What in the hell …

Angela’s recent post on restless democracy is quite interesting. I started to respond in the comment box at Long Sunday but my remarks got long enough that I thought it’d be better as a blog post.

Angela says a lot which I take seriously in this post (and in general). For now, just the first paragraph of the post, which folk should read in its entirety -

“Democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Its various qualifications – as liberal, social, procedural, radical, deliberative and so on – suggest versions of a ‘proper’ connection (representation or ‘fit’) between the demo- (the people) and -cracy (the state), but they in no way distance themselves from, or void, the sense of democracy as the sovereignty of the people.”

I generally agree with Angela, in the way she notes that she and Jon likely agree, about who the enemy is, but I’m not sure what I think about some things here.

Sovereignty of the people is to be abandoned, so of course democracy qua sovereignty of the people is to be abandoned as well. Similary, in abandoning state capitalism one abandons communism qua state capitalism. I agree with Angela in wanting “a non- or a-democratic politics” if we mean democracy qua sovereignty of the people, and we share a desire for a non- or a-communist politics, if we mean communism qua state capitalism. On the other hand, I’m committed to a form of communism in relation to which state capitalism is our antithesis. I’m not personally compelled as strongly by ‘democratic politics’, but I can see some reasons to commit to those terms as well, but this democracy would have to be antithetical to the sovereignty of the people. I suspect Angela would agree with all this. (Do you Angela?)

We might distinguish here between Democracy and democracy, in parallel to Communism and communism. Each first term indicates what is to be rejected, the latter is more varied.

What I’m not sure about is two things. I get the impression that for Angela democracy qua the sovereignty of the people is what democracy really is, what the name democracy really names such that using the name for other things/processes/relations is something of a misnomer. At the same time, for me and I think for Angela, state capitalism is not what communism really names, and is something of a misnomer, at least in terms of how I use the term. This may be just a difference of emphasis or style between the two of us - I like foreground the for-me aspect, the “this is what I mean and how I use the term” when it comes to terms, and I think this is how I take any claims to mean.

Second, and I wonder here if this is a real disagreement between Angela and me, I think there are assertions of or claims to the sovereignty of the people - or assertions of or claims to things which require or imply something like the sovereignty of the people - which occur and can occur without actually being or creating or operating the sovereignty of the people. What I have in mind is primarily rights claims. The relationship of rights to the sovereignty of the people could stand to be unpacked, but I’m going to leave that for now and assume the two are linked.

There are several questions here. First, assuming rights and rights claims in at least one register do imply or rely upon a figure of the sovereign people, do all articulations of rights or claims to rights or articulations of goals in terms of rights have to do so materially (for lack of a better term)? Or can there be claims to this which undermine or at least do not replicate the sovereignty of the people? Sergio Bologna says somewhere (I’ll have to dig to chase up the quote) that the claims and demands put forward by the workers movement at the beginning of the 20th century weren’t, in one sense, particularly radical but they were on the other hand totally antithetical to then present arrangement of capitalism. Similarly, might the extension of rights - or the extension of inclusion within the demos, the people - by those groups which are allotted only the position of inclusion as excluded (invisible, subordinated, sans the right to have rights) similarly cause crisis? If one takes the demos to always include a gap between its universality as a concept and its partiality as a material practice (that is to say, that its material instantiation always has a gap), then might assertion of those who occupy - are consigned to - the gap, such that the demand is for a materially gapless democracy, not explode the very figure of the people and of democracy? I’m not advocating this necessarily, but I think it may occur.

A number of people today understand and people in the past have I think understood their projects and aims in terms of the sovereignty of the people. Are all of them - have all of them been - wrong? This may well be so. The question is, though, is if the “in terms of” can be taken literally - as being about terminology - such that the terms and the material reality part ways. Do all utterances of “the people” really mean that which Angela - rightly - objects to as the people?

One note -

I said earlier that “sovereignty of the people is to be abandoned.” I want to add, “abandon is a poor term,” as it implies a turning away from that occurs in the present. Both forms, the sovereignty of the people and state capitalism, were contested from the beginning. That contesting occurred in a variety of forms. I’m of the view that it might be the case that some of those forms look in retrospect like they share a lot with the position being reject, the position we reject. I’m not sure how much that sharing actually occurred, though. [Note to self, dig up info on the little I know of the French workers’ movements in the late 1700s, that’s relevant. One could say the same of at least some uses of the term “socialism” at earlier points in history.]