Why anti-politics may be pro-community (II)

Bialik - I tried replying directly to your comment this evening, but my comment exceeded the maximum allowed by Blogger, so here it is as a follow-up post:

I think I'm still feeling my way on this subject. There are clearly conceptual imprecisions in the post and I'm afraid I haven't been as clear-headed as I could've been. But you yourself equate politics with party politics, or, at least, you seem to want to run them together - and I think where the thought processes behind what I've said might be leading us is to a point where party politics does not need to be the only form of politics that guarantees freedom from totalitarian states and tyrannies.

A lot of what has been going wrong for quite a while now is entirely due to logistical reasons where representation needs to be fairly observed and generally isn't. How we communicate our wishes, how frequently we can make them known, what those wishes really are, how we define and unreasonably choose to massage them ... all these things are logistically rooted (though they do of course have political consequences) - and all are a result of, as well as result in, the public being too many steps away from the decisions.

That is to say, even if we did want to act more democratically, more representatively, more accurately, our systems of communicating such opinion would not be up to the job.

I'm not talking about electronic polling systems or referendums galore here. I suppose I feel we should really consider the idea of "consultation" a dirty word. I am wary of using such concepts as they seem to me to be completely inappropriate to a real democratic socialism, if what we are looking for is to allow both a true and valid expression as well as an accurate representation of a voting public's opinion. Firstly, it's evident that the hierarchy implicit in the widespread usage by modern politicians of ideas relating to "voter/member/client consultation" clearly indicates who operates the levers and who is operated on. Secondly, we shouldn't even be talking about a voting public but rather a participatory public.

Our objective should be to create a state where each individual is able to easily represent themselves, and where communities can reach the necessary decisions they need to take periodically on the basis of such representations. That is to say, we should aim to weld the concepts of representation and expression so that they become one.

This is where Web 2.0 comes in. What Web 2.0 is now is but a scratching of the surface. Where Web 2.0 will be in five years' time, no one can know for sure. But what we do know is that communication is key to making life, and by extension politics, work - and never was communication as cheap, emancipating and widely available as today. I've blogged recently on the virtues of mobile Internet, of holding a computer in the palm of one's hand, and as capitalism serves to drive down the cost of communication until - for the first time in history - it becomes a right and a good as basic as that of water, food and housing, so capitalism will either have to re-engineer its virtues substantially to maintain its hold on us or Web 2.0 will destroy it from within.

And, perhaps, quite surprisingly, in the end in a mostly peaceable manner.

When we need only utility companies to engage in all those activities traditional politics has learned to feed off and sustain itself with - water, energy, food and now communication; in the future, education, continuous learning, the exchange of all kinds of discourses as goods and services - is when we will no longer need the kind of politicians we have had up to now - or, at least, not quite as much as we did.

A penultimate point. To come back to the title of the post, I do think it's fair to argue that to be pro-community in a Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing world is - quite inevitably and fundamentally - to be anti-politics and anti-politicians.

At least, to be anti-politics and anti-politicians as you seem to understand the concepts.

If I understand rightly, you feel that only party politics can guarantee any degree of freedom from tyranny and totalitarianism. Yet, Web 2.0 and everything that swirls around it, the freedom to create, to be a consumer-producer, to publish, be published and republish one's thoughts and feelings, to distribute to the four corners of the world (distribution is so important to lever true power), to print and film and share and remix, to engage in direct discourse with a planet which is full of people who inhabit an exactly similar hierarchy ... all of this leads us undeniably to one uncomfortable place for modern politics, modern politicians and both big and small governance of any kind - where the people can exchange goods and services without the intervention of money, the political structures that currently reign over us lose all purpose. Not only that - they lose all the resource which previously justified and allowed for their existence, all that income which allowed them to mean something; to declaim and exert their power over us and define what we meant and wanted.

In a way, capitalism and the invisible hand of the marketplace does seem to want - and be able - to win out over a planned economy. But perhaps what is really happening here is a plague on all our houses. Perhaps what is really happening here is that capitalism and its opponents, all of which have depended for so many centuries on making communication and knowledge goods with hefty price tags on them, will become spent forces in the face of this astonishingly seamless - and absolutely acquirable - set of tools we have suddenly been presented with; tools which allow us to engage in a discourse, that is to say, engage in both politics and labour of a most primary nature, with almost anyone and everyone we care to.

Finally, if we are truly pro-community, we simply cannot be in favour of the politics we currently look to and favour, just because we see it as the least worst alternative to totalitarianism and tyranny. There has to be a finer reason than that. Especially as many tyrannies currently coexist with our least worst scenarios.

Undoing, from within, the tyranny of capital over labour - and what's more, in a peaceable manner - is surely reason enough to continue, however inexactly and confusedly, with our pursuit of this line of thought.