Thought for the day - how to reach a TRUER Democracy

[Dover]

"Before capitalism, Western nations were generally run by aristocratic classes. The aristocratic attitude toward wealth focused on management and maintenance. With capitalism, the focus is always on growth and development; whatever one has is but the seeds to build a still greater fortune. In fact, there are infinite alternatives to capitalism, and different societies can choose different systems, once they are free to do so. As Morpheus put it: "Outside the matrix everything is possible, and there are no limits."

The matrix defines "democracy" as competitive party politics, because that is a game wealthy elites have long since learned to corrupt and manipulate. Even in the days of the Roman Republic the techniques were well understood. Real-world democracy is possible only if the people themselves participate in setting society's direction. An elected official can only truly represent a constituency after that constituency has worked out its positions--from the local to the global--on the issues of the day. For that to happen, the interests of different societal factions must be harmonized through interaction and discussion. Collaboration, not competition, is what leads to effective harmonization.

In order for the movement to end elite rule and establish livable societies to succeed, it will need to evolve a democratic process, and to use that process to develop a program of consensus reform that harmonizes the interests of its constituencies. In order to be politically victorious, it will need to reach out to all segments of society and become a majority movement. By such means, the democratic process of the movement can become the democratic process of a newly empowered civil society. There is no adequate theory of democracy at present, although there is much to be learned from history and from theory. The movement will need to develop a democratic process as it goes along, and that objective must be pursued as diligently as victory itself. Otherwise some new tyranny will eventually replace the old.

It ain't left or right. It's up and down.
Here we all are down here struggling while
the Corporate Elite are all up there having a nice day!..
--Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt Maine and anti-corporate activist

http://cyberjournal.org/cj/rkm/WE/jun00Matrix.shtml

http://cyberjournal.org/


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[Mythsaje]

1. Bottom-up democracy

requires an educated, involved populace, access to trustworthy information, and a society-wide belief that honor and integrity is more important than the acquisition of wealth.

[eallen]

2. And you're going to replace capitalism with... what, exactly?

I don't have an idealized view of capitalism. It has a lot of warts, and there is good reason to regulate its excesses and to create a social environment that stands to the side of capitalism, for educating the young, taking care of the infirm, and other purposes we don't want to leave wholy to the market.

But neither do I have the delusion of so many that the theorists on the left have figured out another system for wealth creation. If there were one thing I wish the Democratic Party would clearly shun, it is the notion of viewing capitalism as an evil to be eliminated. Capitalism is a useful mechanism. One that comes with some cautions. But not one to be discarded because of that. The notion that capitalism should be destroyed has about as much viability in American politics as the notion that we should institute an inherited monarchy.