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.

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.