LET THEM EAT WORDS

From “Confronting the Crisis: The Writings of Paul Piccone” [Telos Press, 2008]::

“…..the loss of a traditional grounding [of society] has brought about a veritable Orwellian predicament. Within the context of today’s conformist political theory, modern representative “democracy” can hardly be regarded as democratic anymore; contemporary “federalism’ has nothing to do with federations or the preservation of cultural and political autonomy: the concept of “law” has lost all normative import; degraded to the level of arbitrary and expedient “regulations,” it no longer warrants unquestioned compliance.

Even more recent concepts, such as “the nation” or “the people,” have lost all substantive meaning and have become crude instrumentalizations meant to legitimate the status quo. In the hands of Panglossian ideologists bent on pleasing the powers that be by demonstrating the “universal validity” and therefore the “unquestionable truth” of whatever happens to be the case, these affirmative concepts neutralize and deactivate the normative content they originally embodied.

Thus, “the nation” no longer exhibits any axiological dimensions which designate a particular, self-determining, and geographically circumscribed citizenry sharing a common history and common goals. Similarly, “the people” has ceased to have any specificity or qualifications; it designates only an amorphous mass of physical bodies whose only redeemable attribute is that it can be counted and instrumentalized to legitimate “democratically” whatever mediatized agenda it can be manipulated into supporting.

No wonder, then, that the very notion of “community,” degraded to a positivistic description of “really existing communities,” no longer connotes anything held “in common” other than the fact that some people happen to be in physical contiguity at some particular time.

The reduction of the "people" to an abstract quantifiable mass "democratically" approving or disapproving whatever pre-constituted agenda is placed before them or voting for candidates and parties that operate within a political sphere with no organic roots in active public life is not democracy, but manipulation. ... [T]his kind of [Orwellian] mass democracy often contradicts another fundamental democratic principal: self-determination.

The solution to this [contradiction] rests with a 'federalism' allowing maximum possible autonomy to the constituent elements [communities; regions] whose fundamental units will have to be sufficiently small to permit direct democratic participation. Only within such a context can organic participation in public life define the participants as "a people" determining their own destiny and, in the process, establishing a common identity."