- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://pawb.social/post/42620143
Their lives are blissful… free from the burden of self doubt.
Revolutionary Spain represents an example of extremely effective armed resistance to the rise of fascist forces backed by Hitler and Mussolini, surviving for years. By contrast, many established democracies collapsed relatively quickly when invaded.
For more information, you can check out an anarchist FAQ’s answer to the question, “Does revolutionary Spain show that libertarian socialism can work in practice?”. For a more current example of an anarchist society working in practice, you could also check out the Zapatista movement, an anarchist society which today consists of at least 300,000 people.
If you’re unfamiliar with anarchism, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think.
Well, if efficiency in decision making is more important than freedom, we may as well just have a dictator, no? With that said, there are anarchist traditions which do propose systems where delegates have limited mandates, you can learn more about that on an anarchist FAQ.
I have explained why representative democracy is a system which inevitably leads to corruption and I have outlined for you a basic framework for one possible bottom-up system of direct democracy/consensus decision making. I’ve stated my case, and I think I explained it quite well. I understand that it’s a lot to take in and it seems difficult to achieve, but I fully believe that this system would work very well. It has worked in the past, and it is working right now.
As I like to say, I can lead you to water, whether you drink is your prerogative. I hope you take time to reflect on it, and change your mind.
Either way, I wish you all the best, much love, solidarity forever!
I think that’s pretty reductionist to the argument I was making. I was arguing (with a long list of concrete examples) for why I think the system you’re outlining will either inevitably revert to representative democracy over time, or be incapable of working at a large (millions of people) scale. I’m not saying that none of what you said has merit, or that the form of representative democracy we work with today is the optimal system.
I think both of us (and anyone that has worked in a system where groups send delegates to super-groups to represent them) is familiar with the concept that our group decides on boundaries for what we think are acceptable decisions, and then gives our delegate a mandate to come to an agreement within those boundaries. The simple reason is that negotiations take extremely long if every iteration needs to go up and down the entire decision chain, so the negotiators (delegates) need some kind of flexibility to come to an agreement. I provided plenty of examples of situations where this is applicable.
To be honest, it seems a bit to me like you might have a slightly narrow view on what “representative democracy” entails. I would argue that once you have a delegate representing your interests with any kind of leeway to make decisions (that is, they’re actually a delegate, not just a messenger), you’re working with representative democracy. You can have a wide range of ways to decide who the delegate should be, how broad their mandate should be, and how long they function for. However, if the delegate has any kind of mandate outside of being a messenger, I think it stands that you’re electing (choosing one person from a group by consensus is a form of election) a representative to represent your interests, and thus have a representative democracy.
I’m the first to admit that power can corrupt, and that any representative democracy should have solid mechanisms in place to prevent the emergence of a “ruler class” (which most representative democracies today have in some form or other). Doing stuff like limiting the duration and number of terms is of course one option. At the end of the day, it largely boils down to a tradeoff between efficient management vs. direct involvement of everyone affected. Like you said, the most efficient decision making system is probably a dictatorship, but at that point we’ve tipped over into the opposite ditch (no involvement from the people affected).
For the record, I’m not the person downvoting you :)
Fair enough! Personally, I am all in favor of slow decision making if it means everyone is free and we can live in a world without rulers, but if you disagree, that’s fine. I’m sure you believe that some sort of compromise is possible where you can somehow have representative democracy without inevitable extreme corruption, but we can agree to disagree on that.
I haven’t downvoted you, either! I never downvote people who disagree with me in good faith…Might interest you to know that upvotes/downvotes are a matter of public record, too - you can use e.g. https://lemvotes.org/ to see who has upvoted and downvoted a comment/post.
Thanks for a pleasant and civil discussion, it’s always a breath of fresh air <3