Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a “government” (in this case committee; semantics)?
Edit: I truly appreciate everybody who takes the time to write elaborate answers pertaining to my question. I will read and respond once I have the opportunity and in that case, I hope eventual followup questions are welcomed. :)
All committees are authoritarian regimes, if they have any power. Making any decisions with power to back it up is authoritarian.
The question is whether you want decisions made by 500 bankers and some military conteactors or by collective deliberative organs that respond to the needs of the people at large, and assuming the latter, how do you make them function robustly?
A smart approach would borrow from the successes of others while allowing a bit of experimentation. Most real-world sociakist systems have implemented both a bottom-up local governance system for some domains and top-diwo national level policies for other domains. There is a real-world practical need for both.
Re: The councils in this cartoon, they are referring to, more or less, workplace democracy. Practically speaking, this requires a similar system: workers deciding how to run their company but also there is a need for national/regional coordination, for capital investment, and to balance against the bourgeois tendencies of what is basically a wirkers’ cooperative.
A key promise of socialism is not to immediately establish utopia, but to set the groundwork for how we may develop society for ourselves. There may be a form of workers’ councils that you prefer but that I might critique as unworkable in the current world. But it would surely be something made possible by socialist steuggle over time, as the comic explains: we would work to decrease necessary work time, to live our lives more how we want to. Once free if, say, imperiakist wars and expensive dirty energy, perhaps local workers’ council politics can adopt a simpler, more fair and autonomous form.
Basically, deconstructing oppressive systems would be an ongoing process that would have to be weighed against what is “more important” (e.g. not getting nuked), not one leap. So the form taken would depend on the context of how we win, what threats we face, borroeing from others’ successes, and how our experiments go.
I’ll jump in with an extra question here if I may:
So say you have two companies, doing more or kess the same thing, company A and company B.
If the workers in those companies detain their respective means of production, why wouldn’t they want to do what we see today:
“Hire” the best ones from the other company, grow so they all get more of it, intimidate concurrence etc? I mean it’s not just because there are lots of bosses instead of just some, that it will solve those problems?
Also, if company A does well, won’t people apply for work there, but ot for company B that (say) does less well? Wouldnt company A try to limit hired if they don’t fall in line with what they are thinking/doing etc.?
I just see the same system but with artificial blocks for the most obvious things, blocks people (who want it, I mean those crazy prycopathic bosses will still be around, they’re just not a CEO any more) will just work around.
Yes and no. Most Marxists advocate for a form of Whole-Process People’s Democracy, or Soviet Democracy. Essentially, the idea is that, rather than just having state, local, and federal elections (as a brief example), there are far more rungs you can directly elect and participate in. This ideally holds people accountable better than western democracies do.
Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a “government” (in this case committee; semantics)?
Edit: I truly appreciate everybody who takes the time to write elaborate answers pertaining to my question. I will read and respond once I have the opportunity and in that case, I hope eventual followup questions are welcomed. :)
All committees are authoritarian regimes, if they have any power. Making any decisions with power to back it up is authoritarian.
The question is whether you want decisions made by 500 bankers and some military conteactors or by collective deliberative organs that respond to the needs of the people at large, and assuming the latter, how do you make them function robustly?
A smart approach would borrow from the successes of others while allowing a bit of experimentation. Most real-world sociakist systems have implemented both a bottom-up local governance system for some domains and top-diwo national level policies for other domains. There is a real-world practical need for both.
Re: The councils in this cartoon, they are referring to, more or less, workplace democracy. Practically speaking, this requires a similar system: workers deciding how to run their company but also there is a need for national/regional coordination, for capital investment, and to balance against the bourgeois tendencies of what is basically a wirkers’ cooperative.
A key promise of socialism is not to immediately establish utopia, but to set the groundwork for how we may develop society for ourselves. There may be a form of workers’ councils that you prefer but that I might critique as unworkable in the current world. But it would surely be something made possible by socialist steuggle over time, as the comic explains: we would work to decrease necessary work time, to live our lives more how we want to. Once free if, say, imperiakist wars and expensive dirty energy, perhaps local workers’ council politics can adopt a simpler, more fair and autonomous form.
Basically, deconstructing oppressive systems would be an ongoing process that would have to be weighed against what is “more important” (e.g. not getting nuked), not one leap. So the form taken would depend on the context of how we win, what threats we face, borroeing from others’ successes, and how our experiments go.
I’ll jump in with an extra question here if I may:
So say you have two companies, doing more or kess the same thing, company A and company B.
If the workers in those companies detain their respective means of production, why wouldn’t they want to do what we see today:
“Hire” the best ones from the other company, grow so they all get more of it, intimidate concurrence etc? I mean it’s not just because there are lots of bosses instead of just some, that it will solve those problems?
Also, if company A does well, won’t people apply for work there, but ot for company B that (say) does less well? Wouldnt company A try to limit hired if they don’t fall in line with what they are thinking/doing etc.?
I just see the same system but with artificial blocks for the most obvious things, blocks people (who want it, I mean those crazy prycopathic bosses will still be around, they’re just not a CEO any more) will just work around.
Yes and no. Most Marxists advocate for a form of Whole-Process People’s Democracy, or Soviet Democracy. Essentially, the idea is that, rather than just having state, local, and federal elections (as a brief example), there are far more rungs you can directly elect and participate in. This ideally holds people accountable better than western democracies do.