Most people hate the government. Most people believe in democracy. According to democratic theory, people control their government. So something has gone wrong somewhere.

Words: Luke Roelofs
Pics: Will JobbinsTo come at the same thing from a different angle, why do about half the adult population not bother to vote, nor engage in much other political activity? It's not enough to say that they are lazy or uncaring - if half the population are so foolish, how can we have faith in 'democracy' anyway? Alternatively, if democracy is all it's cracked up to be, and yet people are in such vast numbers deciding that it's not worth engaging with, then, again - something has gone wrong somewhere.

One clue to the problem comes from the obvious and widely-accepted fact that 'unity is strength': a group of ten people organised and acting as a group, is far more powerful than ten people acting in isolation. We might then ask: why does the institution - voting - which is supposed to express 'people power', function largely by isolating people?

People enter the voting booth as individuals, and they swiftly come to feel, quite rightly, that as individual voters they are basically powerless. By contrast, for many people their most 'empowering' experiences, the one that give them the greatest sense of strength and meaningful action, are what they do in groups: in local parties, trade unions, protest marches, etc.

This is not a new point. For the last two hundred years, people have pointed out that elections by atomised individual voters was simply a way to give an appearance of democracy without allowing for voters to wield real power, and that it was a recipe for widespread indifference.

The problem extends to other areas as well. It is sometimes said that a market gives power to its consumers - for example, David Cameron describes the partial privatisation of schools as a way to 'empower' people - but the exact same thing holds again: consumers in a market act in isolation, so they have very little power to affect the overall outcome. The media may be ultimately dependent on people's buying decisions, but it's the owners, editors, and advertisers who exert real power.

Companies, hedge funds, banks, and of course governments are, by contrast, extremely well organised, with the result that whatever 'official' democracy there is, those groups have power and the public don't.

Governments and the rich and privileged have always been more organised and more integrated than the mass of un-privileged people they control, and they've always tried, as far as possible, to prevent those people from becoming more organised, by undermining, suppressing, or infiltrating the organisations they form.

Which makes sense, for them. Because if people were to be as organised as the elite are, then the elite would be superfluous. If people had the real power to hold governments or corporations to account, they'd also have the power to take over all the functions of government and to direct economic production and distribution.

The problem with democratic government is that for it to make sense as a government, it needs us to be so weak that it is no longer democratic; and if people have the power to count as a real democracy, then the government will be chucked aside.

This is why it's important for them to persuade us, firstly, that we are so unruly and short-sighted that we could never manage our own affairs, and secondly, that they by contrast are so wise and noble that we should trust them to do it for us.

But that's not true. The rich and powerful, for a start, are very rarely any wiser or more noble than the rest of us, as the ongoing expenses scandal shows. But more importantly, people can manage their own common affairs: they show this in everyday life, and they show in this in the frequent historical attempts that have been made to live without governments, which have tended to fail not through any internal instability but through military repression from outside.

As a general election appears on the distant horizon, you will probably be told to 'use your vote', and that may be a good idea. But don't imagine that by using that vote, for whatever purpose, you or people like you are in control.



Those interested in further research
into stateless organising could investigate:

The Conquest of Bread, by Peter Kropotkin.

Parecon, a model developed by
Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel.

The history of the Paris Commune.

The history of the 'Black Guards' in
Ukraine in the Russian Civil War.

The history of the CNT in the Spanish
Civil War.