JD: That is because they didn’t live in democracies. They were struggling for democracy. They didn’t have universal suffrage, democratic governments, and so on. So it makes sense that they thought they were for that. Maybe not toward the end of his life, but Marx for the most part believed that once there was a workers’ party and universal suffrage you could possibly install an elected version of something like communism. That seems likely in some of his writings. But that view is ridiculous. The bourgeoisie is not going to give up without a fight. That is why I think Lenin is so much better. In “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder Lenin argues that democracy is the highest form of bourgeois government—it is a vehicle for bourgeois rule.
We need to ask ourselves: What is the attachment to democracy? What does that mean in left-wing discussions these days? I think it’s a failure of will, and even an attachment to the form of our subjection. Why do we keep arguing in terms of democracy when we live in a democracy that is the source of unbelievable inequality and capitalist exploitation? Why are we so attached to this? It makes no sense. Of course, it’s not like we should have a system where nobody votes. The most fundamental things—namely, control over the economy—should be for the common, in the name of the common, and by the common (without being determined by something like voting). It should be known that there is no private property. Everything we own and produce is for the common good, and that is not up for grabs, it is a condition for the possibility of democracy. It shouldn’t itself be subject to democracy, the same way that any kind of revolutionary moment or transition to communism can’t be understood as a democratic move. If we can get twenty percent of the people, we could do it. But it’s not democratic. Eighty percent of people don’t care. Badiou is brilliant when he asks, “Why are people so intrigued by the so-called ‘independent voters?’ Why are people without a political opinion even allowed to decide, when they don’t even care?”
JD: There are a couple of reasons I argue for “the sovereignty of the people” instead of “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The reason I moved to “sovereignty” from “dictatorship” is not simply because “dictatorship” has a bad reputation or that it’s a difficult political position to organize people around (though these are good reasons, too). It is because “dictatorship” connotes a provisional form, whereas “sovereignty of the people” lets us know that we must always be collectively governing ourselves. We have to always be steering ourselves, always mindful of a struggle against those who would attempt to oppress, exploit, or expropriate us.
JD: One of the ways it brings Marx’s theory up to date is really pragmatic. When you’re talking to a bunch of people today, almost no one says that he’s a member of “the proletariat.” They may say they’re part of “the people.” (This, even though Marx and Lenin are very clear that “the proletariat” is not an empirical category). The term “proletarianization” is still accurate and useful, however, so I think it’s important to keep that concept and think of “the people” as “the proletarianized people.” For folks in the US, “proletariat” suggests factory labor too strongly. There are many people who don’t feel like they’re proletarians, even as they might recognize their existence as proletarianized, especially today because we’ve lost so many manufacturing jobs. There are so many precarious workers, fragile workers, so many non-workers—widespread unemployment, people who are underemployed. It’s hard for those folks to think of themselves as “the proletariat.” The sense of “the people” as a divided group better encompasses our own time. Frankly, I also think it includes more of the “reserve army” of the unemployed, the Lumpenproletariat that classical communism had mistakenly abandoned.
Now I don’t mean this in any way as a rejection of the category of the worker. Recognizing “the people” as a revolutionary subject also brings communist theory up to date, because in Russia and in China there were discussions of alliances between the proletariat and the peasantry, both as segments of the revolutionary people. There was a realization in Russia and China that the category of the “the proletariat” risked being too narrow and exclusive and wouldn’t account for a huge segment of the people. Both Lenin and Mao had ideas of “the people” as a revolutionary grouping and both used this language. Lukács is very clear in his book Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought how Lenin evolved the notion of “the people” to give it this revolutionary, divided, and divisive sense. So there are good Marxist reasons to make this rhetorical move in emphasizing “the people” rather than “the proletariat.” They recognized the utility of a militant account of “the people,” not as a totality or unity, but as a divided group.
Yeah that whole part is horrible. The rest is OK if nothing special. This is why I'm big on quotes though. Mao and Lenin don't need you to tell them what they meant by 'the masses' or 'the people', they are very clear and it is very much not whatever garbage Jodi Dean thinks it is. She's also strangely obsessed with language, as if changing words is what matters.
It is first, as Lenin has said, democracy, a form of state, the democratic state with elections, deputies, constitutional government and so on. And secondly it is a form of mass action, it is popular or active democracy with great meetings, demonstrations, riots, insurrections and so on. In the first sense democracy has no direct relation to revolutionary politics, that is no direct relation with justice. In the second sense democracy is not a norm or a goal, it is a means. A means for popular active presence in the political field. Democracy is not the political truth, but one of the means to find the political truth. It is for example very clear in a text of probably by Mao Zedong, that I tell of which his decision in sixteen points, written during the summer of 1967 at the beginning of the cultural revolution.
[...]
From the point of view of philosophy, democracy is neither a norm or a law nor it is a goal. Democracy is only one of the possible means of popular emancipation. But discipline of consequences and maybe dictatorship can also be among the means of emancipation.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/democracy-politics-and-philosophy/
Actually the word "democracy" is inferred from what I term "authoritarian opinion." It is somehow prohibited not to be a democrat. Accordingly, it furthers that the human kind longs for democracy, and all subjectivity suspected of not being democratic is deemed pathological. At its best it infers a forbearing reeducation, at its worst the right of meddling democratic marines and paratroopers.
http://www.lacan.com/lacinkXXVIII6.htm
AH: You claim that nowadays the enemy is not capitalism but democracy. Why?
AB: My thought about this topic is a little more complex. Not only I think that capitalism as a system is an enemy of human emancipation. I also think that there is no signification today in the idea of directly fighting against it, because capitalism is an abstract and objective system, a structural domination. So we have to fight the political expression of capitalism, and not directly its economic imaginary.
Let us look in greater detail at how Lenin proceeds. I quote:
[``]By invoking the right to vote, Kautsky has revealed himself as a polemicist enemy of the Bolsheviks, one who makes litter out of theory. For theory, that is, the study of general class principles of democracy and dictatorship not just those particular to one nation must not bear on a special question such as the one of the right to vote, but instead on a general problem: can democracy be maintained for the rich and the exploiters, in the historical period marked by the overthrow of the exploiters and the substitution of their State with the State of the exploited? It is thus, and only thus, that a theorist can pose the question.[``]
Properly speaking, theory is thus what integrates within thought the moment of a question. The moment of the question of democracy is in no way fixed by a local and tactical decision, such as that of the prohibition of the right to vote for the rich and the exploiters, a decision linked in this instance to the particularity of the Russian revolution. This moment is instead fixed by the general principle of victory: we are, Lenin says, in the moment of victorious revolutions, in the moment of the real overthrow of the exploiters. We are no longer in the moment of the Paris commune, a moment of courage and bloody defeat. A theorist is one who approaches questions of democracy, for example from within a moment so determined. A renegade is one who takes no account of the moment. One who hangs his political resentment onto a particular episode.
isnt this precisely what dean is doing anyway? digging her heels in and rejecting democracy entirely even when, as outlined above and elsewhere, democracy is basically a kind of transitional demand even in the west now? what fucken democracy do we have? mass non-participation, rigged elections, the works...
i think you're making a huge mistake identifying badiou's rejection of democracy, which seems essentially like the kind of anti-imperialist rejection of "democratic bombs" and so forth, with dean's rejection. as i say, dean's rejection of democracy calls to mind carl schmitt or maybe georges sorel far more than frantz fanon or mao or the panthers...
discipline posted:"she says democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be"
and here you're just misrepresenting what she says entirely lmao
We need to ask ourselves: What is the attachment to democracy? What does that mean in left-wing discussions these days? I think it’s a failure of will, and even an attachment to the form of our subjection. Why do we keep arguing in terms of democracy when we live in a democracy that is the source of unbelievable inequality and capitalist exploitation? Why are we so attached to this?
a failure of will? what? so the bolivarian revolution is a failure of will, in that it takes up the language of democracy and attempts to "exhaust its possibilities" by extending it as far as possible?
additionally, i'm not sure why will should be of any analytical use here. this seems essentially idealist/voluntarist... interest is perhaps more useful?
i think underlying this is jodi dean's essential misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what neoliberalism actually is; it has nothing to do with democracy that's for sure.
but jodi dean isn't saying that at all, her stance might flirt with the same language at a glance but what badiou is identifying as the process of political mobilization of the proletariat dean is calling a "failure of will"? like, i don't even know where to begin in understanding that. even just beginning to approach it, dean starts from the assumption that we are living under democratic governments and experience universal suffrage, this is a glaring falsehood... how many workers without documents are living in the united states right now? how many documented citizens have served or are serving time in u.s. prisons? we're all familiar with the disproportionate incarceration rates of ethnic minorities, how with any clear conscience could we identify an authority that denies the participation of so many oppressed peoples a "democracy"? she asks why we continue arguing in terms of democracy, but to me that's self evident, why wouldn't a people who have systematically been denied a political voice fight to realize one?
discipline posted:jools posted:just to drive this point further into the wall, what is popular sovereignty without democracy. what is it. what is it. can someone tell me? because jodi dean hasn't, and it appears to be a central part of her approach
let's ask her
discipline puts her lips to jools' ear and whispers....Watashi wa Jodi Dean desu
blinkandwheeze posted:Crow i dont really understand what youre doing, like yeah on a surface level badiou & dean are approaching a similar sentiment but i dont think their arguments have any relationship with each other in the slightest... badiou distances himself from "anti-capitalism" towards what that interviewer really crudely identified as an opposition to democracy, but for badiou i think this is on account of a consideration of "capitalism" as an abstract category divorced from the experience of the subject, instead locating potential for political interrogation in sites like workers without documents, the enclosure of public space and land expropriation, the opposition to racism more generally, etc... this is instead an opposition to capitalism through the intermediary of these subjective political engagements, an opposition which sets itself against "democracy" only insofar as that this is what the hegemonic structures that enforce these subjective engagements paint themselves as... but i think it's like, blatantly obvious that badiou's entire thinking is dedicated to preserving or establishing popular & active democracy as the vehicle which reveals political truth, it clearly says as much in the essay you first linked... the dictatorship of the proletariat may be realized as a vehicle of emancipation but it's a vehicle that is only allowed into existence as a consequence of the popular or active democracy of the proletarian subject
but jodi dean isn't saying that at all, her stance might flirt with the same language at a glance but what badiou is identifying as the process of political mobilization of the proletariat dean is calling a "failure of will"? like, i don't even know where to begin in understanding that. even just beginning to approach it, dean starts from the assumption that we are living under democratic governments and experience universal suffrage, this is a glaring falsehood... how many workers without documents are living in the united states right now? how many documented citizens have served or are serving time in u.s. prisons? we're all familiar with the disproportionate incarceration rates of ethnic minorities, how with any clear conscience could we identify an authority that denies the participation of so many oppressed peoples a "democracy"? she asks why we continue arguing in terms of democracy, but to me that's self evident, why wouldn't a people who have systematically been denied a political voice fight to realize one?
anyway, there is a serious problem with Democracy-as-master-signifier and it's actually more than just deceptive rhetoric (as badiou points out). additionally, despite the deficiencies of corruption (ie. the American 'democratic system', Yeltsin's 'kleptocracopia') they are nonetheless political instances of an economic machine which also functions in social democracies such as Norway and Germany, these demand a serious investigation and I'm not sure reporting gaps of dysfunction are enough to overcome it. that is, the particular failures of capitalist democracies point to the general failure of democracy in the age of capitalism.
this is not a symbolic disavowal of 'democracy', but it is the grounds for a rapprochement. and these do not just extend to capitalist democracies, per se, as the question of the Russian nation within the Soviet Union was a serious concern for Bolsheviks since the very inception of socialism there, and its unresolved tension laid out the opportunism of Yeltsin in its dissolution.
Crow posted:anyway, there is a serious problem with Democracy-as-master-signifier and it's actually more than just deceptive rhetoric (as badiou points out). additionally, despite the deficiencies of corruption (ie. the American 'democratic system', Yeltsin's 'kleptocracopia') they are nonetheless political instances of an economic machine which also functions in social democracies such as Norway and Germany, these demand a serious investigation and I'm not sure reporting gaps of dysfunction are enough to overcome it. that is, the particular failures of capitalist democracies point to the general failure of democracy in the age of capitalism.
this is not a symbolic disavowal of 'democracy', but it is the grounds for a rapprochement. and these do not just extend to capitalist democracies, per se, as the question of the Russian nation within the Soviet Union was a serious concern for Bolsheviks since the very inception of socialism there, and its unresolved tension laid out the opportunism of Yeltsin in its dissolution.
but the issue i see with this is that you are not exactly elaborating on what the fault of democracy as master-signifier is, the serious problems you identify are not clear to me, to begin with your wielding of badiou here is really problematized by the essay you immediately referred to invoking the appraisal of the gpcr as "the great democracy", like of course badiou also attests that democracy is a machination as opposed to an established established by its sacred import, but i believe what is being identified in the gpcr is democracy as a process being codified as a master-signifier. what i suppose dean is trying to do despite her reformulation of this question as one of popular sovereignty, or what you are trying to do, is propose dictatorship as a vehicle of equal standing to democracy. except, tho, if we are using the terms badiou introduces, and since you are the one who brought them up as the basis of your argument i believe that is assumed, regardless of that i think the delineations he makes are completely valid, seeing as 'great meetings, demonstrations, riots, insurrections' are identified as primary aspects of the active democratic process, dictatorship is necessarily dialectically produced by this procedure. the alternative is a dictatorship that is not established by popular insurgency is of course the authoritarian gesture, categorically fascism. to clarify, the series of signification is a shift from democracy to dictatorship as organizing principle, the cultural revolution then functioning dialectically as the negation of the negation of the dictatorship
so of course i agree with you that reporting gaps of dysfunction is not sufficient, but that was only one part of my argument, the point i am trying to communicate is that democracy under the dictatorship of the corporatist alignment of the bourgeoisie and the labour aristocracy, democracy is a necessary master-signifier because this process, alleviated to the point of organizing principle, is the condition through which the dictatorship of the proletariat is made possible. further than that, i also share the same concerns jools does, 'the people' is a term of extreme ambiguity and i can't conceptualize what popular sovereignty even means without popular democracy
the 'failure of democracy in the age of capitalism' as such appears to me to be an argument closer to the 'failure of socialism in the age of capitalism', that is, this is not an open and shut case and in fact carries a huge deal of ambiguity. we might see the failure of democracy in a similar vein to the failure of the soviet union or the slide of chinese revisionism but of course this does not speak to the failure of socialism as a principle. in the same way we can point to our beautiful light that was so sadly snuffed out, until he returns one day hand in hand with christ and the mahdi, in the bolivarian revolution we see not only a living socialism but a socialism that is built on the principle of democracy above all else, the extension of this process to the excluded and the displaced. this question of what a socialism of the 21st century would look like is at the heart of this question, the bolivarian experience to me is the brightest shining example of socialism as much as it is of democracy. i am sure you find this as frustrating a question as i generally do, but i can't find a better way to approach this, what does an alternative proposition look like in practice? what material examples exist of a truly revolutionary proletarian movement divorced from the democratic principle as guiding process? where does this rapprochement take us?
and tbh when you introduce terms like a 'failure of will' i think its pretty hard to actually distinguish the point from a symbolic disavowal
jools posted:i should probably write a thread about NEOLIBERALISM and why its not about smartphones
its about google glass now