AES is democratic, so there must be something you don’t like but haven’t defined yet.
Well to be fair, I’m probably closer to anarchist than strict socialist because to me decentralization of power and communications is how you solve a lot of this and no societies that exist or have existed have really tried it in the sort of capacities we could try it at this point in history, I believe. There’s just no society who has even come close yet. I do think we were held back slightly technologically and communications have progressed to the level that things can be more decentralized, a la citizen communications like the barbed wire telephone network. I think current iterations of democracy are all really outdated and that there’s been plenty of new options to try but there is no political willpower in any society to pursue those things.
I wouldn’t say I ascribe to Critical Theory, but the general idea of “there is no perfect anything, we must always be critiquing and trying new ways” speaks to me. So hanging our future on 200 year old ideas without any progression or growth of those ideas feels foolhardy to me.
Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with? Most AES countries practice a sort of “top-down, from the bottom-up” form of democracy. Essentially, building “rungs” of councils that start at local levels, elect delegates for regional councils, who elect delegates to further levels as necessary. This is both centralized, in that the highest level has the final say, but decentralized in that the higher levels only make decisions pertaining those lower to them, and can change delegates or practice recall elections. It gets more complex than that, obviously, but this seems as decentralized as is practical.
As for your support for “critiquing everything,” you sound like a Marxist-Leninist. Criticism and Self-Criticism are core concepts of Marxism-Leninism, and the practice of repeating the dialectical materialist cycle of turning theory into practice to refine theory and refine practice is the core to Marxist-Leninist knowledge. The base of Marxism isn’t simply 200 years old, but thousands, it’s a cumulative effort of the early materialists, the early dialecticians, Capitalists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, Utopian Socialists like Owen, Dialectical Idealists like Hegel, and more. We keep Marx’s ideas (and Lenins, etc) inasmuch as they are still valid, and by our analysis they overwhelmingly are. We also add analysis as it becomes more applied, and we see where earlier Socialists, even Marxists, went wrong.
Does that make sense?
Do you have specific issues with the real democratic structures of AES states that you can point to further decentralization helping with?
I understand how all this works, and I think those are systems built on human communications systems of the 18th century, not the 21st. I think communications have come so far that we need to consider that more decentralization and distribution than we already have isn’t going to somehow make things worse.
Current iterations are Napster, and I want us to be be Bittorrent.
Like I said elsewhere, I think communications and how they alienate us from each other has potentially become the bigger issue than commodities separating us, which is why I’m less interested in Marx and more interested in Debord/McLuhan.
Like how McLuhan talked about the history of ancient Egypt and how, after the invention of papyrus and use by the military, the power in society went from the Priest caste, who previously were the only people who could write, to the military caste, because their writing was current, prudent, and useful in everyday life. It changed power relations in society based on a different type of communications system. Modern communications, especially software are literally language made manifest and so much of our world runs on it all now that the private corporations that own it all can effectively put a gun to the world’s head and say “do what we say or we make it all stop working.” We can also look at the flip side, the Great Firewall of China, which endlessly spies on all its citizens and even gives them cute popups to remind them that cops are actively watching their online activity, and why friends of mine used to risk running Tor exit nodes because they wanted to support dissidents in countries who were blocking their communications.
Does that make sense?
Those systems that I described came from the 20th century at the earliest, and are regularly iterated upon to better meet the demands of the people. I’m not saying your focus on communication is wrong, but that you shouldn’t attack others if you aren’t aware of their actual history or developed theory, as you casually tossed aside frequently in this very conversation. Even with China, Western companies spy to an even greater degree and yet China was specifically singled out, I think this method is entirely unproductive and further alienating.
