Democracy?

“Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy – to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself.”

-Benjamin Barber

“It’s almost ludicrous to think of how many men and women have fought and died for the American idea of freedom: a man in a voting booth with a pencil, choosing which box to check. Real freedom, the kind we should be fighting for,is something much grander- it means creating the choices you choose between, for starters. A better illustration is the musician in the act of playing with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they actively create the sonic and emotional environment in which they exist, participating thus in the transformation of the world which will in turn transform them. Take this model and extend it to every moment of our lives – now that would be real freedom.”

-CrimethInc Ex-Workers Collective

The photograph associated with this story is telling in many ways: It illustrates the consumerism and globalization alluded to above. It of course links to perhaps the most well publicized realization of what is percieved to be democratic: The United States presidential election. Barack Obama turned into a commodity in a store window, on a well endowed torso. A man representing a set of principles, turned into a shill to sell t-shirts. Perhaps however, Obama is more than a shill for t-shirts, but also a shill to sell the false hope that the election he runs in, and the country he hopes to represent is really democratic.

The quoted words are sadly evocative our culture’s terribly stunted interpretation of what is democracy. If watching the news tells us anything, democracy is all about defending the right to commodify anything we can -including our means of survival, and by force if necessary- so that it may be bought and sold with consideration only to a largely arbitrary definition of monetary worth. According to many national leaders, democracy is something we must invade foreign land both to enforce and defend. It is for the protection of “democracy” that government and business must watch our every move in more and more invasive ways.

As pointed out, if it is true democracy we want, we must discriminate between the false “better than nothing” man-in-a-voting-booth democracy alluded to above, and real consensus based decision making including not authoritative figures, but all who will be affected by the decisions.

All to often, the persuit of democracy is simply a front used to push ever more authoritative, ever more violent forms of oppression (Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Guantanamo Bay).

It will pay for us all to think hard about what real democracy is, to learn to distinguish between this and the buzz word democracy so often touted by mass media and government. Once we know what real democracy is, we can start to create it in our own lives, relationships, spaces, cities and more!