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nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your

nobody is trying to scale the communal model with more communalism though - it scales with delegates and democracy and whatnot. My town sends a delegate to your town's delegate to discuss where we can mutually support each other. Maybe our elected delegates form regional councils for more regular or coordinated cooperation. It's all good stuff and is basically how democracy /should/ work. In reality, your local rep doesn't mean anything because all the power is top-down.

PeterisP 5y ago
Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks. Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level. I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    "Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at least) a local optimum, and every change will be immediately worse in the short-term; and if you don't have a good reason to presume how exactly you'll get to an actually better scenario then simply "doing something" for the sake of doing something is outright evil and destructive and having good ill-informed intent is not a sufficient justification for harming people with the attempt to fix something. As the Hippocratic oath says, "first, do no harm" - it also isn't an absolute principle, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but at the very least you have a very strong ethical responsibility to be sure that the outcome is really worth the harm. The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.

PeterisP 5y ago

Well, that's the thing that it does not scale with delegates in a hierarchical way. A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not. If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure. And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out. There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.

beaconstudios 5y ago
if I recall correctly, the Soviet councils were robbed of all authority by the bolsheviks. Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level. I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  "Doing nothing is not an option" is a very dangerous principle. Doing nothing is always an option worth considering and something that needs to be realistically compared about the proposed alternatives. The cure can easily be worse than the disease, and we have many historical examples of well-intended changes turning out more horrible than the problems they tried to fix. Quite often it happens that you are in (at least) a local optimum, and every change will be immediately worse in the short-term; and if you don't have a good reason to presume how exactly you'll get to an actually better scenario then simply "doing something" for the sake of doing something is outright evil and destructive and having good ill-informed intent is not a sufficient justification for harming people with the attempt to fix something. As the Hippocratic oath says, "first, do no harm" - it also isn't an absolute principle, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, but at the very least you have a very strong ethical responsibility to be sure that the outcome is really worth the harm. The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.