A thorough critique of liberal democracy reveals an alternative reality of democracy obscured by the myths and institutions of colonial capitalist modernity. It also illuminates why autonomy must play a central role in any emancipatory, collective endeavor. How we can organize and navigate a transition out of our current predicament? Which existing structures could be useful? And how? In his contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Carlos Tornel identifies ‘break points’ for intervention.
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Liberal democracy is not simply ‘in crisis.’ In many places it is moving towards something more perverse: it is using its own procedures to hollow itself out – preserving the choreography and rituals of elections, parties, and participation while displacing the substance of self-rule towards authoritarianism. This however, should be news to no one. The organization Democracy Without Borders shows that at least 60 countries have succumbed to authoritarianism. The rise of the extreme right means that roughly a third of the world’s population now lives under center- or far-right leadership.
While these classifications are always porous, they do offer a glimpse of what Gustavo Esteva named with sharp precision: democracy has historically been designed less to enable a people’s government, than to prevent it – transferring the conduct of common affairs to elites through devices of representation, expertise, and control. The rapid deployment of social engineering techniques and technologies of control, now becoming more and more ubiquitous, have not only stifled any possibility of actual democracy, but have deployed it as a means to sustain a rather pervasive end: one that posits democracy as a tool for (colonial) modernity and the continuation of a system of control for capitalism.
Do we need democracy at all?
The editors of BG | berlinergazette.de propose a discussion on deep democracy, which could entail rebuilding agency and self-efficacy. This rebuilding would entail developing tools that compel power to listen while rejecting the reduction of politics to representation and short electoral timeframes. I understand that deep democracy does not seek to romanticize ‘the local,’ nor does it simply demand more participation inside the same machinery. Rather, it asks how collective life can be organized through commons, assemblies, rotation of responsibilities, and shared obligations – in ways that widen the horizon of what counts as political, including the material infrastructures of care (food, water, housing, safety) that liberal democracy typically treats as technocratic or ‘policy’ domains.
However, I am concerned about whether we should defend democracy in any of its forms. Do we need democracy at all? Thinking with Antonio Gramsci, I would argue that democracy has become a ‘common sense,’ that is, an idea devoid of politics, often translated as a ‘universal good’ or a ‘net positive.’ In reality, however, it has been used as a means to a system that operationalizes and institutionalizes control and capitalist modernity.
The Gramscian concept of ‘common sense’ is typically seen as being in opposition to ‘good sense.’ The term can also be associated with the work of James C Scott, Ivan Illich, and Gustavo Esteva, among others, who have demonstrated how people organize resistance and rejection, as well as knowledge, in their everyday lives. Good sense, is rooted in those practices that reproduce life, care and solidarity, those that are, in my opinion, the very threats that ‘democracy’ mostly in its liberal form has come to erode and wage war on. This is why there is a common need to move from democracy towards autonomy: a system of self organization that proposes a different route towards what Esteva called an “ongoing insurrection,” via rebellious everyday dispersion.
This article tries to lay this groundwork of such a project in three brief parts: first, by rejecting the concept of democracy and showing some of its main criticisms, second, by placing a rejection of four key characteristics that need to be ruptured: scale, rituals, the state, and technology. This project would then produce what could be presented as a confederation of autonomous practices towards a plural rejection of capitalist modernity.
Defending autonomy from democracy as we know it
Plato famously argued that the nature of tyranny arises out of democracy. Aristotle called it a deviation form the common good. As Gustavo Esteva shows, the US Federalist ‘founding fathers’ clearly spoke against a ‘direct democracy.’ Ellen Meiksins Wood, for example, argues that modern capitalist society developed a historically unusual separation: formal political equality can coexist with extreme economic domination – so democracy is de-radicalized and confined to the political sphere while the economy is naturalized as ‘nonpolitical.’ It is similar to Karl Polanyi’s formulation of ‘disembedding’: the liberal project of making ‘the economy’ a self-regulating sphere that subordinates society to market imperatives. The attempt to realize a fully self-regulating market becomes a utopian (and socially destructive) design rather than an achievable condition. Wood argues that capitalism can tolerate formal citizenship precisely because it restricts what citizenship can touch.
David Graeber and David Wengrow offered a deeper perspective: the stories modernity tells about the ‘origins’ of democracy and the state are political technologies themselves. One such myth is that ‘humanity’ progressed from small, egalitarian groups to agriculture, cities, and states, ultimately reaching democracy. Contrary to this, we must acknowledge that early cities and complex settlements often operated without monarchs or centralized coercive authority and sometimes organized participatory governance on a large scale. We also need to acknowledge that humans have long moved in and out of hierarchical arrangements, including the deliberate rejection of hierarchies and coercive authority. In short, modern origin stories capture democracy by linking ‘the political’ to state sovereignty and reducing self-rule to representation and legitimation.
Wendy Brown traces how neoliberal reason radicalizes this capture. It doesn’t merely limit democracy; it also hollows out the subjects, institutions, and norms through which popular self-rule could exist. Neoliberal reason unmoors and substantively disembowels democracy by assaulting its principles, cultures, subjects, and institutions as popular self-rule. In other words, democracy is undone not only by shrinking welfare or privatizing services, but also by transforming what counts as rational conduct and legitimate governance. It even transforms what a person is. Democracy persists here as vocabulary and ritual (through elections and rights-based discourse), but the demos becomes disorganized. Public institutions stop cultivating capacities for judgment, solidarity, and collective self-rule, and the power of ‘the people’ is reduced to a performance or spectacle.
The rise of fascism and disaster nationalism, as well as the rapid emergence of new ‘there is no alternative’ narratives and techno-utopias that attempt to redeem humanity artificially, such as geoengineering, AI, ‘renewable’ energy, and ‘energy transitions,’ are becoming increasingly central to an immunitarian recalibration of liberal democracy. Politics is re-coded as protection of a supposedly threatened ‘body’ (the nation, the population) from intruders, legitimating securitization, walls, surveillance, and a permanent state of emergency. This ‘immunitarian democracy’ tends toward autoimmunity, whereby its protective apparatus flips into a thanatopolitical logic of expulsion and elimination. Thus, war becomes the internal dynamic of order, with Gaza offering a stark contemporary example of immunitarian violence and genocide.
The perversity is that this militarized fix is also self-cannibalizing: by increasing extraction and disposable life, capitalism is burning the candle at both ends and rapidly undermining the conditions it needs: cheap nature, cheap (reproductive) labor, forced labor, and cheap energy as well as cheap minerals. They claim security. They do so through ever-increasing destruction.
Four ‘breaks’ with liberal democracy
Democracy is often considered the ultimate goal of emancipation. When democracy fails, the solution is often assumed to be ‘more’ or ‘better’ democracy. However, under conditions of permanent crisis, liberal democratic forms increasingly operate as infrastructures for state control, technocratic escalation, and the normalization of sacrifice. Thus, defending autonomy today requires breaking with some of democracy’s constitutive logics rather than reforming it. The following outlines four such breaks: with the state, technology, scale, and the hollow rituals that mask capitalism’s descent into planetary barbarism.
First, the modern state is not a neutral container for social life but a historically specific assemblage of sovereignty, bureaucracy, and monopolized force that stabilizes domination as control. As Abdullah Öcalan insists, the nation-state tends toward the maximum form of power: it domesticates society through administrative penetration, pursues homogeneity and forms of internal colonialism through assimilation that can slide into extermination. ‘Liberal’ democracy often merely coats this machinery in procedural legitimacy. Moreover, this sovereignty is also patriarchal: the state is reproduced through the ongoing colonization of women’s bodies – the ‘first colony’ – which disciplines reproduction and renders life governable.
Therefore, democracy has frequently functioned less as an antidote to colonial-patriarchal power and more as its legitimizing interface. When liberal orders enter a state of crisis, they reactivate their constitutive violences, such as colonial containment, racialized policing, and extractive security regimes. They shift from inclusion and assimilation to erasure and extermination. This is evident in the long history of dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the consolidation of the racist belief in Europe that ‘migration is the root of all problems,’ and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Thus, the state becomes an epistemological obstacle, blurring other emancipatory alternatives and framing crises as management problems rather than political ontological problems. Meanwhile, democracy organized around state sovereignty becomes its complicit handmaiden.
Secondly, in 1974, Ivan Illich clearly argued that high-energy modernity cannot be made equitable by redistributing access to the same industrial systems. Beyond certain thresholds, energy-intensive systems manufacture dependency, expand expert/managerial monopolies, and erode vernacular capacities for self-provisioning and self-governance. A break with democracy here means a break with the Promethean reflex that still haunts left ecomodernisms: the belief that emancipation is a matter of scaling the apparatus (industry, grids, services) under a different ownership (i.e. public, or State-led). Convivial transformations are technologies that internalize limits grounded in place, repair, sufficiency, and commoning. In this context, ‘renewability’ signifies a redefined relationship among energy, territory, and needs, rather than a new chapter of developmentalism.
A third break has to do with scale. Contemporary economic and political forces have surpassed human control, making the visibility and safety margins necessary for meaningful regulation unattainable. Today’s turbulence is a crisis of size: integration and ‘solutions’ at ever-greater scale magnify disorder, while the only plausible possibility is to return decisions to human scale – localized economic life, interlinked but relatively self-sufficient territories, and the socialization (not privatization) of functions captured by bureaucracies. Democracy cannot be ‘repaired’ at the scale of planetary management. Autonomy requires de-escalation of the political body so people can actually deliberate, decide, and correct.
Finally, we need to break with rituals. Postwar liberal democracy institutionalized a repertoire of rituals, including elections, representation, and development promises. These rituals helped govern the ‘postcolonial’ order while legitimizing the monoculture of modernization: progress, growth, welfare, development, and national industrialization. However, neoliberal reason is undermining these rituals. Political concerns are absorbed into market metrics and managerial “best practices,” transforming governance into a technique and replacing substantive democratic goals with performance, compliance, and risk control.
What remains is a ceremonial shell masking intensifying extraction, enclosure, and securitized violence. Thus, the final break is about rejecting democracy as a liturgy and abandoning empty procedural gestures that now cover capitalism’s descent into normalized sacrifice. It is about re-centering autonomy as a lived, territorial, confederal practice.
The political horizon of autonomy
Perhaps the best way to express the current condition is through capitalism’s war on subsistence. It is a struggle between autonomy and dependency. Modernity’s institutional ‘solutions’ and the democratic promise that more services, rights, programs, and technological fixes will secure well-being actively create dependency. What is typically defended as ‘democracy’ today increasingly functions as the civic interface of what Ivan Illich termed the age of systems: a regime that translates shared life into administrable needs, delegates responsibilities to experts, and trains people to experience themselves as isolated individuals who can only be ‘included’ through services, programs, and managed participation. In this context, the contemporary celebration of artificiality as humanity’s greatest accomplishment, reminiscent of earlier cyber-futurist enthusiasms, serves as an invitation to accept artificialized life. It treats machinic or artificial intelligence, along with its growing material demands and sacrificial logistics, as an inevitable horizon rather than a political battleground.
In Illich’s age of systems, expert monopolies over learning, health, mobility, welfare, and security define needs in advance. This is the Promethean fallacy of crisis-management: the conviction that every socio-ecological problem can be solved by scaling up control through planning, expertise, and technics. Hope is replaced by administered expectations, and people are remade to fit institutional processes, as technology, progress, and development become the only imaginable remedies. Even the most ‘progressive’ democratic interventions often transform collective life into managed usage. Inclusion becomes access to programs, services, and expert-designed infrastructures that expand rights and amenities while shrinking the space for self-organization.
Conversely, long-standing process of autonomy – such as the example of Acapatzingo in Mexico City – show how people can rebuild self-government through assemblies, mutual aid, and the re-commoning of practical knowledges, but they also expose unresolved problems of durability, internal conflict, and scale – especially when autonomous projects are forced to negotiate, evade, or confront democratic institutions that tend to absorb, discipline, or criminalize what they cannot administer.
This is precisely how the war on subsistence can reach its terminal form. It is not only dispossessing people of means of production, but breaking the collective capacities, vernacular knowledges, and shared competencies through which autonomy is practiced. As Claudia von Werlhof argues, that capitalist modernity is a patriarchal project of alchemical substitution. It seeks to replace dependence on living relationships with artificial systems and calls that replacement ‘emancipation.’ The response, then, is not to refurbish democratic rituals or double down on Promethean promises of technological salvation, but to adopt an Epimethean stance.
We need to reclaim subsistence capacities and convivial autonomy through a permanent ecological struggle against capitalism, grounded in refusing separation from nature and in the pursuit of total liberation with more-than-human worlds. The question is not just which form of democracy to defend, although radical and deep democracy offer important correctives. The real question is which forms of autonomy can withstand the systemic shift toward administration, enclosure, and sacrifice that is inherent to the modern legacy of democracy. Rebuilding collective competence, convivial limits, and more-than-human responsibilities from the ground up can open a horizon of autonomy.