Can direct democracy work? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15268900
Representative democracy is prone to elitism and corruption. The rich buy off the politicians etc and the masses are not fully in control.

How much direct democracy is practical in a democratic system? The argument i've heard against direct democracy is that regular working people don't have the time to invest in learning the issues or the details of legislation etc. I suppose a reason why so many politicians are lawyers.
#15268909
There is a middle ground between the two, of course. Thanks to secure wireless communications, we could easily go back to the constitutional system of having 1 representative per 30-50,000 people. They don't all have to go to Washington - they can stay in their constituency's office and vote remotely. Only those on committees would probably need to have a second office in Washington, and without one guy having to do triple duty on six different committees, you diffuse the power of single individuals considerably. For most committees, you could also have regional offices - does a guy on the committee of Indian Affairs need to be in Washington as opposed to a branch in Oklahoma City? Decentralizing federal power across the country would also democratize things.

I fully support a House of Representatives that has some 10,000 members - at least considerably more than 435. Would help with the Electoral College too, frankly.
#15268911
I don’t know the limits of dorect democracy but the reasoning ofhe average person or even a collective need not be any worse than current leadership. Although I don’t think direct democracy is a necessary alternative due to dissatisfaction with present issues In representative democracies which I think can function fine.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1956/06/every-cook.htm
Direct Democracy

The Greek form of government was the city-state. Every Greek city was an independent state. At its best, in the city state of Athens, the public assembly of all the citizens made all important decisions on such questions as peace or war. They listened to the envoys of foreign powers and decided what their attitude should be to what these foreign powers had sent to say. They dealt with all serious questions of taxation, they appointed the generals who should lead them in time of war. They organized the administration of the state, appointed officials and kept check on them. The public assembly of all the citizens was the government.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily, selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the ones whose names came out.

Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Modern parliamentary democracy elects representatives and these representatives constitute the government. Before the democracy came into power, the Greeks had been governed by various forms of government, including government by representatives. The democracy knew representative government and rejected it. It refused to believe that the ordinary citizen was not able to perform practically all the business of government. Not only did the public assembly of all the citizens keep all the important decisions in its own hands. For the Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/On%20Political%20Representation.pdf#page23
Politicians would often make better decisions if they never had to get re-elected, but that is not the point. Good decisions have first to be made by the great majority of the people, together, after which then getting the politicians to adopt those policies usually follows. Elections and the lousy politicians they produce are not the problem at the moment – it is the quality public discourse which is the underlying problem needing to be fixed, and elected politicians are in no position to help.

Advocates of ‘citizen juries’ have convincingly shown that a randomly chosen group of citizens, if given time and the same kind of expert advice given to elected politicians, generate better decisions than career politicians or even social movement activists. But the suggestion following from this that election of governments should be replaced by such randomly chosen focus groups is premature. Politicians are tasked not just with devising good policies, they are the mediating link in the process whereby the people govern themselves. It is a sorry reflection on our political process that the electorate is incapable of forming themselves into a coherent whole around a sensible social and political program. But that problem needs to be tackled at source rather than bypassed by random selection of legislators.


And as pushback against the emphasis on democracy within the ancient greeks, I recommend this detailed history on the origins of collective decision making to see the linage of modern form of democracy through majority vote.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/origins-of-collective-decision-making.pdf#page23
#15268929
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Representative democracy is prone to elitism and corruption. The rich buy off the politicians etc and the masses are not fully in control.

How much direct democracy is practical in a democratic system? The argument i've heard against direct democracy is that regular working people don't have the time to invest in learning the issues or the details of legislation etc. I suppose a reason why so many politicians are lawyers.



I maintain that everyone can be treated 'equally' civilly / politically, if everyone is generally acknowledged to have their own individual distinct 'priorities' in (social) life, both materially ('demands'), and also socio-politically (social-organization).

Here's a more *granulated* approach, in-the-abstract, and then also for a potential *post-capitalist* political economy:


[17] Prioritization Chart

Spoiler: show
Image



'additive prioritizations'

Spoiler: show
Better, I think, would be an approach that is more routine and less time-sensitive in prioritizing among responders -- the thing that would differentiate demand would be people's *own* prioritizations, in relation to *all other* possibilities for demands. This means that only those most focused on Product 'X' or Event 'Y', to the abandonment of all else (relatively speaking), over several iterations (days), would be seen as 'most-wanting' of it, for ultimate receipt.

My 'communist supply and demand' model, fortunately, uses this approach as a matter of course:

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily

consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174


I'm also realizing that this model / method of demand-prioritization can be used in such a way as to lend relative *weight* to a person's bid for any given product or calendar event, if there happens to be a limited supply and a more-intensive prioritization ('rationing') is called-for by the objective situation:

Since everyone has a standard one-through-infinity template to use on a daily basis for all political and/or economic demands, this template lends itself to consumer-political-type *organizing* in the case that such is necessary -- someone's 'passion' for a particular demand could be formally demonstrated by their recruiting of *others* to direct one or several of *their* ranking slots, for as many days / iterations as they like, to the person who is trying to beat-out others for the limited quantity.

Recall:

[A]ggregating these lists, by ranking (#1, #2, #3, etc.), is *no big deal* for any given computer. What we would want to see is what the rankings are for milk and steel, by rank position. So how many people put 'milk' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'steel' for #1 -- ? How many people put 'milk' for #2 -- ? And how many people put 'steel' for #2 -- ? (Etc.)

*This* would be socially useful information that could be the whole basis for a socialist political economy.

So, by extension, if someone was particularly interested in 'Event Y', they might undertake efforts to convince others to *donate* their ranking slots to them, forgoing 'milk' and 'steel' (for example) for positions #1 and/or #2. Formally these others would put 'Person Z for Event Y' for positions 1 and/or 2, etc., for as many days / iterations as they might want to donate. This, in effect, would be a populist-political-type campaign, of whatever magnitude, for the sake of a person's own particularly favored consumption preferences, given an unavoidably limited supply of it, whatever it may be.

tinyurl.com/additive-prioritizations



https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338



Centralization-Abstraction Diagram of Political Forms

Spoiler: show
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#15268932
Let's do it. Let's have an AI run our country. The AI can shape the laws by constantly polling all citizens via phone on their opinion and then generating laws. Nobody needs to learn any laws, just ask the AI if they are breaking the law and have a massive surveillance state with cameras everywhere, face recognition, etc.
HAL9000 for president.
#15268934
XogGyux wrote:
Let's do it. Let's have an AI run our country. The AI can shape the laws by constantly polling all citizens via phone on their opinion and then generating laws. Nobody needs to learn any laws, just ask the AI if they are breaking the law and have a massive surveillance state with cameras everywhere, face recognition, etc.
HAL9000 for president.



(Yawn.)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
#15268936
XogGyux wrote:
But that is not democracy though, not even indirect :lol: that is pure dictatorship.



Here's a fairly recent example of 'dictatorship', backed by the U.S.:



Guaidó declared acting president

Following Guaidó's speech, the National Assembly released a press statement saying that Guaidó had assumed the role of acting president. A later statement clarified the position of Guaidó as "willing to assume command ... only possible with the help of Venezuelans".[5] The opposition considered this legitimate based on the acknowledged "illegitimacy" of Maduro by many governments, and the constitutional processes that the National Assembly said they were following,[99] specifically invoking Articles 233, 333, and 350 of the Constitution.[93] The president of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice of Venezuela in exile, based in Panama, wrote to Guaidó, requesting him to become acting president of Venezuela.[100]

On 15 January 2019, the National Assembly approved legislation to work with dozens of foreign countries to request that these nations freeze Maduro administration bank accounts.[101] Guaidó wrote a 15 January 2019 opinion piece in The Washington Post entitled "Maduro is a usurper. It's time to restore democracy in Venezuela"; he outlined Venezuela's erosion of democracy and his reasoning for the need to replace Maduro on an interim basis according to Venezuela's constitution.[102]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela ... _president
#15268938
ckaihatsu wrote:Here's a fairly recent example of 'dictatorship', backed by the U.S.:

Some people would say that the other guy, the one that is actually in power is the real dictator. A dictator that doesn't have any power and lives in another country is not a dictator.
Besides, Maduro is the continuation of Chavez, which if he had not died from cancer, he would have continued to be the dictator since he removed the term limits... you know, the sort of things that dictators do.
#15268966
XogGyux wrote:
Some people would say that the other guy, the one that is actually in power is the real dictator. A dictator that doesn't have any power and lives in another country is not a dictator.
Besides, Maduro is the continuation of Chavez, which if he had not died from cancer, he would have continued to be the dictator since he removed the term limits... you know, the sort of things that dictators do.



---



Minutes after Maduro took the oath as president of Venezuela, the OAS approved a resolution in a special session of its Permanent Council declaring Maduro's presidency illegitimate and urging new elections.[6] Maduro's election was supported by Turkey, Russia, China, and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).[87][88]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela ... _of_Maduro
#15268974
(Again.)


ckaihatsu wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System



XogGyux wrote:
But that is not democracy though, not even indirect :lol: that is pure dictatorship.



---



The program is mainly focused on businesses and is very fragmented, contrary to the popular misconceptions that it is focused on individuals and is a centralized system.[1][9]

The origin of the system can be traced back to the 1980s when the Chinese government attempted to develop a personal banking and financial credit rating system, especially for rural individuals and small businesses who lacked documented records.[10] The program first emerged in the early 2000s, inspired by the credit scoring systems in other countries.[1]



The Social Credit System is an extension to the existing financial credit rating system in China.[13]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
#15268980
Wellsy wrote:For the Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot, from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have limited.


Idiotes literally means private. A person who is private instead of public is an idiot. A person who deals his business in a private rather than in a public manner is an idiot.

It still means the same in modern Greek, idiot means private with no negative connotation to it.

Idiotic home is a private house, literally.

Idiotic individual is a private individual.

https://www.linguee.com/greek-english/t ... CF%82.html

This paragraph you quoted is very good and succinct as to what is Greek democracy. People forget that democracy is not about just electing something but about having the entire government run by everyone.
#15269315
My 2 cents on this topic is.

1] Use a law to expand the size of the House a lot, even 3 or 4 times larger.
2] Use a law to require that all districts of House members have more than 1 Rep. with the ideal being about 7. All districts in a state must have X or X+1 rep. Obviously, low pop. states will have 1 district. Voters can and will split their 1 vote between as many candidates as they want simply by voting for more than 1, and machines count and tabulate the votes automatically, with each party being able to demand its own machine be used. The money spent to run elections being well spent to insure that they are fair and honest.
3] Pass a constitutional amendment that requires the Fed. Gov. to fund the campaign expenses of all major parties with only new tiny parties relying on donations until they reach some threshold (maybe have 2 or 6 Reps in the House).
. . . This money will also be well spent to see that the people get the Gov. they want at all levels of gov. The current system wastes hundreds of billions a year because lobbyists have gotten the Congress to vote to give their corp money by making campaign contributions, etc.
. . . We might even pay exmembers of Congress their salary for 3 years and not let them take any money from corps for those 3 years. This to reduce the ability of corps to bribe them with jobs or speaking fees after they leave office. Again, this money is well spent to keep them from being bribed legally.
4] Also, tax camapign ads by anyone other than a candidate or a political party at a 95% rateor just ban them. These have mostly become "attack ads" because this is easy for a 3rd party to do and don't directly suport the candidate they support. They can be totally made up lies too.

.
#15269519
Unthinking Majority wrote:Representative democracy is prone to elitism and corruption.
The rich buy off the politicians etc and the masses are not fully in control.


My argument is that, how much the masses are either capable or willing to be "in control"?

If anything, representative democracy saves a lot of time and resources.

What we need is probably a middle-ground -- to ensure that those who want to be involved in the process (instead of relying everything on the representatives) have the means to do so as much as possible.
#15269525
One version of direct democracy is when citizens vote directly for legislation put on the ballot, such as the system that allows ballot initiatives in California. Despite the opposition of conservatives to the “mob rule” of direct democracy, in 1976 they readily endorsed ballot measure Proposition 13, which severely restricted property taxes.
#15269526
I think if direct democracy is practiced on a regular basis, it creates a certain expectation of political participation that is impossible to reconcile with autocracy. People are too output-oriented when it comes to the question.

wat0n wrote:It depends on the level of government you're considering, direct democracy works just fine in local governments in Switzerland and to a lesser extent the US.


It doesn't really, Switzerland has it at every level.
#15269537
Patrickov wrote:
representative democracy



Such-as-it-is -- there have been *so many* electoral statistical dead-heats that people have been resorting to right-populism shit, for a kind of attempted-fascistic 'override', most notably during the Trump years (Jan. 6), domestically and worldwide.

Dead heat = coin-flip, btw.



Ultimately, Bush won 271 electoral votes, one vote more than the 270-to-win majority, despite Gore receiving 543,895 more votes (a margin of 0.52% of all votes cast).[8]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Unit ... l_election



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Rugoz wrote:
every level.



To *generalize* / theorize, the following 'levels' / scale-based construction is strictly material-*logistical*, since a post-capitalist communist-type gift economy would *preclude* any need for a standing administration / bureaucratic-elitism of any sort, at any scale.

And all such material-logistical-type matters would necessarily be *per-item*, given any particular locale or greater, for both collectivist mass production and for individual-tailored consumption and usage.


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show
Image


https://web.archive.org/web/20201211050 ... ?p=2889338


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

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