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But not every citizen is going to be able to individually weigh in on every decision, right? It would make more sense for people to pick someone to represent their interests in their stead.
The idea is that every citizen is able and has a right to weigh in on every decision that affects them, if they want to. Anarchists generally propose direct democracy and/or consensus based decision making systems.
The problem with representative democracy is that power corrupts, as we've clearly seen, again and again and again. Even a good person given power will almost definitely use it in some way to benefit themselves. It usually starts out in a very small, nearly harmless way, but progressively corruption worsens, especially as the need to cover up the previous acts of corruption becomes a concern.
How do you propose, in practice, to ensure that every citizen has a practical opportunity to weigh in on all the individual things affecting them, without giving them the option to have a representative?
Off the bat, I can think of a myriad of reasons this becomes prohibitively difficult for anything more than a few dozen people, but I'm honestly interested in hearing about a solution that could even conceivably work at a district (tens of thousands of people) not to speak of societal (millions) or international (billions) level.
That's a really great question, thank you for asking.
I will begin, in the classic anarchist tradition, of pointing out that I do not have all of the answers - this always sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but don't worry, I'll answer your question directly in a moment, and it's really important to communicate this because it's super important: anarchism isn't some blueprint for a society that we follow by rote and dogmatically implement, but rather a base layer of ideas we can use. As per an anarchist FAQ
Also, I'll point out that my objection is to representative democracy, i.e. the current system, where voters are mere passive spectators of occasional, staged, and highly rehearsed debates among candidates pre-selected by the corporate elite, who pay for campaign expenses. The public is expected to choose simply on the basis of political ads and news sound bites. Once the choice is made, cumbersome and ineffective recall procedures insure that elected representatives can act more or less as they (or rather, their wealthy sponsors) please. My objection is not with people representing the opinions of others, as long as representatives have very limited power, a limited mandate, and as long as that power can be withdrawn and representatives recalled in a quick and easy way.
Anyways, with that out of the way, I will approach your question by explaining one possible system out of infinitely many which are possible.
Anarchists believe in structuring things from a bottom-up approach, so let's start at the bottom - each neighborhood could have a participatory community which makes decisions for that neighborhood around practical, everyday decisions that directly affect shared living. For example, maintenance of shared areas, the use of community buildings/rooms, improvements to the neighborhood, etc.
Of course, neighborhoods do not exist in a vacuum - neighborhoods would want to work together to share resources and to collaborate to achieve greater goals, so confederations of neighborhoods could be formed. Each neighborhood could select one or more delegates to attend confederation meetings and speak on the behalf of the neighborhood, but not make decisions on behalf of them. Instead, each delegate would attend the confederation meeting, and meet with their neighborhood to bring them news of what was discussed at the delegation meeting. Then, in the neighborhood meetings, each neighborhood would come to their own decisions around what should happen at the confederation level, and a delegate - not necessarily the same person as before - would take those decisions, questions, concerns and discussion points back to the confederation, where either a consensus would be reached, or further discussion - which could again, be brought back to the neighborhood to share. In fact, rotating the role of delegate would be a really good idea, so that multiple people can get a better idea of the issues in the wider community and understanding of how the bottom-up power structure functions.
The cool thing about anarchism is that we can experiment on these ideas and try out different things in a very responsive, small scale way, since the lower levels of participatory communities are small, even bad ideas have very limited harm if/when implemented, and other communities can learn from the failures of others.
I hope this makes sense, and I hope you see how this would differ from representative democracy. The main difference is where the power lies - under anarchism, the power to make decisions always remains with the people as a whole, rather than being concentrated into the hands of a very select few.
If you are interested in learning more, have any doubts about problems with the ideas I have outlined, or some other approaches which could be taken, I would strongly encourage you to have a read of an Anarchist FAQ's section about what an anarchist society would look like - I can pretty much guarantee that any question you have is answered somewhere in there, it's nothing if not comprehensive!
I used to go out with someone who lived in a commune, which operated how you describe here - everybody gets a say in every decision. It was very equitable, but nothing *ever * got done. Part of the roof was falling down and the exposure to the elements was damaging the building at that point. The longer it was exposed the more damage was being done. The wall was starting to crumble. If it fell down it could damage as-yet undamaged parts of the building. A couple of families had already had to move to a different part of the building
At that point it had been 10 years and no decisions had been made. No decisions were close to being made. Their home was literally being destroyed and potentially endangering people -they were and had been no issues more pressing - and nothing has been done for a decade
That was ~15 families living together. And you think it’s feasible to scale that up to millions of people by increasing the group size and number of steps?
This sounds like a really good idea, but let me point something out: For the sake of efficiency, it would quickly make sense for most neighbourhoods to give their delegate a mandate of the type "We want something like this, but you can make minor changes to points X, Y, and Z in order to reach an agreement with the others". For example: We want the new road to be a gravel road that's about 2 m wide, but you can decide the exact quality of gravel, and whether the road is 1.5 m or 2.5 m in the meeting with the others. Whether we have light posts every 40 or 80 meters isn't so important, as long as the road is well lit (just make sure the lights are strong enough if they're widely spaced).
Further, once we get to scaling this up from the neighbourhood level to a scale of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, we're going to get progressively more details and specialist tasks that need ironing out: Should there be import tariffs on any goods? If so, which? What should the tax be? Should it be progressive? If so, how should it scale? What should be the standard bridge-height on a highway (very useful to standardise if you want any kind of long-haul transport)? How many students should there be per teacher in classrooms at different grade levels, and what kind of education should we require from those teachers? etc. etc. etc. This absolutely massive number of questions that need answering, will in practice demand that your delegate receives some kind of mandate to make decisions within the limits of what you've decided.
The larger the society in question, the wider those limits will need to be in order for the society to be able to reach any kind of consensus within a reasonable time frame. If every detail needs to go neighbourhood meeting (O(100 people) => neighbourhood confederation (O(10 000) people) => community meeting (O(100 000) people) => national meeting (O(1 000 000) people) and back for every iteration, the kids are going to be grown before you've decided whether a 5th grade teacher needs minimum high-school level or university level mathematics in order to teach science classes, or even before you've decided on whether this should be something you coordinate at the national level or not for that matter.
Once you start giving your delegates a mandate to make decisions within some pre-determined limits.... you've reinvented representative democracy.
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 length 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
Tyranny of the majority, especially considering that very many people are shit.
not every direct democratic system is majority rule. there are lots of ways to make decisions! remember, we don't need perfection, just something better than the tyranny of the minority we live under now. we can improve from there.
anyone seeking to sabotage decision making in bad faith can be handled however a given commune has decided to handle antisocial behavior (rehab, restorative justice, offering therapy, etc).
To add to the very good comment you already received, I would also point you towards an anarchist FAQ's answer to the question, "Won't there be a danger of a "tyranny of the majority" under libertarian socialism?". I will share a few choice paragraphs from there, but I encourage you to check it out yourself as it goes into a lot of detail: