On the Abolition of Political Parties -- III
It's been two years since the maenad, Mother Sinead, left the building. Best about the above video, in the second song, "Troy," she stands on her tiptoes every time she sings, an operatic doc marten ballerina. I used the womens for the heavy lifting across this piece. Womens can be radical, though ladies it never got radical enough for me. Also in this final part, I turn to the democratic heft of that slave-holding Virginia gentleman – in the antebellum South and everywhere before and since, slaves make the gentleman.
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A revival of democracy in the 21st century would require a restructuring of government creating a more participatory system. In the modern era, we have brief examples of such participatory systems in the American township, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Russian soviets. We also have the ancient examples of Roman and Greek participatory assemblies. It requires developing a new understanding of political organization in opposition to the long established tradition of hierarchical, centralized power, instead, understanding the processes and structures of horizontal distributed networks, the foundational organization of life, indeed the universe.
In the United States, such participatory restructuring need not be created from nothing. With local government structures, the US has a rudimentary historical framework upon which to evolve new participatory structures. Arendt points out the US constitution’s greatest failure to not “incorporate the townships and the town-hall meetings, the original springs of all political activity in the country, amounted to a death sentence for them…, It was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of the American people, which eventually cheated them of their proudest possession.”
The only founder of the American pantheon to truly understand the democratic necessity for a more distributed, participatory council system was Thomas Jefferson. In several letters in the last decade of his life, Jefferson called for the creation of “ward republics.” At the end a of letter in 1816, he wrote of needing such ward republics to insure the survival of the experiment in self-government he helped create. “As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, ‘Carthago delenda est,’ so do I every opinion, with the injunction, ‘divide the counties into wards.'" Arendt writes Jefferson’s referencing Rome's existential fear of Carthage was deliberate. He, correctly, believed without such reform, democracy in America would eventually fail.
In the same letter, Jefferson briefly explains how such a system might be structured,
“The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and federal relations; the State governments with the civil rights, laws, police, and administration of what concerns the State generally; the counties with the local concerns of the counties, and each ward direct the interests within itself. It is by dividing and subdividing these republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations, until it ends in the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing under every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.”
In another letter, Jefferson further explains how this process might work with all political power rising from the ward level through participatory associations. The ward's choices are sent up through representatives to each level above – county, state, and federal. This doesn’t get rid of the issue of representation, but would certainly provide greater control of the representative than a party structure. For example, a ward representative not doing the ward’s will could simply be replaced.
Jefferson’s systems thinking was hindered by no understanding of the ability to organize across geographic distance or among large populations except hierarchically and centrally. The insights of horizontal networking offered most essentially through greater biological understanding, would not begin to appear for another century. Jefferson also prescribes democratic organization for an agrarian republic, not an industrial society. Jefferson believed the overwhelmingly majority of the population would remain farmers. The small yeoman farm, and this is a classical republican understanding going back to the Romans and Greeks, provided each individual economic enfranchisement, allowing the individual the fundamental power to be an independent democratic citizen.
This idea of individual independence, again, going back to classical times, is deeply embedded in all our political concepts of private and public. Both classical republics and their modern two-party counterparts believe every individual has certain private rights beyond the reach of the public. In classical times, essential to this reality of individual privacy was the small yeoman farm, an independent economic and thus political entity. The Greeks called this autarkeia. On their land, in their homes, the citizen was sovereign. All modern notions of privacy extend from these roots, as does understanding of the individual being an enfranchised democratic citizen.
One of the great obstacles agrarian democracy failed to surmount in transitioning to the Industrial era was industrialism's destruction of all notions of economic independence – neither employee or CEO are politically or economically independent. Certainly the employee is subservient to the CEO, but the CEO is reliant on the employee, not independent. The farmers of the Populist era fought and failed to maintain their economic independence, the foundation of their political power, against the consolidating forces of industry. Simultaneously, with completely tortured, lawyerly bamboozling of this classical notion of private, the Supreme Court began its continual bestowing of the private rights of the individual onto the new industrial social organization of the corporation. The word corporation derives from the Latin corpus, body, across history used to describe a body of people. Webster defines incorporate as “to unite.” It is simply incredulous to treat the corporation as an individual.
Today, we face questions of not how to democratically organize the landed agrarian society of Jefferson’s day or of the burgeoning industrial economy faced by the Populists. We face a thoroughly industrialized society overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of leviathan corporations and a now new era of rapidly developing information technology. Fundamental questions of what might provide an individual economic power allowing a degree of political independence, such that the farm had provided agrarian republics, were never answered in the Industrial era. The idea and reality of organized labor fell far short. The new era of information technology dismisses all notions of private and individual control.
However, these new information technologies do offer an ability to transcend the geographic constraints of the American founding and Jefferson’s ward republic system, an ability to create horizontal participatory governance opposed to centralized hierarchical representation. Organizing politics around information requires a merging of our old ideas of private and public, with rights and responsibilities dependent on democratic structure.
Creating a participatory politics, replacing representative party systems, would require vast networks of participatory associations, resembling the participatory deliberative structures of a jury system, opposed to the representative party structure. The first century of the American republic saw such local, though non-networked, associations populating the American landscape. In 1838, democratic thinker and French journalist Alexis De Tocqueville wrote,
"In democratic countries the science of association is the mother of science; the progress of all the rest depends upon the progress it has made,...in countries in which these associations do not exist, if private individuals are unable to create an artificial and a temporary substitute for them, I can imagine no permanent protection against the most galling tyranny; and a great people may be oppressed by a small faction, or by a single individual, with impunity."
Tocqueville witnessed and recorded the height of the American agrarian republic. Participatory associations flourished. During this time, locality still overwhelmingly defined life. Though representative systems above the local were instituted, most decisions impacting daily life still occurred at the local level. Associations, organized in townships and meeting halls, educated, discussed, and decided. Tocqueville records whenever Americans ran into civic problems, they called a meeting.
21st century associations would foremost concern information creation, editing, communication, and decision making. In ways, their intent would resemble the NGOs (non-government organizations) and lobbyists that developed with industrial governance. However, instead of focusing on influencing representative government structures, these participatory associations would work to influence the greater citizen body. Such organization would also require more participatory structures of government. Local political associations and government ward-republics could be networked together into greater interacting federations. Unlike Jefferson's and Tocqueville's times, these political associations need not be geographically restricted, certainly many would be directly tied to local concerns, but others would be organized around issues transcending geographic constraints.
Importantly, these associations would not need the hard membership or homogeneous identity of representative parties, but operate with more fluid, ephemeral relationships. Weil brilliantly lays out what this might look like using an example of the political journals of her era. She writes,
“Outside parliament, intellectual circles would naturally form around journals of political ideas. These circles should remain fluid. This fluidity is the hallmark of a circle based on natural affinities; it distinguishes a circle from a party and prevents it from exerting a noxious influence. When one cultivates friendly relations with the director of a certain journal and with its regular contributors, when one occasionally writes for it, one can say that one is in touch with this journal and its circle, but one is not aware of being part of it; there is no clear boundary between inside and outside. Further away, there are those who read the journal and happen to know one or two of its contributors. Further again, there are regular readers who derive inspiration from the journal. Further still, there are occasional readers. Yet none would ever think or say, ‘As a person related to such journal, I do think that...’”
This is a terribly important idea. Instead of one monolith party defining political identity there are multitudes of associations based on specific issues, concerns, ideas, which people can influence and be influenced by, and join in discussion and action. The individual is not wrapped in a homogenized party banner but politically defines themself through a multitude of heterogeneous ideas and concerns. Weil then writes of the voters' relation with the elected official, but this also describes the relationships among participatory citizens and between the associations themselves. “Elected politicians would associate and disassociate following the natural and changing flow of affinities. I may very well agree with Mr A on the question of colonialism, yet disagree with him on the issue of agrarian ownership, and my relations with Mr B may be the exact reverse.”
Such participatory association is directly contradictory to the politics of today's representative party idiocy. The creation of multitudes of networked participatory associations would resemble both our actual non-political relations with other people, but also mimic the organization of the greater natural world we are all part.
In creating his ward republics, Jefferson offered some excellent advise. We should not get bogged down trying to figure out how it all operated and worked before we preceded. “Begin them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what others they are the best instruments.” This is a much more natural way to look at all politics, an evolutionary process of change opposed to the theological constraints under which government and politics have long operated with the idea of laws blasted in stone bestowed from mountaintops. Not that a few thou shalls and thou shall nots will not always be needed.
In relation to this idea, in Breaking the Barrier: The Rise of Solidarity in Poland, democratic historian Lawrence Goodwyn wrote on the participatory associations that arose with Poland's Solidarity Movement. Goodwyn writes,
“All such inherently dynamic democratic organizational forms are intrinsically experimental. As Solidarnosc itself would experience, contingency is necessarily built into the structure of popular democracy. There is nothing remotely “scientific” about democratic forms. Such building blocks as have been fashioned possess value because they have been experimentally tested over time, not because they harmonize with some enclosed political theory.”
The world is in desperate need of democratic experimentation. To begin such an undertaking requires understanding how we’ve come to where we are. Most immediately, an understanding the party structures which grew out of the establishment of modern republicanism, indeed modern republicanism itself, are in the course of human affairs relatively new and by no means essential to democracy. Today, it is imperative we come to terms with these party structures instead of facilitating self-government largely obstruct it. In the American system, the present parties are little more than codified electoral labels of suppression, a leprosy on the body politic.
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