Our
representative democracy is debased (George Monbiot) precisely because
it has no base. The 'architecture' that must be changed is a pyramid
of ladders, the bottom rungs of which hang above most people's reach.
Hierarchical
gradients of income and wealth, knowledge and power span our
economic, cultural and political life. A large, professionalised
minority we pay, more or less willingly,to provide for us, mostly do
better out of their jobs than we do. The working or non-working
majority who get less than the national average wage also fail to
qualify for any progressive career.
The
decimated old white working class who voted Leave never voted, even
with their feet, to automate their own jobs, relocate their
industries or overpay the bosses and bankers who unemployed them. Few
will be reading Monbiot, or me or any wordy broadsheet.
Yes
what's needed is more direct democracy, but not confined to sensitive
listening devices or top-down tick-box consultations. The direct
democracy so sadly lacking is not mainly about choosing between
preselected policies and representatives, but people deciding and
acting for themselves, hands-on and face-to face, in their daily work
and neighbourhoods.
How
else can we begin to determine what's best, what's possible and how
to go about it. Without this direct practical experience and social
reconnection, how on earth can we decide what more to expect from the
people we send up and away to speak for us?
How
else can we create an effective base to inform the overarching
economic and political bureaucracies that dispose of our time and
money, do better for themselves than most of us, on the coat-tails of
a megabuck, national and global, master-class?
Hannah
Arendt on bureaucracy:
The
greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the
attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is
nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present
grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted.
Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived
of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is
not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny
without a tyrant.
Charles
Dickens on bureaucracy:
Chapter 10 of the
Charles Dickens novel Little Dorrit. The chapter title is:
"Containing the Whole Science of Government," and it
includes the following:
"The
Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the
most important Department under Government. No public business of any
kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of
the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie,
and in the smallest public tart....
"This glorious
establishment had been early in the field when the one sublime
principle involving the difficult art of governing a country was
first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study
that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the
whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done,
the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public
departments in the art of perceiving -- HOW NOT TO DO IT.
"Through this
delicate perception, ... and through the genius with which it always
acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the
public departments, and the public condition had risen to be -- what
it was. …
The
Castle
by Franz Kafka
“Regarding
night interrogations: the night is less suitable for negotiations
with applicants for the reason that by night it is difficult or
positively impossible completely to preserve the official character
of the negotiations. This is not a matter of externals, the forms can
of course, if desired, be just as strictly observed by night as by
day…the official power of judgment suffers at night. One tends
involuntarily to judge things from a more private point of view at
night, the allegations of the applicants take on more weight than is
due to them, the judgment of the case becomes adulterated with quite
irrelevant considerations of the rest of the applicants’ situation,
their sufferings and anxieties. The necessary barrier between the
applicants and the officials, even though externally it may be
impeccably maintained, weakens, and where otherwise, as is proper,
only questions and answers are exchanged, what sometimes seems to
take place is an odd, wholly unsuitable changing of places between
the persons.”
And
The
Trial
by Franz Kafka
“You
can’t go out, you are under arrest.”
“So it seems,” said K. “But for what?”
“We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your room and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course. I am exceeding my instructions in speaking freely to you like this…. If you continue to have as good luck as you have had in the choice of your warders, then you can be confident of the final result.”
“So it seems,” said K. “But for what?”
“We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your room and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course. I am exceeding my instructions in speaking freely to you like this…. If you continue to have as good luck as you have had in the choice of your warders, then you can be confident of the final result.”
Chris
Hedges updates (in the last
15 minutes of his Wages of Rebellion) what Harry Belafonte once
called the incarceration of black America. Now says Hedges, it's
modern slavery and the return of the company store in privately run
prisons.
'Another
day older and deeper in debt..' If it were only black America
suffering, poor whites wouldn't have turned their backs on shabby
normality to vote for snake-oil Trump. And if it were wealth as such
that riled them, they wouldn't have voted for Trump, any more then
our own systematically deprived voted for Farage. The elites our poor
whites rebel against are not confined to Washington – or Brussels
or Westminster – but much nearer home, in everyday schools and
offices etc
Hannah
Arendt, who covered the trial of Eichman, called his conduct 'banal'
– however evil the results - and homed in on a more
general'thoughlessness' of bureaucracy. Chris Hedges talks of the
indelible blindness of privilege, and Dickens and Kafka wrote long
ago on what happens to people caught up in such systematic
thoughtlessness.
Here's
a trailer for Le Proces, aka The Trial which scared the daylights out
of me in the 1960s, and left me in love with Jeanne Moreau (not to
mention Orson Wellies):
Hedges,
who teaches black prisoners (partly to heal his privilege-blndness)
says a lot are of prisoners are still in debt to their private
prisons when they leave. He says the black man shot in the back as he
ran away from traffic cops was afraid of being sent down again for
non-payment of those debts. His name was was Walter Scott and this
Guardian report has a video of his banal execution in what could be
any old park round here.
.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/07/south-carolina-police-officer-murder-charge
*Ivor Goodjob was a name coined in an unemployed writers' group for a fictitious official from what was then the Department of Health and Social Security. I think the department has changed its name and hardened its criteria for disability, deservedness etc
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