We've Been Here Before... And Fixed It Before...

[Jackpine Radical]

24. think that the fundamental problem lies in a realm beyond

the doctrines of socialism, liberalism, or any other political "fix." Almost any hierarchy seems to become dominated by power-junkies, regardless of their nominal ideology. Witness the history of the Soviet Union, or of China. No matter how democratic and humanistic Marx might have been, those acting in his name have often perverted ins teachings.

Autocrats of all stripes love centralization, at least up to the level just beneath them, and seek to pull power away from the people and political structures under them.

In too many cases, the following model applies:

Marx:Marxists::Christ:Christians

I have been preaching the virtues of leaderless organizations here, and have been watching the worldwide popular movements of the past year. What I see is a global populace using new tools such as the social media in uniting, informing itself, and initiating a loosely coordinated series of actions. There is no strongly hierarchical organization, there are no permanent leaders, but there is a group decision-making process. There is planning. People see what needs to be done, and do it, be it setting up an aid station, distributing food, or cleaning up litter.

I think we are nowhere near discovering the potential power that springs from universal one-to-many communication, in which any person with an idea can communicate it to others, and watch it go viral if people start finding merit in it. In fact, the whole movement rests largely upon this power.

Socialism to me means an equitable distribution of both goods and power. In the past, attempts to enact socialist policies have always relied upon centralized power in the hands of a few leaders--in other words, a power structure not too different from those of the capitalist countries. Both the capitalist and socialist power structures severely limit the freedom of the ordinary person.

The leaderless direct democracy exists in direct contradistinction to the hierarchical model of organization that has been typical of human societies for the past several thousand years.

In fact, I think that the new leaderless organizations may best be compared to a number of pre-agricultural societies, such as those of the woodland Indians of North America. Among many of these tribes, the leaders had no institutional power beyond that of persuasion. A given person might develop a reputation as a good leader of war parties, and people might look to him when it came time to raid an enemy. He would lay out his scheme for battle and everyone would talk about it, making modifications based on suggestions from the group members. If you didn't like the resulting plan, you were free to express your differences, and, ultimately, you were free to go your own way if you could not resolve those differences. Leadership was not a paid position. A good leader was simply someone who could get most people to accept his ideas. In daily life, he lived in the same way as everyone else, engaging in the same economic activities and suffering the same hardships.

Historically, that sort of direct participatory democracy could only function in small groups because people needed to meet face-to-face. The advent of agriculture pretty much destroyed this type of democracy, for two reasons, both related to the increased availability of food. First, the population increased beyond a size that could comfortably meet and confer, and (much more importantly), the extra food meant that not everyone had to spend all their time trying to feed themselves, so some leisure time became available. Priesthoods and monarchies arose based on the new infrastructure. The priests specialized in acquiring (real or imagined) knowledge, and the monarchs specialized in building power structures and regulating the lives of their subjects. Sometimes the priests and rulers were one and the same, and sometimes the roles were separated, but they always stood in alliance, reinforcing and checking each other's power.

Modern government descends from the social structures and social assumptions that arose with the advent of agriculture. All such governments are hierarchical in nature, and tend to be marked by imbalances in information flow. That is, the rulers and priests controlled access to information through one-to-many communication devices, while the peasantry were limited to (at most) one-to-one (or at best, one-to-a-few) communication with each other, and only very limited forms of communication with their rulers and priests.

The Industrial Revolution that began in the 18th Century is often cited as the next phase after the Era of Agriculture. I think this is a somewhat overblown notion because while the advent of the machine did shift power balances around somewhat among the ruling classes, it did not fundamentally change the hierarchical, centralized nature of social organization--except, in some ways, to facilitate its development and amplify its scale. The same pattern of one-to-many communication for the powerful and one-to-one communication for the masses persisted.

Only now, in the Information Age, is this ancient model starting to break up.

I see the Occupy movement as the first, embryonic stirrings of a totally new mode of social organization that will bring global changes to the species that are at least as significant as the changes that occurred with the Agricultural Revolution.

I believe that the advent of mass one-to-many communication in the hands of the people will permit us to recapture the advantages of tribal self-government, to break down the walls of hierarchy, and institute a species-wide, totally democratic network of self-governance unlike anything the world has ever seen.