Two Ways of ‘Taking Democracy Seriously’
One question the truck protests over the past three weeks have raised for me is this: given the popular unhappiness (even rage) against the disruption these convoys have caused, the vehemence of the calls for the police and even the military to be used against the protestors, and the clear rallying around state authority in the face of treasonous insurrection, how must a communist revolutionary movement differ. In many ways what has taken place over the past three weeks fits the popular image of the Romantic voluntarist, Jacobin insurrectionary model of the 19th century (which is why it is so attractive to reactionary ideology and self-image). Voluntarism and Jacobinism have been ideas and revolutionary models the left has had to deal with since at least 1848 - they were charges mistakenly laid at Lenin’s door and continue to be one of the hinges around which turns criticism of Bolshevism and What is to be Done?
As opposed to the insurrectionary kind of spontaneous uprising, post-Soviet revolutionary communists have, I think, recognized two things: First, that a revolution is not spontaneously summoned up out of nothing, that in fact capital itself produces the revolution, the role of the vanguard is to see it coming, prepare for it, and try to turn the revolutionary energy in the direction of social justice. When capital has ruined itself sufficiently, revolution happens with or without a communist party or a communist culture. The question is what it new mode of production it leads to.
The second thing - and this remains controversial - is that a revolution is not merely political: it is not a coup or a change in regime, but a thoroughgoing change in culture. This follows directly from Marx, our social and cultural lives are proper to the ways we organize production, distribution, and consumption of our material resources. If production, distribution, and consumption are unfair, unequal, and exploitative (as by definition they are under capitalism), then our social lives will be unfair, unequal, and exploitative. A social and cultural project of education has to take place alongside the organizational preparation for revolution. In a country like Canada, with no organized left to speak of, the organizational challenge is urgent and immediate. But so is the cultural one.
Where the right-wing insurrectionaries, in true populist fashion, argue (and may even believe) that they represent an unspoken common culture, a silent majority of Canadians, the past three weeks have shown that they absolutely do not. What communists must do differently is take the time to create the cultural and social outlook appropriate to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, so that when the time comes and capital has made it impossible to go on living in the old way, people are ready to take the leap to the next way of life together. The “trucker” protests are, essentially, a group of alienated individuals, formed in the crucible of neoliberal selfishness who, for cynical tactical purposes, claim to be speaking for the majority of Canadians. But they are in it for individual “freedoms” that vanish as soon as they are probed to any depth.
The question of this kind of preparatory “cultural revolution” (discredited in its Maoist form, Fredric Jameson has been trying to restore the idea to legitimacy in some of its recent work) was the cause of some debate in New Left circles during the rise of Thatcher (i.e. the neoliberal turn) in the 1970s. The truck protests - like all right-wingers - deny the existence of ideology: there is a single common-sense truth that everyone must be able to see (though they never seem to agree on what this is - a dead giveaway). The left in Britain at the time recognized the existence of ideology, but tended to think in terms of a “true” class consciousness, one for the workers, one for capital. If working-class people adopted, say, a conservative (or neoliberal) ideology, that was just a mistake, a con-game by the Conservative party, to be undone simply by the correcting of the error.
Stuart Hall proposed, however, the ideology was more complicated than that. Far from there being only one articulation of ideas and values proper to a particular class position, the contradictions and realities of that class position could be articulated in a great number of ways. What the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative party understood - and the left did not, in Hall’s view - was that a culture that supported neoliberalism and Thatcher could be constructed, that consent (to use Chomsky’s term) could be manufactured, and that legitimacy for the neoliberal project - legitimacy for the destruction of the welfare state - could be made to seem like the working class’s own idea.
The Thatcherite project exemplified what Hall called “authoritarian populism”, a political tendency that leveraged a claim to be speaking in the name of the people, while using authority (especially the power of the police) to construct “the people” in the first place. While the truck protest has been merely Jacobin, the response on the part of the government (inaction by police, at least some of whom are fully in sympathy with the “truckers”, leading to calls for more police action - even military intervention - and finally to the triggering of the emergencies act) has actually followed the authoritarian populist playbook in a particularly Canadian mood. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms provides a sense of legitimacy for the emergencies act, while the state - and I’m sure, the Conservative Party once Pierre Poilievre takes over - can leverage the “spontaneous” outpouring of demand for more policing to construct a law and order society, the epitome of authoritarian populism, in Hall’s view.
This authoritarian populist model requires demonized Others whom law-and-order can safely be aimed at. White supremacist “truckers” are not it, but doubtless the Canadian government will return to pointing police and military violence at the traditionally “acceptable” targets in this country: Indigenous people, especially land defenders who will have watched the lack of swift and immediate armed response with at best bemusement and at worse rage. We can look forward to a “soft” version of this from the Liberals and the NDP and a hard version from (presumptively) Poilievre’s Conservatives.
What Hall saw was that the technocratic and proceduralism the left tends to be concerned with with - organization of groups, political economy, elections and parliamentary activity (in countries where this is allowed) - while vitally important, still leaves huge areas of popular life untouched by the left. In order to build a genuinely popular democratic movement for social revolution, the left must not only think in terms of constructing its own consent, winning its own hegemony, but laying the groundwork for the necessary cultural revolution which must accompany any political revolution. Hall asked, “why should socialism be a popular political force when it is not a force in the popular cultures and aspirations of the masses?” The difference between authoritarian populism and a true “democratic popular politics - which he once described as “Two Ways of ‘Taking Democracy Seriously’” - the difference between a thoroughly transformative left-wing revolution and what we have seen the right bring over the last few weeks, depends on our answer to this question.
Because fundamentally, and this follows from what I said above, the vanguard party is only one voice among the multitude of popular voices who will make the revolution when it comes. Every voice with a stake in the future constitution of our social order - especially Indigenous people with a view to sovereignty and land - will be part of the uncontrollable, ungovernably democratic process that lead to the new society. What the “truckers” represent is not that; and the left must ensure it does not fall into the same trap.