Setting aside Capitalism vs. Communism (or maybe I just think I am), this structure vs. that. Why is it that there aren’t really huge lists of alternatives? Where are the people who are imagining new government structures?
Like electing citizens to office at random, like we do with jury duty (forget the word for it). Or totally different arrangements of legislatures. Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense. That one is especially probably a terrible idea, and they’re not even that unique, but who is brainstorming this stuff? Is it mostly just sci-fi authors? Where is it talked about that isn’t already bending toward a team in the already-existing scheme of things? Even the most radical sorts are referencing back to books/ideas that are a century old. There are ultimately like four ideas and we just kind of gave up? That’s all of them?
Why have we seen so few different approaches tried? Or seemingly even imagined? I feel like even in fiction, it’ll be 2,000 years in the future and the whole thing is structured like a glorified city council ruling entire star systems. I feel like it’s difficult even for our minds to imagine anything truly inventive, in that sense. Is that baked into the concept? Is it because we’re just dumb monkeys that only understand “big strong monkey better?” HAS this stuff been written about extensively and I’m just unaware (probably, yes)?
Multiple good hypotheses here. I’d like to add my own. The governments can be viewed as a modern iterations of religious cults, and there is no bigger taboo in a religious organization than questioning the basic dogma.
Try to question democracy in a democratic republic and you immediately get the weird looks, and irrational dismissal. 9 times out of 10 this self preservation instinct is good and beneficial to everyone involved, because giving a benefit of doubt to closeted authoritarians would be a mistake. That one time somebody really wants to have an honest discussion, it simply sucks.
Honestly, I think the issue here is more your lack of education/awareness than anything else.
Like electing citizens to office at random
Ancient Athens had a system to do exactly this for a period of time.
Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense
Check out the Democratic Confederalist system currently in practice in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (commonly called Rojava). It’s not strictly pure democracy, but that’s a core principle, and it’s MUCH more participatory than virtually any other governmental system on the planet.
The big issue here is that education is always political, even if you don’t think it is. I’m guessing, based on your writing here, that you were educated in a western liberal democracy. The curriculum you were taught in school, especially with regards to governmental systems, civics, and history, is heavily influenced by the ideology of your country: liberal western representative democracy. I had the same education in school growing up. The curriculum is only interested in presenting alternative forms of government as a way to show how great the one you were living under is. “Monarchy was bad for these reasons, so we replaced it with liberal representative democracy.” “Fascism is bad for these reasons (while ignoring all the ways it’s very similar to our current system), so be happy you have a liberal democracy.” “State communism was authoritarian and bad, so be happy you have what you do.” Etc.
They never talk about the shortcomings of their own system, or the benefits of others, because they aren’t trying to educate a bunch of radicals who might one day overthrow the system.
There are a lot of people thinking of alternative forms of government. For my own personal ideological biases, I’d recommend reading stuff by people like Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), David Graeber (1961-2020), or Abdullah Öcalan (1948-).
Vendor lock-in.
Because political systems are not purely ideological. They are derived from a material (economic) basis and must satisfy existing relations to production or change them. In our case the two primary relations to production are those who own the means of production and those who produce. Under the economic base of capitalist production there are multitudes of political superstructures but you will be most familiar with the liberal democracy. This form of political structure provides some extra freedoms and luxury to its domestic working class but is only able to do so while maintaining the infinitely expanding profits demanded by capitalist production by exploiting a foreign working class for cheap labor. When the cyclical crises of capitalism eventually places an insurmountable strain on the liberal democratic political superstructure which can no longer hide or balance the class contradictions at its base you get one of two things. Communism or fascism. In the case of fascism it is essentially the owning class going all in, exploiting a foreign working class stops being enough so their imperialism turns inward on their own working class. Since they cannot increase oppression on every worker without inciting revolution they pit one section of the working class against another often along ethnic lines but who is pit against who is arbitrary. An out-group is intentionally created and alienated so that the owning class can maintain economic power. In the case of communism/socialism it is basically the workers taking full control of the economy and political superstructure because the capitalist class failed to maintain it. There is also anarchism but I am not well read enough to speak on it too much.
In short, western liberal democracies have essentially only two classes and the economic contradictions that the state exists to mitigate originate from a conflict of interest between these classes. If we are to be frank there is only the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the dictatorship of the proletariet, and classless society.
I hope this isn’t too much of a ramble lol, my partner was watching tiktok so I was a tad distracted.
No, this was a really great, thoughtful answer, thank you.
Lots of people, they just don’t get a lot of people reading about them. Most of the really serious ones are pretty wonky documents that most people wouldn’t want to sort through.
One idea I’ve personally had for years was taking away the voting rights of Representatives and Senators and making them glorified figureheads who write laws. Once they write a law (with Version Control being applied so we know who wrote what sentence) it’s instantly posted online in Wiki format where citizens (with proof of citizenship) can contribute in editing and work-shopping the new laws, and then when the new laws are ready, they are put up to a direct vote by the citizens. This would remove the representatives ability to be influenced in how they write the laws since citizens would have more direct control via editing the law and voting on it. I’m not as thoughtful as the more wonky people who have written a lot more serious stuff like this.
Outside an existing system, I think there’s lots of interesting writing on decentralized societies where diffuse power structures can lead to less consolidation of power by individuals seeking individual control. Anarchy lite, I guess you could call it?
The word you are missing is “sortition”
THANK YOU.
You could also look back. History has many examples of people governing themselves in various ways that differ from the systems used at the moment. Even within the spectrum of contemporary democracy, there are several options to choose from. People could just look up what kinds of democracies are used in other countries and how they differ from the one used (or not used) in your home country.
I think we need a new radical philosopher who comes up with a new way of government, and starts promoting it actively. Actually, long ago, I heard a small political party do just that. They wanted to switch to the kind of direct democracy used in Switzerland, which sounded nice IMO. If people heard about someone proposing an alternative, they might at least consider it.
The way I see it, people aren’t really exposed to different ideas of this kind. They see the problems, but not the answers. People aren’t really proposing new solutions that much, now are they?
If you have any specific examples, that’s just the kind of thing I’m after. Stuff that makes me go, “whoa, I didn’t know that was even a thing!”
Have a read of Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn Of Everything. It’s a re-examination of the political implications of archeology, and it’s pretty inspiring. Definitely dispelled me of any notion that capitalism or communism or totalitarianism were the only plausible systems.
If Wengrow and Graeber were required reading every civics/government/social studies curriculum for high school age students, the world would be a much better place.
That sounds spot-on, thank you!
Ideally, you would find a “philosopher king”, but that’s unlikely to happen. The next best option would be liquid democracy or some sort of direct democracy. If that’s not an option, you could switch to preferential voting that leads to a coalition parliament fairly often. Proportional representation works too. Basically anything other than FPTP.
Think of a more direct democracy. I will oversimplify enough to annoy those from Switzerland:
Differing levels of law require differing thresholds. Country votes on a law, the majority above the required threshold vote it in. It becomes a national law. That is easy. What about when it fails? Then look to the state level. Did it pass the threshold for your state? Yes? Then it is a state law. Failed state level? Let’s look at your county/city/local level. Passed threshold? Local law.
Again, over simplified, but general idea.
We can imagine all kinds of things.
Imagination does fuck all in a the face of legislative process and beaurocratic entity which forcefully redistributes wealth for military and public wellbeing.
No matter what system you imagine its going to end up as a big circle of old men pushing pens around and reading at a podium.
