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A political strategy for degrowth | tldr: mass parties founded on egalitarian principles and courageously advocating for anti-capitalist policies (www.resilience.org)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/degrowth@slrpnk.net
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32632129

"[R]epresentative democracy is a failure and elections are a circus. If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished." | A political strategy for degrowth

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[–] [S] 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Remember that sortition is government by committee. You're not selecting one person to be in charge by lot and taking a gamble on that person's competence; you're selecting a group of dozens or hundreds of people, from a pool of qualified volunteers, and having them come to a consensus on what to do.

If I had to decide who would make better decisions, a committee of 100 or so ordinary citizens, all of whom were more politically active and aware than the average citizen (or they wouldn't volunteer in the first place), or a career politician whose first priority is to manipulate citizens into voting for him and whose second priority is to make money off his position, I'd choose the committee every time. Better a group of people who may have been influenced by post-truth brainwashing than one of the people doing the brainwashing in the first place.

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Not all forms of sortition are based on volunteering, sometimes it's proposed as a civic duty similar to jury in the States. Volunteering introduces a selection bias which could make the system unfair.

    The main issue with it in my view is that in present-day society there'd be many attempts to influence the committee (read: corruption). Of course this also applies to representative democracy, but that doesn't make it any less of an issue because that's one of the major problems with representative democracy that needs to get fixed.

    I can easily picture a dystopian implementation of sortition where the public sees it as a lottery where they can get rich by getting selected and taking bribes from corporations once they're in, much the same way American representative democracy currently works (and to a lesser degree, representative democracy everywhere).

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    I think there are more important things than fairness. We have laws requiring employers to give you paid time off for jury duty and it's still a significant burden on a lot of people. For someone to be chosen by lot to participate in what's likely to be the equivalent of a full-time job? Frankly, it would be unfair to place that burden on people who didn't sign up for it.

    And sortition would be pretty much guaranteed to fail if the people chosen by lot weren't drawn from a pool who'd already proven they understood, to some degree, the issues they would be making decisions about. If we take conscripts instead of volunteers, we'd have a committee full of people who didn't know, or care, about the issues, who didn't want to be there in the first place, and who'd happily rubber stamp the decisions of whoever on the committee was the loudest and most passionate so that they could go home early.

    And I think you have to draw a distinction between influence and corruption. Everybody has the right to advocate for policies that benefit them. Everybody has the right to form unions and groups and lobby for policies that benefit them. So of course this committee will be influenced by outside parties. The alternative is decision makers who don't listen to people telling them what they want and need, and that's not good for society.

    And of course there will be explicit and implicit bribes, there will be be influence campaigns, and so on, because you can't have any decision making process, anywhere, that people won't try to rig.

    But: it's much, much more difficult for some corrupt billionaire to bribe 100-plus members of a committee - especially if, as I hope, that committee makes decisions by consensus, anarchist style, instead of by majority vote - than it is to bribe one politician. And once you've bribed all those committee members, as soon as their term expires you have to bribe a whole new committee, because there's no guarantee that any committee member will be selected by lot next year (and, in fact, I'd argue someone shouldn't be eligible to serve again for x number of years after being chosen). On the other hand, bribing a career politician is a continuing investment that pays off year after year after year.

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