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Nov 24

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i think any socialist government should include a People's Assembly of people chosen through a lottery, maybe as an upper house in the legislature and to replace the supreme court. such a body would not be so compromised by people trying to build power as a political class, since whatever they do, a regular person will be replacing them at the end of their term.

ideally such assemblies would be numerous and large enough at the local level that every person in the community could be guaranteed to be selected for assembly duty, like jury duty, several times a decade.

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see also monastic government

i am not familiar with that text yet, but in my opinion it would be best to start out this system by putting it into effect in trade unions, tenants unions, collectives, community gardeners, co-ops, etc in which case it would come as a condition of membership.

socialist parties would also adopt such systems, it could encourage membership and give people a concrete way to get involved.

and those parties could push to establish People's Assemblies at the municipal level. there's precedent in Canadian and Dutch law.

But control of People's Assemblies, the mechanism of the lottery, the infrastructure for giving them information and advice and how they select and hire and fire their agents, should not be left to the monopoly of any one agency, be it the city government, the nation state, a confederation of unions, or a party. the point is not to create single hierarchy of People's Assemblies, but to develop a broad network of them in a variety of institutions, thereby building up democratic know-how among workers and the population at large.

that said, i think people should have the right to defer a term. if someone has a health condition or small children or anything else which makes service on such a board infeasible they should be allowed to claim their spot at a more convenient time.

i like how in Hinduism one god might be an incarnation or avatar of another god, who in turn is a manifestation of a third god, who in turn is an emanation of fourth God.

Christianity gets a lot of flack for having a 3-in-1 God. but in the Upanishads, two sages are having a conversation that goes like,

how many Gods are there?

there are 3 million gods