This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and it’s a huge problem, but I don’t really see a lot of discussion about it. We have the technological means now for every single person on the planet to communicate directly with every single other person, in near-real time. The only real barrier to it is logistical (and is mostly impeded by resource hoarding). That’s amazing. And the recent election in Nepal via Discord has me thinking again about how the internet could form the basis for a real, democratic, world government. There are a ton of problems that would need to be addressed, off the top of my head:
- not everyone has internet access
- not everyone that has access has unfettered access
- It’s hard to preserve anonymity and have fair elections
- it’s hard to verify elections haven’t been tampered with
- what happens when violent crimes are committed?
- how do taxes work in this system?
- how do armed forces work in this system?
I don’t think any of these problems are necessarily unsolvable, but I don’t know how. So, how would we get from where we are to where we want to be? How do we even define what the end state should look like?
From an objective materialist standpoint, democracies are a tool of the ruling capitalist class to legitimize its own rule and keep their position of class domination while providing an illusion to the working class that they have some sort of power in the matter (they don’t, all candidates are pre-selected so all you can choose is essentially the “flavor”, who ultimately gets selected usually is determined via campaign money spending and media, once they’re in power they gotta preserve the state machinery and capital in place etc).
Nationalism is also a very powerful tool of capital to unite people under single unified volk, deliberately obfuscating the class that might divide said volk and it’s constantly used by opportunists and conservative elements.
Given these two statements, I don’t think a world government like that can even exist, or if it did it’d implode via separatism from opportunists who want to be the next “great man”. US for the longest time was and still is closest to this kind of position though, but they sure as shit are never going to let foreigners vote.
Democracy just means people get to choose who leads them. You may be talking about specific societies where there’s the illusion of democracy, but that’s not a problem with democracy, it’s a problem with capitalism.
True, but the post isn’t really talking about democracies in general but liberal democracies (the specific societies kind you mention), stretched to a worldwide scale. Probably should have clarified that.