Democracy is at odds with corporate hierarchies – a truly devastating insight.

Power in Democracy is dispersed – corporate power is concentrated!

Yes, sadly, today, we have to accept the limits of popular democracy.

Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Fu… https://youtu.be/LGc8DMHMyi8?si=aub1xuS0vIPYeII3 via @YouTube

Sheldon Wolin 1922 – 2015

“Democracy in the late modern world cannot be a complete political system,” he wrote in a 1994 essay, “and given the awesome potentialities of modern forms of power, and what they exact of the social and natural world, it ought not to be hoped or striven for.”

“The left cannot play politics on terms set by mass media and mass organization,” he told The New York Times in 1982. “A more decentralized and local politics, scattered and diffuse, is the first best hope.”

He eventually took the view that corporate power and political power were becoming so intertwined in the USA, and the public so apathetic, that genuine participatory democracy was at best a remote possibility, expressed in rare “fugitive” expressions of the popular will.

In a word, the USA – and the West, in general – has invented a new political form, “inverted totalitarianism,“ in which economic rather than political power is dangerously dominant.

 

It looks as though Sheldon was right all along: true democracy is only seen and expressed in rare and spontaneous moments of popular participation and resistance to power – witness parts of West Africa today. What’s more, our democracy is by now totally dominated by the corporate agenda and, what I call the dark arts of ‘media entertainment’.

Remember, it only takes an ‘n’ to turn ‘demo-cracy’ into a demoN! That’s ‘cracy’!!!!!

Given Wolin’s depiction of potential “inverted totalitarianism” in the here and now, what does he suggest “the people” – referred to as “the demos” from the Greek – do? Mmmm!

What can ‘they’ do? What can ‘we’ do? Remember, the ‘demos’ only needs that ‘n’ to become demons … demonic! Maybe that is a risk that has to be taken. Maybe? Really?