Liberal Democracy

Liberal democracy is always a democracy-to-come. Not because of what Derrida calls its immanent contradictions between "demos" and "kratos"—the inclusive "people" and the exclusive "power" (Rogues, Stanford, 2005, 22–24) that prevent it from ever becoming one with itself. Democracy will always be an "absent present" (Derrida's canon) because of what Engels, in his "Progress of Social Reform on the Continent" (Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 3, 393), calls its "untruth"—a "theology"—that obscures the class contradictions of wage labor as a discursive aporia:

The "to-come" not only points to the promise but suggests that democracy will never exist, in the sense of a present existence: not because it will be deferred but because it will always remain aporetic in its structure—a force without force, incalculable singularity and calculable equality, commensurability and incommensurability, heteronomy and autonomy, indivisible sovereignty and divisible or shared sovereignty, an empty name, a despairing messianicity or a messianicity in despair, and so on (Rogues 86).

Democracy is the theopolitics of capitalism the task of which is to produce a class truce between the owners and workers, to displace the freedom from necessity with political freedom ("sham liberty," as Engels calls it).

The rights of the "individual," the "equality" of "all," the "freedom of choice," the "right to own private property" as "natural" rights,….— these and other foundational claims of democracy are, in reality, the "appearance of liberty and therefore the reality of servitude." They are the appearance of liberty because they are the extension of the domain of the market.

The "individual" at the center of democracy is the primary agent of the market and their "freedom" is their "freedom of choice." Freedom of choice, of course, is based on the notion of the autonomy of consciousness and thus a "rational" chooser in the market. But market relations distribute what is already produced. What is already produced in market relations is a surplus value produced at the point of production. "Inequality" from the standpoint of democracy, in other words, is a matter of distribution of what is already produced by relations of exploitation.

There can be no equality, however, where the exploitation of labor exists. There is no political freedom in the relations of economic unfreedom. There can only be different ways of distributing the exploited surplus value of others. Political parties within democracy are in this regard parties that fight over the distribution of the surplus to maintain the explotation of labor by capital.

This is why democracy advocates ethical and legal equality of all, the equality of genders, races, sexualities, dis/abilities, ages—but never economic equality. Democracy is never a questioning of the right to own private property (a right that depends on the lack of ownership of others). It is the political outcome of private property relations by which the displacement of production by distribution is normalized, so as to make exploitation existential—a "fact" in modernity and its forms of production.

Capital has made democratic rights—i.e., the right of all to equality before the law—natural human rights since capital’s early modern fight against the remnants of feudal property relations, which restrained capital accumulation of surplus value and its corresponding political relations. On the (humanist) terms of democracy, "The natural liberty of man," as Locke writes, "is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule" (The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Hackett, 1980, 17). The market in which sellers and buyers of labor power meet, in other words, represents the overcoming of the historical need for external, "extra-economic force."

But the absence of extra-economic force depends on the presence of economic force: the "silent compulsion of economic relations"—relations in which the conditions of labor are concentrated in the hands of one class in the shape of capital, while the majority have nothing to sell but their labor-power—that "sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, Penguin, 1976, 899). That is, the worker’s "dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them" (899).

This is the economic content concealed in Derrida’s theology of "a force without force" (Rogues 86). The force that forces without forcing is what Le Chapelier, the French voice of the bourgeoisie, more openly referred to as "that state of absolute dependence which results from the lack of the necessaries of life, and which is almost a state of slavery" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, 904).

Democracy makes the economic force of capital's laws of production "natural" so as to represent its "immanence"—which appears in the writings of Deleuze and Negri as the immanence of being itself—as the furthest horizon of rights beyond which humanity can never develop.

But "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society" (Critique of Gotha Program, Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 24, 87). Only once the "enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished […] can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!" (87).

Democracy supplants the objective end of human bondage from class rule with the illusion of self-sovereignty. Self-sovereignty is the ideological horizon within which the worker is taught to forget their actual "slavery" (Engels's word) to capital and instead look "upon the requirements of" capitalism as the "self-evident laws of nature" (Marx, Capital vol. 1, 899).

The role of Derrida’s double writing is to undo "essence"—as in the economic essence of bourgeois democracy—to keep the focus on appearances (freedom of and in the market) as both always a "goal" and always reconciled to absence, its deferral. In his subtle idioms that make his theology seem "nuanced" and "realistic," the (post)humanist Derrida, unlike the humanist Locke, teaches that a fully realized freedom (of the market) is not only impossible but unethical, which in effect makes the limits of freedom of the market the ground of ethics itself. Which is to say that ethics, like democracy, is a "hypocrisy," an "untruth."

"[D]emocracy, as well as every other form of government, must ultimately break to pieces," Engels writes, because "hypocrisy cannot subsist, the contradiction hidden in it must come out; we must have either a regular slavery — that is, an undisguised despotism, or real liberty, and real equality — that is, Communism" (Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 3, 393). The use of extra-economic force (i.e., state violence) is the "untruth" (hypocrisy) of democracy breaking to pieces upon the truth that it is the dictatorship of capital over labor.