5 ms·

On Democracy as a Necessary Anarchist Value (2017)

25 points by ofou 5y ago

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
> If we understand democracy in this way, it is not only indispensable to anarchy: it is anarchy. This was such an interesting read. The last sentence nails on the head why pure democracy doesn't work. Nothing gets done. Pure democracy is a meeting with more than 12 people in it. This is incidentally why political parties are emergent phenomena in real-world democracies. It's also why archetypal leaders are either ineffective, or devolve into dictators of one form or another. Real political power in democracies comes from forming coalitions, and gaining agreement. Archetypal leaders, representing any one single ideal, aren't able to do that.
- ofou 5y ago
  > "So ultimately the concept of democracy makes sense as something that ordinary people have actually done, and continue to do when they can create spaces of possibility in which they can act as equals to solve their common problems." I agree you your comments, btw I think is still an open problem how to deal with political parties in real-world democracies.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    It s a balancing game with changing rules - a sane democracy accepts to change (I dont think the american system is a democracy fwiw, as a French). For instance, sometimes an election with 13 parties will have open primaries in 5 of them binding the entire population to each candidate who will end up similar to each other, and the next time parties change the rule to avoid this risk and end up with a wide pentagram of mainstream extremes, and some revert back etc. As long as you have more than a binary split, anyone can join parties militant groups and local officials approve the national election candidates (so you have a soft gatekeeper), you open up to arbitrary mutations that prevent rotting fixtures. The GOP/Dem eternal fight in the heavens is distracting people from their duty to elect people to solve problems imo. Elections are a duty to manage the country, not a right to choose between two sides of the same coin.
  - c21h30o2 5y ago
    To me it seems obvious that we will get technological solutions to voting that can make direct/local democracy more competitive against representative democracy. I think we won't need national governments as much anymore, instead we need a global "lightweight" government that does as little as possible, and much more diverse and bespoke local city/community level governance where the governed mostly govern themselves. Shared resources such as fishing quotas, forests, mineral deposits etc. should be governed by smart contracts where the incentives of the voters are aligned with long-term sustainability. It shouldn't matter which country a person is from or how big their boat is, if they extract X tons of something they need to buy X tons of quota for it on the open market.
- SamWhited 5y ago
  > The last sentence nails on the head why pure democracy doesn't work. Nothing gets done. Pure democracy is a meeting with more than 12 people in it. I keep reading this but can't square it with what the last sentence seemed to say. I'm pretty sure they were arguing the opposite of what you took that sentence to mean, or am I missing something obvious?
- kragen 5y ago
  You seem to be reading Kevin with the understanding that "anarchy" means "nothing gets done" or "ineffective organization". But that's a misreading that amounts to begging the question; Kevin's principal point in this essay (and, perhaps, across his writings in general) is that pure democracy is a very effective form of organization that gets a great deal done.
  - michaelbrave 5y ago
    I've always believed pure democracy can be very effective but has problems of scale and the complexity that comes with it
ouid 5y ago
I wish the people who wrote about this stuff valued precision in their language. Of course if they did, then it would open the nonsense that they spout to criticism. > The ultimate in democracy, in the sense of a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed. And in this sense, a permissionless, stigmergic organization, in which all individual activity is self-chosen, is the ultimate in democracy. What on earth are the assumptions and conclusions here? What is the mechanism of inference? Maybe this person should spend some time trying to formalize their beliefs.
- TrispusAttucks 5y ago
  Yeah. Pro-anarchists seem to do mental gymnastics to validate their beliefs. On a long enough timeline an anarchist society would necessarily become democratic.
- justicezyx 5y ago
  I don't even follow this sentence after reading a few times...
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    Yeah. It’s word soup to me. If an idea is a good one it’s usually possible to describe it in very plain language.
- kragen 5y ago
  What are you having trouble with in this passage? It seems straightforward to me. Maybe if I restate it as the contrapositive it will be clearer: any rule imposed on someone without their consent reduces their agency and control over their lives, although if their agency was infringing on someone else's, that rule might increase that other person's agency by a greater amount. That seems so straightforward as to be almost tautological. You could maybe criticize it for speaking in abstractions that are open to misinterpretation instead of parables, but parables are notoriously imprecise, so your criticism would seem to be the opposite. There's a little bit of conflict between the two sentences you quoted, in the sense that the second sentence doesn't explicitly take into account this possibility of one person's agency infringing on another's, but if there's an unstated assumption that imposing activity, as opposed to forbearance from activity, is never necessary to prevent that kind of interference, that would clean it up nicely. The overarching theme in the passage you've quoted, as in the whole essay, is that there's an inherent tension between democracy and coercion; the employment of coercion endangers (Kevin's definition of) democracy at best, destroys it at worst. Is that of any help? I'm kind of shooting in the dark here, since I don't understand the root of the difficulty, so it's possible that my explanations are just as opaque to you as the original text. Can you elaborate a little bit on what part you're having a hard time understanding?
AnonHP 5y ago
Tangent: Mod, this needs (2017) in the title.
justshowpost 5y ago
[flagged]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xcambar 5y ago
I'm not yet through with the whole article, but something reads like a warning from the beginning: the author uses agreement, consent and consensus as if they were interchangeable terms. Which they are certainly not. That poses a real difficulty with the topic at hand.
justshowpost 5y ago
[flagged]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
justshowpost 5y ago
[dead]
justshowpost 5y ago
This is completely fake, leftists are always authoritarian statists, happy tribes of utopically dancing hippies is just a wet dream (and bourgeoisie pays for it). This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Going back through the twentieth century communists generally fall into two categories; 1) Mass-murdering, totalitarian dictators when in power and 2) terrorists when not-in power. “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” noted retired FBI agent Mark Noel. Most of these bombings were committed by terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground. Which is just one in a long list of communist terrorist organizations including FARC, M-19, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the PKK and, let’s be honest, Antifa. In fact, a 2001 Department of Energy study found that, From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations.*

25 points by ofou 5y ago

> If we understand democracy in this way, it is not only indispensable to anarchy: it is anarchy. This was such an interesting read. The last sentence nails on the head why pure democracy doesn't work. Nothing gets done. Pure democracy is a meeting with more than 12 people in it. This is incidentally why political parties are emergent phenomena in real-world democracies. It's also why archetypal leaders are either ineffective, or devolve into dictators of one form or another. Real political power in democracies comes from forming coalitions, and gaining agreement. Archetypal leaders, representing any one single ideal, aren't able to do that.

ofou 5y ago
> "So ultimately the concept of democracy makes sense as something that ordinary people have actually done, and continue to do when they can create spaces of possibility in which they can act as equals to solve their common problems." I agree you your comments, btw I think is still an open problem how to deal with political parties in real-world democracies.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  It s a balancing game with changing rules - a sane democracy accepts to change (I dont think the american system is a democracy fwiw, as a French). For instance, sometimes an election with 13 parties will have open primaries in 5 of them binding the entire population to each candidate who will end up similar to each other, and the next time parties change the rule to avoid this risk and end up with a wide pentagram of mainstream extremes, and some revert back etc. As long as you have more than a binary split, anyone can join parties militant groups and local officials approve the national election candidates (so you have a soft gatekeeper), you open up to arbitrary mutations that prevent rotting fixtures. The GOP/Dem eternal fight in the heavens is distracting people from their duty to elect people to solve problems imo. Elections are a duty to manage the country, not a right to choose between two sides of the same coin.
- c21h30o2 5y ago
  To me it seems obvious that we will get technological solutions to voting that can make direct/local democracy more competitive against representative democracy. I think we won't need national governments as much anymore, instead we need a global "lightweight" government that does as little as possible, and much more diverse and bespoke local city/community level governance where the governed mostly govern themselves. Shared resources such as fishing quotas, forests, mineral deposits etc. should be governed by smart contracts where the incentives of the voters are aligned with long-term sustainability. It shouldn't matter which country a person is from or how big their boat is, if they extract X tons of something they need to buy X tons of quota for it on the open market.
SamWhited 5y ago
> The last sentence nails on the head why pure democracy doesn't work. Nothing gets done. Pure democracy is a meeting with more than 12 people in it. I keep reading this but can't square it with what the last sentence seemed to say. I'm pretty sure they were arguing the opposite of what you took that sentence to mean, or am I missing something obvious?
kragen 5y ago
You seem to be reading Kevin with the understanding that "anarchy" means "nothing gets done" or "ineffective organization". But that's a misreading that amounts to begging the question; Kevin's principal point in this essay (and, perhaps, across his writings in general) is that pure democracy is a very effective form of organization that gets a great deal done.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  I've always believed pure democracy can be very effective but has problems of scale and the complexity that comes with it

ouid 5y ago

I wish the people who wrote about this stuff valued precision in their language. Of course if they did, then it would open the nonsense that they spout to criticism. > The ultimate in democracy, in the sense of a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed. And in this sense, a permissionless, stigmergic organization, in which all individual activity is self-chosen, is the ultimate in democracy. What on earth are the assumptions and conclusions here? What is the mechanism of inference? Maybe this person should spend some time trying to formalize their beliefs.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago
Yeah. Pro-anarchists seem to do mental gymnastics to validate their beliefs. On a long enough timeline an anarchist society would necessarily become democratic.
justicezyx 5y ago
I don't even follow this sentence after reading a few times...
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Yeah. It’s word soup to me. If an idea is a good one it’s usually possible to describe it in very plain language.
kragen 5y ago
What are you having trouble with in this passage? It seems straightforward to me. Maybe if I restate it as the contrapositive it will be clearer: any rule imposed on someone without their consent reduces their agency and control over their lives, although if their agency was infringing on someone else's, that rule might increase that other person's agency by a greater amount. That seems so straightforward as to be almost tautological. You could maybe criticize it for speaking in abstractions that are open to misinterpretation instead of parables, but parables are notoriously imprecise, so your criticism would seem to be the opposite. There's a little bit of conflict between the two sentences you quoted, in the sense that the second sentence doesn't explicitly take into account this possibility of one person's agency infringing on another's, but if there's an unstated assumption that imposing activity, as opposed to forbearance from activity, is never necessary to prevent that kind of interference, that would clean it up nicely. The overarching theme in the passage you've quoted, as in the whole essay, is that there's an inherent tension between democracy and coercion; the employment of coercion endangers (Kevin's definition of) democracy at best, destroys it at worst. Is that of any help? I'm kind of shooting in the dark here, since I don't understand the root of the difficulty, so it's possible that my explanations are just as opaque to you as the original text. Can you elaborate a little bit on what part you're having a hard time understanding?

AnonHP 5y ago

Tangent: Mod, this needs (2017) in the title.

justshowpost 5y ago

[flagged]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

xcambar 5y ago

I'm not yet through with the whole article, but something reads like a warning from the beginning: the author uses agreement, consent and consensus as if they were interchangeable terms. Which they are certainly not. That poses a real difficulty with the topic at hand.

justshowpost 5y ago

[flagged]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

justshowpost 5y ago

[dead]

justshowpost 5y ago

This is completely fake, leftists are always authoritarian statists, happy tribes of utopically dancing hippies is just a wet dream (and bourgeoisie pays for it). This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Going back through the twentieth century communists generally fall into two categories; 1) Mass-murdering, totalitarian dictators when in power and 2) terrorists when not-in power. “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” noted retired FBI agent Mark Noel. Most of these bombings were committed by terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground. Which is just one in a long list of communist terrorist organizations including FARC, M-19, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the PKK and, let’s be honest, Antifa. In fact, a 2001 Department of Energy study found that, From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations.*