Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 14:52:44 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: Re: the state redux & socialism



At least these proposals take the problems seriously. I don't buy them for
several reasons, but they recognize that there are problems that boring
old liberal democracy is our best attempt, so far, to solve.

1. The computer-voting direct democracy idesa was explored and defended in
Robert PAul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism. Among its main problems are
these: it lowers policy decisions to the level of opinion polls, cutting
out the possibility of meaningful deliberative discussion. This not only
reduces the quality of the decisions made, it encourgaes self-interested
voting that pays no attention whatever to the interests of others because
decisions do not require public justification. Moreover, with regard to
anything other than the most general level of decisions, basic policy
choices and the like, it cuts out informed participation in politics,
since most people will not have the opportunity or inclination to become
familiar with the details of highly technical policy proposals. Finally,
but I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot, it leaves the basic direction of
society to those who set the agenda by proposing the bills, which much be
a fairly constrained process, one thatw innows out most of the obvious
nonstarters before they are put to a public computer vote. "I don't care
who gives the answes so long as I set the questions."

The ide of randomly chosen representative assemblies has certain
attractions and I have toyed with the notion myself. I do not think,
though, that it likely to be any less alienating than a system of elected
representatives: nothing in the random system per se makes the practice of
politics any more appealing to people who are likely to regard it as they
do jury duty, as a mere imposition on their time. Moreover, it actually
reduces the scope for popular choice in preventing people from selecting
those citizens whom they would like to represent them and who, in virtue
of experience, intelligence, political savvy, or whatever would be more
able to do so than a random selection.

As to the idea of replacing courts with randomly selected bodies of
citizens, Anglo American liberal democracy realizes that to a degree in
the existence of juries. But if the value of law, as a means for peacably
resolving disputes, is in part in its stability and predictability,
getting rid of judges as trained interpreters of the law and a system of
precedent that constrainbs the judges to follow known interpretations
means that interpretation and enforcement of law is liable to be
unpredictable and arbitrary, failing to put people on notice as to
what their responsibilities, rights, and obligations are beforehand and in
fact unjust in treating like cases differently. 

I think a lot of the objections to liberal democracy are really to
capitalist democracy. This is alienating because with disproprtioante
capitalist control of the political process, ordinarily people have little
influence over the actual direction of policy. Without capitalist control
and assuming that bureaucractic and other state tendencies towards
self-aggrandizement can be resisted, the main obstacles to active
participation in politics are the size of the polity, which waters down
the effect of each of a large number of equal votes, and the largely
inherently boring nature of most policymaking. Unfortunately, nothing can
be done about either if we stick with large political units, and any
degree of socialized production on a continental, hemispheric, or world
scale will involve large political units.

Do doubt the instutions of liberal democracy will evolve, as indeed they
have. Reacll that the administrative state is less than a century old; in
fact, probably less than 60 years old. Universal suffrage in America goes
back ony to 1919. What we would regard as extensive civil and political
liberties are basically Warren Court inventions, so less than 40 years
old. But the principles on which those institutions are based, as opposed
to particular manifestations of them, are sound and a socialist democracy,
indeed, a communist society, will preserve them.

--Justin

On Sat, 28 Sep 1996 shmage-AT-pipeline.com wrote:

> Justin: 
>  
> I tend to agree with you on two of the major points at issue in the
> discussion under this rubric: that the eventual transition to a communist
> society will necessarily involve markets and democracy--both functioning in
> the interest of the working population and in a way far more free,
> effective, and universal than monopoly capitalism can dream of allowing.  
> However (leaving economics aside for the nonce), 
> I think your comments on law, parliaments, suffrage, political parties,
> police (implying prisons), courts, etc.--in short, your treatment of the
> transition epoch as maintaining a form of "liberal democracy"--is a
> singularly unimaginative approach to the political institutions suitable
> for a truly egalitarian and post-revolutionary society. 
>  
> The problem with these sorts of institutions is their alienating and
> alienated nature: a part of society is set up as functionally separate and
> privileged, at best carrying over bureaucratic and authoritarian habits
> from the previous order and at worst threatening to become centers for
> reversion to "the old crap" as long as near-absolute abundance has not yet
> been achieved.   Of course, this is easy to say, but I would have no right
> to say it without at least suggesting an alternative. 
>  
> The most obvious alternative to liberal democracy is the old idea of direct
> democracy--everyone is to participate with equal voice in the deliberative
> process leading to decisions and in the decisive vote itself.  But this is
> also, and just as obviously, unworkable in a society of three hundred
> million adult (over the age of 13) citizens (a socialist federated north
> america), let alone one of four billion citizens (a socialist world
> federation).  And this is so irregardless of technology--even if everyone
> could vote by computer on each issue (as indeed can be expected to be the
> case), no meaningful deliberation involving so many people could take place
> in a finite time of less than many millenia!   
>  
> So I would envisage, not classical direct democracy, but an entirely new
> form of *directly representative democracy*.  This would be based on what,
> in Plato's time, was recognized as the central institution of democracy:
> selection of public officials by lot and for short periods of time.  Let me
> imagine a way in this would be concretized. 
>  
> I assume a complex society, with a basic level of decent living assured for
> all its members but still with a great (maybe even greater than now)
> variety of social groups and strata, each with its own spectrum of
> histories, attitudes, interests, even ideologies.  Decisions have to be
> made for the whole society on questions that vitally involve the whole
> society (for example, everything involving human colonization of outer
> space, or everything involving treatment of the territorial unit as a
> single ecological system, plus taxes and some sorts of more conventional
> rule-making and priority-setting decisions).   
>  
> Under liberal democracy all such decisions would be made by a freely
> elected parliament of professional (or at best semi-professional)
> politicians elected on party lists and subject to recall by special
> election.  What I envisage is very different.  Before a question is judged
> ripe for social decision, there should be lengthy public discussion (in
> which, as a matter of necessity, only a tiny self-selected portion of the
> citizenry would participate, but of which everyone would be aware).  At
> some point (perhaps on petition of a certain number of citizens) a
> referendum would be held on whether to enter the next stage of the
> decision-making process, selection of a deliberative body to formulate the
> decision.  If a majority voted in favor,  a statistically representative
> body (somewhere around one thousand people) would be chosen totally at
> random 
> to take part in a special-purpose council (a really supreme soviet!) whose
> entire purpose would be to study, debate, deliberate, and ultimately
> propose a decision by a majority representing some degree of consensus,
> maybe three fifths.  The council would meet in a university-like setting
> set aside for its work.  Its members would be relieved of all social or
> familial obligations except for deliberation, and they would be permitted
> no private business activity.   For a year they would be a body of
> *disinterested* full-time legislators,  comparable in conscientiousness to
> what a jury is supposed to be under our present system.  Their
> deliberations would be totally open, broadcast worldwide.  At the end of
> the year they would return to private life, and their proposal would be put
> to referendum.  Again, a three-fifths majority would be required for
> adoption.  If the proposal failed, the entire process could be repeated
> until a consensus was reached.  
>  
> Other of the problems you raised could also receive radical solutions. 
> Randomly chosen arbitration panels could replace courts and lawyers. 
> Compulsion, and therefor an apparatus of criminal law, would probably still
> be required for dangerous cases of anti-social behavior but prisons would
> become places devoted to rehabilitation, and to ensure that this does not
> become a mockery as it is under capitalism,  *everyone* professionally 
> employed in the criminal justice system--judges, cops, prosecutors, defense
> lawyers, guards, wardens--would be required to be confined for one week of
> every year as an anonymous, ordinary, prisoner. 
>  
> Much more could be said, but [un]fortunately we have a *very* long time to
> pursue this sort of discussion before any of it becomes politically
> relevant.   
>  
> I look forward to seeing all comments. 
>  
> In solidarity, 
>                            Shane Mage 
>   
>  
>  
>  





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