ACFM - #ACFM Trip 22: Democracy

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Has democracy broken down? Is it even an idea worth fixing? Trip 22 is a three-horse race as Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn consider the anti-democratic shifts happening across the political spectrum and ask what it really means to be ruled by the people. The gang discuss whether democracy is necessary to tackle […]

Hello, hello, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left, and I'm joined, and I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idol. and my good friend Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about democracy. So why are we talking about democracy at this point? Well, there's a bunch of reasons, aren't there? So there's a number of current tendencies that seem to be very anti-democratic in contemporary politics.

So there's clearly an ongoing anti-democratic animus on the point. of the political right. We're seeing fairly explicit voter suppression in the UK, such as the measures to insist that voters have to have photo ID, which everybody knows and the Tories admit, is just going to exclude about a million people from voting, none of whom would historically have voted for the Tories. What else? What else is happening from the right, do you think? Well, I mean, you can see in the US that pretty conscious and overt attack on democracy particularly voter suppression is even more evident. I can't remember how many bills are going through.

Local Senate, something like 36 voter suppression bills are going through being pushed by the Republican Party. And it's a wider trend. It's a wider trend against democracy or to push back or to pen in democracy. There's a reason for it. The reason is I think the right and particularly the sort of the contemporary rights or contemporary conservatism,

if you want to put it that way, they sort of recognize that there are in many countries including particularly the US actually but also including the UK there are sort of demographic tendencies which mean that the conservative cohort or conservative voters are probably minority a minority now and are very much likely to be in minority in the future you know one of the one of the big talking points in in conservative circles in the U.S. is the United States is not a democracy, it's a republic. And that's to sort of lean and sort of defend the anti-majoritarian parts of their constitutional setup, which is the Supreme Court, which is pretty much captured by the right. The Senate, which is an anti, you know, the Senate was created in order to to ensure that the sort of slaveholding parts of America would stay on board with the Republic, basically. it gives far more political weight to somebody who lives in depopulated rural states

than it does to, you know, states with huge, huge populations like California. So California's got, I can't remember what the population of California is. It's absolutely huge. And they've got two senators the same as, Jeremy, you know America. Anyway, the same as a state which is we're very small. South Carolina, let's see, South Carolina, yeah, yeah. So the American upper chamber, the Senate, which has far more power than, say, the House of Lords in Britain, exactly, is organised that way. Yeah.

But I mean, we would say as well that, you know, what you're seeing in the UK is reliance on our anti-democratic parts of the constitution, which is basically first past the post. But isn't there, can we just take just one step back? I know we want to do a good breakdown of like the different anti-democratic turns from the right and the centre and the left. but isn't there a kind of overarching issue, which is effectively the dissolution of effective institutions in the West and, you know, many places in the world as well. And it's, in fact, that turn that has just made a lot of people, even before they step into politics, whether it be, you know, consciously or unconsciously with their actions, that these institutions are no longer working for them.

And so there's a, there's a feeling that democracy, perhaps, maybe this is a crass way of putting it, but it isn't relevant anymore because the social contract doesn't work. So it's each man for themselves, in effect, and we see things like happened in the US in terms of with the capital, etc. And I know we're going to talk about other examples from along the political spectrum, but isn't that the kind of backdrop to all of this? Yeah, I think it's a good point, yeah. that's the sort of longer-term trend of hollowing out democracy and, you know, yeah, hollowing out democracy and bringing in things, technocratic sort of rule, which has been going on for a long, long time. And in fact, what we've seen over the last five or six years is some sort of attempt to, or

dissatisfaction with that sort of technocratic rule and attempt to have some sort of return to democracy. It's a bit difficult to talk about that. one of the ways people talk about it is in terms of populist threats on the right and the left, etc. But some sort of reanimation of popular political participation in some sort of form. I would say whether we're talking in abstract terms or in purely formal terms to do like representative democracy, in any of those terms, I think we can say, well, there's a period in the middle decade of the 20th century when for better or worse, the institutions of the

like parliamentary democracy, they seem to more or less produce governments, which more or less are doing what a majority of people in that society want them to do. And those institutions are capable of, for example, vetoing really unpopular wars and ensuring that the general direction of public policy is one that benefits more people than it harms. Exactly. And those institutions did benefit a section of the population. And at least there was a perception that these institutions were for the benefit of, you know, the public good and even if, in fact, there were loads of groups who didn't benefit. But there was that kind of perception, those institutions that held up that democratic, you know, contract.

And we're definitely not there now. This is not where we are. And I would say there's a sort of weak liberal centrist perspective, which usually thinks that this breakdown of those democratic institutions and what I call democratic efficacy. has happened quite recently. It's happened because of Trump or because of Johnson or maybe because of David Cameron being an idiot or something. And I think that is a completely useless historical perspective. It's quite clear that breakdown really happened in the 70s and that the whole period

since the 70s has really seen the implementation of political projects. They never had the kind of mandate from the broader public that the ones that preceded them did. So this is one of my favorite catchphrases, like nobody really voted for neoliberalism. You know, hardly anybody actually wanted it. The conservatives didn't want it. They thought they were getting something quite different when they first voted for people like Thatcher. They thought they were going to get like a return to the 50s. And then the left obviously didn't want it. The people who voted for Blair mostly, despite what it said in the manifesto, they thought they were voting for like a restoration

of social democracy. They didn't get it. So, I mean, really in historical terms, the period of like something like democratic efficacy, I think only really lasts from like the 30s to the 70s. And it's so it's been over for longer than it ever lasted, actually. It's a strong narrative though. It still exists in a lot of people's heads. There's still a lot of people that I think still think that that world is possible again. Yeah, I mean that that point Nadia, that leads us into the other places where you can see a real anti-democratic turn or basically anti-democratic arguments being being put forward, and that's from the centre. You know, the centre,

let's just call it the neoliberal centre. And it's always, the neoliberal centre, you know, it wants a technocratic politics. It wants a politics which is run by technocrats and not, you know, it's not overly concerned about a diminishing democratic participation. But the way that's playing out at the moment is a reaction to Corbinism, basically.

The reaction to the sort of the wave of political enthusiasm that surrounded Corbynism and, you know, the hundreds of thousands of people who flooded into the Labour Party around that. Recently, my MP, Rachel Reeves, she's the MP for my constituency, Leeds West, declared that a lot of members had been leaving her constituency Labour Party, and that that was a good thing because they didn't share Labour values. I mean, it's my CLP, so she's talking about people I know, really, and it's a pretty obnoxious thing to say.

but it reveals something. It reveals the idea that the people who now have control of the Labour Party do not want a mass party. They want something, they want what's called a cartel party, basically, a small professionalised party. And if you have members, that's good because perhaps they can feed in money or they can do some door knocking during elections. But that should be pretty much the extent of the participation.

And so, you know, what went along with the period of democratic efficiency that Jeremy was talking about earlier, that period in which parliamentary democracy seemed to produce something that the majority of the population wanted. What went along with that was were mass parties. Basically, the Conservative Party was the biggest party. I had five million members, I think, at one point. Yeah, in the mid-50s. Yeah. In the mid-50s.

And, you know, let's be clear, part of the reason people joined that was because it was some, sort of like path to personal enrichment's a bit much. But, you know, well, it was a marker of class belonging. I mean, in the 50s, the Conservative Party just became what it meant to be middle class in Britain was to be a tool, was to be in the Conservative Party. I mean, that was, I mean, five million people is basically the entire British middle class at that time that were in, arguably, pretty, or a very large chunk of it. I guess it's significant. I didn't realize that. Yeah, but there's also been a, there's always been a chunk of working class Tories. I mean, my partner Alice's

had was a working class Tory. And for him, it was, it was, I want to associate myself. Aspirational. That was the word I was searched for earlier at Nadia. It is, I want to associate myself with the middle class, even though we're petrol pump attendant. I'm going to go knocking the door for the Tories, and then it'll feel as though I'm belonging to that.

All of that is hollowed out, basically. The Conservative Party is just a shell. and the Labour Party is just a mere shadow of what it was. But during the Corbyn years, it grew to 500,000 plus members. And now I believe they've lost 150,000 members. We don't know because they won't release proper membership figures. So what we saw was that June Democratic Efficiency had had these big mass parties and real mass participation in politics.

and also had a really high level of, like, political literacy, you'd put it that way, basic understanding of how things work, basically. And that declines from the 80s, just as mass participation in political parties. And other associational activities as well. So there's that Robert Putnam book Bowling Alone, where he just, you know, all of these sort of like community activities, including bowling leagues and all that, just drop off a cliff during the 80s and 90s and onwards. basically. The point is, that's what the political centre want. That's their aim. They want that

to, they want that basically. Well, it's partly because they, the, what we now call the political sector centre, really only came into existence to sort of, under those circumstances, didn't it? You know, the, the modern professional political class emerges really in the 80s, like as partly in response to all, and as part of those changes and in response to those changes. So I mean, that's partly why people like Reeves are just absolutely, just existentially, cannot cope with the idea for mass democratic politics, is because, well, their whole mode of being in the world was formed by its absence and as a response to its absence. So, I mean, that's why, yeah, the PLP just had this absolute meltdown over all these people

joining the party and having sort of democratic expectation. It is also, because the Labour right, they basically do believe some very odd things. and basically nobody supports them. They appeal to a very small constituency, and so if there's democracy on the table, they're basically not going to get very far. I think they probably don't label it as being anti-democratic. They just think it's, I can't imagine what it looks like

from their own perspective, because they live in such a bubble, the labour right. I can tell you how they, they have a very worked-out justification, which is that it's in the nature of party politics, that people who join parties are more committed and are further along the political spectrum than ordinary voters. Therefore, by definition, if you're someone who's joined a party, you're probably not actually representative of the wider public. So by being against their own members, they are in fact more representative of the wider public.

That's amazing. That's like the perspective of what we call the traditional right, the old right. I mean, the Blairites have a kind of historically, had a sort of more interesting position in a way, I think. And their position was that indeed, I mean, I would say that the reason for the ending of sort of democratic efficacy is because the models of the institutional models of democracy that we got in the middle of the 20th century, they were designed for the conditions of mass industrial society. they're designed for the society in which, well, you know, people, you've got millions of people living relatively homogenous lives. Like, they're all working in massive factories. And if they're women with children, they're not working at all. And you have this idea of the housewife, which is this sort of cross-class idea of what it means to be a woman for a few decades. And under those

conditions, like, well, yeah, maybe it's relatively reasonable proposition. Like, how do you do democracy? Now, you have these massive things called parties and you have an election like every four or five years. the platform that gets the most votes then gets implemented over the next four or five years. And I think, I mean, lots of people, people on the right in some cases, but also like the people on the left, especially the new left, we're saying from the early 60s saying, look, this isn't really going to work as society becomes more differentiated, more complicated. And so you're either going to have to have more participatory forms of democracy, many more forms of like localised democracy, and deliberative democracy. Or it's just going to break down. It's not going to work.

and the latter is what happened and the Blairites had their own version of that analysis actually in the 90s but their analysis was yeah, this kind of old-fashioned representative democracy, it can't really represent what people want anymore but what we're going to do is we're going to use

like focus groups and polling and stuff to find out what people really want and then we'll give it to them then we'll that so that's where you get the beginning of this idea of you know policies just being determined by focus groups and for these people like Philip Gould, one of the architects of new labour. It was, they saw it as a form of democracy. There

was, like, more responsive to the complexity of things. And also, that's why they ended up becoming neoliberal, because they became convinced that market mechanisms where it would ultimately be a more responsive way of giving people what they wanted than trying to do it through sort of mass democracy. So, you know, you can't possibly please everybody, like, but with what kind of schools they want. So what do you do? You let schools compete. and let people choose and let the market decide. I mean, it's totally not, I mean, it's nonsense. It doesn't work because it doesn't fulfill the one function of actual democracy,

which is to enable people to make collective decisions with other people. It works by just reducing everybody to a single, a kind of individualized consumer. And that's why it just didn't work as a response to the democratic crisis. It was a total failure. But they did have a sort of theory of it. I mean, I think, to be honest, I think people like Mandelson, who were really committed to that in the 90s. I think they've pretty much abandoned it, to be honest.

Because another thing, if you're thinking about the traditional Labour right, I was thinking about that phrase from Rachel Reeves that when she said all these people, she's happy people are leaving the party because they don't share labour values. If you ask, well, what does she mean by Labour values? I mean, frankly, for the traditional Labour right, and this does go back to the early 20th century, what Labour values means is total deference to the Parliamentary Labour Party.

That's all it means. basically, that their idea is the function of, we live in a parliamentary democracy, the function of the Labour Party is to get Labour MPs elected and then serve them by any means necessary, by any means possible. And basically, anyone else who wants any other thing to, the Labour Party to do any other thing, doesn't understand what the Labour Party really is or is for, and is, and it worst, is some sort of an enemy of parliamentary democracy. That's how they still, even to this day, they slip into this kind of Cold War rhetoric and this red, and kind of anti-communism, because they do really believe, like, parliamentary democracy

is this sort of sacred institution. But where do they think they get their wages from? They, well, they think they get them from the public. They think that's who they're responsible to, the electorate. They think that's who they're responsible to, the electorate. I mean, it's nonsense. I'm not defending it. No, I know.

No, I know. I just think it's a very, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you're right, of course. It's just, when you lay it out like that, it just does sound like madness, but it's very prevalent. If we want to think about democratic moments in music or in culture, one of the things you'd always point to would be like punk rock or something. But if we wanted to look within punk rock,

one of the moments we'd really, really want to look at is, it is, you know, the band crass and the sort of an anarcho-punk movement that sort of emerged out of them. Because that was the point at which this sort of idea of DIY, do it yourself, anybody can do it, really sort of gets affirmed, I think. So crass, they were a punk band, but the basis of the group were actually veterans of the 60s counterculture. And in fact, they lived totally sort of in violation of the sort of urban sort of stick of punk. They were living in a commune in a farmhouse in Essex, Dile House, which is still there, still going.

And so there's these countercultural sort of people, Penny Rimbaud and G. Vouch had both been to art school, for instance. So you've got this sort of like stuff. And then they meet a load of young working class people from Essex, Steve Ignorant being the sort of lead singer, the person who took on being a lead singer. They're really interesting because they've got this democratic stick of like anybody can do it. But the way they did that was through basically quite avant-garde means.

So G-Voucher and Penny Rimbaud been to art school and they take up all of this avant-garde art sort of stuff. G-Voucher's artwork, which gets put onto the record covers, is like really influenced by like anti-fascist um john hartfield john hartfield etc from the from the 30s um you know you'd go to one of their shows and it would be like these films these sort of like avant-garde films being shown they'd all be dressed in sort of like almost like uniforms they'd be slight you know they took stencils that they really brought into vogue the idea of stenciling messages everywhere stenciling their their their graphic just sort of like a graphic of a of a snake eating itself etc

And the music would be, you know, really, really variable for punk. And there was an article that went around recently called Crass Terns, Cras Goes Disco by a guy called Sean Smith, which really, really long. But like, you know, at the beginning, there's all these testimonies of people around the country just finding these incredibly powerful moments of going to their first crass gig. And, like, you know, inevitably from that, they'd then go and participate in country. They'd go and start a fan, you know, go and stay a band, etc., etc. If we wanted to play a song by them, to be honest, it'd probably be more interesting to play a remix.

So basically recently, the veterans of crass dissolved in 1984, the veterans of crass, they put all the stems of their songs out and asked for remixes. And out of those, a whole series of interesting ones came about, I think we should play this remix of Punk is Dead, the remix by Use Knife. And partly because the punk is dead, you know, it just, it starts off with just a, yes, that's right, punk is dead, just another cheap product of the consumer's heads. It's that sort of critique. And then some of the lyrics are, I'm tired of staring through shit-stained glass, I'm tired of staring up a superstar's ass. I've got an ass and a crap and a name, and I just want my 15 minutes fame. So the song is really about that, like, never mind all of the poses in London, like, do it yourself. I think that's what a country must have been. This is what I'm rocked. This is

another tree, but I'm going to say. This that's what my kid's been. Just that's what my kid's been. I think, you know, broadly speaking, we can understand from all this, why there's been significant attacks on any kind of democratic resurgence from the political centre, because the whole political centre, as it's been constituted over the past few decades, is an anti-democratic institution, a sort of post-democratic institution. But then, Kear, you were also saying when we were preparing for this, that you wanted just to talk about anti-democratic tendencies from the left. So... Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. I think I can sense a turn against democracy, or, yeah, a turn against democracy amongst some sections of the left, or perhaps a flirtation

with a turn against democracy is the way you put it. And what's interesting is the arguments mobilize are very similar to the arguments that you were discussing just now, not so much the Blair rights, but this idea that, you know, members of parties, they're different to the general public and therefore, you know, if we have too much democracy, we just alienate the general public. And it's a sort of argument that's been put forward around like left organizations such as momentum, right? About that we couldn't, if we have too much democracy, we just, you know, we'll just reflect the values of the current left, which is too young, urban, metropolitan, etc.

And so it'll alienate the real working class out in the small town somewhere. And I put it that way because I think underneath that, resting underneath this sort of discussion about democracy is basically a disagreement about class, basically, what the current class composition is and beyond that what the current conjuncture is. And that disagreement around class is this idea that, you know, if you looked at who got infused by Corbinism, it was young people, perhaps young graduates, and of course they've got different, they're different to the people who we need to get in the smaller towns, in the red wall and all these sorts of things. There's a real, real similarity of argument between the Labour right and some parts of the left, you know, it's not something to completely dismiss that argument, right? what you have to understand is, you know, that that sort of split is a split within the working class, you know. And so the idea that you should get rid of democracy so that we don't get contaminated so that the ideas upon which we refound the left after Corbynism don't get contaminated by the liberalism of the cities or something like that.

But that kind of makes sense in a way because if you've got this vision, which is the project, whether you are left or right or centrist or whatever. If you've got this concept of the project and you're thinking, I think we're going to talk about this later, whether democracy is a means to an end or an end in itself. And if you're finding that the democratic structures or processes are not producing the project or feeding the project,

we're nurturing the project, then effectively what do you do? You end up with all of these very convoluted arguments. And quite rightly, as you said, Kier, like confused conceptions of various different pieces of social analyses. Yeah, I think you're right. And there's also the long legacy of the Russian Revolution and the fact that the less and many people drew from it was that, well, you can only get a really radical, political

project implemented if a committed group of professional revolutionaries, more or less by accident, but also through careful, Tunism, managed to seize control of the situation during a deep crisis. And from that point of view, what you're always looking, you're looking for opportunities to do that, but what you're not interested in doing really is like building up mass institutions of democracy. Yeah. Building up large-scale social coalitions. And as I said on the show many times before, I think one of the big weaknesses with Corbinism was that I think some of the key people advising,

Jeremy, that was really where they were coming from. They weren't actually interested in the idea of Corbinism as a broad-based mass movement. They were interested in it as a historic opportunity to, more or less by accident, seize control of the state, which obviously they didn't get to do anyway. There's also something you hear quite often, and it's come up in a range of recent work, I think, which is the question as to whether there is really now a sort of democratic solution to climate. change. So there certainly is a body of opinion on parts of the, what you might call sort of eco-communist left, I suppose, which would say, well, actually, we're not going to be able to have anything resembling democracy during any imaginable short to medium-term future where we are resolving the problems of climate change. The problem with that, I mean, this reflects

some other other debates as well, such as there was that book by Jeffrey Mann and somebody else so I can't remember, called Climate Leviathan, who sort of let's set out a whole series of ways in which you might tackle a climate crisis. Climate Leviathan is the one that you're probably talking about, Jeremy, which is you can't have democracy because people will have to, or this is the way it's set out, people will have to vote for a diminution of their living standards.

I don't know if that's particularly true. I think you'd have to change the way we think about what we value from life, basically. But that's the way it's sort of set out. People won't vote for that. So you're going to have to rely on these sort of like big leviathanic governments, basically, who will do the right thing. They're sort of talking about let's cross our fingers and hope the Chinese Communist Party

know what they're doing, basically, not my strategy. But they have this third strategy, which is this network. I can't quite remember how they put it, not strategy X or something like that, basically, which is something we think we'd be more on board with, which would be, you know, the way you deal with climate change is, not to say, well, democracy won't work because people won't vote for their own interest, but it is to intensify democracy, change it from purely sort of representative democracy to the sort of participative, nitty-gritty democracy that Jeremy was talking about earlier

in terms of where the new left wanted to go as soon as the sort of mass party system sort of broke down. And that would involve things such as pushing democracy much, much further than it ever has before. So you're talking about democratising the economy and perhaps like linking democracy, to ownership. So through things such as the commons, etc. And the commons is, you know, you have a resource which is democratically, is commonly owned, but is democratically sort of governed at the same time. And so that would produce a very, very different idea of what democracy is and perhaps the effects of democracy and would be a way around that problem of why would people vote for their living standards to decline. They basically haven't so far. So why would you

rely on that? I think it's another way around that problem, I think. Well, obviously, that's our preferred. That's my preferred solution. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's the one that's least mapped out in the climate have I found book. I mean, I think climate change is an important issue because for me, climate change sort of marks the limit point

of any kind of democratic efficacy. I mean, when I'm explaining this to students, if I'm trying to explain the idea that there's been a deep crisis in democracy since the 70s, the most overwhelmingly persuasive example, I think is simply this, that we've known about climate change since the 80s, at least. It's been widely known. There's been a wide consensus that it's happening and what its causes are and what it would take to stop it. But we haven't been able to stop it because, and it's that,

that is the thing that democracy is supposed to be able to do. If functioning democracy enables collectives on whatever scale to take decisions about which affect their futures and to act on those decisions. And that is the thing that has been not able to happen at any level which would have a meaningful impact on climate change. And that's partly why I think any kind of anti-democratic response to climate change isn't ultimately going to work, because it's not that it's not democracy that has produced the climate crisis. It's the breakdown of democracy. It's the lack of democratic efficacy, I think. If you think about why democracy in so much trouble now. Behind the sort of political moves, there's just this background of this,

you basically cannot have a functioning democracy. Like democracy sort of presupposes some sort of level of equality that we can go back to this like majoritarianism argument and anti-majoritarian tendencies amongst the US right in particular. Right the way back to sort of ancient Greeks, democracy was always was always linked to rule by the poor because the poor are more numerous than the rich. This is an argument by Aristotle. And so, you know, that it was always seen as like Aristotle was against democracy

because he saw it as ruled by the poor who would sort of overthrow the rich and it would lead to tyranny, etc, etc., etc. But like that is the way that democracy is seen all the way through the sort of like democratic revolutions that took place in the 18th century and then the sort of the working class movements for democracy that took place in the 19th century,

like charitism in the UK. You know, chartism is always seen as you want democracy because democracy is the thing which will allow us to make society more equal to overthrow the rich. And of course, right, the period in which we had democratic efficacy was the period was basically the one period in which you had increased equality in terms of material equality. In fact, the real decline in the wealth of the 0.1%. Right the way up to that 19706 is the point at which their wealth is at the lowest level. and, you know, material equality is the most level, well, probably in British history. And it's just been a complete reverse since then, basically. So, yeah, so underlying this thing of, like, let's democratize society is, yeah, but in order

to do that, you have to take on and defeat this incredibly powerful sections of society, which basically is another reason. I think that is another way in which perhaps the Blair right or the Labour right think, look, that's not going to happen. And if that happens, it's just going to, you know, how is that, not going to happen. So we have to be really comfortable with people being extremely, extremely rich. But this goes full circle to what we're saying earlier is that if people feel like they have no agency through the democratic structures, because in their lived experience,

those structures have not delivered on any of their wishes, whether or not those wishes are actually them voting for their own interests or not, if their impression is, and probably quite right, rightly, recently, that they are unable to make a difference through those structures, through participating, either, you know, on trying to influence the local council, on changing this thing, or like, whether it's about, you know, voting in a general election, or whether it's about making any change, then their understanding is that democracy is just, is not, is not going to work for them. So why should they be agitating for democracy rather than the specific thing that they want.

Yeah, you're totally right. You're totally right. I mean, this is, I mean, this has been, I've been banging on about this for years. I mean, I was banging on about it when Ed was Labour leader and very repeatedly when Jeremy was Labour leader that, look, the only way I could envisage this situation being addressed under circumstances like ours in Britain today is the only people who really have a public platform who would be senior politicians, you have to have at least one of them at some point come out and say all this. Come out and say explicitly, look, representative liberal

democracy hasn't been working since the fucking 70s. And we need to really address that. Like, we need to address the scale of that crisis. And I know there's a handful of Labour MPs who are willing to say that. You know, Clive Lewis has given speeches along those lines. People like Crudders, to be fair, have sort of said this and are willing to say it. There's a handful of others, but they tend to be these idiosyncratic, these slightly maverick MPs. who were sort of on the left of the soft left. Like the campaign group, most of the campaign group,

including people like Corbyn, even McDonald, although McDonald will say it in private and at small meetings, won't come out and say it because they think it undermines the morale of their supporters, who they want to believe

that basically getting them elected into government would pretty much fix everything. So I think it's a real problem. Like, it's a really endemic problem, I think. Even, you know, you look at the new, some of the youngest of the left-wing post-Corpidite MPs in Parliament now, people like Zara, they're never going to come out and say that. They're committed to this sort of Benite rhetoric,

which is based on a critique of capitalism, but an implicit promise that, well, if you get them and a government made up of people like them elected, they'll be able to fix it. And they don't actually come out and say, look, actually, Parliament is a completely, you know, ineffective institution. and we've been living through a massive crisis for decades. And I think that's what it would take. That's what we really need political leadership from people who are willing to say that.

Because that's the rational thing. The rational thing is this all doesn't work. Yeah, exactly. That's the rational thing. No, exactly, because I think it would massively resonate with people. Well, I think this is what people were looking for. A lot of the people voting for Brexit, you know, they were expressing their sense that, their correct sense that institutional democracy hasn't been working since the 70s.

And the response so often, even from the left, is just to give people a sort of moral exhortation. So, well, if only, if everybody votes, it'll all be, it'll all be fine. We'll come out and vote. And I've been, well, I mean, I've been saying this. I mean, to be honest, I've been saying this. For at least 10 years, Jeremy, you've been saying to people. Wow, we've not heard the Jeremy 25 years before. I've been in little meetings, little seminars, and the topic of voter apathy or young people not being engaged in politics, blah, blah, has come up. And I've been saying for 25 years, is, don't you think the point is the reason like these young people or people in general

are not interested in politics is because they are right. They are correct on the basis of their own experience that actually voting doesn't get what they want. And just I've been met every, you just get met every single time with sort of blank looks. But to be honest, I got met with blank looks by, you know, people like Jeremy Corbyn for saying that as well. I think it's really one of the biggest weaknesses of the left. And when you start talking about this stuff. And the sort of orthodox left, for the most part, they just sort of glaze over and they say people aren't interested in that. People want to hear about jobs and homes. And you say, I think the moment matters, though. I think I would think that I would, I would be sympathetic to

people not wanting to talk that talk during a moment, like, you know, 2017 or 2019 election, when there was actually, you know, everyone was just giving everything they got in the hope that there might be some sort of shake-up. But I think, you know, it's moments like now where we should be talking about this stuff. So, well, one of the great experiments in democratic music making to come out of the avant-garde of the 60s was an organisation called the Scratch Orchestra, which was basically the idea was completely untrained musicians would participate in playing these musical pieces, which I think was sometimes composed or semi-composed and sometimes improvised, sometimes they were using graphical scores. I think people like Eddie Prevost from

AMM were involved, but the real leading line was the avant-garde composer and musical activist Cornelius Cardieu, who at some point in the history of the Scratch Orchestra went from being a sort of 60s countercultural radical to being a committed Maui. who then wrote sort of in peasant marching songs to be accompanied by a solo piano. They're examples of like

of democratic music making because, you know, that sort of graphical that graphical scores idea is that, you know, that Cardi would like, you know, they'd score some music

using these graphical notations, which wouldn't have a particular, I wouldn't have one's fixed specific means of playing it, right, basically. So there's always,

of some sort of negotiation between the players and the conductors, et cetera, et cetera, about how it would turn out in the end. So it's like it's an instantiation of this like democratic politics that he carried through in his other life as well. The only other thing I was going to say was this biographical note of Cardioux dies in 1981, he gets knocked down in a sort of hit and run accident. And then they were like, and he was coming back from the central committee meeting of this small Maui sect he was a part of.

But, like, basically, after that, people, his party members thought he was killed, basically. They thought he was killed either, you know, by fascist, because they were very strongly involved in anti-fascist working at that point, or more nefarious, by more nefarious people, MI5 or something like that. So, you know, his actual autobiography on, sorry, his biography is just really sort of interesting and worth looking into. So, well, let's hear a bit of the great learning by the Scratter Orchestra. from 1971. I mean, I think famously, well, not so famously, but on the show, I've said I don't really care about democracy before, so I think I need to explore that now. I'm really interested in this means to a net, because I'm not sure that I care necessarily about democracy as an end because I'm interested in the social relations and the goods and services and products of justice at the end point. and I think that democracy can deliver them.

But I'm not sure what a democratic society really looks like. Well, I mean, there's lots of definitions of democracy. I tend to think, I would say, first I'd say, one of the problems historically with defining democracy is that over the course of the 20th century, especially in English language discourse, there's a massive conflation between liberalism and democracy, to the point where, if you ask a lot of Americans, what does democracy mean?

They'll list a set of features of liberalism, like individual rights, which isn't historically what democracy means at all. Democracy historically means the rule of the many, some form of popular sovereignty. And then the idea of liberal democracy, which is exemplified by things like the American Constitution, is actually that liberalism and democracy sort of modifiable, each other. So you don't just have majority rule. You have majority rule plus a lot of safeguards

for individual rights and individual property. And that and then you get to the point where by the late 20th century, a lot of people seem to think it's the latter is just what democracy means at all. So the whole question, well, what do we even mean by it and how much do we want is really complicated? And I think, you know, it's always important to take note of the fact that, well, For example, if democracy just means majority rule, well, then it can mean a situation in that case in which a majority decide to violently oppress and even genocidally murder by minority. So then there's a whole question as to, well, in that case, if you want to say democracy is like a political good, do you mean something other than just majority rule?

Or do you accept that, you know, there are other ends other than democracy, that the democracy might be a means to or might not. And one version of that, one response to that dilemma is, as you've just said, an artist said, well, you want a situation in which people are getting services, people are getting a good life, and democracy is one way of getting that. And my response to that would be twofold. Like on the one hand, I would say, I say, look, even if you just have an instrumental approach that you only want democracy as a possible means of everybody getting decent

schools, decent lives, decent working lives, decent personal lives, I would say there is no other way. There is no other way you're going to get those things apart from through a deepening an extension of democracy and all other promises to deliver those things by any other means are illusory, have been shown to be illusory, they are fantasies, they must be dispelled. But I would also say from my point of view, when I talk about democracy from a sort of philosophical perspective, I mean, I have thought and written about this quite a lot, and I think for me, there is something about the inherent complexity and multiplicity of any group, which means that for me, what democracy means is, it means any group on any scale, expressing its creative capacities in a way which will necessarily involve a sort of expression of its complexity and its multiplicity. and that is what I mean by democracy, mate. And I think for me that actually is a sort of end in itself,

a society in which the collective capacities of human beings are maximised in ways which cannot happen either through simple majoritarian, like oppression of minorities by majorities, or through purely market mechanisms or through sort of limited government. I mean, that is what I think I want. And how is that different from civil society, or like active communities or concepts like that. Well, it's not really.

I don't really like, I'm a bit, I tend to be a bit, like I'm a bit sniffy about the concept of the term community because it gets thrown around so much. You're right. I prefer the term collectivity because it's less loaded. But it isn't one. Yeah. For me, that's just what,

I mean, this phrase I use sometimes is potent collectivities. Just collectivity, people are able to do other things, to do things with other people in groups. That's it really. That's all it means. on any scale. Like it might mean just organizing like a board game night with your friends

or it might mean solving climate change. My argument is always on some level, like whether you want to just organise a board game night with your friends or you want to solve climate change on a planetary scale, people have to be able to do things with other people to make the thing happen. They want to happen and they have

to be able to coordinate their activities with other people. And is that what the big, Cameron's big society was kind of tapping into and co-opting. Yeah, I think that was, yeah, I think there's a percent, yeah, that is one of many, many things, I think, which have tapped into it, yeah. I mean, I would say, like, a big part of contemporary platform culture,

like social media culture is people, is channeling people's desire for a genuine desire for collectivity, for participation, for collective creativity, for conversation and deliberation, and then just making it useless and just turning it back on itself, most of the time. Not always. I think that's right though.

I mean, even you can see it when sort of social media is best or Twitter it is best perhaps is when something sort of sparks off and perhaps a meme gets developed and then somebody else comes along and like alters it and it's even funnier and somebody else alters it and it's even funnier. The thing that comes out at the end of it seems like you feel as though you've created it even though perhaps you just had one part in that moment. And it is that collective creativity, do you know, that collective participation. But the way you're describing it, Jeremy, which I obviously find very attractive,

leads us back to, you know, the whole spinnows and conception of joy. Right back, you know, which we discussed perhaps on, perhaps in the first episode of the podcast. Perhaps the second. I'm not sure. Yeah, the second, you're probably right. I know them off my heart. So that's sort of like, it's basically, yeah. So it's the, you know, that. that feeling of joy is that, you know, increasing your capacity to affect the world or be affected

by the world. But one thing that comes from that is, you know, it relies on also having a better understanding of the world and how it works and how we can intervene into it, etc. I think that might lead us to something which is a more tricky sort of problem, which is, you know, are there preconditions to fully participating in democracy in that way? And there are, like, there are material preconditions. There are intellectual preconditions. Perhaps that's something that, you know, people might find awkward to talk about. They're probably like psychological preconditions to that.

And that, like, leads to this other problem of democracy. Yeah, well, perhaps the great paradox of democracy. It's almost like a catch-22, really, which is that idea that, like, which comes first, democratic institutions or democratic people, or democratic subjectivity, because they both seem to presuppose the existence of the other. Do you know what I mean? In order to have democratic institutions,

you need the people with the right sorts of attitudes to participate in that. It's so hard. Because if you have collectivities, you know, groups of people who, for them, the unit of movement is the family, and they don't want to engage outside the family, for example, which is a reality in lots of places in the world, it's a reality of a lot of parts of Britain in different sections of society,

then how do you create that engagement outside the household? It's a thing, especially if you think the world out there is dark and works against you, then it's really regressive, in my view. That leads into the other argument against democracy, which is we should have minimum amount of democracy

rather than the maximal democracy. Jem is talking about, you need minimal democracy because basically we want to increase the realm of private life, allow people to go off and live their private lives. I don't think the private public distinction holds up, but it's a really central distinction in liberalism, for instance. The answer to that would just, would be, I think,

is that, you know, the answer to all of that is there's only one way to increase democracy, to participate in it. Do you know what I mean? I, like, you know, people need to be trained in democracy. And the only way you can get trained in democracy come to think of it as like a natural part of your life is to participate in it. So presumably you need to, you know, you need to try and build up the amount of people

who have participated and get that glimpse of the joy of democracy, if you want to put it that way, joy of having collected control over their lives. You have to build it up, perhaps, through institutions by democratizing. certain parts of the economy, developing these sort of commons, etc., etc. And then at some point, that becomes the, you know,

that has to be linked up. On the DIY kind of theme, I think we should definitely play a song by Shona Knife for like an amazing Japanese kind of alternative rock, punk-type band who were formed in Osaka in 1981, which I had the pleasure of seeing live

at all tomorrow's parties, I think about 10 years ago. And they've got, yeah, this really kind of underground garage rock kind of sound. They've got this kind of DIY aesthetic. The energy of all of the material is amazing. They're really great. But I should say, yeah, they're all female band if I didn't say that. And they're amazing. but arguably, you know, going back to the big

thing, thing, like Britain is an island where there's a lot. If we're going to take that definition of democracy, you know, what about volunteering? Like all of these people who volunteer and like meet up, you know, and I'm one of them and I know a lot of people who do all of this stuff in their local community, I don't think much of it these days has much of an effect on the direction of, you know, society or politics whatsoever. But what it does is it definitely creates joy and it definitely creates, what was the word that you came up with Jeremy that wasn't community? Collective, public connectivity. I think that's good. Let's work with that. It creates that sense of collectivity. And I mean, definitely when I go and volunteer at an event, like I did in my local park run this morning, I feel much better about my day because I've gone and I've hung out with a group of people and done a thing. How do all of these activities actually change society well? Okay, well, one argument based on what you're saying is it engenders that experience that that is possible.

And so going back to the question that Keir posed about which comes far as a democratic people or democratic society or institutions, in that sense, I think people perhaps who participate in groups or collectives of some sort doing an activity together are more likely to believe that the institutions are possible, so we'll invest in them. but again it goes back to the you know the cynical position of that if you know like you were saying jeremy with a lot of young people if if all of the the official ways of being democratic are not working then maybe it it will mean that people are less likely to participate in any kind of group activity that's my fear yeah yeah you're right you're right I mean this is all really important so one of the great theorists of democracy in British political theory over the past few decades was the left-wing thinker Paul Hurst, who started out as a 70s out-his area of Marxist, but he became a theorist of what he called

associational democracy. And the argument was basically indeed, if you take seriously all these arguments we've been putting forward, then partly what you want to do is build on all those places in society where people are already engaging in forms of democratic association, which would be another phrase for describing what we've been calling like potent collectivities or active communities. And then building on that to make that a sort of model for democratic institutions at a political level, a workplace level, etc. And I remember, I guess we're going back 15 years now,

like pre-Corp, in really even pre-Ed miniband's labour leadership. There was lots of excitement on the sort of centre left about communities, organising, especially as it was being promoted by what was then called the East London Communities Organisation, Telco, but then became the basis for this organisation Citizens UK. And their model, indeed, it was this classic version of the community organising model. What you had to do is you had to go find people who were already indeed part of active communities. And then you would organise on the basis of those. You would recruit those communities to wider federations of action and you would organise some campaigns on that

basis. There was a lot of excitement and there was a lot of excitement because they seemed to have had some success. Yeah, I remember this era. Yeah, I'm sure you do. I'm sure you remember it as well as I do. A lot of excitement because they seemed to have had some success and they had, particularly they had had success getting significant wage rises for cleaners, big institutions like banks and some universities in London. They never had any other big success again of any kind ever, like as far as I know. And I mean, part of the problem with it was,

well, everybody got very excited about this and lots of people went and did training with them. I never did training with them, but my personal interaction was not once but twice. They did this thing to me with what they call a relationship meeting, but they come round your house, they send some and they sort of quiz you and they try to sort of recruit you or work out whether they're interested in recuting. you. And it always ended up with me having these arguments with them, because basically when

it came down to it, the core of their organising group and their ideology really were religious people. And I kept saying to them, look, what do you think constitutes a community? Like, I'm all for the model, but what are your parameters? Like, what counts as being part of a group? And basically, they only had two types of institution they would recognize as representing a community, and those were churches and primary schools. And so in particular trade union branches, lots of people I knew in unions spent years trying to work with them and just failing again and again to get any of them. Because they were really, really sniffy about even recognising workplace, union branches, as communitarian institutions. Because essentially what they meant was, well, you had to be an institution that was grounded in a very specific locality and represented a more or less ethnically and ideologically homogenous group of people within that locality.

And if you're not part of one of those, you're not in a community. And I kept having this argument with them at the time. I kept saying, look, you're talking about a tiny fraction of the population. What about all the other people who'd like to be in some kind of active community, but they're not? And in effect, what it came down to is that they thought those people were not worth bothering with because they were morally degenerate because they should be going to church, frankly. And so that was a real kind of limit. And for me, the argument I kept having with them at the time was, so look, you shouldn't,

it's fine to organise people who were active with their local primary school or their local church. but, you know, you shouldn't rule out, ruling out people whose communities are all online, they're all Facebook groups, because for some people, that is the community, the active community they're part of. You've got to have a really capacious idea of like what, what it means to be part of a, of a connectivity that can do something. And there was interesting echoes of those debates in the early days of momentum. There's the debates between the people who, who thought that momentum should only be organised on the basis of local branches who met face to face. and people who thought actually

there should be these networks of people who could organise online because you had to accept that actually that's just how a lot of people organise themselves today. One way to take, one direction to take this discussion is both the benefits and the big, as we all know, drawbacks of collectivities through social media such as Facebook and the algorithms of social media

as they are now does not mean that they would have to be that way in the future, etc. And also the idea that, you know, well, we have to start where where people are So we have to start with religious groups, et cetera, et cetera. All of those, I think you can take into account in democratic politics. But you have to think of it, like, just because that's where people are now, you can't be satisfied with that and say that that's the limits of democracy. Instead, it's got to be, I think you have to have an idea of like transition.

You have to say, well, this is where we are now, but we need to get over here somewhere, basically, in order to have a fully functioning democracy. But who's we? How are we? Who's we in this? Who's the actor here? because in a way it could sound like leninist entryism in another sense it can it can it can sound like you know community organizing like who's the we in this case yeah I mean all right that's a debate I didn't want to I want to have now but like basically that the we is like there isn't an out of that the we is as you know whatever us three discussing this now okay fine fine but also but also you know whatever organization you can pull together around that you know I've got several wheeves that I'm involved with, who discuss this sort of thing and try to act in a way to bring it about. And if we wanted to think about that, how that would work in a non-sort-down manner, we'd probably think about the, go back to the discussion we had with Rodrigo Nunes

and think about that, that idea of thinking about this whole thing as an ecology. But I wanted to go back to, to concretize my point about, like, you have to, if we just take the collectivities that exist now and say, well, that's a material for democracy. That's a material we start with, but we have to create new material for democracy. Just to concretize that, the big critique of Cameron's big society, and there's a modern iteration of that called community-powered conservatism, which is, in fact, gone a lot more radical, yeah, there's more radical tinge to this community-powered conservatism

than it was for the big society. But it's the same ballpark. The big critique of the big society was, you know, basically you're going to give resources to those communities who are active and can take control over community assets and these sorts of things. Well, we know what those communities are. Those are the communities which have, you know, people with spare time to donate, people with high levels of material resources,

people who aren't working four or five, two or three jobs in order to make ends meet. So basically what you had was a redistribution of resources towards more well-off communities because they were the ones who could more easily fulfill the preconditions for democratic participation. So you've got to say, well, right, yeah, well, we have to have to start with that and then including our plans, ways in which to overcome that. And that brings us to this other bit of like, well, what are the material conditions for participation in democracy, free time, some sort of sense in which we can actually have an effect, but also, like, we have to take seriously the psychological effects of

inequality, basically, and just a huge diminishing it has on people's confidence and their confidence to be able to participate in stuff, which brings us to a bigger conception of democracy, I think, you know, this idea of a democratic culture. And it brings us to, like, music and the stuff that we all like talking about, you know, about the periods when, you know, or the scenes or the places where people can actively participate in creating a culture that they live within.

Those are the moments where we look at and think, well, those are really democratic moments. Okay, we thought we'd play something by person fans orchestra, some bit of music being played by them, just because they are a Moscow orchestra who came out of the revolution and in the 20s became famous for an orchestra that got rid of the conductor. Instead of having a conductor, they just make all the musical and directorial decisions collectively. And when Keir and I were talking about this and researching it, we only found out at that moment that actually they were re-founded just about 10 years ago, apparently, and not even 10 years ago, and are currently active as a conductorless orchestra. So that's really fascinating. One of the big critiques of democracy is that a lot of people don't want to do it. People don't want to participate.

And if we did have, if we did just have an extension of democracy, we just basically get people caught up in their passions, etc., producing dangerous results, you know. And the answer to that we can look at is, well, let's look at where there is democracy or democratic moments in our society and whether you have like deliberative democratic moments and just look at the results. And a really good example of that is the recent trial of the three people who were involved in pulling down the Colston statue in Bristol.

So Colston was a big slave owner in Bristol. And philanthropist, don't forget. Yes, I had a philanthropist, yes. And so a hundred years after his death, a society in Bristol decided to erect a statue, but apparently for his philanthropy, although it's probably just to erect. It's a prominent monument, a monument to a prominent hero of their class. Yes, exactly, exactly. The fact that he was responsible for, I can't remember how many,

a huge number of people becoming enslaved, huge amounts of, death. He made his money out of sugar and was directly involved in the mid-passage slave trade. And basically, people just tied a rope around his neck, had a big demonstration, pulled the statue down and dumped in the river. It was a joyous moment. I felt the joy of democracy watching it more or less live on social media. And basically, they got to trial. A trial happened, and they got found not guilty. People sat down and went through the evidence and went fought through the issues and basically said, no, they're not guilty. What were they not guilty of?

Not guilty of criminal damage. Right. And, you know, there's lots of footage and they admit, yes, they pulled him down. They checked him in the river, which would come under some sort of idea of criminal damage, presumably, so they made a political defence, basically. The point is that, you know, straight afterwards, the tabloid papers did some instant polling. and, you know, that showed that 53% of the population disagreed with the verdict of them being found innocent, and only 23% agreed with that verdict.

And so that meant the Pablo said that this really, really strange thing, are juries out of touch? Which is just insane, because obviously juries are randomly selected members of the population. But it shows the difference between, you know, an opinion which is just polled in a sort of focus group way that Jeremy was talking about early. with people who sit down and deliberate, and that produces different outcomes, basically, and it produces basically much more intelligent outcomes. So that is really strong evidence that deliberative democracy does work.

It does produce intelligent outcomes. And so that's a really big answer to one of the big critiques of democracy. So one of the great, one of my favorite ever slogans. I love these slogans from the 60s, especially from the American New Left, you know freedom is an endless meeting is one i think we've talked about before if we haven't we'll talk about it again we'll do an old episode about it's that's the title of a book isn't it i can't remember the book it's a great book by polliata it's a it's a book about about the way in which

social movements use democratics of institutions but one of the others one of the other great slogans and it's the title of james miller's book about students for a democratic society is democracy is in the streets and i guess the only one of us who's ever really been involved in a genuine mass democratic uprising in the street is you, Nadia. So why don't you tell us? Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, I don't think that's entirely true. Actually, the example that I wanted to talk about first before, I mean, what you're pointing to

is my participation in Egypt in 2011 in Tahrir, which was incredible and amazing, despite the outcome. But before we get onto that, I was actually thinking about the chant, the kind of tired chant, but actually how much I love it, of this is not what democracy looks like, that's not what democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like, which is this chant that's kind of been, that's been said over and over and over in the streets of London whenever people are in Parliament Square. And it is really tired out and it's become a cliche, but actually I really like it. And I think it points back to what we were just talking about, is that if democracy is about participation and you're effectively saying, look, us here now doing this thing, this is what democracy is, it's this collectivity that is democratic rather than that image of the elected parliamentary MPs, then that's quite significant because those are very, very different conceptions of what democracy is. So I just wanted to start with that, really, and that if we're saying democracy is on the streets,

I mean, it can't just be on the streets. But, you know, when we were talking about collectivities earlier, I thought I was thinking to myself, fucking hell, it's been a really long time since I've been in a demo. And there's a demo going on right now, as we're recording the show, for the cost of living crisis. And in a sense, part of me was thinking I should have been there. Because big groups of people, I know it's fashionable for people to. to say that they don't like big crowds of people, but I love them, and I actually think it's really important for human beings to experience being in those big crowds. And I think

that is a really central question, actually, of that, is that an essential part of democracy, like be participating in those waves of movements or of protests when they come? Because of course, historically, there will be a lot of people who have never gone to one of these things. But it's so kind of central to how we've engaged with the public being on, you know, an active left. And so it's interesting for me to also observe that from the outside, because of course there are some people who would think, well, you know, what happened in Tehrir and what happened in the anti-war movement and what's happening on the streets now around the UK, all of those A to B demonstrations, that's not democracy. It's a really interesting because there's a bait, because of course

there is this whole view, and that is absolutely the view of like the Labour right, for example, and indeed the liberal political class in this country. Well, yeah, look, there's a legitimate kind of democracy and it's representative democracy. You elect your representative. They are a professional. That's their job being your representative. And that's legitimate. Whereas what you're describing, Nadia, is really just mob violence. And that's not legitimate. And I just think the whole, I mean, I've written about. this loads and we've talked about it on the show, I think you can trace that argument right back to ancient Greece to some extent and say that, well, really, no, an actual meaningful

or meaningful democracy, what democracy feels like it is, being part of a crowd, is part of what it feels like. Exactly. I think whether or not, I think where I'm coming to with all of this is whether or not it was tactical or strategic or whether or not when you analyze these trends, of different ways of expressing your voice, you know, for lack of another word or whatever, lack of another phrase, of whether or not it's effective. Because we can sit here and critique A to B marches,

but, you know, after COVID, I feel like actually thinking about it now, I wish I was on way more like A to B marches and demos and also parties. Like those are forms of collectivity that perhaps if more people were, involved in, it would eventually create a more democratic society rather than the point I was making earlier of people retreating into the household, which I think is a regression of some

sort. And of course, we've all retreated into the household because of COVID. Of course. I could totally, I totally need a bit, I need a hit of a potent collectivity. You've got football. You've got football. Me and Jeremy don't have football. It's not, it's not the same. It's not the same. We could also play something by the great jazz fusion band in some ways, the band that defined the genre of jazz fusion in the early 70s weather report. We could just play, I think, Milky Way, I think, is the first track from their first album. They came out of jazz, but they were famous for this, they had a motto which defined their practice, which was nobody solos, everybody solos, the idea that there wasn't going to be.

that no one musician in the band would be the center of attention for any length of time. And that sort of defined what they were trying to do. And obviously, jazz and improvised music of lots of different kinds, especially in that radical moment of the early 70s, as seen by a lot of people as a way of expressing a sort of democratic musical ideal. I guess whether it were more listenable than a lot of people who try to put that into practice. It's this big It's this big debate about, like, how do those moments and he's sort of like, big

debate about, like, how do those moments and these sort of like bigger, not just the sort of like the protests and demonstrations, et cetera, but also these really exceptional moments like Terrier, people talk about them in lots of different ways as like outbreaks of democracy. I've talked about them as moments of excess before, but you see these huge outbursts of democratic participation. Like 2011 was one of them. We've seen it again with Black Lives Matters in various waves, etc. You know, if we wanted to come up, with what does democracy feel like, in the sense of a potent collectivity like Gemman's talking about earlier, like that's what we would point to our peak moments like

that, wouldn't we? We talk about that and the feeling of like, you know, anything's possible. In fact, there's an article from the 70s by this guy, Aristide Zolberg, he calls them moments of madness because they don't fit into everyday politics. And he talks about it as, you know, basically their moments when anything seems possible. Yeah, but I'm not sure that the moment of excess are necessarily the same thing, because there's something there about power, is that what my answer to the question of like, what does democracy feel like? If we're talking about those moments of collectivity, if we're taking that as democracy, then it feels like that anything is possible is effectively power, like I matter. The person next to me matter. That's why I use this term potent connectivity. It's potency. It's potential and power. What I would say is part of the gambit, one of the claims and hopes of the radical left for at least 200 years, has been the idea that it is possible or it would be possible to create institutions which normalise and routineides the sense of potential which we normally only

get in those moments of excess and revolutionary rupture. I mean, I think the reason they feel like moments of madness or they feel like moments of excess is because those are the moments when a participatory experience of democracy comes up against the limits of institutionalised, liberal, individualising, representative democracy. And I think there's really two different conceptions of politics going on coming into conflict in those moments. But I think, I have to believe it's possible. It's possible to create institutions which don't feel like permanently giddy and exciting and exhilarating, but they do feel like they carry with them, you know, long term, that sent to participatory the potential. And that's what experiments with constituent democracy in Latin

America, the participatory budgeting experiments in Brazil, in Porto Alegre, what the Soviet experiments in workers' councils and etc. All those kind of experiments in participatory deliberative forms of democracy. But in those in those experiments, people had a very strong link to where they came from and what made that possible. Yeah. And we're we're quite sound. Savvy too, I would say this is a gross generalisation, but savvy too, the kind of co-option and the kind of negative institutionalisation that happens with some of these movements all around the world, where they go, okay, you've won this thing now or we've won this thing now, and then things become kind of bureaucratized and the kind of the political flair or the participation or the collectivity is kind of weeded out of it. one way to think about that is like if if those moments are like these moments of madness let's stick with that one are these moments where anything seems possible well is it is it just the intensity of the moment that keeps that keeps that sense of possibility open right and how does it relate to the more everyday idea of politics which people often talk about as the art of the possible right which is much more constrained how do you how do you keep those two together I do think that that is the I do think we've got someone with this. If we want to, I really do like the idea of potent collectivities. And if we want those potent collectivities to manifest themselves, not just in these intense moments, we do have to go,

we do have to deal with this problem of finding institutional structures which can reflect them. But I don't think that, you know, I don't think we have, let's have one of these big moments and then we'll get the right institutional form and then democracy solved. It's probably that we keep, we probably do just keep need, needing these, these moments to flare up again, basically. We need to get out of the house. We all need to get out of that. It's spring now, isn't it almost? So everyone needs to get out of the house. That might help. You know, I also think it's that. What, it's definitely, I definitely definitely do need it just on an individual level. But I also think it's like these big moments are the moments when the unheared are heard

or new, new problems emerge, which society then has to adjust to, in order to take those on board. You know, I mean, I think, anyway, I just think we've got somewhere with this, with this idea that there's some sort of relationship between these moments. I mean, Thomas Jefferson talked about this. He talked about the idea that each new generation, each generation needs, I can't remember where he puts it. It's like water, as a society has to go through a revolutionary process, like every two generations. You refresh democracy. Yeah. He says you have to water the tree of liberty with the blood of what's, perhaps or something like that.

I think, yeah, we're on a much more kind of basic level. What I meant by everyone needs to get out of the house, as I'm saying really seriously, like there's a lot of us that don't know what the world of collectivity looks like anymore, like just on a really base level. I also think part of what we're getting out is something that comes through when people like Jacques Derrida talking about democracy, which is the idea that it has to be understood as a necessarily open-ended thing.

You can never think of democracy as something that has been, achieved. It has to be something that you're constantly working on and constantly keeping open. And I think this is a really powerful argument that can be made as a critique of like institutionalised politics in places like Britain after the 70s. I mean, really up until the 70s, one of the things is going on is it's not the case that even moderate kind of liberal opinion thinks, well, we've got our democratic institutions now. We don't have to keep working on them. That sort of complacency only really sets in, I think, after the 60s. And again, I think it's not, like, it's not at all an unreasonable demand, even of really mainstream politics

in a place like Britain today that we should have some political leaders who are willing to say, look, we just haven't had a serious think about what institutional democracy looks like, really since the 30s, like not really since women got the vote. We haven't, we haven't really thought about, does this work? Like, is this the right way to. do it? What should the institutions be? And I'm always really resistant to any idea that we should have a blueprint that we should say, we know what the institutions of a 21st democracy should look like. I don't think any one person or group of people should be expected to have that. I just think putting the question on the table and just acknowledging,

well, look, if you're living in a society that's gone through the kind of changes we've gone through since the 20s, but you haven't really had a serious think about what democratic institutions look like, you better just assume that they're probably going to be broken by this point. Because everyone's on the defensive because things are so shit. I know, but look, this isn't pie in the sky. This is what's happening in Chile at the moment. They had this huge uprising, this moment of excess, this moment of madness, huge, huge uprising. And now they're going through a constitutional process where they're creating a new constitution to replace Pinochet's constitution. And, you know, a leftist has just been elected

as president, Boric. You know, this is something really that's happened. happening in one part of the world, and it can happen in this part of the world? I think Latin America, I think, has been always, like, ahead of, way ahead of most of Europe and North America on these issues, I think partly because there's a history in Latin America. There's a history of people talking about liberalism as a specific philosophy, rather than just a natural common sense, which lots of people can't imagine being outside. And because the liberals always have to justify being liberals, in relation to both conservatives, and socialist of various kinds.

That means that you can have a much more complex argument about what kind of democracy you want and what it looks like. The trouble in the English-speaking world in particular is liberalism is so hegemonic, so normative, like most educated people in places like Britain and America really cannot imagine a conception of democracy other than really just an institutionalisation of liberalism.

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Oh, that's too far out. Thank you.