History’s democratic movement has been humanity’s great hope. Wherever people have suffered scarcity and oppression, and wherever the human spirit striving to break its bonds has chafed at the stupidity and inertia, we have looked to the expansion of political and economic democracy as the vehicle of our liberation and the guarantor of this achieved freedom.
Concurrently with the industrial revolution and the rise of fossil fuels, humanity lofted the call to universal democracy as the logical and moral culmination of our political experience. But was democracy a trap? The rising movement was diverted to “representative” government. By now it looks like the goal was to misdirect the democratic impetus long enough for the elites to steal all the wealth produced by the oil surplus before restoring feudalism.
By now we who affirmatively strive cannot experience representative government, capitalism, elitism, as anything but blockages to our soaring, while all who aren’t rich and powerful increasingly experience these as oppressors and thieves. The poor always experienced them as such, and as we’re liquidated more and more of us are to experience what it’s like to be economically and politically poor, even if we’re not technically there yet.
So we experience the perversion of democracy as a negative assault, and as a blockage to our affirmative humanity. This is the basic political, economic, and psychological situation. In fact, the concurrence of the rise of mass democracy and fossil fuels is exact enough, while Peak Oil and the advent of neoliberalism have a direct causal relationship, that we have to ask if the democratic movement itself, not the ancient political idea but its efflorescence into mass politics, was really nothing more than an ornament of cheap oil. The criminals now want to prove that it was. Are we really going to let them do so?
Democracy is the logic of history. It’s our imperative to fight for it. A basic precept of the American Revolution is that liberty and concentrated power always grapple in a zero-sum conflict, and that to whatever extent a society allows power to concentrate, the citizenry must be actively vigilant against this power. This is an obligation imposed by freedom, and therefore an intrinsic element of it.
If the measure of freedom includes the measure of one’s will to be vigilant, then it follows that the measure of democracy itself includes the measure of one’s will to fight for it. This, at least, depends nothing upon oil or other material factors. All things start with an act of will.
This is fortuitous, since this same historical moment where we need this great act of will is also the moment where all conventional actions are blocked for all who lack wealth. So here again we find the concurrence of our affirmative and negative imperatives. For both self-transcendence and self-preservation we need to make the truly transformative action to redeem our democracy and restore it to its true path, such that it shall finally fully realize itself.
And what is the nature of this true democracy? I’ve written many times about the failure of representative government, about the fact that in its inception it was a sham, and (most recently here) about how according to the ideology of the American Revolution it has no necessary authority, but was only to be taken provisionally, based on how well it worked in action. I think the tenure of this provision has long since expired, and the results are in. Representative pseudo-democracy doesn’t work and is unworthy of us.
Instead the consummation of the democratic movement, and the only way out of the historical bottleneck in which we find ourselves, must be the achievement of positive democracy. I described it here:
What are the basic principles/practices? (In positive democracy, there’s never a clear division between principle and practice. There’s no citizenship other than through citizen action. The measure of one’s capacity for freedom is that one acts as a free citizen, as much as possible, and is always seeking to expand the bounds of freedom’s possibility.) Direct democracy, political freedom (meaning the opportunity to meaningfully participate), political participation itself, all of these on an equal basis. Material equality (defined as the absence of class stratification and wealth concentrations) is the prerequisite for equality of political opportunity. Food Sovereignty as a political and practical imperative. Land and natural resources are things of nature, and can therefore be the property only of sovereignty itself; Western political theory always recognized in principle with the labor theory of property that to gain a possession right on the land one must productively work the land. The things we call rights and enshrine in Bills of Rights. All of this arising from the people’s sovereignty and therefore the province of human beings only, while by definition other entities can only be servants with responsibilities, never persons with rights.
Economic democracy, worker self-management, distribution of, by, and for those who actually produce. All this as a self-actualization value in itself, as well as providing the material prerequisite for true political democracy, with the universal and equal opportunity for participation. This too is the realization of our humanity as well as the most effective way to attain wise governance.
So both politically and economically, positive democracy shall both achieve the best practical result as well as, in its very exercise, constitute the ultimate human process, the ultimate realization of our humanity itself. This is the horizon which beckons. This is the promise which dawned with the first rising of the democratic sun. The enemies of humanity have sought to obscure this sun with their clouds of menace and confusion. Today they wish to bring down the veil of blackest night forever.
But while they, in their typical elitist way, believe they obscure the sun from the eyes of benighted, earthbound wretches, it is in fact we the people who are the sun. And so it’s our choice to burn away the fog in front of us and bring infinite clarity to the world and to life.
In the end, we each must choose, and we must choose as a whole: Are we in fact wretches groveling in the mud under a darkening sky, or shall we be the soaring sun?
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