The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy

182 Pages·2013·3.388 MB·English

by  Mark Purcell

The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy
Antipode Book Series
Series Editors: Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota, USA, and Sharad Chari, London School of
Economics, UK
Like its parent journal, the Antipode Book Series reflects distinctive new developments in radical geography.
It publishes books in a variety of formats—from reference books to works of broad explication to titles that
develop and extend the scholarly research base—but the commitment is always the same: to contribute to
the praxis of a new and more just society.
Published
Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism
Brett Christophers
The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy
Mark Purcell
Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics
Edited by Michael Ekers, Gillian Hart, Stefan Kipfer and Alex Loftus
Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land Ownership
A. Fiona D. Mackenzie
The New Carbon Economy: Constitution, Governance and Contestation
Edited by Peter Newell, Max Boykoff and Emily Boyd
Capitalism and Conservation
Edited by Dan Brockington and Rosaleen Duffy
Spaces of Environmental Justice
Edited by Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter and Gordon Walker
The Point is to Change it: Geographies of Hope and Survival in an Age of Crisis
Edited by Noel Castree, Paul Chatterton, Nik Heynen, Wendy Larner and Melissa W. Wright
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society
Edited by Becky Mansfield
Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy
Edited by Katharyne Mitchell
Grounding Globalization: Labour in the Age of Insecurity
Edward Webster, Rob Lambert and Andries Bezuidenhout
Privatization: Property and the Remaking of Nature-Society Relations
Edited by Becky Mansfield
Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya
Joel Wainwright
Cities of Whiteness
Wendy S. Shaw
Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples
Edited by Kim England and Kevin Ward
The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy
Edited by Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod
David Harvey: A Critical Reader
Edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory
Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Activism, Professionalisation and Incorporation
Edited by Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi
Threads of Labour: Garment Industry Supply Chains from the Workers’ Perspective
Edited by Angela Hale and Jane Wills
Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction
Edited by Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston and Cindi Katz
Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working Class Youth
Linda McDowell
Spaces of Neoliberalism
Edited by Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore
Space, Place and the New Labour Internationalism
Edited by Peter Waterman and Jane Wills
Forthcoming
Fat Bodies, Fat Spaces: Critical Geographies of Obesity
Rachel Colls and Bethan Evans
The Down-Deep
Delight of
Democracy
Mark Purcell
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2013
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global
Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about
how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our
website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Mark Purcell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in
print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as
trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service
marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not
associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed
to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It
is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional
services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a
competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Purcell, Mark Hamilton.
The down-deep delight of democracy / Mark Purcell.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4443-4997-9 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-4443-4998-6 (pbk.)
1. Democracy–History.
JC421.P865 2013
321.8–dc23
2012045277
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Viernes 20M_23 By Julio Albarrán
Cover design by www.cyandesign.co.uk
Set in 10.5/12.5pt Sabon by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
1 2013
To the one Forever Overhead.
The board will nod and you will go, and though we
grieve we are grateful for these shards of light from the
hearts of sad stars.
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
1 What Is to Be Done? 1
2 What Democracy Means 29
3 Becoming Democratic 75
4 Becoming Active 92
5 Revolutionary Connections 122
6 Conclusion 143
References 159
Index 168
Acknowledgments
Like any other book, this one is an assemblage, a rhizome that opens out
into the world and connects with many different people, ideas, desires,
and energies. It would be impossible to acknowledge them all, and so
this is only a partial list. Susan Fainstein, Ananya Roy, Peter Marcuse,
David Imbroscio, Byron Miller, Michael Brown, Helga Leitner, Andy
Merrifield, Clive Barnett, Nicholas Dahmann, Nathan Clough, Erik
Swyngedouw, Nik Heynan, Richard Day, Deborah Martin, Walter
Nicholls, Eugene McCann, James deFilippis, Matt Wilson, and Gary
Bridge have all contributed to and pushed my thinking in various fruitful
directions.
Also incredibly stimulating has been the extraordinary work of blog-
gers whose active and high-quality thinking and writing are a model
we all should aspire to. Among them are Lenin’s Tomb, I Cite, ABC
Democracy, The Commune, Take the Square, Red Pepper, Ceasefire,
Anarchist Without Content, Pop Theory, Cities and Citizenship, No
Useless Leniency, Progressive Geographies, and (the former) Infinite
Thought.
Among the many at the University of Washington, special thanks go
to my students in CEP 301 and CEP 461, who read the classics with me
with great effort, patience, and insight. And to Chris Campbell, one of
the few administrators who knows the value of scholarship and how to
engender it in an institution. And of course to Becoming-Poor, which
exists, incredibly, in an academy increasingly cheapened by money, and
nevertheless has absolutely no intention of giving in. Autogestiamo!
The people at Wiley-Blackwell have been fantastic. Rachel Pain guided
the project into existence with grace, and Vinay Gidwani saw it to com-
pletion with elegance. Jacqueline Scott and Isobel Bainton were fabulous
in every way. And two anonymous reviewers were extraordinary for
their supportive, thoughtful, and erudite comments.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
I had the good fortune to receive financial support from the College of
Built Environments at the University of Washington to hire a copy editor
and indexer. I hired Karen Uchic, and I could not be more impressed by
her work.
Let’s face it, the cover of this book is the best thing about it. The
photographer is Julio Albarrán. Find more of his work at http://www.
flickr.com/photos/julioalbarran/.
And of course, as always, for everything: Mom, Elham, Roshann, and
Neeku.
1
What Is to Be Done?
…be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the
darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you
chances.
know them, take them…
the more often you
learn to do it,
the more light there will
be…
you are marvelous.
the gods wait to delight
in
you.
—“The Laughing Heart,”
Charles Bukowski (1993)1
In The Politics, Aristotle describes how oligarchies fall and give way to
democracies: “by concentrating power into ever fewer hands, because of
a shameful desire for profit, [the oligarchs] made the multitude stronger,
1 Reprinted from The Prairie Schooner 67.3 (Fall 1993) by permission of the University of Nebraska
Press. Copyright 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press.
The Down-Deep Delight of Democracy, First Edition. Mark Purcell.
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
2 THE DOWN-DEEP DELIGHT OF DEMOCRACY
with the result that it revolted and democracies arose” (Aristotle, 1998b,
p. 1286b). As we stagger through the flotsam of the financial crisis and
the preposterous proposal of “austerity” as a solution, it is not hard to see
ourselves in the first part of Aristotle’s account. But in this book, I want
to focus on the second part, the part where he suggests that o ligarchies
tend to “make the multitude stronger,” that they awaken and activate a
popular power that rises up and expresses its desire for democracy.
Aristotle also reminds us that, in a sense, political questions are always
very old ones. He advises that we should “take it, indeed, that pretty well
everything…has been discovered many times…in the long course of
history….Therefore, one should make adequate use of what has been
discovered, but also try to investigate whatever has been overlooked”
(Aristotle, 1998b, p. 1329b). Nietzsche displays a similar kind of humility
in the face of the long history of political thought, arguing that ideas
grow up in connection in relationship with each other…. However
suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought,
they [are] nevertheless…far less a discovery than a recognition, of remem-
bering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive
household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally: philos-
ophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order (Nietzsche,
1989a, p. 27).
So asking the question “What is to be done?” is always an atavistic
enterprise in a way, a kind of mining of past political action and thought.
It is Lenin’s old question, but it is no less the question Plato and Aristotle
were asking, writing as they were in the wake of the Athenian defeat in
the Peloponnesian War and living under a pervasive sense that their
society was crumbling. Marx was asking the question too, and Lenin,
and Gramsci. In the poem that opens the chapter, Bukowski is also
searching for an answer, as are we today. And so in taking up the question
of what is to be done, I try to be very much aware of this history, of what
has already been discovered, and I try to make adequate use of it. I mine
the work of thinkers like Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes, Lefebvre, Deleuze and
Guattari, Rancière, Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci, and others, trying to
learn what they have to teach us. At the same time, I do not mean only
to retrace the steps of others. I intend to use the political wisdom of the
past to cut a path toward a possible future, toward a political community
we have not yet realized.
My answer to Lenin’s question of “What is to be done?” is: d emocracy.
Less concisely, what is to be done, what we all must do together, is to
engage in a collective and perpetual struggle to democratize our society
and to manage our affairs for ourselves. I do not propose democracy as