democracy versus oligarchy take 2

hi I'm sorry I'm unable to give the the talk directly but I'm going to try and go through it from here and I'll try and edit in my video slides of what's happening now I'm starting off by talking about what political system does the USA have officially the USA is a democracy and it has all the ceremonial and symbolism which is supposed to be associated with democracy and there's a actually a rather nice point about this at one level if you look at the buildings of Washington they are white marble buildings with pillars and your first thought is oh this is modeled on Athens it's modeled on Athenian democracy but then there are other themes within that they have a domed capital now that dome is actually a piece of Roman architecture and when you look into the history of it you find that these great monuments were actually built by slave labor and that the political form of the US Constitution is far more influenced by that of Rome than of ancient Athens and that's significant because Rome was an oligarchy and more and more political scientists are coming to say that in fact the u.s. is an oligarchy and this is coming out in the press it's coming out in books it's coming out in the commentary people are saying it's quoting a study by Givens from Princeton and page from Northwestern which found that the preferences of rich people almost entirely determine what laws are passed and very little influence is exerted by middle and lower-income people on on the laws that are put forward and the policy changes with support among the economic elite are very likely to get passed or get passed fifty percent of the time whereas those with support among which don't have support among the elite are unlikely to get passed now this effect on public policy is is one thing it is in pinnacle evidence that the the rich dominate the policies in America the next point is to look at who makes up the legislature and you find this very young representative of the population for instance the the richest senator was worth 500 million even a prominent Democratic senator like Feinstein was worth fifty eight million and one hundred fifty seven members of Senate of the Senate of Congress had work were millionaires and one hundred fifty five members of Congress where had fortunes between a hundred thousand 1 million now those are not vast fortunes but if you contrast them to the situation of most Americans there is a lot the median American household had only about four thousand dollars in savings and even if you count their other assets like bank accounts and the etc there sorry not just the bank accounts but retirement savings their median savings was eleven thousand so that these assets of the legislature put them way way above the median position now why they so unrepresentative the US has got elections so ought to be more representative but we know that Congress is very unrepresented now this goes right back to issues that were debated more than 2,000 years ago Aristotle writing in the politics and the Fenian Constitution said that the two key principles of democracy where that the sovereign assembly of the citizens decides major questions and any councils are selected by lot from the citizen body not elected he further says that snakes based on elections run a lot were in fact aristocracies not democracies so in that sense the US would be an aristocracy or an oligarchy and it probably was deliberately designed to be an aristocracy by the slaveholding there is - caught aristocrats of the south but the point that Aristotle makes is that if you have deliberate selection as you get in elections this always selects higher class people because the richer and better educated people are in a better position to campaign for office and get disproportionately represented and the social composition of the US Senate is a clear illustration of that and he said the distinguishing feature of a democracy was the poor actually rule estate now in ancient democracies like Athens that was done by the body of citizens meeting in the town hall and voting on things and same system persisted in Switzerland till recently now obviously in setting up a state like the US which was Continental in size or case very large they couldn't replicate Town Hall democracy of the sort which existed in localities in the u.s. at the national level and they serve the upper class certainly didn't want that to happen so instead of an Athenian model they chose a Roman model and all the key items of the US Constitution are pulled directly from that the Constitution Pro firstly they call it a republic which is a Roman toe secondly they have president and vice president who correspond to the consuls in the Roman Republic then they have a Senate which is drawn directly from the Roman Republic now at this point you start to get it even less Democratic than the Roman Republic is the Roman Republic at least had an assembly of the plebs where the non senatorial citizens could gather in the town square vote on things that doesn't exist in the US Constitution instead they have the Congress which an elected body so you have two two elected bodies both of which end up being disproportionately made up of the upper classes they even have a role for what was the priesthood or August who decide on critical issues and whether they're the the gods favored them or not instead of a priesthood deciding whether the gods favored them they have the Supreme Court but there's the same thing because the the the Pontifex Maximus in enrollment lis College of priests were drawn from the senatorial or upper classes and the same as the case of the US Senate US Supreme Court now it may be said that there was no option in the days of when they set up the u.s. no option but to have an elected assembly well that's partly true and partly not true it was only impossible to hold votes of the entire population of the type that were held in ancient Athens or were being held in Switzerland at the time the u.s. was set up you couldn't do that on a continental scale you could I suppose have chosen the Congress by lot the way the council in Athens was chosen by random selection among the population and that would have given a representative class composition the other thing that can be done now though is to use electronic voting it is perfectly possible to have a virtual community a virtual meeting of the entire population issues debated on TV people can make contributions from the the population on TV by having a an audience debating it that is randomly selected and then people can vote and you can vote by mobile phone or the Internet I'll get onto that later technically you can say that wasn't available now what's happening in Britain it is an example of the historical process by which one form of democracy or one form of rule replaced another you all know that in the 1600s the absolute monarchy in Britain was overthrown and a parliamentary system was established by the victory of Cromwell's revolutionary armies and that establishes the the principle that in the British constitution the monic had to obey what Parliament set although the fiction is maintained that the monarch is just taking the advice of her ministers in practice the salutary example of King Charles having his head chopped off when he didn't take the advice has meant that no other moloch has dared not take the advice the reality obviously is that like the US Senate the and Congress the two houses of parliament in Britain are drawn from the upper classes disproportionately drawn from the upper classes and when an issue that is particularly critical comes up this is in the past always been dealt with in Parliament but a crisis was caused when the issue of membership or non membership of the EU was instead of being settled in Parliament put to a direct democratic vote of the population the overwhelming majority of the Parliament and of business interests were Pro remaining in the EU the upper class as a whole were Pro remaining in the EU there was a minority within the political class and a minority within the business class that wanted to leave but they were not a majority they were therefore shocked when the direct vote said to leave and the direct vote said to leave largely on the basis of class the less educated you were the lawyer income was the more likely you were to vote to leave among university educated skilled highly skilled people the proportion voting to leave was much lower most of them voted to remain however it was a leave vote but the Parliament didn't want to to enforce it and you went through three years of increasing constitutional crisis as you had a contradiction between direct democracy and parliamentary representation and all sorts of arguments were put forward to the effect that the vote was just advisory the masses were ill-informed were not in a position to make judgments on topics like this so what was interesting to me was that these were all very old arguments these were arguments which went right back to the arguments Plato made against democracy that the masses were ignorant were led by demagogues and therefore shouldn't be trusted to vote on things these are classic anti-democratic classic aristocratic arguments have been put and they weren't just being put by the far-right by any means the paradox was that it was the liberal left that was most enthusiastic at putting these classical anti-democratic arguments forward now it was a catastrophic error of the Labor Party in Britain to adopt those positions they were able by aligned with groups of the Conservative Party in Parliament to repeatedly block a law to remove to leave the EU but when an election came they were completely defeated and the populist right were the ones that gained a victory from this now this issue of whether the the system and in the West is democratic or not isn't just being played out in Britain it's being played out across Europe most obviously in France where there have been huge demonstrations by the yellow vests against the presidency of a macron enormous demonstrations the British press place and down you don't hear that much about them but these movements have been bringing up issues of classical democracy one the key demands they're making is that the people should be able to demand a referendum on any issue for which there's sufficient signatures they're also raising the issue of whether elected parliament should exist at all or whether citizens assemblies chosen by lot should take their place so these are the classic demands of democracy which are now coming to the fore again because the fraudulent character the oligarchic character of the constitutional systems in the Western countries is becoming increasingly apparent to the public now in a sense it can be said that the parliamentary system was obviously a clear advance over absolute monarchy it reduced the arbitrariness and allowed at least some voice for those who could vote those who could vote were in the main the property classes because property qualifications for voting were only removed in the 20th century but they allowed some kind of popular vote but time and time again you come up with the situation where legislation is passed which would never have been put through if it were put to a referendum now the lessons I have been drawing from this and these are something I've been arguing since the time of Margaret Thatcher and her poll tax in in Scotland is that the left should be championing direct democracy we should be calling for referenda we should be calling for direct electronic voting on issues to do with tax and spending and we should be calling for legislative bodies to be selected by lot now there's been experiments with this recently in Ireland they had a citizens assembly to decide on whether or not there should be a referendum on abortion and the citizens assembly said yes there was then a referendum and the abortion law went through which was a tremendous setback to the established power of the church and would never have gone through it was left to the ordinary parliamentary system now how can you do referenda easily well we developed an experimental system at Glasgow University which we call handy vote which uses the most basic mobile phone facility sending a text message the idea is it's all citizens are given or get a voting card and they ideally they get the voting come by when they go to vote they put their hand in a jar and pull out a sealed envelope of their choice and this has a voter's card on it like a credit card which is a secret number that only they know so nobody knows what your secret number and what your secret pin is because no one could predict which envelope you're going to draw out of the jar so you then have that when you want to when there is a an issue which is going to be a referendum on there's a television debate there's then a vote yes or no and you could is done by sending a text message wife or yes enfin Oh followed by your secret number and your PIN in order to validate that there's no cheating the lists of all the numbers with the pins removed that voted yes and all the numbers that voted no are published on the web you can then check that your number was in that anyone with a computer can rapidly scan through millions of numbers the totals can be independently verified by everyone as a computer the whole system is open aboveboard you can see how you voted but no one else knows how you voted because your number is secret the pin is not published so that you can reuse your card later and no one else knows what your PIN is so no one else can just look at the the numbers that are voted and guess the pin so the system is simple secure and personally verifiable and we have also demonstrated in the software for counting votes that you can use that for voting on a combination of expenditure and tax issues so people can vote when they want taxes up 5% taxes down 5% expenditure on education up 5% expensive down 5% etc and the the software then chooses the mean position of what people want the average position of what people want as a change so the point is that's a Dem a proof of principle and a demonstration but what it shows is a that it's very cheap and simple with modern technology tab nationwide referenda and it also shows that they can be on topics which are go beyond just yes or no you can in fact have them on economic decisions as well

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 2,058

Rating: 4.9407406 out of 5

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Id: YxSPirB9ePA

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/parentis_shotgun]

Also lots of good stuff in here about direct democracy.

Tangential but I wrote a breakdown of his proposed cyber-communist system here.

[u/AntonioMachado]

Check out the concept of Herrenvolk democracy as elaborated by the brilliant Domenico Losurdo