Happy New Year --- Organization
It's not a coincidence one of history's greatest, if not the greatest thinker on democracy is lost to the 21st century. If it wasn't for Alexis Tocqueville's reporting on and analyzing of the 1830s American republic, most today wouldn’t believe it ever existed. Ten years after publishing Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote, The Ancient Regime and the Revolution. There's an excellent passage in the book about the structure and culture of all history’s despotic regimes. It could well have been written about today's America,
“In such communities, where men are no longer tied to each other by race, class, craft guilds, or family, they are all only too ready to think merely of their own interests, ever too predisposed to consider no one but themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism where all public good is snuffed out. Despotism, far from fighting against this tendency, makes it irresistible since it deprives all citizens of all shared enthusiasms, all mutual needs, all necessity for understanding, all opportunity to act in concert. It confines them, so to say, to private life. Men were already moving towards isolation; now despotism confirms it. They were cooling in their feelings for each other; despotism freezes them solid.
In such kinds of society where nothing is settled, every man feels endlessly goaded on by his fear of sinking or by his passion to rise in that society. Just as money has become the principal sign of social class and the means of distinguishing men's position, it has acquired an unusual mobility, passing as it does continuously from hand to hand, altering the social condition of individuals and raising or lowering the status of families. Almost no single individual is free from the desperate and sustained effort to keep what he has got or to acquire it. The desire to grow rich at all costs, the taste for business, the passion for gain, the pursuit of comfort and material enjoyment are the most common preoccupations in despotisms. Those preoccupations spread with ease throughout all classes of society; they even affect those very classes which had been most free of them to that point; shortly they would weaken and debase the entire nation, if nothing emerged to check them. Now the fundamental feature of despotism is to encourage and spread these preoccupations. Such demoralizing passions come to its aid, filling men's imaginations and diverting them from public affairs, making them shudder at the very idea of revolution. Despotism alone can provide them with that state of secrecy and obscurity which makes greed an easy option and favors the making of dishonest profits by outfacing dishonor. These passions would have been strong enough without despotism; with it they are rampant.”
All power is structured, it's organized. Democracy is distributedly organized with innumerable connections between people and then innumerable connections between the associations —community, political and economic structures — people create. Centralized systems, where connections are few, communication emanating from the top, overwhelmingly in one direction, are systemically undemocratic. It is no coincidence as economic and political power in America overwhelmingly concentrated in massive corporations and the federal government, the understanding of organization as key to understanding all power was lost.
The last great democratic movement in America, the Civil Rights Movement, was the last to understand organizing and the resulting organization as fundamental to all democratic process. The remarkable democratic thinking and action of the peoples involved is always incredible to continually discover. The descendants of American slavery sought to be enfranchised into the republic's established government structures, unfortunately, these structures had become increasingly archaic, a situation not lost on some of the Movement's participants.
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In his 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, one of the Movement’s citizen organizers, Stokely Carmichael wrote of the necessity of reforming the American system, a “Political modernization”":
“We mean by it three major concepts: (1) questioning old values and institutions of the society; (2) searching for new and different forms of political structure to solve political and economic problems; and (3) broadening the base of political participation to include more people in the decision-making process.”
Continuing,
“The prevailing social order is not capable of bold innovation in basic areas of life. White America is rich, strong, capable of grand designs to conquer space and other scientific feats, but it is woefully underdeveloped in its human and political relations. In these areas, it is primitive and backward.”
A century after Tocqueville laid out the order of despotism, Carmichael asserts its antithesis,
“We are calling at this time for new political forms which will be the link between broadened participation (now occurring) and legitimate government. These forms will provide a means whereby a newly politicized people can get what they need from the government. It is not enough to add more and more people to the voter rolls and then send them into the old “do-nothing,” compromise-oriented political parties. Those new voters will only become frustrated and alienated. It is no good to enact an anti-poverty program calling for “maximum feasible participation of the poor” and then saddle that program with old City Hall and bureaucratic restrictions. The people will see this only as a perpetuation of the same old colonial situation. This country can continue to appropriate money for programs to be run by the same kinds of insensitive people with paternalistic, Anglo-conformity attitudes and the programs will continue to fail. They should fail, because they do not have the confidence and trust of the masses. In order to gain that confidence and trust, the people must be much more involved in the formulation and implementation of policy. Black people are indeed saying: “Mr. Charlie, we’d rather do it ourselves.” And in doing it themselves, they will be developing the habit of participation, the consciousness of ability to achieve, and the experience and wisdom to govern. Only this can ultimately create a viable body politic. It is not enough that shiny new school buildings be built in the ghettos, if the black people whose children attend them basically feel no attachment to those schools. Learning will not take place.”
“We have come to a stage in our history where the old approaches of doing for a people will no longer suffice. This is especially true when that which has been done often contributed to the retrogression, not the progression, of the recipients. No better example of this can be found than in the nation’s welfare program. As Mitchell Ginsberg, director of New York City’s Welfare Department, told a Senate sub-committee not long ago, the system is “bankrupt” as a social institution. Stating that the present system must be “thrown out” and calling for a new approach, he declared: 'As long as public assistance does not perform its relief function in such a way as to free the poorest of the poor, rather than to lock them in dependency, it has failed as an anti-poverty weapon.'”
Thirty years after writing this, asked about the electoral gains African Americans had made due specifically to his and thousands of others’ efforts, particularly in regards to city government, Kwame Ture astutely noted power from American city governments had largely been usurped. Today, the impotence of city government is obvious to all. Mayors vainly struggle against the effects of a mega-corporate economy and the now decades after decades disastrous global policies out of DC.
Today, what’s deemed politics is completely devoid of any understanding of organization, thus no politics in America, only growing isolation and a theater of the absurd. Changing direction would begin and end with organizing new, distributedly networked political, economic, and cultural associations.
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