A Marxist-Leninist here as well. In my view, dialectical materialism is the best tool we have for understanding the world and social relations.

But then you see how experts have to be involved at least at some point in the cycle here. For example, you could have a solution where you vote on the problems, experts come up with potential solutions explaining pros and cons for each, then you have a second vote on the approach to adopt. My key point is that understanding what practical solutions are requires experience and domain knowledge. And that’s the key reason why we end up needing abstractions. You have different groups of people who focus on understanding different types of problems, and they become the best equipped people to solve these problems. People outside the domain have to delegate to the people who are the experts.

Meanwhile, when it comes to corruption, the real issue here is in economic inequality. If wealth is evenly distributed within the society, that problem largely goes away because nobody has a significant financial leverage over others that they’re able to exercise. It’s an issue that’s completely separate from hierarchies.

And you’re welcome. :)

Right, you only have so much time in the day. And most people don’t actually want to be engaged politically all the time. You just want to live your life in peace at the end of the day.

If what you suggest was effective then that’s how we’d be doing things. Surgery would be done by vote. Instead of surgeons spending years learning how to do it, you’d just get a bunch of people off the street and what on where and how to cut. Bridges would be designed by vote, where people would just get together and figure out what materials to use and how to arrange them. There’s a reason these things aren’t happening anywhere in the world.

There’s also zero reason to believe that there would be no corruption in such a system. People would still try to influence others for their own benefit, make deals, and so on. And as I’ve already pointed out at the very start, direct democracy works at small scale. The problem is that it runs into physical limits both in nature and in society. Complex organisms like humans aren’t organized as a form of a direct democracy either. You end up with hierarchical structures with cells organizing into organs, organs into organ groups, brains coordinating the operation of the organism as a whole.

At the end of the day it comes down to thermodynamics. A society has to organize with a sufficient level of efficiency in order to function. As it grows in scale, it becomes necessary to delegate and abstract things because the scale escapes human comprehension.

China has plenty of diversity across provinces, so I don’t really see how a large state is at odds with local diversity. In fact, a lot of decision making in China is done in form of direct democracy at the local level. Which, again, is the scale where this makes sense to do. People can meaningfully participate in decisions that affect them personally and that they have a good understanding of. Doing a referendum across 10 millions people makes a lot less sense because those people likely don’t have a lot of overlapping concerns in most cases.

That’s a problem, because experts are chosen by the power in place, who determines what orthodoxy should be if not the citizens ?

This isn’t a theoretical issue. You can look at how this works in China today. I wrote about how this works in practice here with concrete examples if you’re interested https://dialecticaldispatches.substack.com/p/rethinking-governance-through-outcomes

So, instead of experts deciding for us, what we should want is experts from both sides of the debate/referendum(, with an equal airtime of course), and citizens watching/reading their debates(, i’d prefer written exchanges to an improvised time-limited verbal sparring), who’d then vote based on these debates by researchers/engineers/experts. It’s much safer against abuses of power.

I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t make sense in practice. Say you have a traffic problem in a city. Everybody can agree that we want less congestion, but without actual experience and training in civil engineering it’s not possible to reliably solve this problem. Do you need more buses, or more roads, or LRT, or subways, or all of the above. Without experience and domain subject knowledge it just becomes a roll of the dice.

Advocating for solving problems through uninformed voting is just anit-intellectualism. The world is too complex for any single person to understand it fully. We have to delegate decisions to people who spend the time and effort in specific subjects. As Mao put it, no investigation, no right to speak.

These were tiny in comparison to any modern economy. The key part is that we don’t see direct democracies form past a certain scale because the logistics simply don’t support this model.

I would argue the actual problem is with conflating voting on what the problems are and coming up with solutions. The first makes sense because people know what problems they have in their daily lives, but voting on how to solve these problems makes no rational sense. You want subject experts to make informed decisions with full understanding of the trade offs involved.

Incidentally, this is basically how Chinese model works today. There are broad public surveys to identify key issues the public is concerned about, and then five year plans are made by experts to tackle these problems.

Personally, I wouldn’t call worker owned cooperatives a form of anarchy. If you look at how Huawei is structured, it’s not a direct democracy. You still have structure and delegation in form of hierarchy. This is not a negative thing because hierarchy is just an organizational tool. I do think this is the right approach, with workers having a full say in how an enterprise is run. But the enterprise itself exists within the society and its goals have to align with broader social good. So, we have a form of hierarchy here once again.

And this basically sums up why anarchism doesn’t work in practice. Even if you did manage to create an Utopian society without any hierarchies, it would have to compete with and defend itself against other types of societies. The part anarchists ignore is why hierarchies arise both in human societies and nature. The elephant in the room is that flat structures have hard scaling limits. You can only have so many people working directly together before communication overhead starts becoming overwhelming. Anybody who’s ever worked in a professional setting knows this.

Hierarchies act as a form of abstraction facilitating separation of internal and external concerns. A group of people working on a task can worry about the details of that task, and then surface only the aspects of the work that are relevant to other groups they need to collaborate with. And that’s how hierarchies form.

It’s absolutely incredible to me how hard anarchists work at not understanding this.

welcome comrade

Even more fundamentally, the whole metric of what defines good life and happiness is arbitrary based on the values of a particular culture, but it’s being applied as some universal value.

lmao he’s so pathetic

literally this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

oh yeah would be useful :)

I’m going to plug Psychological Warfare in the Strategy of Imperialism yet again, it’s an absolute must read to understand the roots of modern western propaganda

november8ph.ca/psychological-warfare-in-the-strategy-of-imperialism-v-l-artemov/

lol yes

Last book on politics I read was this one, and I can’t stress enough how good of a read it is https://november8ph.ca/psychological-warfare-in-the-strategy-of-imperialism-v-l-artemov

For non fiction, I was reading The Fisherman by John Langan, and also a fun read if you enjoy Lovecraftian style horror.

Yeah pretty much, but I do think people like him provide value because they have the authority of actually having been there when all these decisions were made.

that’s exactly it, he’s very good for exposing all the horrid shit the empire does, but he’s incapable of providing any solutions because he lacks material analysis

Just started reading Psychological Warfare in the Strategy of Imperialism by V.L. Artemov, and can’t recommend it enough.

For non-fiction, I’ve just finished reading Consciousness Explained by Dennett. I thought it was enjoyable overall, but my biggest criticism would be that it attacks a lot of idealist points I already consider to be absurd, so it’s preaching to the choir in that sense. That aside, it does do some interesting analysis of how consciousness might plausibly work, and provides good thought experiments. Can definitely recommend to anyone interested in the subject.

On the fiction side, I’m just reading The Fisherman by John Langan, and it’s an enjoyable Lovecraftian style horror if you’re into that sort of thing.

Basically it’s a stage of development where the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established, but the existing capitalist relations have not yet been abolished. This is a good explanation of what socialism means in Marxist terms. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3228-lenin-s-three-theoretical-arguments-about-the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat