Anarchists: Views on direct democracy?

[Aspiring Humanist]

I'm not quite an anarchist yet, still have some exploring to do, but I have one big roadblock in the way. I don't see how things could be carried out in a stateless society without implementation of direct democracy, which is the citizens voting directly on the issues without representatives. How will this protect the minority? This would not have worked to protect minorities rights during the civil rights movement, how could it protect minorities today? Please don't say something cliche out of Maos little red book like "The class consciousness of the people will ensure camaraderie and fraternity for all of the working class" or something ok. Or is there an alternative to direct democracy that wouldn't form a state?

[Tablo]

Anarchism promotes direct democracy when it is a viable option. Regional economic planning would be decided more along the lines by instantly re-callable candidates.

[The Idler]

Delegate democracy where necessary.

[Mr. Natural]

Comrade,
All life forms have a "state"--a higher level organization by which the lower elements maintain their being. Every cell in your body, as well as the body, itself, and your family, and your political group, have an organization.

The question for higher levels of organization such as a state is: is it organized from the bottom up and therefore in accord with the organization of life, or is it a top-down alienated structure that dominates its parts (people).

Human social systems must have higher levels of organization or they fall apart. Manifesto: "we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Associations are organized, whether the organization is formal or informal. And a minimal state of some sort is essential to any society.

Bakunin is clearly wrong in pointing to the state as the enemy of humanity. It is the capitalist state that is our mortal enemy.

[Rowan Duffy]

Comrade,
All life forms have a "state"--a higher level organization by which the lower elements maintain their being. Every cell in your body, as well as the body, itself, and your family, and your political group, have an organization.

I believe this is essentially correct. It's a "law" of control theory that you need a control parameter on the scale of the problem. If you want to control CO2 emissions, you need an organisation on a world scale that can deliberate and decide on that outcome.

The question is really if you define that as a state or as governance. Engels defined the state as a "special coercive force" which was generally graded by property such that "it is directly admitted that the state is an organization for the protection of the possessing class against the non-possessing class."

Anarchists like to define the negative features of government as the state, and good cooperative organisational features as governance.

Of course we're not entirely free in how we choose the definition of our words and in the modern age with the much larger useful functions of the state, such as various public services and, in some cases, even health-care, it's not the most useful for conveying meaning.

In general I think it's better to say what we're for than what we're against. We want the most democratic and egalitarian organisation of the entire political-economic scope as is realisable.

[Kotze]

The general Anarchist answer seems to be to decide a lot regionally and allow freedom of movement.

The concept of proportionality does not only apply to electing people (or sortition), voting on issues can also be done in a proportional way. Semi-proportional voting methods (provisional compromise opinion plus proportional representation of minority opinions) can be used to allocate debating time to various questions and for competing proposals how to deal with a specific question, even if ultimately a majority decides. Budget allocation in the arts can be done in a proportional way. Time slots in a stadium can be allocated proportionally instead of strictly according to majority taste.

Less usual ideas: A voting procedure could have an incentive mechanism to find compromises backed by a supermajority without slowing down progress (like the usual supermajority requirements do): the threat of a ballot lottery. I don't think that a lottery-fallback result far removed from majority opinion would have much of a chance to be implemented in reality though. Voting on issues could also be done with issue sets where people can distribute vote weight according to how important this or that is to them. Directly making a decision in that set go this or that way based on the number of points allocated has big problems and it would require in the end a very complicated procedure to curb such probs.

[syndicat]

Libertarian socialism (as I prefer to call it) is based on the idea of direct democracy, because people have to have the power to make those decisions that mainly affect them, collectively.

Over larger areas the idea is to use delegate democracy as an extension of direct democracy. this can work so long as the base has the power to force issues to be discussed and decided by the base assemblies. also the delegates should have no privileges whatever and work the same sorts of jobs as others. being a delegate is something they do part of the time. so they share the conditions of life of the base, are elected by the base, are required to give regular reports to the assemblies at the base, can be removed by these assemblies, and their decisions can be counter-manded by decisions of the assemblies when needed.

[Leftofleft]

Perhaps these delegates can have limits on their time in such a position (again, determined by the base of people) and/or each member of a people's assembly could be given the opportunity to "run"?

[Jose Gracchus]

Socialism must necessarily involve the mass, active participation of the working-class as a whole.

[Zav]

I'm not quite an anarchist yet, still have some exploring to do, but I have one big roadblock in the way. I don't see how things could be carried out in a stateless society without implementation of direct democracy, which is the citizens voting directly on the issues without representatives. How will this protect the minority? This would not have worked to protect minorities rights during the civil rights movement, how could it protect minorities today? Please don't say something cliche out of Maos little red book like "The class consciousness of the people will ensure camaraderie and fraternity for all of the working class" or something ok. Or is there an alternative to direct democracy that wouldn't form a state?
Most likely decisions would be made by consensus democracy in horizontally associated local federations, as opposed to mass direct democracy, which never considers the minority.