Size Limit for Direct Democracy?

[Havet]

I don’t think you can be an anarcho-communist or an anarcho-syndicalist. You know if the commune runs everything, and decides for everything, whether it is a neighborhood commune or a mass country commune – it really does not matter in this case, somebody’s got to make the communal decision. You can’t tell me that you’ll have participatory democracy and that everybody is going to equally participate. There is obviously going to be a small group, the officiating board or the statistical administrative board or whatever they want to call it, whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be the same damn group making decisions for everybody. In other words, it’s going to be a coercive decision for the collective property. It will be another state again, as far as I can see. So I really can’t see any basis for collaboration. That is really part of a broader analysis of the communist versus the individualist position.

I saw this piece of commentary in a blog and wondered how would people respond to this here. Will communes have to be necessarily limited in size so direct democracy actually works, or are the author's fears on centralizing power and decision overestimated?

[IcarusAngel]

Boy, don't you just love all the facts and evidence he provides to make his case that communities have to have a central dictator, just like Adolf von Mises taught? I mean, communities always have to have one leader who makes all the final decisions. Yeah right.

I have a 'family unit.' I make independent decisions all the time in this family unit. If the community acts singularly, they would do it based on MAJORITY rule, they wouldn't do it based on the whims of some dictator or it wouldn't be a community in the first place. This is in contrast to capitalism where elite, private tyrants come into power and make all the decisions.

But why would the community even act as a singular unit unless it had to do with something of extreme consequences, like going to war. The only point of the community I see is helping to prevent private tyrannies from existing. As Karl Marx said, communists don't even deny people the right to their labor, they deny people the 'right' to derive power from that labor to rule over and coerce others.

Of course, community wouldn't even be needed to ensure that capitalists can't monopolize land. Just take away government, and they couldn't monopolize it either.

[Искра]

Size is not important.
In classfree society we will still keep today's technology which can be used for purposes of direct democratic voting etc..

[IcarusAngel]

Evidence:

The first governments were not set up to act as board to represent the people. They were set up to deal with property relations. Certain groups were worried that their property would be taken by others, that is why they needed a government to protect it. So, the foundations of government were to ensure one of group of peole (say, aristocrats or slave owners) had total domination over other groups of people.

Humans have lived in one form of slavery or another ever since.

Is there evidence otherwise?

[SocialismOrBarbarism]

I saw this piece of commentary in a blog and wondered how would people respond to this here. Will communes have to be necessarily limited in size so direct democracy actually works, or are the author's fears on centralizing power and decision overestimated?

I'm going to again suggest reading this:


From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

...

Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts administrative, judicial, and educational by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time. And in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were also added in profusion.


The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.

Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workman’s wage. The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune.

Having once got rid of the standing army and the police – the physical force elements of the old government – the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the “parson-power", by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles.

The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.

The judicial functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject subserviency to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of allegiance. Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

The Paris Commune was, of course, to serve as a model to all the great industrial centres of France. The communal regime once established in Paris and the secondary centres, the old centralized government would in the provinces, too, have to give way to the self-government of the producers.

In a rough sketch of national organization, which the Commune had no time to develop, it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service. The rural communities of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assemblies were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandat imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents. The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and thereafter responsible agents.

The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture.
...

The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the state parasite feeding upon, and clogging the free movement of, society. By this one act, it would have initiated the regeneration of France.
...

It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.
...

The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!
Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land, and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor. But this is communism, “impossible” communism! Why, those members of the ruling classes who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system – and they are many – have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?

[Demogorgon]

The problem with talking about the size of Communes is that Communes are very poorly defined. Are they your locality, your city, your region, your country (for want of a better word), the planet? Often when I hear people talking about them I get the impression they mean Kibbutz style units but as currently existing societies are structured as cities and that is unchangeable, we won't be capable of living like that.

I think society will have to organise itself on all the levels I referred to. At the local level that can be pure direct democracy, as you get larger scale it is inevitable that representatives will have to be used, whether they be elected, chosen by sortition or whatever else is a different issue, but we will have to delegate for the sake of practicality. The important thing is the people having a veto over their decisions and the ability to circumvent them and act directly if necessary, while recognising that it will be impractical to do all the time.

Mind you, that is rather abstract. I am talking in a very theoretical manner about local communities banding together and delegating authority upwards, but in reality we are all already bound together anyway in the capitalist system. We are hardly going to completely separate from one another and then come back together again in a completely new way. Rather we will remake the current structures keeping our different communities connected.

[trivas7]

Of course, community wouldn't even be needed to ensure that capitalists can't monopolize land. Just take away government, and they couldn't monopolize it either.
Of course; if we were the Borg, communism would go swimmingly. :D

[ChrisK]

I don’t think you can be an anarcho-communist or an anarcho-syndicalist. You know if the commune runs everything, and decides for everything, whether it is a neighborhood commune or a mass country commune – it really does not matter in this case, somebody’s got to make the communal decision. You can’t tell me that you’ll have participatory democracy and that everybody is going to equally participate. There is obviously going to be a small group, the officiating board or the statistical administrative board or whatever they want to call it, whatever it’s going to be, it’s going to be the same damn group making decisions for everybody. In other words, it’s going to be a coercive decision for the collective property. It will be another state again, as far as I can see. So I really can’t see any basis for collaboration. That is really part of a broader analysis of the communist versus the individualist position
I saw this piece of commentary in a blog and wondered how would people respond to this here. Will communes have to be necessarily limited in size so direct democracy actually works, or are the author's fears on centralizing power and decision overestimated?

There are a few problems with what the poster said.

First, to assume that it will be the same people in a small workers council ignores the point of elections and instantly recallable electors. Also, who says that these people can do be on the board more than once before you go through a cycle in which everyone has to have a turn.

Second, the assumption that direct democracy cannot exist is silly. Technology allows for voting on all things that pertain to production. Also, even if there are small workers councils, then their decisions ought to be subject to referendum.

Third, he misdefines state. Organized political power only becomes a state or government once forcible coercion becomes something that is in the hands of some minority and not the majority. This will not exist in communism because of points one and two.

Therefore, direct democracy can very well be used and even if small workers councils are the main bodies of decision making, they will not consitute a state.

[spiltteeth]

3,000 - the size Libya has decided on.