To mitigate, if not halt, the catastrophic escalation of the planetary polycrisis, we must counteract market and state relations by strengthening social relationships. This requires a democratic approach that transcends the formal decision-making processes of liberal democracy. Mutual respect, the ability and willingness to listen, and solidarity economies are necessary to reposition democracy as an everyday practice, Andreas Exner argues in his contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series.
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Democracy today often operates as a vehicle of or towards tyranny – a critique that dates back to Antiquity and had been reformulated by Critical Theory in the 20th century. Therefore, to disentangle the notion of democracy from liberal and increasingly authoritarian understandings and practices appears to be a precondition for defending moral, civilizational basics. Certainly, engaging with parliamentary democracy remains important. Yet a purely defensive stance is not particularly promising since authoritarian tendencies have grown out of this very form of democracy, which is, in addition, at odds with overcoming capitalist economies.
However, this is becoming increasingly important year after year in order to mitigate the causes of social and ecological suffering. We must find more livable ways to deal with the New Climatic Regime, long-term toxic waste, irreparable destruction of biodiversity and the planet’s beauty, and the many traumas that liberal capitalist progress has inscribed in human and non-human lives. At the very least, we must avert enduring catastrophes of unimaginable extent, which totalitarian regimes of the 20th century may have foreshadowed.
Thus, for a strategic reorientation, relevant issues need to be addressed more carefully and courageously without resorting to illusory best-case scenarios that will not materialize, contrary to what most discussions and activities regarding social-ecological transformation seem to assume. Naivety, in terms of underestimating destructive and obstructive forces, usually fuels short-termism and often leads to strategic miscalculations. This results in frustrations that transformative movements cannot afford.
Democracy, equality, and freedom
One key issue in this regard concerns dominant notions of democracy, equality, and freedom that are deeply entwined with liberal capitalist structures. These notions shape even critical discourse to an extent which makes any real change for the better unlikely, as limited as it might be. More than ideas, they are part of state and market relations that provide no perspective of avoiding ever increasing catastrophes – quite to the contrary. This is why we need to question liberal democracy, equality, and freedom. During this process, we must uncover and bring into debate what has been made invisible by a patriarchal understanding of these concepts.
Questioning the dominant notions and practices of democracy, equality, and freedom requires confronting subjectivities that have developed alongside liberal capitalist progress, a process that the political left has rarely questioned. A fundamental shift in subjectivities is necessary, regardless of left or right, corresponding with practical changes in how people lead their lives and relate to each other, to non-humans, and to the world at large.
Reembedding economy and politics
According to Karl Polanyi, capitalist economies are disembedded from social relationships. This explains why they are largely self-referential in terms of economic growth. Monetary inputs (investments) are compared with monetary outputs (income), from which a strictly quantitative orientation in terms of abstract surplus, profit, emerges. Under these conditions, degrowth towards a steady state economy with low, renewable resource throughput is impossible.
State property is not able to change this destructive rationality because the state expresses the very disembeddedness it might be expected to combat. The process of disembedding economic activities from social relationships also produces the modern state, which safeguards the market and draws its resources from it. Disembedding political regulation from social relationships in terms of legal relations corresponds with disembedding economic activities as market transactions. To the extent that production and consumption are mediated through the disembedded, modern market, products take on a self-referential character as commodities embodying abstract value which is expressed in money form.
Nationalized enterprises are also producing commodities, calculating perforce in monetary terms, and access to goods and services continues to be constrained by money. The state can attempt to circumvent these constraints by political fiat as has happened in the Soviet Union, for example. However, this only exacerbates the underlying issues of a disembedded economy. Producers are isolated from one another and their surroundings, operating in a manner that is ultimately destructive. They compete with each other and are in constant tension with the state, which thus fails to manage the economy effectively. The ability of market socialism to overcome such structural obstacles is questionable as well, and it has not materialized historically.
To socially and ecologically reembed economic activities rather requires counteracting market and state relations by expanding social relationships, and organizing these in democratic fashion, which goes way beyond formal procedures of decision-making but requires mutual respect, the willingness and ability to listen, and a distinct spirit of cooperation. Briefly put, democracy needs to be resituated as a practice implicit in everyday lives.
Democracy as way of life
In this vein, reframing democracy as way of life, John Dewey situates the notion and its core aspects within social relationships because “[f]raternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions”, “for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion”. Hence, liberty “is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others”, while equality “denotes effective regard for whatever is distinctive and unique in each, irrespective of physical or psychological inequalities. It is not a natural possession but is a fruit of the community when its action is directed by its character as a community”. These propositions resemble “From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs”, and thus, a conception of communism where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”.
In fact, social relationships – in contrast to market and state relations – are not a realm of liberal freedom and equality. For individuals are not free in this sense when becoming involved in social relationships, where ties are created and associated with tacit moral obligations; and they are not equal either, since no common denominator such as money or legal status as a citizen erases all concrete difference between them in favor of abstract equality in formal terms. This is known to everyone, in principle. For not even capitalist enterprises or state authorities can exist without social relationships, let alone everyday life, not to speak of family and friendship. However, liberal capitalist progress framed the disembedded realms of market and state as means of improving people’s lives – which might have been true in certain situations in the past, but with the ultimate result of bringing the world at the brink of self-destruction.
Social relationships can be structured through highly unequal power relations, which is glaringly illustrated by patriarchal relations within households. Yet they can also be shaped by democracy as way of life, as Dewey posits and solidarity economy initiatives demonstrate that produce, distribute or consume products and services through communities of common concerns. They build and reproduce social relationships alongside economic activities that are reintegrated into social ecological life in this very process. To this end, solidarity economies fuse at least two roles that the market separates. Accordingly, in many authentic cooperatives, members often describe these in terms of participation, family, and friendship. For instance, in a consumer cooperative, buyers and sellers are one and the same, in a producer cooperative, it is those that provide and use means of production – structures that can be highly complex.
Pre-rational sources of a politics of deep relationality
The market is imagined as a sphere of individual autonomy where egotism reigns and actors compete for scarce resources. In contrast, the state is imagined as a sphere where these same actors work for the common good. However, private life under conditions of market competition profoundly influences political discourse, the ideologies of political parties, voter behavior, and state activities. Replacing market relations with social relationships is thus the first precondition for deepening democracy, or rather: for developing democracy differently than through the state.
Scholars have long recognized the indispensable role of relationships in civic life for the somewhat naive ideal of liberal democracy. Yet it has not been commonly understood that liberal democracy perforce undermines what it requires to exist but cannot produce – which has now become empirically quite clear. However, what might follow from this strategically?
The power of social movements to improve lives by counteracting the destructive dynamics of market and state relations draws from pre-political, pre-rational sources that are connected with social relationships as (always flawed, incomplete) democratic ways of life. The worker movement, for instance, was a secularized version of Christian beliefs and orientations. It built on social relationships of pre-capitalist contexts or social relationships were redeveloped by socialist and communist parties that were implicitly shaped by Christianity
In order to mitigate, if not stop, the catastrophic escalation of the planetary polycrisis, we must rediscover and redevelop pre-rational and pre-political convictions and orientations that are rooted in deep relationality. This requires acknowledging our mutual interdependence and relinquishing the illusion of control.
“At the very least, we must avert enduring catastrophes of unimaginable extent, which totalitarian regimes of the 20th century may have foreshadowed.”
I believe that the reason our dire situation is attributed to the 20th century here is for the sake of brevity. However, to be safe, I will also address issues excluded from discussions for other, certainly more problematic reasons.
In “Black Marxism” (1983), Cedric Robinson argues that a group of radical Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Oliver Cox, did not view fascism as an aberration from the progress of civilization, but rather as a logical development of Western civilization itself. They viewed fascism as a blood relative of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism—global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economies, but also in racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity.
Since then, much scholarship has been conducted on how colonialism and imperialism prefigured fascism. This scholarship provides the global historical perspective necessary to understand the scope and magnitude of the planetary catastrophe we are facing.
Digging deeper into the history of colonialism, you’ll find that the genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas and the subsequent radical transformation of the use of land brought about the first far-reaching radical change in the climate. This has been well documented in research and provides another reason why we need to consider “ancestral catastrophes” (Povinelli) in the colonies as not only precursors to today’s end of the world, but also as interventions whose impacts extend far beyond one generation and unfold over centuries.
Scholars seem to expect BIPOC to articulate these truths. Yet, there are also convincing arguments in favor of this post-Eurocentric perspective from white intellectuals such as Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato in “Wars and Capital”, Jason Moore, Robert Nixon, and the aforementioned Elizabeth A. Povinelli. We need more of them. Because we need to tear down the borders separating us to face the challenges of our time.
Arendt, to whom I am referring in the link embedded in the text, argued that Fascism emerged from Imperialism and Antisemitism, under specific conditions regarding the political, social and economic development of the North. While Totalitarianism shares the historical roots of Fascism, it is something different than Fascism, she argues, which I also think and wanted to underline. (Not addressing problematic aspects of her work here, which one would have to, when discussing Racism and Eurocentrism in more depth than was indeed possible in this article.) The unimaginable horror the text is alluding to is not the horror of historical Colonialism, Imperialism or Fascism, but of Totalitarianism, because it is an even more extreme form of domination than each of these, the most extreme form of domination, actually, and thus surpasses the capacity of the mind to understand. Definitely all of its elements were prefigured earlier, but the phenomenon as such was novel when it appeared in the 20th century. I would say (and I believe one could argue that with Arendt) that Totalitarianism has become perhaps more likely, under certain conditions (and conditions currently develop or change quickly and will do so for the foreseeable future) than it perhaps had been at the beginning of the 20th century, but this is of course speculation. Also it would take on novel historical aspects. I am grateful for your critical comment.
No critical comment, but I thank you for this thoughtful and timely piece! I very much appreciate the framing of democracy as an everyday, relational practice rooted in care, solidarity, and shared responsibility! This framing is highly relevant for thinking about transformation beyond technocratic or institutional fixes.