Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

ibid.
359), or to bring them “into the core of the political system [to] 
receive formal consideration” (
ibid.
381). While civil society can play a role in shaping 
discourse and influencing formalized decision-making, “in no way does it occupy 
the position
of 
a macrosubject supposed to bring society as a whole under control and simultaneously act for it” 
(
ibid
. 372). Therefore, people can try to influence formal procedures of government, but they 
cannot 
act
in the sense of making decisions independently of those procedures and carrying them 
out. Citizens can speak, but not act; they can influence, but not decide.
Dean and the Need for Left Politics Beyond Democracy
For Jodi Dean (2009, 22), the deliberative ideal has become a “democracy that talks 
without responding.” Perversely, the abundance (to use Dean’s term) of messages and 
communications today actually renders the Habermasian ideal of reaching understanding moot.
The non-stop stream of information and opinion makes us all feel like we are participating, like 
our voices are being heard. However, “[u]nder communicative capitalism…messages are 

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110 
contributions to circulating content – not actions to elicit responses…A contribution need not be 
understood; it only need be repeated, reproduced, forwarded” (
ibid.
26-27). That anyone with a 
computer or a phone can share their opinion with the world, does not a deliberative democracy 
make. More important, though, than Dean’s criticism of deliberative politics in the context of 
communicative capitalism, though, is her identification of a far more pervasive problem in 
democratic theory: the identification of democracy with deliberation. Whether one has in mind 
orderly reason-giving or more contentious communicative acts, the result of seeing democracy as 
primarily discursive is “the reduction of politics to communicative acts, to speaking and saying 
and exposing and explaining, a reduction key to democracy conceived in terms of discussion and 
deliberation…[D]oing is reduce to talking, to contributing to the media environment” (
ibid.
32).
For Dean, this reduction of democracy “speaking and saying and exposing and 
explaining” has serious consequences for left politics. Believing democracy to be synonymous 
with communication, she argues that activists have placed too much emphasis on the wrong 
activities. Discussion, education and consciousness-raising – important as they may be – are 
not
equivalent to democracy, nor are they sufficient to make political change. 
That people know what corporations and governments are doing doesn’t mean 
they can change them. That they are aware of a problem, have an opinion, and 
make their opinion known doesn’t mean they have developed the infrastructure 
necessary to write new legislation, garner support for it, and get it passed, much 
less carry out a revolution (
ibid.
32).
Instead, left politics is reduced to MoveOn style “clicktivism,” wherein “all one has to do is 
contribute – an opinion, a signature, or money” (
ibid.
46).
On my reading, Dean argues that rather than “speaking truth to (or about) power”, the left 
needs to (re)learn how to actually exercise power.
15
Indeed, what is missing from this conception 
15
More specifically, Dean suggests that the left should focus on “occupying military bases, taking over the 
government, or abandoning the Democratic Party and doing the steady, persistent, organizational work or 

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111 
of democracy – and, more particularly, from this brand of left politics – is an understanding of 
power, both in regards to the prevalence of existing power asymmetries and in regards to social 
movement strategies that generate collective power. The popular conception of democracy as 
centered on communicative acts between equals has reduced the capacity of the left to “take a 
stand” for something and use collective power against the institutionalized power of state and 
capital. Instead, much of the left is stuck in the “nonposition” (