Liberal Democracy’s Had A Good Run
But it’s dying now, and needs to be replaced
By Joe Reynolds
There is fortunately, a better form of democracy. Hannah Arendt referred to it as council democracy; Kees Boeke used the term sociocracy; Murray Bookchin called it democratic confederalism; The Haudenosaunee people have been calling it the Great Law of Peace for a thousand years. These are all different names for a democratic system in which communities govern themselves, and each elects a representative to a regional governing body. This type of system has existed on a small scale many times throughout human history and has often been spontaneously created during revolutions such as the Paris Commune in 1871, Hungary 1956, Iran 1979, and currently in Rojava. In each case though, they have remained isolated and been destroyed by the better organized forces of capitalism. With hope, Rojava might be able to prove the trend wrong. The best known example though, would be the soviet (council) democratic system which was created by workers and soldiers during the 1917 Russian revolution. That brief experiment in truly representative democracy was tragically destroyed when the Bolshevik party seized control of the soviet with the October Revolution, imposing its authoritarian rule. Not only did that coup end the Russian experiment in council democracy, which otherwise might have been able to grow globally and ultimately change the world, it has also left the progressive movement confused, divided and demoralized for more than a century. Hannah Arendt’s dream of a global democratic council system for humanity to govern ourselves came to be viewed as no more than a utopian fantasy, and sadly that interpretation was probably correct, before the Internet.
The internet, a global communication system, now allows us an opportunity to create a democratic system for the world, but it will require a very specific design to work. Many believed, back in the 90s and briefly after the millennium, that the internet had the potential to bring us democracy and a better world. Douglas Rushkoff’s 2003 book ‘Open Source Democracy’ predicted hopefully that “the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.” That optimism lasted only until facebook and other platforms began to demonstrate how capitalism would now be able to use the internet to extract ever more profit out of us, and further erode liberal democracy. But of course democracy was never going to happen automatically; we’ll have to design and build it together. Many have tried to create such a movement, but unfortunately, despite what Margaret Mead famously, but mistakenly said about “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” changing the world, in reality, movements have only ever been able to change parts of the world, and even then, only temporarily. No movement will ever be able to unite enough of humanity to change the whole world, simply because movements, being ideological, automatically generate opposition and resistance, sometimes leading to civil war. Millions of dedicated activists and organizers all around the world are selflessly building essential social movements and nobly fighting for change, but with humanity divided from each other in so many ways, there is no single ideology that will ever unite us so that we can cooperate globally. As much as we might wish for it, changing the world just won’t work that way.
There remains hope though, in the fact that we are capable of organizing ourselves in two distinct ways. One is ideologically, by uniting people around a set of common beliefs, the way that movements, political parties, and religions do. However, for practical reasons, people will also join non-ideological organizations that are useful to them, like unions, or internet platforms. The latter provides the possibility for a global system of council democracy to be built gradually, by using the internet. Only when we have a fair, global, democratic system will we be able to act collectively to confront the myriad of problems that have been created by capitalism, and replace it with a cooperative system to govern the world. As the anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote about the embryonic democratic system developing during Occupy Wall Street, “but was it our job to come up with a vision for a new political order, or to help create a way for everyone to do so?”
Ironically, facebook has also shown us a better way to organize the world for positive change. Imagine for a moment if facebook had originally been created as a democratic platform cooperative, rather than a profit seeking corporation which is now responsible for so many horrendous social problems and suffering. It could have instead grown by now to be a global democratic organization of over 3 billion people, perhaps even in a position to realistically demand from corporations and governments the changes we need for a better world. Of course, many individuals and communities have tried to organize a cooperative social media platform, but the problem that every internet platform runs into, is anonymity. Online ‘communities’ are not really communities at all, because there is just no way to know and therefore trust each other. It would take only a simple requirement though, of having to register a real community that we are part of—our workplace, school, religious or cultural community, neighbourhood… and many other possible real communities—to remove the element of anonymity from a cooperative internet platform. Each individual’s behaviour on such a platform would then be self-policing, as we all are within our communities, because they’ll have to explain themselves to their own community if they behave in an anti-social way on the platform. A platform that we could actually trust would appeal to many people who are frustrated by the anti-social climate of so many platforms, but in order to eventually encourage everyone on the planet to choose to join the platform, it would have to provide something of interest to every community. It could for example, provide any or all of the same types of services and entertainment that people currently get from platforms like facebook, google, amazon, spotify, tiktok, games or any other app that is useful to someone. The only requirement for membership on the platform would be recognition in good standing by a real community, which must itself be recognized in good standing by the neighbouring communities, ultimately creating a sort of ‘blockchain’ of communities. Each individual wishing to join the platform must register a community which will endorse them. They can either choose one that is already recognized, or organize a new community and then seek recognition for it. Obviously this could only be built in a gradual way, beginning with any programmers and other volunteers willing to offer their time to create and maintain an open source platform cooperative. The growth of this platform would initially have to take place in the same manner as any other movement for social change, but the platform must also be designed in such a way to be capable of scaling up infinitely—something that movements are unable to do—eventually growing to include everyone. Yeah, everyone. Otherwise we won’t be able to change the world.
One of the reasons that movements for progressive change have always reached an upper limit in their numbers, and are unable to change the world in any lasting way, is because they must make demands on our time, energy and finances, which is a lot to expect from people who have very busy lives, struggling just to survive and feed their kids in the increasingly competitive world of capitalism. Unfortunately, organizing ourselves ideologically, and expecting masses of people to commit themselves to a project, no matter how progressive, will just never be able to bring together the numbers of people necessary to actually change the world, but facebook, in contrast, has organized the most people in human history simply by offering something that is useful, or just fun, and makes no demands. If an open source, democratic, platform cooperative were to do something similar—provide an excellent web platform that people WANT to join—and include the REQUIREMENT to register a REAL community that they are part of, we can begin to gradually build a global system of council democracy together. This mechanism prevents anonymity on the platform (and therefore the antisocial behaviour that goes with anonymity) and, it simultaneously brings grassroots communities around the world into a democratic Network.
There is a well established strategic formula that is typically followed when organizing for change: 1—Develop an ideological theory. 2—Find the others. 3—When the number of people reaches the ‘tipping point’, implement the desired change. While this is of course a gross simplification, the point is that while this method works quite well in achieving relatively small goals, it won’t scale up to allow us to change the world. Regrettably, it will never be possible to convince all of humanity to agree to one single ideology which means that we cannot change the whole world with this method. However, reversing the order of the first two will allow us to first organize enough people to be capable of actually changing the world, then together, democratically, humanity can decide how we will act collectively to change the world. There are of course many reasons not to trust our future to the internet, but at the same time, it’s a powerful tool that we can use to organize ourselves in a new and fair way. It is our communities themselves, in which we are all organized already, that we can trust, and the internet can facilitate the organizing of those communities into a global democratic network. If we keep trying to solve our problems with the same strategies that have always failed, we really should stop expecting different results.
You can reach Joe Reynolds at joe@liberigi.net
But it’s dying now, and needs to be replaced
By Joe Reynolds
July 29, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Power of Collaboration by Kati Szilágyi
One thing that all past human societies and civilizations have in common is that they all eventually collapsed. While each of us may be aware of this in the abstract, we don’t necessarily follow the logic to the depressing conclusion: why should we expect this one—global capitalism which is responsible for countless atrocities and yet, is also our collective life support system—to be any different? Although we can’t know when the collapse will happen, many believe we are now dangerously close to that day. Millions of people are screaming the warnings and demanding change from global leaders, but those ‘leaders’ have no real power. The sad reality is, humanity simply doesn’t have a system for making decisions collectively. Instead, the only decision making system we have is an economic one, in which those with capital to invest, do so in their own best interests, no matter the consequences for the rest of us, or the biosphere.
Through their individual choices, capitalists collectively, are deciding humanity’s future. The economist Adam Smith described this process nearly 250 years ago as an ‘invisible hand’. Despite all the promises or intentions, of every type of politician, there is unfortunately no way to control capitalism. To avoid the gradual, or sudden collapse of the world we know, humanity will need to first create a democratic system if we’re going to make decisions collectively.
Liberal democracy, the nation state, and capitalism all grew up together over the last few hundred years, evolving into this complex global system in which we now find ourselves, forced into the inhumane situation of having to compete for survival with 8 billion of our sisters and brothers, as individuals, communities and heavily armed nation states. The roots of this system though, are in the discovery of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago and the surplus of food which could then be produced. Soon-after, the value of that surplus was recognized by some, and the concept of private property was born. Since then, economies and cultures based on the idea of property ownership have gradually come to dominate the world. Owning food, land, tools, animals and even people has seemed ‘normal’ to those who grow up in such a culture, yet there have always been, and hopefully still are, cooperative cultures in which the idea of ‘ownership’ is not even understood let alone accepted as truth. Humans are by nature, a cooperative species. In fact, we would never even have survived at all without the ability to create communities and support each other. Unfortunately though, we evolved to cooperate in relatively small groups, in which we know and trust each other. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests a maximum of about 150 people.
The reason that liberal democracy doesn’t work for collective decision making is because it groups together voters who don’t know each other, so naturally each votes in their own interest rather than the collective good. Under such a system, politicians are stuck. To get re-elected they must keep the economy delivering for the voters’ individual interests, which generally requires doing whatever it takes to promote investment. Keep in mind, liberal democracy was designed by slave owners to manage their collective property rights, not for the benefit of communities or humanity as a whole. At the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2022, Joe Biden said “American democracy is not a reality show. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality itself.” So passionate, but he’s wrong. American democracy is in fact very much a reality show. Reality itself, is capitalism, the global market in which individual property owners make choices to invest their capital, which leads inevitably although sometimes indirectly, to the manipulation, exploitation and destruction of communities all around the world. Liberal democracy on the other hand, is really just a game in which some people claim they can control capitalism and promise to make all of our lives better, just like a reality TV show. The contestants (politicians) participate in various activities (debates, rallies, media appearances, canvassing…) hoping to be chosen by the viewers (electorate). If chosen, they generally have four years to prove themselves to avoid being voted off the island of economic control. The producers of the show (corporations, hedge funds, the IMF, Davos attendees, think tanks…) are permitted to fill all forms of media with their expectations (low taxes, privatization, de-regulation, high stock prices…) as challenges for the politicians to meet. If on occasion, we are able to elect progressive politicians and they actually put people’s needs before the profits of capital, investors can just take their capital somewhere else to avoid regulations or taxes. This obviously hurts the local economy, which in turn hurts that politician’s chances of being re-elected. Usually though, capitalists merely have to threaten to pull their investments out to have politicians bend to their will. The extreme polarization between political parties along with the rise in real and threatened political violence, keeps us all locked in ideological warfare and fearful of each other, unable to cooperate in a global system that is spiralling out of control. Liberal democracy provides us with nothing more than an illusion of collective control, while ultimately, the market itself always forces political leaders at all levels to comply, one way or another.
In recent years, even this extremely limited version of democracy is under attack and on the decline while most of the world continues to live under autocracies, which make little or no effort to even appear democratic. While the decline of liberal democracy is very unlikely to be reversed, and it was never suited for humanity to govern ourselves globally in the first place, many people remain hopeful that the United Nations will provide a rational decision making system for humanity, but the UN doesn’t represent humanity. Instead, the general assembly represents only the most powerful people in each competing nation state, whether democratic or autocratic, and ultimately all decisions rest with the security council, whose five permanent members—each with veto power—are currently at war over Ukraine and possibly soon Taiwan. Each year environmental activists are heart broken as the COPs once again fail to deal with the robber barons who’s wealth decides humanity’s future. This is no conspiracy though—they don’t trust each other any more than we should trust them—it’s simply the inevitable result of a system which is based on the accumulation of private property. Investors have an incentive to make short term decisions for their own profit; politicians have an incentive—getting re-elected—to make decisions in the interests of capital. The tragically inadequate global response to the pandemic has shown us that we are not at all prepared as a species to deal with global emergencies cooperatively. It’s completely unrealistic to expect that nation states, which are all trapped in a competitive struggle to survive, will suddenly begin to cooperate. As the world slides further into chaos, humanity desperately needs to create a global democratic system to face these crises together if we are to avoid social collapse.
Power of Collaboration by Kati Szilágyi
One thing that all past human societies and civilizations have in common is that they all eventually collapsed. While each of us may be aware of this in the abstract, we don’t necessarily follow the logic to the depressing conclusion: why should we expect this one—global capitalism which is responsible for countless atrocities and yet, is also our collective life support system—to be any different? Although we can’t know when the collapse will happen, many believe we are now dangerously close to that day. Millions of people are screaming the warnings and demanding change from global leaders, but those ‘leaders’ have no real power. The sad reality is, humanity simply doesn’t have a system for making decisions collectively. Instead, the only decision making system we have is an economic one, in which those with capital to invest, do so in their own best interests, no matter the consequences for the rest of us, or the biosphere.
Through their individual choices, capitalists collectively, are deciding humanity’s future. The economist Adam Smith described this process nearly 250 years ago as an ‘invisible hand’. Despite all the promises or intentions, of every type of politician, there is unfortunately no way to control capitalism. To avoid the gradual, or sudden collapse of the world we know, humanity will need to first create a democratic system if we’re going to make decisions collectively.
Liberal democracy, the nation state, and capitalism all grew up together over the last few hundred years, evolving into this complex global system in which we now find ourselves, forced into the inhumane situation of having to compete for survival with 8 billion of our sisters and brothers, as individuals, communities and heavily armed nation states. The roots of this system though, are in the discovery of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago and the surplus of food which could then be produced. Soon-after, the value of that surplus was recognized by some, and the concept of private property was born. Since then, economies and cultures based on the idea of property ownership have gradually come to dominate the world. Owning food, land, tools, animals and even people has seemed ‘normal’ to those who grow up in such a culture, yet there have always been, and hopefully still are, cooperative cultures in which the idea of ‘ownership’ is not even understood let alone accepted as truth. Humans are by nature, a cooperative species. In fact, we would never even have survived at all without the ability to create communities and support each other. Unfortunately though, we evolved to cooperate in relatively small groups, in which we know and trust each other. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggests a maximum of about 150 people.
The reason that liberal democracy doesn’t work for collective decision making is because it groups together voters who don’t know each other, so naturally each votes in their own interest rather than the collective good. Under such a system, politicians are stuck. To get re-elected they must keep the economy delivering for the voters’ individual interests, which generally requires doing whatever it takes to promote investment. Keep in mind, liberal democracy was designed by slave owners to manage their collective property rights, not for the benefit of communities or humanity as a whole. At the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2022, Joe Biden said “American democracy is not a reality show. It’s not a reality show. It’s reality itself.” So passionate, but he’s wrong. American democracy is in fact very much a reality show. Reality itself, is capitalism, the global market in which individual property owners make choices to invest their capital, which leads inevitably although sometimes indirectly, to the manipulation, exploitation and destruction of communities all around the world. Liberal democracy on the other hand, is really just a game in which some people claim they can control capitalism and promise to make all of our lives better, just like a reality TV show. The contestants (politicians) participate in various activities (debates, rallies, media appearances, canvassing…) hoping to be chosen by the viewers (electorate). If chosen, they generally have four years to prove themselves to avoid being voted off the island of economic control. The producers of the show (corporations, hedge funds, the IMF, Davos attendees, think tanks…) are permitted to fill all forms of media with their expectations (low taxes, privatization, de-regulation, high stock prices…) as challenges for the politicians to meet. If on occasion, we are able to elect progressive politicians and they actually put people’s needs before the profits of capital, investors can just take their capital somewhere else to avoid regulations or taxes. This obviously hurts the local economy, which in turn hurts that politician’s chances of being re-elected. Usually though, capitalists merely have to threaten to pull their investments out to have politicians bend to their will. The extreme polarization between political parties along with the rise in real and threatened political violence, keeps us all locked in ideological warfare and fearful of each other, unable to cooperate in a global system that is spiralling out of control. Liberal democracy provides us with nothing more than an illusion of collective control, while ultimately, the market itself always forces political leaders at all levels to comply, one way or another.
In recent years, even this extremely limited version of democracy is under attack and on the decline while most of the world continues to live under autocracies, which make little or no effort to even appear democratic. While the decline of liberal democracy is very unlikely to be reversed, and it was never suited for humanity to govern ourselves globally in the first place, many people remain hopeful that the United Nations will provide a rational decision making system for humanity, but the UN doesn’t represent humanity. Instead, the general assembly represents only the most powerful people in each competing nation state, whether democratic or autocratic, and ultimately all decisions rest with the security council, whose five permanent members—each with veto power—are currently at war over Ukraine and possibly soon Taiwan. Each year environmental activists are heart broken as the COPs once again fail to deal with the robber barons who’s wealth decides humanity’s future. This is no conspiracy though—they don’t trust each other any more than we should trust them—it’s simply the inevitable result of a system which is based on the accumulation of private property. Investors have an incentive to make short term decisions for their own profit; politicians have an incentive—getting re-elected—to make decisions in the interests of capital. The tragically inadequate global response to the pandemic has shown us that we are not at all prepared as a species to deal with global emergencies cooperatively. It’s completely unrealistic to expect that nation states, which are all trapped in a competitive struggle to survive, will suddenly begin to cooperate. As the world slides further into chaos, humanity desperately needs to create a global democratic system to face these crises together if we are to avoid social collapse.
There is fortunately, a better form of democracy. Hannah Arendt referred to it as council democracy; Kees Boeke used the term sociocracy; Murray Bookchin called it democratic confederalism; The Haudenosaunee people have been calling it the Great Law of Peace for a thousand years. These are all different names for a democratic system in which communities govern themselves, and each elects a representative to a regional governing body. This type of system has existed on a small scale many times throughout human history and has often been spontaneously created during revolutions such as the Paris Commune in 1871, Hungary 1956, Iran 1979, and currently in Rojava. In each case though, they have remained isolated and been destroyed by the better organized forces of capitalism. With hope, Rojava might be able to prove the trend wrong. The best known example though, would be the soviet (council) democratic system which was created by workers and soldiers during the 1917 Russian revolution. That brief experiment in truly representative democracy was tragically destroyed when the Bolshevik party seized control of the soviet with the October Revolution, imposing its authoritarian rule. Not only did that coup end the Russian experiment in council democracy, which otherwise might have been able to grow globally and ultimately change the world, it has also left the progressive movement confused, divided and demoralized for more than a century. Hannah Arendt’s dream of a global democratic council system for humanity to govern ourselves came to be viewed as no more than a utopian fantasy, and sadly that interpretation was probably correct, before the Internet.
The internet, a global communication system, now allows us an opportunity to create a democratic system for the world, but it will require a very specific design to work. Many believed, back in the 90s and briefly after the millennium, that the internet had the potential to bring us democracy and a better world. Douglas Rushkoff’s 2003 book ‘Open Source Democracy’ predicted hopefully that “the rise of interactive media does provide us with the beginnings of new metaphors for cooperation, new faith in the power of networked activity and new evidence of our ability to participate actively in the authorship of our collective destiny.” That optimism lasted only until facebook and other platforms began to demonstrate how capitalism would now be able to use the internet to extract ever more profit out of us, and further erode liberal democracy. But of course democracy was never going to happen automatically; we’ll have to design and build it together. Many have tried to create such a movement, but unfortunately, despite what Margaret Mead famously, but mistakenly said about “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” changing the world, in reality, movements have only ever been able to change parts of the world, and even then, only temporarily. No movement will ever be able to unite enough of humanity to change the whole world, simply because movements, being ideological, automatically generate opposition and resistance, sometimes leading to civil war. Millions of dedicated activists and organizers all around the world are selflessly building essential social movements and nobly fighting for change, but with humanity divided from each other in so many ways, there is no single ideology that will ever unite us so that we can cooperate globally. As much as we might wish for it, changing the world just won’t work that way.
There remains hope though, in the fact that we are capable of organizing ourselves in two distinct ways. One is ideologically, by uniting people around a set of common beliefs, the way that movements, political parties, and religions do. However, for practical reasons, people will also join non-ideological organizations that are useful to them, like unions, or internet platforms. The latter provides the possibility for a global system of council democracy to be built gradually, by using the internet. Only when we have a fair, global, democratic system will we be able to act collectively to confront the myriad of problems that have been created by capitalism, and replace it with a cooperative system to govern the world. As the anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote about the embryonic democratic system developing during Occupy Wall Street, “but was it our job to come up with a vision for a new political order, or to help create a way for everyone to do so?”
Ironically, facebook has also shown us a better way to organize the world for positive change. Imagine for a moment if facebook had originally been created as a democratic platform cooperative, rather than a profit seeking corporation which is now responsible for so many horrendous social problems and suffering. It could have instead grown by now to be a global democratic organization of over 3 billion people, perhaps even in a position to realistically demand from corporations and governments the changes we need for a better world. Of course, many individuals and communities have tried to organize a cooperative social media platform, but the problem that every internet platform runs into, is anonymity. Online ‘communities’ are not really communities at all, because there is just no way to know and therefore trust each other. It would take only a simple requirement though, of having to register a real community that we are part of—our workplace, school, religious or cultural community, neighbourhood… and many other possible real communities—to remove the element of anonymity from a cooperative internet platform. Each individual’s behaviour on such a platform would then be self-policing, as we all are within our communities, because they’ll have to explain themselves to their own community if they behave in an anti-social way on the platform. A platform that we could actually trust would appeal to many people who are frustrated by the anti-social climate of so many platforms, but in order to eventually encourage everyone on the planet to choose to join the platform, it would have to provide something of interest to every community. It could for example, provide any or all of the same types of services and entertainment that people currently get from platforms like facebook, google, amazon, spotify, tiktok, games or any other app that is useful to someone. The only requirement for membership on the platform would be recognition in good standing by a real community, which must itself be recognized in good standing by the neighbouring communities, ultimately creating a sort of ‘blockchain’ of communities. Each individual wishing to join the platform must register a community which will endorse them. They can either choose one that is already recognized, or organize a new community and then seek recognition for it. Obviously this could only be built in a gradual way, beginning with any programmers and other volunteers willing to offer their time to create and maintain an open source platform cooperative. The growth of this platform would initially have to take place in the same manner as any other movement for social change, but the platform must also be designed in such a way to be capable of scaling up infinitely—something that movements are unable to do—eventually growing to include everyone. Yeah, everyone. Otherwise we won’t be able to change the world.
One of the reasons that movements for progressive change have always reached an upper limit in their numbers, and are unable to change the world in any lasting way, is because they must make demands on our time, energy and finances, which is a lot to expect from people who have very busy lives, struggling just to survive and feed their kids in the increasingly competitive world of capitalism. Unfortunately, organizing ourselves ideologically, and expecting masses of people to commit themselves to a project, no matter how progressive, will just never be able to bring together the numbers of people necessary to actually change the world, but facebook, in contrast, has organized the most people in human history simply by offering something that is useful, or just fun, and makes no demands. If an open source, democratic, platform cooperative were to do something similar—provide an excellent web platform that people WANT to join—and include the REQUIREMENT to register a REAL community that they are part of, we can begin to gradually build a global system of council democracy together. This mechanism prevents anonymity on the platform (and therefore the antisocial behaviour that goes with anonymity) and, it simultaneously brings grassroots communities around the world into a democratic Network.
There is a well established strategic formula that is typically followed when organizing for change: 1—Develop an ideological theory. 2—Find the others. 3—When the number of people reaches the ‘tipping point’, implement the desired change. While this is of course a gross simplification, the point is that while this method works quite well in achieving relatively small goals, it won’t scale up to allow us to change the world. Regrettably, it will never be possible to convince all of humanity to agree to one single ideology which means that we cannot change the whole world with this method. However, reversing the order of the first two will allow us to first organize enough people to be capable of actually changing the world, then together, democratically, humanity can decide how we will act collectively to change the world. There are of course many reasons not to trust our future to the internet, but at the same time, it’s a powerful tool that we can use to organize ourselves in a new and fair way. It is our communities themselves, in which we are all organized already, that we can trust, and the internet can facilitate the organizing of those communities into a global democratic network. If we keep trying to solve our problems with the same strategies that have always failed, we really should stop expecting different results.
You can reach Joe Reynolds at joe@liberigi.net
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