Books and mags, booze and fags. posted by Richard Seymour

Alright, aside from my usual repertoire of subscriptions and regular reads, I've just signed up for a subscription to Red Pepper , which I had previously rejected for some curious reason. I strongly recommend you do too, since upon reading it again I've found it invaluable. They'll take electron payments over the internet now, which is something you povo fucks who had your proper card taken off you by the bank (like I did) will find useful. Naturally, I get Socialist Review , and International Socialism . The New Left Review is either genius or codswallop, depending on which article you're reading, so I buy it selectively. Historical Materialism is a remarkable, under-read publication. From Zizek's perambulations about the risk society to polemics about Brenner, it is a vast repository of knowledge and conceptual clarity. It is by turns enthralling, infuriating, difficult, stunning and entertaining. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Alright, I'm a wierdo...

I hoke around the second hand book shops, the bargain basement outfits and especially the Waterstones near Russell Square all the time. Why just today, I purchased Ian Kershaw's study of popular opinion under the Third Reich, Christopher Hitchens' book 'Love, Poverty & War' (the section on war is remarkably short, presumably a publishers' concession to the fact that his writing about war has not been very good, and all stuff pre-9/11 heavily edited to omit the searing antiwar invective), Tariq Ali's 'Empire and Resistance' and 'Street Fighting Years', Daniel Guerin's 'Fascism and Big Business', John Gray's 'Heresies'... Now, here's the thing. Tomorrow, I'll probably find a way to squeeze in a few more, and tell myself that I'll actually read the bastards, which will only happen incidentally.

The occasion for the Kershaw book is that I got in a bit of an argument with someone who was demonstratively expostulating about 'evil majorities, democracy is repulsive, an enemy of liberalism' etc. Among the many arguments he cited, some of them very sophisticated, he remarked that the Nazi regime in the late 1930s was very popular. It occurred to me that at any rate if the majority had ruled in 1933, Hitler would not have become Chancellor. But this argument is actually not as marginal as it may appear. There is a growing consensus among 'human rights' types that the main threats to freedom today are 'democratic dictators' whose destructive policies are mandated by electoral majorities (or pluralities). This represents a profoundly conservative turn among NGOs and their representatives, many of whom have argued that democracy must be susbtantially curtailed in the interests of promotion liberty. In particular, when it comes to Bosnia or Kosovo, they prefer the Republic of Human Rights to the Democracy of Risk.

Now, Michael Mann has a book out about 'The Dark Side of Democracy' in which he expatiates on precisely these themes. But it is hardly an original insight in itself to suggest that there is nothing sacred about a majority, and that majorities can be quite evil. John Stuart Mill, heavily influenced by Tocqueville's writings on democracy in America, based a large part of his On Liberty precisely on the idea that democracy, having supplanted the abritrary and brutal rule of a minority, might deliver the arbitrary and brutal rule of the majority. As a Member of Parliament, he proposed all sorts of checks on democracy, including giving those who were educated double the voting power of ordinary electors. As a utilitarian (albeit a more sophisticated one than his predecessors), he submitted every recommendation to the Utility Machine - does it produce the greatest happiness, and does it cause harm (defined here as repressing in any way a person's 'internal preferences' as opposed to their 'external preferences', the terms coming from Ronald Dworkin), etc. Mill famously believed that we should make experiments of our lives, since it was unlikely that human society in its present condition represented the nec plus ultra of our species' development. In order to be able to do this, we needed to be free from all kinds of arbitrary power, including majoritarian tyranny. Consequently, he developed the 'liberty principle' in which no one may be threatened or punished by another person or party, unless they are protecting themselves from harm (in the sense defined above).

Now, my foil was advocating Mill while saying he'd be quite happy to live under a benign dictatorship. Provided, he thought, everyone was able to live freely and conduct their own lives without undue interference, what need have they of politics? (I should have pointed out that his view wasn't a million miles from that of Thomas Carlyle, who believed that the most wise of men had never been represented in a majority in his life-time, never mind anyone else's). Everyone running the country? Nightmare! Pressed for time, I opted for a cheap joke about how it was at least less objectionable than the government presently running the United States. Works every time.

However, the argument hadn't moved me. Even supposing a society could be constructed along the lines advocated by Mill, in which people are merely regulated rather than self-governing, in which a governing class provide the conditions for freedom (Mill was a Fabian before his time), who is to prevent the agents doing the governing from violating the liberty principle or the utility principle, accruing unusual and ungainly amounts of wealth and power, and becoming more oppressive than the majority he is so terrified of? There seems to me no more guarantee of freedom in a republic than in a democracy. It is a sociologically banal fact that basic liberties have been most under threat when the majority has not ruled in some way.

There is, in fact, no guarantee of any freedom or 'right', however construed. There is only struggle, which is largely occluded. And at any rate, invoking the many crimes of the 20th Century to justify such a posture involves a specious reductionism, in which the history and trajectory of such movements as have threatened freedoms is simply not assessed. So, therefore, one starts from Hitler and the alleged popularity of his regime in the late 1930s, rather than in the crucial years of 1929-33. No majority returned the Nazis to power, and their vote was declining after the 1932 elections. And the argument has no sociological content - we might ask how these 'democratic dictators' emerge, under what conditions, and to what extent there is any real democracy at work. I'm afraid my foil was an apostle of 'totalitarianism', convinced that the only reasonable discussion about modern polities is how they avoid Stalinism and Nazism, which are superficially compared with respect to their techniques of governance and which are teleologically assumed to have been necessary correlates of their tainted ideological source (Hegelian organicism or some such thing).

At any rate, I did his knee-caps in and had a few drinks.