If we go back to our school, we would recollect a few definitions about the word ‘democracy’, which is available even in Wikipedia now – the word comes from two Greek words demos -"common people" and Kratos -"strength”, in turn, we termed it ‘people rule’. Also, we would have heard the famous slogan delivered by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address – “of the people, by the people, for the people”. But what remains unanswered is – who are the ‘people’? The answer varied from time to time. The Greeks who coined the term democracy rejected few human bodies in the name of slaves. We commonly know the history about the time when most of the world democracies denied even the basic voting rights for women until the later years of the 20th century. The most recent example would be the filthiest word that has become a common public discourse now – ‘refugees’. Most countries deny even basic human rights to human bodies under the status of refugees. So, do we really have space for all the human beings under the word demos? – does it really include the people who are oppressed by caste, class, religion, race, gender, sexuality, color, appearance, nationality, ethnicity, knowledge and more? So now we have the answer to the question - who are the people that the definition or slogan or meaning of democracy mentions – it is a certain category of people which the so-called democratic laws approve or the few people who hold the real power. Arturo Bris opened his article ‘A democracy is not democratic’, with a data “only 4.5% of the world’s population live in a fully democratic country, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. About 45% live in flawed democracies, while 33% are citizens in authoritarian regimes” [2]. I agree with this argument; however, I am trying to extend the discussion further, the 4.5% and the 45% which is termed as democracies (true & flawed). Also, this is not the first text that intended to question the system of democracy. In fact, we have a very long history, from Friedrich Nietzsche – who claims the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement [3].
Moving to the next question, who created these laws? Even if I deliberately attempt to exclude Michel Foucault and his very beginning of the book History of Sexuality - we the other Victorians [4], I would be forced to mention the same words in a different form. The current world systems and structures are enforced by Victorian laws and principles in every way - anything after the 18th century has a blind relation to the Victorian era. We are enforced to born, live, eat, ha sex, think, act, and die as Victorians; there is no way out of it. At least after the twilight of World War Two, some of the European states shifted from feudal victorian values - although not completely - and tried to enforce capitalist values in the name of people welfare states. But their former colonies which were under their rule until the end of the Second World War still follows the Victorian laws. One example is the Indian sub-continent, the world’s biggest democracy according to the number of votes. We still follow victorian doctrine for almost everything, including education and law – Macaulay education and Macaulay penal code or constitution. Except for a few amendments like the reservation system, the rest is still the same. India is one of the fewer countries in the world which still holds governmental murder in its law in the name of capital punishment. Ironically, the world’s biggest democracy still kills its own people in name of the law. Not just this, but as a society, we haven’t turned out to be a society that is defined by values that are termed as human values. Human values, I have so many questions over it – probably it could be a potential matter for a different discussion.
Again, let’s go back to our initial question – who are the people that are part of the word demos? If you are a postmodernist and want to keep the population of a state between the famous post-modern ‘X’ i.e. center X margin, certainly humans in the center constitute the word demos. However, in most of the situations, people in the center and the states need a certain number of bodies from the margin, as a measurement for the vote or as a proof of democracy. In this view, the word demos consist of people in the center of a state as real numbers and the certain number of people from the margin as virtual numbers. Rest of the people are neglected or rejected from establishing the demos + kratos. By rejecting a chunk of the population and including another chunk only as virtual numbers, how can we claim democracy? Then what is a democracy? Maybe we should add a question ‘which’ to the dubious democratic slogan – of which people? by which people? for which people?
Before exploring the position of people or demos in the concept of democracy, I would say we need to understand the schematic picture of this system. Anyone with basic logic and understanding of the political systems can easily catch the black hole, that none of the systems that we have in practice practices equity or equality or we can just say a system which includes all the human beings. Rather every system has its own way to annihilate human beings in the name of caste, class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion and so on - they are legal according to their own laws within the system. The same schematic map applies to democracy too. Under democracy (including socialist democracies) every state has their own criteria to discriminate human beings. Can we frame an absolute picture for democracy? A common one across the globe? The answer would be a big ‘NO’, we cannot frame a blind single answer for anything in the universe. However, based on the above arguments we can frame a very generic schematic diagram in binary form- a real one and a virtual one.
The virtual diagram represents the actual dictionary meaning of the word democracy, that is, it includes every human being virtually or rather pretends that it has included every human being. Every citizen of a democratic state feels or is made to feel or enforced via various modes like education, books, and visual medium to feel the presence of their own self in the democratic system. A paradigm would be the “vote” model, in a representative democracy. We are made to believe that our vote has an enormous value and that it can change anything within the system. There is even a famous statement among Indians (not sure about other states) that, “if you don’t vote you are not a patriot or you don’t have the rights to question your government”. The truth is that our vote has null value or accounts to just a minimum value as a count to make us believe that a person wins the election, based on our votes. But to come to that conclusion, we would have been trained or molded mentally and physically, at least a year or two before the elections, by every medium possible via print media, visual media and today by social media. To understand the concept of the vote in direct, representative democracies we need to take a deep dive into it, which we can do in the latter part of this text.
The real diagram of democracy will not be much different from the monarchy model. It mostly represents the monarch model, however with a slight difference: for example, there will be a change of power or to be brutally honest it would be an exchange of power between two or three groups once in four or five or a specific number of years. This arrangement is to make people believe that they have the power to change things in a democracy, but on a real scale, nothing is changed, except for the governing people. Even under monarchy change of people, the clan will happen by various factors like conquering etc., but in a democracy, it is happening on a very different scale. Real ‘people’ who constitute democracy across the globe are the one with economic and political powers – hence it would be merely 1-2% of the world’s or state’s population that constitutes the democracy and the rest 98-99% of the population is made to believe that we are living in a modern civil society.
I don’t think it makes sense to put economics and democracy in parallel terms. The imaginary structure that has been built over democracy will demolish automatically when we bring in the virtue of economics into it. Economics makes things easy for people who question the world’s most civilized political forms. When the economic structure of any society oscillates between wider gaps, then how we can claim that society to be democratic? Because economics is linked along with basic human rights - I would say ‘involuntary’ human rights, which are supposed to be off the economic system itself. How can we claim ourselves as a progressive democratic society after placing the ‘involuntary’ human needs like food, water and the basic human rights like health, education systems under the economic structures?
In the current globalized neo-capitalist society, not only democratic power but almost all the powers are with the corporates and they decide everything. A big chunk of a state’s economy goes under the shoes of these big conglomerates, for example, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report, 2016 [5] “The richest 1% of Indians now own 58.4% of the country’s wealth and 80.7% of the total Indian economy belongs to just 10% of the state’s population”, so the remaining 90% of the population shares 19.3% of the total economy. This wide gap is the real face of democracy or any other political system in our current world. To prove this gap right, we use different economics driven bogus terms - hard work, laziness, ambition, dream etc. and we made ourselves believe these are true. I am not sure how they could be true. When a person can spend millions for a meal whereas another human being starves for even a single meal a day. As mentioned earlier, how does a democratic system deny even a meal for a human being whereas, on the other hand, it gives lavish money to drink a cup of tea? Democracy advocates equality, liberty, fraternity - in a crux, it means every human being has every right to live a dignified life. So, which is true? Written statements about democracy or reality? What brought this huge gap? How can we claim the democracy that we live in is a true democracy?
I think I should talk from the Indian context which will help us understand the biased behavior of the democratic system better. India is a democratic republic for almost 70+ years. According to its Constitution, India is a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic [6]. However, India has a deep-rooted social discrimination still in practice in the name of caste. Caste prevails throughout the life of every human being, in every form - from birth to death. The irony is not only Hinduism, even the European religion, Christianity practices caste discrimination in India – and few other religions also. Birth decides the social status of a human being under the caste system. If you are born in the top hierarchy of the caste system, then you are entitled to all the powers and if you are part of the lowest hierarchy then you are not allowed to even drink water from public water bodies. Although the caste system has come across many changes due to various reforms and revolutionary movements. We have come so far from where we were earlier, but still, caste is the ultimate base of Indian social system and practices inequality in every way even today, however on a different graph.
In a recent article, Kancha Ilaiah [7] questioned the position of power and intellectual system in the Indian subcontinent. He came out with a hidden fact – although it is not hidden - that the power and economic capital of the subcontinent is completely under certain Brahmin-Bania castes. Shudras, the working class of the caste system or the lowest caste according to the caste schema and Dalits, the people who were/are not part of the caste system don’t have any position in controlling the power of Indian political and economic systems. Even though certain shudras became the regional power centers, still they are unable to get hold of Delhi – the old Mughal city, now the capital of Indian state, predominantly occupied by Brahmin-Bania castes. The same applies to India's business capital Mumbai too, the business crux of the sub-continent is under Bania roofs.
If you are from west and if you believe India is a land of spiritual enlightenment, culture, family system etc., the fact is, in India if you love someone whom you like, then you and your lover will be killed by your own parents, in the name of caste and they call such murder an honor killing. According to a report presented by an NGO named Evidence, 81 humans were killed in three years in the state of Tamil Nadu in India for choosing a partner outside their caste. Please note that I am not talking about homosexual love here, it is only the so-called heterosexual love - a girl and a boy. Homosexual love - needless to even mention here, because Victorian principles allow only sex or love as a production unit, not for natural pleasure. The good note is, Indian Supreme Court has decriminalized homosexuality just about a month before. However, even caste discrimination is a criminal activity according to Indian law, but no one is bothered about the Constitution itself. Indian social structure is one of the finest examples exhibiting the double-strand of democracy or the actual system which we believe as the democracy. This is the two faces of the same state, a socialist, democratic republic as per the statement, whereas the same state will kill you for love.
Speaking of democracy, we need to talk about the major contributor to its structure or the so-called ultimate right of every human – the “Vote” or the electoral system. We believe that vote is the strongest weapon, let it be the same. Professor Jason Brennan in his book against Democracy [8] mentions that ignorance of the voters is a major pitfall of modern democracies. He also categorizes the voters into three: 1) Hobbits - mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics;2) Hooligans - are the rabid sports fans of politics or supporters of one party. They have strong and largely fixed worldviews. They can present arguments for their beliefs, but they cannot explain alternative points in a way that people with other views would find satisfactory; 3) Vulcans – who think scientifically and rationally about politics. Their opinions are strongly grounded in social science and philosophy. However, I want to leave this truly intellectual argument about democracy apart. Even, I don’t want to talk about the CIA or KGB papers behind the elections of any third world state. However, I want to ask how strong or how democratic is the current electoral system? According to the election commission of India, the party that formed the government in India in recent 2014 elections got the total vote share of 31% which means 69% of the population voted against the party that governs the country currently. In the state of Tamil Nadu where the central governing party got 5.5% of the vote share, which means 94.5% of the voters from the state of Tamil Nadu voted against the formation of the current Indian government. But the ironic truth is that the leader of the party that received 69% votes against them across the country and 94.5% of votes against them in the state of Tamil Nadu is now the prime minister of the country and the state of Tamil Nadu. However, he gained the power not because of any coup, but by democratic law which India acquired from the British, of course, the Victorian electoral system. Just because we have a law which legalizes the formation of government in another form it doesn’t mean it is justice or law of people.
If we deconstruct the electoral system of any state in the world, it will end in a void and it will have no democratic meaning. Amidst this big discrepancy, we still claim that the electoral models which govern the states for centuries as the greatest democratic model. When we talk about the Indian Constitution, I would like to remember a statement delivered by Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Chairman of the Drafting Committee of Indian Constitution, and India’s first law minister - “It is by placating the sentiments of smaller communities and smaller people who are afraid that the majority may do wrong, that the British Parliament works. Sir, my friends tell me that I have made the Constitution. But I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody. But whatever that may be, if our people want to carry on, they must not forget that there are majorities and there are minorities, and they simply cannot ignore the minorities by saying, Oh, no. To recognize you is to harm democracy. I should say that the greatest harm will come by injuring the minorities.” [9]. This statement is more than evidence for anyone to prove how fictitious the democratic constitutional system is.
Like the electoral system, privacy constitutes a major part of democracy. We believe that our state laws protect our privacy. But do the governments really safeguard our privacy? No individual in today’s world, not even the primitive communities have their privacy guaranteed. Everyone is under continuous surveillance and monitored in the name of national security. We don’t even have our personal chats private, everything we do in a day gets recorded in a server or a camera or a tracking machine. Powers – states or corporates, will know everything about your - diet, social behavior, economic status, sex life, political affiliation, travel – even the solo backpackers who believe that they are alone. These surveillance controls, mold the physical and mental behavior of an individual or eliminate the individual. Right to privacy is totally dumped under the guns of national security. Michel Foucault in his text Discipline and Punish introduced a word called Panopticism which finds its relevance even in the current dataveillance world. Foucault sees panopticon as a symbol of the disciplinary society of surveillance. The rough definition of Panopticism would be – an experimental laboratory of power in which behavior could be modified by surveillance [10]. Again, I would like to illustrate this with an Indian example. Most of the people in India, don’t know what is happening in their fellow states Kashmir or Nagaland or Manipur. However, the government and media keep advocating about the threats, presence of terrorists or anti-national groups in these states. People of the rest of the country are trained or brainwashed to believe that everyone in Kashmir is a Terrorist and anyone from Nagaland is a separatist. And whatever actions were taken by the Indian defense force in these states are only for ensuring national security. We are trained to believe that the brutal rapes or massacres of school children are for safeguarding the national security. When we are talking about privacy and surveillance, we cannot skip the role of Army, police, intelligence agencies in enforcing these brutalities and surveillance in the name of defense, also the roles of punishments and the prison system. A lot has been discussed about the defense atrocities across the globe in the name of security or for defending the state borders, hence I would like to skip these for now. We can conclude here by saying – surveillance or defense systems are on a reverse evolution, where they are evolving in a worse shape with the advancement of science and technology.
We have a democratic political system at least in our law books, but on contrary, our social systems are not democratic. We are living in a highly unequal society which thinks inequality is the way of life and justify with the famous evolutionary quote – “survival of the fittest”. Out of the many social structures, the least discussed structure in any society is about language or communication. Only during later part of 20th century, we started the discussions around language, communication, writing etc. When we put our communication/language system under a microscope - includes all form of communications - verbal and non-verbal languages, it will be evident that we are still using the feudal communication system. Like anywhere, we are maintaining the monarchy or barbarian values in communication too. How can we eliminate discrimination without eliminating the discriminations in these un-questioned microstructures?
Around 64 countries in the world still include religious mention or images in their national flags. Even a highly democratic country like Switzerland holds a religious symbol in their flag. When we talk about democracy, the immediate reflection would be the Scandinavian countries, but all three of them holds their official names starting with “Kingdoms” and they do have a chair for monarch until now. These samples help us in questioning the position of democracy in our languages. In the same way, we can deconstruct any structure of a state and can find its roots in the aristocracy. Do we use our verbal language in a democratic way? How does a highly democratic world or the saviors of democracy - west and North America uses words like immigrants, ghettos, colored or such things still in practice? If we bisect the word colored, it means every color but how come colored here just points to a black or brown or yellow or red skin but not to white? How does a highly democratic society still hold color as a social division? Or immigrants – how has this word made its presence in an extensive way in a democratic world? Who becomes an Immigrant? What is the reason behind it? When a pre-victorian world had fewer complexities with immigration or borders, then in the post-victorian or post-second world war how did borders, visas and states become a huge issue? Is it another reverse evolution? In the same way, we still use the non-democratic terms to represent democracy like power, rule, etc. How the democratic langue can be homophobic or misogynistic?
A few questions for the Democrats ¬- What about the stories behind Muslims being targeted as terrorists after 9/11? Who made Muslims terrorists? What is the motive behind that? How can a democratic world or state make a global community a terrorist? Who infused the fear about a community into the subconscious mind of every human across the globe? What about the stories behind the poverty of Africa? When Africa is a land of valuables like the diamond, gold, cocoa, etc., how is Africa a poor continent with so much of ethnic conflicts and famine always? Who owns the valuables that belong to the African soil? What about the stories behind the conflicts in South America? What about the corporates that are behind the wealth of Amazon? Why was Afghanistan invaded? Why was Iraq invaded? What about Syria? Who is responsible for the death of millions of people after the second world war? So, what is a democracy now? The most probable answer for most of the questions would be “conspiracies”. But, how many Democrats are ready to reveal the secrets that are lying under the shoes of the world leaders? Those secrets that are kept as secrets in the name of national or global security. Under democracy, we the people should know everything about our state. Or at least tell us how many progenies of these patriotic democrat leaders are part of the national defense forces? Why are the defense persons mostly from poor ghettos and countryside? Why not the kids of these great politicians or business tycoons? Which so-called progressive people welfare European state will apologize to the world for colonization? For the human zoos? For slavery? For the dead corpses that were drowned in the Atlantic? For cutting down Africa, Asia, South America into pieces – which is the reason for the everlasting ethnic conflicts? For killing millions of native Americans? United States’ propaganda made Americans and the rest of the world to believe that North America is the native land of whites, is that really a true statement? Americans like Trump and their American mainstream media keep repeating that immigrants should go back to their lands. If that is the case when are the Caucasians going apologize to the native Americans and vacate the native Indians’ land? the same applies to the Caucasians who occupied the aboriginal lands too. So, what is a democracy now?
Are these arguments trying to reduce the true value of democracy? Or narrow it down to the monarchy? Or do they advocate an alternative form like socialism? When talking about democracy, it includes socialist democracies too. Also, questioning the democratic system does not mean that it is justifying the invasion of Poland – a joint venture of USSR and Nazis which marked the beginning of world war two or any brutality did in the name of socialism. Narrowing down the democratic system to the monarch - it is not intentional, but these arguments and sociological perspectives take an automatic shape to put both the systems in parallel lines, so they are basically like identical twins. Again, I think I must quote my paradigm from India: Where does the president of India reside – in a fort that was built by colonizers for their viceroys; Where does the Prime Minister celebrate India’s Independence Day - in a fort that was built by Mughal rulers as their court and living residence; Where does India carry out its daily constitutional and governing activities - in a grand building that was built by colonizers for ruling the sub-continent. Why do the Prime Minister, President, and other higher officials need a convoy? Why do they need to stop the whole traffic for their convoys? Where did all these practices come from? Doesn’t convoys sound more like a King’s visit during the rule of the monarchy? Does my argument sound so stupid or silly? Maybe, but let it be because the fact is that we still have the monarchy in every means under the facade of democracy. We need to dig to the basics - swinging between the systems or representatives will not help humans to achieve anything - rather it would help us in deepening the stratifications and make life more complex.
What is the solution? Or an alternate? It is truly embarrassing for an anarchist to identify an alternative system for existing systems - aren’t we tired of systems? When I talk about being anarchist, I also wonder if a Muslim from India will have the privilege to announce themselves as an anarchist. I am afraid that a Muslim from India will not have that privilege or right to question the constitution or democratic model or the concept of state and they are always in a situation to prove their genuineness and patriotism towards the country in every way. If not, they will be tagged as a terrorist and will have more chances to go behind the bars for infinite times. Hence, even being an anarchist is a privileged term under the existing constitutional model. As Jared Diamond argues, the worst mistake in the history of humankind was the evolution of humans as an agrarian society [11], when everything turned out to be the relationships of production. We have come a long way and now we are living in an internet-driven robotic neo-liberal globalized world, where corporations hold the universal key. I know we cannot go back to pre-agrarian society or my small mind is not good enough to think of a reverse evolution or a big crunch, like imagining the robotic world going back to hunting. I am also aware that we cannot change anything upside down in a day or change will not happen tomorrow or we don’t have one stop solution for every complex problem. Change is long, and a continuously evolving process and it is not possible to change a complex society within a very short span of time. Also, as mentioned earlier, we cannot derive a single solution for everything, just how the theoretical physicists who are looking for that one equation which will answer everything about this universe or multiverse. Our structures are not linear rather they are of infinite dimensions! Hence the evolution should also be infinite!
References:
[1] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, 1988
[2] Arturo Bris, A democracy is not democratic, 2017 - https://www.news24.com/Opinions/Voices/a-democracy-is-not-democratic-20170312-2
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, From Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 1976
[5] Credit Suisse global wealth report, 2016
[6] Preamble to the Constitution of India
[7] Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, where are the shudras, The Caravan, Vol.10/10 2018.
[8] Jason Brennan, Against Democracy, 2016
[9] B R Ambedkar, Rajya Sabha, 1953
[10] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment,1975
[12] Jared Diamond, The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Discover, 1987
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