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Notes for Opening Statement for 'Democracy on Trial' 24th of March 2017
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen of the jury, your honour ,and other colleagues. My name is John Barry and I am your lead prosecutor today. I am here to criticise and therefore cause you discomfort, but primarily I am here to ensure the safety of your democracy. Please take a moment to locate your nearest exit from democracy, taking care to note that it might be behind you marked with a Trump or a Brexit sign.
Before I begin I wish to give you some quotes to start off with.
Don’t sit on the fence, you only get splinters
"The reasonable man adapts themselves to the world. The unreasonable man seeks to adapt the world to himself. All progress therefore depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw
My opening statement for the prosecution contains three main points.
But before I begin I need to be clear as to what is in the dock this afternoon. I hate to disappoint anyone but I am not here and neither am I three expert witnesses whom I will call shortly, we are not here to promote or defend an anti democratic or authoritarian type of government. The main claim of the prosecution case is against liberal democracy within a capitalist economic order. So to be clear when we criticise democracy it is liberal capitalist democracy that we are criticising.
The first point I wish to make is that we stand for the further democratisation of society and the economy and politics and hold liberal democracy within capitalism as a prophylactic (look it up) hampering and holding back the full flowering of greater democratic control decision-making and autonomy in the 21st century. The claim I make is this: why should democracy and at the factory gate, the classroom door, or indeed the laboratory door.? Why should democracy not be extended to the economic arena for example.? Given we claim to live in a democracy, it is extraordinary that we limit this to voting or not every couple of years in elections or referenda.
Or considering that we spend most of our lives - that is those of us lucky on lucky enough to have a job - in employment, why is it that we do not seek to democratise these spheres of our lives? Why limit democratic decision-making infrequently to the formal electoral sphere?
Also, given that many decisions are taken which affect our lives without our knowledge or authority or having any influence over them, such as investment decisions or the directing of resources towards science or technological development, or many planning decisions for example why do we not see more democratisation in these cases?
To my mind there is only one almost cast iron reason why we should not extend democracy, and that is in the cases of expert knowledge which by definition create power and knowledge imbalances. In such cases of expert knowledge democratic, equalised decision-making is not appropriate. A good example here is the case of medical expertise. So, even while we may come up with other reasons, some practical, some to do with the demands on our time, or other competing ends, the principal should be this: we should democratise as much of our collective lives as possible and move beyond the current situation where democracy is limited, liberal and linked to capitalism.
The second point and following on from the first, is that what the prosecution seeks is not simply a democratic system of regular or irregular competition between political parties to elect representatives and form a government (the standard liberal view of democracy) what we seek to deliver on is the full promise of democracy in terms of cultivating active citizenship as opposed to passive voting every couple of years. As the great French political thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau noted in the 18the century looking across the English Channel "the English are free every couple of years during elections and then they put the chain is back on".
Democracy and democratic work, and it is work even though it's not recognised in Gross Domestic Product or economic growth but then that's another story, the work to keep our democracy vibrant and dynamic requires relations between active citizens and institutions through and within which such collective forms of self determination and democratic decision-making are enacted.
Part of the problem we see the contemporary liberal democracy is the reduction of citizenship to being passive ratepayers or taxpayer and perhaps membership of a jury. Citizenship like democratic politics itself is a muscle the stronger it gets with more exercise and it atrophies when not exercised. Hence we see a contemporary crisis of democracy with less and less people voting, taking an interest in politics or seeing they have a duty to contribute to the common good and our decision-making around that common good.
Its is often said, that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and one of the ways this can be done is through active citizenship, viewed as the necessary democratic labour required for us to live in free societies. That is to live in the presence of one another as equals.
What we have in modern liberal democracies today are passive consumers of political decision-making. This is why the prosecution disagrees with the standard liberal view that ‘silence equals happiness’, that is that the lack of people being interested in politics, revolting or protesting is somehow a good thing in the sense that it demonstrates peoples contentment with the status quo. The prosecution’s case is that this is wrong. People, while they may have the opportunity to get involved in politics, are otherwise actively directly and indirectly discouraged and alienated from so doing. In short, our modern democracies in liberal capitalist societies end up serving the rich, the powerful, the articulate, the professional. Indeed the sociological and political profile of many of us gathered here today in fact! How can we say that our democracies are legitimate when some elections mean that perhaps less than 50, 40 or 30% of those eligible to vote bothered to cast their ballots?
A final issue here is that what we need more of in our modern democracies is dissent and a active citizenship organised around selectively withdrawing its consent and legitimacy where it judges our current economic and political system to be against our collective self interest. Dissent if positive, if as I do one views democratization as cultivating non-violent forms of disagreement, recognising and valuing pluralism, debate, opposition and disobedience. As Howard Zinn perceptively noted:
As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem.... Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty.
So, unlike liberal democrats, I do not accept that ‘silence is contentment’ and indeed view such silence and conformity as corrosive of democratic politics.
Currently liberal democratic capitalist society promotes private freedom, private wealth accumulation, private consumption and neglects public freedoms and the common good and the public infrastructure without which private action is impossible. What we have in short is the promotion of private wealth amidst public squalor. The liberal capitalist democratic freedom reminds me of a quote from Samuel Adams, one of the founders of the American republic:
"If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen"
The third and final point I wish to raise is the question of how capitalism itself as an economic system systematically undermines even anemic liberal democracies and blocks greater democratisation. Capitalism with it inevitable concentration of economic power means that this economic power can be translated into political power. One of the principles of modern democracy is that ‘each to count for one, none for more than one’. Yet how can this possibly be the case when we have such anunequal, class divided society by economic income and wealth. This is a process that has gathered pace over the last 30 years or so under neoliberalism and globalisation which has enabled capital to flow freely across the planet, at the same time as restricting the movement of people and ultimately undermining democracy.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, liberal democracy within capitalism is like two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. A post liberal, post capitalist democratic society is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote and disarming the wolves. Thus, we cannot have political freedom and equality without economic freedom and equality.
Liberal democracy within capitalism, or capitalist democracy if you like, is a race to the bottom, the encouragement of people to be individual entrepreneurs in their own life, presides over the individualisation of risk and responsibility, and a concomitant neglect of the public sphere and indeed the common good. Democracy under liberal capitalist conditions has left us with a vision of democracy as all about rights and less about our duties and responsibilities. It is a politics of empty, manifesto rights – that is rights without the necessary resources and the wherewithal to be able to exercise those rights. To paraphrase Anatole France Liberal democracy, “in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”. Its offers us rights of equal opportunities without equalised outcomes, you have the opportunity to eat, but there is no obligation for someone or some institution to give you food. In short, capitalist democracy is like the Ireland football team, sounds great on paper, crap on grass. Or you can receive charity from a foodbank but not from the state…I, Daniel Blake as an instruction Manuel as opposed to a warning….
So to conclude, modern capitalist democracy is a pale shadow of what democracy can and should be. With the help of a good decision today and a commitment to pursuing democratisation, the best days of democracy are yet to come. But we need to throw off the shackles of the liberal chrysalis and capitalist ways that is holding back its progress. The impetus and arc of history and human evolution is towards freedom autonomy. This is the promise of democracy.
In short, the case for the conviction of capitalist democracy is its denial of the emancipatory potential of democracy. Democracy is not just an institutional system for making collective decisions, but should be a way of life. Something woven into the very fabric of our day-to-day dealings, structuringand animating our communities, our education systems, the day to day political decision-making process and perhaps above all within the economic sphere.
What we have at the moment in terms of liberal democracy, least I am misunderstood, is something we should celebrate and indeed something not to be taken lightly. However, the real issue is to move beyond the current liberal capitalist phase of democracy to move into a post not anti-democratic social order based around democratisation. This is of course easy to say and there are many, many practical, empirical and indeed theoretical and moral objections one can imagine.
And this is good for the vision democratisation I promote which can be described as a distinctly republican one. By republican, for those in the jury not schooled in classical political theory, I do not mean the usual way in which republicanism is spoken about on this island by other bearded politicians. I do not mean nationalism in general or in particular Irish nationalism. By republicanism I mean a form of democracy and politics based upon free and equal citizens engaged in processes of collective decision-making in all parts of their collective lives to deliberate and make decisions about the public good.
It is a vision of democracy based not as a current democracies are where citizenship is reduced to voting for parties which promise to increase individual economic wealth opportunities. This republican vision of democracy focuses on the internal goods of democratic decision-making of people gathered together to debate, argue and to ultimately maybe agree to disagree. This is a vision of democratisation as non-violent disagreement, of vibrant agonistic debate and the celebration of pluralism diversity and dissent. around competing conceptions of the good life and the common good.
It is against the idea of ‘politics as zookeeping’, disciplining and corralling people into passivity or a completely private or domestic life of either quiet despair or wealth accumulation. So I urge you to ‘take the red pill Neo’ and realise that the liberal democracy emperor has no clothes. To realise that capitalist democracy requires passivity, cynicism and a negative view of politics and public life, alongside the soma of privatised consumerism, or buying crap you don’t need to impress people you don’t care about.
I suspect the defence might argue that we can reform and refine the current liberal democratic system within capitalism. To this I would simply say the following: The system is not broke it was made that way.It is unreformable and requires radical transformation not tinkering around the edges. The full flowering of democracy cannot be realised within the confines of a liberal democratic capitalist order. We must move beyond both liberalism and capitalism to get to democracy. But remember this, the end of liberal capitalist democracy is not the end of democracy. Rather, it is the beginning of democratisation, of moving beyond a failed and failing anemic and passivity inducing liberal democratic system and the creation of a democratic society of freedom, equality and solidarity.