On not being governed by 'the best'

A single person will not serve as the sole representative of the Partido da Terra, the libertarian municipalist political party elected to Lousame municipality in North-West Spain in May. Instead, under a system of rotation, every four months a different person will occupy the position; 11 in total over the four year term.

In Iceland, the grassroots group Alda (‘The Association for Sustainability and Democracy’) advocates that a third of Icelandic Parliament be reserved for randomly selected citizens. Part of Alda’s board is also randomly selected. “Random selection is simply a very incorruptible process, unlike elections which are usually won with money,” argues board member Hjalti Hrafn Hafthorsson.

Faced with the twin realities of economic and ecological failure, many opposition movements press for the widening use of elections to bring undemocratic institutions into line with the popular will. Under the banner of ‘economic democracy’ there is an insistence that company boards and pension fund managers, for example, should be elected, not appointed. More conventionally, there is a fervent desire – witness Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Syriza etc - for elected austerity-imposing governments to be replaced by elected anti-austerity governments.

But alongside this fixation on more elections – choosing people to occupy empowering positions for which the only available recourse is that they lose subsequent elections - there exists a growing recognition that they cannot overcome the burgeoning set of problems we face. Both in terms of what kind of person puts themselves forward as a candidate for election and the forces exerted on that person once in a position of power, many are concluding that elections are not the answer. Random selection (or sortition to give it another name) – the selection of people who don’t visibly desire power to govern for short and non-renewable periods – can be however.

Not only are elections not the answer to the unmistakable issues of mammoth inequality and elite power, but they are also not democratic. For a long time elections have been regarded as synonymous with democracy, but random selection has a far better claim to be the democratic way.

Ancient Athens and sortition

Aristotle famously said that choosing officials by lot was democratic but selecting them by election was a sign of oligarchy. A cursory look around the world reveals its oligarchical character – the widespread use of elections, coupled with the barely hidden assumption that elections cannot actually threaten the interests of the 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent. Ancient Athens was the originator of the practice of government by sortition – apart from expert posts such as architects or admirals, all public officials, magistrates and so on, were chosen randomly, using an allotment machine for that purpose, the kleroterion.

But sortition didn’t die out with the end of democracy in Athens. According to the anthropologist David Graeber, for much of European history elections were assumed to be an aristocratic way of selecting public officials. “’Aristocracy’”, he writes, “after all literally means, ‘rule by the best,’ and elections were seen as meaning that the only role of ordinary citizens was to decide which, among the ‘best’ citizens, was to be considered best of all.” The democratic way to select officials, he asserts, was taken to be by random lottery (and this was actually the case in early modern times in the Italian cities of Lucca and Vincenza).

Ambition and other disorders

And now, in a world convinced that elections are the only democratic way to choose who governs us, we are growing increasingly tired of being ‘ruled by the best’. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level has astutely identified one of the faults of our political system as selecting “people with ambition as their primary quality”. The English psychologist, Oliver James, claims that, while 13 per cent of the general population have a personality disorder, so do a majority of high achievers in spheres such as politics, business and the arts.” And invariably the high achievers will be the ones pushing themselves forward as candidates and being elected to positions of power.

The evidence that psychopathy amongst corporate chief executives and senior managers is four times higher than amongst the rest of the population has by now become something of a trope in popular culture. But psychopathy is just an extreme example of personality disorder. Personality disorder more commonly takes the form of narcissism (marked by the desire for dominance, insensitivity to others and a preoccupation with personal success) or the borderline (capriciousness and impulsivity). I believe any close-up observation of the exercise of power by successful people will reveal these behaviours to be very common.

As James emphasises, the traits that accompany personality disorder are an advantage in the quest of reach positions of power. “Being a chameleon, with the self-monitoring, game playing distance that often accompanies dissociation, has been shown to enhance career success in organisations,” he says. “Ruthlessness is easier if you lack empathy for the emotions of others, as borderline people often do, and being ruthless is usually necessary if you are to reach the very top.”

According to James, personality disordered behaviour thrives in organisations “where an individual is very concerned to gain power, resources or status.” Institutions that hold out the lure of gaining “power, resources or status” are clearly not limited to profit maximising capitalist corporations. Public sector organisations, elected governments or pan-governmental bodies like the EU are just as susceptible to this kind of misrule. There is now a well-trodden career path in politics – intern, researcher, special adviser, MP, minister – while a common alternative is to demonstrate your talent in the corporate sector before switching to politics. It is more accurate to say that personality disordered behaviour thrives in oligarchic institutions.

Mimicking the elite

Our collective sense of impotence is compounded by the fact that, while ruling elites are generally more disordered than the populations they rule over, the mass of people are catching up. The American researcher Jean Twenge, has identified a 30 per cent increase in narcissism, among college students, since the late 1970s. She says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement, ‘I am an important person’ but, by the late 1980s, this had risen to 80 per cent. The English academic Peter Fleming, says students now approach their education like “fecund bank managers who only see rational and singular futures.”

Culturally, ‘being the best’, the aristocratic mode of rule, has become firmly entrenched, as evident in public life, marked by perennial elections, as it is in its traditional bastion of the autocratic private, corporate sector. For the rest of the population, the only feasible choice is to try and mimic the successful, prodded by the neoliberal insistence that everyone think of themselves as an individual enterprise. Witness the rise in self-employment and the accompanying conviction that success or failure is a personal responsibility. But, as much we seem besotted with the lives of the rich and famous and want to emulate them, there is a germinating awareness that there is something wrong with ‘the best’ and the kind of rule they embody. Paradoxically, we need rule by people who don’t want to rule over us. Immediately we allow the desire for power to be let off the leash, multiple problems ensue. “If righteous people don’t want to govern,” says French economics lecturer, Étienne Chouard, “and if we give power, as in representative government, to those who want it, the worst will govern.”

Conventional political thought, even if it recognises the problem, cannot provide an answer. Oliver James, who politically is a left-wing social democrat, candidly admits he can’t ultimately see a way out. “To run a large business or government department requires extremely hard work, and it may even be that the disordered are the best equipped to make what to others would be a sacrifice of their personal lives.” The social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose 1960s experiments showed the power of obedience, could only suggest “constant vigilance” as a remedy.

However, sortition does offer a solution, if not an instantaneous one. The choosing of people to hold positions of power, not as part of a well-thought out career ladder, but randomly and for short and non-renewable periods, can neutralise the pernicious effects of electing individuals to niches of power. And as has been demonstrated, it can more accurately reflect the make-up of society, increasing the presence of women and marginalised groups. Random selection can therefore loosen the stranglehold of the upper middle classes on political power.  A reliance on elections, by contrast, will merely reproduce the same political inequalities.

A realist vision

But less noticed is the fact that random selection can turn traditional notions of Left and Right on their head. The linguist Steven Pinker differentiates between a left-wing utopian vision of human nature and a right-wing tragic vision, associated with, among others, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The tragic vision assumes that people are inherently selfish and flawed and that any changes will likely have unintended consequences worse than the problems they are intended to fix. The utopian vision assumes people are altruistic, and, in principle, perfectible. In short, conservatives are realists, leftists are idealists.

But random selection rests on a realist view of human nature and the conviction that institutions have a decisive effect on how people behave. You don’t count on virtuous behaviour; you assume people are not inherently good, you assume dishonesty. That’s why mandates, under random selection, are short and non-renewable. Representative government, however, when it is not simply disingenuous, is founded on a naïve idealism: that democracy will somehow emerge unscathed, while the elected inhabitants of power pursue their own self-interest and, in between elections, accede to the demands of the economy’s dominant financial and corporate institutions. It is time to see through the election myth and recognise how the world works

 

What about the workers? Jeremy Corbyn and the private sector

Here's a disturbing fact. In May’s UK General Election, if only workers in the private sector had been allowed to vote, the Conservatives wouldn’t have just scraped a majority, they would have absolutely romped home. Labour got a paltry 26% of the vote (and the Tories 43%). How is this possible for a party that was created, at the start of the last century, as a party of private sector workers? And will the Blairite nemesis, Jeremy Corbyn, be able do anything about it?

To understand Labour’s steady diminution on this issue and the fact people manage to maintain a straight face when the Conservatives now present themselves as a ‘workers’ party’, you have to look at history and the Labour party’s gradual surrender to the forces of corporate Britain and the inexorable decline of organised labour.

A brief of history of Labour and work

When Labour was formed in 1900 it was as a political party representing the interests of trade unions - with a socialist wing attached. Given that Britain at the time was a resolutely industrial society, trade unions could justifiably claim to represent something approaching a majority of society. The socialist wing of the Labour Party became dominant with the adoption of the party’s Clause 4 constitution committing it to ‘common ownership’ in 1918. The fact that the Labour party was officially socialist did not mean that it was about to institute socialism. In the late 1920s and early ‘30s when it finally got it hands on power of some sort, Labour was spectacularly conservative, supporting austerity and welfare cuts. But there was nevertheless an assumption that the current autocratic organisation of private sector work (there wasn’t a public sector to speak of at the time) was living on borrowed time.

It was only after the Second World War, when Labour was elected with a massive majority, its so-called ‘High Noon’, that the party could make the kind of society it desired a reality and change the character of work in the private sector. Writing in 1947 the American political scientist, Robert Dahl, said there were two contradictory schools of economic thought about which way Labour should go: “one advocating central control of the economy in the hands of the state, and the other advocating workers’ control, where “workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but direct participants in the control of productive enterprises”. The Labour government decisively choose the first option: industry was controlled by civil servants and appointed managers. Ownership may have changed but the new organisation merely mimicked the old, autocratic form of private sector organisation. In archive footage from the film, The Spirit of ’45, one miner laments that the ‘same tyrants’ remained in charge after nationalisation.

Though few realised it at the time, the roots of the Labour party’s alienation from private sector workers were laid here. But for a long time Labour’s model of nationalisation held sway. For 30 years the economy was resolutely mixed; even the travel agent Thomas Cook was in state hands. The interests of workers were thought to be sufficiently represented by strong trade unions, either in the now much larger public sector or the private sector.

This changed utterly with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. The power of trade unions was destroyed and state industries privatised. In retrospect, talk of a property-owning democracy now feels like a transparent fraud, but Thatcher drove a tank through the mixed economy, post-war consensus - helped enormously by fact that the City of London, media magnates and other owners of private sector capital backed her the hilt.

The reaction of Labour was first to resist this new dispensation, then reluctantly accept some of it (Labour under Neil Kinnock was still in favour of some ‘social ownership), then to wholeheartedly embrace it all under Tony Blair. The Labour Left, of which Jeremy Corbyn was a part, merely defended the old approach from these multiple onslaughts.

New Labour and ‘the big end of town’

Tony Blair’s genius in winning elections was entirely the product of convincing the City of London and media moguls like Murdoch and Richard Desmond that New Labour wouldn’t interfere with their power. Originally interested in Will Hutton’s stakeholder democracy idea for the running of companies, Labour backed down the moment they discovered ‘the big end of town’ didn’t like it. The result was that New Labour’s view of the private sector – a part of the economy employing about two-thirds of society – was entirely determined by the desires and interests of those who owned those companies. Yes, the Labour government made it slightly easier to get trade union recognition, but, in a complete reversal of what the Labour party was originally about, the assumption became entrenched that the interests of the owners of companies and those that worked for them were identical. Both wanted ‘success’ and, in practice, what that entailed was left to the owners to define. To even whisper about nationalisation, or, heaven forbid, workers’ control, was to immediately place yourself beyond the pale.

When Ed Miliband lost May’s general election, the idea instantly sprang up amongst the Blairites that a primary reason was that he was anti-business. Yvette ‘Work Capability Assessment’ Cooper recalled going to a CBI conference after the election and being confronted by a businesswoman who told her, ‘You pushed me away. I felt like you did not want my vote. My staff felt the same.’” Note the location and the trademark assumption that that interests of owners of capital and employees were indistinguishable, although only the owner gets to articulate them. Added to this was the specious and, politically dumb, assumption that wealth creation was a gift generously bestowed by the owners of businesses and entrepreneurs.

But though the Labour Left may not have liked these associations or conclusions, it had very little to say about the private sector. This was, now that the trade unions in the private sector had been decimated, decisively ‘enemy territory’. The public sector, however, palpably needed defending, first from the import of private sector techniques under New Labour, and then from austerity. This turn inwards was disastrous. The envy that has underpinned hostility towards benefit claimants stems in part from a perception that private sector workers feel abandoned by an official Left that doesn’t seem remotely interested in them, or their problems. With the desertion of the Left, the private sector is perceived as an homogeneous mass, not the locus of conflicting interests, desires and outright coercion that it is.

All the new thinking about how private sector businesses should be organised has come from outside the Labour party. American economist, Richard Wolff, is trying to forge a social movement in favour of worker self-directed enterprises. In the UK, the authors of the influential book, The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (who have backed Corbyn), advocate the development of workplace democracy, along the lines of the famous Mondragon group of cooperatives, throughout the economy.

The major stumbling block, sturdily erected by New Labour, is that it would be suicidal to focus on anything but the success of private sector companies, for the sake of workers as much as anybody. But the obsession with conflating success with the interests of owners, though deregulation and tax cuts, has led to its complete opposite – an endless financial crisis and insipid economic growth.

Beyond neo-syndicalism

However, before advocating that a Corbyn-led Labour party embraces a neo-syndicalism, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the nature of work has dramatically changed in the last 40 years. In the 1970s, it could be said that workers were still essential to the way production was carried out, and to ignore them was to invite disaster. Workers’ control was possible and, in some places, implicitly happened. Forty years later, the UK is largely a de-industrialised country and workers live with the ever-present threat of abandonment. If they are not necessary to produce profit, they won’t be used. Around 15% of UK workers are now self-employed anyway. Moreover, whereas manual labour was a source of pride and identity, today work is often characterised by just going through the motions to get a wage. According to a 2013 US Gallop survey, seven out of ten workers are ‘actively disengaged’ from their jobs. In Britain, 37 per cent of employees think their jobs are meaningless. Democracy at work won’t alter the fact that many people want to get away from their jobs, to many they are a necessary evil.

This is where an unconditional basic income could come in. A basic income could enable activities unrelated to work but vital for a flourishing society – such child-rearing, caring or artistic pursuits, but also facilitate small-scale economic activity that could breathe life into areas that the conventional corporate economy has left behind. The formation of thousands of cooperatives, social enterprises and other small businesses would become possible if they did not have to maximise profit. Both as an economic strategy and a way for the Labour Left to escape from its public sector ghetto, a basic income could be invaluable.

How about some 'market non-conforming democracy' Angela Merkel?

If the yes votes wins Sunday’s Greek referendum and Syriza falls, “too many will believe”, fretted the Guardian’s columnist in chief, Jonathan Freedland on Saturday, that Brussels and Berlin engineered the toppling of a democratically elected government.

I wonder where they could have picked up that delusionary belief?

It clearly can’t have come from the senior German conservative politician, described as “one of Europe’s most influential politicians” who told the Times newspaper  last week that Angela Merkel’s CDU would block any deal with the ‘communists’ Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, campaign vociferously for a ‘yes’ vote, and then install a ‘technical’ government in Syriza’s place.

Revelations from Martin Schulz, German social democrat (!) and President of the European Parliament, to the effect he wanted to Syriza to resign and be replaced with a “technocratic government so we can continue to negotiate” obviously had no effect.

But, perhaps, you know, “too many” have just been paying attention to the record of Eurozone institutions and core country governments like Germany’s since the beginning of the financial crisis. A record that betrays an unbending desire to topple recalcitrant governments and views the will of the people as a minor impediment to which no credence should be given.

Let’s have a brief refresh

Ireland, February 2011

On the eve on the Irish general election in February 2011, the European Commission helpfully intervened to point out that the result would have absolutely no effect on the country’s IMF-EU bail-out conditions, imposed after the financial sector imploded and its enormous bad debts were transferred to the state. It could not be renegotiated as it was “between the EU and the Republic of Ireland, it's not an agreement between an institution and a particular government,” the Commission said.

The Irish government, it emerged last month, was strong-armed by European Commission into agreeing the 2010 bail-out in the first place, and also to accepting that ‘senior bondholders’ such as large banks, should not share any losses. The ex-General Secretary of the Irish government’s Finance Department, told an inquiry into the causes of the financial crisis in June that the European Commission applied enormous pressure through “misinformation” and “anonymous media briefings” so that Ireland swiftly agreed to the €85 billion IMF-EU bail-out.

All this was quite in keeping with the views expressed in May 2011 by now European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, that fiscal policy was “too important” for voters to have any say over, and should be determined in “dark, secret debates”.

But, you can say that, technically speaking, Eurozone institutions were not toppling governments, just telling them what to do.

Hang on a minute …

Portugal, April 2011

After months of Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates refusing to accept a bail-out, the European Central Bank (ECB) intervened for the sake of the banks (sorry Eurozone). In April 2011, Portuguese banks decided to stop buying government bonds if Lisbon did not seek a rescue. The head of the country’s banking association admitted that he had been given “clear instructions” from the ECB and Bank of Portugal to cut off the tap.

During the ensuing general election campaign, ECB and European Commission experts demanded that all parties sign an accord agreeing to the bail-out memorandum. Before the election, that is. “Let's not have a public dialogue every day,” said EU economy commissioner, Olli Rehn. Portugal has since been lauded by the London School of Economics for establishing consensus over implementing austerity. Well done.

Moving swiftly on …

Greece, November 2011

You could be forgiven for thinking the Eurozone’s current travails with Alexis Tsipras and co were the first time a Greek Prime Minister had thought of holding a referendum on bail-out conditions. But back in November 2011, Prime Minister Georges Papandreou (of the centre-left Pasok party, currently riding high at about 3% in the polls), announced a referendum on whether to remain in the euro and accept the then austerity measures being proposed. But before it could happen he was called in for a swift re-education session with Angela Merkel, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the ubiquitous Jean-Claude Juncker, then European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and the IMF’s Christine Lagarde. “We made Papandreou ... aware of the fact that his behavior is disloyal,” said Juncker.

But they didn’t stop there. In the words of the Financial Times journalist, Peter Spiegel: “Mr Barroso had called Mr Samaras, the Greek opposition leader, from his hotel before the meeting. He knew Mr Samaras was desperate to avoid the referendum. Mr Samaras told Mr Barroso he was now willing to sign on to a national unity government between his New Democracy party and Pasok – something he had assiduously avoided for months in the hopes he could secure the premiership on his own. Mr Barroso summoned his cabinet and other commission staff to his suite… to plot strategy. He decided he would not tell Mr Sarkozy or Ms Merkel of the conversation but according to people in the room, they began discussing names of possible technocrats to take over from Mr Papandreou in a national unity government. The first person to come to Mr Barroso’s lips was Lucas Papademos, the Greek economist who had left his post as vice-president of the ECB a year earlier. Within a week, Mr Papademos would have the job.”

Technocrats, engineered to take over from elected politicians, who’d have thought it?

Last but not least:

Italy, November 2011

Alright, this one involves Silvio Berlusconi, who you could say, deserved it, but the point still holds. If the EU could remove an obstructive right-wing politician, they would have no qualms about doing so in the case of a left-wing government - like Syriza.

According to a 2014 book by former US Treasury secretary, Timothy Geitner, he was approached by EU officials in November 2011 with a plan to overthrow Berlusconi. The idea was that the US would refuse to back IMF loans to Italy as long as Berlusconi remained in power. Geitner didn’t oblige but the plotting didn’t stop there.

According Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, Italy’s former member on the European Central Banks’s executive board, the EU decided to remove Berlusconi and replace him with former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, because he started threatening in private meetings to ditch the euro and bring back Italy’s former currency, the Lira.

What did definitely happen was that the interest rate on Italian government bonds rocketed in the autumn of 2011 and Berlusconi resigned on 9 November. He was replaced by Monti, who announced an austerity programme and the interest rate miraculously plummeted.

Greece, 2015?

The difference now is that the current Greek government is not prepared to accept ‘dark, secret debates’ or hotel room coups and won’t go quietly into the night. With a ‘no’ vote in Sunday’s referendum, Angela Merkel’s guiding philosophy of ‘market conforming democracy’ is threatening to turn into, heaven forfend, market non-conforming democracy.

And they are really, really asking for it …

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