Ontology:Q37,78
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the culture by the people 1-1-1
Core characteristics[edit]
- item type
- S2 (pronounced C) 1-1-1
- pronounced [P] label [string] (L)
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the culture by the people 1-1-1
- pronounced [P] alias (mis) [string]
- Democracy is the people overcoming the Spanishness Office
- Freedom is government of the culture by the people
- democulturocracy proposition (note: proper noun)
- democulture proposition (main proposition)
- statist anarculture proposition
- associated Term [Lexeme]
- field, scope, or group [Item]
- sub-case of [Item]
- --
- case of [Item]
- Existentialist-Structuralist proposition
- anarchist proposition
- super-case of [Item]
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the person by the people 1-1-1
Components[edit]
- model combines claims
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Appearances[edit]
- appears in work [Item]
- Anti-Oedipus
- context
- arguing position
Use in thesis portals[edit]
- appears in work [Item]
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Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the person by the people 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the culture by the people 1-1-1
- forming from [Item]
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the culture by the people 1-1-1
- ??
- pronounced [S2] Democracy is government of the person by the people 1-1-1
Usage notes[edit]
This claim is somewhat complicated to unpack, because it is much more often implied in works than it is outright stated. This is the proposition that a "free society" is produced through the people taking control of culture and in particular everything about culture which could potentially be harmful or oppressive. This is not to say that this is the only step to producing a "free society" — only that it is considered a necessary step toward that goal. This claim is found within many different and sometimes-conflicting ideologies, including Western Marxism, anarchism, queer theory, and general anti-racist or "postcolonial" theories of single countries. It may be fair to say that although nobody generally takes the position outright, the further a theory is from Marxism, the closer it will come to actually claiming that taking control of culture is the only step to achieve a "free society".
What makes this proposition complicated is that there is no particular obvious way for the people to "control culture". Wherever this claim comes up, it seems to imply the existence of some kind of "Spanishness office" where a handful of appointed bureaucrats decide on absolutely everything about being Spanish, and everything about how culture is practiced across a whole society would change if only a handful of anarchists or Western Marxists could overrun the designated Spanishness Office and redesign the Spanishness Office to be democractic. But of course, there is no particular localized Spanishness Office, or Whiteness Office, or Confederateness Office. When it comes to the actual way that people determine and express culture, there may be anywhere from one social structure per 5,000 people to one per 50 people to 300 million per 300 million people where everyday culture is made. Some particularly constructed forms of culture such as news stations or book publishing companies may constitute a group of 100 to 1,000 people which could conceivably be taken over, but the problem is that there will still be thousands and thousands of them in existence; there could be so many social structures to take over that when every person who belongs to a minority is placed into a target social structure there could still be more untouched target social structures remaining than minority people. Worse, there may be many cases where people are genuinely deciding on bad culture as individuals, or as households, without interference from any outside social structure or "institution". If Joe the Tory genuinely doesn't like gay couples after he met two of them, but nobody else told him to have that belief and he simply chose it himself as a calculation he thought was the best choice to improve his individual survival and well-being, there is not really any physical method for anarchists or Western Marxists to infiltrate his head and declare themselves the rightful possessors of his mind. There could easily be 50 million of these people per 300 million people, who have decided on bad cultural values all by themselves but are fully numerous enough to stage their own anti-anarchist protest if they all ended up filling up the same city. And if this were the case, any attempt to change all of society by "filling up institutions" would become dubious.
The notion of attempting to prevent action by groups of people united into a corrupt culture through filling up institutions is found in Gramsci's prison notebooks. Gramsci describes philosophy as a battle acting on "the popular mentality", which he suggests to be a synonym of "culture". He also says that for parties or educators to reach people everyone must deconstruct the process that creates "common sense" and "the social and cultural position of the masses" — which to any number of people outside Gramsci would also be synonyms of "the process of creating culture". [1] Thus, Gramsci frames the task of Marxist parties as the task of changing culture, this more or less applying to all individuals of all classes. What he likely intended by these statements was for Marxist parties to learn how to speak to regular people and integrate into culturally-sorted groups of regular people in order to organize workers into various structures which would make up a capable proletarian subpopulation and thus become a workers' movement — implied by his particular historical conditions and needs to be an intersectional workers' movement without different groups of workers erupting into racism. However, various groups of people have seemingly twisted Gramsci's words to mean that culture is something Western Marxists control and change in an active way rather than something they simply integrate into. This misunderstanding has facilitated abusing Gramscian texts to promote non-Marxist ideologies. Should LGBT+ or anti-racist movements show up only thinking about removing demographic prejudice from one university or one workplace, it becomes easy for them to appropriate Gramscian rhetoric to claim that Gramsci wrote his texts to give Liberal-republican civil rights movements a way to change culture so LGBT+ people can win civil rights and go about their day without having to become Communists. Equally, should a swath of anarchists show up, they can appropriate Gramscian rhetoric to begin claiming that the only reason they haven't created anarchy is that they need to make use of Gramsci's methods to actively change culture — or alternatively, that they can use these methods to blend into society so that once inside society and able to speak through everyday culture they can then organize anarchists together to create anarchy.
In the end, the "Spanishness office" is a concept born from a country's plurality of different ideologies not realizing that they are distinct material objects with distinct progressions of future history they would each like to realize, but each of these separate ideological groups of people coming to believe that "culture" is the thing that somehow stands in their way. On the ground, culture is really just the action of all individual behavior producing patterns of group behavior. If culture is a static physical object, then culture is the socially-linked, bordered group of people forming an ethnicity or nationality or demographic identity. A united group of LGBT+ people is culture. A regional Trotskyist party is culture. A group of anarchists is culture. A tightly-linked congregation of White Southern Baptist Christians which hates Black people and is suspicious of Muslims is culture. This is where one of the greatest difficulties of realizing Gramscianism or Gramscian principles comes up. If it is the case that in the real world, a Trotskyist group or a bigoted church is culture, then what exactly does it mean to take the locus of generating culture and make it create culture better in order to empower movements? It more or less means invading another distinct demographic of people and taking over that demographic itself as another demographic. It means putting on the face of Southern Baptist Christianity and living as a demographic Southern Baptist Christian just to keep people from being Southern Baptist Christians while being racist. Depending on the target demographic, that might or might not make any sense. Can a Christian invade a Christian church? Of course. Can a lesbian art student invade an institution for art students? Probably. Can an anarchist invade a Trotskyist party, or a Trotskyist invade a Liberal-republican social-democratic party? This is more dubious. Any group which is actually based in ideology will naturally be more difficult for a person or group of another ideology to infiltrate. The critical thing to understand is that many groups of Tories or "fascists" are in fact based in ideology rather than demographic. Certain core values they contain such as being "strong enough" to pass an arbitrary literacy test or to drive a car to a polling place without need for public transit or to not need hormone treatment or to not defend protests about "criminals" are unbudgeable values that actually define group identity and whether people will be allowed to be in the group at all. These groups and any social structure which they create all naturally expel any group of people who would even want to change them, Communist or otherwise. This, in the end, actually makes Gramsci's original thesis questionable. For Gramsci to have even been correct, there would have to exist some group or structure of people which consents to people infiltrating it even when it asks bigoted people to change themselves because they are part of the group. But taking the United States as an example, it is doubtful there is a single structure with this description in the entire United States. The United States itself and its branches of government clearly do not count — as time has gone on, socially-linked groups of Tories have become enraged that the overall United States would have policies that force them to carry out any practices of another culture that is not "their" culture, including gay marriage and abortion. Whether they have strategically been told to hate these policies by people with other interests does not matter. The only thing that matters is that they find it entirely credible to be told these policies are "unamerican" and that they should hate them. As long as these are credible enemies, Tories will hate their enemies just because these are their enemies, if that happens to boost their own survival.
To solve the question of the Spanishness Office, we all need to make some time to ask ourselves a big-picture question which by itself is not immediately useful. Say there are two Marxist parties in an emerging Soviet Union, and somehow neither has power over the whole federation. Should Trotsky invade Stalin to realize Trotskyism, or Stalin invade Trotsky to realize mainstream Marxism-Leninism — is either of these things ethically permissible? In this scenario, Trotskyists only want to construct Trotskyism over the whole federation, and they threaten to tear apart Stalin's party only in service of creating Trotskyism. Meanwhile, Stalin's party only wants to construct mainstream Marxism-Leninism over the whole federation, and threatens to imprison Trotskyists only for the purposes of protecting mainstream Marxism-Leninism from attacks on its people and government. Both parties are afraid that if either of them gains power the country will deteriorate, not because either ideology is in some way "extreme" versus the other — the two ideologies contain very similar content — but specifically because the other ideology is not building particular material plans that one or the other wants to see happen. The plans of the two ideologies may contradict each other so that there is no possible compromise which allows doing both of them. There is no "asking the people" because both ideologies strongly claim to represent the people, enough that some outside countries believe Trotskyism represents all the people of the federation and some outside countries believe mainstream Marxism-Leninism represents all the people of the federation. Both parties have supporters. Both parties want to determine themselves. Trotsky's party and all its supporters do not want their people to be determined by Stalin's party, and Stalin's party and all its supporters do not want to be determined by Trotsky's party. What should each party do to create the best outcome? Clearly the best outcome involves both parties operating together to realize they both believe in Marxism and it's best if they find some way to live in peace rather than destroying each other — as well as each other's chances of surviving a world where they are both surrounded by giant axes of Liberal-republican countries that also want to destroy them. But this problem is complicated by the fact they are separate entities which cannot necessarily predict each other, and who each benefit from banding together with their own party to destroy the other party. How can they even realize that they are poised to destroy each other and come to consciousness of the existence of multiple parallel Marxisms when from inside each of their own vantage points they are invariably the only true Marxism that exists while the other one is just a bunch of revisionist errors and not even good for anything? (You are not allowed to answer this question with "a flood of Gramscians or anarchists should sneak into each party and fix them with Western Marxism". Even though this scenario is hypothetical and diverges from real history, it takes place before 1925 and Gramscianism hasn't been invented yet.)
The situation of Liberal-republican parties in the United States is similar to this idealized Soviet Union. Republicans are a demographic. Democrats are a demographic. The parties are elite circles that only some people fit into or have hope of becoming "proper" representatives for, but they each seek self-determination, and as such they get angry when overarching processes try to make them accept anything that doesn't match their actual set of policies they wish to realize over the country. Both of them believe in Liberal-republicanism, and their publicly-stated positions are almost the same, but within the tiny wedge where they do not have the same positions they get absolutely heated that anybody would pass a different policy over the top of them and make them live a different way. This is because the actual bodies of individuals who fill up the demographics are in conflict. Republicans and non-Republicans walk by each other and bristle at outward signs they encountered the other one because the other one might ultimately operate in concert with all the other people in that group to bring down an oppressive law on them — or at least one they could never endure. Neither set of individuals actually wants to live in the same country sharing the same central government with the other set of individuals. At the same time, they are forced to pretend to be the same country by every well-educated expert journalist, Liberal-republican author, and representative that in daily life has no actual stake in what kind of animosity and violence that will create between everyone. Any actual appearance of Communism will prompt the same hostile reaction they have toward each other, because Communism is a new demographic. Mainstream Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism are all demographics as much as they are ideologies. Anarchism, too, is a demographic if it ever gets discovered. When Tories discover one person anywhere having a belief which is distinctly anarchist and not confusable for Toryism, they get furious, and immediately start painting everyone who is not neatly a standard Republican or Democrat as literally a hardcore anarchist. One anarchist existing means that 50,000 social-democrats are all Bakuninists who would burn down a building. One Communist existing and printing boring theoretical magazines means 50,000 social-democrats are bank robbers or guerilla armies. The threat of a new demographic being created terrifies both demographics so badly that they both equally seek to eliminate the new demographics. LGBT+ rights can be granted only when people neatly characterize exactly what people are in the demographic, and never leave the borders ambiguous. Whenever anything is less immediately possible to categorize as a separate static nation of people allied with the main two static nations of people, it becomes a threat.
(unfinished)