Direct Democracy

If I cannot even trust my comrades within the context of the party, how am I supposed to hold any towards the un-associated masses who are not well informed?

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Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
srs qstn pls nswr

So there's no workers democracy in your version of "socialism".

It could be a channel for anything really. You might get communist leaders leading the people to a communist utopia. Or you might get pastor dan and his militia being voted into power.

Workers' control can assume other forms than what we often describe as "democracy".

Most conceptions of 'democracy' are a sham and nothing but garbage. Local self-management by those involved and affected by decisions is right and proper, administrative/civic roles are to be filled through sortition on brief terms. Where representation in a regional or global assembly is necessary delegates from communities with right of immediate recall should be dispatched.
Communism aims for the abolition of politics.

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This

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Fetishized by hyper-liberals

If the masses decide something incorrect then you shouldn't just inact it because lol the masses wanted it XD.

Democracy isn't real. All forms of society are diactatorship until organized violence is abolished.

good poast

...

Read Cockshott you faggots.

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t. Maurras
Forgot to put a king on top tho

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Interdasting…

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Maurrassian integral nationalism and decentralized models of socialism have different motives — agrarian romanticism and anti-jacobinism for the former, workers' control and anti-authoritarianism for the latter.

False dichotomy.

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Yes obviously, I'm just making fun of Trotanon's post (and this thread in general) for only providing very generalized and vague critiques and solutions to contemporary democracy that could as well be espoused by a political theoretician that had nothing to do with socialism.

Direct democracy may be unrealistic, but representative "democracy" is a proven farce. Liquid democracy is a great synthesis though.

Like others said it has the problem that the most reactionary policies can be implemented through swiss-style direct democracy, for example the fact that women's suffrage in Switzerland got universally accepted only in 1971 was due to it being rejected in earlier referenda: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_Switzerland
Maybe it could be implemented once the masses are sufficiently educated but this is problematic; there always remains the possibility that a majority of the population will hold reactionary views on some things. In the case of a direct democracy, what things should be decided through referenda and what things shouldn't?

If people want reactionary policy, they should get it, good and hard.

How can you be certain that indirect voting on that (voting for reps who then discuss and vote on it) would have implemented that earlier?

You want it good and hard huh Zig Forums? From /tv/?

There are some key things to take int account when discussing direct democracy. The OG model of direct democracy in Athens was, beyond being simply a model of governance, also an extremely important tool for keeping the rich in check and preventing the rise of an oligarchy. There's also the fact that one of the ways in which democracy has always been condemned is for allowing for the rise of "demagogues" i.e. people who pursue policies like debt forgiveness and land-reform, i.e. policies any communist should sympathies with. Added to this is the pattern that a well managed direct democracy has the potential of creating a highly politicized citizenry. It's sort of a chicken and the egg thing, you can go on and on about how uninformed people are and that you don't want uninformed people deciding shit over you, but I think its pretty obvious that by and large people remain uninformed because they have no real power and thus see no real point to getting informed. I can sort of get the Bordigist critique of democracy as some holy principle, but the upsides I just mentioned I think makes it obvious that the tool can be really fucking useful.

The example of women's suffrage I gave already shows that the people who want it are not necessarily the same people who get it. Also think of possible apartheid-ish laws etc.

Good point, however I do think it may have been implemented earlier because that's the way it went in most other European countries at the time. Direct democracy seems to be the cause of it getting delayed in switzerland.

Sure, but then the only argument against this is is resolved by simply expanding the circle until you have reached a consequence-based universality. Direct democracy for all people who are affected by the decision being taken. With our current technology this is not impossible. Obviously there are still political obstacles: if you implement this kind of direct democracy in one country, the effects of the actions on people in other countries remains unresolved. But that's going to be a problem regardless of what your guiding ideas about decision making are.

Elaborate on this

Cumshott is a STEMfag, not a political philosopher.

As an anarchist, direct democracy in the digital age is looking more and more to just become the tyranny of the people with the most likes on social media. Note, I'm referring specifically to digital direct democracy, but I don't see the digital going anywhere–not a primmi–and I don't want democracy in that form.

I'm also losing faith in consensus as a decision making platform en mass. It works with committed, educated people, in smaller collectives, but on a larger scale I feel that autonomous action and networks are more the way to go. There's nothing stopping a collective of collectives from forming.

Always open to suggestions though, I'm sure there are decision making processes we just haven't formulated yet that might be better.

Everybody voting on all issue all the time isn't feasible. Liquid Democracy is the idea that individuals should have the freedom to change between directly voting on an issue or to delegate the vote to somebody they trust. Another feature that is usually associated with Liquid Democracy is that recursive delegation should be allowed (that is, you delegate to another person in case you don't vote, and if that person doesn't vote either, it goes to the person that person trusts, and so on). Proposals for it usually also have the feature that there should be a sorting of referenda into different topics and individuals should have the ability to make different delegations based on topic.

The German Pirate Party has used a free software for that called LiquidFeedback (which is kinda strange, because they talk much about privacy and the software can't really protect that, in turn for that you can use really fancy voting procedures like Condorcet-Schulze and can be sure the votes are counted correctly). As some people predicted (and not on meritocratic grounds), it lead to an extreme concentration of voting power. Maybe this can be fixed by just changing a few parameters. When you don't vote, your delegation (or that delegation's delegation or…) votes for you. If you don't vote for a really long time, I think your delegation should be nullified. The question is where we set "really long time", I think it should be one year or shorter. (I haven't kept tabs on the PP and LF in the last couple of years, maybe LF got improved in that regard.)

It's absurd how very indirect delegation can get. The programmers have been hypnotized by the aesthetics of recursion as a mathematical idea. Instead they should think about what it means when you are indirect friends with somebody through a long chain of other people, and I think it doesn't mean shit. I mean, just about any actor can claim to be a colleague of Kevin Bacon in the sense of having worked with people who in turn… *let's insert one or two more people in the chain here* … who have worked with him. Check out oracleofbacon.org/ and you will get the idea.

I think a similar system (with more focus on preventing power concentration) could work. Suppose we get rid of recursive delegation and put in the feature that you can approve several people, so your delegated voting power is split among them, and you have to log in at least once within the span of 6 months for that delegation to remain active, something like that.

A simple version of the basic idea that would also protect privacy for ordinary voters, but maybe doesn't really count as Liquid Democracy: People vote for a parliament, and also on issues. Voting on issues gets scheduled so that you don't vote on many days just for one question, you instead vote (say quarterly) on a whole battery of several questions, and when you do that, you can also specify a party preference, meaning for questions you don't specify a position on, the party's position will get copied.

This tbh.

In France, in some of the universities are held "General Assemblies" which are sort of like direct democracy, everybody can speak and vote for decisions.
The thing is, when it gets too big, and I'm speaking of more or less around hundred people in the case of my uni, you end up with fucking fascists and counter-revolutionnaries participating in the GA's.
I went to my Uni this morning and they were all over the place, ready to fight with people who they consider leftist, and the security had let them pass with knuckle gloves and steel boots.
Nobody throws them out because "muh democracy".

That's also due to the fact that those organizing this kind of events are bourgeois fucking scum and have more or less bourgeois or liberal ideas, and try to pass it as leftist.

Now I'm just fucking angry nobody does anything about the fash at the Uni and if I do anything against that I'll probably get my ass beaten because nobody is ready to face them physically, so yeah, fuck direct democracy in my case.

It's unclear to me what groups doing consensus really mean by that. (And I've met some in real life and talked with them for hours. They have such an imprecise language it's driving me insane.) If the way you do consensus means that a group refrains from implementing a decision if even one person doesn't like it, it should be obvious that, as the group increases in size, the probability of reaching a consensus, and so the probability of the group doing anything, implodes. (I told them that much, and they treated that as an ultra-subjective statement as if I had talked about which type of ice-cream I prefer.)

It's pretty clear to me that to get anything done in bigger groups that use a type of consensus, the only way to preserve consensus is to limit what blocking a decision means. That is, you as an individual block the usage of a particular resource for obtaining that goal: yourself, your arms and legs (if you have 'em), your brain, your mouth. Those who do the work of implementing the decision can do that with a consensus among themselves.

Here's what I'd like to see: A big group that can constantly split into smaller groups of people who care about a thing and want to do something about that and then they merge back, split in other ways, merge back together, and so on. The big group can still have an identity as a big group and publish official statements (say, a 3/4 super-majority requirement for general statements, a threshold of 1/4 for NAME OF BIG GROUP - SOME FACTION statements). The big group can also own some venue and use that for concerts and habbenings and the like and recycle some proportional voting method, so that you have some proportional representation over time of what different smaller groups within the big group want to do with that.