is democracy actually good? what would some alternatives be?

Dean Spade 53:53

Right. Versus like the legitimate authority, like, you know, Bea knows how to bake really well, and I've never baked bread before, as Bea is teaching me how to bake bread, I should acknowledge this level of experience and follow along, instead of being like, no Bea, we're doing it my way that is based on nothing. That there are legitimate ways for people to cultivate skills and share them, and that's so different.

Anyway, that idea is really helpful to me, like the state is about congealing systems of illegitimate authority that are entirely about extraction. I mean, my fundamental belief is that the state is just like an extraction machine. It's like -- you can think about taxation in this way. It's like we're gonna tax you all, we're gonna keep our boot on your neck, we're gonna make sure that there's nowhere for you to live that's free, that there's no way to get your needs met that's free, so you must work these jobs and you must be taxed and then we can use that money to send, you know, so that more people in Gaza can be bombed, like that's that whole process of extraction, or so that more billionaires -- so that we can like, you know, pave roads and set things up so that billionaires can not pay taxes and have like the best possible place to do their terrible factory or their, you know, where they store their data or whatever.

I think the other thing that what you were saying brought up is like the relationship between like policy and regulation. Like, I mean, I think we talked about this before, but like a big -- a big way that people have a fantasy that the state will care for us is that it will regulate pollution, or that it will regulate billionaires, or that it'll -- like there's a kind of fantasy that like wise, expert based regulation is what the state is for, and you know, oh, sometimes it makes mistakes.

And the reality is like, the ways we are governed permit maximum poisoning of us, like the idea that it is to facilitate and protect us is one of a -- it's a liberal fantasy. I teach administrative law, in these classes, you know, we're studying the administrative state, it's all about regulation. And it's like students come in, and if they're Republicans, they think they're anti-regulation, and if they're Democrats, they think they're pro-regulation, that's like the fantasy in our culture. And it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, you guys [laughing], like, you know, first of all, all of you just want to like regulate the fuck out of poor people and immigrants, and you all want to like, you know, facilitate the growth of wealth for believers of imperialism, for the wealthy. That's those -- both of those genders are the same, but also the idea that like that -- that misunderstanding.

A final thing I'll say about this is like, one of the things I think is really useful about what you were reading and that I got a lot from Foucault, is that stateness is also regimes of practices. Like it's both like that there is this border, and they do have guns, and like that's really real, there's like violence backing up this illegitimate authority. And also, it's whole ways of being and thinking that we do participate in, and so that we could act like that even in our own meeting of our mutual aid project, we could be like, well, let's keep out drug users. Then we're inheriting a regime of practices from social welfare systems. And we're using the same kind of, who are the deserving and the undeserving of these unhoused people that we're supporting? Or we could also do it if we use majority rule in our meetings as our decision making process, right? Majority rule is this like very weird technology of domination, that I'm personally totally not into, right? I'm like, what if we made decisions in our mutual aid project where we were like, we want to make sure every single person is heard here. So even though there's only one person who has kids here, and there's only one person who uses a walker, and there's only one person who's hard of hearing, we're not going to make a decision that cuts those people out, and that doesn't care about what they said, even though they're the only ones, or there's less people with that experience, or only two Spanish speakers or whatever. We're not -- we are going to work together to find a solution to whatever problem, or a way to do our work, that nobody's gonna have to leave if we do it this way.

Like, that's our -- that's called consensus decision making. It's the idea that actually it matters that we bring us all along, as opposed to mimicking the state and taking on the methods of this false voting thing we live under, where it's like, well, sorry, if white people outnumber Black people in your state, then we're just gonna -- you know, like whatever the sort of narrative history of that has been, and the brutal reality. Also, it covers over, of course, that all of those actual electoral systems benefit like very small minorities of extremely wealthy people. And that's what they were designed to do. But that, you know, I think that's juicy for us, as people on the ground trying to think about immediate action, like how do we not use statist models as our model for how to interact with one another. And I think people do that a lot, being like oh, we need a chair of this group.

People just like set up a mini city government or whatever they're modeling it after, instead of being like, how do we want to actually act for making decisions together and sharing stuff and getting through crises and that, to me, a lot of also like women of color, feminist analysis is a lot about that, like being careful of institutionalization, and also anarchist analysis and other anti-state analysis about like, how do we be together in ways that don't mimic this model that is designed for domination and extraction? source