In my younger days I thought direct democracy was unworkable, but now I realise that might have just been my brain conforming to the bourgeois representative government status quo.
Obviously we easily have the tech to do DD these days, everyone has a smart phone in their pocket, we could do it instantly and on the go. But how you could manage a planned economy that way I’m not sure.
I still like the idea of "liquid democracy," where representatives are elected to a representative body, but instead of getting one vote they get as many votes as people they represent -- and any person can override any vote cast on their behalf by their representative through a parallel direct-democracy vote.
Of course I'm aware that it's basically impossible without internet voting, vulnerable to propaganda, glorifies individuality to a creepy extent, and is just about the most lib idea ever. But I still like it for some reason.
tbh a rational society would have put into place the infrastructure for secure and accessible internet voting decades ago.
The "individualism/collectivism" dichotomy is what's liberal, not the glorification of individual freedom itself. Individual freedom is a good concept that's perverted by almost everyone who uses it.
edit: perverted by being positioned against the collectivist boogeyman
I guess what I mean is that the idea seems to appeal to the instinct that "all those other people can have someone else vote for them, but you’re an extra-special boy who can cast their own vote." Of course anyone could be that extra-special boy in theory, but the logistics of actually doing it in an informed way would seem to put a lie to that.
But even still it seems to be better than just a representative or just direct democracy (maybe especially for smaller groups). I don’t know; I just like it.
You can have a directly democratic soviet. Vote directly on workplace issues. You can even use consensus for a lot at that scale. Hell, I've seen quaker institutions of a few thousand use consensus.
everyone has a smart phone in their pocket, we could do it instantly and on the go.
E-voting is a very bad idea
I’ve heard that. Is there no way it could ever be secure? We’re already assuming a successful revolution so we’re doing some kind of pie in the sky thinking as it is. And if it could never be safe to use electronic voting, how could we start to approach direct democracy? It would be far too unwieldy.
One problem with it is the sheer amount of compromised hardware, the vast majority of people would have no idea whether or not their phone is infected with malware
Another is simple man-in-the-middle attacks, which have been declining as net security has got better, but they are still possible
Another is that attacks on paper ballot elections are not easily scalable, if you want more impact, you need more people, and more people means it's more likely that the scheme gets blown wide open. Contrast with an attack on an e-voting election, which is very easily scalable, a single talented hacker half a planet away can change a million votes just as easily as they can change 20
And if it isn't using the internet to electronically vote, then what's the point? Turning up at a polling station to press a button on a machine is no more convenient than marking a piece of paper. Voting machines are basically a big, expensive, hackable pencil.
The fundamental problem with electronic voting is that electrons are very small and you can't see what they're up to.
Even if you have a perfectly secure voting system, you can't tell that's actually what's running on the machines.
We'll need to be at a relatively high stage of socialism for it to work. Everyone needs to have the same amount of free time to devote to it for everyone to have equal representation
How does that system deal with allocation of resources etc? It seems quite difficult to have a global economy like the one we have today that way. Does it do away with any notion of a planned economy?
let me preface this by saying that i am in every sense a Dumb Bitch
as we all know the global economy we have today mostly consists of selling people shit they don't need in order to create wealth for the ruling classes. the basic stuff we need to live - food, water, shelter, medicine, power - can be produced locally and sustainably, especially when the profit motive is removed. a federation of communes built around the principle of mutual aid would allocate resources according to need, so a location experiencing drought would receive food relief, a location experiencing catastrophic bushfires would receive equipment, without being expected to offer something up in return.
to get from where we are today to a system like this would probably involve a planned economy, with the state being necessary to establish the means of production in each locality, before transferring ownership to the people that will work there. on a global level, councils of experts in their fields would set the direction for their sector, making decisions according to what is needed. a free flow of information and total transparency would be crucial in this system
of course this all depends on a radical culture shift and wholesale destruction of the upper classes, but hey a guy can dream
The following three things have to be reconciled.
First, the people have a right to rule themselves that should basically never be surrendered.
Second, it's impractical to do something like have everyone gather in a giant coliseum once a month to vote on every little issue.
Third, tyranny of the majority is real. If everyone has a say in everything, including things that are none of their business, people will be repressed.
The solution, in my opinion, is for the general public to ordain institutions whose job is to concern themselves with the process of government, without actually giving those institutions themselves any power. Any decisions they make are only valid with public support; if, for example, the municipal transportation council wants to construct a new rail line to ease congestion, that's treated the same as if some train expert had convincingly argued the case to the public and the public had directly voted to build the new line.
Of course, in real life, it wouldn't be possible for these institutions to actually have no power whatsoever. They would always have some power in practice, and not recognizing that fact would make it impossible to respond to it. So, alongside the idealistic framing under which institutions have no power of their own, there would be additional protections; human rights, nondiscrimination, anticorruption, etc. Since an institution's area of power is small, perhaps as small as a single workplace, it would be easy for its peers to keep it in line.
Interesting points. Something your “tyranny of the majority” comment brings to mind is that it’s extremely likely, in the West at least, that any post-proletarian-revolution society would be comprised of a majority of reactionary/non-proletarian/non-revolutionary people. These wouldn’t be third-world revolutions of the majority of the people rising up against colonial oppressors, the seizure of power by the working class in the imperial core would be of a different character.
We’d still be dealing with a probable majority of the population who are stuck in a capitalist, petit-boug, settler mindset. It would be sort of like the Russian revolution in the sense that the proletariat doesn’t make up a majority (I think we can make a general comparison between the smallholding peasant and the “suburban petit boug” of, say, the USA). That context makes the question of democracy quite puzzling - after a hard-fought proletarian revolution, we can’t simply allow the underdeveloped elements of the working class to vote the bourgeoisie back into power.
"the municipal transportation council wants to construct a new rail line to ease congestion, that’s treated the same as if some train expert had convincingly argued the case to the public and the public had directly voted to build the new line."
do you mean in this example, that the public would get a direct vote upon the proposal, or just that it would be treated as if that were the case because the public voted on the institution?
and how can we treat an institution as equivilant to a train expert, unless it is staffed by train experts? in which case is your point that the public would vote a technocratic institution in, and the composition of it, and thereafter cede decisions to them?
also, with your three reconciliations:
-
isn't it the case that material conditions mean that we do not have a right to rule ourselves, at least isn't it more complicated than that - we a are helpless for time and cannot do so, and some people are disabled and cannot. our right to self rule is necessarily bounded by our physical powers and our relation to society surely, such that we can't treat 'everyone has a right to self rule' as a fundamental proposition, at least in all aspects of human experience? or do you mean just politically?
-
Why? We consider it necessary for the function of government to do all sorts of things requiring great effort and cost, why is this any different? I agree regarding every little issue, but I'd say at least every significant issue is possible once a month?
-
yes, but i think this is resolvable via the implemented structure of dd. So you don't get a vote on everything, just things that affect you. You can end up voting on something that doesn't directly affect you, but not on something that doesn't directly or indirectly affect you.
i struggle with the solution you present with creating powerless institutions, like you say i think it would be create appropriate checks and balances - they need some power to function.
This is less of a description of a system of government than a description of the principles behind it. So, who exactly votes on what and when remains to be seen, but it's based on a particular set of ideas.
Institutions have no power of their own in the sense that they're basically employed by the people. Like, if the CEO hires a manager to run a convenience store or something, the manager isn't really the ultimate authority over the store, despite the fact that they make many decisions over how it runs. They've just been chosen by the CEO because the CEO isn't personally interested in micromanaging every aspect of the store, and while they have some range of personal discretion, ultimately if they started acting out of line with the CEO's vision they'd be removed.
So, the manager lacks nominal power, but it's also important to recognize that they will have some power in practice and set up checks against them abusing that power.
On the reconciliations:
-
You're right, I shoudn't have said this right should "basically never" be surrendered. For example, children surrender it to their parents, and if they didn't it would be pretty disasterous. I should have said, this right can't be surrendered without a very compelling reason.
-
Some people just don't want to be hassled about certain things, and so long as the thing isn't huge and immensely consequential, they should be able to turn down the chance to exercise their democratic power. Also, knowing what to do in a lot of situations could require a lot of research, and if people are forced to weigh in you're either putting a large burden of research on them or forcing them to vote on something they have no idea the consequence of. This point is really just the reason to have any institutions at all.
-
Yeah, this one doesn't contradict dd. If any of the points contradicts direct democracy, it's the second one, but am I wrong to say that a system that works like I described could still be considered direct democracy? Every policy is still implemented on the authority of the general public.
-
-
Direct democracy is best on a local level, but when it comes national or international planning it doesn't work. The supply chains of corporations such as Walmart are insanely complex and it is infeasible for people to vote directly on whether they should import fourteen thousand or fifteen thousand smartphones for this month. Starting to relocalize production can help but the fact is that natural resources are not evenly distributed and it is impossible for people in the UK to efficiently grow bananas or for people in Japan to try and mine for lithium. Until the material conditions for fully automated communism are achieved then central planning is a necessity to upkeep these supply chains.
this is a common criticism, that it doesn't scale.
but you're using corporations (walmart) and their organisational structures to argue this, when those are not democratic organisations (not even representative democracy). So ofc they can't work with democracy, they didn't come from it.
the same goes for the problems of nations and resource distribution - at no point was the system of commodity trade & exchange created or agreed upon democratically, the same is true of nation states.
in fact i'd predict that under dd, national borders would naturally drastically change or disappear, and the resource exchange mechanism (the world economy) would become much better adapted to fairly solve the distribution issue.
Lots of people have no interest in being involved in government and I think that's fine. Representative democracy is good enough for me provided reps can be recalled at any time by a vote of constituents.
ppl only lose interest when they know they have no involvement in government, which most don't.
being able to fire your boss isn't the same as being your own boss, its still giving another power over your life - this is the trick of republican 'terms' in office, it gives the illusion of choice where you have none.
Do you think we should at least scrap the standard upper/lower house concept, and just have one “people’s assembly” of some sort? Seems like in most western countries the upper house exists to protect the status quo.
I’ve also seen people say a good reform for the Westminster system would be multi-member electorates, where each district/division doesn’t have a single MP/congressman/whatever, but several, allocated by vote share.
That's basically the NZ MMP system. You have a single house, a local rep and then extra reps are allocated by popular vote
This post has inspired me to make cringe: strawponies_democracy.png :mao-shining:
(for continuous revolution: strawponies_template.png, original meme)Here's how I think of it... every household determines their needs and wants for some future period, say the next year. You need X pounds of flour, Y new pairs of socks and hey, you'd like a new computer. Everyone submits their needs and wants for the time period. Then it's up to the central planners to make it happen as much as possible. Maybe you don't end up getting a new computer this year but you're in the queue and you end up getting one next year.
Basically the people let the central planners know what they want, directly. The central planners then take their cues from the people - not some central government - about what needs to be produced and they do their best to make it happen.
One area direct democracy could work well is where you want the law tied to popular notions of morality -- think referendums like "should X be a crime?" You'd probably want something like 60%+ of people to agree before criminalizing anything, though.
In terms of more technocratic questions (e.g., does this industry-specific regulation make sense?) you'd want some expert input.
Any kind of centralized system of power, including whatever apparatus is used to implement democracy, can be used to gain and consolidate power. In the long run we need to find ways to dismantle these systems (without leaving a power vacuum) or they'll just generate new class struggles.
The fact that direct democracy doesn't scale very well past the size of a workplace or local community might actually be a feature.
I kind of like an upper house/lower house system where one of them is just regular people voting on shit.
Direct democracy within the world today very often results in short term oriented decisions that hurt the country over the long term. You need people who are going to say no to shit like tax cuts.
You're asking two different questions: is a planned economy more efficient at achieving it's goals than a market one, and are democratic institutions always the best way to distribute power, or can there be exceptions?
I think the answer is that localized control is best, and the more democratic an institution, the better the outcomes for everyone involved. Also planned economies are better than markets because we can organize their outputs to target better goals than just "make as much profit as possible right now". Combine those two and you have a democratically controlled planned economy, where the goals of distribution are set by the people who live within the economic system. Then it's just a matter of creating the most democratic control mechanisms possible.
That’s what I’m asking though, what is the most democratic control method possible, that is still workable?
I wrote out a whole thing but someone else's "liquid democracy" idea is basically it, but also abolishing the presidency and senate, and somehow overcoming the internet voting problem.
