Current status: obsessively reading about various schools of #anarchist and #LibertarianSocialist thought.
Is anarcho-pacifist-liberatian-municipalism a thing?
But, then, I think about how fucking stupid most people are and think: can direct democracy *actually* work on a large scale? Certainly, nothing bigger than a city. But is even that too big in some cases?
@ink_slinger I like the idea of hyper-local anarchosocialist collectives dealing with our day-to-day problems, and connecting up to solve the big ones.
The way we _do_ democracy in liberal democracies is fundamentally alienating. It trivializes the importance of individual action and ownership in group decisions, and it turns politics into at best a technocracy and at worst a game. Direct democracy in _this system_ cannot work by design.
@ink_slinger i think its not so much that people are stupid as they are trained not to think critically about things, because thats not usfull for capitalism.
regarding scale, that can be solved buy federating small groups together, if a decision only effects a group they can decide it, if it effects multiple groups they can all come to a position, mandate a delegate with that position, and have all the delegates meet to try and find a result that is acceptable to all groups.
@radicalgraffiti That's a good point. Many people were never taught to think critically. That's probably 1 of the many reasons why current forms of liberal democracy are so alienating. People haven't been given the tools to understand the issues, then can't understand why or how decisions are made (or even think it doesn't matter because issues are made to seem too abstract to impact their lives). Then we wonder why there is growing populist backlash against institutional politics.
@RexfordGTugwell Corporations aren't people. They don't get a vote. Private property would be abolished. But...how, if pacifist? Probably impossible.
@ink_slinger pacifism doesn't make much sense, and isn't municipalism a reformist alternative to anarchism?
@radicalgraffiti Eh, it can be. Seems there are a few conflicting definitions.
@ink_slinger yes, it was huge in the early days of dutch anarchism
@ink_slinger and the Swedish SAC discussed and used it as a form of Communalism between 1950-65
@ink_slinger although Korea could be a history of interest for you, but there is not too much material about their tries in English as far as I know
@ink_slinger have you considered syndicalism? mutualism?
@NetKitteh Yes. Mutualism seems to make a lot of sense. I'm not an expert, by any means, but it's one of the ideas I find most interesting at the moment.
@ink_slinger what a mix.
I mean, fuck it. I want to decentralize everything else, why not government? Why not decentralized democracy and the dissolution of the nation state? A confederation of cooperative municipalities (possibly even individual neighbourhoods, is a city is particularly large)?