This episode explores contemporary fears about the decline of democracy. Is the current downward spiral actually part of a rhythmic oscillation of democracy? And given its centrality to modern political life, can democracy really be eradicated? Listen to hear about how the changing forms of the democratic project must be understood with reference to historical dynamics and logics of capitalism.
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Glossary
Nation-state
(07:01 or p.2 in the transcript)
Nation-state is a territorially bounded sovereign polity—i.e., a state—that is ruled in the name of a community of citizens who identify themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of a nation-state’s rule over a territory and over the population inhabiting it stems from the right of a core national group within the state (which may include all or only some of its citizens) to self-determination. Members of the core national group see the state as belonging to them and consider the approximate territory of the state to be their homeland. Accordingly, they demand that other groups, both within and outside the state, recognize and respect their control over the state. As a political model, the nation-state fuses two principles: the principle of state sovereignty, first articulated in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which recognizes the right of states to govern their territories without external interference; and the principle of national sovereignty, which recognizes the right of national communities to govern themselves. National sovereignty in turn is based on the moral-philosophical principle of popular sovereignty, according to which states belong to their peoples. The latter principle implies that legitimate rule of a state requires some sort of consent by the people. That requirement does not mean, however, that all nation-states are democratic. Indeed, many authoritarian rulers have presented themselves—both to the outside world of states and internally to the people under their rule—as ruling in the name of a sovereign nation. source
The Yellow Vests Protests
(37:51 or p.10 in the transcript)
In France, in November 2018, the gilets jaunes started as a movement directed against what was considered to beexcessive taxation, especially on fuel. Protesters wearing gilets jaunes – yellow high visibility vests which motorists are legally obliged to have in their car and wear in case of accident or breakdown – blocked major roads as a sign of protest. This thus led to the collective name of the movement: the gilets jaunes (or yellow vests in English). Beyond the sustained blocking of some roads, the movement developed into regular demonstrations on Saturdays across the country blocking roads and city centers. At their peak in November 2018, the movement mobilized between 300,000 and 1.3 million people, depending on sources. Not unsurprisingly, considering the fractured, spontaneous and leaderless nature of the protests, the demands of the protesters spread to include the resignation of the French president, a general reduction in taxes, increases in public services and state pensions, and so on. Some gilets jaunes even called for revolution and said the movement was the start of a civil war. The polymorphous, uncontrolled and uncontrollable nature of the movement also provided an opportunity for some of its supporters to engage in violence against the police and symbols of the state such as motorway tollbooths, police speed cameras (over 50% of which were destroyed), government buildings, locations associated with the elite (such as Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs-Elysées) and so on. This violence is said to have cost the French economy an estimated at €200 million according to the French insurance industry and has resulted directly or indirectly in 12 deaths and 4000 injured. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, the Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the third episode of Season 8 of "Democracy in Question," and I'm pleased to welcome Dilip Gaonkar, Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University, Chicago, where he directs the Center for Global Culture and Communication.
His main fields of interest are the intellectual traditions of rhetoric and the political impact of global modernities. Dilip has edited several books on global cultural politics, such as "Globalizing American Studies,"[i] "Alternative Modernities,"[ii] and "Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies."[iii] And he has co-edited several important special issues for journals, including on Laclau's Populist Reason[iv], one on “Cultures of Democracy”[v] for Public Culture in 2007 and “Technologies of Public Persuasion”[vi] with Elizabeth Pavinelli in 2003.
In 2022, Dilip co-authored thevolume, "Degenerations of Democracy,"[vii] with Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun, both of whom I've also had the pleasure of hosting here on the podcast almost a year ago. Today, I'm going to take my cue from the same book, and I'm going to continue the conversation about the much-lamented decline of democracy, but from a different angle. I ask Dilip whether the many contemporary fears about the decline of democracy are well-founded. Or should we instead consider the current downward spiral to be part of the rhythmic oscillations of democracy. Can democracy even be eradicated at all today, given its centrality to our very understanding of modern political life? I discuss with Dilip whether variable forms of the democratic project can be understood without reference to the historical dynamics and logics of capitalism.
Dilip, a warm welcome to you, and it's wonderful that you've joined me today from Chicago on the podcast.
Dilip Gaonkar (DG): Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, Shalini.
SR: In "Degenerations of Democracy," Dilip, all three of you question the illusory belief that democratic progress is linear and irreversible. So, your argument is that we should resist the temptation of taking the narrative about the decline of democracy at face value. And instead, we should focus on the historical rhythms and temporalities of democracy. As you observe in your essay in the volume, the fate and evolution of democracy is tied to the social formations and the political context in which it is embedded. And I quote you here, "For democracy, there are good times and bad times. There are hospitable social formations that allow it to flourish and inhospitable ones that destabilize and endanger it."
My last two guests on the podcast this season, Nancy Fraser and Yanis Varoufakis, seem to agree with you that the times we live in are particularly bad for democracy. Could one argue that the advent and spread of capitalism may have been linked with the emergence of modern democratic institutions? But over the last few decades, the very social institutions and norms which were crucial for the cultivation of a democratic ethos have been subjected to the disruptive forces of capital accumulation, commodification and marketization. Are the logic and practices of neoliberal capitalism hostile to the flourishing of democracy today?
DG: To some measure, Shalini, I would have to agree with Fraser and Varoufakis that democracy would be hobbled and compromised in a society or a polity that is dominated by the uncheckedtemporalities and logics of capital and capitalism, and further justified by radical, free market ideology. I do agree that today and for many decades now, capitalism has been dominating societies, both democratic as well as non-democratic, across the world.
However, I do not think capitalism (has been) unchecked either today or in the past, at least since the advent of modernity with which the career of capitalism roughly coincides. It is true that (in) my contribution to our book, "Degeneration of Democracy," I emphasize the fact that democracy does not control its own destiny because it is socially embedded. It has to contend with and compromise with a variety of social forms, forces and practices which surround and enclose it. Among those forces, the mode of social reproduction is the most decisive.
Capitalism has been the dominant mode of social reproduction for some centuries. Hence, democracy had to contend with and make a series of compromises, as spelt out by Calhoun in our book, with capitalism. However, that shouldn't lead one to the conclusion that capitalism is an independent, autonomous force. One might be able to speak of an abstract logic of capital, say, of its distinctive mode of reproducing value at any given time, or in terms of making use of the labor time.
However, capitalism invariably is located, just as democracy, in social formations, and not only in terms of time, but also in terms of place. It is invariably the case that the space is a national, cultural space. So, despite what people say about capitalism, about globalization, global capital, global modernity, capitalism is still not one thing. Sure, it has certain enduring common features and properties, but they manifest themselves variably across time and space. And at each phase or stage, from mercantile, to industrial, to postmodern, to the post-industrial, to financial, multiple other phases that characterize capitalism today, as surveillance capitalism, digital capitalism, all of these characterizations point to one fact, that capitalism is deeply embedded in a set ofcultural and historical formation as is democracy or the democratic project.
The democratic project has to contend with two leviathans today, the capitalist market and the modern nation-state. It has to leverage both of them to enhance and push the democratic project. Neither the state nor the market is a friend or a foe of democracy. Task is to democratize both market and the nation-state.
Today, we have, as a default mode, universal adult suffrage. Democracy has to engage in furthering its project without bracketing anything. And that is why sometimes the normative theorizing about democracy, what it ought to be under some imaginary ideal condition, can be very exasperating. And much of my criticism is directed at that kind of idealized condition in which democracy is X or Y.
SR: So, your argument is that the current deterioration of democracy should not be framed within an apocalyptic narrative of decline and fall. You would rather view it as a seasonal ebb and flow, a historically variable oscillation akin to what Polanyi famously called the double movement. This is primarily because modern democracies, as you explain, and I quote you here, "Modern democracies don't seem to die. They may break down, retract, and recede, but they always come back. The idea of the sovereign demos once planted cannot be fully eradicated from the political imaginary of a people who have glimpsed and experienced it and claimed it as their collective right." So, does this mean that democracy has become a constitutive potential in capitalist society? In fact, an inexhaustible source of popular resistance to the ravages of capitalism?
DG: You know, that is a very important question, but we are still using the binary of raw force of the demos and sometimes disciplined or undisciplined dynamics of capitalist reproduction. But there is a third player, that is the nation-state. So capitalism, as well as demos, are engaged in a very complex relationship and negotiation with the nation-state.
In a way, democracy has been furthered by, unintentionally maybe, by the bourgeois and even aristocratic forces in trying to get what we call the rights revolution. But then once we have something like a representative democracy, which is also grounded in a legal order, what is called the liberal legal order, capitalism is capable of acting within the framework. Of course, it's constantly maneuvering, disrupting, and subverting, but it can largely function within the legal framework and yet cause havoc.
And its primary havoc is not only the degradation of the resources, but also it is invariably what you call (an) inequality generating machine. Even though it generates a lot of growth and wealth and prosperity, it can create inequality. And demos, whichever way you think about it, whether in the Greek sense of the word demos or the way we think about modern sense of the demos, is an egalitarian force, whether it actually functions that way or not.
And that egalitarian force also makes its presence felt by trying to get the state as a representative state to work on its behalf. However, the state is not as responsive to the egalitarian spirit of the demos and voices of the demos, because it sees itself as a legal representative system and as a result, it's already thinking it is legitimate in having served the whole of the society. This is, I think, the Polanyi kind of two-step movement that the state does not ever move quickly enough. So, the democratic energy of the demos has to be brought into play in order for the state to react.
SR: A key themein your recent work has been the potential dark side of resistance which can emanate from the demos. You argue that far from constituting just a conservative topos, the fear of unruly crowds and rioting masses structures liberal democracy itself. And the impossible dream of taming the demos, of making the people "safe for democracy," you suggest, is a foundational antinomy at the heart of the liberal democratic project. The collective political agency of sovereign people has always posed thus a formidable threat, which was to be kept in check through what you call the liberal package of representative government, constitutional limits and counterbalancing institutions. And much of liberal political theory has been haunted by a paradoxical fear of mass democratic participation by the unruly crowd. Could you explain the origins and effects of this antinomy, which is inherent in modern democracy, which is predicated on universal suffrage and yet is fearful of full electoral participation by the masses?
DG: This is, in fact, one of the governing paradoxes, or irony, of the democratic project. This paradox goes all the way back to Athenian democracy, which was very restrictive and exclusive. And in some sense, by being restrictive and exclusive, it was the society of equals as far as citizens were concerned, because economy was bracketed out in the standing of the citizens.
And yet, in this, there were critics of this particular mode of democracy, and Plato being one of them, who did not question the equal standing of the citizens. But what he basically points out is whether they should be equal in political decision-making. Because we always rely on experts, the people with knowledge, about how to solve any problem or any concern in any sector of life.
He says, how is it possible that everybody is an expert in politics, that everybody has equal political wisdom? And so as a result, he does not think politics can be an exception to the principle that we listen to the best and the brightest and the expert in every walk of life. So,democracy, by definition is bound to fail, because it's going to be largely dominated by people who do not have any kind of political wisdom.
But of course, this has got a real problem. As Aristotle points out, no society, no polity can be legitimate unless it includes in some way the voice of the masses, the demos, poor citizens, equal but poor citizens, right? So as a result, this argument that people should not be allowed to exercise their political right, is not really something which can be operationalized insofar as you want a legitimate polity. Even in a non-democratic society, people are always invoked as the ultimate source of legitimacy.
You cannot rule by force alone. You need consensus, legitimacy, whether ideologically generated or not. But the more interesting legacy of Plato is not so much the incapacity of the individual citizen to exercise political wisdom properly, but rather the idea that politics never operates on a single vote, single person all the time. In fact, political decision-making, political action are very often collective. As a result, the argument Plato makes is what is really problematic is when people lacking in political wisdom assemble in a decision-making body, they make even worse decisions than individuals will make. The errors of the individuals are compounded in a group. As a result, demos becomes a dangerous force for any established order. And this continues all the way from Plato to Madison.
So what does the representative system do? The representative system filters out the errors of the demos and their tendency towards greed, irrationality and things like that. So as a result, Madison in Federalist Paper 63[viii] explicitly says the genius of the American Constitution, it has completely eliminated the collective agency of the people and replaced (it) with that what you call individual agency of the citizen. So one way of domesticating is to break up the demos among autonomous individual citizens as bearers of rights and duties in the liberal imaginary.
And who can be made to function with what we call the citizenizing strategy, which has been going on, that the way to discipline the demos. It becomes very clear that we cannot withhold universal adult franchise, there are a variety of ways in which there's a resistance in the first place to granting adult universal franchise, (and) once granted various ways to control it.
SR: But Dilip, let's look at another more recent twist to this entire discussion on citizenizing, as you call it, or giving individual rights to and breaking up the demos by giving citizens individual rights. The recent wave of authoritarian right-wing populism does something else. It's a politics not of rights, but of resentment. It's a politics that has been very successful in channelizing and amplifying various forms of social discontent and directing them against so-called elites. Unlike liberals, populists see elections as a strategic opportunity to capture and to mobilize the return of the repressed demos from the political unconscious of mass democracy. They've been able to undermine democracies from within with the help of ballots, turning the calculus of simple electoral majorities into what we could call the tyranny of majoritarianism.
So combined with an exclusionary, ethno-nationalist, dark side of modern imagined communities, to use Ben Anderson's phrase, that is what you have called the primordial understanding of "We The People," this can become a toxic mix. So why does the invocation of "The People" as a homogenous majoritarian collective defined antithetically, vis-a-vis the so-called elite, have such appeal? And in the book, you raise a number of key questions – this connection when you write, "Why does the specter of ethno-nationalism continue to haunt the democratic project? Under what conditions does this specter erupt, suddenly dominating the political horizon? And why is this eruption named populism time and again?"
DG: You know, this is the most challenging question of our time. That is, in what way does this ethno-national conception of "We The People" come into play? I talked about a liberal project of citizenizing the collective called demos and establishing a particular kind of a legal political order is one way in which you discipline and pacify the demos. But at the same time, there is this notion about nationalizing the demos.
Whether nationalizing the demos was originally a liberal project or not, that is open to question. But insofar as liberalism itself has flourished within the national form, they have not exactly resisted in any ways the nationalizing project. Now, if you look at it, the idea that "We The People" of the American Constitution immediately goes on to talk about "We The People" of the United States, it's clear that "We The People" is never we the people in a global universal sense, as if you compare to the Declaration of Independence, which says "All men are created equal."
So, this nationalizing tendency is about 300 years old. There was a time in which, in fact, we lived in imperial formation(s) with all the evils of the imperial formation. But nevertheless, ethno-nationalism was never a serious issue in imperial formations. It is, in a way, (a) historical fact that (for the) nation-state, the very condition of its possibility is to create this idea of the national demos.
Once national demos is created or appeals to (an) imagined (one) invoked time and time again by every side of the political spectrum, conservative, radicals, liberals, this idea of who can capture "We The People" becomes a very important political battle in which, an ethno-nationalist in every society is likely to have some sort of majority population along some line, religion, language, or something like that. And I think that's why ethno-nationalists have been incredibly successful by invoking that and harnessing that.
This is a question about how do you talk about the liberal or more emancipatory project of unity in difference, as opposed to divisive politics, which enables you to acquire a majority. On the one hand, we have ethno-nationalism, as a potential source of mobilizing people. Then we have a kind of representative machinery, which was meant as an elite institution. But slowly (it) begins to fade and it becomes increasingly a kind of a mobilizing machinery where ethno-nationalists have an advantage. And I don't know whether there is any way to correct it, other than to get people to see that ethno-nationalism may not be in their interest, and seizing the state is not the only objective of politics or for that matter democratic politics.
SR: Let me press you on the aspect of mobilization that you just referred to. You make it clear that authoritarian populists don't merely gain power in the electoral game through the art of demagogical persuasion. On the contrary, they seem to be much better than liberals at the nitty-gritty routines of mobilization. And as democracies, these regimes may be regarded as ugly democracies, to borrow your provocative concept, when compared to so-called good liberal democracies. But they do have a semblance of democratic legitimacy, and they refer to the collective sovereignty of the demos. Most authoritarian, illiberal populists win and come to power through elections. But even after they have been elected, and they take over institutions and start to rewrite constitutions, their world seems to be a world of permanent mobilization. Would a progressive answer to this authoritarian, illiberal politics, would it rely equally on the power of collective mobilization, or would it use a different means?
DG: One would hope that we could come up with an alternative strategy of mobilizing, instilling in demos or persuading demos to look at larger ends and of what is it to live in a society where there is harmony and solidarity rather than simply seizing power. But there are too many elements today which sort of promote the singular focus on seizing power.
First, there is even within the idea of a nation state, (the idea of) “we, the people”. And also when you translate it into the citizen strategy, both nationalizing strategy and citizen strategy can become exclusionary. I've already talked about how nationalizing strategy can be exclusionary and lead to a certain kind of majoritarianism. But citizenizing strategy also can be exclusionary because the idea of citizen clearly in the ancient Greeks was an incredibly privileged status. You had power, you had access to certain kind of provisions because you are a citizen, because you are a male citizen and so on.
So, citizenship itself has an exclusionary dimension, which is of considerable interest to you about immigration. And how an earlier generation of immigrant will say without any hesitation that we came in legally, we were naturalized legally, but “the illegals” ought not to be allowed. It is not just the so-called “people” who imagine themselves as being always already there, who claim the privilege of citizenship and want to exclude the non-citizen. Even recently naturalized citizens do that. In all of this, the egalitarian impulse,an egalitarian inflection of the demos that has been forgotten or attenuated. So in order to do that, we got to get that egalitarian element or the dimension of the demos back into politics.
So, how can we engage in an egalitarian politics, which is not hijacked by the authoritarian right wing ethno-nationalist one, which always has within it a kind of a privileging mechanism of the majority, or the real American, real Hungarian. You see, the constant invocation of ethno-national "We The People," the structure of a representative system, and the privileges granted to citizens, those three things come together in a combustible way to make the authoritarian demagogic project, which in the name of the people, in the name of equality and all of them can run havoc. And the liberal apparatus with all its legal order, all its emphasis on human rights, all sorts of rights, political, civil, social rights and cultural rights, is not able to withstand that particular force which is unleashed today.
The so-called ethno-national majority is a fiction. It is not really as real as people think it is. It is a rhetorical construction.First of all, “We The People” is a rhetorical construction. And then the ethno-national, the real people is a rhetorical question. So the question is, how can we redefine “We The People” as opposed to who are the real people? That becomes a very important issue and a great challenge.
SR: And what could be the modalities of an alternative progressive politics in the face of this challenge? You've proposed a more radical, emancipatory project which would, as you call it, and I quote you, "awaken the sleeping giant, the non-voter, not simply to vote, but to engage." Democracy, in your view, cannot be regenerated merely by tinkering with the current system, institutions or even normative frameworks, but requiresa politics of what you call direct action by the people. What are you thinking of when you talk about direct action, both in terms of traditions of direct action, but also particularly in terms of current praxis?
DG: I make a distinction between persuading the people and mobilizing the people. And then I want to make a further distinction between mobilizing the people and engaging the people. What the ugly Democrats have learned is persuasion is overrated. And what really matters is mobilization. Persuasion is overrated, according to their view, because after all, persuasion or rhetoric is not some kind of set of hoodwinking people or persuading them against their interest. Rhetoric or persuasion simply are conditions where you cannot demonstrate indubitably some policy is correct, something is right, some values should be adhered (to).
But rather, we live in a contingent world where you have to give good reasons, as Habermas would say. In terms of knowing the people and persuasion, you not only have to give good reasons, you have to appeal to the emotions, sentiments of the people, but you also have to appear credible. So, persuasion has always been a very important staple of democratic projects. It is a part of the ideological struggle. But we have now arrived at a point where ideology is no longer the site of the struggle, but rather, the mobilization.
Now, the liberal democratic alternative cannot be simply the same thing. You can't simply keep trying to either give a high-minded persuasion. But you have to engage them. And my sense is, all things being equal, if the Liberal Democrats or people who are Social Democrats all were to engage people more, they will have an advantage, as opposed to the authoritarian figures or demagogues, if they were to engage people. The moment you engage the people, some version of validity or truth or some version of coherence become evident. So as a result, I think we need to get into micropolitics rather than the macro politics, (stop) constantly thinking about national leaders and ideology that is being disseminated from above, rather than see how politics can emerge from the bottom.
There's a lot of micro-politics of resistance. And you have to recognize this is happening in every country. And the liberal democratic or social democratic project has to really take cognizance of the need to engage people. But here, the liberals particularly, and even social democrats, have a heritage of trying to shut up the demos, being fearful of demos, assuming demos always already is predisposed towards negative things. That is a very, very pessimistic view about your own ability, of your own agenda, your own ideological appeal.
And the other thing is to what extent (the) liberal democratic project, or even social democratic project, is firmly committed to what we call an egalitarian project, firmly committed to creating what Rosanvallon calls a "Society of Equals." Andeven if they are doing it, they are not convincing the demos that they are doing it. The demos simply thinks there's a pervasive unfairness, to borrow the phrase byJeffrey Green, that the shadow of unfairness hangs over our society. One, about economic inequality, and second about what Charles Taylor says, incapacity of the citizen or citizen inefficacy in trying to influence and control their own destiny.
Given that, liberal as well as social democrats or deliberative democrats all have to do something about awakening the sleeping giant. Most of the majoritarian claims are not backed up by electoral data. Very often a majority government wins about 35 percent of the vote and controls 80 percent of the legislature. And given that, I think there is still a dormant demos. There are many segments of the people who (the) shadow of unfairness has made apathetic. They don't trust anybody. And that has to be changed. And now we have increasingly (an) informational revolution, which makes it possible to reach them, engage them and involve them. I don't think there's any other way but to put your trust in the demos and try to get them involved.
And this is where my point about direct action comes in, Shalini. Direct action simply is a way of characterizing a kind of a political action which does not go through a legislative route or through the judicial route. That is, no society is perfect, there are all kinds of wrongs and injustices. And different segments of society experience and complain against these injustices and grievances. And a democratic society has to have recourse to expressing their grievances and getting them addressed. And the argument that one can address people's grievances and redress them largely through the electoral process, through making laws, or executive action, or by people who have grievances going to the court and finding redress. These are the two methods promoted by Liberal Democrats and even Social Democrats, basically.
And they say, why do you need any other way? Because especially in advanced democratic societies it is very clear, as in the Polanyi's second movement, it always comes late. But that is about big changes. But even in small changes, people's grievances are not addressed on time. This is where temporality comes in. The temporality of the poor, people who are subjected to a wrongtheir temporality is different. As a result, they have to take to the street, or they have to mobilize and try to get redress to their grievances. Without that, they don't get heard.
I mean, this is what (was) exactly said by Martin Luther King as to why we can't wait in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail." And I think that is very important. Without direct action, the democratic project cannot be furthered. If you rely only on the judicial route or the legislative route, the democracy moves very slowly in addressing the needs of all its people. And direct action, continuously goads people into action. And that is what Liberal, Social Democrats don't realize.
So, in fact, Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is not addressed against segregationist, not against racists, but it is addressed to his friends, his liberal friends, liberal clergymen who say, hey, listen, take it easy. Go through the legal route. Influence the Democratic Party. And he says, I can't wait.
But if you think about even all the rights which were won whether through the aristocratic or bourgeois intervention, or the intervention of the demos, getting a right to vote by women and the laborers, they were all products of direct action. People went to the street. Women went to the street for suffrage. Labor went to the street. They mobilized. It did not come through the benevolence of the legislative body in any country. So as a result, virtually every right which we have won, everything that has been emancipatory at some point has come from the support of the demos. Of course, the idea may have originated with a philosopher or a thinker, but the way they have given body is in the street.
So direct action is unavoidable. We'll never reach a perfect society. And never will we have a political system or a legal system which is responsive to the people on a continuous basis. Almost all the good political things have emerged out of the struggle of the people in the street. And that, I think, is the most important thing to recognize.
SR: So Dilip, let me wrap up by asking you to focus on two aspects. You derive the necessity of direct action from the differential temporalities of political possibilities. I'd like to hear your thoughts about the specific temporalities of direct action and collective mobilization on the part of the poor, the unruly masses whom Partha Chatterjee has memorably called the governed. Two aspects of it interest me, the question of space and the question of scale. You call for a spatial reorientation of progressive politics to crowded streets and to slums, the mirror-like theater in which the multitude in Spinoza's sense recognizes itself as poor and oppressed. To wrap up our conversation, could you reflect on the spaces and the scales of direct action in an age of selective abundance, asymmetrical affluence, and deepening inequality, as you call it, the age in which we live.
DG: That is actually the question, and it is, in fact, my current preoccupation. I'm really trying to think about the relation between time and politics, temporalities of politics. But in this particular context, particularly, and also I'm thinking about space. These are the three factors we have to take into consideration. One is the politics of the demos and the related struggle between the elite and the demos, whether it is empirically mappable or not, rhetorically the tension between the elite and the mass is very much there. It is occurring, first of all, now in three matrices.
One is the matrix of economic affluence in some way. We no longer live in a society where there is poverty in a stark sense of the word. There are pockets of poverty, even in very rich countries. But when you think about the masses and the elite, you don't think in terms of the purely starving poor and the corrupt sort of rich. But rather, we live in an affluent society where there is differential, not absolute inequality, but relative inequality. So we are really trying to figure out how to think about an egalitarian project where the primary objective is not removing poverty as such, but rather bringing a more equitable, distributive economy.
The second one is the spatial dimension that some urbanologists have noted only about 15 years ago. Now more people live in urban areas rather than in rural areas. And this trend is likely to continue. And as urbanologists have also pointed out again and again, that you might be able to get a job when you move to the urban area. You might find enough to eat, clothe yourself. But what you are not going to be able to get is proper housing for the majority. So as a result, the majority are going to live in slums. And living in a slum is a collective experience. Just the way Marx used to think working in a factory is a collective experience. And that will create a kind of a class consciousness of the worker because they share the common horizon of time, space, experience.
So, today, living in a slum creates a particular kind of consciousness. And that needs to be mobilized. And what is that consciousness? That consciousness is not only of inequality, but it's the consciousness about a sense of indignity, humiliation, which is dramatically experienced by the people. It is not something phenomenologically you can avoid. You get down from a train, you walk through filthy streets and get into a neighborhood which has got all sorts of deprivations. So you know the difference between the various spaces within the city. Where you work, where you live, and so on.
This is compounded by what I call the third one, temporalities. So the temporalities of the people living in the slum or the poor is very different from temporalities of both their friends and their exploiters. For instance, when you think about temporalities of the poor, if you think in terms of economic matters, they've got a very different way how they're going to balance a monthly budget, or a weekly budget, or a daily budget.
As Yellow Vests (in France) said, you guys are thinking about the end of the world, we are talking about the end of the month. That's a classic statement about temporality. That may be the Yellow Vests in Paris, but the condition of slum dwellers in Brazil or in Nigeria or India is not end of the month. It's the end of the week, end of the day. So temporality of the poor is different from temporalities of even people who are trying to help them. NGOs, they have a different temporality. The bureaucrats who might be sympathetic to the poor, their temporality is different.
The office holders who say, hey, listen, I'm going to get you this and that. Their temporality is different because they're running for office every four years, five years, six years. And the policymakers, their temporality is different. So there's a collision of temporalities. And furthermore, poor have multiple temporalities than, in fact, the other classes. You know, (the) poor are not only thinking about what they're going to eat, they're thinking about whether they're going to have secure housing. They're wondering about their children. (The) poor spend a lot of time trying to invest for their children. And that is a very conscious, continuous affair. Whereas as you go up the economic ladder, saving for your children's education is an important thing, but it is not like it's a daily matter. Whereas we live in multiple temporalities, but we are not consciously experiencing our multiple temporalities.
The temporality of the poor should be something to which the Democrats need to pay more attention. Not to the temporality of policymaking, not to the temporality of governmentality. And I think that's why the idea of temporality, especially when it intersects with spatiality, where they live, how distant it is from water supply, a health care system, how far it is for the schools, for their children. All of those things are constant reminders not only of material inequality, but they are reminders of humiliation, indignity. We are creating systematically conditions of indignity for a vast number of people, visible and invisible. And somehow the authoritarian figures are able to tap into that as a resentment. It is more than a resentment. It is in a way, a justified anger of the people. Anger is different from resentment.
And you have to really figure out how to appeal to both those sentiments. They have to appeal to that anger of the people who feel they are humiliated and treated badly and given a raw deal. And also those people who have become apathetic, who have resigned and say, there's not much we can do. So we need to mobilize both of them. And without that, I don't think (the) democratic project, which I always see as primarily an egalitarian project can really succeed.
SR: Thank you so much, Dilip, for this fascinating conversation on the possibilities of a democratic project, but also of its intellectual trajectories from Athenian democracy to various aspects of a social democratic project, as well as the authoritarian, illiberal project that we are seeing unfolding in front of our eyes. So thanks so much for being with me today.
DG: Thank you, Shalini. It is a pleasure to participate. And the questions you asked were very, very useful and something for me to think again in the future.
SR: We’ve just heard Dilip Gaonkar made a strong argument against keeping a permanent vigil at the demise of democracy. Instead, he suggests that the current downward spiral can only be considered a part of the rhythmic oscillations of democracy. He firmly believes that given its centrality to our very understanding of modern political life, democracy can be temporarily damaged, but it cannot be eradicated anymore.
He's argued that the changing forms of the democratic project must be understood with reference to the historical dynamics and logics of capitalism. He linked these to the foundational antinomy of the liberal imagination, namely the reliance of liberal democracy on the legitimating power of the sovereign collective people, whose radical potential, however, it constantly strives to contain and constrict. In his view an adequate conceptualization of democracy must therefore understand the power of the demos, i.e. the collective people, as a fundamentally egalitarian force in tension with capitalism and the modern state.
Dominant understandings of the demos are influenced by deeply ingrained historical aversions to crowds, deemed irrational and potentially dangerous. Liberals have always been anxious about the potential of violence in the masses, the rioting crowd that needs disciplining. This fear of the unruly collective people is at the heart of the modernist project of taming the demos through techniques of representative government. Dilip calls this “citizenizing”, that is the imaginary fragmentation of the people into autonomous, individual citizens, which ultimately underpins the political imaginary of liberalism.
Thus, the intrinsic tension between institutionalized democracy and the unruly demos has long haunted political theory and praxis. And this antinomy may well illustrate our current concerns about ethno-nationalist, xenophobic populism, which has successfully mobilized mass resentment into support for soft authoritarian rule. Since liberalism itself was historically tied to the national state, the demos, which is the ultimate source of sovereign legitimacy, remained susceptible to ethno-nationalist ideological capture. And this is also at the root of resurgent right-wing populism today. Perhaps the most important struggle, therefore, should revolve around persuading the people that genuinely democratic politics should not be limited to exclusionary forms of majoritarian representation. But it should focus instead on bringing the radical egalitarian dimension of the demos back into politics.
An adequate response to the populist challenge may thus require innovative forms of direct political action. These draw on more radical traditions of civil, but also uncivil, societal activism, emerging at new sites of resistance both nationally and transnationally. Democratic politics can only be regenerated merely thru bolder experimentation with what Dilip calls direct action. Legislative and judicial channels of political practice have a temporality that is incapable of addressing the existential urgency of many hardships that large masses of poor people are confronted with in their everyday realities. Besides the differential temporalities of the poor, we must also bear in mind the spatial specificities of their political theater, embedded in the urban landscape of what Mike Davis memorably called the “planet of slums”. Direct action literally takes politics to the street because, in Dilip’s words, “almost all the good political things have emerged out of the struggle of the people in the street”.
The liberal alternative to the efficient mobilization of people by populists fueling resentment cannot abandon ideological persuasion. But the people cannot be won over just by telling them what is rationally and ethically good for them either. The way out of this false dilemma for Dilip, the false dilemma of choosing between persuasion and mobilization is engaging ordinary people on the micro-political level. He puts his faith in everyday resistance by the poor against myriad forms of injustice, inequality, and humiliation to regenerate democratic politics at the micro level. Liberals and social democrats can only ever succeed in awakening the dormant emancipatory potential of the demos if they manage to convince people of their genuine commitment to fighting what Dilip terms the immense “shadow of unfairness” hanging over society, which breeds apathy and despair.
This was the third episode of Season 8 of "Democracy in Question." Thank you very much for listening. Join us again for the next episode in a fortnight when my guest will be Oleksandra Matviichuk – an internationally renowned human rights lawyer and Head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago in 2022. We’ll talk about the prospects of durable democracy and peace in Ukraine two years after Russia launched its war of aggression.
Please go back and listen to any episodes you might have missed, including the previous two episodes, which have also focused on the relationship between democracy and the historical dynamics and logics of capitalism. And let your friends know about this podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of Central European University at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
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