The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
The answer to misleading information about USSR had issues feeding its population. source : https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp84b00274r000300150009-5
There is no single problem, and many of the problems are not necessarily simple.
Many perceive a problem from decisions that affect them being made by elected representatives.
Others may be more agreeable to elected representatives making decisions, but demand much greater participation by and accountability to the constituency.
Communists have long been critical of representative government, because it enforces a class disparity of elites over the governed, not broadly different from aristocratic rule.
Yes, yes, we all know that the dream is to live in a fully stateless society.
But we also know that a fully stateless society isn’t actually possible, because then who would organize the large infrastructure projects?
There’s quite a bit more that government do, but I don’t really care about law enforcement. Most crimes go unpunished as police don’t actually try to solve crimes, just enforce laws on the poor and minorities…
International trade and such are a big one.
And a military, because that’s how the last two attempts at stateless communism failed.
So if you must have a government (and you really must), then it should be the best one possible.
Any form of dictatorship is right out. That’s a flat betrayal of the communist dream, and places the people into a new form of feudalism. It stops being the dream of communism and starts becoming the nightmare of Leninism, or worse, Stalinism.
Direct democracy is the dream, but you quickly run into an issue of scale. You would need dedicated communication channels to constantly broadcast information about proposed laws and regulations, and the entire population would need to spend a good portion of their time reading and researching, and not you know, working on their own shit.
This leads to a representative democracy. You pick people whose full job is to read and research that shit. They then have aids and staff who further read and research.
Now, there are several problems that can crop up with representative democracy, but if you look back at the posts above, the specific one I referenced, the “Lesser of two evils” has one cause. First Past the Post voting.
Arrow’s Theorem is a major problem for representative democracy, but it’s not a problem without a solution. You simply ditch FPtP in favor of a cardinal voting system like STAR.
That’s the first step. The next is Apportionment. The US has one of the least representative democracies around due to a law passed in 1929 called the Reapportionment Act of 1929. It capped the size of the House at 435 members, despite the population tripling since then and adding two extra states, that number stands.
After the apportionment is fixed, there need to be term limits. I’m in favor of consecutive term limits. As in, you’re not limited to the total number of terms, but to the number of terms in a row.
After that, well, there are a few nitpicks, but most things would sort themselves out with those three fixes.
Terse judgments about impossibility are not generally meaningful, and the particular objections you chose are not particularly persuasive.
However, I think the broadest issue is not your insistence that the state is necessary, but rather your assumption that it must encompass all of politics.
A truly stateless society is only possible when everyone is 100% self-sufficient.
This can mostly be done on a community scale, provided that the communities number no more than about 150 individuals. After that, you need to start forming some sort of governing body.
People can come together in amazing ways when there’s a desperate need, and often the community response to a disaster is better than the government one. But when the roads need paving and the sewers need fixing, you turn toward the government to handle it.
Or, here’s a big one. Environmental protection. That really needs government backing. You as a single person cannot do it. But we as a collective can, and that collective is a government.
You are not understanding the essence of stateless society.
The ideal entails no objection against organizational bodies at a scale above the level of the community.
Do you know what those “organizational bodies at a scale above the level of the community” are called? They’re called governments. i.e. the State.
The simple truth is that the whole “stateless society” falls apart the second you have communities larger than 150 people, because our brains literally can’t handle it. We have physiological limits to the number of relationships that we can maintain.
And spoiler, humans like to live in cities that have vastly more than 150 people.
Now, think about all the people who have full time jobs maintaining the infrastructure to keep a city going. Do you think “the community” could come together and do all that? No, they’ve got shit to do. I personally can’t sit in hours of planning meetings per day to schedule sewer maintenance so that the entire city doesn’t get cholera and die.
Which is why I vote for people who do have time for that shit. And then I trust that the people I vote for will have the power needed to close streets as needed to get things done.
Now, I have issues with the process of voting. But that’s because First Past the Post is flawed and easily abused. I have notes, and would like a better voting system, but I still want a voting system.
No, a regional or even international body is not necessarily a government in the sense of your objection, as a state power that asserts authority through coercion.
I am sorry, but you are conflating various distinct concepts as one. You have not adequately understood the ideas against which you are asserting strong objections.
And you’ve not actually put forward anything different beyond “organizational bodies at a scale above the level of the community”, which is a government.
Yes, these bodies will have the power of coercion, because that’s how you get shit done at scale.
Imagine a farm or factory is dumping chemicals into a watershed. There are very few options for stopping that shit without some sort of coercion, and I prefer my coercion to not be in the form of mob justice, which requires a functional government.
But that’s just me. Why don’t you enlighten me on how the above scenario would work in your dream of a stateless society.
Stateless society is not a dream, but rather an objective, or an ideal toward which to struggle.
If you want to understand how it might be structured, then I encourage you to investigate and to discover.
At the moment, however, you are engaged in shifting of the burden of proof.
You have also entered into several instances of a false dichotomy, including through your insinuation that all societies are either disordered, or must be kept orderly by a coercive authority.
I feel you are more likely to benefit from explanation of certain ideas if you are not encumbered by such kinds of fallacious reasoning.