Why Voting Matters. But An Organized Electorate Matters More.
On Voting, Change, and Political Freedom in the 21st Century
If you told the Founding Fathers that by 2020 the United States would have an aspiring dictator for President and be teetering on the brink of failed state status, they would have been distraught and dismayed.
But here we are.
At the root of the problem, the foundation of our democracy has been eroding away for decades. Partisan politics, voter suppression, gerrymandering, disinformation campaigns, and corrupt corporate influences — all underscored by white supremacy and patriarchy — have distorted our democratic process. To top it off, our democracy is faced with the monumental challenge of voter apathy. People are giving up their power because they believe their vote doesn’t matter. They believe they lack the power to change things for the better, so they surrender whatever power they could have held. Voter apathy means that the president is regularly elected with less than a third of eligible voters consenting to their presidency. Nonetheless, the president wields executive power and privilege as would a constitutional monarch.
So why don’t Americans vote?
They don’t believe their voice, their vote, can change anything.
At this point, most writers and voting advocates would dive into why voting matters and how it fosters the foundation for change, but I can’t. I can’t because the truth is more complicated than simply saying, “voting matters.” After all, there has to be a reason why half of all eligible voters feel such profound disenchantment and skepticism with the political process. In a democracy, we have to contend with the uncomfortable truth that voting doesn’t create change, at least not by itself.
This a truth that activists have understood throughout the history of social progress. Voting doesn’t create change: movements do. An organized electorate does. Nonetheless, I’m someone who votes at every opportunity, encourages friends and family to vote, participates in voter registration initiatives, and volunteers to Get Out the Vote. Even if voting can’t create change, I do all of this because voting is how movements can ensure their voices are heard, because voting matters. Every vote counts, literally.
These two statements, at first glance, seem to contradict one another. How can voting matter if voting doesn’t create change?
If we look at each statement more closely, we can see that they aren’t as contradictory as they first appear. We’ll start by looking more closely at why voting matters before diving into the limitations of the vote around creating change.
Why Voting Matters
First and foremost, voting matters because it is the only means for the masses to directly exercise political power. Voting is how the people can act to remove barriers to change, to remove the politicians protecting the status quo, and to install elected officials who will fight for the policy changes that we, The People, need. Your vote is how you can express your discontent with the system as it stands today and ensure your voice will be heard.
In all other instances, without any concrete means to directly influence public business, The People are effectively mute in the face of the structures of government, unless and until we resort to organized demonstration and protest. Yet, even in the face of such demonstrations, our representatives are not obliged to represent our interests, that is unless we represent a reelection risk. This reveals the nature of popular power in a democracy. As Hannah Ardent described in her 1954 book On Revolution, “‘all power resides in the people,’ is only true for the day of the election.” As such, it is crucial that we wield well our power while we have it. Without wielding the vote, the people, en masse, are mute: Only through the vote is the government required to acknowledge the will of the people.
This is why the 1%, the billionaires, the bourgeoisie, and the beneficiaries of oppressive political institutions will do everything in their collective power to restrict your ability to vote, limit the power of your vote, or steal your vote with lies and manipulation.
The reality is that the electoral problems facing the United States stem from efforts to control, subvert, or otherwise exert undue influence on the votes of the people. In these situations, I find myself wondering why would the oppressive, oligarchical and aristocratic influences of our society expend political and financial capital to influence our votes if voting didn’t matter? This is a simple argument that gets at the dilemma of voter apathy at a time when voting rights are under attack. If your vote didn’t matter, what reason would there be for purging voter rolls, shutting down polling locations, imposing strict voter id laws, and otherwise restricting our voting rights and capabilities? If there was no power in voting, there would be no reason to suppress it.
The power of the popular vote is the reason why the United States of America never intended on becoming a fully realized, popular democracy. Voting privileges were originally only afforded to property owning white men, eventually extending to a broader populace in the ensuing centuries; however, suffrage was only ever by earned portions of the populace after mass movements and popular protests. The fight for popular suffrage has spanned centuries, and our generation continues this struggle today. We continue to fight for voter rights because the conservative forces of the establishment recognize that full, guaranteed enfranchisement is a risk to the stability of their power.
Unfortunately, our generation has to organize across multiple fronts in the fight for voting rights. We are organizing to protect the voting rights that generations before us have won. We are fighting to counteract the recent reactionary restrictions imposed on our rights like voter ID laws. We are combating outdated systems like the electoral college. We are pushing for massive campaign finance reforms to get money out of politics. Above all, we must fight for the full enfranchisement of all citizens and tax paying members of the public as well as a guaranteed public space in which the people can exercise their full political rights.
Fighting For Full Enfranchisement
Regarding the full enfranchisement of all citizens and taxpayers, there’s a relevant revolutionary refrain that must be remembered: “No Taxation without Representation.”
This was the cry taken up by the Sons of Liberty in 1773 when they dumped British tea into the Boston harbor. “No Taxation without Representation.” This was among the demands of the colonists that eventually led to the American Revolution and the founding of this nation we now find ourselves in.
However, given the millions of people paying taxes to the U.S. government but not receiving representation or voice in that government, the United States has failed to live up to that creed. For instance, Washington D.C. is a prime example of a colonial-esque system of taxation without representation. The 700,000 people living in D.C. are not given representation in Congress nor electoral votes for president. This is particularly nefarious given that this domestic colony has historically been a predominantly Black city. Washington D.C. is, however, far from the only colony of the American empire.
Looking external to the continental U.S., we find millions of colonial citizens across the territories. Islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific which are subject to the colonial oversight of the U.S. government: most notably Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each of these territories is taxed by the U.S. government, their citizens can, and do, serve in the U.S. military — even though, for Samoans, they are restricted from rising to officer ranks — but they nonetheless are denied representation in Congress and electoral votes for President. Some territories, like Puerto Rico, can send a delegate to the House of Representatives, but the delegates are not recognized voting members of the House. This is a situation that reeks of colonialism.
All told, between D.C. and the various territories, over 4 million people are taxed by the U.S. government but not represented within it, yet the political disenfranchisement does not stop there.
By looking further at the two premises stated earlier, we can find even more evidence of disenfranchisement. The first premise was that any recognized citizen of a State should be afforded certain inalienable rights within that State, among those being the right to political participation, including but not restricted to the right to vote. The second premise was that per the principle of “no taxation without representation,” a person living within a State and regularly paying taxes to that State should be extended the right to political participation, even if they are not a citizen.
These two premises, the second in particular, reveal millions of disenfranchised people within the U.S. and other democratic nations around the world. The second premise implies that the 13 million lawful permanent residents (LPR) in the United States should be able to vote, yet, despite paying the same taxes as a voting-eligible citizen, LPRs are denied voting rights. LPRs can even serve in the military, yet we question their loyalty at the polling booth.
The political establishment sees no problem with LPRs receiving military training and possessing firearms, yet they are scared to arm them with the vote. What other reason can there be for this than an outright admission of the power of the polls? They know that, in a democracy, the ballot beats the bullet. The biggest threat to the status quo is mass voter mobilization.
So the people in power do everything they can to deny, revoke, and restrict voting rights wherever they can because they are threatened by an empowered populace. Beyond the denial of voting rights to lawful permanent residents and colonial citizens, the threat of the vote is evident in the voting restrictions imposed on felons and convicts across the United States, especially given that the harshest laws are found in states with large black populations. As voting restrictions for convicted felons were put in place, we saw a surge in the incarceration of Black men and women. This surge in criminalization and incarceration, which manifested itself in the War on Drugs, followed closely on the tail of the voting rights advances of the Civil Rights Movement.
Coincidence?
While the reasons behind mass incarceration are numerous, and laid out in great detail in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, we know that a lasting impact has been the disenfranchisement of citizens across the country, especially in Black communities, which conservative politicians have taken advantage of. As of 2018, there were 6 million people across the nation who were denied their right to vote because of anti-democratic felon voting laws. The impact is worst felt in Southern states with large Black populations. According to the Sentencing Project, nationally “one in 13 African Americans of voting age is disenfranchised, a rate more than four times greater than that of non-African Americans” and “in four states . . . more than one in five African Americans is disenfranchised.” The levels of voter disenfranchisement are staggering, and they are the result of a systematic plan to silence the voice of the people and restrict our freedoms.
Through targeted tactics of voter suppression, conservatives are able to shift elections in their favor. When it’s all tallied up, between the disenfranchised felons, lawful permanent residents, and citizens of U.S. colonies, there are approximately 20 million prospective voters who are silenced by the establishment. 20 million is roughly one-third of the votes received by either candidate in the 2016 presidential election: Hillary received 66 million popular votes and Trump received 63 million. So it should be readily apparent that 20 million additional voters would impact any presidential election tremendously. The impact only grows when you consider how many disenfranchised people are clustered in swing states.
Given the nature of the U.S. electoral college, voter disenfranchisement in swing states magnifies the effect to disastrous consequences. It allowed George Bush Jr to beat Al Gore in the 2000 election, preventing the U.S. from making any early progress on, what was then termed, global warming. Even worse, it has meant that the U.S. has endured one Trump term, despite him losing the popular vote by a three percent margin. He was elected because he earned 304 electoral college votes — 270 being needed to claim the White House — which he only secured through political and electoral gamesmanship. His campaign seized every advantage they could find, including blatantly tapping into America’s demons, openly lying to the People, colluding with foreign powers, and amplifying voter disenfranchisement.
Florida, a swing state with 29 electoral votes, is a prime example of such gamesmanship. Florida was essential to Trump’s path to the presidency in 2016, and you can be sure it will be again in 2020.
The top pick from the Republican playbook for Florida: Voter disenfranchisement.
In 2016, one in five Black Floridians were prevented from voting in the election due to felon voting laws. There were 1.5 million people in Florida who could not vote in the 2016 presidential election. 1.5 million people, 10% of Florida’s voting population, prevented from voting in a swing state whose 29 electoral votes were decided by a 1.2% margin, about 110,000 votes.
It’s easy to imagine how a fully enfranchised Black vote would have flipped Florida Blue in 2016. While even without Florida Trump would have had just enough electoral votes, 277, to secure the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that Florida is the only state that would have gone blue if all citizens and taxpayers were afforded the right to vote.
So I beg you, dear reader, please do not think your vote doesn’t matter. It’s important you make your voice and your vote heard. At the very least, you should make your voice heard for all those who are denied their voice and their vote. Voting is our only chance to exercise our power as a people. If we don’t exercise our power, they will take it from us.
Why Doesn’t Voting Create Change?
Even when we do vote, the representatives we elect will invariably take our power with them to Congress. It is only by taking the people’s power, the mandate of the people, that elected officials are able to do the work of governing. This is the nature of representative democracy.
The nature of modern democracy is that the people are only free to elect their leaders. Robert Michels, in his book Political Parties, said, “when voting, the people is at one and the same time exercising its sovereignty and renouncing it.” It is only for a brief moment that the people wield the power of the polls. Once the ballots have been cast, the people have collectively relinquished their power to the elected representative. The representatives, once granted the power of the people, maintain that power until they are voted out of office. Thus if the people do not vote or are denied their vote, they are in effect controlled by an oligarchy. In its purest form, the vote is the only concrete, governmental means by which the masses may oppose the oligarchy.
Yet, if we use the vote as our sole means of influencing politics and creating change, we will be doomed to sit under the rule of the oligarchs for ages. This is because, as Henry David Thoreau said in his enduring classic On Civil Disobedience, “voting for the Right [thing] is doing nothing for it.” This might seem negative, especially after I just espoused the importance of voting, but I agree with Thoreau. His statement is a revelatory reflection on the nature of voting, political parties, and the organs of government. Voting can do the important work of removing from office the oligarchs, plutocrats, and kleptocrats and replacing them with leaders who respect and respond to the masses, but the truth is that voting alone doesn’t suffice to create change.
Governments, and the political parties which support them, are fundamentally and intrinsically resistant to change. The majority of world governments today are representative democracies, and we’ve been led to believe that these republics were created for the purposes of egalitarianism and equality; however, as Arendt reveals in On Revolution, “the republican form of government recommended itself to the pre-revolutionary political thinkers not because of its egalitarian character . . . but because of its great durability,” and, as a matter of fact, the constitutional debates in the early United States were focused on how to ensure the stability of the American experiment. The result is a robust system of checks and balances intended to prevent tyranny in any of its forms. Arendt reminds us: “the Founding Fathers tended to equate rule based on public opinion with tyranny,” the checks and balances that exist are, among other things, intended to limit the capricious influence of an ever-shifting public opinion.
Institutional inertia thus obstructs all efforts to institute political reforms, even those aimed at increasing the quality of life of the public. For instance, community efforts to defund the police and invest in community-based peace and safety programs are ruthlessly opposed, as are those intended to decarbonize the global economy and prevent ecological catastrophe. Voting is one of the ways these obstacles to change may be overcome, but, as any politician can tell you, legislative change is a long, slow, and arduous process. So, what can the people do when we’re tired of waiting and we want to see change, we need to see change?
What can we do when we’re tired of being told that change will come in some mythic tomorrow? What do we do when we can’t wait for tomorrow because we won’t live to see it if there isn’t change today?
What do we do when we need change now because our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and children are being gunned down in the street by the weapons of the State? What do we do when we are fleeing forest fires as the days of climate consequence bear down upon us, demanding that we respond to the climate crisis immediately or perish?
How can the people change the course of government when, as Arendt points out, “the constitution provide[s] a public space only for the representatives of the people, and not the people themselves”?
What Makes a Movement?
In times like these, our only options are Resistance and Civil Disobedience. Regardless of who we elect, if we wish to see change, we must impose ceaseless pressure on the government and organize external to it. Movements of resistance and civil disobedience are what Henry David Thoreau advocated for and what Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, John Lewis, Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and so many others led. Even when they’re unpopular, which is often, these movements are how change is created. On the subject of change, in her book Freedom is A Constant Struggle, Angela Davis said, “I don’t think we can rely on governments . . . to do the work that only mass movements can do,” and “every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements.” The people must continue to build mass movements if we wish to see the change and freedoms we’ve long been striving for.
This prompts two questions: What makes a movement? And, what should our movement aim for?
At the simplest level, a movement is a mass of people collectively organizing and mobilizing in pursuit of common purpose and common goals. As movements grow, they quickly become multidimensional affairs, implementing a range of tactics and strategies only feasible and effective when the collectives are coordinated but decentralized. A movement is not a crowd of people led by a handful of charismatic leaders. A movement, a democratic movement, is a collective of individuals and communities collaborating to craft a common vision while carrying out the work to bring that vision into existence.
The collective, decentralized nature of movement building and organizing is emphasized by radical Black feminists like Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Patrisse Khan-Cullors. Ella Baker, civil rights leader and advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, famously said, “strong people don’t need strong leaders.” In particular, she meant that the people don’t need charismatic, deified figureheads who demand deference; the people don’t need Mussolini-esque figures to inspire them to action and lead them to victory. The people need only organize among themselves to effectively wield the collective strength and power that comes from organization.
However, this does not mean that there should be no leaders at all, or that there isn’t room for charismatic leaders in the movement. “Strong people don’t need strong leaders,” but effective, collective organizing nonetheless requires an identified and defined leadership structure, and charismatic leaders can help the movement to build capacity and galvanize action. Even the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — a civil rights organization that became a model of decentralized, democratic movement building — had a national leadership committee. Despite the need for leadership, many modern movements are decentralized to the point of lacking higher level coordination.
Movements today are stressing decentralized organizing at the expense of national coordination, and, in practice, it ends up looking less like a distributed organization and more like disorganization. This is the problem that plagued the Occupy moment in 2011. Without the necessary organizing and leadership behind it, Occupy fell apart in the same way it came together — slowly then all at once, over only a few weeks. There has even been debate about whether the Movement for Black Lives would be better suited by building more (inter)national coordination, and the same is true for the climate justice movement, but many activists and organizers struggle with the apparent contradiction between distributed organizing and an established national leadership, framework, and agenda.
Decentralization and National Coordination
The apparent contradiction exists because of the historically oppressive conditions that centralized power structures have created. Leaders have regularly ruled with unquestionable authority and superiority. Even in the revolutionary movements of previous centuries, the leaders of centralized parties assumed superiority over those they supposedly represented. For instance, Vladimir Lenin, a “strong advocate for a completely free and democratic society,” believed that “a small party of revolutionists should lead the masses because they were incompetent to find the correct road without direction.” Such conditions of centralized authority ultimately led to nothing but suffering and new forms of oppression, so activists are understandably weary of any hierarchy which might introduce authoritarianism into our organizations.
Distrust of centralized power apparatuses combined with the advent of the Internet has led to a surge in decentralized movements around the world. The Movement for Black Lives is taking this approach, as are the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong and the climate justice movement. This approach was also employed in the early 2010s by Occupy and the activists of the Arab Spring, and it was even seen at the beginning of the millennium during the Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization. Decentralized organizations might have less field heritage than the more traditional approaches of the 19th and 20th centuries, but the tactic has been around long enough for us to recognize its strengths, weaknesses, and limitations regarding the creation of long-term lasting change.
The strengths of decentralization are playing out right now in the U.S. anti-police movement. It allows for greater flexibility in local strategies and empowers each community to fight for the changes they most need. Decentralization allows for effectively anyone, anywhere to get involved in organizing for the movement, even if they disagree with other organizers about strategic or ideological specifics. This trait is meant to recognize that each community is a unique environment with their own challenges and community members themselves are best equipped to create the needed solutions. However, if no national structure, coordination, or leadership is established, then in-fighting and disagreement will eventually arise. Without any organizational means to resolve such conflicts, the movement’s progress can be up-ended from the inside. Beyond the potential for unresolved conflict, a decentralized movement without national coordination is incapable of fully realizing its goals.
For change to be ensured, national organizing and coordination is essential, but national organizing need not contradict with the democratic essence of decentralized movements. There are several examples whereby decentralized organizations have used national coordination to more effectively advance their collective goals. For instance, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) are often seen as an example of a centralized movement, yet, as Angela Davis points out, Mandela insisted on “always locating himself within a context of collective struggle.” This idea of Nelson Mandela being the sole leader of the anti-apartheid movement also contradicts with the reality that the movement continued to make major strides while he and other ANC leaders were imprisoned for nearly three decades. So despite the anti-apartheid movement being told as a story that seems to rest on a single individual and organization, the movement was the work of a large, distributed and decentralized collective organized behind a coordinated national platform.
In the U.S. civil rights movement, we saw a similar style of organizing. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led by, at separate times, John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael, was debatably the most influential civil rights organization of its time, and this was thanks to its ability to effectively combine national coordination with decentralized organizing. SNCC had a national platform, philosophy, ideals, and objectives that guided all of their work, but they were intentional about leaving room for each and every community to tailor campaigns to their specific needs and conditions. This high degree of collective organization is necessary for change. As Michels stated in Political Parties, “organization is the weapon of the weak in their struggle with the strong.” We, the People, cannot overcome the powers of a corrupt, tyrannical government if our communities are not organized and if we do not build a sense of connection and interdependence between our communities.
The challenge with a thoroughly decentralized movement is the lack of connection between individual communities. Despite there being an abundance of solidarity between communities, there may still lack the cohesion to coordinate the collective will and translate it into comprehensive change. High-level coordination, or the lack thereof, is a defining characteristic of any movement. Fundamentally, the difference between a movement based entirely on decentralization and a movement with intentional (inter)national coordination is the difference between rebellion and revolution.
From Liberation to Freedom
Rebellion and revolution are often seen as synonyms. However, while rebellion can lead to revolution, it itself never constitutes a true revolution because their objectives are different. In On Revolution, Arendt shares that, “the end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is freedom.” Liberation is only a pretext for freedom, much like rebellion is a pretext for revolution, but liberation itself does not constitute freedom. Liberation means solely to rid oneself of oppression, while “political freedom, generally speaking, means ‘the right to be a participator in government,’ or it means nothing.” As such, a decentralized rebellion aimed at liberating Black communities from the police can achieve its goal without providing Black communities with tangible, political freedom. Even without the police occupying our communities, we will still lack the capacity for self-determination that we desperately need.
Fundamentally, Black people across the United States, and much of the world, lack control over our communities. The result has been disastrous. Black communities across the country are hardly fit for human habitation. Whole portions of communities have been demolished to make room for interstate highways, displacing some families and creating unhealthy air for those left behind. We’ve seen our communities populated with heavily polluting industries and flooded with toxic waste. To top it off, our communities are chronically underfunded and under-resourced while being criminalized and overpoliced.
To attain political freedom, we need to build beyond rebellion and establish the basis for revolution. A revolutionary movement is about more than mass, public demonstrations aimed at garnering attention in the news and on social media. When Lenin said, “Without a revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement,” he was affirming the reality that a crucial aspect of a revolution is an ideology that can guide and inform the actions and direction of the movement. The development of ideology is essential to any movement building process.
We have certainly seen the emergence of shared political beliefs and ideology in the Movement for Black Lives and the climate justice movement, but we still seem to be lacking a comprehensive, revolutionary ideology to connect our movements.
Our movements can easily identify all that’s wrong with the world, but we don’t seem to have a common conception of how to address it. Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the Ghanaian revolution, said, “a revolutionary ideology is not merely negative. It is not a mere conceptual repudiation of a dying social order, but a positive creative theory, the guiding light of the emerging social order.” We lack such a light, so we have no revolution, at least not yet. Nonetheless, we can tap into the thoughts, ideas, histories, hopes, and dreams of our communities to create the ideology we need. In fact, many of the solutions that we are looking for already exist throughout history, it’s a matter of recasting them for the 21st century.
There is a long legacy of revolutionary ideologies to pull from. The past two centuries are full of revolutionary organizations who developed ideologies aimed at overcoming oppressive regimes and creating a world of freedom and equality; the history of each organization is full of lessons to be learned and absorbed by our modern movement. If we trace back far enough, we can recognize a common thread.
Connecting to the Revolutionary Tradition
Past and present revolutionary leaders of the radical left are connected via a tradition dating back to the influences of Revolutionary France. Whether or not we realize it, we, today, are continuing the legacy of the French Revolution. On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, which I’ve referred to throughout this essay, describes the lasting legacy of the French Revolution and how it differs from that of the American Revolution. In it, Arendt notes that “to the extent that our political terminology is modern at all, it is revolutionary in origin.” Whether or not we speak French, or have a direct connection to France, we continue the same struggle with similar language. We continue to strive for Liberty, Equality, and Community as we fight against the wealthy aristocrats and oligarchs who would oppress the masses.
Our fight for Liberty, Equality, and Community continues because we still lack the political freedoms we deserve as people. We lack political freedom because we lack the space and means to participate in the public business, to directly shape our communities through politics. The constitution provides such space and means for the representatives of the people but not for the people themselves. As such, even with full voter enfranchisement would not equal freedom because the people would still lack concrete channels in government, and we would still have to resort to resistance and civil disobedience as our only course for change.
This, to me, then, reveals the path forward for a modern revolutionary movement. Our revolutionary theory, fundamentally, must address itself the questions of political and economic freedom for our communities and how to best achieve that, while acknowledging the looming reality of the climate crisis. Angela Davis said, “Freedom is still more expansive than civil rights.” As such, we must go beyond fighting for voting rights alone and recognize that we must establish the political institutions to guarantee our right to political freedom, our right “to be a participator in government” and not merely an observer who elects their overlord.
With only the vote to empower them, the people can presently do little more than determine the individuals who would lead them. However, as discussed above, when we vote, we are both exercising and relinquishing our power, but we have no other option because “democracy is inconceivable without organization,” it is inconceivable without elected leadership. This means the people must, at some level, relinquish a portion of their power, and any revolutionary theory of government must balance the needs for equality and autonomy felt by the masses with the need for actionable authority residing in an established, elected leadership.
The question, in essence, becomes: How can we best maintain the stability, longevity, and authority of the State while providing the people with a public space in which they can meaningfully act? Potential solutions to the problem present themselves throughout the history of revolutionary movements.
Examples of Citizen Self-Governance
The radical left has long been intent on creating a free, egalitarian society, and there have been multiple attempts to do so, with varying degrees of success. The most notable attempt took place during the early stages of the French Revolution and became the West’s earliest modern example of citizen self-government. The National Constituent Assembly emerged from the people as a way of contesting the power of the king and the aristocracy. Through the National Assembly, Paris was divided into 48 communes, each commune was administered by a locally elected and assembled group of citizen representatives and provided the communities of Paris with a degree of self-determination. It was from these communes that representatives were selected to the National Assembly. The French, council system of government was eventually disrupted by Robespierre and the Jacobins because the citizen assemblies represented a threat to the power of the political party.
Even though the First French Republic failed due to the influences of corrupt, partisan politicians, the communal self-government model has become a recurring theme of revolutionary political thought and movements. For instance, at the dawn of the USSR, the original soviet was created as such a communal government, with these soviets forming together to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, following the centralization of power by the Bolsheviks and, later, the establishment of a national Communist party, the influence and sovereignty of soviets were undermined and attacked, like the Parisian communes before them. Once state power was consolidated under a single party, true democratic participation by the people was an impossibility. Communal self-government met an unfortunate demise in both the USSR and the early French Republic; however, this says more about the threats to popular self-governance than about the failings of self-governance.
In fact, the prospective successes of this style of government meant that two notable American revolutionaries, two centuries apart, each advocated for their own version of communal self-governance. Both the Black Panther Party Co-Founder, Dr. Huey P. Newton, and the U.S. Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, advocated for semi-autonomous self-governance by and of individual communities.
Towards Intercommunalism
Huey began publicly advocating for “revolutionary intercommunalism” in the 1970s. His theory never received wide attention for a few reasons: among them, Huey’s public speaking difficulties and the decline of the Panthers. Above all, the biggest problem was that his theory is what Paulo Freire would call “verbalism”, reflection without action, as opposed to “activism”, action without reflection, or “praxis”, the combination of action and reflection. Huey struggled to describe how communities could act to bring about the new world he envisioned.
The essence of his theory is that globalization and technological advancements have broken down and opened up international borders. This has created the technologic and sociopolitical foundation for a new form of global governance, intercommunalism, and, at the moment, we live in a world of reactionary intercommunalism in which the world’s richest individuals and companies dictate the direction of development.
Global capitalism has brought the world closer together than ever before, and, in doing so, the largest multinational corporations, and the men behind them, have accrued disproportionate wealth and power. We live in a world where the richest 1% of the global population control nearly half of all wealth. The simple fact of this wealth inequality is egregious, and it is worsened by the reality that with extreme wealth comes the power to privately shape public policy purely for personal profit.
In every sector of the economy, corporations exert all the influence they can muster to reshape policy to fit their priorities — even when and where this conflicts with the interests of the public and the ideals of the nation. This affects every level of government, local to national, and it’s not restricted to the United States. The specifics of how this has taken place globally are beyond the scope of the present piece, so I’ll refer the reader to Hasan Minhaj’s web-series Patriot Act for investigations of the various areas, from diets and deforestation to fashion and fossil fuels, multinational corporations have shaped society for their profit. Multinational corporations, along with the nation-states that support them, are influencing international initiatives specifically to establish and expand their economic empires.
The imperialist tendencies of capitalism have brought the world’s peoples closer together than ever before, making us functionally interdependent. However, the co-dependence between countries has led to far from equal outcomes. The imperialist nations of the Western world and the Global North, are enriching themselves at the expense of the Global South, the previously colonized countries of the world. Even after the end of formal colonialism, the countries of the Global South are continuing to be exploited. As Jean-Bertrand Aristide, former president of Haiti, sees it, the situation is bleak: Faced with globalization, the world’s poor are given two options, “either we enter a global economic system, in which we cannot survive, or we refuse, and face death by slow starvation.”
That statement reveals a number of sad realities, among them the fact that globalization has made it impossible for former colonies to establish true independence. This point is central to Huey’s thesis on Intercommunalism. He believed, “if colonies cannot ‘decolonize’ and return to their original existence as nations, then nations no longer exist.” Based on Aristide’s statement that Haiti, and other former colonies, can neither participate in nor abstain from the global economic system without risking death, it’s fair to say previously colonized countries cannot “return to their original existence as nations” because they lack the economic means to do so. As such, according to Huey’s theory, nation-states are functionally non-existent.
Instead of nation-states, Huey believed that the world was better understood as being made up of a “dispersed collection of communities.” These communities currently interact under conditions controlled by corporations and capitalists, and it was this system of conditions and interactions which Huey termed “reactionary intercommunalism.” However, the same technologies that have enabled a small circle of capitalists to control whole countries could be seized by communities to enable a transition to “revolutionary intercommunalism.”
In an era of revolutionary intercommunalism, the communities of the world would interact and cooperate via socialist principles and humanitarian ethics to provide a good quality of life for everyone on the planet. Unfortunately, Huey failed to elaborate on the details of how communities could seize the means of production or how communities would interact and cooperate under this framework. His inability to turn his theory into praxis is why it failed to make an impact.
Thomas Jefferson and the Community Ward
Jefferson on the other hand, with his experience in constitution making, was more forthcoming with specifics. I’ll acknowledge that it seems ironic to look to Thomas Jefferson for inspiration on the establishment of an egalitarian society. After all, Jefferson is likely, and with good reason, the most controversial U.S. Founding Father. Jefferson enslaved over 600 Africans throughout his life, and he likely carried out all of the brutalities and atrocities that even “good” slave masters were known to do. After the death of his first wife, Jefferson also took one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings, as his concubine, impregnating her at least seven times: the first happening while Jefferson was in Paris serving as the American ambassador to France. Sally was 16. Jefferson was 46. The reality of Jefferson’s humanitarian shortcomings means that we should be skeptical of his ideas, though we need not completely disregard them.
Despite the literal horrors he committed, Jefferson nonetheless made many notable contributions to political theories for effective government. I believe that by detaching his theories from his rampant racism and remixing them with thought from the Black Radical Tradition and other political traditions, we can establish the foundation for the realization of full political rights for all the people, including Black communities. The remixed theory would provide Black communities, as well as all others, with their own communal government.
After his presidency, Jefferson privately advocated for the creation of communal “wards.” According to Arendt, Jefferson believed, “state government and even the administrative machinery of the county were by far too large and unwieldy to permit immediate action” on the part of the public. Seeing that the public needed a space in which to act, he proposed subdividing sparse counties and dense cities into wards, and “he expected the wards to permit the citizens . . . to act on their own and thus participate in public business.” These wards would turn every community into its own “elementary republic,” as Arendt refers to them. These tiny republics then become the building blocks for a grander government. By uniting and integrating, communal governments can reproduce the higher levels of an intercommunal, federal republic.
A few questions remain: How would we form these elementary republics, what would their purpose be, and how would they unite to form the higher levels of government?
Addressing Climate Change through Intercommunalism
I believe that the answer to the first two questions can find their answers in the existential threat facing the planet: the climate crisis. Our community governments should be concerned, first and foremost, with how we take action on climate change by decarbonizing our local economies and making our communities more sustainable. Given that massive economic, social, and cultural changes have to occur for us to adequately address the climate crisis, it makes sense for this to serve as our focal point.
With this in mind, the elementary republics, the communal wards, should be formed as EcoDistricts. An EcoDistrict is a community organizing framework aimed at taking local climate action through projects which foster equity and resilience in the community. They give people the freedom and opportunity to reimagine and recreate their communities to be healthier and more ecologically sound. EcoDistricts, in their fullest form, would provide neighborhoods and communities with the public space necessary for the people to engage directly in the public business.
The citizens of a community would work together on projects aimed at decarbonizing their local environments and communities while establishing the basis for a self-sustaining local economy. This would best be accomplished through the framework of the Third Industrial Revolution, which describes how recent trends in technology has brought about a transition towards a decentralized, “sharing economy.” By establishing community energy cooperatives, expanding community gardens, and building out municipally-owned internet services, communities can detach themselves from the global economy before reuniting with neighboring communities to meet any needs that can’t be individually addressed.
To build towards an intercommunal world, the EcoDistricts, these elementary republics, would need to form together with neighboring districts to recreate the higher levels of government. Ideally, these higher levels of government would be created according to the notions of biosphere politics and bioregionalism. EcoDistricts would unify to create Ecopolises — EcoCities — and Ecopolises would form together into Ecoregional counties, with the Ecoregions then forming Bioregional states, such as Cascadia. In this new world of biosphere politics, “governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage.”
The borders of the ecoregional counties and bioregional states would reflect naturally occurring geological and ecological boundaries, and each level of government would be tasked with preserving and restoring the ecosystems under their care. From the bioregional level, the states would unite to form Continental Congresses. Through the combination of continental governments, the world would ultimately unite to form the Republic of Gaia which would be a global, federal government created through, at the most basic level, the intercommunal unification of EcoDistricts. As Jeremy Rifkin said, “this new complex organism operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally.” The Republic of Gaia would enable an era of biosphere politics.
Closing Thoughts
Establishing communal republics and building a global, intercommunal republic would give the world the chance for a fresh start. The new, communal republics would demand new ways of being and coexisting in our society that would allow us to address the climate crisis while creating a more humane and peaceful world. By establishing community wards as EcoDistricts, leveraging the Third Industrial Revolution, and uniting communities into bioregional states and a global republic, ecological intercommunalism, also known as Gaian Intercommunalism, would economically, politically, and environmentally empower communities around the world.
Communal wards would provide communities with the capacity for true self-determination and fully actualized political freedoms. However, establishing these wards won’t be possible through voting alone; there are too many obstacles to this scale of comprehensive change. Only through intentional organizing, educating, and mobilizing can we get there. To build a revolutionary movement, we need to start by defining the ideology we uphold, the goals we are striving for, and the structure of government that will meet our goals and fulfill our needs.
It was Henry David Thoreau who once said, “Let every [person] make known what kind of government would command [their] respect and that will be one step toward obtaining it.”
A global, intercommunal, eco-socialist republic would command my respect. What would command yours?
