Kristin Ross: Democracy for Sale
“All today’s ‘advanced industrial democracies’ are in fact oligarchic democracies: they represent the victory of a dynamic oligarchy, a world government centered on great wealth and the worship of wealth, but capable of building consensus and legitimacy through elections that, by limiting the range of options, effectively protect the ascendancy of the middle and upper classes.”—Kristin Ross “Democracy for Sale”
In Democracy in What State? , Kristin Ross considers the ways in which many so-called democracies fail to live up democratic principles. Looking at recent elections in the EU as well as Rimbaud’s views on democracy, Ross asks herself “Can I call myself a democrat? (For excerpts from other contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Ranciere).
Can I call myself a democrat?
It’s certainly not enough to criticize, in an incrementalist way, the “failed” or “insufficient” democracy of this or that law, party, or state. To do so is to remain enclosed in a system that is perfectly happy to critique, say, the blatant seizure of electoral procedures by a Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, but remains powerless before the same process when it is accomplished by economic phenomena that respect democratic rituals—like the exactions of the IMF, for example. In fact, the understanding of democracy as having to do with elections or with the will of the majority is a very recent historical understanding. What is called representational democracy—in our own time said to consist of free elections, free political parties, a free press, and, of course, the free market—is in fact an oligarchic form: representation by a minority granted the title of stewards or trustees of common affairs. All today’s “advanced industrial democracies” are in fact oligarchic democracies: they represent the victory of a dynamic oligarchy, a world government centered on great wealth and the worship of wealth, but capable of building consensus and legitimacy through elections that, by limiting the range of options, effectively protect the ascendancy of the middle and upper classes.
