[P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us?

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Apostolis,

I don't believe you can simpliy wish politics away, and look for
technocratic solutions based on mathematics, and I also think it has been
shown that the Power Law operates in every distiributed network.

In my opinion, what is needed are 'counter-measures' that balance power law
tendencies with their opposite, which is exactly what the greek democracy
did, but also the free cities in medieval Europe. But all of these were
also a direct result of politics. The greek democracy was based on the
revolt of the people against debt slavery, and because the
sailors-proletarians were armed; the medieval councils were based on the
power of the guilds and the city militias which could act against the
nobility ...

It's less mathematics that will help us, than 'group threshold'
anthropology and other in-group vs out group findings of evolutionary
psychology, which show more precisely when democratic ingroup processes
start to break down.

The Norwegian Terje Bongard, in his book Biological Man, has recently
published a whole book outlining such an approach.

Peer production has shown us that the global scaling of small group
dynamics is now possible; can we apply this to politics as well? Some ideal
combination of permanent individual expression of choices (such as the
liquid feedback system of proxy voting), small-group deliberation, could
augment any system of representation that is still needed where
down-scaling is not possible ..

All of this is however, dependent on popular mobilization, as much as on
real-life experimentation of real peer production communities that have
successfully defended their autonomy, or in other words: messy politics

Michel



XXX

Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:14:07 +0200
From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <xekoukou at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is
        there a lesson for us?
To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
Message-ID:
        <CAOX4E5F+744hzv4fX8pfC9Ly4G84tJA5n29F4Nmv8CFqOjeQpg at mail.gmail.com>
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Letting people literally become the state is the best way to protect
Democracy. But how efficient is this?

The good thing is that today we have the internet and thus it is much
easier to have a decentralized state by the people, thus solutions like
these could for some things scale without costing a lot.

I wonder if there has been any mathematical research for the amount of
decentralization that is required so that a hegemonic class doesnt emerge.

I'd prefer it to be mathematical because I know a lot of opinions on this
matter which are always interrelated with one's political
agenda.(reformist,anarchist,revolutionary marxist,capitalist)
-- 
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