Has It Been 20 Years?

the anniversary of my first published text

Twenty years ago this summer, right around now, I got my very first text published. I was 21.

“What Is Democracy?” is a short pamphlet that takes on the claim that democracy is a system of governance that guarantees its citizens freedom and participation. Chapter by chapter, I test that claim by laying out how a participatory system that is oriented towards freedom would respond if serious oppressions or inequalities, or controversial social proposals, were brought to public attention.

I then use historical examples from the US and other democracies to disprove this claim and show that the only model that fits the available evidence is that democracy is just another oppressive form of government, but one that offers the ruling class with innovative methods for covering up the systemic nature of their exploitive, oppressive practices, for disarming their subjects, giving false hope, and gaining popular complicity in maintaining the oppressive structure.

It was exciting moment, getting that box in the mail, opening up, and seeing my copies (10% of the print run, I dutifully spread them to the four winds). I had been on the high school literary magazine and gotten some pretty grim poetry published, and after I got out of prison in early 2003 my best friend from high school got my short article, “The Function of Prison,” published in their university paper. But this was the first time I’d sent something I’d written to a publisher run by a complete stranger, and then been accepted and printed!

It was an interesting time. With acts of eco-sabotage multiplying around the world, and governments and corporations laying the rhetorical and legal groundwork for the coming Green Scare, as I was writing the text I remember wondering how the coming repression would play out in our own scene, what sort of precautions we should take, if anyone I knew would get arrested (whether scapegoated or caught for something), if I would be going back to prison.

Granted a pamphlet with a print run of a few hundred is a limited resource, but it was exciting to see that we had the tools to spread our radical, urgent critiques.

The publisher was See Sharp Press, run by Chaz Bufe in Tucson. I just checked and he’s still going, which is impressive, given that he started See Sharp in 1984. It looks like they’re not taking new submissions and now they only publish pamphlets online. As a long time distroer, I can testify that over the past years, fewer and fewer people grab zines or pamphlets, like something should either look good on a bookshelf, or stick to a readable length (375 characters?)

What a long road it’s been since then. Within the next year, I would self-publish a big old zine with my closest friend in Harrisonburg, “World Behind Bars: The Expansion of the American Prison Sell,” based on a workshop that we’d put together to spread critical perspectives of prison in our circles and at local universities. And then I wrote and self-published my first book, How Nonviolence Protects the State. And a year later I got arrested in Barcelona and ended up spending the next 16 years over there…

(Incidentally, a demented Maoist later took over the website and imprint a friend and I were using for self-publishing, in what I can only interpret as a particularly bizarre form of obsessive cyberstalking, given that he also created a fake blog in my name… Maoists, am I right?)

Going back and reading old writing, it always feels embarrassing how clunky your past self was, overly confident in a narrative voice not quite yet found… With this text, I’m glad that at the least, I think the basic argument is still sound, and it’s just about seeing the institution for what it is.

Though extremely dated, it also feels incredibly timely in a way. These are times when so many people are arguing that one political party or the other present an existential threat, when both are trying to kill as many people as they can get away with… or urging people to support the UN’s climate framework before it’s too late, even though the apocalypse has already started and the climate framework actually isn’t designed to stop or significantly slow global warming, it’s designed to ensure continued economic growth (and it’s been so disastrous, a decade or two from now it might even fail at that in a massive way).

This late in the game, it’s so frustrating to see people still trying to reform a tool without seeing the exact purpose it was created for, whether that’s the climate framework or democratic government.

So say it loud, say it proud: democracy is a militaristic system of government that innovates new methods of social control, that was founded the first time by elites whose power came from slavery and commercial empires, and founded the second time by elites whose power came from chattel slavery, commercial empires, and modern colonialism. It has never been anything else. It has never belonged to us, so talking about “reclaiming it” is either naïve or dishonest.

Eventually, I’ll publish the book I have on the subject, that I’ve been working on for a decade and already have a hundred page of notes for… For now, in all honesty, I’m not going to recommend this first text of mine, and besides, it’s out of print.

But if you want to read more about the futility of reforming capitalism or trusting in the mainstream climate framework, try The Solutions Are Already Here.

And until next time, take care of yourselves.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-what-is-democracy

https://seesharppress.com/about.html