We’re taught that a diet low in fat and high in fiber is supposed to be the nutritional path to good health. We’re also taught that regular “exercise” is the path to physical fitness. Both of these bits of conventional wisdom are falsehoods. We don’t need exercise, we need physical fun. And we don’t need oatmeal, we need healthy fats. Sound crazy?

Against Exercise

Exercise is what they give caged animals to do to prevent them from dying of depression. If you don’t live in a cage, you don’t need exercise. You need natural movement. You need to do what your body does instinctively. You need to play.

In all cultures, children instinctively learn to play in all different kinds of ways. They learn to walk, run, jump, throw, catch, crawl, climb, and wrestle. If they’re near water they also learn to swim. Like any other kind of animal, humans will instinctively learn to do physically impressive things if they are raised in their normal habitat. They don’t need to exercise if they’re simply doing what they’re adapted to do–moving naturally is their “exercise”.

You don’t see lions cross-training to chase down springbok. They learn to hunt by playing, and they acquire the fitness to hunt by hunting. But humans aren’t lions. We’re smarter. We’re also stupider.

Possibly more so than any other species, humans have transformed their environment to minimize energy expenditure. If you want the process of acquiring your food to be effortless, you can buy your food. You only need the strength and skill sufficient to move yourself over to the vending machine. This reduction of required effort satisfies our desire for efficiency and our desire to devote time to things other than survival. But it also neglects the ancient needs and drives that persist in a body adapted to more primitive conditions.»

Despite the modifications we’ve made to our environment and our way of life, our bodies need to move to keep functioning. Exercises have been designed to satisfy our bodies’ need for movement, but most people don’t like to exercise. We need an alternative. One alternative is to just start playing again.

Why Don’t We Play?

Sometimes we do play. We play when we have fun moving. If you like to dance, have sex or swim, you know what it feels like to have fun moving around. You know what it feels like to enjoy your body’s capabilities. Now imagine trying to engage in any of those activities while nauseated. Or, imagine trying to enjoy doing any of those things with a referee evaluating your performance. Not as fun, right? But these are the conditions that we now labor under when we try to play while eating unhealthy food or participate in competitive sports. In sports, we have to worry about losing, which is annoying. With our diet, we’re so used to feeling a little bit bloated, a little bit of heartburn, a little bit sluggish, that we don’t think about it. But, these are the symptoms of a diet that is making us sick. Of course, poor food quality is not the only problem–the other problem is that we’ve lost touch with our bodies and what they can do.

If you want to be active, you might first consider three options: hit the gym, join a yoga studio, or take up a competitive sport. There’s nothing wrong with these activities. If you do these things and like them, then great. But these activities have limitations that explain why a lot of people do none of them. Gym workouts are generally highly routinized and often purely cosmetic–you go to a gym to develop a modelesque body, not to have fun. You endure the gym, you do not laugh and have fun in the gym. For an alternative to the traditional gym...»

Yoga studios are places to discipline your body and relax. But, the exercises are not functional. Yoga is not practiced in the context of an application. Nor does it resemble any of the natural movements that children perform in play. For some of us, yoga is fun, but for most of us, yoga is not fun. If it is neither fun nor functional, a lot of people won’t want to do it.

Sports are generally competitive endeavors. You might have started to play a sport for fun, but the focus generally drifts toward victory. Where there are winners, there are also losers. Performance anxiety takes the fun out of sports. Some don’t care if they win or lose, some care a great deal. It’s no surprise that the competitive atmosphere turns a lot of people off.

Natural movement is not exercise, sports, or yoga. We can’t explain why people give up on natural movement by appealing to the same factors. So how is it that children stop engaging in natural movement?

Why Do We Stop Moving?

“Immobilization associated with a sedentary lifestyle, such as long hours of watching television, is chronic and can be severe. The stress response to immobilization induces inappropriate hypercoagulation, platelet hyperaggregation, and inflammation, which are all risk factors for several life-threatening conditions.” Charansonney & Després, Nature Reviews Cardiology May 2010

Two factors help explain why we stop moving. First, our economy (and thus our educational system) demands that we sit still–that we adopt a sedentary lifestyle. Sitting still is one of the first lessons that we are taught in the classroom and in the home. In the workplace, either you sit still or you perform exactly the movements that you are instructed to perform (e.g. waiting tables). We are trained to stop playing.

The second major factor that causes us to stop moving is our diet. The modern diet consists of foods that rob us of energy and turn our bodies against themselves. Processed sugar causes us to store fat, taxes our liver and makes us feel depressed, feeds cancers, raises bad cholesterol levels and contributes to diabetes. Grains and beans damage our intestines, induce allergic responses that go undiagnosed and cause our immune systems to attack our own tissues leading to arthritis and other problems.

How do we overcome the culture of competition and routine, and our diet of harmful foods?

Step 1: Find Your Fun: It is natural for us to walk, run, catch, throw, crawl, climb, practice self-defense, swim and dance. Thus it’s a good bet that if you look for activities that involve these kinds of movement that you’ll enjoy yourself. Be a tourist at martial arts schools, running clubs, and dance halls. Play catch or frisbee with a friend. Try climbing trees in the park or get a day-pass at a rock-climbing gym.

Step 2: Work on Skills Instead of Winning: who gives a shit if you can swim faster than the person next to you? Can you swim faster than you did yesterday? Could you save someone’s life with your swimming skills? Who cares if you have won a 5k? Can you sprint without injury? Learn to focus on refining the skills necessary to make your body capable. Victory is fleeting. Learning is never-ending. (And don’t forget to have fun!)

Step 3: Stop Trying to Teach Kids and Adults to Sit Still: (This is a cultural step.) Kids will get on your nerves with all of their hyper energy. But it’s probably a bad idea to try to teach them to sit still. Better to join them than fight them. For information on how to raise a kid without teaching him/her to be sedentary check out the Primal Family blog.

Step 4: Eat Good Food: Nutrition is a minefield.  Things to avoid: processed sugar (especially high fructose corn syrup) and the lectins found in grains and nuts. Things to eat in moderation: starchy foods. Things to pursue: Healthy Fats, Organic Fruits and Vegetables, 100% Grassfed Beef, Pastured Eggs. For info on snacks and meal planning, see: My Paleo Kitchen, Mark’s Daily Apple.

Step 5: Listen to Your Body’s Natural Read-Outs: Your body provides you with natural read-outs to help you know that something you are eating is damaging you. However, we have gotten so used to feeling like crap after eating that many of us are used to it. Thus, it’s a good idea to do trial eliminations of suspect foods from your diet to see if you feel any better or worse. Generally, you can notice food sensitivities after forgoing a type of food for 1-2 months. If reintroducing the food after that point makes you feel worse, then it was probably causing you harm before you gave it up. To do effective trial tests, you probably want to think in terms of the ingredients in what you’re eating (e.g. grains) rather than specific dishes (e.g. cake). There are at least four natural read-outs that your body gives you to let you know that you’re eating foods that are beating you up:

1. fluctuations in your energy levels
2. your level of digestive comfort (bloat, gassiness, acid stomach)
   
3. your moodiness
   
4. the comfort level in your joints (joint ache)

Pay attention to these variables when you experiment with your diet and you may learn a lot about the foods that do you good and the foods that do you wrong. Specific food sensitivity issues?» .

The bottom line is this: it’s bad for your body to sit still, but the motivation to move around depends on how you eat and whether you’ve got anything fun to do. Feeding yourself a diet low in carbohydrates and low in lectins will give you the fuel you need to be active. Finding your fun will make you excited to get moving.

A Classic Study in Institutions

In 1971, a Stanford psychology professor gathered twenty-four undergraduates for an experiment studying the psychology of prisoners and prison guards.  By the end of six days, the “Stanford Prison Experiment” had to be stopped because of the severe abuse and mental disturbances that arose in both the “prisoners” and the “guards.”  Guards became exceedingly cruel, despite not being allowed to physically injure prisoners, but figured out ways to cause suffering and humiliation to the prisoners anyway.  Prisoners, at first rebellious, became frightened and docile, accepting the abuse given by the guards.  But none of the people involved were beforehand found to be prone to this sort of behavior.  All subjects were selected as the most mentally and emotionally stable of the original pool of volunteers, and were assigned randomly to the roles of “prisoner” and “guard.”  The subjects» were acting out the roles and norms that inhere in the institution of prisons.  These were not evil or crazy people.  Rather, the evil came out of placing human beings in a collection of roles and norms – collections called institutions – to which human beings may be ill-suited.

It is typical of American political discussion to reduce political problems to the motives of particular persons in power, usually the person occupying the presidency, but also of various congresspersons.  Any attempt to range beyond such discussion, by identifying the system of class rule in American society, for example, is dismissed as a “conspiracy theory.”  This charge may have originated in the mass media, where it is often used to deter sensible debate (see this discussion here, for an example, where a journalist can’t understand that he’s not being accused of being a CIA agent).  While much political discourse in American politics has been taken over to the discussion of conspiracy theories, such as “9/11 was an inside job” theory, we are not discussing conspiracies here.  A conspiracy is a group of people acting in secret concert to achieve an end that is outside the norms of society (plenty of groups operate in secrecy, after all, but are part of the normal business of society, unfortunately).  Neither shall we play the political game of assigning all of our hopes and dreams to one powerful or influential person, and all of our nightmares to another.  We here at Philosophyhelmet are rational persons.  To that end, we seek problems and solutions to those problems not in persons but in the social institutions in which those persons act, and by which they are conditioned.

Social Institutions

Institutions are the regular patterns of behavior and interactions (and the built environment and infrastructure that house the interacting persons, and also shape their interactions).  Institutions are what allow us to form reasonable expectations about how other people acting within the same institution will behave, and what allow them to have similar expectations and predictions about us.  All of this allows us to cooperate in complex ways – kind of; not all institutions work very well.  Institutions outlive the actual, particular persons comprising them by the transmission of rules regarding behavior and interaction to newcomers to the institution.  Institutions reproduce themselves across generations of a single society in this way.  What counts as an institution may be as specific and official as the Presidency of the United States, or as broad as “marriage,” “capitalism,” “the state,” or “the nation.”

Rules are imposed by taking advantage of our motivations, either extrinsic or intrinsic.  Extrinsic motivations are motivations originating from outside of the individual, and usually take the form of rewards and punishments.  But institutions also take advantage of our intrinsic motivations, motivations that originate from within ourselves, from our own values and beliefs.  Marriage is an institution that relies on the intrinsic motivation to express our feelings to our partners by the cultivation of certain beliefs about romantic practices.  Wage-labor, on the other hand, relies on the extrinsic motivation of money to induce people to work at jobs that would be otherwise avoided.  But wage-labor is also assisted by intrinsic motivations that we usually think of as just good sense.  For example, the “work ethic” has persuaded most Americans to work long hours despite the great increase in productivity that would allow them to live well while working far fewer hours.  Meanwhile economic myths have caused people to eschew labor unions in large numbers (leading to stagnation in real wage growth), take on unsustainable debt in expectation of endless prosperity (leading to debt peonage), and to otherwise subordinate their interests to those of employers and creditors.

Social institutions are not “inanimate.”»   We are concerned with institutions precisely because the particular construction of an institution can have an effect on the way in which people behave.  Not only are institutions themselves composed of consistent behaviors, but institutions result in the overall alteration of human behavior in general.  For example, Marx contended that the growing prevalence of the market as a dominant institution in society resulted in the displacement of the traditional values of the society by commercial values.  Institutions transform each other over time by the conflict and complement of each institution’s norms to those of other institutions, and by the general transformation of the people within those institutions.

We can say that individuals are conditioned – given tendencies to act or think in a certain way – by the institutions in which they act.  We may experience ourselves as just who we are, but upon reflection we all know that our behaviors are determined by physical forces beyond our control.  Our experiences acting within institutions structures our expectations of behavior not just by other institutional actors, but people generally.  For example, an amusing discovery of social psychology is that students in college studying business or economics are less honest than most people, and expect other people to be less honest.  Perhaps business and economics studies attract persons who are naturally dishonest, but given the apparent pliability of the human mind, I doubt it.  This is probably a result of the institutional ideology – of the presumed selfishness of human beings – of the dominant business and economics profession.

Framing Problems in Terms of Institutions

Thus we can develop a useful conceptual structure for understanding the problems that confront us.  For example, Oakland and Bay Area Rapid Transit police gunned down another unarmed person and then lied, just a year after shooting unarmed Oscar Grant in the back of the head and then lying about it, despite being caught on camera.  We could chalk this up to “a few bad apples,” but then we consider all the other unarmed persons, mostly but not always African-American, killed for no good reason, and whose police murderers go unpunished.  We consider the police riots that occur during major international demonstrations, for example recently during the G20 meeting in Toronto, where police cavalry suddenly and without cause almost ran down a large number of people.  We consider the unholy number of “police brutality” videos on Youtube.  We consider police officers in schools tasering six-year olds.  And on and on.

Eventually we should conclude that the problem is not merely the individuals who become police officers.  There is just something wrong with “the police” in itself – there is something wrong with organizing people in such-and-such a way, with such-and-such a relation to society.  The problem is with the institution, not the people in the institution.  The people in the institution are merely acting out the roles and positions, rules and norms that are provided to them.  That’s not to say that there aren’t messed up people who become police officers.  And that’s not to say that there are not police officers who become messed up as a result of being a police officer – because they bear a certain institutional relationship to the rest of us.  Whatever the case, there’s a lot of getting messed up; you’d have to be to think that the things I’ve described above are remotely acceptable.  The solution is to alter the institution of the police.  Punish the guilty, to be sure, but only changing the institutionwill bring about lasting good outcomes.  An institution must be changed so that, first, its norms reflect the democratic norms that we seek in our institutions.  Second, that the institution successfully reproduces itself in the way that we want it to – that it does not become what we did not intend.  Third, the institution reliably produces the outcomes that we want to achieve.

The source of these institutional outcomes may be the interaction of the institutional norms with “human nature.”  Our institutions are not, after all, designed to produce bad outcomes by bad means.  But institutions do degenerate to produce bad norms and outcomes in regular and predictable ways.  People given absolute power over others develop a predictably bad relationship, as in the Stanford Prison Experiment.  One possibility for this predictability in institutional outcomes is that human beings are a certain way, given in our biology, and that human constitution is incompatible with certain ways of organizing institutions.  But I shall merely contend that we should focus on establishing free institutions, not trying to create institutions to accord with a nebulous notion of human nature.

But institutions may not change or die easily.  European feudal institutions like royalty, aristocracy, and established churches have lived on well beyond whatever purpose they once served.  We can call institutions that reproduce themselves beyond our need or even tolerance for them, pathological institutions.  The world is currently suffocating underneath a mountain of entrenched institutions whose particular beneficiaries would prefer to continue to reap the rewards of their institutional position rather than have a hand in crafting a society of free institutions.

“You Better Free Your Mind Instead”

Our institutions are mostly foisted upon us by the circumstances of history, but sometimes peoples may have the opportunity to create institutions from whole cloth.  Perhaps I have yet to give you, the reader, good reasons for believing that freedom ought to be the central principle of our social institutions.  But we needn’t quibble too much, for all the good things that people come out of the equality of effective freedom – justice, democracy, tolerance, personal development all that good stuff.

Despite what the Beatles claim» , living as a free person is not a choice that you can make as you like.  No matter what you do, you carry institutions around with in the very actions you perform.  Institutions are what comprise the patterns of our lives, and it’s the institutions that determine whether individuals have relationships that can be described as “free”.  Cause and effect are the reverse of what the Beatles sang – if you want to free your mind, you better change the institutions.

The social institutions of a free society are institutions that maintain the greatest equal liberty of persons in all spheres of life.  In undertaking collective tasks, this liberty is expressed as democratic equality, acted out by optimally deliberative interactions of the institutional actors.  That is, people cooperate as much as possible through reason-giving discussion instead of rewards and punishments.  Democratic institutions are also constructed so as to reproduce themselves as democratic institutions.  In other words, the roles and norms that comprise the institutions not only are themselves democratic, but also aim towards the continuation of its democratic roles and norms to the indefinite future.  Not only that, however, but institutions in a free society become themselves objects of human will – institutions become subject to transformation by the very people who live in them, within the constraints of democratic equality.  When we shape our institutions, rather than are shaped by them, we will actually have freed our minds.

Predecessors

A directly democratic element at the most fundamental base (the smallest unit above the family) of society is not a new idea.  The direct self-government of the people in their towns and cities is as old as ancient Athens, the panchayat village-system of India, or the medieval commune.  Of course, The New England states are to this day largely divided into townships governed by the annual assembly of all its citizens.  Thomas Jefferson attributed the energy and success of New England’s defiance of his embargo to the township» . New England continues to be administered today by townships, even though the townships have grown to sizes beyond the means of an effectively deliberative mass assembly.

The radical democrats of history have recognized that if electoral representation is to be effectively democratic, then representative democracy requires the existence of direct democracy at the base of society.  During the American, French, Russian and many other Revolutions, society became effectively governed by mass assemblies of ordinary persons.  The French and Russian revolutionaries inscribed such popular assemblies into their constitutions.

What is new is that these directly-democratic organs of Venezuelan neighborhoods have been adapted to the conditions of the greatly urbanized modern world.  The modern city has grown beyond the means of direct self-government without any reconsideration of its democratic structure.  New England townships are governed by a handful of residents who can actually manage to attend the meetings of the assembly.  Even if everyone in the township could make the journey to the church or hall where the assembly is held, there would be no place for them to stand or sit, or time for everyone who wanted to speak to speak.  The modern industrial city has outgrown the infrastructure of traditional mass deliberation that could govern municipalities.  The Venezuelan communal council reduces the scale of democracy to the urban or rural neighborhood, or the indigenous community.  The people become organized at the scale most directly meaningful to their needs, while being able to scale upwards by making connections with other popular organizations.

Structure of the Communal Council

Communal councils are composed of at least two hundred, and at most, four hundred families in urban areas.  In rural areas, owing to the greater dispersal of the population (one surmises), communal councils are composed of at least twenty, and at most, forty families; among Venezuela’s indigenous peoples, communal councils may be even smaller.  Neighborhood organizers are responsible for organizing at least 20% of the population of a self-defined territorial community.

Once registered with the state, the communal council is founded upon a citizens’ assembly of all those community members over the age of fifteen.  The assembly then forms committees dealing with the administration of any of the many subjects confronting the community.  Article 9 of the 2006 law establishing the form of communal councils specifically mentions “health, education, land management…, housing, social protection and social equality, popular economy, culture, security, communication and information, leisure and sports, food, technical guidance on water, technical guidance on energy and gas, services, and any other matter the community may decide useful to proceed with.”  Finally, each committee sends spokespersons to the executive committee.  Other committees include, by law, those for auditing and those for finance (formerly “communal banks”).  Each person may sit on only one of any committee at a time.  All work done for the communal council is volunteer labor – no one is paid.  This is sometimes offered as a criticism of the communal councils, for some baffling reason.

Uses of the Communal Council

Communal councils are becoming a major locus of community planning.  Popular organization of citizens allows them to throw their weight around.  The organized community is able to make demands of the state the mere voter for a representative is unable to make known.  Communal councils articulate common needs and develop projects that they can then acquire financing to enact.  The communal councils have many sources of money, including the states and municipalities in which they reside, the Chavez government, state-owned companies, et cetera.

The advantage of the communal councils is their capacity to formulate a common will and interest that can then be represented to other communal councils or organizations through delegation.  Delegates, unlike ordinary representatives, are tasked with being the spokespeople for the explicit will of the communal council.  Common delegations of communal councils are becoming the basis for social and economic organizations in Venezuela.  Communal councils have organized themselves, in some cities, into communes for the organization of specific public services by cooperative enterprises.  The stated goal of many radical Chavistas is to reform municipal governments into unions of communal councils as “commune-cities”.  The Torres municipality of northwestern Venezuela has replaced its traditional municipal government with an assembly of delegates from communal councils.  Most recently, the National Assembly created a “Federal Government Council,” composed of not only state-governors and city mayors, but also delegates of regional congresses of communal councils.  The ultimate aim is for the entire Venezuelan state to be subsumed by the “communal state,” in which all state organs are in some way founded upon the communal councils.  Communal councils, and other “councils of popular power” that may be founded in the future, are the cells of a future democratic society.

Once organized, a community has a power to make demands of society that no individual can make heard.  Individuals cannot hold public entities to account, but organizations can marshal the people, resources, and attention to effectively discipline wayward officials.  The organization of democracy at the base of society, where people actually are, will, if the momentum of democratic change is maintained, invert the relationships of power in society.  Then those we consider to be “at the top” really will be “public servants,” a phrase which at the moment seems pretty sarcastic.

One problem is that existing representative institutions do not actually serve us very well.  In Brazil, municipal governments and public resources were at the service of the wealthy and connected.  One such city was Porto Alegre, in the Brazilian state of Rio Sul de Grande.  In 1989, Porto Alegre elected Olivio Dutra, a founder of the Workers’ Party and bearer of a magnificent mustache, as mayor.  The Workers’ Party organized a system of “participatory budgeting,” so that the people of the city could determine where and how municipal resources were directed. Over the course of the 1990’s, the process was refined by several additions.

Olivio Dutra, feeling doubtful about your mustache

Each of the sixteen municipal districts of Porto Alegre would host an open assembly, which any local resident could attend, as well as municipal officers and administrators and representatives of community organizations.  In 1994, assemblies were added that addressed specific municipal issues, like traffic and public transit.  There are two meetings of each assembly every year.  The first meeting reviews the budget of the last year and informs citizens of what the municipal government requires in the budget.  The various assemblies then elect delegates.  Generally, we don’t think of a delegate as being anything other than a regular elected representative; for example, Virginia has a House of Delegates whose members have no more accountability than other representatives.  However, traditionally, delegates have been considered to be a special sort of representative that is entirely accountable to his or her electors.  Delegates may have an actual mandate, instructions from his or her electors to vote a certain way.  Delegates may in some cases simply be mouthpieces for his or her assembled electors.  Back in Porto Alegre, this is what participatory budgeting delegates are.   From the first assemblies to the next, delegates move back and forth from various delegate councils back to their districts.  Delegates are expected to walk their districts and meet with residents.  A second session of assemblies begins the finalization of the budget.  A Participatory Budget Council is formed of delegates from district- and issue- assemblies, the municipal workers’ union, the union of residential associations, and the municipal government.  The mayor has a veto on the budget proposed, and the Council can either amend the budget or override the veto with a two-thirds majority.  The final budget is sent to the state legislature so that the city can get their money.  Delegates then serve as the medium between district residents and the municipal administration, to ensure that the budget is being implemented.

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process of public administration, encompassing various democratic forms.  First, participatory budgeting is deliberative.  The process enjoins city residents to gather together and determine what the most pressing needs in their district are by mutual reason-giving.  They cannot engage in the horse-trading, log-rolling, back-scratching behaviors of elected representatives; whereas elected representatives have future votes to trade away, ordinary citizens have nothing to trade for the manner in which they vote and argue.  Each citizen cannot be assured that others will be around to reciprocate at future assemblies.  Thus, citizens will deliberate by reasons, rather than negotiate future rewards.

Participatory budgeting is also participatory, in that representatives are not alone deliberating, but rather citizens, associations, representatives, and delegates are all deliberating together, according to how they are affected.  There is mass, multifaceted deliberation, not simply the deliberations of representatives and bureaucrats.

Finally, participatory budgeting is corporative, or associative, in the sense that it involves the deliberations not only of citizens but of citizens organized into particular articulated interests.  The various assemblies, forums, and councils that meet in the course of the budgeting process develop and articulate the interests of citizens in different fashions.  The sorts of conclusions determined in a district assembly will be different than the conclusions of the assembly concerning, say, health and social welfare.  Those interest-formations are then represented by delegates on councils, including the Participatory Budgeting Council.  Contrast this with electing the US House of Representatives, where every representative is purportedly elected by people organized according to the same principle of “one person, one vote.”  And for a legislature, that is appropriate, because such a body should capture the equality of citizens.  But public administration is for the particular application of laws, and each application will have a different balance of affected interests, depending on the law applied.  In that case, associative principles of democracy would be appropriate for the participatory budgeting process.

Those are the principles of democracy that the participatory budgeting captures, but what are the mechanisms by which it operates?  The process is one of the articulation of interests, the circulation of information, and continuous accountability.  Particular interests are variously captured through the open assemblies in the various districts and regarding certain general issues.  Information is distributed through the election of delegates to various councils and forums, and these delegates return to add to the considerations of citizens and civic associations in their deliberative assemblies.  The final round brings it all together in a sufficiently precise budget plan for the next year that represents the collective will and interests of the people of the city.  The Participatory Budget Council ensures that the municipal government agrees to the final plan, and all the elements of the system can then determine whether the plan is being implemented.

Since 1988, participatory budgeting has spread to cities all over the world with the struggle of dedicated democratic activists.  In Brazil itself, the process has become popular enough that subsequent political parties less friendly to democracy than the Workers’ Party have pledged to retain participatory budgeting.  Municipal spending priorities are noticeably different after the adoption of participatory budgeting than before, focusing more on social services, and social indicators have improved.  However, the Brazilian government under the popular Lula de Silva has decided to continue repaying the debts owed to global loan sharks like the World Bank and the IMF.  This means that the government implements “austerity” measures – cuts in public services – for the sake of repaying the debt.  It’s a foolish move that generally reduces most countries to the basket cases that we see littered across the world, but Brazil has so far avoided this fate and is in the process of becoming a regional power.  In any case, Brazilians say that participatory budgeting has become “participatory austerity” as the federal and state governments reduce spending.  Regardless, participatory budgeting is a successful democratic institutional innovation upon which we might build further democratic structures.

You can find a thorough overview of Athenian democracy here, with all the primary resources you’d ever need, but I’ll give you the rundown.

A Very Brief History of Ancient Athens

Athenian democracy is thought to begin with the commissioning of Solon, in 594 BC, by the city’s oligarchs to save the city from its economic and political troubles.  The polis was awash with uncollectible debt among its lower classes, mostly in the form of the ancient Athenian version of mortgages.  That sounds familiar.  Apparently wiser than most leaders in history, Solon realized that this was a problem.  This great democratic experiment began with the annulment of debts and mortgages.  Solon also introduced the first democratic elements into the constitution, including right to trial by jury, an Assembly for all citizens, and the use of lotteries to fill offices.  Oligarchic elements remained, for example the officers called archons, the “Council of the Areopagus,” and property qualifications among the four classes codified by Solon, but these too were more open to the citizenry at large.  But Athens was still a class society, which is incompatible in the long-run with a viable democracy.  Thus by 546 the Constitution of Solon had fallen to the tyrant Pisistratus.  The tyranny was finally brought to an end in 510 by Cleisthenes, another populist aristocrat, who restored the democracy, probably to prevent the ascension of another aristocratic family over his own.  Cleisthenes reorganized the entirety of Athenian territory to break up traditional loyalties with artificial tribes and ‘demes’.  A subsequent reformer, Ephialtes, further opened magistracies and the Council of the Areopagus to popular participation.  More tyrannies and oligarchic ambitions followed the Periclean Age, in which Athens reached the height of its power and achievements.  Finally, Athenian democracy reached its maturity with the reforms of Demosthenes, until the city was finally conquered by the Macedonians in 338 BC.

The Instruments of Democracy

All citizens of the polis were entitled to come and participate in its famous Assembly. The collective citizenry itself was the seat of power in the city.  Every man was entitled to speak, but only the Council (“of 500,” more or less the executive of the Assembly) could introduce agendas to be discussed.  The Assembly is usually portrayed as being able to make any decision at the whim of the crowd, but Athens was governed under the rule of law.  It was, in fact, a punishable offense to propose the Assembly perform some action that was contrary to existing laws.  And, as with modern Anglo-American law, the courts could strike down illegal decrees.  However, until the introduction of the nomothetae, the distinction between law and executive decrees doesn’t seem to be clear, at least to us.  In the time of Demosthenes, a body of nomothetae (“legislators”), hundreds of citizens selected by lottery like jurors, was commissioned to compile the laws of Athens.  Soon such a commission was called for every law proposed in the Assembly, with each law debated before nomothetae as if the law itself were on trial.

The laws and decrees of the Assembly were executed by the Council of Five Hundred (originally Four Hundred) and about sixty commissions of ten magistrates each.  The Council itself had a rotating presidium of fifty men, with one of the ten tribes taking a turn for one of each month (on a lunar calendar).  That presidium itself had a president who sat for one day and one night.  Furthermore, the citizenry directly applied its laws in its participatory court system.  Unlike the small courts of the English tradition that we continue to enjoy, Athenian juries numbered in the hundreds.  Like the English tradition though, cases proceeded by ‘adversarial’ means, the word of the accused argued against the word of the accuser.  The Athenians passed sentence by a kind of barter, with each side proposing punishment, and letting the jury decide.  The “prosecutor” – not a public official but merely the accuser – could find himself fined if less than one-fifth of the jury found in his favor.  This was to keep citizens from bringing flimsy criminal charges against one another for personal gain.

All of these offices and juries were filled by lot, and the Athenians made the purpose of this clear.  Aristotle claimed that to be free was for all to rule all, and failing that, for each to rule and be ruled in turn. In other words, democracy achieves the freedom of each individual (free, male citizens) by the distribution of political power as widely as possible.  Democratic lottery breaks the “iron law of oligarchy” that prevails in organization, the general tendency of leaders to continue to be leaders long after their desirability has ended.  Lottery makes such retention impossible and the formation of ruling cliques within the government very unlikely.  If there are to be such cliques, they would be tenuous, temporary, and easily broken – and, indeed, in the conspiracies that would bubble up, this was the case.

Criticisms of Athenian Democracy

Such conspiratorial disruptions have been said ever since to be the hallmarks of democracy.  If we just take a look back at the little history I provided above, Athens clearly had a lot of ups and downs.  Just as clear are the causes of these disorders.  Athenian democracy, though exclusive to free men, nevertheless eventually included all free men, rich and poor.  And, of course, the poor were more numerous and passed laws in their favor, such as, the government paying for the poor to attend Assemblies.  When Aristotle and other anti-democratic philosophers put it like this – that the poor pass laws in their favor – it sounds unfair, doesn’t it?  Of course, the poor could do this because they were the majority.  Another way of putting the same proposition would be that the majority passed laws in the interests of the majority.  But Aristotle claimed, rightly, that the source of democratic instability was that the poor (the majority) would take the wealth of the rich for their own use (public use), which they often did.  Thus the rich would seek to establish oligarchies or tyrannies, which they often did.  So what is the real problem here – that the majority passes laws in the interests of the majority, or that the rich do not like to have their wealth taken for public use?  Regardless of which you choose, the source of democratic instability is class conflict. Thus, political philosophers from Aristotle to Madison have been seeking the institutional means to balance the classes.  Others, like Rousseau (or Madison in his later years), realize that the freedom of the individual is more important, and that social equality simply becomes a prerequisite for democratic liberty as well as stability.

The more modern concern with Athenian democracy is that it is not only exclusive of women and its slaves, but that it is necessarily exclusive of women and its slaves.  Athenian democracy could not have operated – men could not have left for Assemblies and juries, magistracies and councils – without the free labor of women and slaves to produce the material basis of the city – the things the city needed to persist.  It is undoubtedly true that democracies cannot exist without the existence of free time for its participants to exercise their political power.  But it is ancient societies that require the support of economic and gendered slavery; in modern society, the need for labor is mitigated for all people by the machine, potentially at least.  It is possible to cut the working day in half and maintain a standard of living in value equal to fifty years ago, leaving time for democratic activities.  In fact, I would say that such progressive shortening of the workday is necessary to expanding modern democratic practice.

Let us dispense with the usual objection that historical democracies were small, and people could meet easily.  No one is suggesting a resurrection of city-states.  We are suggesting that we examine the means by which we might transplant such principles to the modern state.  Such principles as mass jury courts, election by lot, plural executives, and widespread participatory responsibilities do not depend on the size of nations.  We ought to compare the relevant results of ancient democracy with the relevant results of modern (supposed) democracy.  The assumptions and principles of Athenian democracy present a stark contrast with the practice of the supposed democracy of the modern age.  Modern democracy owes more to the anti-democratic, class-conscious republican tradition exemplified by ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, and modern England and the United States.  Ancient Athens, on the other hand, exemplifies the institutions of actual democracy.

Myth 1: “The United States is a Democracy”

As established, the people of the United States lost the battle for democracy before the Revolutionary War was over.  The Senate is full of millionaires, serving decades in unchallengeable seats.  The Supreme Court is an office for the appointment of judicial toadies to life seats.  The Presidency is the seat of a pseudo-elective monarchy that has become more powerful than any absolutist European despot, with a vast labyrinthine bureaucracy of policy planners completely divorced from popular demand.  So where is the democracy?  The House of Representatives is the closest thing, but the Representatives are beholden to advancing the power of their own parties and bowing to the wishes of the highest bidder, not obeying the will of their constituents.

Americans content themselves with this arrangement by claiming that the United States is “a republic, not a democracy.”  But this mantra was never very meaningful in the first place.  The Founders never had any good idea what a “republic” was, except that it was not a democracy.  The most coherent definition of republicanism comes from Rousseau, who contrasted a republic with a tyranny.  The magistrates of a republic acted according to the law (which, for Rousseau, was only law if approved by the people directly), whereas the magistrates of a tyranny did not.  Thus, Americans cannot even content themselves with the belief that the United States is a republic of that kind, since its last president committed a variety of major state crimes, and its current president won’t enforce the law because then people might not like him.  Even if executive power had ever been a source of public power, it has by now been completely unmoored from the popular will.

Myth 2: “The Constitution is a Living Document”

We’ve all heard the old trope that “the Constitution is a living document.”  I’ve never heard this applied to any other document, and it doesn’t make much sense when I try to (“this cookbook is a living document”).  This is supposed to mean that the language of the Constitution can be understood according to the needs of the present generation.  Thus, we get the “right to privacy” out of the Fourth Amendment, for example.  I certainly agree that we require a right to privacy against one another, as there are so many so eager to violate the privacy of the individual.  Extracting that concept from the few sentences contained in the Fourth and perhaps Sixth Amendment is an amazing leap though.

The problem with this approach of course is that it can be used against the expansion of desirable rights and for the cause of authoritarianism.  Can you find the passage in the Constitution about the “unitary executive”?  You can’t, but it’s there, because the Constitution is a living document that says the President has any power he wants beyond the reach of law, even when the actual words of the document don’t say any such thing.

This whole nonsense arose from the establishment of the otherwise laudable federal programs of the New Deal and the subsequent liberal dominance following the Second World War.  Congress didn’t have the power to create any of those New Deal programs, unless the meaning of the words in the Constitution meant something other than what they said.  These semantic gymnastics all depend on the existence of friendly courts that will agree that the Constitution does say “free beer,” we just never noticed before.  When the courts are not so friendly, they say the Constitution says “torture is fine” and “no habeas corpus.”»   If you want the Constitution to say what you want it to say, you’re going to have to put the words in there.

Myth 3: Socialism and Communism

You see a lot of talk these days about how certain people are communists, fascists, and socialists, all at once.  Socialism, communism, and fascism are all different things, though.  Socialism and communism are special recipients of confusion, even by those who are being charitable towards them.  Hostile commentators still living the Cold War will talk about state power and control, oppression, and so forth, all very real things in the former Soviet bloc, but all irrelevant to the actual philosophy behind socialism and communism.  Those intellectually generous types might say that socialism and communism are all about advancing the common good, or value equality over liberty, or other nice glosses that try to match the soaring hopes of Marx for humanity with the police state morass on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  The secret was that the two things had nothing to do with each other except in the words used by the party ideologues to justify their injustice.

Socialism involves the transition towards ownership of land and capital “by society,” which may mean different things depending on how one understands the phrase “social ownership.”  For some socialists, it will mean the ownership of land and capital by the democratic state, so that the government would appoint the executive authority of public enterprises.  For most socialists, I think, state ownership is a means towards social ownership, not an end.  Most socialists conceive of social ownership as involving the workers of public enterprises being their own collective managers, electing their own administrators, enacting company policy themselves, and providing goods and services on the basis of human need, without needing to be motivated by maximum profit.  The government role here would vary according to particular socialist ideals, but would involve directing the general trajectory of the economy.  Particularly ‘light’ versions of socialism (“pinko”) may claim the mantle of socialism while not actually altering the property relations of society at all.  Instead, they content themselves with managing a bureaucratic welfare state, but this claim to socialism is rather dubious.  It’s just managed capitalism.  This path-of-least-resistance “socialism” dominated Western Europe for the second half of the twentieth century.

Socialism is of course bound up in the concept of communism.  Communism is generally speaking the common ownership of things, and this can include religious communism where people share absolutely everything.  However, I am certain that when we speak of communism, we are talking about the recent social philosophy originating with Karl Marx.  Marx argued for the possibility» of communism as developing out of capitalism as a result of the conflict of the owning class (capitalists or the bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).  The capitalist possesses power over the proletariat by virtue of the capitalists’ ownership of the means of production, the tools which the worker needs to produce the very means by which he or she survives.  The proletariat would organize against their exploitation and oppression and overthrow the bourgeois state and regime of private property.  The workers would create a new thoroughgoing democratic society, destroying the old means of bourgeois oppression – private property, the police, the military, the nation-state, the bureaucracy – and the state itself would come to an end as this universal democracy took hold generally.  This society of the “free and equal association of workers” would be communism, a world of perfect human freedom.  It was after Marx’s death that “socialism” came to mean the bridge between capitalism and communism.

I should note that in neither socialism nor communism are personal possessions socially owned – personal possessions remain personal» (this may not be true in religious communism and hippie communes).  I simply make this observation because of the widespread misconception that socialism and communism means not having anything of one’s own.

Also note that nothing said above can describe any of the so-called “Communist” nations (that is, nations governed by Communist Parties) of the twentieth century – all were to varying degrees authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchies that ridiculously attempted to plan every aspect of the economy.  Such nations were failures in establishing socialism or communism, and their relation to such political philosophies was mostly rhetorical.

Myth 4: Fascism

Fascism is an eruption of violent and authoritarian nationalism emerging across social classes in periods of general social distress in any particular society.  The problems of the society are claimed to be the cause of some element that is not a part of the nation.  This element may be either external to the nation, in a foreign enemy, or internal to the nation, in the form of groups that do not share our national values and beliefs.  Fascism is the attempt to conquer state power to enforce this vision of what constitutes The Nation from those elements that do not conform to the vision of proper nationality.

This usually comes out as an extensive list of enemies (in Nazism, biologically identifiable): Jews, Gypsies and other migrating or segregated peoples, homosexuals, communists and socialists, liberals and progressives, non-whites or non-Europeans, et cetera.  There may also be religious enemies – Spanish fascists were very Catholic, for example, and the modern European fascist has targeted a racialized conception of Muslims.  The list can get pretty long, and the more extravagant the story of the nation, the longer the list of those parts of society that do not conform to the story.  Fascism is, essentially, the organization of a society by the state into a vast lynch-mob.

The original fascism of Italy and Germany pursued economic “corporatism.”  This does not mean corporate as in corporation, but rather corporate in the more general sense of any association having a common body.  Parliaments supposedly representing citizens as equals were replaced with advisory assemblies of the representatives of associations, usually economic, and usually tiered.  By tiered, I mean that business associations were more important than labor unions, and the needs of business always won out over that of labor.  While the original fascist state intervened in the economy to produce growth, it did so at the direction of, and in service to, big business.  Business in turn provided the arms and other industrial services with which to fight and liquidate enemies of the state.  Corporatism is not necessarily fascist, and many postwar Western European nations formed corporative advisory councils of business associations and labor unions for the self-regulation of the economy.

The difference between fascism and socialism is fairly marked, so that the conflation of the two at the level of theory seems baffling.  The goal of socialism is, as Marx put it, “the reabsorption of the state by society”, or the redistribution of state power into the hands of the public.  The goal of fascism is the obverse, to quote Mussolini: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”  In other words, fascism is the absorption of society by the state, and a completely undemocratic state at that.  The conflation of socialism and fascism seems to emerge from identifying both as “totalitarian.” This is another term from Mussolini denoting the attempt to control every aspect of society by the state according to national values.  This was an illusion of course, but the term has survived to describe taxation and the postal service in the United States (but not the Department of Homeland Security).  The totalitarianism of fascism was a deliberate feature of its strange outlook.  The totalitarianism of the Soviet Union was a development of a bureaucratic oligarchy struggling to contain the adversities of war and famine, overbearing the ad hoc democratic institutions of a still-born revolutionary republic, and raising the rule of a single party to the level of philosophy.

Myth 5: “Our Debts Will Make Our Grandchildren Poorer”

The prosperity of the United States is not necessarily threatened by budget deficits and the national debt produced by covering those deficits.  The debt-burden is determined by the relation of debt to the gross domestic product (GDP, the sum of everything produced in the United States).  The United States may have a sky-high debt, but it also still has a sky-high GDP.  The current ratio is about 65% – federal debt is about 65% of GDP.  By comparison, the debt-to-GDP ratio of Japan is about 220%.  Our debt-burden is higher than usual, but actually not that great, especially considering the general economic decline.

We will be able to tell when the national debt becomes a problem.  If lenders begin to think that the national debt will not be repaid, they will begin to hold out for higher interest rates on the government bonds that hold the debt.  Lenders of money to the government will want the promise of a greater return in the future in exchange for the risk of holding bonds that may not be repaid, or otherwise worth less, in the future.  Thus, we can tell how threatening the debt is becoming by the going interest rates on government bonds.  Currently, the interest rate on such bonds is three percent.  This is low; there is nothing to worry about so far.  Well, about our public finances anyway – it’s not a good sign for the private economy in fact.

Budget deficits are actually required for continued economic growth in a modern economy that has hit a rough patch.  Investment and production follow consumption – if people can’t afford to buy things, then other people can’t afford to make things.  As a result of the popping housing bubble and the financial crash, the United States lost at least a trillion dollars worth of consumption.  If the economy is going to move again, then the government has to make up the loss.  The bank bailouts approach this level, but the banks aren’t going to start lending the money to a bunch of poor people, so that’s just $700 billion into a banker’s pocket (and they aren’t going to spend it into consumption, just more non-productive finance).  After subtracting all the tax breaks and other leakages from the “stimulus package,” we get something like $150 billion per year in public consumption.  This is a lot less than one trillion dollars.

That said, not all budget deficits are equal. The government can produce budget deficits by producing massive amounts of weapons of war and giving money to banks that don’t lend it out, or it can produce quality schools, universal high-quality health care provision, and enduring infrastructure.  During the Second World War, the government was able to produce a lasting prosperity by deficit-spending on the military.  Spending on the military created jobs and put factories into operation creating products that people would be able to afford because they had jobs.  After the War, despite the largest debt ever accumulated probably ever, prosperity continued as military spending continued, because the military could continue to provide new jobs, new orders for new products, funding innovations in universities that would then find their way into consumer products.  This spending gave us interstate highways, computers and the internet, and space exploration.  And, since the United States was enormously richer as a result of this deficit-spending, the national debt became significantly less burdensome.  The growth in the GDP outpaced the growth of the national debt, and the debt-burden became smaller, as a paradoxical result of deficit-spending and borrowing.

But eventually military spending exhausted wealth- and job-creation and technical innovation.  Investments in the military begin to get used in the pointless destruction of nations oversees – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and instead of public investment improving the life of the nation, it flows out of the country to build the outposts of imperialism (750 foreign US bases at last count).  In the middle of the century, budget deficits caused by military spending provided domestic benefits to make the nation richer, but now the projection of imperial power overseas expends the wealth of the nation, creating debt without providing the means by which it can be repaid.  This is of course beside the moral point of the wholesale butcher and conquest of non-combatants that the money is going to pay for.  Whether budget deficits make us richer or poorer in the future depends on what they are used for.  If deficit-spending is used for improving the built environment and human well-being, the wealth that such spending produces will make the debt taken to finance such projects easily repayable.  If the money is spent on imperialism, then debt repayment will indeed be impoverishing.

This is a sample declaration of rights that includes all the minimum of rights that ought to be presumed by democratic peoples today.  The document is extensive, because the list of rights and liberties denied by the United States to its citizens is extensive.  The extent of our explicit rights and duties are derived from the means by which human freedom – our sole, original right – encounters the changing conditions of specific societies.  The social union has to account for changes in, say, the technological basis of the society that it unites.  What I’m saying is, we have to put “no killer robots” in our constitutions.  That’s the world we live in.

Language found in the Declaration has been taken from many sources, primarily the many international conventions on human rights, other national constitutions, and existing laws expanding constitutional rights and liberties.  The section on “The Rights of Victims of Crime,” for example, is taken from existing “victims’ rights” legislation found in many US state constitutions.  Also, the material concerning law enforcement has been inspired by the work of conservative Jon Roland, of the Constitution Society.  Finally, I have used the phrase “Public Power” as a stand-in for the totality of various governments in the Union, whether federal, state, or local.  All of these governments have the responsibility for executing these rights, so I used a term that would not distinguish between them.

History is not about the past, but about the present.  People who talk about the United States being “a republic, not a democracy” may be correct, but they also want you to be disempowered.  Reclaiming our understanding of American political origins will allow us to reconceive the American political project today by understanding the path not taken.  And when we see why the path was not taken, we will see that it was not for any good reason, and in fact was for many bad reasons.  By understanding that the path we have followed was not the only one available to us, we can understand how we might achieve democracy in America today.

Oh those Founders.  I would wager that half of all contemporary political writing has some reference to The Founders.  The picture we have of the authoring of the United States Constitution is one of wise Founders crafting an enduring document.  We remember James Madison, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton for the Federalist Papers, a propaganda piece in favor of the Constitution that they had been so influential in drafting.  We don’t remember that these men were largely elitist, with pretensions to aristocracy and hostility to democracy.  They and other members of the Philadelphia Convention stepped in to stem the tide of the democratic forces that had been overtaking the American Revolution following the capitulation of the British Empire.  This sort of period in any revolution would come to be known as a “Thermidorian Reaction.”

A Thermidor, or Thermidorian Reaction, is the passage in a revolution from the dominance of popular democratic forces to the dominance of a new elite who seek to preserve the power they have gained from participating in the revolution.  The phrase derives from the violent reaction against the leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins» .  The French revolutionaries adopted a new “metric” calendar, the last summer month being “Thermidor.”  Because the purge of the radical Jacobins occurred in that month, the period of reaction by conservative forces within any revolution is usually called a Thermidor, or a Thermidorian Reaction.  The reactionary forces are usually composed of those who have achieved political and economic power from the revolution, and don’t want to see the revolution carried further» .

We can also reconstruct the progress and regress of the American Revolution in this way.  Despite what is written in history textbooks, the elite usually follow upon the heels of the people at large.  It was the people of little property or reputation who truly drove the transformation of British America from colonies into more democratic states.  The great cities, like New York and Philadelphia, elected new governments parallel to the old.  Women from Boston to Philadelphia seized food stores during the low points of the Revolutionary War to impose a just price on the wealthy merchants who tried to make money from conditions of scarcity.  The people called their own constitutional conventions, without waiting for the great names of the revolution to summon them, and from the common ranks rose great democrats.  James Cannon and Thomas Young, for example, were militiamen who were at the center of drafting the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, the most democratic constitution in English North America.  But by 1787, all the advances of democracy in the young nation will have been stamped out by the reaction of the wealthy and well-born.  The Constitution signaled the completion of the American Thermidor.

Massachusetts was the state in which the tides turned against the democratic wing of the Revolution.  Boston was the scene of the greatest radicalism, fostered in the citizen assemblies of its townships.  But when time came to write the new constitution for the state, the conservative forces stalled and the moderate center caved.  The township assemblies would merely advise on the content of the state constitution, rather than vote directly on its passage.  The conservative constitution included a powerful executive, bicameral legislature, and high property qualifications to be allowed to vote, and the majority of the Massachusetts towns despised it.  The elite-dominated convention passed it anyway.  This wealth-dominated constitution would result in instability several years on.  Massachusetts, as most of the rebel states, had sold bonds to raise money for the war effort.  By 1786, the wealthy bondholders were ready to cash in, and the state government raised taxes to pay for the repayment of the debt.  These taxes proved burdensome to poor western Massachusetts farmers, and one farmer, Daniel Shay, led a militia against this transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.  It was this “Shay’s Rebellion” that gave urgency to the establishment of a new Constitution for the whole United States.

Generally, history texts gloss over the period between the Revolutionary War, ending in 1781, and the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  Intellectuals who lionize the Founding Fathers (two hundred long years after massive change in the social and economic conditions in which the Founders lived) usually describe the United States Constitution as necessary because what existed before “didn’t work.”  In this, they are usually echoing the judgments of the Federalist Papers, and not without some truth.  But the fact of the matter is that history does not happen for good reasons, and the political arrangements that were destroyed or denied in the new Constitution had much to commend them.  Today, it is the existing government that “doesn’t work,” and, in fact, is almost entirely irrelevant to the operations of the government it is supposed to constitute.

If we are to save ourselves from the enormous problems today, we must do several things:

1. We must realize that the Constitution is dead. The end of the twentieth century saw the end of the Constitution, as its wording was squeezed for any meaning that could be made of it.  The Bush Administration shredded its parchment, burnt the scraps, and stuffed the ashes down the throats of tortured prisoners.
2. We must realize that nothing in our current government is working, and has little to do with anything in the Constitution.  The Democratic and Republican parties don’t have anything to offer anybody that isn’t a corporation.  The Tea Party definitely doesn’t have anything to offer.  Nothing is going to happen until we choose to see beyond the blinders placed upon us by the power-serving jabber of Fox News, the New York Times, or CNN.
3. We must recognize that to begin to correct these problems is to write a new founding document, with a declaration of rights appropriate to the whole host of needs and rights now denied to us – social, economic, cultural, and environmental.
4. We must organize across communities to draft such a foundational document.  A stepping stone to a new federal constitution would be the collective authoring of advanced democratic state constitutions.
5. To successfully organize to win our freedom, we must overcome the interpersonal barriers that we have as a result of our unequal society, connect with our compatriots, trust them without good reason to do so, and be willing to be there when the struggle is difficult.

As part of such an endeavor, I will be posting some of those features that our democratic forebears thought essential to a democratic republic in their day and how such features relate to the social conditions we find ourselves in.