CHAPTER SIX

Democracy and the Fetish of Participation

There is no doubt that the democratic system we have in Britain is broken, hollow and unfit for purpose. Corporate lobbyists and finance power have unlimited influence, while civil society groups are gagged in the run-up to elections. The real power resides not in the institutions of democracy but in the governmental executive, in corporate and private interests, and in unelected technocratic bodies. Our system of party funding is corrupt. There’s the notorious revolving door between ministerial office and the private sector. MPs are professionalised and media-trained to become impermeable robots, and all-powerful whips enforce uniformity and message discipline. As The Thick of It illustrated to the point of cliché, politics has become a cynical game of spin, marketing and PR. Most of the British media is owned by a handful of right-wing billionaires. The debating chamber of the House of Commons hosts a mechanical performance. More recently, elections have been skewed by dark money, the manipulation of data and the use and abuse of algorithms. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to hold politicians to account over time: the resignable offence – you said that then, you say this now – feels like a thing of the past. Politics exists in the moment, which can be shaped by powerful forces and media management: the past – which includes manifesto commitments – is erased; irrelevant. The loss of the temporal dimension is an understated aspect of so-called post-truth politics.

Above all, however, democracy is dominated by right-wing parties. It’s true that there are structural problems with the electoral system that militate against the success of Left parties. Electoral reform is long overdue. But in order to properly diagnose the problem, we need to begin with a question that is a theme running through this book but is rarely asked elsewhere: Is the problem the system itself, or its capture by the Right?

We are living in a post-democratic era, but the reaction to this is complicated by the fact that MPs on Right and Left, left-wing NGOs, think tanks and activists are all saying that representative democracy is dead. Their legitimate critique of democracy in terms of its corruption by the Right merges confusingly with a critique of the system of representation itself. Belief in the principle of representation has been replaced by a quixotic faith in referendums. In the aftermath of Brexit, MPs voted shamefully to deny themselves a meaningful vote on the form the final deal would take. The emasculation of parliamentary sovereignty in Britain epitomises the way in which democracy is now being eroded – in the name of democracy.

Right-wing populists like Douglas Carswell criticise the parliamentary system, but are still thoroughly invested in institutional power. The Left are equally populist – even Jeremy Corbyn describes the Westmin-

ster system as ‘broken’²³ – but instead of taking power, a lot of left-wing energy is channelled into setting up a myriad of alternative initiatives. There is Unlock Democracy, Involve, Assemblies for Democracy, Flatpack Democracy and Occupy Democracy to name just a few. There are sites like 38 Degrees which have some effect but are prone to the pitfalls of ‘clicktivism’. And there are groups using innovative face-to-face methods of participation and engagement such as Podemos and Take Back the City. These are all great. But reinventing or reviving democracy is nothing if not structural, and few of these groups address the question of how their work fits with the existing system. It’s as if we are building lots of little wooden sheds in the grounds of an old, crumbling mansion.

It’s logical to want to create bottom-up initiatives to reinvigorate democracy, but how do these relate to the mainstream political arena? How do alternative democratic platforms tackle what the Right has done to parliamentary democracy? Unless we are really pessimistic and there is no hope of broader change, advocates of these initiatives need to keep in mind the connection between what they are doing and the big picture. The election of Corbyn as Labour leader, and his subsequent relative success in the 2017 general election, created confusion among many proponents of alternative democratic spaces, because it placed radical political action back in the mainstream democratic arena. But this new reality has not been adequately integrated into a systemic working-through of these questions about the relationship between activism and the status quo. Politics is after all about organising the whole system.

Of course, the best democratic initiatives see no conflict between established and innovative; one complements the other. But we must at least think through the relationship between old and new. One group, therules.org, comments that it is ‘working for change from the ground up’, but how does that fit with the top down? Therules.org claims that ‘we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need’. But what if the right people were in charge – would we need to reinvent the system then?

For the last five years, the leftists with energy on their side have been busily rejecting representative democracy in favour of direct, deliberative and participative forms – government by the people, not just for the people. They claim that people are no longer content to simply vote every five years and then ‘go back to sleep’. But then Brexit happened, and it was abruptly clear that direct democracy is not necessarily better at all; that majoritarianism has inherent problems that we didn’t really anticipate, because – as with the vast majority of commentators blindsided by right-wing populism – everyone was assuming that we just needed to give people more power, and everything would be okay. It’s not necessarily a more progressive situation if more people vote and they are mostly right-wing and ‘the will of the people’ equates to enabling exploitation and disempowerment.

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Simply calling for a replacement for our current system, therefore, obscures key questions about what’s happened to democracy, who dominates it and why, and what the word even means. Because it’s such a moveable feast, ‘democracy’ can simply indicate a direction of travel, or the impression of a direction of travel: it can signal an intention for the people to have a more powerful role, or it can also be simply a PR term: signalling but not instituting people-power.

There are such diverse definitions of democracy that it’s difficult to know what people mean when they say they want things to be ‘more democratic’. For example, the proponents of a project called ‘Redesigning Democracy’ say they are ‘pro real democracy’; they want to build ‘a truly democratic society, where everyone will be given an equal chance to prosper’.²⁴ Such initiatives surely mean well, but they are emblematic of the ambiguity that surrounds the term. The people behind Redesigning Democracy want to give up on politicians, and look for change from ‘the British people’. But they also want to rescue the NHS and HMRC. Do they want top-down at all, or just bottom-up? It’s not clear. At its worst, this ambiguity is not only intellectually unclear and strategically undermining – it can also lead to co-option: for example, ‘Direct Democracy’ is the title of a pamphlet written by right-wing ideologues intent on dismantling the NHS.

The question of whether or not representation is a good thing is complicated by the fact that, as the political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin noted in her 1967 book The Concept of Representation, there are multiple, competing forms. We need to ask if representation is unfair in principle, or if there are just contingent reasons why people aren’t being properly represented now.

Before the modern period, democracy had nothing to do with elections – it was all about citizen juries and other participatory processes. Athenian democracy was direct in the sense that officials were selected by lot from the general public rather than through elections. Thus to its oligarchic opponents, democracy was a pejorative term: it meant mob rule. The founding fathers of the US constitution never talked about democracy; they preferred the word ‘republican’. The word ‘democratic’ only started being applied to election-based systems in the twentieth century, ironically when financial and corporate power was really starting to dominate. Anxieties about ‘the mob’ were no longer being voiced in public, therefore, but the people were being ‘managed’: the concept of democracy was becoming a PR term.

Advocates of a ‘new democracy’ implicitly portray the UK’s democratic system as an obsolete one that hasn’t changed in decades. A typical statement is that of the Green co-leader Caroline Lucas, who has described our political system as both archaic and broken. Lucas is an exemplary politician, but it’s important to be clear whether it’s a system that’s rotten at its heart, or whether the rot set in at a particular point in history. What if the system’s problems are relatively recent? As Ferdinand Mount points out, the UK was once much more decentralised and participatory than it is now, with strong local government and a network of community organisations that have been all but stripped away. What neoliberalism has done is to centralise so many decisions – from the school curriculum to local planning decisions on matters like fracking – but confusingly, it does so while speaking the language of small government, small state and local autonomy.

We should ask what is inherently wrong with the principle of representation before dismissing a set of institutions that are bad at representing people in practice, for reasons that are partly structural, partly historical and partly political. Is representative democracy really ‘dead’, or has the whole game just moved to the right? Are we in danger of throwing out the baby of representative democracy with the bathwater of neoliberalism? This muddle is not helped by the ubiquity of broadsheet comment pieces that ask: Is liberal democracy dead? Or talk about the waning of the era of social-democratic parties in Europe and the rest of the world. These announcements that such models have ‘failed’ creates a tautological sense that they are faulty by design – when it may be that there is nothing wrong with them, but people have lost faith because we are persuaded to go along with that consensus. The question ‘is social democracy dead’ conflates an ‘is’ with an ‘ought’, but it has become an op-ed truism before it can be properly analysed or understood.

There’s also a danger of reinventing the wheel: deliberative democracy is arguably already present in the form of select committees, and localism in – well, local government, and constituency surgeries. It’s true that ordinary people don’t have enough say in decisions that are taken about their lives. But the state, the government, our elected representatives also don’t have sovereignty. Their hands are tied by globalisation, by corporate and financial power, by bureaucracy and complexity and general ossification. They need to have more power, not less.

It’s tempting to try to re-animate the Athenian model of citizens’ juries, consensus-formation and other forms of active taking part. Commentators I admire such as Hilary Wainwright, Stuart White and Jeremy Gilbert are great proponents of participative and deliberative democracy. Experiments in participative democracy are powerful, they argue, because they provide an exhilarating experience of agency that can lead to broader mobilisation: the Indignados movement in Spain influenced both Podemos and the Radical Independence Campaign in Scotland, for example.

While experiential exemplification can be radical in its immediacy of enactment, we need to be clear and explicit about whether what we are doing is symbolic or substantive. The Flatpack Democracy project in Frome is an inspiring model of direct democratic control: a group of independent councillors have taken over the parish council, and are using the localism bill to exercise both political and economic power in the public interest. Such projects are transformative, but difficult to scale up. They are invariably spearheaded by a charismatic individual. The internet certainly won’t do it spontaneously, as many have claimed.

As Wendy Brown, Srnicek and Williams, and Greg Sharzer (author of No Local: Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World) argue, such models only work – like Athenian democracy did – on a small scale. With a larger population the question immediately arises of how to fairly incorporate everyone’s wishes. The excitement surrounding consensus politics obscures the fact that, invariably, those with the loudest voices tend to dominate. Division of labour is efficient, and it ensures that not everyone has to be involved in every decision. There are many situations in which experts are valuable. Since not everyone can rule or have a say, all of the time, there has always got to be some way of mediating or aggregating people’s views and desires. Representative democracy contains an acknowledgement of this: as such it is indeed the least-worst option. Existing institutions have guarded against corruption and abuses by building in checks and balances, airlocks of necessary delay and reasoned consideration, that small local systems don’t have. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to go to meetings about the provision of energy in their community or the logistics of refuse collection; they just want it to function properly, as it did before privatisation. As Yotam Marom of Occupy says: ‘At the very heart of your process is the notion that all views will go into the consensus, but now you’re sick of the meeting, you’re hungry, you’re tired of arguing, and you want to go home’.²⁵

There is also the problem of what Jeremy Gilbert calls ‘disaffected consent’: people have become passive and cynical and simply providing new mechanisms is not the answer. Not being listened to can make you angry and engaged, but it can also prompt you to disengage. In my own experience it is really difficult to get people involved in local activities – apart from a number of very well-publicised exceptions. People are burned-out and put-upon; they have request fatigue. Even if we designed the ideal system, it’s not clear that it would actually be taken up. A case in point here are the admirable attempts at a constitutional convention – it’s a good idea to expand people’s participation in the very question of how best to represent people, but in practice it’s hard to ensure that it’s not just the usual suspects turning up. Moreover, the liveliness of this kind of initiative can – when the meetings stretch out – very quickly turn into the procedural dullness that everyone hated in the first place.

As Jodi Dean has argued, this is where the party comes in – the body that can pick up and carry forward these political orientations and desires. ‘We are losing’, she writes in Crowds and Party, ‘and we are perversely praising the conditions and causes of our loss, trying desperately to form them into a politics. This is the politics of the beautiful moment’. The real task of politics, she continues, ‘is to organise the beautiful moment, to give the crowd an orientation, to direct it. The Party names the organization of the crowd into a revolutionary politics that can institute a new social order’.²⁶ This is the role of the party: to concentrate and direct the energies of the people. Ultimately, we need both. The excitement, the feeling of losing yourself, that collective euphoria of the festival can’t last, but it can lead to something else. My point is that not enough people are talking about the structural dimension: community projects and social movements are so often idealised on the Left as if they are the authentic primary origin of all political action. It would help if these different positions were aired and debated in the open, but this is hard to do amid the rousing calls to ‘rip it up and start again’.

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We often hear that people feel distanced from politics because they are not involved in decisions that affect their lives. But there are two issues here that are often conflated: participation in decision-making, and the exercise of meaningful choice in electing a government which would produce a more equitable society. There is a confusion, in other words, about whether democratisation is about giving people the ability to participate, or about electing a party that can change the macro balance of power between finance and humans.

Democracy is not just about taking part. As Chantal Mouffe and Peter Mair note, democracy is about the representation of competing interests, the play of political choices. Our problem is not just one of process, it’s the lack of agonism; it’s the narrow bandwidth in the political spectrum. In its emphasis on problem-solving and consensus-formation, deliberative democracy is unwittingly technocratic. It is anti-ideological, and therefore anti-political. We place too much emphasis on decision-making itself and not enough on the formation of public opinion that shapes the content of those decisions. As a culture we have stopped being interested in the genesis of ideas, just as we have stopped talking about ideology. We tend to think that political views are authentic and organic. But if they are swayed by misinformation, as happened with Brexit, then does that really constitute meaningful democracy?

Our democracy is not working, in other words, not only because it does not represent ordinary people, but also because it does not adequately represent left-wing people – a distinction that is not often made. Is the aim of new democratic experiments to increase the bandwidth of the political spectrum, or is the aim to create a platform of political participation that feels left-wing? It’s not clear to me that systems that are more democratic are necessarily more progressive. Surely a functional democracy contains the Right as a legitimate option.

These are tricky questions. Neoliberalism is indeed anti-political, and works to undermine a functional democracy in which the Left can exist as an option. Better democratic representation offers more opportunity for ordinary people’s voices to be taken into account, which is inherently progressive. But it’s crucial to distinguish between political process and political ideas. When people say ‘we need a new kind of politics’, it’s impossible to know if they mean they want a new system, or new – i.e. left-wing – political ideas. When they say ‘there’s no point in voting, they’re all the same’, they can mean politics is professionalised, robotic and captured, or they can mean the parties are all now clustered to the right of the political spectrum.

At an event convened in 2016 by Jon Trickett MP entitled ‘Designing Democracy’, participants found themselves split between those who wanted to achieve a better society, and those who wanted to simply create a platform which people could use for whatever purpose they chose. If we simply call for a new decision-making system – Democracy 2.0, Democracy OS – then we are neglecting to make the essential case for progressive values, for the kind of society we want. We need purpose as well as process.

We need to think harder about these conundrums if we’re to make meaningful headway. The takeover of the political system by financial power is both an anti-political move and a neoliberal one. We need to be clear about whether reinstating the primacy of politics over economics is a matter of political process or political orientation. And we need to ask how reinstating the primacy of the political over the economic helps with the issue of power – systemic economic power which has come to dominate politics. Are the new democratic formations an end in themselves or a means to an end? Is the problem to do with politics itself or the effect of economics on politics; and is the solution a political or an economic fix, or both – and how will the solution address the relationship between the two?

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Buried within the visceral desire for agency and control so vividly yet incoherently illustrated by debates about the EU is a question about scale; the level at which democratic jurisdiction should operate. Do we want local autonomy, national sovereignty, a European or a global system of governance? Everyone is calling for devolvement of power – but to not set a limit on that downward push to the grassroots is to evade something fundamental. Politics is not just about speaking but about being heard, not just about taking part but about being part of something that matters above the level of you as an individual. There are admirable moves to ‘democratise’ everything on a micro scale – the workplace, education and so on. But what we also really need is civic space, a central forum for democratic exchange, representation and contestation. For people to feel recognised, they need to be acknowledged by the public gaze. If that gaze is fragmented, that need will remain unanswered. This ambiguity is reflected in the word sovereignty. Sovereignty means autonomous control and self-government – sovereignty over the self. But sovereignty also looks up to a representative – as in the sovereign as a figure invested with royal authority – who symbolises this at a higher level. So sovereignty represents the paradox that we only really have autonomy that counts by looking up to a leader.

I believe the nation state as a unit of jurisdiction still has value, because it embodies the idea of the public. It is the level at which representation and accountability are meaningful. The Left needs to have a mature conversation about national democracy and not maintain a sole focus on grassroots community that is politically reductive, tactically ineffective, and mirrors the Right’s emphasis on individual, bootstrap autonomy. But democracy can operate on different levels at once: the desire for control can be met at the sweet spot between individuals and national government. There used to be a name for this: local government. What should it be now? And we also need a system of really macro, international governance to address global inequality, manage migration and limit carbon emissions.

The defective House of Commons has been replaced in the Left imaginary by ‘the commons’: the idea that resources are not only commonly owned and produced, but also administered directly by the people – a different way, in other words, of conceptualising democratic space. In the digital age this space is mapped onto the internet and social media. It’s colonised by groups such as 38 Degrees, Sum of Us and therules.com. This alternative space is not an adequate substitute. Online democratic systems such as delegative democracy, Crowdpac and similar initiatives get a lot of publicity in certain quarters, but it’s very hard for them to catch on and be sustained; you need them to be absolutely universal monopolies to function properly, rather like the route-planner app Waze – which relies on everyone using the same platform. Real-world commons initiatives can be inspirational, but they need to have a rigorous set of rules if they are to work. As soon as you start to replace democracy with another system, you tend to work your way back to the system we already have.

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At the same time, however, I am not against assessing the merits of our democratic system from the ground up. Since that system has been poisoned in the public mind, the renewal of traditional representative democracy will indeed need to be strengthened with participative, deliberative and local forms. These will not be a substitute for representative democracy, but rather can be coherently stitched into it, for example via the institutions of everyday life – work, education and healthcare – so that representative democracy is extended and enriched and people have the experience of engaging with the decisions that affect them.

We should ensure that the renewal of democracy rests on as broad a foundation of engagement and consent as possible, by staging public conversations about our political system. This can happen in the form of a constitutional convention comprising randomly chosen groups of citizens, otherwise known as sortition. Such a group could make structural recommendations – for example, that elements of sortition should be included in the political system itself. This kind of conversation won’t happen organically – it takes organisation and coordination. Progressive alliances between parties opposed to the dominant neoliberal hegemony could be the formal advocates for a better electoral system.

In terms of practical options, many leftists favour a form of proportional representation known as the single transferable vote; although there’s nothing stopping PR benefitting small right-wing parties. We can have a process for recalling MPs, but if we make MPs’ jobs ever more difficult, this ensures that only party insiders and special advisers will ever put themselves up for election. We need to find ways to strengthen big politics so that people-power can be aggregated to counterbalance the power of business and finance – but in a way that takes account of new times, and that gives people more democratic agency.

Once again, we need to pursue a dual strategy: to both model the possible and rework the actual. What of the old democratic system do we want to retain, and what do we need to reinvent? As I’ve argued, the Left is failing to face and get to grips with this structural question. Even if we say ‘the existing structures are inadequate, let’s just start again from scratch’, we still have to say what structures we are going to put in place, otherwise we just replicate the destructive, fragmenting logic of neoliberalism. But to do this work of sifting, analysis and design, we need to tackle the fact that political energy right now is populist; it’s anti-system. And this prevents us from realising our political goals – the subject of the next chapter. What kind of world do we want these structures, institutions and processes to help us achieve, anyway?