Report on the Anti-Democracy Agenda Symposium 2010: Setting the example for the debate of the future

The first event held by the Geneva-based Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS) in conjunction with its "Anti-Democracy Agenda" blog, the Anti-Democracy Agenda Symposium 2010, took place to great acclaim on 8 and 9 November 2010 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich.

Keynotes to the symposium were contributed by Professor Doh Chull Shin, a native of Korea, director of the Korea Democracy Barometer, and core partner in the Asian Barometer Survey (an ongoing research project monitoring democratization in Asian countries), who is based in the Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri, a leading public research university in the United States, and Professor Kuldip Singh, Head of the Department of Political Science at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, India.

The Anti-Democracy Agenda Symposium 2010 attracted twelve papers submitted by participants from institutions such as the National University of Singapore, the University of the Philippines, the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal), Ankara University (Turkey), the University of the Punjab, Quaid-i-Azam University (both Pakistan), the University of Central Oklahoma (USA), and the Islamic Azad University (Iran). Other countries and territories of origin or residence represented include Palestine, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the UK, Switzerland, Nigeria, Korea, and India.

Participants – from doctoral candidates to full professors – came from the disciplines of Political Science, Philosophy, Political Theory, Islamic Studies, Defence and Strategic Studies, Law, and Media Studies, giving theoretical as well as empirical presentations under the titles "Is Confucianism Anti-democratic?", "Islamic Philosophy and Criticizing Democracy", "Against Liberal Democracy", "Anti-Democracy Is Created By Means of Media", "Twenty-First Century Anti-Democracy: Theory and Practice in the World", "A Critique of Western Discourses of Sovereignty and Democracy from Chinese Lenses", "Reflecting on Anti-Democracy Forces in Arab Politics", "'Democracy' in Kazakhstan: Political System Managed from Above", "Pakistan’s Road to Democracy: Islam, Military and Silent Majority", "Democracy: A Form of Government or an Instinct?", "The Role of Ethics in Shaping Democracy: An Examination of Unethical Actions among House of Assembly Members in Nigeria", and "Pekan Anti Otoritarian: Some Observations on Anarchist Gathering at Indonesia".

After a workshop on "Anti-Democratic Thought" in Manchester in 2007, this was the second symposium on anti-democracy organized by the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society and, once more, it opened up new frontiers for the study of anti-democratic thought and practice. Bringing together scholars from both sides of the debate, advocates of democracy as well as critics and opponents, it set the example for the proper academic conduct of a discussion that does not take place anywhere else, yet. Focusing on twenty-first century anti-democracy, rather than historical expressions and criticisms, it shone the way toward the most important debate of the near future. Asia will play as central a role in that debate as participants from Asia did in our symposium.

The Anti-Democracy Agenda blog and the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society will continue to be at the forefront of these developments.

Book: We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008

"We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008", edited by A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris and Void Network (AK Press, February 2010):

www.akpress.org/2010/items/weareanimagefromthefuture

Publisher's description: "What causes a city, then a whole country, to explode? How did one neighborhood's outrage over the tragic death of one teenager transform itself into a generalized insurrection against State and capital, paralyzing an entire nation for a month? This is a book about the murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, killed by the police in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens on December 6th, 2008, and of the revolution in the streets that followed, bringing business as usual in Greece to a screeching, burning halt for three marvelous weeks, and putting the fear of history back into the bureaucrats of Fortress Europe and beyond. We Are an Image From the Future delves into the December insurrection and its aftermath through interviews with those who witnessed and participated in it, alongside the communiqués and texts that circulated through the networks of revolt. It provides the on-the-ground facts needed to understand these historic events, and also dispels the myths activists outside of Greece have constructed around them. What emerges is not just the intensity of the riots, but the stories of organizing and solidarity, the questions of strategy and tactics: a desperately needed examination of the fabric of the Greek movements that made December possible."

Endorsement: "This dazzling collection is not a book about the great insurrection of 2008 – it is a living piece of it that can become a part of us, and through us, it opens the prospect of a universe we might never otherwise have imagined possible. Future historians may well conclude that the Revolution finally began in 2008. If they do, this book will have played a crucial role in that realization." (David Graeber, Goldsmiths, University of London)

The book contains texts such as "Their Democracy Murders – The Polytechnic University Occupation" and many writings by the "Ego Te Provoco" counter-information group, including the eponymous "We Are Here / We Are Everywhere / We Are an Image from the Future" (pp. 165-8), "The media as part of the counter-insurgency" (pp. 169-72), and "A Bedouin Anytime! A Citizen Never." (pp. 197-8; translators not named).

Excerpts: "The other thing we put forward was a discourse against democracy, because many people were saying, what kind of democracy kills children, we need more democracy, and we were trying to deconstruct this whole notion of democracy, to claim that this murder is not an exception, it is the rule of democracy, the rule of the nation-state, the rule of capitalism." (p. 170)

"We despise democracy more than anything else in this decadent world. For what is democracy other than a system of discriminations and coercions in the service of property and privacy? [...] The bourgeois, with a voice trembling from piety, promise: rights, justice, equality. And the revolted hear: repression, exploitation, looting. [...] Our contempt for democracy does not derive from some sort of idealism but rather from our very material animosity for a social entity in which value and organizing are centered around the product and the spectacle." (p. 198)

A.G. Schwarz is the assumed name of a North American living in exile abroad.

Tasos Sagris is a member of the Athens-based Void Network, an arts and action collective established in 1990.

Article: Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure

Andy Robinson's article "Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure" was published in "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed"
(issue 60, 23 [2], fall/winter 2005-06: page numbers not given).

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Andy_Robinson__Democracy_vs_Desire__Beyond_the_Politics_of_Measure.html

Excerpts: "My contention in this article is that anarchy and democracy are incompatible, because anarchy is based on an active politics of desire whereas democracy is necessarily reactive and thus plays into the repressive logics of industrial society and especially, of contemporary capitalism. [...] Democracy and the politics of desire may seem complementary, but in fact they run contrary to each other. [...] That minorities be prevented from expressing themselves with wildness and immediacy – that they remain always the 'loyal opposition' within the confines of a system in which the majority gets its way – is a necessary part of the idea of democracy. For this reason, democracy goes against the emancipation of desire, operating simply as a particularly powerful ideology of recuperation with especially effective, and therefore insidious, ways of excusing social repression. [...] [D]emocracy is a specific instance of state power – and not, as implied by some anarchists, a critique of state power or a form of anarchy. [...]

"The people – the 'decent' or 'law-abiding' or 'hard-working' ordinary folk or 'citizens' invoked to justify crackdowns and repression – are the agent of repression, while the excluded, the new barbarians, defined as criminal, indecent, and 'anti-social,' are the object. It is thus 'rule by the people' at its most brutal – a violent tyranny by those who define themselves as the authentic people, over those who are excluded from it. It is also, of course, a self-policing of capitalism and industrial society – but this is unsurprising, since the 'people', after all, are not defined externally to this society but rather are constructed by it. [...] Reactive psychology, which expresses itself in the ethics of self-deadening 'shoulds,' transmutes the internal repression of desire (itself necessary for one to subordinate oneself to the majority) into a hostility against the expression of active desires by others, thus drawing social repression as the consequence of psychological repression. Where the majority have such character-structures, democracy can be nothing more than a dictatorship by bigots. Where they do not, democracy is unstable, undermined in its calculative finality by desires that overflow it. [...]

"Is it a coincidence that the same self-styled anarchists who identify anarchism with democracy are also often insufficiently rigorous in opposing the new form of capitalist control expressed through the crackdown culture? [...] Everywhere, 'class struggle' anarchists rally behind the calls to oppose 'anti-social' activities, even to the point of critically supporting crackdowns (always, of course, with the usual supplements, denouncing the existing state even while forming the working-class itself into a parallel state with its own repressive force and its own conformity-imposing closures). One thus finds these would-be anarchists cast as the last defenders of the state. For the state, in its last instance, is not the macro-social aggregate; it is the logic of control and policing of life from above, which is epitomised locally in policing agencies (whether those of the official state police or of vigilantes, snoops, and busybodies), and psychologically in repressively formulated ethics (whether those of a liberal or aristocratic elite, or those of a self-righteous 'decent people' fixated on its own decency). Without a rejection of the fixed identities and categories that operate as cops in our heads, there can be no destruction of the state – only its transmutation, fragmentation, and ultimate revival ih [sic] new, and maybe stronger, forms.

"The 'people' who rule must after all be a determinate entity, and in order to be conceived as such, the 'people' must be given fixity as what Max Stirner terms a spook – an ideological construction to which actual people subordinate themselves, and of which one is a part only to the extent that one conforms. [...] 'Rule by the people' thus turns out not to be self-determination by actual people at all, but rather, to be the tyrannical imposition of a normative conception of an essence of peoplehood by those whose own identity is constructed around this category. What is excluded is the 'un-people' to misquote Stirner – the flows of desire and activity which exceed and overflow the fixed category, which are unspeakable in terms of its representations. [...] The adherents of anarchy, the opponents of despotic gestures of this kind, must necessarily be on the side of the excluded, indeed, among the excluded, and thus, against the imposition of conformity, and radically exterior to the imagined 'community' their fixed categories construct. [...]

"Democracy is not an inclusion of all those who vote; it is a means of silencing those who are left in the minority. [...] Active desire is not capable of accepting the a priori insistence that it conform to the result of a majority decision. [...] Thus, desire is minoritarian not simply in that it can often end up in the minority when a vote is taken; it is minoritarian in that it is non-denumerable, it cannot be reduced to something to be counted and weighed on a scale with other desires or with other entities of whatever kind. To reject the aspiration to be the majority – not only in the numerical sense but in the ideological sense, to reject the aspiration for one's own desires and contingencies to be classified as decent and normal to the exclusion of others – is a logical extension of active desire. Active desire, wildness, is unconditional and irreducible. It cannot, therefore, find expression in a system which reduces it to its representation, as one among many elements to be counted."

Andy Robinson is a Leverhulme Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, from which he holds a PhD in Political Theory.

Book: The Rule of Law without the State

The late Michael van Notten's book "The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa" was published posthumously, edited by Spencer Heath MacCallum (Red Sea Press, 2005):

www.africaworldpressbooks.com/servlet/Detail?no=9

Publisher's description: "Written by a trained and sympathetic observer, this book shows how Somali customary law differs fundamentally from most statutory law. Lawbreakers, instead of being punished, are simply required to compensate their victim. Because every Somali is insured by near kin against his or her liabilities under the law, a victim seldom fails to receive compensation. Somali law, being based on custom, has no need of legislation or legislators. It is therefore happily free of political influences. The author notes some specific areas that stand in need of change, but finds such change already implicit in further economic development. Somali politics is based on consensus. The author explains how it works and shows why any attempt to establish democracy, which would divide the population into two classes – those who rule and those who are ruled – must inevitably produce chaos. Viewed in global perspective, Somali law stands with the Latin and Medieval laws and the English common law against the statutory law that became prominent in Europe with the modern nation-state. This book explains many seeming anomalies about present-day Somalia and describes its prospects as well as the dangers facing it."

Dutch-born libertarian Michael van Notten (1933-2002), a Law graduate of Leiden University, spent the last twelve years of his life promoting economic development in Awdal, Somalia.

The book's editor, Spencer Heath MacCallum, is also the author of a number of articles on Somalia, among them "The Rule of Law without the State", published by the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute in its "Mises Daily" on 12 September 2007.

The article can be read free of charge here:

http://mises.org/daily/2701

Excerpts: "Were there such a category, Somalia would hold a place in Guinness World Records as the country with the longest absence of a functioning central government. When the Somalis dismantled their government in 1991 and returned to their precolonial political status, the expectation was that chaos would result – and that, of course, would be the politically correct thing to expect. Imagine if it were otherwise. Imagine any part of the globe not being dominated by a central government and the people there surviving, even prospering. If such were to happen and the idea spread to other parts of Africa or other parts of the world, the mystique of the necessity of the state might be irreparably damaged, and many politicians and bureaucrats might find themselves walking about looking for work. [...]

"[A] study published last year by Benjamin Powell of the Independent Institute, concludes: 'We find that Somalia's living standards have improved generally ... not just in absolute terms, but also relative to other African countries since the collapse of the Somali central government.' Somalia's pastoral economy is now stronger than that of either neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia. It is the largest exporter of livestock of any East African country. Telecommunications have burgeoned in Somalia; a call from a mobile phone is cheaper in Somalia than anywhere else in Africa. [...] All of this is terribly politically incorrect for the reason I suggested. Consequently, the United Nations has by now spent well over two billion dollars attempting to re-establish a central government in Somalia. But here is the irony: it is the presence of the United Nations that has caused virtually all of the turbulence we have seen in Somalia. [...]

"Like most of precolonial Africa, Somalia is traditionally a stateless society. When the colonial powers withdrew, in order to better serve their purposes, they hastily trained local people and set up European-style governments in their place. These were supposed to be democratic. But they soon devolved into brutal dictatorships. Democracy is unworkable in Africa for several reasons. The first thing that voting does is to divide a population into two groups – a group that rules and a group that is ruled. This is completely at variance with Somali tradition. Second, if democracy is to work, it depends in theory, at least, upon a populace that will vote on issues. But in a kinship society such as Somalia, voting takes place not on the merit of issues but along group lines; one votes according to one's clan affiliation. Since the ethic of kinship requires loyalty to one's fellow clansmen, the winners use the power of government to benefit their own members, which means exploitation of the members of other clans.

"Consequently when there exists a governmental apparatus with its awesome powers of taxation and police and judicial monopoly, the interests of the clans conflict. Some clan will control that apparatus. To avoid being exploited by other clans, each must attempt to be that controlling clan. The turmoil in Somalia consists in the clans maneuvering to position themselves to control the government whenever it might come into being, and this has been exacerbated by the governments of the world, especially the United States, keeping alive the expectation that a government will soon be established and supplying arms to whoever seems at present most likely to be able to 'bring democracy' to Somalia. [...]

"A [...] point about the Xeer [customary law] is that there is no monopoly of police or judicial services. Anyone is free to serve in those capacities as long as he is not at the same time a religious or political dignitary, since that would compromise the sharp separation of law, politics, and religion. Also, anyone performing in such a role is subject to the same laws as anyone else – and more so: if he violates the law, he must pay heavier damages or fines than would apply to anyone else. Public figures are expected to show exemplary conduct. [...] Michael van Notten's book describing this system of law deserves to be better known and widely read. It is the first study of any customary law to treat it not as a curiosity of the past, but as potentially instructive for a future free society."

Spencer Heath MacCallum, a social anthropologist and business consultant, is a Research Fellow at the libertarian Independent Institute.

Article: Capital and Democracy

In 2006, the Hungarian anarchist "Barricade Collective" wrote an introduction and commentary, titled "Capital and Democracy", to a 1969 text by French communist theorist Jacques Camatte ("La mystification démocratique").

Both an undated English translation of the original text by Camatte, "The Democratic Mystification", and the more recent introduction and commentary (which may or may not have been written in Hungarian initially) can be read free of charge here:

www.anarkismo.net/article/4454

Excerpts from the introduction: "The dead labour's independence [as value] and its dominance over living productive activity – this necrophilia of capital – yields the present disgusting relationship between individuals and the loathsome ideology which adheres to it: the practice and the theory of bourgeois democracy. [...] Democracy assumes different forms according to the forms of productive labour and the extension of commodity production. Ancient democracy was an internal affair of the ruling class, because only free citizens were commodity owners (namely owners of the land, the slaves and their products). In modern bourgeois democracy everybody is a commodity owner, and the key commodity for the bourgeoisie – labour force – is put on the market by the working class. Hence, democracy is total now. [...] Political parties – i.e. the parties of the bourgeoisie, including the social democratic parties – have never represented more than the alternatives of the development of capital, in other words the interests of some ruling class groups. The democratic (parliamentary) principle was the guarantee that the political management would not separate from the interests of aggregate capital. [...]

"When capital comes to a profound crisis, it seems to break with the democratic principle. During the crisis, a huge mass of constant capital loses its value and is unable to function further as capital, to produce surplus value by absorbing variable capital. So the crisis of constant capital is also the crisis of variable capital, which manifests itself in the fall of (real) wages and massive unemployment. Capitalism is unable to handle such crises through the usual reconciliation of interests between capitals (parliamentarism) and the reconciliation of interests between capital and the working class (trade unionism). In such cases, the strongest representative of capital undertakes the task of capitalism's re-structuring, for capital's survival. The main elements of this are the destruction of those capitals which have lost their value and the destruction of the unnecessary labour force – open or hidden war. [...] Facing this phenomenon, leftists shout: 'Capitalism betrays democracy! Capital is capable of sacrificing democracy for its own interests!' Some go so far as to try to prove theoretically that capitalism can never be democratic.

"In contrast to this, it is extremely important to emphasize that the 'anti-democratism' of capital during crises is an absolutely democratic phenomenon. The case is exactly that it tries to maintain the commodity-owner individuals, private property. Capital is obliged to infringe the political rights proclaimed by capital itself (freedom of press, assembly and speech) if they hinder the process of capital's reproduction (production, circulation or both), and democracy between the people is the first precondition for this reproduction. A revolutionary situation is the peak of capitalism's crisis. [...] Revolutionaries who want to fight consistently against capitalism cannot make any compromise with democracy. Democracy is the form of existence of those who have been alienated from the human community, 'of those who have lost their original organic unity with the community'
(Camatte). Therefore the communist revolution which means the creation of human community cannot be victorious without the total destruction of this way of existence." (italics removed)

Article: Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction

Graham D. Macklin, "Co-opting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction" ("Patterns of Prejudice",
39 [3], September 2005: pp. 301-26):

www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/00313220500198292

Abstract: "Formed in 1996 by former National Front activist Troy Southgate, the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) is a 'national-anarchist' groupuscule. In contrast to the International Third Position, the reactionary Catholic fascist sect from which it emerged, the NRF promotes a radical anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist 'anarchist' agenda of autonomous rural communities within a decentralized, pan-European framework. While the NRF retains an ideological core that is readily identifiable as fascist, that ideology is far from a mimetic atavism. As a result of its increasing radicalization the NRF has attempted to move 'beyond left and right', transcending the traditional limits of national-Bolshevism, to forge a seemingly incongruous synthesis of fascism and anarchism.

"Through its print and online publications, the NRF seeks to utilize its unique ideological position to exploit a burgeoning counter culture of industrial heavy metal music, paganism, esotericism, occultism and Satanism that, it believes, holds the key to the spiritual reinvigoration of western society ready for an essentially Evolian revolt against the culturally and racially enervating forces of American global capitalism. A detailed examination of its history, activism, structure and continued ideological morphology reveals the NRF as an ideological crucible for a growing international network of dissident 'national-revolutionaries' who are currently recalibrating their ideals in order to overcome their acute marginalization."

Excerpts: "This case study of the National Revolutionary Faction (NRF) provides a salutary example of fascism's cogent syncretic core and its ability to produce novel and pragmatic syntheses. [...] Even [Southgate's] assimilation of Noam Chomsky's scathing analysis of social control and hypocrisy at the amoral heart of American-led liberal democracy was refracted through the conspiratorial ideological lens provided by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [...] In order to 'change society completely' the NRF purloined anarchist thinkers like Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, using their revolutionary rhetoric to justify the overthrow of liberal social democracy [... .]

"NRF ideology is totally devoid of anarchism's humanistic social philosophy, which is rejected as 'infected' with feminism, homosexuality and Marxism. In its place Southgate has propagated a 'third position' anarchism based not on 'moral' rights but on Darwinian struggle, which would illuminate the 'natural order' from which every group with 'insurrectionist potential' could unite to destroy 'One World' tyranny with a 'primal bloodlust'. [...] Southgate's view of 'Traditional Anarchy' is suffused with [Julius] Evola's advocacy of 'self-rule by an elite' and the creation of a racial hierarchy conditioned by 'genetics' that, despite its alleged 'anarchism', looks favourably on the heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon England as a model of racial 'kingship'. [...]

"To liberate Europe from the all-encompassing 'blanket cosmopolitanism' of American-led consumerism, not to mention the 'occupying force' of its military presence in Europe, Southgate advocates relinquishing 'the very idea of the West'. [...] The increasing ability of groupuscules like the NRF to absorb and mirror left-wing and environmental causes, effortlessly refracting their concerns about globalization and liberal democracy through their own antisemitic and racist framework, creates a dangerous conflation between ecology and anti-immigration as a way of restoring the 'organic balance' of nature."

In January 2005, Southgate founded the French "Nouvelle Droite"-inspired "New Right" group in the UK which defines itself as "opposed to liberalism, democracy and egalitarianism and fight[ing] to restore the eternal values and principles that have become submerged beneath the corrosive tsunami of the modern world".

This article offers extensive bibliographical references to related literature.

Graham D. Macklin is now a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Institute of Design, Culture and the Arts at the University of Teesside.

Greek riots: "Democracy Shall Not Win"

In the so-called motherland of democracy, Greece, democracy has, once again, come under severe attack.

Youth riots and anarchist violence and bombings have been shaking the capital, Athens, for over a year. On 9 January 2010, a bomb exploded outside the building of the Greek Parliament. The attackers had warned the media of the imminent threat, so the area was cordoned off by police at the time. No injuries were reported.

The "Guerilla Group of Terrorists – Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire" took responsibility for the bombing in a communiqué titled "Democracy Shall Not Win" of which a translation in (bad) English has now become available at this link:

www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2010/01/18/172

Excerpt: "If it sounds unthinkable in our days for anyone to speak against democracy without being labeled a conservative or a fascist, it is because propaganda resides in the houses and in the minds of [democracy's own] subjects. Democracy's totalitarianism has otherwise nothing to envy from previous totalitarian regimes. Nepotism, aristocracy, men of the court, favoured men, businessmen, mediators, contractors and publishers still rule social life, while down 'below' remain unjustly treated and at the same time, always willing to be 'fooled'.

"Society continues to passively tolerate them and wants to take their place at the same time. The ambitions of becoming easily rich, of spectacularly advancing to a higher social class, of having a career, accumulating property, securing material objects and double-locked doors is what democratic prosperity comes to promise. And so, the willful subjects surrender to the totalitarianism of capitalist sovereignty placed against a democratic background. The exploitation of our labour and our lives intensifies, social disparities grow, the world's police become militarised, spectacle rules – material, and at times intellectual and emotional decadence becomes the choice of the many.

"Most of this is not new. This has been, more or less, the state of social life under any authority. Yet today, democracy sugars the pill. Democracy is the coup d'etat that doesn't bring tanks out on the streets but TV cameras and reporter microphones instead. Democracy rules with the power of its propaganda. Labour is protected in the constitution as a supreme right, social disparities are the achievement of the free market and of competition, the police protect and serve the social demand for security, the spectacle protects the freedom of expression and your next-door neighbour might come to a plight, but it's not you, so why bother ...

"Democracy's new social contract is ratified across western capitals: in-between confiscated cars, endless queues forming outside social security services, the torturing take place inside police stations, new cell phone special offers, flat-screen TVs, unemployment benefits, psychological problems and loneliness, upsurges of nationalist pride and unpaid loan installments. And most importantly, non of this was forced upon anyone, nor was it carried by the order of some junta generals. These are 'the people's grand achievements'.

"This is why we claim that democracy is technique and the ability of power not to be understood as oppression. Capitalism is the boss and democracy is its spokesperson. We are not naive to believe that 'the chosen few' the people have elected are really in charge. They obviously comprise bearers of state orders, 'men and ladies of honor'. Most of them are not to be taken seriously anyway. Democracy's main role is to function as the smokescreen for the monstrous capitalist machine. It is the systemic shop-front, modeled upon the mafia economy. It 'launders dirty money', it keeps the 'profile clean', sees that everybody gets 'paid' (from those working in parking lots up to singers) it has an army of bouncers (from formal police force to para-state agents) and the clients (i.e. the proud people) always pay on time.

"It would be a mistake on our side if we did not at this point mention the upgraded role of journalists in these dealings. Nowadays, in the democracy of our time, the media have taken on the role of mediators traditionally reserved for political parties. [...] This is part of democracy's advanced communication strategy. It now becomes clear how politicians and journalists work side by side. Their rhetoric might seem differentiated on TV news and on talk shows, depending on who might be speaking and whose interests are served – however, they have one common direction: to justify and to defend democracy.

"All talks and disagreements end up there. In order to achieve this, they invent an imaginary dialogue between society and politicians, using journalists as mediators. This is why they use the truth of a democratic 'public opinion'. They construct the 'immovable' truth of a majority that nobody dares to question. The truth in opinion polls and numbers. This is how public opinion becomes a client of political parties and vice versa. This is how politicians and journalists shape social relationships, and transform them at will. At the same time, relationships change as opinion polls that supposedly derive from society eventually return and come to shape society through the spectacle. And so the people, just like consumers, are always right.

"In this odd clientelist relationship, democracy, allied with the media comes to shape social behaviours. Especially nowadays, the epidemic of fear is spreading. On the one hand are the American-fed employees of the ministry of police, with their imaginative statements and the 'leaked information' about ruthless terrorists, and on the other hand, the journalists' cutting headlines and stories on an 'upsurge of violence' and 'violence and insecurity'. In this way the squeeze and mix together different cases and contrastive incidents – bank robberies with pick-pocketing, arson attacks with mafia dealings, kidnappings of rich people with trafficking [...]

"In this way, the demand for security is restored and the ideology of terror is produced. We bring up these examples, because with them as a guide we can perceive a percentage of the operation of democracy. All the statements and announcements above are in reality not made in order to face the problem of 'criminality'. 'Criminality' partly serves certain state interests. The objective therefore is not exactly neither safety neither order, but their spectacular reflection. [...] Because in reality democracy is the spectacular reflection and the substitute of freedom. No freedom can exist for as long as democracy exists. [...]

"[W]e would never understand an axiom that invokes the 'objective' right of the many over the few. History has proven we should have no confidence in the opinion of the masses. The persons that willingly adopt for themselves the term of 'the people' and who speak as part of 'we the people, who pay for it all', abandon every creative self-confidence and let themselves drift in the fallacy of their leaders. This is the people. A noisy mass with lowered heads, incessant moaning, misery and crowd mentality that degrades life to repeated operations and sequences of rules. No good reason exists for us to respect its judgement and its choices. We wish for a world in which each one individually will undertake their responsibilities, will communicate their thoughts, exchange arguments, will have the courage of their opinion even if questioned by the majority, without hiding behind representatives and mediators.

"Voters in democracy are never satisfied with their lives and their environment. They always have a complaint about something, they exasperate, they are angry and protest – but every four years they wrap their conscience in a ballot and support, once again, the system. They postpone crucial decisions about their life until the next elections, believing as they do that someone more suitable, more correct and more fair than the previous one will come to power. They stubbornly refuse to admit that no one is more capable than themselves to manage their own life, as otherwise they would be confronted with the void of their life, the years of resignation, an entire life of captivity – and they would have to admit that they have been slaves. That they were victims of fallacy – and no one is ever willing to degrade themselves in this way, by admitting something like this.

"They prefer to always blame others, the incompetent politicians, the foreigners, the terrorists, everyone but themselves. No one offends his ego, even if for the rest time, they will let themselves be trampled by the system. For us however, the issue is the questioning and the rupture with any dominating system, never mind how liberal they may be presented to be. We understand that the power for the management of our lives lies within us – and the decision of how we shall live belongs to us. Which is something that the voter refuses to understand: the power of their self to exceed set barriers, the prohibitions, moral values, ideals and to define their Ego by themselves. [...]

"To begin to fight means to stop seeing yourself through the eyes of the system, to allow no more for yourself to be determined by coercions, to be freed from fear. [...] The conscience and the determination of certain persons to terminate the habit of survival are enough in order to pass from resistance to attack, to place the question of liberation – not in a vague future for the following generations, but in the permanent present; here and now, for their own selves – and this is how a guerrilla group is born. [...]

"[Parliament,] the temple of democracy, surrounded by the most cutting-edge systems of surveillance and a large number of policemen did not stand as an obstacle to our choice. The choice, that is, to offend this symbol, the prestige of democracy without any moral hesitation. Each place has its vulnerable point and the satisfaction of finding it will never cease. [...]

"To democracy we shall show no respect, only rage and attack."

One of the most sensible and clear-sighted indictments of democracy I have read. That is precisely why even bombs will not get it the attention it deserves.

The original communiqué, in Greek, was published here:

http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1120563

Audio: An Anarchist Critique of Democracy

On YouTube, you can find three videos – more truthfully: audios – outlining "An Anarchist Critique of Democracy" (Parts 1, 2, and 3). Apparently, they were created by one Moxie Marlinspike and one Windy Hart (pen names, one suspects). Here's a link to the playlist:

www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=A902B96F4702B1F3

Description: "An explanation of why anarchists oppose democratic government, in all the varying flavors that democracy comes in."

Part 1: introduction; definition of democracy; alienation; decontextualization as a form of alienation; majorities; Part 2: immanent critiques; the reproduction of democracy; Part 3: democracy is only a single component of our lives; direct democracy isn't anarchy, you fucks; conclusion.

The audio-videos are based on a text (apparently written in 2005 by the same authors) that is available here:

www.againstallauthority.org/democracy.html

Some quotes: "[W]e recognize an inherent tension between democracy and the freedom of individuals to create their own lives as they see fit. Some of the problems we find with democracy have been acknowledged by defenders of democracy as well, but have only led to the development of amended types of democracies (as various thinkers tried to prune the concept into an acceptable shape). By contrast, our analysis has led us to abandon the concept all together [sic], because we find some fundamental faults with the idea itself that can not be reconciled by new modifications or reforms. Our critique is of democracy in all its various forms, whether representative or direct. We are not echoing confused cries for more democracy, we are calling for its entire abolition. [...]

"Democracy does nothing but maintain the existence of alienated power, since it requires that our desires be separate from our power to act, and any attempts to engage in that system will only serve to reproduce it. Democracies of any type make decisions via elections, the very essence of which transfers one's will, thought, autonomy, and freedom to an outside power. It makes no difference whether one transfers that power to an elected representative or to an elusive majority. The point is that it's no longer your own. [...]

"Voting strongly resembles the capitalist economic system that always accompanies democracy. There are producers who dictate the agenda, and there are consumers who spend most of their time in the role of spectator – choosing opinions from the marketplace of ideas. These choices also become a competitive game, and every decision will end with 'winners' and 'losers.' [...]

"By providing the illusion of participation for everyone, democracy allows majorities to justify their actions, no matter how oppressive. Since democracy makes the claim that everyone can participate in the political process, there is no harm in providing suffrage for groups with minority opinions, since their losing votes will only justify the contrary actions of a majority. Likewise, if individuals choose not to participate in a vote, their actions are still interpreted as a consent of the majority opinion, since they could have voted against it if they'd wanted to. There is no escape. [...]

"Issues like campaign finance reform or subsidized media time are not interesting to us, because in recognizing the tyranny of political manipulation, we do not then seek to change things such that we can make this tyranny our own. Democracy only offers the choice of relieving yourself of oppression by becoming the oppressor – freedom lies in the entire institution's abolition. [...]

"When democracy frames our discussion and forces us to argue in its terms, all actions to change the socio-political environment must happen via its means and achieve only those ends it will sanction. For these reasons, democracy reproduces itself with little special effort from the ruling class. [...] Even the most obvious contradictions get overlooked because the system has equated its existence with freedom and so places its existence outside the realm of contestable ideas. [...]

"And so one sees presumably intelligent people tieing [sic] themselves in knots, trying to reform a system that in its best and most functional form can only hope to oppress everyone, equally, an equal percentage of the time. Again, the ruling class can rest easy as long as we place blame on ourselves and not them for our alienated position in modern society and that will continue until we realize the intrinsic flaws in the concept of democracy itself and refuse to reproduce it. [...]

"Anarchists believe in unmediated relations between free individuals, the absence of any coercive or alienating forces in societies, and an unquestionable, universal right to self-determination. [...] Even 'direct democracy' demands surrender to the status quo that produces a hierarchy of group over individual, thus separating us from our desires and our desires from their unfettered realization in direct action. Any who would give up these principles should also give up the name 'anarchist' – perhaps in favor of 'libertarian.'"

As is in the nature of anarchism, many anarchists won't agree with all or parts of this particular critique of democracy (see comments left on YouTube).

Mandatory reading/listening.