Can someone explain living without democracy?

[Prentasid]

Can someone explain living without democracy?

Hello! I've always been wondering about this. I'm used to a democracy where everyone vote, and that every vote count. In school I was learnt that the opposite og democracy was dictatorship.

But how will this work when the state have been abolished? I know that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but how will this work?

Here is my first, poor example:
Let's say you live in a really small commune with only 6000 inhabitants. It's soon winter, and the people are already freezing. Something has to be done in a hurry. 3000 inhabitants want warm clothes, and the rest want firewood. There is no place where the clothes can be made, and there is no place where the wood can be cut. The commune need to build the workplace. Unfortunately, they don't have enough resources to build both a tailor workshop and a "woodcutter workshop"; they can only build one. How do they decide what to build when 50% wants clothes and 50% wants firewood.

Another poor example:
We are in a big city with 40.000 inhabitants. We have a lot of carpenters, bakers, etc.

I just moved to the city, and I want to build my own workshop. I need an area or land where I could build this workshop.

I am going to make a huge worskhop, so I need much land.

I find a beautiful area. Unfortunately, I can't just take the land, so I need to ask the inhabitants if I can take it.

20.000 of the people say it's ok, but the rest is against it; they want the area to be used to other things.

Now we are at 50/50. How could we then deside if I should get the land or not, without voting?

I just can't imagine how this will work. We don't vote and we do not have a group of leaders that can come up with the answer.
I really hope someone here could explain how decisions
could be settled without democracy and leaders.

Thank you!

Ps: wrote this on my phone so there could be some typos!

[tuwix]

Can someone explain living without democracy?

Hello! I've always been wondering about this. I'm used to a democracy where everyone vote, and that every vote count. In school I was learnt that the opposite og democracy was dictatorship.

But how will this work when the state have been abolished? I know that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but how will this work?

I don't who did tell you that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but definitely he was wrong.

It's the most democratic system ever known because assumes real democracy instead of rule of the richest which is apparent today. Besides it assumes democracy everywhere and not only in state. All enterprises institutions and enterprises should be managed democratically.

[Brutus]

Communism is the negation of politics (withering away of the state), and so the negation of democracy as we know it. Democracy under communism will be no more than people getting together and saying "what are we going to do today?".

[jake williams]

First of all, the sorts of problems you're talking about are also problems in representative democracies (where everyone elects a few people to basically manage the government).

If you have a town and it's actually split 50/50 about what to do about a problem, then at best you're going to disappoint 50% of people.

Usually people who are communists think that one of the main points of communism is to make decisions more democratically. When a society elects a couple people to represent everyone else (and not everyone votes), those people don't always end up having much in common with the people affected by the decisions they make. If instead of electing a couple of people to run a town, you have people making decisions about their own workplaces, their own neighbourhoods, their own schools, and so on, you have more input and you have more democracy.

[Red Economist]

Can someone explain living without democracy?

Hello! I've always been wondering about this. I'm used to a democracy where everyone vote, and that every vote count. In school I learned that the opposite of democracy was dictatorship.

But how will this work when the state have been abolished? I know that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but how will this work?

Both Democracy and Dictatorship assume a contradiction between the individual and society/state. The normal definition of dictatorship is a dictatorship by a minority over the rest of society, whereas a democracy is a dictatorship by the majority. Democracy means 'majority rule', so the majority gets to over-rule or dictate to the minority or 'individual'.

The ideal is that under communism, everyone will be completely free. This includes not having to work because machines/artificial intelligence will be doing everything for 'us'. Because no-one has to work, no-one will therefore be forced to do what a minority or majority wants. Equally, no work means no division of labor and therefore no division of society into classes. Without this economic need for compulsion, their is no need for a state.

Here is my first, poor example:
Let's say you live in a really small commune with only 6000 inhabitants. It's soon winter, and the people are already freezing. Something has to be done in a hurry. 3000 inhabitants want warm clothes, and the rest want firewood. There is no place where the clothes can be made, and there is no place where the wood can be cut. The commune need to build the workplace. Unfortunately, they don't have enough resources to build both a tailor workshop and a "woodcutter workshop"; they can only build one. How do they decide what to build when 50% wants clothes and 50% wants firewood.

The scarcity of resources (which is going to be dependent on the level of economic development) leads to competition over their use, so one group will have to over-rule the other. Now, ideally, this will be that the majority (representing their own needs and interests) will over-rule the minority in a democratic system.
Because this decision is driven by what people 'need', not simply by what they 'want', it will not be a simple 50/50 split. Rather, people would prioritize one over the other and would have to discuss it.

However, this may not be the case as it depends on the division of labor, the division of society into classes and therefore who gets the power.

If the tools for building the tailor workshop and woodcutter workshop are privately owned- the 'capitalists' (who own the tools) will get to decide what is built and a state will enforce this decision as the property rights of the capitalist or 'the rule of law'. It will be described as a 'representative democracy', but in practice, it's still a minority telling a majority what to do- so it can be considered a dictatorship of the capitalist class.

If the tools are owned by the proletariat (assuming no crazy totalitarian deformations) they will decide what to do with the tools more democratically, than in the capitalist instance. However, because they still have to work, they are still going to be bound by the economic necessity of making a decision. So it will still be a democracy.

Another poor example:
We are in a big city with 40.000 inhabitants. We have a lot of carpenters, bakers, etc.

I just moved to the city, and I want to build my own workshop. I need an area or land where I could build this workshop.

I am going to make a huge worskhop, so I need much land.

I find a beautiful area. Unfortunately, I can't just take the land, so I need to ask the inhabitants if I can take it.

20.000 of the people say it's ok, but the rest is against it; they want the area to be used to other things.

Now we are at 50/50. How could we then deside if I should get the land or not, without voting?

I just can't imagine how this will work. We don't vote and we do not have a group of leaders that can come up with the answer.
I really hope someone here could explain how decisions
could be settled without democracy and leaders.

Obviously, this couldn't be done without a democracy or a dictatorship because of the economics of needing to build the workshop. It is not simply you're decision as to whether you build a workshop- in both a market economy and a moneyless planned economy, you still have to have some demand for the workshop- so the obvious question is do other people need you to build it?
Under capitalism, this is (somewhat) measured by how much money you can make by building the workshop and then selling it's products. If you build a huge workshop and no-one buys anything, you got out of business. Under Socialism/Communism, it should be done more consciously based on economic planning of what people need based on trying to figure out the physical quantities of resources available and goods needed to be produced.

The limit on how democratic the system can be is how much free-time people have to participate in the democratic process. If people have a low productivity of labor they're going to spend most of their time working- so it is more likely a minority will rule. If people have a higher productivity of labor, they have to do less work and therefore have more time to be part of the decision making process- so it is more likely to be majority rule.

"Problems" arise when people have a lot of time, but are ruled by a minority. This minority acts as a class, ruling via a state, imposing it's system of property rights that acts in their interests on everyone else. But if the majority has more time to be politically active- they can turn round and say... we want a democracy and we're going to have a revolution in order to get it! This is- in theory- how an economic democracy could be created under socialism/communism.

[ckaihatsu]

Can someone explain living without democracy?

Democracy was a *political* concession that the bourgeois class won from the royalty, at the waning of feudal-based rule -- it's not something that *anyone*, especially revolutionaries, should feel *beholden* to. Rather, in the domain of mass industrial production, we're dealing more with matters of consumption-driven material demands which aren't dependent on who is "in charge" or exactly which persons carry out the labor for it.

To prove this point there could be a situation where a broad-scale vote is taken and 'the majority' votes to have menial labor provided on a lifelong basis to each and every person -- doesn't mean that any worker is going to actually *oblige* such a "vote".

Hello! I've always been wondering about this. I'm used to a democracy where everyone vote, and that every vote count. In school I was learnt that the opposite og democracy was dictatorship.

But how will this work when the state have been abolished? I know that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but how will this work?

The historical legacy of elite rule has brought us to where everything of significance has to be routed through the bottleneck of a standing authority, the bourgeois state.

This greatly distorts the *material reality* on-the-ground, where, if such a third-party authority could be ignored, much more potential -- as over productive possibilities -- would be opened up from the sheer lack of interference from above.

We have to ask ourselves if a workers' control of mass production would *require* the bottleneck of a bureaucratic-type authority, as for overseeing vote counts for the election of bureaucrat-type specialists, for ultimate decision-making over the issues of the day.

If this kind of elitist power structure can be eliminated then we would need to have an agreeable process to replace it, for decision-making over material concerns. (I'll posit that, given modern-day mass industrial production capabilities, there would not be any shortfalls in providing for everyone's basic needs of life and living, if all productivity were controlled by the workers of the world.)

In dealing with *material* (productive) realities, we're *not* dealing with (bourgeois-type) *political* institutions, like "democratic voting", which really just bottlenecks and funnels mass support for one-or-another "representative", for substitutionist decision-making over matters of material reality for the rest of us. We would do better to look at practices that deal more directly with what we're after, and those practices are related-to (but not exactly-from) the field of economics, instead of from bourgeois politics.

Again, from another thread:

Oh okay, I'm starting to understand you a little better.

So by democratically you mean, what the 51% decides is best to produce is what will be produced?

This is taking the current, dilapidated approach to politics and trying to make it fit for the domain of demand-driven liberated production.

A moment ago it sounded like there was *too* much demand from the 7 billions, but suddenly now it's all getting squeezed into a one-time, majority-wins blueprint-approach to the world's total production planning. This is taking the worst representative practice from *politics* and grafting it onto the very granulated *economics* sphere.

---

Here is my first, poor example:
Let's say you live in a really small commune with only 6000 inhabitants. It's soon winter, and the people are already freezing. Something has to be done in a hurry. 3000 inhabitants want warm clothes, and the rest want firewood. There is no place where the clothes can be made, and there is no place where the wood can be cut. The commune need to build the workplace. Unfortunately, they don't have enough resources to build both a tailor workshop and a "woodcutter workshop"; they can only build one. How do they decide what to build when 50% wants clothes and 50% wants firewood.

The rule-of-thumb for a post-capitalist mode of common production would be to 'increase capacity' -- for *any* given example, we'd have to ask if existing material conditions are being *unduly* constrained in any way.

For this example of yours, I'd have to ask if the commune is really that isolated and cut-off from the larger world population, and if there wouldn't be some kind of social ties, or outreach, to a greater society of material resources -- wouldn't a commune exposed to harsh winters have access to *electricity*, and other fuels, as for heating -- ? And, if not, wouldn't they be actively looking farther afield to *make that happen* -- ?

Another poor example:
We are in a big city with 40.000 inhabitants. We have a lot of carpenters, bakers, etc.

I just moved to the city, and I want to build my own workshop. I need an area or land where I could build this workshop.

I am going to make a huge worskhop, so I need much land.

I find a beautiful area. Unfortunately, I can't just take the land, so I need to ask the inhabitants if I can take it.

20.000 of the people say it's ok, but the rest is against it; they want the area to be used to other things.

Now we are at 50/50. How could we then deside if I should get the land or not, without voting?

I just can't imagine how this will work. We don't vote and we do not have a group of leaders that can come up with the answer.
I really hope someone here could explain how decisions
could be settled without democracy and leaders.

Thank you!

Ps: wrote this on my phone so there could be some typos!

What *you* have, for the "big city", is simply a *proposal* -- being only one person there's no reason that you should expect more consideration than what would be due to one person.

You would probably want to consider *politicizing* it, so as to show how such a large workshop would be worth the land it would cover, for as many of the inhabitants as possible. If you can gain support from a number of people, for some version of a large-landed workshop, then the people of the city would have to consider the proposal on the basis of how many people *support* it, as a group.

The political will of the 'big city' could be ascertained, to a fine measurement of relative preference, by allowing people to *prioritize* their favor for one-or-another proposal, over all others:


[17] Prioritization Chart

[tallguy]

Democracy in a capitalist society is a system of limited choice for citizens within the constraints of undemocratic underlying societal structures designed to service the interests of a minority

Deomcracy in a socialist society is a system of limited choice for citizens within the constraints of undemocratic underlying societal structures designed to service the interests of the majority.

If you are a part of the majority and not part of that minority, you have to be a dumbass or an ignorant victim of endless capitalist propaganda to prefer the former over the latter. I do accept, by the way, that the reason for much of the reticence in the population for a socialist society is due to propaganda induced ignorance and not due to dumb-assery.

But, dumb-assery doesn't help.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Communism is the negation of politics (withering away of the state), and so the negation of democracy as we know it. Democracy under communism will be no more than people getting together and saying "what are we going to do today?".

I think, being realistic, the intricacies and scale of the world, of human social behaviour, of human population and of the systems and institutions we have created demand that we have a slightly more formalised system than this.

Of course, it is pointless sitting here theoretically masturbating about blueprints for a world that hasn't been created yet, before the old world has been torn down.

But let's be clear, if whatever system of social organisation follows capitalism is to be progressive and long-lasting, it must be more democratic than ever before. More inclusive, more fair, more equal, more participatory, more orientated towards social justice, and it must give people more opportunities for self-realisation through learning, through the acquisition of knowledge, and through the ability to, essentially, do what they want to do.

I don't particularly want to get any less wishy-washy for now because, quite honestly, it's pointless. We can only learn what specific actions we can take in response to specific situations - learning by doing -, taking into account what has gone before - learning from history. As an historian, I choose for now to focus on the latter.

We cannot have a society dominated by anything monolithic - be it a person, cabal, party, or any other oppressive, institutional mechanism of political/state power and dictatorship. Thus, logically, we must look to the opposite, that power should rest in the hands of ordinary people like you and me. Has there been a satisfactory 'blueprint' for this so far, or a satisfactory enaction of a genuinely democratic socialist model? Probably not. We don't have that practical experience yet, but we can learn from history (take into account what has gone before). We know to avoid a one-party dictatorship, we know to avoid cults of personality altogether, we know to avoid attempting to manage capital through either the existing mechanisms of the state or replacing one state bureaucracy with another.

So using history as a starting point, most of us (both communists and non-communists) have a pretty good idea of where we don't want to end up. This pushes us slightly closer to an ultimately desirable ends, but when all's said and done, the majority of our theories and blueprints will be formed in practice - learning by doing. So we will have to wait for now, for a situation of revolution, and continue to educate, and win propaganda wars on issues that we can win now - the total failure of capitalism, the need for greater social justice, equality, real social/economic/political freedom and a genuine democracy, and the idea that pretty much none of this can be achieved under capitalism.

[Prentasid]

Thank you very, very much for great answers! I completely forgot this thread. I will read trough everything as fast as possible!

I don't who did tell you that there is no such thing as democracy in communism, but definitely he was wrong.

Thank you very much for the clarification. I have heard it from a lot of people (Some few were on the left side, not sure if they were communists or not)

[ckaihatsu]

But let's be clear, if whatever system of social organisation follows capitalism is to be progressive and long-lasting, it must be more democratic than ever before.

I'll add that perhaps there's a key distinction to make, always, on the topic of democracy, regarding socialism.

My understanding is that politics and/or democracy is simply what happens when there's *scarcity* involved, and so democracy can be *supplanted* just by ensuring that everything needed is supplied in abundance -- *this* is the paradigm that's far more in-line with modern (industrialized) reality, rather than one of sprawling byzantine power structures to be penetrated and rationalized by a mass democracy.

I think we tend to be conditioned into the 'civil society' or 'town hall' mindset, where all issues there boil down to some complicated drama between two local people, reaching back years or decades, over something-or-other.

Into this social context, we, the larger body of enlightened minds, are supposed to use 'democracy' to overcome all past logjams, making the meeting room *glow* with our collective wisdom and rightful public proclamations. And, by extension, this 'democracy' could eventually solve the world's festering problems, if only enough people would take the time out of their personal schedules to show up to such town hall meetings on a regular basis.

In contrast, we *should* be dealing with the *industrialized* world that we've been born into, and look to what *material* solutions may exist for rationalizing *production* -- this is what's at-stake, since tool-aided labor can fully provide for the necessities of life and living.

So, in this sense, all matters of production are *beyond* 'democracy', since there doesn't *need* to be a consensus on what human beings require to live -- what counts is the actual *fulfillment* of these well-known outstanding needs.

There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours, on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.

And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/ar...scar/soul-man/

[exeexe]

Can someone explain living without democracy?

Well do you work for a capitalist company? That should explain all you need to know. Capitalism is antidemocracy...

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

I'm very sorry, but you need not image living without democracy as you are doing so now. The liberal model is exclusionary by nature. Add to that the capitalist control over the system, and it is clear that we have a thinly disguised oligarchy where people are conned into thinking they have freedom. Sure you can say what you want without going to prison, unless you say it in the wrong place or to the wrong person, but if you say anything too nonconformist, you will lose your job and then your house, your friends, your spouse, your health insurance, and you will end up a non-person living on the margins. Each election your choices are confined to your geographic area (as if people in CA have different needs than those in FL or some other part of the world), and to those who are willing and financial able to run--rich narcissists, basically. You are left with a choice between two nationalist, capitalist, patriarchal candidates with one perhaps not quite as bad as the other. And even then, one can win with 49.9% of the voters (who are a fraction of the adult population) in opposition, which means one party can win a legislative majority with 26% of the vote.

The hope with a post-capitalist society is that it would be based on a consensus of the human community, rather than the exclusionary politics of the liberal power structure.