Equality by lot

Back in 2010 and 2011, I wrote a couple of posts on this blog linking to writings by Paul Cockshott about sortition. Cockshott, who is a Marxist economist and a computer scientist, himself followed up in the comments.

I did not know until very recently, however, that Cockshott, together with a collaborator, Allin Cottrell, wrote in 1993 a book called Toward a New Socialism [full text PDF] which makes a case against elections and for the use of allotted bodies in government. While the book focuses mostly on economic planning, chapter 13, “On Democracy”, presents an insightful analysis of the oligarchical nature of electoralism as well as of the problems associated with two standard Marxist alternatives, soviets and communist party dictatorship. The analysis uses the historical cases of Athens and the Soviet revolution and also make mention of Burnheim’s Is Democracy Possible? (1985).

Some excerpts:

Chapter 13: On Democracy

Utopian social experiments are strongly associated in the public mind with brutal dictatorships and the suppression of civil liberties. Given our century’s history this is to be expected. Although there is a growing realisation in Britain of a need for constitutional change, visions of what this might involve are modest. Devolution of power to regions and alternative parliamentary electoral systems may be open for discussion, but the supercession of parliamentary democracy itself is almost unthinkable. Our object in this chapter is to think the unthinkable—specifically, to advocate a radically democratic constitution. We outline a modernised version of ancient Greek democracy, and defend such a system as the best political counterpart to socialist economic planning.

Democracy and parliamentarism

It is one of the great ironies of history that election by ballot, for millennia the mark of oligarchy, should now pass as the badge of democracy.

In his dystopian novel 1984 Orwell makes ironic reference to Newspeak, a dialect of English so corrupted that phrases like ‘freedom is slavery’ or ‘war is peace’ could pass unremarked. What he was alluding to is the power of language to control our thoughts. When those in authority can redefine the meanings of words they make subversion literally unthinkable. The phrase ‘parliamentary democracy’ is an example of Newspeak: a contradiction in disguise.

Democratic centralism’—a dead end

Lenin’s notion of ‘democratic centralism’, whereby the outstanding class-conscious members of the working class, organised in a Communist Party, are elected through a system of workers’ councils to form a workers’ government, is fundamentally flawed. It seeks to build a democracy on an instrument of class rule: elections. The fact that the vote is restricted to workers does not stop elections being an aristocratic system in the classical sense. Politics becomes a matter for the politicos. Like all aristocracies, it degenerates into a self-serving oligarchy, and is eventually replaced by an ‘honest’ bourgeois plutocracy.

The idea that a right of recall would be an effective constraint on this process is laughable. The right of recall is written into the state constitution of Arizona, and was in Stalin’s Soviet Constitution without noticeable effect. It takes the collection of tens or hundreds of thousands of signatures to secure the recall of an official. It is bound to be a rare event compared to regular elections, but if elections do not keep officials in line why should recall? As for average workmens’ wages, who is to enforce this? What is to stop elected officials voting themselves other benefits?

The advocates of democracy present a radical critique of the 20th century bourgeois state, but the practices of classical democracy seem, paradoxically, so novel and alien that there is a danger that people will automatically reject them. Advocates of genuine democracy have to mount a persuasive case and fend off the standard objections.

Contemporary political science is overwhelmingly elitist in sentiment. It is held that the complexity of the modern state is such that only an elite of political professionals is capable of dealing with it. Ordinary Athenian citizens might have been able to run a simple city state, the argument runs, but they would be ill prepared to confront the full-time bureaucracy of the modern state. For this you need full-time politicians with paid research staffs.

Another common argument against classical democracy is that it was a democracy of the slave owners, and so has nothing to teach us.

A more prosaic objection to direct democracy focuses on scale. You just cannot gather all the citizens of a modern nation in the agora or town square to debate affairs of state.

The modern state, as we have said, is based upon centralist, hierarchical principles. The institutions of democracy provide a quite different model. In a democracy there was no government, no prime minister, no president, no head of state. Sovereign power rested with the popular assembly. Particular branches of the state were run by juries or officials drawn by lot. Power flows neither up nor down, but is diffused. We can sketch out how these principles might be applied today. At one level, the sovereignty of the people would be exercised by electronic voting on televised debates. To ensure that this was universal, TVs and voting phones should be available free as a constitutional right. This would be analogous to the payment for jury service that the Athenians introduced to allow the poor to participate in the assembly.

Since only a minority of the decisions that have to be taken in a country can be put to a full popular vote, other public institutions would be supervised by a plurality of juries. The broadcasting authority, the water authority, the posts, the railways and so on would all be under councils chosen by lot from among their users and workers. Such councils would not be answerable to any government minister, instead the democracy relies upon the principle that a sufficiently large random sample will be representative of the public. A system of democratic control over all public bodies would mean that at some time in their lives citizens could expect to be called up to serve on some sort of council. Not everyone would serve on national councils, but one could expect to have to serve on some school council, local health council or workplace council. If people were to participate directly in the running of the state, we would not see the cynicism and apathy which characterise the typical modern voter.

Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, Elections, History, Proposals, Sortition |