The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy E-Book

Mark Purcell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Antipode Book Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 394

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Arguing that the hegemony of the neoliberal/capitalist nexus must be challenged if we are to address the proliferating challenges facing our world, this inspiring book explains how democracy can revive the political fortunes of the left.

• Explores issues central to the civil uprisings that swept the world in 2011, drawing profound connections between democracy and neoliberalism in an urban context
• Features in-depth analysis of key political theorists such as Gramsci; Lefebvre; Rancière; Deleuze and Guattari; and Hardt and Negri
• Advocates the reframing of democracy as a personal and collective struggle to discover the best in ourselves and others
• Includes empirical analysis of recent instances of collective action

Leseprobe

Contents

Series page

Acknowledgments

1 What Is to Be Done?

The Current Context

A Methodology of Thought and Practice: Transduction

Plan of the Book

2 What Democracy Means

A Social Order of Many Souls

Democratic Desires

Conclusion

3 Becoming Democratic

Perpetual Struggle

Conclusion

4 Becoming Active

Popular Activation

David Foster Wallace

So Then, How?

Coda

5 Revolutionary Connections

The Ornithology of Collective Action

Gramsci: Beyond Welding

Laclau and Mouffe: Equivalence

Deleuze and Guattari: Relentless Connection

Conclusion

6 Conclusion

Objections

Transduction

The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy

References

Index

Antipode Book Series

Series Editors: Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota, USA, and Sharad Chari, London School of Economics, UK

Like its parent journal, the Antipode Book Series reflects distinctive new developments in radical geography. It publishes books in a variety of formats—from reference books to works of broad explication to titles that develop and extend the scholarly research base—but the commitment is always the same: to contribute to the praxis of a new and more just society.

Published

Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in CapitalismBrett ChristophersThe Down-Deep Delight of DemocracyMark PurcellGramsci: Space, Nature, PoliticsEdited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex LoftusPlaces of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land OwnershipA. Fiona D. MackenzieThe New Carbon Economy: Constitution, Governance and ContestationEdited by Peter Newell, Max Boykoff and Emily BoydCapitalism and ConservationEdited by Dan Brockington and Rosaleen DuffySpaces of Environmental JusticeEdited by Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter and Gordon WalkerThe Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of CrisisEdited by Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. WrightPrivatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-SocietyEdited by Becky MansfieldPractising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the AcademyEdited by Katharyne MitchellGrounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of InsecurityEdward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries BezuidenhoutPrivatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society RelationsEdited by Becky MansfieldDecolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the MayaJoel WainwrightCities of WhitenessWendy S. ShawNeoliberalization: States, Networks, PeoplesEdited by Kim England and Kevin WardThe Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global EconomyEdited by Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew HerodDavid Harvey: A Critical ReaderEdited by Noel Castree and Derek GregoryWorking the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Activism, Professionalisation and IncorporationEdited by Nina Laurie and Liz BondiThreads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ PerspectiveEdited by Angela Hale and Jane WillsLife’s Work: Geographies of Social ReproductionEdited by Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston and Cindi KatzRedundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class YouthLinda McDowellSpaces of NeoliberalismEdited by Neil Brenner and Nik TheodoreSpace, Place and the New Labour InternationalismEdited by Peter Waterman and Jane Wills

Forthcoming

Fat Bodies, Fat Spaces: Critical Geographies of ObesityRachel Colls and Bethan Evans

This edition first published 2013© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Mark Purcell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Purcell, Mark Hamilton.The down-deep delight of democracy / Mark Purcell.pages cmIncludes index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-4997-9 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-4443-4998-6 (pbk.) 1. Democracy–History.JC421.P865 2013321.8–dc23

2012045277

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Viernes 20M_23 By Julio AlbarránCover design by www.cyandesign.co.uk

To the one Forever Overhead.The board will nod and you will go, and though we grieve we are grateful for these shards of light from the hearts of sad stars.

Acknowledgments

Like any other book, this one is an assemblage, a rhizome that opens out into the world and connects with many different people, ideas, desires, and energies. It would be impossible to acknowledge them all, and so this is only a partial list. Susan Fainstein, Ananya Roy, Peter Marcuse, David Imbroscio, Byron Miller, Michael Brown, Helga Leitner, Andy Merrifield, Clive Barnett, Nicholas Dahmann, Nathan Clough, Erik Swyngedouw, Nik Heynan, Richard Day, Deborah Martin, Walter Nicholls, Eugene McCann, James deFilippis, Matt Wilson, and Gary Bridge have all contributed to and pushed my thinking in various fruitful directions.

Also incredibly stimulating has been the extraordinary work of bloggers whose active and high-quality thinking and writing are a model we all should aspire to. Among them are Lenin’s Tomb, I Cite, ABC Democracy, The Commune, Take the Square, Red Pepper, Ceasefire, Anarchist Without Content, Pop Theory, Cities and Citizenship, No Useless Leniency, Progressive Geographies, and (the former) Infinite Thought.

Among the many at the University of Washington, special thanks go to my students in CEP 301 and CEP 461, who read the classics with me with great effort, patience, and insight. And to Chris Campbell, one of the few administrators who knows the value of scholarship and how to engender it in an institution. And of course to Becoming-Poor, which exists, incredibly, in an academy increasingly cheapened by money, and nevertheless has absolutely no intention of giving in. Autogestiamo!

The people at Wiley-Blackwell have been fantastic. Rachel Pain guided the project into existence with grace, and Vinay Gidwani saw it to completion with elegance. Jacqueline Scott and Isobel Bainton were fabulous in every way. And two anonymous reviewers were extraordinary for their supportive, thoughtful, and erudite comments.

I had the good fortune to receive financial support from the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington to hire a copy editor and indexer. I hired Karen Uchic, and I could not be more impressed by her work.

Let’s face it, the cover of this book is the best thing about it. The ­photographer is Julio Albarrán. Find more of his work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/julioalbarran/.

And of course, as always, for everything: Mom, Elham, Roshann, and Neeku.

1

What Is to Be Done?

…be on the watch.there are ways out.there is a light somewhere.it may not be much light butit beats thedarkness.be on the watch.the gods will offer youchances.know them, take them…the more often youlearn to do it,the more light there willbe…you are marvelous.the gods wait to delightinyou.

—“The Laughing Heart,” Charles Bukowski (1993)1

In The Politics, Aristotle describes how oligarchies fall and give way to democracies: “by concentrating power into ever fewer hands, because of a shameful desire for profit, [the oligarchs] made the multitude stronger, with the result that it revolted and democracies arose” (Aristotle, 1998b, p. 1286b). As we stagger through the flotsam of the financial crisis and the preposterous proposal of “austerity” as a solution, it is not hard to see ourselves in the first part of Aristotle’s account. But in this book, I want to focus on the second part, the part where he suggests that ­oligarchies tend to “make the multitude stronger,” that they awaken and activate a popular power that rises up and expresses its desire for democracy.

Aristotle also reminds us that, in a sense, political questions are always very old ones. He advises that we should “take it, indeed, that pretty well everything…has been discovered many times…in the long course of ­history….Therefore, one should make adequate use of what has been discovered, but also try to investigate whatever has been overlooked” (Aristotle, 1998b, p. 1329b). Nietzsche displays a similar kind of humility in the face of the long history of political thought, arguing that ideas

grow up in connection in relationship with each other…. However ­suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they [are] nevertheless…far less a discovery than a recognition, of remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order (Nietzsche, 1989a, p. 27).

So asking the question “What is to be done?” is always an atavistic enterprise in a way, a kind of mining of past political action and thought. It is Lenin’s old question, but it is no less the question Plato and Aristotle were asking, writing as they were in the wake of the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War and living under a pervasive sense that their society was crumbling. Marx was asking the question too, and Lenin, and Gramsci. In the poem that opens the chapter, Bukowski is also searching for an answer, as are we today. And so in taking up the question of what is to be done, I try to be very much aware of this history, of what has already been discovered, and I try to make adequate use of it. I mine the work of thinkers like Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Lefebvre, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière, Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci, and others, trying to learn what they have to teach us. At the same time, I do not mean only to retrace the steps of others. I intend to use the political wisdom of the past to cut a path toward a possible future, toward a political community we have not yet realized.

My answer to Lenin’s question of “What is to be done?” is: ­democracy. Less concisely, what is to be done, what we all must do together, is to engage in a collective and perpetual struggle to democratize our society and to manage our affairs for ourselves. I do not propose democracy as the Platonic Form of the good community. It is not some end of history we should expect to reach. Rather, my argument is more restrained: perpetual democratization is the best way forward in the current context and for the foreseeable future. What we need in our time is to move politically from oligarchy to democracy, from passivity to activity, and from heteronomy to autonomy.

The Current Context

To understand what it would mean to democratize society in the current context, it helps to have some sense of what that context is. Over the course of the last seventy-five years or so, capitalist social relations of production were extended (if incompletely) to almost all parts of the globe; the dominance of Keynesian and social-democratic thinking was replaced by a neoliberal common sense; attempts to establish a state-socialist alternative to capitalism collapsed in utter failure; the world’s population has not only grown rapidly but become predominantly urban; geopolitics moved from the Cold War to a “war on terror” to the current post-terror landscape; and the environment (both the global ­climate and localized disasters) came to be seen as a central political question at all scales. Like all periods, the current era has also been greatly shaped by recurrent manifestations of popular power, in the form of both intense eruptions and everyday struggles by people to collectively liberate themselves from the various structures that contain them.

Political economy

The recent processes of globalization, through which capitalist production spread to incorporate almost every part of the globe, have been so extremely well documented that I think recounting them at length here is unnecessary (e.g. Dicken, 1998; Brenner and Theodore, 2003; Harvey, 2005). I will therefore offer only a brief review. Although capitalism has been extending itself geographically since its inception, the globalization processes of the twentieth century have greatly speeded up the process by which the entire globe is being integrated into a single capitalist economic machine. How we orient ourselves to this machine is a central political, economic, and cultural question in the current context. State socialism, of the kind that came to power in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, among other places, represents a state-led attempt to create a non-capitalist alternative. While these regimes often call themselves communist, they are all more properly socialist societies managed by the state. Another option, what we might call a welfare-state approach, has been to accept capitalism but use the state to actively manage it with an eye toward stability and material redistribution for social justice. Keynesianism and social democracy are the leading models associated with this second option. A third option, generally known as neoliberalism, wants to unleash the capitalist market by reducing the size of the state and its ability to regulate the economy. I argue that each of these options, in its own way, is nothing other than a form of ­oligarchy. None offers a properly democratic response to the question of what is to be done.

The modern welfare-state model was born in the wake of the Great Depression. It typically followed a national-Keynesian approach to economic policy, which is to say it favored a very strong and active central government that carved out an expansive public sphere: strong state authority and generous provision of public goods and services. It was a model in which the state (usually a liberal-democratic one) acted as the primary representative of the public. This association became so ingrained in the culture as to make the state virtually synonymous with the public or the people. In this role as public, the state closely regulated industries and managed the macro economy. It also standardized ­currencies and ensured relative monetary stability. Government spending was seen as a primary economic variable, a linchpin for ensuring economic growth. Large government bureaucracies were required to carry out this economic management. They employed many people, ­generally with good wages and benefits. Labor organization was typically strong, and governments participated centrally in creating broad accords between capital and labor that usually secured high wages and good job security for workers. Beyond those accords, government ­policies tended to favor material redistribution to the less wealthy. Such policies included national social security, high minimum wages, subsidized health care, and the like. In addition, high tax rates enabled ­governments to provide well-funded and high-quality infrastructure such as public schools and ­universities, child care, hospitals and clinics, libraries, parks, public transportation, and so on. In the more fully social-democratic regimes, most of which were in Europe, it was common for the state to assume even greater economic control by owning certain enterprises and even monopolizing entire economic sectors like natural resources, telecommunications, or transportation.

Clearly there is a spectrum of possible policy actions within the ­welfare-state model, and particular policy combinations vary by place and time. However, for the purposes of this brief account, in broad ­outline what all such regimes share is a commitment to a large and interventionist state that acts on behalf of citizens, usually to create social policies whose goal is some amount of material redistribution for greater equality. The welfare-state model thus occupies the broad middle ­between the hard-left alternative of state socialism and neoliberalism’s free-market fundamentalism. It insists that a liberal-democratic state can and should play a large role in regulating capitalist economic activity so that we can have a stable, prosperous, and incrementally more equal society.

During roughly the same period that the welfare state was the dominant model in the capitalist world, a number of revolutions across the globe created an archipelago of state-socialist regimes that offered a stark alternative to capitalism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 created the Soviet Union, and after World War II Soviet insistence helped install state-socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. Relatively more independent revolutions in Yugoslavia and Cuba produced state socialism there. The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 initiated state socialism in the East Asian sphere, and it spread to places like Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mongolia. As with the ­welfare state, state socialism varied in its particulars. In basic outline, it took its agenda from the Communist Manifesto, which called for workers’ parties to seize the state and use its power to expropriate from the bourgeoisie the privately owned means of production. Such collectivization or nationalization was designed to abolish private property and classes, and thus end capitalist relations of production. The idea was that this socialist phase led by a one-party state would be temporary; once classes were abolished, the state would no longer be necessary, since its purpose was to manage the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The state would wither away in due course and lead to a self-managed and egalitarian communist society. Of course, this transition from state-led socialism to stateless communism did not occur in actual practice. In fact, the opposite tended to happen: as the state bureaucracy took over control of the means of production, it became the new ruling class and ruthlessly intensified the power and scope of the state to the very limits of imagination. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were the largest-scale disasters, but few state-socialist regimes avoided the horrors of totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Part of the failure was due to the folly of trying to manage national-scale economies through central-state command, and part of it was the ill-conceived attempt to defeat the capitalist West in a race to industrialize. But perhaps an even more fatal flaw of such states was the brutality and terrorism of their totalitarian political regimes. Extraordinary movements in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, China, and Romania, just to name a few, demonstrated that people will not submit to a totalitarian state indefinitely. They will resist, resolutely and creatively, through both small everyday acts and large public spectacles, when the state attempts to control ­virtually every aspect of their lives.

By 1989, the state-socialist model was largely exhausted. The Soviet Bloc began its rapid collapse and entered a “post-socialist” phase. Today, only China, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba remain as countries with state-socialist regimes.2 To be clear, the “utter failure” of this model I mentioned is not at all the failure of communism, which was never achieved in almost any sense. It is rather the failure of state socialism: the central management of a national economy by an authoritarian state controlled by a single party nominally allied to the proletariat.

As we saw, during the era when state socialism was at its height, it faced a capitalist world in which the welfare-state model was dominant. But by the early 1970s, the welfare state’s dominance had begun to erode. Two main forces precipitated its decline. The first was a sustained ideological assault from the right carried out by neoliberal intellectuals. The second was the emergence of economic problems such as unemployment, inflation, and capital flight that began to intensify in and around 1973. The intellectuals’ ideological attacks began to emerge in the late 1940s, when thinkers associated with groups like the Mont Pelerin Society remobilized traditional arguments from liberal ­economics. Scholars like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Karl Popper opposed state intervention in the economy, and they insisted that society is more efficient, wealthier, and more open when capitalist markets are allowed to operate as freely as possible (Popper, 1945; Friedman, 1962; Hayek, 1994). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, they prosecuted a long war of ideas against Keynesianism and the ­welfare state and for a neoliberal alternative. Then, in the early 1970s, economic events provided neoliberals with an important opportunity: most ­economies in the developed world underwent simultaneous and acute stagnation and inflation. It was a clear opportunity to press the case that management by a Keynesian welfare state could not ­provide economic stability and prosperity. At about the same time, it was becoming increasingly feasible for corporations to relocate their operations, to flee the high wages and benefits won by labor in some parts of the industrialized world for areas with weaker labor organization and lower wages. Some of that flight remained within the industrialized economies, but some left for less industrialized places like Korea and Taiwan and then at different times China, Thailand, Brazil, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Mexico, among others. The flight of capital from Keynesian welfare states made such states appear unable to compete effectively in a rapidly globalizing world economy.

The rise of politicians like Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s helped translate these intellectual and economic trends into concrete policy for the global North. Markets were deregulated, ownership and control of economic enterprise was privatized, and social services were aggressively cut. Such policy initiatives spread insistently, though at different rates, to governments in other wealthy economies, so by the mid-1980s neoliberalism was having great success in its struggle to supplant the Keynesian welfare state. This success was only intensified by the fall of most state-socialist regimes in the late 1980s. As the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites collapsed under the weight of their failed totalitarian model, the neoliberalizing West was quick to claim ideological and economic victory, narrating the changes as inevitable, a result of the inherent superiority of free markets and liberal democracy over their “communist” alternative. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” was perhaps the most memorable example (Fukuyama, 1992).

The dominance of neoliberalism extended very much also to the question of economic development in the global South. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, a line of thinking known as the “Washington Consensus” came to dominate international economic policy, especially with respect to countries in the global South. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) helped produce a pervasive common sense regarding poorer countries, whereby the only possible path to development was austerity and “structural adjustment,” which would drastically reduce state spending and ownership of assets, lower trade barriers, encourage Foreign Direct Investment, and energetically integrate their economies into global commodity flows. The World Bank and IMF induced such policy changes by making them conditions of the loans they offered to developing countries. Throughout this period, more and more Southern countries were integrated into this system whereby the public/state sector was reduced and the economy reoriented toward the production of commodities for the global capitalist market. The fall of the Berlin Wall only accelerated this process, as countries could no longer rely on their position in the Cold War system of satellite or client states to secure resources. They were increasingly forced to participate effectively in the global market.

By the 1990s, neoliberalism had become so taken-for-granted that center-left leaders like Clinton and Blair were unable and/or unwilling to propose either a return to Keynesian welfarism or some other alternative. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that by the 1990s it had become very hard to imagine anything other than neoliberalism. It was only when the great recession of 2007 hit that the neoliberal consensus began to weaken. The housing sector and its financial markets were widely seen as the leading cause of the crash, and those markets had been ­subject to the same active deregulation as other markets. It became no longer self-evident that the markets will regulate themselves, that public oversight by the state is superfluous. This new doubt was symbolized by the appearance of Alan Greenspan, a leading light of neoliberal thought, before Congress in October 2008. Greenspan was ashen and penitent. He testified that the crisis had exposed serious flaws in his economic worldview. The Washington Consensus had become open to debate again.

And so we currently occupy a state of uncertainty. The recession of 2007 clearly destabilized neoliberal common sense. But that destabilization was in no way total; much of neoliberalism remains common sense, if only because we have had so few alternatives for thirty years. Recent events only mean that a new battle has been joined over the content of political-economic common sense. There is today an opening, an opportunity, for non-neoliberal alternatives to assert themselves effectively.

One alternative that has already begun to emerge is a reinvigorated Keynesian welfarism. In many ways, President Obama’s bailout package in response to the economic crisis in the United States was classically Keynesian, particularly the strategy of government spending as economic stimulus. The US government also took controlling stakes in very large firms crippled by the crisis, such as General Motors and Chrysler (Chang and Gilmore, 2011). The financial regulation bill passed in the United States in 2010 similarly reasserts (albeit weakly) the need for more national-government regulation of market activity. Another alternative is that neoliberalism will stagger on, wounded, but still stronger than any other idea. For example, when Obama took office in the midst of the crisis, one of his first appointments was Laurence Summers as director of the National Economic Council. Summers is an influential neoliberal economist who was Clinton’s Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001. He was widely thought to have played an important role in deregulating the derivatives market, which helped cause the crash (e.g. Ames, 2008). Yet Obama, even as he explored Keynesian stimulus solutions, also seemed unable (or unwilling) to cast aside the voice of neoliberal orthodoxy, making Summers one of his closest economic advisors in the early days of his presidency.

Since the crash, neoliberals have cast around almost desperately for ways to end the persistent recession. One response, incredibly, has been to remobilize the austerity approach in the global North, which is to say they have tried to solve a crisis precipitated by neoliberal deregulation by pushing neoliberalization still further. Many states in Europe are faced with mounting national debt caused by insufficient tax revenue as a result of the recession, ineffective tax collection systems, and relatively generous welfare spending. The “troika” of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the IMF has recently been pressing ­countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy to undergo austerity measures, which typically involve cutting all sorts of welfare benefits, reducing the number of public employees, privatizing state-owned assets, and increasing taxes. Architects of austerity claim that reducing the national debt in this way will get economies “back on track” (e.g. Daley, 2011). Austerity for these countries is presented by the Troika and by the mainstream press as the only alternative to their default and the continental economic collapse that would surely follow. Such forced austerity packages have been the stock-in-trade of the Washington Consensus, and they have long been the prevailing wisdom of the World Bank and IMF in dealing with debt-ridden poor countries facing economic crisis. And in fact such austerity measures are not limited to relatively poorer countries. Wealthier governments like the United Kingdom, United States, and Israel are also carrying sovereign debt as a result of the recession and are currently involved in a pitched struggle over how to respond: what public spending to cut and how much, and whether to raise taxes and for whom.

Not surprisingly, coming as they do in the midst of economic recession and high unemployment, austerity measures face vigorous opposition from mobilized populations. Such opposition roiled Greece in 2011–2012, when massive demonstrations destabilized the Greek government to the point of political collapse. Similar uprisings took place in Spain, and there is some indication that something similar is developing in Italy. Even in the United States the Occupy Wall Street movement voiced significant resistance to the current political-economic structure. To some extent, this mobilization is an attempt to defend what remains of the welfare state. Crowds are demanding that the government retain state-sector jobs with good wages and benefits while preserving robust state transfers that support citizens in many different sectors of life. A similar desire can be seen in the anti-cuts movement in the United Kingdom and in the spring 2011 protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Unlike in Greece and Spain, in Wisconsin the attack on state employment and spending was not initiated by supranational monetary institutions but by relatively local political forces. Nevertheless, the mobilized response was similar: massive and strident public demonstrations and occupations to defend established welfare-state goods like public-sector jobs and government service programs. In sum, one important desire that is being expressed in the popular anti-austerity movements is to defend what remains of the welfare state against neoliberal attempts to ­dismantle it still further.

Each of these uprisings is complex, and the desire to defend the ­welfare state has been only one among many political demands. I do not want to say we should reject this demand. Defending the welfare state, or even trying to reinvigorate it, is a perfectly understandable way to respond to neoliberalism and austerity (Judt and Snyder, 2012). It is the alternative closest at hand, the non-neoliberal logic we have most recently experienced. Without doubt, a Keynesian welfare state is preferable to its ­neoliberal alternative. However, I want to argue that we can aim at more; that in terms of democracy, we can do far better than the welfare state. We can aspire to and achieve a much more democratic form of life than the welfare state has to offer.3 The full weight of this argument will become clear throughout the book as I develop my conception of what democracy means, but here let me sketch the outlines of the Keynesian welfare state’s democratic deficit.

As we saw, Keynesianism imagines the state to be essentially the same thing as the public, in the sense that the state stands in for, and acts as though it were, the people. But in fact the state is not the people. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had it right: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people’ ” (2005, p. 44). The state is only ever a very small subset of the people. Democracy means that the people rule themselves. Oligarchy is the term for a regime in which a small subset of the population rules the whole. Insofar as it imagines the state to be the sole, legitimate, and unchallenged representative of the people, the ­welfare state is much more an oligarchy than it is a democracy.4 In that way, Keynesianism differs little from state socialism: it accepts that in the everyday functioning of the polity a small cadre of rulers (state ­officials) will govern a large body of ruled subjects (everyone else). To be sure, Keynesian states have been more democratic than state-socialist ones. In state socialism, the state/public sector aspires to encompass all areas of life, while Keynesianism usually ­operates within liberal-­democratic ­governments where the state/public sector is formally limited.5 Further attenuating Keynesianism’s oligarchy is the fact that citizens in liberal democracies have some say in selecting their governors through majority vote. To a limited extent, therefore, state agents are accountable to the people. While this accountability is typically quite weak, it is nevertheless stronger than in a state-socialist regime. Keynesian welfarism thus offers a relatively more democratic version of state socialism in which the state alone embodies the public and acts for the people, but its ­control is mitigated somewhat by liberal-democratic structures.

Of course, neoliberals have criticized Keynesian welfarism as well. A central tenet of their argument has always been that Keynesianism endangers the liberal qualities of liberal democracy because it advocates a larger state/public role in economic policy, working to enlarge the authority of the state to manage the behavior of people in the private sphere (and particularly the market economy). That is, neoliberals argue, a strong state-public sector restricts the liberty of citizens in the private sector, and such restriction is precisely what liberal democracy, ever since its original formulation in Locke, is designed to prevent. For Locke, ­tyranny is the greatest of all political dangers, and many neoliberals are quite sincere when they decry high taxes, state regulation of industry, and redistribution policies as tyrannical. Their argument is that a small cadre of state bureaucrats, rather than the free market, is deciding what to do with a significant portion of each citizen’s material fortune. The old Republican Party adage that “you know what to do with your money better than the government does” is very much heir to this anti-tyranny legacy.

I do not mean to suggest that neoliberals are offering a more democratic alternative. Not at all. They propose a market of purportedly free individuals as a substitute for state control. Of course, capitalist markets are also highly oligarchical, dominated as they are by a few large corporations that heavily influence how goods are made and distributed.6 Moreover, it is hard to ignore the less idealistic motivations of neoliberalism. It is also a naked power play to free those large corporations from state interference so they can dominate economic markets and maximize their profit. But still, the kernel of the neoliberal objection to Keynesian welfarism is not wrong: state power, even in a liberal democracy, is ­oligarchic by its very nature.7 A few state officials must necessarily make decisions for the many. Neoliberalism and the Keynesian welfare state thus offer a choice between one kind of oligarchy and another. We must look elsewhere for a properly democratic alternative.

The continual recurrence of constituent power

Throughout the current era, indeed throughout history, there has been another kind of power at work, a power very different from the one I have been examining. It is a popular power, a power that arises from below, from within the body of society. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book Empire (2000), offer a useful conceptual framework for understanding this other kind of power. They argue that there is a conflict at the center of modernity. This conflict is “between, on the one hand, the immanent forces of desire and association, the love of community, and on the other, the strong hand of an overarching authority that imposes and enforces an order on the social field” (2000, p. 69). In the Modern age, they argue, the powers of creation that had previously been thought to reside in heaven, in a transcendental sphere, were brought down to earth. The source of all creation is no longer thought to be God, but rather the work of an organized human society. In other words, the power of creation is no longer transcendental, but immanent. This shift resulted in what Hardt and Negri call a crisis of authority: if it is no longer God in heaven that rules the world, if that power is now in the hands of human beings, how can we give form to this immanent authority so that order can be preserved? Hardt and Negri argue that the central project of modern political thought is to imagine this new earthly authority.

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was the opening salvo. In a world where authority was no longer transcendental, no longer vested in a king by divine right, Hobbes’ project was to construct an authority that derived from nothing other than people themselves, an authority those same people would accept as legitimate. He constructed this authority to be supremely powerful, such that “there is no power on earth that can ­compare to it.”8 He began from the premise that in the state of nature, which is to say in the human condition without a state, immanent power is all that exists. God does not determine our fate; rather each person has the power to do as he or she pleases. Hobbes thought that in such a state there was nothing to prevent each person from using their own power to make war on everyone else, a situation he famously termed a war of all against all. Hobbes’ ­solution was to invent an originary political contract. This contract had a very specific structure: each person contracts with each of the others individually, and they both agree to give their individual power over to an “artificial person,” an entity created by the contract itself. This entity was his Leviathan, or the modern state, an earthly power that serves to overawe the multitude and keep order in society (1996, Chapter 16).

For Hardt and Negri, Hobbes’ Leviathan initiates the central conflict of modernity, between the power of people to act as they choose, and the power of Leviathan to impose order on them. Hardt and Negri call the power of people to act “constituent power,” whereas the power of Leviathan is “constituted power.” According to this narrative, constituent power is primary; its origin is in the bodies and minds of all people, in “the multitude” as Hobbes called them. Constituted power is therefore derivative; it is siphoned off from constituent power and turned back onto people in order to control them. This idea of primacy is not Hardt and Negri’s invention. It is rather a central tenet of all modern political thought starting with Hobbes: power originates in the bodies of the ­multitude, and constituted power (Leviathan) is merely an artificial creation, a human contrivance that serves the purpose of establishing societal order.9 In other words, constituent power is autonomous, it is self-producing. It does not need constituted power to exist. The mass of people, what Hardt and Negri also call “the multitude,” can act, create, and produce life on their own. The constituted power of the state (or of capital), on the other hand, depends on constituent power for its very existence.

Constituent power goes by other names. Marx (1994) calls it our “vital powers”; for Spinoza (1996), it is our conatus; Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the term puissance; for Nietzsche (1989a) it is our will to power; and Aristotle (1998b) just thought of it as our nature (physis), our inner drive to grow into a full-fledged human being. Each retains the idea that this power is somehow our own, that it is different from a power outside ourselves. Thus, the various ideas about constituent power point to the tension between autonomy and heteronomy, between governing oneself and being governed by another.10 It is the struggle ­between the multitude acting by itself and for itself and the multitude being ruled by an entity outside itself. It is, in short, the struggle between democracy and oligarchy. Hobbes’ Leviathan is the quintessence of ­heteronomy. It is when the people give up their own authority to make laws and transfer it to an artificial entity outside of themselves. The modern state is thus founded on the principle of heteronomy, on the multitude being ruled by something beyond them, rather than on autonomy, on the multitude ruling themselves.

The fact that constituent power is the creative force of society, that it produces the world, means that constituent power is always present, always operating, always driving the process of change. We tend to think of this power as weak and fleeting, as flittering at the margins of society, as reacting meekly to the real power, to the structures of constituted power like the Keynesian welfare state, or the capitalist market dominated by large corporations, or the totalitarian societies of state socialism. But if constituent power produces the world, if it is the real engine of history, it must also produce constituted power; it must itself create the structures that contain it. This way of thinking, one very much inspired in Hardt and Negri by Deleuze and Guattari (as we will see), repositions constituent power as original, permanent, and primary. Our habit of seeing it as weak is not so much its weakness, but ours. If we understand power in this way, then we need to recondition our way of seeing. We must more carefully attend to and learn to better perceive constituent power. Even if power most often manifests as constituted power, we must try to understand how and why constituent power gave rise to the particular structures of constituted power. Moreover, we must also be attentive to constituent power when it emerges and operates on its own terms, as the power of the multitude reclaiming their agency, resolving to act for themselves again.

The Arab Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and Oman in 2010–2011 are perhaps some of the most spectacular manifestations of raw constituent power in recent memory. Although they are extremely important and worthy of close attention, they are only one in a very long line of such events. In 1871, working class residents all over Paris rose up and took control of the city; they governed it themselves for two months. In 1920 in Turin and Milan, in a wave of factory occupations in Northern Italian industrial towns, workers’ ­councils took control of factories and ran them themselves, without bosses, for extended periods (Anonymous, 1921). In the 1940s, Indians rose up against British domination using a variety of tactics that included mass actions of non-violent refusal. In the 1950s and 1960s, people all over Africa struggled insistently for independence and an end to European colonial domination. In 1956 in Hungary, students, workers, and ­ordinary people rebelled against a Stalinist bureaucracy and ­succeeded in controlling the country for several weeks until Soviet troops put down the uprising and reinstalled the former regime. In 1968, again in Paris, students and workers brought off enormous occupations and general strikes that destabilized the government to the point of collapse. Similar upwellings, in Tiananmen in 1989, Chiapas in 1994, Argentina in 2001, Bolivia in 2005, Iran in 2009, and in Portugal, Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom, Chile, Israel, the United States, and Russia in the summer and fall of 2011, teach us that constituent power continues to assert itself, to express its desire, and to shape the course of history. To be sure, a close analysis of each of these events would reveal a complex mixture of constituent and constituted power. The movement for democracy in China, for example, saw a continual struggle between leaders who tried to shape and direct the movement and the mass of participants who repeatedly refused to be ruled (Zhao 2004). All such events are marked by intricate ebbs and flows between constituent and constituted power, between autonomy and heteronomy. All I want to do here is to give a name to constituent power, to understand it as fundamentally different from ­constituted power, and to make clear that it has been a vibrant and important force in the politics of the current context.

Rapid urbanization

One particularly prominent feature of the political-economic shifts of the last forty years has been the rapid urbanization of the globe, a ­process driven almost entirely by urbanization in the global South (e.g. Davis, 2006; Roy and Ong, 2011). As cities in the global North deindustrialized, some manufacturing production has moved to other cities and towns in the North, but much of it moved to cities in the global South. Those cities began to attract migrants to the new factories, and rural-­to-urban migration intensified. This process has been particularly strong in newly industrializing countries like China, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, but it is common in other places as well. Often this urbanization develops fitfully, as firms like Nike contract to make products in a certain place for a time, but then move their operations elsewhere in search of cheaper labor. Thus, urbanization as a result of industrialization in the South has been very uneven, and it is often characterized by rapid boom-and-bust cycles.

But industrialization and pull factors are not the only, or even ­primary, force driving Southern urbanization. Also key have been push factors in the countryside. As the capitalist market has increasingly penetrated all parts of the globe, large sections of the rural areas of the South have been industrialized, and production has shifted from food for local ­consumption to cash crops for global markets. This shift has been accompanied by changes in land tenure, as small holdings have been consolidated into large ones that are more able to carry out the mass production of cash crops necessary to compete in the global market. While this process of rural land consolidation and market integration is not new, having begun in most places during the colonial era, it has intensified in recent decades, especially in Africa and Asia, as the global market has become increasingly integrated.11 As we saw, structural adjustment policies actively encouraged countries to integrate themselves into the global market and to encourage Foreign Direct Investment, and so those policies made rural restructuring even more acute. As a result, an increasing number of peasants and small holders have been displaced from their land. While not all have immediately migrated to cities, that has been the most common outcome. In countries with ­primate cities, like Nigeria, Thailand, or the Philippines, these migrants overwhelmingly flock to just one city, causing astronomical growth. Thus, places like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, have taken over the mantle of “shock city” from Manchester and Chicago, whose rapid urbanization in the nineteenth century now seems stately by comparison.

In addition to industrialization, new international free trade agreements have also promoted the consolidation of rural land holdings. Free-trade agreements like NAFTA and ASEAN prohibit national governments from engaging in protectionism for their own agricultural products. As a result, in many places, local markets for agricultural products have been flooded with cheaper replacements from abroad, driving down prices and making it difficult for local small-holder growers to compete. When they are unable to sell their crops, they can go into debt and eventually lose their land. Periodic drought and infestation can of course make this situation worse. Again, the result is the creation of new migrants, many of whom float into cities.

Still another factor causing migration out of rural areas is conflict and civil war that creates large numbers of refugees in places like Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Palestine, and Lebanon. Some are resettled in camps, but many end up in cities like Khartoum, Mogadishu, and Kinshasa.