The US and China’s Mutually Codependent Conflict over the Meaning of Democracy
Last week in Alaska, talks were held between high level representatives of the US and Chinese governments. The first of their kind since the Democratic Party took control of the United States in January, these conversations were, to say the least, a bit tense. A bit of tension does go a long way in those circles, however, because both countries, and the systems they use, threaten the continued existence of organized humanity on our planet. These competing powers uniquely contribute to the twin existential crises that we confront as a species — environmental destruction and world war. I argue that their relationship to each other is, at its heart, mutually codependent. That is to say, that they rely on the parasitic aspects present in the opposing system to justify maintaining their own dangerous, and deeply entrenched, patterns.
One of the core conflicts at hand is over the meaning of the word democracy. Most in the West consider the situation to be far simpler — their perception is of a binary contest between autocracy, represented by China, and democracy, represented by the US. On the other side of the world, however, the Chinese and those within their sphere of influence appear to view the Chinese government as more effectively democratic than that of the United States. For them it is framed as a fight between well-organized democracy, represented by China, and oligarchic chaos, represented by the United States.
We in the United States are sometimes unaware of the fact that the Chinese vote, but vote they do — for representatives, as well as to pass or to change laws. The caveat is that their options are constrained by the desires of the ruling Communist Party, and by the considerable limitations of the decision-making system that the government employs, a system which is called democratic centralism.
Those are some pretty serious caveats, but if we look at the other cop in this good cop, bad cop showdown (where one side’s good cop is the other’s bad cop, and vice versa), we see a vastly different pattern that, despite its differences, produces eerily similar outcomes. The United States uses a decision-making structure called representative democracy, which has its own built-in limitations, not the least of which is the tendency to produce stalemates between unpleasant binary options. This, and other systemic limitations, are duly exploited by those who tend to make the actual decisions in the American system, those with the money necessary to tip the government’s scale towards one or another outcome, to bind strategically-placed politicians into certain agreements and compromises.
Last week’s intergovernmental negotiations, which were held at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, saw the delegations from both countries bring their own laundry list of offenses which the other has committed, in what appears to be twin attempts to prove to the world (and perhaps, to themselves) the superiority of their own conception of democracy. I personally remain unconvinced. What keeps me unconvinced, of either argument, is that both of these raps sheets are highly accurate, and, in fact, are both somewhat understated. That is to say that both countries, both systems, have done horrible, reprehensible things in our world.
They have brought much beauty and joy, as well, as they make our current reality possible. But these gifts carry costs the likes of which I fear our species may not be able to afford much more of. The United States has dropped the A-bomb, spied on and assassinated its own citizens, and did commit war crimes, escaping prosecution by force of pure intimidation. China did massacre its own citizens in Tiananmen square, has put Uighur muslims in concentration camps, and did put into place some of the most terrifying mechanisms of public surveillance and control currently imaginable.
Both countries contribute vastly to environmental destruction all across our world and both have nuclear armaments that could destroy organized life as we know it, should the wrong person or idea occupy their halls of power for too long, or should the conflict between them boil over beyond the somewhat hollow bellicosity in which they currently engage. These risks are real, and the need to overcome them cannot be overstated.
I do not think that these outcomes are the fault of one or another of these two systems, as is commonly espoused by experts on the matter, but rather that these past, present and potential tragedies can be seen as emergent properties of a single structural fault, which is shared by both decision-making rulesets. This fault is at its heart the confusion of words with deeds, and the consistent result of this confusion is plutocracy. Plutocracy — the rule by a small, rich elite, and its effect, is imminently palpable in both societies.
Democratic centralism emerged in Russia some time around 1917 within a group that was attempting to wage a democratic revolution on the behalf of a huge population of diverse Russian workers and peasants. This group, which grew to become the famous (and infamous) Bolshevik Party, appear to have wanted to institute a fully democratic government that would control not only ordinary government functions (tax collection, military upkeep, protection of property), but those that the capitalist market ordinarily performed, as well (the widespread allocation of funds and necessities). This, I believe, they tried in good faith because of the terrible outcomes of the previous Tsarist system, as well as the relatively new and brutal global rule of capitalism. Fair enough.
Creating such a thing — a democratic revolutionary government that could care for all of its people in detail, proved to be a terribly (some might say impossibly) difficult task. Lenin, Stalin and their associated revolutionaries ran into a complication along the way that is experienced by anyone trying to make decisions together in a group, anywhere in the world. The more people there are, the longer the meeting takes, and the more likely that even if a majority agrees upon something, the minority that disagrees may be able to sabotage the whole operation, by stalling or undermining the process after the agreement is reached.
This is a real problem. I’ve seen it emerge and be addressed in various ways in anarchist collectives, general assemblies, union meetings, government hearings, street negotiations and private businesses. What I see in those different settings is very uniform across the board. Stalling almost always benefits the richer and more powerful in the situation, those who, at that point in the Russian revolution, are exactly the people Lenin and Stalin did not want their processes to benefit. Also, let’s keep in mind that these structures were being operated during a war, adding another layer to the perceived need for speed.
So they made a compromise with democracy, to suit the situation. A compromise named democratic centralism. Democratic centralism says that once a majority (commonly sixty percent) of the group agrees upon something, the motion is passed and dissent, blocking or stalling are no longer allowed. The new rule just becomes part of the precedent, and is not to be challenged. Much Chinese Communist Party behavior goes from being nearly incomprehensible to downright reasonable when this ruleset, and its perceived benefits, are taken as a given.
When I think about it this way I can see why those who use this system think it is democratic. Some may even consider among its major flaws that it is too democratic and can have a tendency to empower a majority (as in the Han Chinese) to oppress a minority (the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, for example).
I do not agree with this assessment, that the Chinese Government is too democratic. Nor do I agree with it’s across-the-Pacific twin — that the United States itself suffers from an excess of democracy. Most of our government’s issues, like those of the Chinese Communist Party, can be easily traced to an excess of plutocracy — the perennial monkey on the shoulder of the state.
The United States has the exact sort of system that Lenin was attempting to improve upon with the creation of democratic centralism, but it is also a system that protects itself from what the Chinese might see as a form of particularly chaotic (and consequently, dysfunctional) democracy. It’s separation of powers and checks and balances effectively prevent either of the two main competing interests (the market and the government itself, by my estimate, represented by the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively) from gaining enough power to fully overcome the other. In the process of preventing either power from excessively dominating the system, we have created what is effectively a centuries-long stalemate between factions of the upper class, only to be broken in cases where legislation is favored by deep enough pockets to tip the scale. This does help prevent possible atrocities that could be committed via the “tyranny of the mob” and many minority groups are comparably well defended in the United States, especially if we use China as our basis of comparison — a dubious prospect, as I have noted earlier.
So, by way of representative democracy’s unwillingness to deal with the problem of stalemates and stalling, mixed with the capitalist market’s ability to step into the resulting power vacuum, both entering into an interdependent global competition with democratic centralism’s overly momentous and homogenizing so-called “solution” to these deep rule-behind-rules riddles, which are inherent to the creation of such rulesets — through all this, we find ourselves at our present moment in history, a moment which is precarious, to say the least.
My question, after all this, is what if there were another way to answer this riddle? What if there’s a way that works?
Come on back if you like and read next week’s essay, where I begin to explore two approaches to answering this most key question, both utilizing (with varying effectivity) the powers of money-mouth continuity and simple mathematics.
WES PLZ // 03.24.2021
