The power of participation

If ever there was a moment when Gramsci’s famous quote, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born”, is critically relevant, then it is this moment. 

Your Party has been launched by Zara Sultana (pictured) and Jeremy Corbyn with 800,000 sign ups. It is a moment of the whirlwind, it is a historical situation - far greater than we may want to admit. 

Because, if we are honest, we are not going to get many more 'get out of prison cards' before the skies permanently darken and far right forces in Western democracy make what 'cannot happen here', happen here. 

Corruption

I do not want to get into all the machinations of the YourParty space. But suffice to say, the dead weight of twentieth century dysfunctional convention is set to create another failed left project, unless we come together to give birth to the “new world”.

This new world is not about warm words - abstractions. Nor is it about policies, shopping lists of what is good and right. It is this: concrete ways in which dominatory power is confined, and mass participation is set free. 

This is not just a glorious political project in itself, it is also the only way the left will win elections and take state power. This is not the time to repeat failures which have always failed. 

To properly understand why progressive political projects end in tears, we have to be brave enough to accept that what we have been sold as democracy is not actually democracy. 

By this I don’t mean the conventional liberal and pseudo-left analysis that the reason that things are bad is because we don't have fair elections, not everyone can get to vote, and we have corruption in our politics. 

Classes

No, what we have to understand is elections by definition are not fair, voting by definition excludes minorities and the poor, and our 'democracies' with their political parties are by definition corrupt. 

In other words, we need to challenge the whole 'democratic' paraphernalia of modernity. This democracy grew up alongside industrialisation and global capitalism as all part of the same system of class domination, a system that keeps the rich and powerful in control. 

This is bad enough in itself, but as we know, it is now a matter of continued human existence in the era of nuclear, climate and AI.

We are truly at the end of the road which is why we need to think very clearly about how domination actually happens and what is the liberatory alternative.

It is a sad reality that the left, even the so-called radical left and hard left, have accepted political forms which act in the interests of the classes they claim to oppose. 

Participation

Left projects fail because they use the opponent’s tools to try to create a new world and thereby only to reproduce the old one. 

"It's so embarrassing”. I have heard this said over and again in the last few days as Your Party has imploded into “power struggles”. 

This is put down to personalities and lack of democracy. Control has to be given to 'the masses'. It is claimed we need a proper process to elect leaders who will then 'take charge of the party'. 

Such views are naive liberal myths even if they are wrapped up in left language. They are contradicted by overwhelming evidence that voting and elections do not remove dominating power - they create such power. They do not remove power struggles; they are the cause of power struggles. 

We have to understand that there are two opposing forms of power -  this dominating power that comes from a desire to control, and a popular power that comes from mass participation in decision making. 

Oligarchical

When dominating power is enacted, as in the present conflicts in the Your Party space, then you get a collapse of participatory power. 

People exit the space, as we now see in the hundreds of comments on articles and Youtube shows dealing with the present mess: “That’s it, I’m not getting involved”. “This is horrible, I am cancelling my donation”. 

What I will outline below is a summary of the long essay I wrote during my last days in prison during August of this year: Your Party: Grasping the Enormity of the Moment.

I propose three concrete social designs which are essential to prevent regression into oligarchical power, the power of the few; and to enhance participatory power, the power of the many. 

No political party elections: replace them with sortition. 

The original source of domination is not who controls the centre - the executive power, the hard power of the money, data, and social media keys. It is who controls who controls these forms of power. Who decides who decides. 

And as soon as you have humans deciding these matters the cry goes up “why you and not me” and there is never a satisfactory answer to that question and so matters degenerate into power struggles. 

Such is the nature of the corruption of power. Corruption is intrinsic to power. You cannot uncorrupt this power. To stop corruption you have to remove power itself - the power to dominate. 

You do this by taking power from humans and give it to chance - to a non-human power. Sorition is selection by lot, randomly - by chance. 

In one simple revolutionary design change dominating power is removed from the centre of the system. The most powerful one per cent get exactly one per cent of the representation in an assembly, or convention.

And the least powerful 50 per cent, the working class, the poor, get 50 per cent representation. You get power by the people in one simple move. Nothing is more revolutionary than this. 

No political party branches: replace them with an ecology of local groups.

Just as no one should be a national 'king', so no one or one group should be a local king. You need to end local power centres. 

Branches are mini-states. Whoever or whatever group gets to run them gets a monopoly power over a territory. The logic of the branch is part of general colonial logic of modernity - localities as the colonies of political power. 

Before modernity there were numerous groups within any territory based upon occupation, culture or religion. And so it can be again. 

Any group should be able to use the movement/party brand and engage in local collective activities - campaigns, mutual aid, support for candidates etc. 

Dominating

No one can get to do gatekeeping if there is no gate to be guarded. No one can say what comes under the movement brand or not. 

If some groups violate core values of the movement then people can just choose to leave that space and go to another one. 

There needs to be no bureaucracy, no core dominatory decision making space - no more local power struggles. 

No one can be a local king because there is no such role. Again dominating power is designed out of the space. 

No political party candidates: replace them with open hustings. 

We are not peasants who need to be told who to vote for in local and national elections by 'leaders' who make 'pacts' between parties. 

That is the feudal model of politics - this mode of dominatory power. Participatory power demands participation - that people of an area decide on their candidates themselves, thank you very much. 

If there is more than one candidate on the left in a community, then there are a series of open events - hustings - where local people can hear the candidates, discuss amongst themselves in small groups who is best, and then vote on the best candidate there and then. 

The people decide not the party. The party serves the people, not the other way round. There is no power outside these participatory spaces. Once again it is designed out. 

These are the three key elements of real democracy. Sure there are details to be discussed and experimentation needed. Sure we can all dream up possible means of corruption and these potentialities need to be attended to.

Rules

This is not utopia - it is practical doable design. It is not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than what we have now. 

These designs are not corrupt by definition as are the modernist alienating practices of voting, elections, and the political party form that enforces these perversities. 

Nor do they lead to a disintegration of our collective voice into 'horizontalism'. A single political programme is created by sortition based national conference. 

A single candidate is created by hustings in each constituency. You get mass participation as well as the aggregation of people's views - the best of both worlds. 

The left needs to get with the programme. We will never win using the old game rules created by the liberal bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. 

Ecologies

Before the hegemony of modern capitalism was established, democracy always meant sortition and participation. 

Voting and elections always meant oligarchy - rule by the aristocrats. People were not stupid. They understood how domination works.

These designs then are the only way we are going to win against fascism in the next decade. Liberal “democracy” is structurally determined to create fascism because it insults people with the great lie that its “democracy” will lead to their empowerment. 

It never did and it never will. Humiliated and disillusioned, they opt for something else. 

And if there is no option of a real democracy - sortition, local ecologies of groups, and open hustings: the processes of popular participation - they will choose the other alternative: fascism. 

We need to smarten up and reverse this two hundred year regression. And then we might finally start to win before it is too late.

This Author

Roger Hallam is a founding member of Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain and Just Stop Oil.