as well as consensus-based, so that universal agreement is unnecessary. This is a step in the right direction, but it introduces new questions. **How should people be divided into polities? What dictates the jurisdiction of an assembly or the scope of the decisions it can make? Who determines which assemblies a person may participate in, or who is most affected by a given decision? How are conflicts between assemblies resolved? The answers to these questions will either institutionalize a set of rules governing legitimacy, or prioritize voluntary forms of association. In the former case, the rules will likely ossify over time, as people refer to protocol to resolve disputes. In the latter case, the structures of decision-making will continuously shift, fracture, clash, and re-emerge in organic processes that can hardly be described as government. ***When the participants in a decision-making process are free to withdraw from it or engage in activity that contradicts the decisions, then what is taking place is not government—it is simply conversation.

*would still be same song.. need to try/see curiosity over decision making

again.. how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

**all irrelevant s if legit free.. so all cancerous distractions

***perhaps whalespeak.. but still too steeped in govt ness to be convo of legit free people

“Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.”

? not sure what ‘stop people talking’ means

– Clement Attlee, UK Prime Minister, 1957

20

If everyone were free to organize with others on a purely voluntary basis, that would be the best way to generate social forms that are truly in the interests of the participants: for as soon as a structure was not working for everyone involved, they would have to refine or replace it. This approach won’t bring all of society into consensus, but it is the only way to guarantee that consensus is meaningful and desirable when it does arise.

we need to try itch-in-the-soul ness over voluntary (always compliance) ness

ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

22

There are no easy fixes for this problem.

red flags doing it wrong.. problem not deep enough.. et al.. ie: takes a lot of work ness

23

Recall how grassroots women’s shelters founded in the 1970s were professionalized through state funding to such an extent that by the 1990s, the women who had founded them could never have qualified for entry-level positions in them.

25

Without a legitimate central governing body, what mechanism could stop people from acting oppressively?

ie: tech as it could be.. to augment interconnectedness

27

Democratic Obstacles to Liberation

Barring war or miracle, the legitimacy of every constituted government is always eroding; it can only erode. Whatever the state promises, nothing can compensate for having to cede control of our lives. Every specific grievance underscores this systemic problem, though we rarely see the forest for the trees.

This is where democracy comes in: another election, another government, another cycle of optimism and disappointment.

aka: cancerous distraction

“Democracy is a great way of assuring the legitimacy of the government, even when it does a bad job of delivering what the public wants. In a functioning democracy, mass protests challenge the rulers. They don’t challenge the fundamental nature of the state’s political system.”

protest ness

– Noah Feldman, “Tunisia’s Protests Are Different This Time”

Considering how much power the market and the government wield over us, it’s tempting indeed to imagine that we could somehow turn the tables and govern them. Even those who do not believe that it is possible for the people to rule the government usually end up governing the one thing that is left to them—their resistance to it. Approaching protest movements as experiments in direct democracy, they set out to prefigure the structures of a more democratic world.

But what if prefiguring democracy is part of the problem? That would explain why so few of these movements have been able to mount an irreconcilable opposition to the structures that they formed to oppose. With the arguable exceptions of Chiapas and Rojava, all of them have been defeated (Occupy), reintegrated into the functioning of the prevailing government (Syriza, Podemos), or, worse still, have overthrown and replaced that government without achieving any real change in society (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine).

When a movement seeks to legitimize itself on the basis of the same principles as state democracy, it ends up trying to beat the state at its own game. Even if it succeeds, the reward for victory is to be coopted and institutionalized—whether within the existing structures of government or by reinventing them anew. Thus movements that begin as revolts against the state end up recreating it.

any form of re ness as cancerous distraction

“Occasionally you rebel, but it’s only ever just to start doing the same thing again from scratch.”..t

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

– Albert Libertad, “Voters: You Are the Real Criminals”

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If we limit our movements to what the majority of participants can agree on in advance, we may not be able to get them off the ground in the first place. When much of the population has accepted the legitimacy of the government and its laws, most people don’t feel entitled to do anything that could challenge the existing power structure, no matter how badly it treats them. Consequently, a movement that makes decisions by majority vote or consensus may have difficulty agreeing to utilize any but the most symbolic tactics. Can you imagine the residents of Ferguson, Missouri holding a consensus meeting to decide whether to burn the QuikTrip store and fight off the police? And yet those were the actions that sparked what came to be known as the Black Lives Matter movement. People usually have to experience something new to be open to it; it is a mistake to confine an entire movement to what is already familiar to the majority of participants..t

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If we want to foster inclusivity and self-determination, it is not enough to propagate the rhetoric and procedures of participatory democracy. We need to spread a framework that opposes the state and other forms of hierarchical power in and of themselves.

ie: a sabbatical ish transition

Such movements usually focus on “corruption,” implying that the system would work just fine if only the right people were in power.

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The one sure way to avoid cooptation, manipulation, and opportunism is to refuse to legitimize any form of rule.. When people solve their problems and meet their needs directly through flexible, horizontal, decentralized structures, there are no leaders to corrupt, no formal structures to ossify, no single process to hijack. Do away with the concentrations of power and those who wish to seize power can get no purchase on society. An ungovernable people will likely have to defend itself against would-be tyrants, but it will never put its own strength behind their efforts to rule.

aka: sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do.. but focus needs to be on the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. not on ‘refusing’ ness and ‘legitmizing’ ness.. those will be cancerous distractions

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Towards Freedom: Points of Departure

The classic defense of democracy is that it is the worst form of government—except for all the others. But if government itself is the problem, we have to go back to the drawing board.

Reimagining humanity without government is an ambitious project;..t two centuries of anarchist theory only scratch the surface. For the purposes of this analysis, we’ll conclude with a few basic values that could guide us beyond democracy, and a few general proposals for how to understand what we might do instead of governing. Most of the work remains to be done.

mostly because actually doing it would be too simple to be believable.. we’ve been trained to believe in takes a lot of work ness

– Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive!

“Anarchism represents not the most radical form of democracy, but an altogether different paradigm of collective action.”

not so if still any form of m\a\p

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Where Thomas Paine wanted to enthrone the law as king, where Rousseau theorized the social contract and more recent enthusiasts of capitalism über alles dream of a society based on contracts alone, we counter that when relations are truly in the best interests of all participants, there is no need for laws or contracts..t

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Creating Spaces of Encounter

*In place of formal sites of centralized decision-making, we propose a variety of spaces of encounter where people may open themselves to each other’s influence and find others who share their priorities..t Encounter means mutual transformation: establishing common points of reference, common **concerns. The space of encounter is not a representative body vested with the authority to make decisions for others, nor a governing body employing majority rule or consensus. ***It is an opportunity for people to experiment with acting in different configurations on a voluntary basis.

*again.. how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..

today we can go infinitely deeper.. ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)

**rather.. common itch-in-the-soul ness

***voluntary ness is still cancerous distraction

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Cultivating Collectivity, Preserving Difference

If no institution, contract, or law should be able to dictate our decisions, how do we agree on what responsibilities we have towards each other?

we don’t.. we just trust that if we are legit free.. legit undisturbed.. that we will dance

responsibility ness et al

The question is how to foster both responsibility and autonomy at every order of scale.

the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness

[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]

Resolving conflicts

Sometimes dividing into separate groups isn’t enough to resolve conflicts. To dispense with centralized coercion, we have to come up with new ways of addressing strife.

do we?.. would we? .. i don’t think so if we’re legit free.. that’s whalespeak

One of the most basic functions of democracy is to offer a way of concluding disputes. Voting, courts, and police all serve to decide conflicts without necessarily resolving them; the rule of law effectively imposes a winner-take-all model for addressing differences.

that’s why.. any form of democratic admin a cancerous distraction

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It isn’t necessary to get everyone to agree, but we have to find ways to differ that do not produce hierarchies, oppression, pointless antagonism. The first step down this road is to remove the incentives that the state offers not to resolve conflict.

there’s a nother way.. one sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

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From Democracy to Freedom

Let’s return to the high point of the uprisings. Thousands of us flood into the streets, finding each other in new formations that offer an unfamiliar and exhilarating sense of agency. Suddenly everything intersects: words and deeds, ideas and sensations, personal stories and world events. Certainty—finally, we feel at home—and uncertainty: finally, an open horizon. Together, we discover ourselves capable of things we never imagined.

to (virus) leap et al

What is beautiful about such moments transcends any political system. The conflicts are as essential as the flashes of unexpected consensus. This is not the functioning of democracy, but the experience of freedom—of collectively taking our destinies in our hands. No set of procedures could institutionalize this. It is a prize we must wrest from the jaws of habit and history *again and again.

*hardt revolution law et al

Next time a window of opportunity opens, rather than reinventing “real democracy” yet again, let our goal be freedom, freedom itself..t

legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do

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