Wikileaks is the most important thing to happen to the cause of democratic rule since the multitude of grassroots uprisings in 1968. Even sympathetic commentators miss the fundamentally radical threat to the existence of the bureaucratic state it represents; Wikileaks is most powerful contemporary weapon in the arsenal of radical, grassroots transparency advocates and democrats. A decentralized plethora of Wikileaks-type websites focused on local, state, and national affairs in every nation, scouring for document leaks from governments, corporations, and organizations has the potential to shatter an intrinsic part of the modern state’s anti-democratic structure: the ability of bureaucrats and officials to hide decisions and actions from the demos itself. Not only can this be done with the tools now available to us, it must be done.
State secrecy is nothing new, but the rise of the modern bureaucratic state is barely a century old, coinciding with the rise of massive industry and, ironically, with the advent of universal suffrage. Its rise chronicled by intellectual luminaries of the day such as Max Weber and Robert Michels, bureaucracy was the extension of rationalized organizational patterns from industrial capitalism to the sphere of government. Prior to the twentieth century Western governments kept the masses from participating via restrictive suffrage laws; after the advent of universal suffrage this shifted to limiting the possibility of direct democratic influence through oligarchic control over organizations necessary for the maintenance of the modern industrial society: political parties, state institutions, and capitalist corporations. Radical democrats fought back, and the twentieth century is littered with attempts at curtailing the power of elite oligarchy found in bureaucratic institutions via workers’ councils, grassroots political parties, the alternative press – but none ever succeeded in breaking the hold of secrecy and control they fought.
Complete transparency in government (and the economy) is a necessary feature of any truly democratic socio-economic system. Alienating the democratic will of many into that of a few representatives is a compromise (Rousseau claimed it was the abolition of democracy), and to retain any sort of democratic power the citizen must ultimately have access to everything their government does, overtly and covertly. It provides a necessary check against anti-democratic rule and government lies and half-truths. Without full access to information, it is often difficult for a person to make the best choice in any circumstance. Without access to information, the modern citizen has become a passive player in what amounts to a sham democracy, controlled by elites and bureaucrats cloaked in secrecy. It is the bureaucrats and elites who have access to critical information, allowing them to rule unchecked. Wikileaks provides the demos the possibility of reversing that trend.
The growth of the national security state and the technology it has used to dis-empower the demos is without parallel in world history. Yet, as Karl Marx long ago observed, every socio-economic advance eventually creates the conditions for its own demise – its own gravediggers. Capitalism created immense wealth, poverty, and the most concentrated and powerful ruling class in history, but via the collection of the urban working class and intense development of technology the possibility (still just a possibility) of a truly egalitarian order. The modern industrial bureaucratic state, itself part and parcel of contemporary capitalism, created vast swathes of routinized specialists across society whose technical expertise and need for secrecy eventually compromised the possibility of democratic check on their rule. Yet, the seeds for change, always existent within the bureaucracy, are now being actualized.
Much has been made of Wikileaks as reaction to the craven complicity of the mass media to the state. This is undoubtedly true, but again misses the point. Noam Chomsky pointed out long ago that the media, privately run and owned by corporate executives, has always been a gatekeeper and a fundamental part of industrial society. Reporters do not only desire access to the state, preventing them from consistently acting as a check on the oligarchs; the media is a pillar of the modern state. It has as much interest in the state’s survival (profits, elite status itself) as Wall Street or Barack Obama. When its paid employees attack the recklessness of Wikileaks, they are attacking their own ability to carefully manage and shape information for the public’s consumption. Wikileaks does no editing, save for redacting some names; it presents information to the public for its own analysis, understanding, and enlightenment. Wikileaks does not rely upon legions of trained reporters, but rather other citizens for its information. The release of the documents from Iraq was done by a courageous soldier who had come to understand the extent of the American state’s imperialism and crimes, and wished, for the benefit of other citizens and without monetary remuneration but rather prison in the offing, to expose the plutocrats who had conducted the war.
Wikileaks was, thus, always a latent possibility with the advent of the Internet and direct mass information exchange worldwide. Like any other anti-systemic movement, it only took a group of committed people to organize and exploit that possibility. It is, then, up to those committed to radical democracy and egalitarian social change to extend the gains made by Wikileaks by proliferating its example and encouraging the growth of transparency via document dumps at all levels. A world where all levels of government and the economy would have to be wary of exposure is one where the rank-and-file would no longer be met with opaque silence about the inner-workings of government, but could begin to take the oligarchs and plutocrats to task, the first step in a truly democratic worldwide revolution. Bureaucracy’s wall of mystique will be shattered, and the demos will wrest control away from the officials and the elected representatives who rely on secrecy to cut deals, divide the population, and keep the masses dis-empowered.
It is not often that the wheels of history give us the potential to swing the pendulum toward democratic rule and a curtailment of elite power. We have such a chance now, and it is up to us to take advantage of it. Let a thousand Wikileaks bloom – let us build the democracy of tomorrow, today.