Democracy (TM) — Coming to a Corporate Welfare State Near You
Posted by Kevin Carson on Aug 3, 2011 in Commentary • 9 commentsDemocracy is great, when people genuinely participate in making decisions about things that affect them. But it seldom works out that way. Once a formally democratic entity gets large enough to require government by representatives and a permanent administrative apparatus, it ceases to be “democratic” in anything but that formal sense. This results from what Robert Michels, in his analysis of the European social democratic parties a century ago, called the Iron Law of Oligarchy: “the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators.”
A society could be organized along the best syndicalist or libertarian communist lines, with federal bodies made up of delegates recallable at will by local worker-managed factories. But the tasks of central coordination would still require permanent staffs of economists and other experts, and in time the formally democratic bodies of delegates would be reduced to rubber stamping plans made by those permanent staffs. In the end, centralized institutions — whatever their ostensible purpose — serve the interests of those who run them.
But what about the local level, where elected representatives have small constituencies and are closest and most accessible to the people?
Several years ago in nearby Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I lived at the time, Dan Coody — the leader of a dissident, New Urbanist minority faction on the City Board, who had fought the real estate developers and other good ol’ boys for years — was elected mayor.
After his election his New Urbanist agenda consisted entirely of greenwash: Nitpicky aesthetic standards for buildings, an ordinance regulating the maximum size of signs, ubiquitous speed bumps in residential areas, and all sorts of other yuppie micromanagement.
When it came to stuff within his legitimate purview that would have genuinely curtailed sprawl, he was afraid to rock the boat. For example, when the sewer system needed a capacity upgrade because of the increased burden from all of real estate baron Jim Lindsey’s new outlying developments, what did Coody propose? Increased sewer hookup fees to make the developers pull their weight? That choice wasn’t even presented — the only alternative was an up or down vote on a penny sales tax to fund the renovation.
In Springdale, where I live now, voters last year turned down a millage increase for new school construction. The agenda included extravagances like giving the new second high school its own football field so the two schools wouldn’t have to share.
The vote came on the heels of a bunch of unpopular measures, taken in a virtually unaccountable manner by the school board, like closing the city’s main street for a block on either side of the old high school and constructing a luxurious administrative building — with an enormous central dome and atrium — spanning the street.
During the debate, a bunch of other interesting stuff came out. For example, the school board gave Superintendent Rollins a new Tahoe, and school staff were used — on the clock — to cater the new high school principal’s third wedding.
After the measure failed, the school board scheduled a second vote less than a year later. This time, Rollins leaned aggressively on teachers to propagandize parents and get supporters out to vote. But the administration kept a low profile in public venues like the local newspaper and tried to avoid drawing general public attention to the issue. So this time, with fewer voters and the deck stacked in favor of supporters, the millage increase won. Our “public servants” showed us who was boss.
The local governing institutions of northwest Arkansas, supposedly so close to the people, comprise an interlocking directorate. They include the city councils; the boards of directors at Tyson, Wal-Mart, Lindsey Real Estate, J.B Hunt, the University, and the Walton Arts Center; and the Northwest Arkansas Council (a quasi-private shadow government — er, public service organization — made up of corporate welfare queens). And the same handful of people keep shuffling back and forth among them.
In the real world, governments are simply beyond genuine democratic control. No matter how “progressive” candidates are, how much they talk about “hope” and “change,” once elected they’ll find they have more in common with the oligarchy than with you, and their primary interest will be continuance in office.
Democracy’s a great thing when people voluntarily associate for their own purposes, and participate directly in making decisions. But when it comes to controlling organizations that exercise coercive authority, like the state, democracy simply doesn’t work.
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.
"Democracy is great, when people can genuinely participate in making decisions about things that affect them."
Oh, really?
You think it's great that my neighbor gets to use the violence of the state to force me into behaviors that I may or may not choose on my own?
HA!
Some "Mutualist" you are.
You're awesome, Kevin.
I'm posting this anonymously, not because I'm afraid of standing behind my words, but because I'm talking about the experience of someone else. I've not had to deal with petty tyrannies, because I live in a part of the world where standing half a dozen dead cars in your driveway is OK. My brother, on the hand, had to live in an area where having three totally-working, road-legal cars in his driveway was cause for complaint to the parish council, saying he was taking down the tone of the area. And the nit-picking fucks would find ANY excuse to find anything he was doing wrong.
I used to be a big, BIG booster of local democracy. Then I heard stories of people, like those of my brother, who had been fucked around from government at even the most local, inconsequential level, and even when I still clinged to those beliefs, I told my brother about how awesome local democracy would be and he was like hey, local democracy gives the largest voice to those who have nothing better to do than go to local parish council meetings, and I was like "shiiit, it''s kind of like that". Those little tyrannies are almost as bad as the big tyrannies. Hell, I think even a totally-centralised government wouldn't be as bad as those local democracies that people like me were so fond of because they couldn't possibly keep track of every car on everyone's driveway, let alone how much people didn't like that people were using their own property as they see fit.
Fun time #1: One time, someone came up to him and complained that his 1960s Land River was a rustbucket. This Land Rover had been totally rebuilt from the chassis up and this old fuck was driving a 10-year-old Ford hatchback, so he said, "okay, let's let at *your* fucking car", and then actually pointed out all the places it was rusting.
Fun time #2: One of his neighbours just wouldn't shut the fuck up about how having a few totally-working-and-road-legal old cars was making the place look worse. So he parked his 1960s Land Rover on their lawn. Woohoo! ;D
Be well, Kevin.
Northwest Arkansas Council sounds similar in concept to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which is the local power structure in Michigan. Every year they hold an annual pow-wow on Mackinac Island where the state's political class goes to collectively kiss the ass of the state's business elite. Politics is everywhere subservient to business, which is where the real coercive authority is. Sure, the people doing the dirty work wear the uniform of the state, but the commands are issued from the private sector.
My recent post In pursuit of the haggle-free economy
People rightly focus on the awfulness of the federal government, with its penchant for war and torture and surveillance. But local tyrannies are ubiquitous–perhaps less obvious in virtue of their pettiness but not less abusive and authoritarian. Just ask the local city council member who didn't like the state of our lawn and set the evil "code enforcement" thugs on us.
I had an encounter with the curb appeal fascists too; trying to implement some backyard permaculture. It was then that I learned why it is that you can't fight city hall. Virtually every law firm, at some time or another, has done some modicum of municipal work, so it would be a conflict of interest for them to represent anyone against city hall. Pick 3 lawyers out of your local Yellow Pages and call them up if you don't believe me. The CIA's strategy is to buy up all the economics talent, the NSA all the math talent, and city hall all the legal talent. As long as brains are dependent on money there will be no way to fight city hall.
My recent post In pursuit of the haggle-free economy
The operative word above is "genuinely"
My recent post In pursuit of the haggle-free economy
Kevin, glad to see a post illuminating specific, ground-level state capitalist injustice!
Because ALL variants of democracy require the State, right?
Several years ago, the school board in Las Cruces, NM, decided that leasing the enormous football stadium at NMSU was more expensive than owning their own Field of Dreams. The idea was put to a referendum which was shot down 2:1. Not willing to thwarted that easily, the school board suddenly discovered that there was more than enough money in their budget (!!!) to acquire the land and build another stadium. The land where this enormous complex sits used to be agricultural fields, so we've turned perfectly productive fields into a space that costs money to maintain