Why do we clamor so desperately for ‘democracy’? In her “Deep Democracy” contribution, Sanem Su Avci argues that the word’s symbolic force stems from the history of modern domination – a legacy that civil societies have yet to process.
*
We are deep in multiple crises. Can anyone imagine a nice future for humans these days? Dystopias that seemed grossly exaggerated until recently, are unraveling through technological advances directed by a very small power group. Anxiously waiting for the future, we cling to old promises, regardless of whether they have worked out in the past. After all, the failure of a promise does not annul that promise. More often, it creates an obsession around that promise, making it impossible to move on. A failed promise will disappear only when a new promise comes up, one that can stir desire while also explaining the failure of the previous promise.
Our political imagination ends at the word ‘democracy.’ It is the most we can ask for. It is our horizon. No other word seems to live up to it. The concept of ‘democracy,’ popularized during the ancient Greek era and again during the European age of mass rebellion against aristocrats, is appealing because it simply means ‘rule by the people.’ The moderns adopted this word as a signifier for the desired political system where all citizens have the right to participate in political power, where everyone’s opinion is taken into account and their interests are protected.
Today, we are familiar with the history of ‘democracy’ in ways that the 18th-century European bourgeoisie did not know or care about. ‘Democracy’ in ancient Greece was a political system where about 10-15% of humans living under it were considered citizens. Women did not participate in ‘democracy.’ They served the recreational and reproductive needs of its citizens. Slaves were not part of ‘democracy.’ They carried out the undesired, time-consuming labor that kept the economy running. The citizen ruled above his household that included women, children, slaves, and animals. He was equal only with other men with similar social standing. But not with all men. Foreign men who lived within the polity were not considered citizens, and hence could not elect or be elected. ‘Democracy’ was the joint rule of local men, who claimed equal rights in a political order that asserted their superiority over women, children, slaves, and foreigners.
Some might argue that the ability to desire anything is a good thing. However, concepts come with baggage. The hierarchy and discrimination in ancient democracy makes it more ‘far-right’ than the average far-right ideal of the 21st century. Yet, the word ‘democracy’ today is still used to define an egalitarian, inclusive political system. How has the meaning of this word changed so radically?
The limits of modern ‘democracy’
As bourgeois revolutions unfolded in the West starting from the mid-18th century, the desire for ‘people’s rule’ was deemed original and unique to new times and to modern societies. Technological advances and capitalist accumulation had allowed the West to dominate other civilizations on an unprecedented level. It looked like they were the only ones to have risen from darkness in a world governed by irrational tyrannies. ‘Democracy’ was one of the words that came to signify political good in the modern era, like ‘freedom.’ Unlike ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy’ was mined from ancient Greece, conceived as an exceptional spark in an otherwise dark history – a spark over which the West claimed monopoly. Allegedly, ‘democracy’ signified something that had never existed in other times and places.
Despite its singular roots, modernity claimed to be universal. Western civilization was superior only because they were further ahead in a line of progress on which all humanity was advancing. A quest for modernization thus took off, because the only way to evade domination by the West, it seemed, was to become like them. Western colonization claimed to benefit the colonized populations by modernizing them. Elites within sovereign countries grounded their power on their ability to modernize, while trying to make it seem like the modernizer and the modernized were one and the same.
‘Democracy’ was conceived as a consequence of modernity and a privilege. People who were not modern were supposedly not able to desire or even to recognize ‘democracy.’ But in most Western countries, participation in ‘democracy’ was initially reserved to wealthy men, and only gradually granted to the whole society. Property-less men got voting rights only after their mass mobilization in WWI, while women attained voting rights after World War II where they helped war efforts by joining the labor force. ‘Democracy’ extended towards those whose participation was necessary for the political unit, in this case the nation-state, to maintain its standing against other units. After WWII, the rivalry of communism and capitalism as alternative modernities, helped extend the limits of ‘democracy’ into the lasting assumption that political participation had to be a universal right.
Shortly after the end of that rivalry, the last standing superpower started to invade other countries in the name of ‘democracy.’ Now, as drone warfare and AI production drastically reduce the need for human soldiers or workers, we should not be surprised to see a global retraction in ‘democracy.’
‘Democracy’ and genocide
Contrary to what moderns believed, humans always and everywhere want a political order where they do not feel oppressed, where power insofar as it exists caters to everyone equally and serves their interest. They resist tyranny in ways that they can, as much as they can. Some anthropologists have claimed that primitive societies reject any political power that is not the society itself, and therefore live in a state of absolute ‘democracy’ in the literal sense of the word, which for them also means statelessness. We do not have much information about these societies since they seldom took written records, and perished or transformed upon contact with the moderns.
In the human past to which we have historical access, religious upheavals seem to have been a vessel to the desire for all people’s joint rule. Divine rule, God’s kingdom on Earth if it can be achieved, means the ‘rule of the people,’ because god is, or is the master of, all believers.
In the modern age, other communities of conviction or identity have been vessels of such desire, most significantly the nation. The ideal for the self-rule of all nations, implemented on territories which were home to multiple ethnic and religious groups, has been disastrous. People with different creeds and languages who previously cohabited lands ruled by a distant sovereign, in the democratic age came to mutually perceive each other as obstacles to the popular sovereignty they had to achieve. The practice of genocide, total elimination of an identity group from a certain territory, frequently accompanies projects of national sovereignty, to this day. The language of indigeneity is employed to confer ownership of the land to those who supposedly came first in the recorded history of linear time.
Living together in large numbers, humans relate to each other in multidimensional complex networks of activity and it is impossible for everyone to equally participate in political power. Government is power, but it is also work. People who have other work to do, because of necessity or preference, will not have the time. Some people will have adequate skills for government work and some will not. Some will manage to dominate others while seemingly remaining equal, accumulating the power and resources generated from the activities they oversee. Others will ostracize these usurpers and build power for themselves, a pattern often repeated also in ancient democracy.
The distribution of resources and benefits and burdens will never feel just and fair for everyone. In order for inequality to not feel like a lack of popular sovereignty, a link has to be maintained between those who are in the center of political processes and those who are not. A perception of sameness has to be produced, and that is best produced in opposition to others who are not the same. Some have to be excluded for some to be included.
Political representation may not be an exclusive commodity per se, but no ‘democracy’ has ever existed without some exclusion. Modern attempts at direct democracy, such as the Paris Commune or Rojava, have appeared in wartime. War creates a clear and definite externality of the enemy at the gates, and a voluntary mobilization among those who remain within the defended territory. None of the wartime attempts at direct democracy have lasted or extended beyond the belligerent conditions in which they appeared. Therefore they cannot provide models but only certify the democratic necessity for externality.
A new word
What is it that ‘we’ want when ‘we’ say we want ‘democracy’? Given this dismal account, maybe this word suits Palantir’s manifesto better than it expresses our persistent desire to be part of a political unit that is us, that works for us, or that lets us be? But we cannot let go of ‘democracy,’ because we do not have another word for what we want. The symbolic force of the word comes from the history of modern domination, a ‘process’ that has not yet been processed.
Certain civil societies in Europe managed to break the chains of their tyrants not because of their exceptional will and mental clarity, but because they had gathered way more power than their Kings through extreme capitalist accumulation. Today, capital is accumulated in the hands of very few individuals and companies at an increasing rate, who are destroying all livelihood in pursuit of even more power and profit. Governments are failing their peoples because they are caught in this web.
National sentiments are rising because governments have no other tool to create the illusion of sameness. Popular sovereignty is imitated through the violence of social-media induced mobs. But the human urge to submit to power only insofar as it treats all of its subjects fairly and serves the life of each and every one of them, that includes and reflects them, where they feel free and empowered, is relentless. When it reappears, maybe then we will have a new word.