Democracy and centralism.

[Taikand]

I'm not an Anarchist but I have libertarian leanings but in the same time I support centralism. I want the whole world to be one big commune where everything the human races produces goes into a pot and then it is shared by all, but that requires centralism.
Can we have centralism and democracy?

[mountainfire]

The term "democratic centralism" is normally applied in the context of discussions about Lenin's theory of the revolutionary party, and what the term effectively means is that decisions should be taken through the democratic process but that, once taken, all decisions should be abided by and implemented throughly at each level of the party organization. The term itself is potentially misleading in that it appears to put democracy and centralism in tension with one another whereas actually they are two sides of the same coin - if people do not follow through on decisions that have been taken democratically even when they do not agree with them there is rarely any point in using democratic procedures in the first place. Outside of discussions about revolutionary organization, centralization is one of the features that many Anarchists see as integral to the state, preferring instead a decentralized form of government, based on federations of local communes, but the experience of revolutionary struggles indicates that the bourgeoisie will use centralized institutions like armies and governments to seek to retain its power and that the best way for the working class to maintain its own interests in the course of struggle is to develop its own centralized bodies, which concentrate the energies of the class - the Paris Commune being the first and most significant example of this.

[Paulappaul]

I'm not an Anarchist but I have libertarian leanings but in the same time I support centralism. I want the whole world to be one big commune where everything the human races produces goes into a pot and then it is shared by all, but that requires centralism.
Can we have centralism and democracy?

Yes and while I am a Marxist -who is inspired by anarchists- I would say that an ideal Communist or Anarchist society could be both Democratic and Centralist. While it's often claimed that the Paris Commune reflected the federalism of Proudhon, it didn't. The Paris Commune aspired to be smaller part of a larger centralized Commune.

As long as the government maintained recallabe delegates and power to the lower organs of the Commune, it would remain democratic in a centralised fashion.

No doubt the results of every revolution will have different outcomes, some countries will operate under a centralized government, some under decentralized, some under representative governments, some without any government at all. Who are we to say how the future society will look like?

[mountainfire]

Who are we to say how the future society will look like?

We certainly shouldn't make detailed predictions about how society will involve but Marx and Engels certainly thought that they could make some statements about the fate of politics and the social world in the event of the overturn of capitalist relations of production. Engels, drawing on Saint-Simon, identifies the transition to a communist society with the end of politics, understood as the rule of men over men, and its replacement with the administration of things, understood as the purely technical management of an advanced productive apparatus. Now, the notion of society no longer being concerned with politics doesn't rule out the need to take decisions or use democratic procedures, but it does seem clear that, for Marx and Engels at least, the communist society wouldn't involve government in the sense of a distinct political sphere, orientated towards the management of social conflicts and the implementation of policies.

[Paulappaul]

No doubt.

But my point was that inherent conditions will imply different forms of organization. We can theorize as much as we want, but a legitimate revolution will be "the act of the working class" - thus rendering ideology useless. The results of a revolution will be the act of their creators.

[ckaihatsu]

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We certainly shouldn't make detailed predictions about how society will involve but Marx and Engels certainly thought that they could make some statements about the fate of politics and the social world in the event of the overturn of capitalist relations of production. Engels, drawing on Saint-Simon, identifies the transition to a communist society with the end of politics, understood as the rule of men over men, and its replacement with the administration of things, understood as the purely technical management of an advanced productive apparatus. Now, the notion of society no longer being concerned with politics doesn't rule out the need to take decisions or use democratic procedures, but it does seem clear that, for Marx and Engels at least, the communist society wouldn't involve government in the sense of a distinct political sphere, orientated towards the management of social conflicts and the implementation of policies.





For the reader I'd like to introduce a model I developed not too long ago. It posits a mass-prioritized listing of political demands and consumer preferences, aggregated from all individuals, updated daily.

On the labor-supply side, using entirely collectivized assets and resources, the model establishes a political economy of labor-hour-based labor credits that are *not exchanged* for material personal possessions (since the output from collectivized infrastructure by liberated labor *must* be free-access, by definition). Instead the earned labor credits proportionally empower liberated laborers to organize and select *incoming* liberated laborers, going forward, in perpetuity.




communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

This is an 8-1/2" x 40" wide table that describes a communist-type political / economic model using three rows and six descriptive columns. The three rows are surplus-value-to-overhead, no surplus, and surplus-value-to-pleasure. The six columns are ownership / control, associated material values, determination of material values, material function, infrastructure / overhead, and propagation.

http://tinyurl.com/ygybheg




Associated material values

communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process

labor [supply] -- Labor supply is selected and paid for with existing (or debt-based) labor credits

consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily




Infrastructure / Overhead

communist administration -- Distinct from the general political culture each project or production run will include a provision for an associated administrative component as an integral part of its total policy package -- a selected policy's proponents will be politically responsible for overseeing its implementation according to the policy's provisions

labor [supply] -- All workers will be entirely liberated from all coercion and threats related to basic human living needs, regardless of work status -- any labor roles will be entirely self-selected and open to collective labor organizing efforts on the basis of accumulated labor credits

consumption [demand] -- A regular, routine system of mass individual political demand pooling -- as with spreadsheet templates and email -- must be in continuous operation so as to aggregate cumulative demands into the political process


A further explanation and sample scenario can be found here:


'A world without money'

tinyurl.com/ylm3gev

[Uppercut]

Democracy is correlative with freedom, while centralism is correlative to discipline. They are both opposites, but when applied in a dialectic manner, they offer a system of governance that encourages "freedom of discussion, unity of action", as Lenin put it.

[A.R.Amistad]

I'm not an Anarchist but I have libertarian leanings but in the same time I support centralism. I want the whole world to be one big commune where everything the human races produces goes into a pot and then it is shared by all, but that requires centralism.
Can we have centralism and democracy?

I'm going to let comrade Chris Harman answer this one for me. He puts his essay in a really good format, listing the main arguments of some against "centralism" and showing how centralism is necessary and important to democracy:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1978/07/democent.htm