<nettime> Alan's query - counter-powers

[Brian Holmes <106271.223@compuserve.com>]

Alan, I'm no jurist, but I think your idea of pressing charges against Bush
for failure to keep his campaign promises (among other things) is worth a
try. It's very much the way that politics is really carried on today. 

Why should Bush be put on trial? What would be the larger issues behind
such a trial? 

I want to relay a few ideas from a German sociologist named Ulrich Beck,
who wrote a book called The Risk Society. A very brilliant book, still
valid 15 years after its writing. 

After considering the risks of modern technological civilization, and the
growing public consciousness of those risks (like the environmental and war
risks you rightly mention), Beck talks about the way of dealing with them:
democratic politics. The problem is, electoral politics don't do the job:
"Ultimately, the monopolization of democratically constituted
decision-making rights is founded on the contradictory image of a
democratic monarchy." 

In other words, government by the people and for the people - so-called
"popular sovereignty" - is a fiction. Not only does the "monarch for a
term" become authoritarian, but worse, the people affected by his actions
become "democratic subjects" in the subservient sense. They lose their
freedom during their 4-year wait to express it again. This is the situation
throughout the Western democracies - and painfully so in the USA right now.

Beck essentially reiterates the description that the economist Schumpeter
famously gave, in the 1940s, of democratic elections as the new mechanism
for the reproduction of power elites. But his conclusion is more complex.
At the same time, he says, democracy has instituted and legitimated a
number of freedoms allowing politics to be pursued by other than electoral
means. In this sense, democracy is advancing rather than declining, despite
increased awareness of the contradiction in electoral politics. To specify
these advances, Beck identifies the different fields of what he calls
"sub-politics." These are: the separation of juridical and executive powers
(the possibility of legal recourse), then the consolidation of freedom of
the press, then the institution of collective bargaining. He further says
that in present times (and partly in response to a decline of collective
bargaining) forms of critical professionalism - i.e. taking an ethical
stance within one's profession - and also more spontaneous social movements
using protest techniques are both contributing strongly to a "political
process" and indeed a "political culture" outside the electoral forms of
parliamentary democracy. These "sub-political" forms of expression  (think
of "sub-commandante" Marcos) are where politics really happens now: as the
play of counter-powers in constant tension with the offically democratic
ones.

The key thing is to consolidate this "political culture," this taste for
counter-power on the left, because of course anybody can play that game:
look at how the Republicans have been using the courts and the media. I
think that since the unrest of the 60s, the power elites (whose existence
the Bush oligarchy makes so obvious) have been doing all they can to
channel the different forms of non-parliamentary politics, in order to
appropriate them or neutralize them. The co-optation of human rights
rhetoric that someone was talking about here recently is one of the many
forms of channeling, trying to manage what was called "the crisis of
democracy" (title of the 1975 Trilateral Commmission report). A crisis
brought on by social movements and their new uses of law and the media.

Your idea, in the U.S.A. right now, would be a good way to push toward a
more democratic political culture, that is, a more activist one. For
starters, the only way to make it realistically happen would be to get an
ethics question going among the lawyering profession. Because you need a
lot of free labor to make your idea happen! And of course the separation of
the juridical and the executive is exactly what failed in the Supreme Court
decision that brought us Bush, so the issue is real. If you could get the
ball rolling it would be a lot more interesting a trial than Clinton's, for
instance. Americans on the left would watch even more TV! (If that's
possible.) Such a trial would draw the attention of an awful lot of social
movements (black people, environmentalists, abortion rights, so on). And it
might be one way to start getting beyond the issue-specific nature of
political activist groups in the States, not by erasing the specific
issues, but by adding one central issue which is in the erosion of the
basic freedom to have a voice in the way the country and even the world
develops. 

Something you might be wrong about, though, is the absence of any effective
protest movement in the United States. The student mobilization for the
upcoming "Free-trade area of the Americas" summit in Quebec is real
interesting. The issue there is not Bush, but the program of the whole
pan-American power elite that he serves. I'm not sure nobody's listening to
this stuff - I know a whole lotta people who are. Watch how that develops,
the future might be there (SalAMI's action in Ottawa on April 2 was
brilliant, for instance, like their whole campaign: see indymedia Quebec).
I understand that many people don't want to believe in this because they
don't want to be disappointed again - but is that any way to get things
moving? 

Alan, I've been struck by all your recent posts, because you put your
creativity right up against reality. Take that bastard to court! And make a
few new friends doing it!

best, Brian Holmes

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