Democracy Past, Present, Future: Another World Is Possible. Public Lecture - University of Otago, Division of Humanities

I will be giving a public lecture on this topic.

7-8pm Thursday October 3rd, 2013.

Burns 1 in the Arts 1/Burns Building (on Albany Street), University of Otago.

The lecture theatre is booked from 7-8.30pm so that those who want to stay on for question time can do so. This will be followed by an informal book launch with music, discussion and drinks in the Divisional Tearoom, 1.W.9 - up the stairs from Burns 1 on the first floor of the Burns Building.

Here is a brief description of the focus of the lecture.

In the 21^st century there are sound reasons to consider democracy’s past as part of the struggle for a more democratic future. Governments are managing the global financial crisis and ensuing prolonged recession – universally recognised as constituting the most severe crisis of the world capitalist economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s– in the interests of the rich and powerful. So-called liberal democratic governments are clearly disproportionately influenced by business and increasingly using the kind of domestic surveillance and spying normally associated with authoritarian states. The global economic crisis is unfolding in the context of a deepening environmental crisis, most notably involving unsustainable patterns of non-renewal resource use and climate change.

This suggests that we need to explore the possibility of an alternative to a world of crisis, environmental devastation, inequality, poverty, and war. Yet the world’s rulers, the corporate media, and the majority of political theorists assume, and actively promote the assumption, that the only viable model of democracy to have emerged thus far in history is liberal representative democracy. In my book – The History of Democracy – I show that this assumption is highly disputable and that the history of democracy is more complex, varied and inspiring than liberal depictions of democracy suggest, with Athenian, liberal and socialist forms of democracy being worthy of recognition and consideration. The history of democracy suggests that another more democratic, egalitarian and environmentally sustainable world is by no means inevitable, but that it is a realistic possibility because, among other things, it will be built on the foundations of what has come before.

This lecture is based on The History of Democracy, originally published by Pluto Press in 2013, with translated editions due to appear in China, Germany and Turkey. It is described by David McNally, Professor of Political Science at York University, as a “stunning and panoramic book”, which “sheds light on the theory and practice of democracy across the ages”.  According to reviewers, The History of Democracy provides: "an excellent exploration of the history of democracy and the struggle to extend it" (Socialist Review (UK)); “an excellent text for anyone seeking to understand a socialist perspective on democracy, historically rooted, and then read on further” (London Socialist Historians Group); an “ambitious project of cutting-edge relevance for the Arab region and the world” (Jordan Times).

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Big thanks to all those made it to my public lecture. To Philip Nel for providing a typically warm and generous introduction, to Robert Patman and the rest of the Politics Department at the University of Otago for supporting it, to the International Socialist Organisation for helping with the advertising and running the bar. Some people said really nice things about my lecture and my book afterwards. This means a lot to me- it's what keeps you going as a lefty intellectual when so much of the time you have to deal with hostility and derision in the academy.

Around 100 people turned up and listened very politely to my hour-long lecture. I wasn’t happy with my performance. I tried to squeeze too much material into it. The pacing was far from perfect- too much waffle in the Introduction, too rushed towards the end. Because I was so tired from working a succession of nights on preparing a slick PowerPoint file (bad idea) I really struggled to maintain concentration and when I departed from my notes I struggled to be articulate, fluent and coherent. My responses to questions could have been better. It wasn’t a disaster, but my performance could have been a lot better.

More positively the point of the lecture wasn’t self-promotion. In part it was to promote the book, but mainly the idea was to draw together people from across the left in Dunedin, as well as students and members of the public interested in the topic. It was undoubtedly a success in this regard. The questions, contributions and discussion afterwards were really interesting. So once again thanks to all who made it. And thanks to Sharon Van Etten, PJ Harvey, Shapeshifter and Broken Social Scene for providing the soundtrack.

I've put the PowerPoint slides for the lecture as jpg files below.

Radio National Interview on "Spying, Lying and Democracy" (Monday, September 2, 2013)

Radio National Nights interview on the topic: 'Spying, Lying and Democracy' was very frustrating. You can listen to it at: http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player/2567865 

My own performance in the interview was the pits. Not only did I fail to make the basic point that spying and lying about spying have always gone together, but I only got through around a third of the material. I've also made these points on Facebook which means that they can be easily accessed by the NSA directly via Prism (enabling direct access to Facebook’s US based servers) but not, according to New Zealand Prime Minister John Key in his Campbell Live interview on 14th August, by the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) or SIS (Security Intelligence Service). Yeah, right...

This interview can be viewed at: http://www.3news.co.nz/John-Key-defends-the-GCSB-bill/tabid/817/articleID/309018/Default.aspx


This interview is best considered in conjunction with a reading of the following articles from The Guardian website at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

Three key points I didn't get to make (if you'll excuse the pun). First, Key repeatedly stated that the GCSB only had requests from the SIS to provide information on 88 individuals during the last decade, that is 9 per year. But even if this is true it does not mean that the GCSB is only collecting data on nine New Zealanders a year. It would hardly need to employ 300 people and have a budget of $63 million (in 2012/13) if its surveillance activities were that narrow. 

Second, towards the end of the interview Key said that the GCSB had told him that to listen to every phone call and read every text message today, the GCSB would need to employ 130,000 people (only 30,000 people more than the NSA actually does employ by the way), and have a budget of $6.6 billion. This may well be true but the whole point of Snowden's revelations are precisely that they don't have to if they can use a search engine (like XKeyscore) to identify and access the material that is of interest to them and then focus on that.

Alternatively, if they are engaging in information sharing with the NSA then they could request and/or have information provided to them on a relatively small number of individuals in New Zealand. But this does not mean that the NSA is not monitoring the Internet activities of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. In fact, it most likely is doing precisely this. And as well as infringing upon our right to privacy in a big way, it also strikes me that this constitutes a fairly major encroachment on New Zealand's 'national security', something that the SIS and GCSB are meant to be defending.

Third, Key stated on several occasions that it is 'factually totally incorrect' to claim that the GCSB is engaged in wholesale spying. But these statements would only be try if one is prepared to accept what many would consider to be an unacceptably narrow definition of spying, that is, as only occurring in cases involving the detailed investigation of particular individuals. But what Snowden's revelations make clear is that the NSA and other allied intelligence agencies are not just spying in this narrow sense but much more worryingly engaging in historically unprecedented mass surveillance. It is this mass surveillance that enables these agencies to identify and focus on the vastly smaller number of individuals that their search engines flag as of interest to them.

The upshot is that Key’s performance in the Campbell Live interview was truly impressive as an example of political spin. Without directly lying about anything, he made a series of statements that encouraged the public to draw inferences that are false. For example:

• The SIS only request information on a small number of individuals per year (may be true), therefore the GCSB is not engaged in the surveillance of the electronic activity of a large number of New Zealanders (almost certainly false).

• The GCSB does not have the personnel and funding to listen to everyone’s phone calls and read all their text messages (certainly true), therefore it is not engaged in the wholesale surveillance (either directly itself or else through information sharing with the NSA) of the electronic activity of a large number of New Zealanders (almost certainly false).