Not trying to throw jargon around to look smart here. Derrida has this idea that democracies, because of their instability, have these strange autoimmune defenses that paradoxically sometimes suspend or alter particular pieces of democracy in order to preserve democracy.
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Democracy isn't just "freedom," it's full of contradictions. Sometimes it has to close itself off in order to preserve itself. But it can't do that too much, or else it loses its democratic and elastic character. All democracies do this; socialist ones do it in interesting ways.
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Derrida's case study is Algeria, where he was born, where he notes elections were suspended in '92 to prevent the democratic undoing of democracy. This neat summary comes from Michael Naas's book *Derrida From Now On*:pic.twitter.com/7oZSWPO8bP
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In Venezuela, you can see this autoimmunity operative in a unique way. Many commentators found it unthinkable, for example, that Maduro called a Constituent Assembly in 2017. But this process is constitutionally available arguably for this reason. (More: https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13260 )
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Notably, any resulting constitution from the Constituent Assembly would have to be voted on by the Venezuelan people to have legitimacy. But the sort of state of exception granted here is an attempt to ensure the gains made by the people aren't undone by a single bourgeois party.
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A similar dynamic played out in Bolivia. Morales reached a term limit. He put the possibility of another term to a vote, which was narrowly defeated. The Supreme Court ruled it was constitutional, after all, for him to run again, so he did. Is this authoritarian? It's not simple!
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The dictator narrative says Morales wanted to run again cynically, because he was power-hungry and addicted to the presidency. But he claimed he wanted to continue the progress made and that he would do best against the opposition (not unlikely!), which is clearly a real force.
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The question isn't authoritarianism or democracy; it's what mechanisms of what democracies are really enabling a movement toward a more egalitarian and just society. The US is full of anti-democratic mechanisms, but they don't work in the interest of working people.
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Socialist autoimmunity isn't the same as capitalist autoimmunity. Democracy is a mess. People in power know this; they exploit it all the time. But whose gains are protected by the immune response? That's the right question to ask if you're looking at any democracy.
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And in case it's not obvious from pracitces like Bolsonaro conspiring to jail Lula to prevent him from running in Brazil, when the autoimmune response favors international capital, authoritarian suspensions of democratic processes are readily ignored or promoted.
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As this thread is starting to go around, I should say if you're an editor reading this I'd be happy write a longer and better version of it!
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