My very first encounter with a large-scale rally, as an active participant, was in December 2009. We were about 100,000 people that had gathered in Copenhagen to demonstrate and draw attention to the urgency of political-ecological issues, so obviously ignored by the governors of our democratic nation-states; we wanted more people to act as if our world(s) mattered. At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference—the Copenhagen Summit—international cooperation again proved unable to deal with the severe threat of environmental degradation. In the shadow of that intense presence of global governance , I became introduced to ungovernable resistance making, enacted right in the midst of apparent powerlessness.
A few blocks down the march road, I saw police break into the demonstration, hindering both the way forward and the way back . A certain segment of the rally, about 1000 individuals, had deliberately been isolated since we apparently represented, as the police recurrently told us, “the problematic part of the demo.” Perhaps that was not incorrect. Some of us were, indeed, masked and dressed in black, confirming an iconic imagery of anarchist troublemakers; some of us would, for definite, affiliate with that enduring anarchist tradition. And as we were sitting there, hour after hour, in temporary (and even, as it later turned out, illegal) confinement, people began chanting, cunningly, the very characteristic call-and-response of the late Alterglobalization Movement :
“Show me what democracy looks like!”
“This is what democracy looks like!”
Echoing between the house walls, in the twilight of mid-winter Copenhagen, the chant delivered a rather cynical subtitle to that confined part of the rally. As a sarcastic reference to the leitmotif associated with the acclaimed “non-problematic” part of the demo, the democracy chant asserted, when coming from our restrained black block, an anarchist critique of radical democracy.
The aim of this book is to trace the genealogy of that critical thought, to expose and theorize a social conflict embedded in democracy itself: the antagonism between the democratic government and those it tries to govern. The starting point for this exploration derives not from the self-identified anarchist milieu, but from the collective experiences of democratic conflict in Husby, a Stockholm city district, located at Sweden’s socio-political periphery. This empirical study shows what democracy looks like, in a place like Husby, displaying how political activities are ignored, and suppressed, by municipal and state governors. We will see how democratic conflict has been historically intense in Husby, culminating in May 2013 in what become known as the Husby Riots , triggering one of the fiercest police interventions in Swedish history.
The Husby case, then, exposes the conflictual nature of democracy, a conception that is central to ongoing scholarly theorizations of—and searches for—a radical democracy. Our inquiry into democratic conflict is accordingly guided by the radical-democratic theory of Jacques Rancière , exposing an antagonism between the democratic life of the Husby community, and the ignorant and repressive response from the democratic state. Yet these collective experiences also exemplify resistance: Husby residents continue to find ways to be ungovernable. This book digs deeper into this resistance phenomenon—the experiential critique of the democratic state—by interrogating a political ideology targeting that very antagonism. In the historical tradition of anarchism, then, we will trace critical approaches to democracy in relation to anarchy. As we shall see, this ideological tradition defies not only the social divide between governors and governed, but also nurtures a critique of even the most radical democracy. By connecting that anarchist critique—what I call The Impossible Argument—to the scholarly exploration of democratic conflict, this book adds critical theory to the search for a deeper—that is, radical—form of democracy.
The search for radical democracy is, of course, closely linked to the discursive centrality of the concept itself: actors all across the political spectrum situate their projects in a democratic framework. We recognize anti-democratic and non-democratic as pejorative ascriptions, reserved for political adversaries. For the modern nation-state it appears rather difficult—if not impossible—for it not to present itself as democratic. The same could certainly be said for non-governmental organizations, social movements, and other agents of the so-called civil society. For state and non-state actors alike, appropriating democracy, to attain legitimacy, appears to be at the very center stage of political action.
Since the concept became a subject for the scholarly community, most notably through the writings of political economist Joseph Schumpeter, it has been particularly defined through the procedural nature of political representation .1 Though widely debated throughout the twentieth century, democratic theory produced in the Global North typically denotes democracy as a certain political condition,2 which, as Robert Dahl declares, is particularly apt for large-scale nation-states.3 Democratic theory has therefore been, as it were, the tonality of potential, of promising opportunity, indexed by a vigorous civil society.4 But after the collapse of state socialism in the early 1990s, left-leaning academic scholars soon began theoretical explorations to answer, in the words of David Trend, democracy’s crisis of meaning.5
A notable development in that reconceptualization is this notion of radical democracy, construed as a path beyond both liberal and communitarian forms of democracy.6 The prefix “radical” denotes the etymological root of democracy, people’s rule, and therefore evokes, as Chantal Mouffe puts it, “extension and deepening of the democratic revolution initiated two hundred years ago …, a radicalization of the modern democratic tradition.”7 The notion of advancing already existing democratic tendencies, for instance through progressive participatory practices, represents one particular branch of contemporary democratic theory.8 But the connotations of radical democracy also encompass a pluralist feature, a theory of difference, heterogeneity, and social antagonism.
This pluralist nature of democracy answers to the theory of deliberative democracy, most famously promoted by Jürgen Habermas, which presumes, or at least aims at, overall political consensus.9 The universalist feature of this democratic theory is severely challenged in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s now epic book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which asserts political dissensus, or pluralism, as a key pillar of radical democracy.10 For some time, the academic literature has been defined by the divide between the Habermasian and this post-Marxist interpretation,11 though it is probably fair to say that most scholars now associate radical democracy with a contentious societal process.12
At the same time, the search for radical democracy is also catalyzed by an unblemished political inclination, the age-old dream of envisioning “the people” as actually taking over the state apparatus. Douglas Lummis contends that “radical democracy is more frightening even than anarchism [as it] does not abolish power, it says that the people should have it.”13 Indeed loyal to the Marxian tradition, though in the vein of reasserting Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe declare that the “socialist strategy” ultimately crystallizes into “the people” taking over state power; the demos becomes reinvoked, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, as “the central protagonist of politics.”14 This elevation of left-populism, continuously endorsed by Chantal Mouffe, quite naturally “presupposes allegiance to the political ...