The Recuperation of Popular Power

or: Margaret writes some Theory

I’ve been writing about Flock cameras, and the fight against Automated License Plate Readers more generally, for a few weeks now on my history podcast. I get to tell the story about how it’s all stolen cars all the way down: the first ALPR-assisted arrest was of a car thief in London, like thirty years ago, and “catching car thieves” is the main justification trotted out by the police chiefs who are bummed that no one wants to live in a surveillance state; the first American databases of ALPR data were built by repo men about twenty years ago, while they drove around looking for cars to legally steal from the poorest people in our society; and the funding for ALPRs, before the era of massive federal grants, largely came from the money that local police made through “civil asset forfeiture” AKA the stuff that the cops stole from people, like cars.

So ALPRs exist “to catch car thieves” but got their start largely through legal car theft. Fun stuff.

ALPRs are wildly unpopular right now, and Flock cameras are being destroyed at a remarkable rate by vandals across the country and across the political spectrum. And the very same politicians who oversaw their funding and installation are now decrying the systems they helped install. (DeSantis in Florida says Flock cameras are “out of control,” while Abbott in Texas has canceled state grants for the cameras.)

By and large, cities that are canceling their contracts with Flock are just moving to its competitor, Axon. Because what our political system is designed to do is to recuperate popular outrage into mild reforms that do not fundamentally challenge the status quo.

So let’s talk about that.

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You’ve probably heard the economic maxim “labor creates all wealth.” The idea behind it is simple: it’s people making stuff and doing things that generates economic value. Bosses don’t build airplanes, mechanics do. Bricklayers build mansions, not billionaires.

It’s also true that all political power flows upwards from the people. This is self-evident in a democracy: politicians are only invested in power by the people who vote for them. But it’s true in every political system, and occasionally people drag out a guillotine and remind their rulers where power resides.

People want a lot of different things. One axis you can divide people on is the classic left/right axis, with socialists (in the broadest sense, including communists and anarchists and other folks) on the left, then progressives, then centrists, then conservatives, then fascists. (There are other ways to map politics, but this will do for now). The people themselves, popular power, it might look like this:

I left the centrists out because I ran out of room. They’ll get over it.

Our power flows upwards, and in a state democratic society like ours, that power then empowers political parties who are entrusted to enact our desires. The parties serve as a mediating force, a moderating force. We can call this higher tier of power “political power” in this context.

There is an argument for this system, of course. Wildly disparate ideas and extremes are balanced out. The rough edges are sanded off, and we’re more able to live with one another without fighting over everything. Maybe centrists have a point after all.

But this mediation also means that the power of the people is blunted and the ability for society to make dramatic changes is removed. As a result, foundational problems in the system are left intact (so issues like “being an ostensibly democratic nation built on genocide and slavery” are hard to address in a meaningful way). Furthermore, crises that require a fundamental shift in ethics and economics are impossible to respond to quickly. The existing system seems incapable of meaningfully addressing climate change on a timeline that is acceptable, for example.

Populist power expresses itself in one of two ways: direct or indirect. Direct action bypasses mediating forces like the political system and involves simply addressing issues directly, changing things directly, and then challenging people to accept that change. Indirect action is action that attempts to pressure the existing political system into changing.

You can go fill the potholes on the street yourself today or you can pressure the city into doing it eventually. There are advantages to both. Direct action gets it done. The indirect method, if it works at all, might mean that specialists will do it better than you could have, and there’s even a chance you’ll be able to get the city to pay more attention to potholes on a systemic level. That would involve changing the status quo, though, so probably not.

Political parties, for their part, can fall into two categories. One is the one we’re used to in the United States: parties can be recuperative. Recuperation, in this framework, is the process by which the political system redirects popular power into political power that ultimately leaves the status quo unthreatened or only marginally changed.

They can also be revolutionary parties, committed to restructuring power and to breaking from the status quo. This isn’t inherently good either—see the modern Republican party.

But of course, when all parties in a political system are recuperative parties, only direct action can accomplish large scale change.

For most of my life, that’s been the political situation in the United States. There were two political parties, both of which were recuperative parties. Each was the other’s loyal opposition, each committed to maintaining the status quo with only incremental shifts.

The democrats were a centrist party, while the republicans were center-right.

In the old way of doing things, most popular power was recuperated into political power, but the Left and the Right edges of the spectrum were liable to seek greater change than what the status quo would allow and would therefore rely on direct action as well as indirect action. You could imagine it like this:

These graphics aren’t great but I have a broken finger so they’re the best I’m going to do.

When Mussolini invented fascism, his specific purpose was to take the revolutionary strategy and ethos of the Left and apply it to rightwing politics. That is, he developed the idea of the rightwing revolutionary party, a party that would serve to focus rightwing populist power into a radical transformation of the status quo.

Over the course of the past ten years, the Republican party has transformed itself from a recuperative party to a revolutionary party. Since it’s a rightwing revolutionary party, that means it is fascistic. But it is still a mediating force. It is not the direct will of the people. A revolutionary party is a structure of organizing populist power into revolutionary political power. So some populist demands will still be recuperated into the status quo—rightwing populist opposition to Flock is likely to be recuperated and will have no meaningful, lasting impact on the surveillance state.

The political situation, then, looks more like this now:

The fact that right wing populist power is now filtered through the state can be seen all over the place. The Proud Boys used to be a direct action group, but now they serve the state and mostly by having become ICE agents. Meanwhile. conservative popular outrage about “things changing” and “life getting worse” are funneled into xenophobia and transphobia, away from things like “billionaire pedophiles are running the world,” an issue that is dearer to the heart of everyone across the political spectrum.

The Left has not had a political party (recuperative or revolutionary) to call its own in this country for at least a hundred years (although the democrats under FDR came the closest). Most likely, this has to do with the structure of our democracy, which is largely seen as primitive by other Western democracies—we are structurally built in a way that promotes a two-party system.

The Democrat Socialists of America have made a bold proposal recently: what if the Democrats actually represented progressives and leftists, instead of just taking their votes and their dollars? It’s a worthwhile experiment and I wish them luck with it, though history does suggest that democratic socialists are more likely to act as a recuperative force than a revolutionary one. Though New York City sure has done a lot of work filling in pot holes now that it has a DSA mayor.

Left-wing revolutionary parties predate fascism, of course. Mussolini started off a Communist. But its possible that revolutionary parties (that is, systems that mediate and redirect popular power into political power) are inherently prone to authoritarianism. Certainly most of the examples we have of right and left wing revolutionary parties taking power has led to authoritarian excesses.

It might be better if revolutionary populist energy is not mediated into a party at all. The anarchist’s approach has always been one that rejects the transformation of popular power into political power, at least within the current state framework.

But “populism” as a phrase has its own baggage and negative history. It seems likely that we need structure in our society to prevent the worst excesses of human nature (and encourage the best aspects of the same). We need structures, just cooperative ones. We need political power that isn’t political power. We need revolutionary parties that don’t mediate the power of the people, but instead simply organize the power of the people.

We’ve seen examples of this, across history and across the world. We’ve seen truly democratic structures practiced by some of the indigenous inhabitants of North America, creating vast confederacies designed to respect diversity but promote social cohesion. We’ve seen the people of Chiapas apply their traditional anti-authoritarian values to temper a revolutionary communist army into what we now know as the Zapatistas. We’ve seen the Kurds develop and live in Democratic Confederalism. We’ve seen the anarcho-syndicalists of Revolutionary Spain feed millions of people while holding back a fascist coup.

It can be done.

But in the meantime, don’t let either party convince you that you can just swap out Flock Safety cameras for Axon cameras.

The better way to influence political power is to force it to catch up with you. Don’t beg at the table for scraps. Feed yourselves and others, and force the parties to want in on what you’re already doing.

As Malatesta put it so perfectly, a hundred years ago:

“We will never recognize the institutions; we will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one tears occupied territory from the enemy’s grasp in order to go on advancing.”