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Hi Rafe,

Thanks for your positive response. Much appreciated.

 

 

 

Unless we are writing a history of ideas, such labels should only be used when they are helpful. As you say, it is the effort to draw good ideas together that counts.

 

"[My position] is no more utopian than your quest for participatory democracy, and I don't imagine that you would accept the "utopian" criticism as a fair coment on your aim. The point is that it indicates a direction to move, and any move in that direction is likely to be worthwhile."

 

Absolutely. I agree and affirm that my position is utopian, but I do not think that in itself that is a criticism. I think that we should not be afraid to be utopian. It is important that we put forth alternative visions of the ideal society.

 

I would actually be quite surprised that, in a room of 100 people at random, if there was another person who advocated participatory democracy. But, in my experience, most people would feel themselves to be (to a greater or lesser degree) competent to govern their own affairs and that they could do a better job than their political "representative". The problem is that most people do not trust other people (either their competence or their motives) and while I think that most men would feel that they could survive as Robinson Crusoe, the idea of some kind of citizen's assembly fills them with images of freeloaders, idiots, and demagogues. I also find it quite interesting that women tend to be more sympathetic to the idea of participatory democracy, but are concerned that they would be marginalised by male chauvinists. Which they probably would.

 

There have been scant few historical examples of states of affairs that even approximately fully participatory democracy. In my view the closest examples, except for a few isolated communes, have been the Paris Commune, many of the Soviet workers' councils between Febrary 1917 and October 1917, many of the collectives during the Spanish Civil War, some of the New England townships in America prior to the War of Independence, some Kibbutzim, some of the communes and workers' councils in Yugoslavia, and a few other isolated experiments. They all had their limits and flaws. As do all other forms of political and economic organisation.

 

Actually, there is a sense that all political organisations (including dictarships and theocracies) are limited participatory democracies, providing that one notes that democratic participation is limited to a specific minority of people. Hence, ancient Athens, senatorial Rome, modern representative democracies, multi-national corporations are in a real sense, limited participatory democracies, given that each of these have an elite class of equals that deliberate and decide on societal projects and goals.

 

But, what I am interested is in theoretically understanding the social (including political and economic) conditions for the possibility of basing society on participatory democracy for the vast majority and how that could occur in a modern scientific and technological society. The book I am currently writing is an historical and philosophical study, rather than a manifesto or a handbook, and I am more concerned with critically examining and identifying minimal conditions, rather putting forth concrete proposals.

 

However, I think that it might be more fruitful for us to discuss the differences in our persepective and discover our points of commonality in relation to a practical and concrete discussion about education, as a case in point. How do you see the best way of organising access to education in society?

 

"Further, I suspect that you will find as you move towards your objective that there will be a greal deal of overlap between our agendas."

 

I suspect that this would indeed be the case in Anglo-American (including Australian) societies, but in many other countries, I think that democratic participation would lead to different economic organisations would emerge that would not be based on market exchanges between individuals, companies, or cooperatives, but would take a much more communal and collective form. For example, many indigenous peoples do not based their economic relations on trade and exchange of surplus, but rather collectivise their resources and labour to achieve common goals. There have been and still are some experimental efforts to emulate this form of collectivisation in the modern world, which have proved quite successful in terms of productivity and improving living conditions through cooperative, but they are rare and have their limits.

 

"Again, it is a matter of moving in the desired direction.  I think that economic illiteracy (mostly expressed in constraints on free trade) has done more damage than any other single error or doctrine in the last 200 years, from the debacle socialism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet block to the expansion of the state in the west and the protectionist policies of the US and Europe that do so much damage in the Third World."

 

I think that we have many disagreements on this point. My own view is that globalisation is the obstacle to genuine free-trade, which in my view can actually only occur at a local level between people with a high degree of economic and political equality. I also think that you are underplaying the racism and romanticism that was central to Nazi ideology, but that it a complicated historical discussion, which, for now, I do not have time to get into. I also think that the rise of the Bolsheviks cannot be explained in purely economic terms and hence cannot be understood as some kind of ignorance of economics, but again I do not have time, for now, to get into this. Perhaps, another time, we can return to this. Actually, from a economics perspective, the Soviet Union was tremendously successful between 1917 and 1961, given that the rapidity of its transformation from a peasant based economy to an industrial superstate in an incredibly short period of time, under the starkest of circumstances. It was only during the Regan presidency, with the intensification of the arms race, that the Soviet Union was unable to keep up with the level of technological innovation and productivity of the West.

 

The failure of the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik coup was a moral and political failure, not an economic one.

 

I must also point out that my area of "expertise" is not economics, but is physics and the history and philosophy of science. I cannot even balance a checkbook. However, my wife is an economist, specialising in strategic and technical operations, who, in my view, somewhat unsurprisingly, is much more persuaded by your point of view than mine. But, the point that she would agree with me and disagree with you, if I understand your position correctly, is that one cannot separate political power from economic relations. It seems to me that you have overly idealised the "free market" and have assumed a distinction between political and economic relations that does not actually exist. She agrees with me that the "free market" is based on power structures and relations, therefore, is not actually "free" nor "liberal". 

 

Having said that, of course I do not expect you to be persuaded by my "my wife says...." argument. I just want to help you understand that, even though I am not an expert in economics, I do have some idea about what your ideal is.

 

The point that I most strongly disagree with you is that situation in the Third World is not due to protectionist policies at all, but is due to the military interventions that have been imposed on the Third World in order to create the conditions for exploitation. I am actually in favour of local protectionism as the means to redress the imbalance created by colonialism and globalised corporatism, as well as preventing the destruction of developed countries' labour markets. Globalisation prevents local businesses and companies from having access to markets dominated by corporations utilising the slave labour (including child labour) from the Third World. My own view is this can be countered, at least in part, by removing all forms of business and sales taxes from local companies and businesses, while multi-national corporations and their franchises should still pay them. What do you think?

 

Karl.