In the end, I am uninterested in parties. I am not at all sure we need them. What we need is communities - local and transnational. We have new tools for getting together in 'interest groups', across borders and maybe across languages barriers.
I believe we will no longer need politicians nor parliaments in the future. They were invented, after all, to solve a logistics problem that might no longer exist in a few years. Who needs a representative, if you can represent yourself?
What the Internet has started to prove is that 'middleman' are no longer needed. Politicians are 'middlemen'. We need decentralization. Peer-to-peer.
We'll still need a civil service to implement our decisions.
OK, OK all this is in the future, and I may not be around to see it. What you are asking in this debate is what we can do now to affect the dialogue (or rather begin a dialogue!!!). I'd like to see a 'hard left' that is so hard left that it becomes something else never seen before - with a new name!
We could always bring back Flower Power... Retro is in now ;-) You can't be me, I'm taken
You stole my line!
But actually most people do not actually WANT to participate in every decision that affects them but may well be prepared to delegate to other individuals they trust - particularly subject by subject in relation to particular issues they did not feel they have knowledge or experience of.
While reserving the right to participate if they wish.
I came across quite a useful distinction - made by a lifelong activist who has immense practical experience - between what he calls "divergents" and "convergents".
The former constitute maybe 5% of the population, and the latter the balance of 95%, and it is the former who are prepared to take responsibility and represent others, while the latter are quite happy to delegate that responsibility to them, while reserving the right to participate directly.
I am sure that there is much academic material in social anthropology that I am entirely ignorant of which relates to all this, but I found it a very useful approach and if it could be "encoded" in some way, we might make progress towards Democracy 2.0
The divergent/convergent insight is a valuable one - and I WILL steal that one!. BTW isn't convergence to divergence what kids go through in relation to their parents, and isn't that what education should be about?
Venture Communalism Rules! You can't be me, I'm taken
Just Reading along.
This is interesting. "When the abyss stares at me, it wets its pants." Brian Hopkins
I'd like to see a 'hard left' that is so hard left that it becomes something else never seen before - with a new name!
Long live Venture Communism!
http://www.telekommunisten.net/venture-communism
