Could you govern a nation like that?

In my last post, I asked what the Occupy movement has achieved. One thing that at least shows promise from it, while not directly affecting anything concrete at the moment, is the experiment in direct participatory democracy.

At the Occupy LSX protest, Tina Rothery, the first video presented here, describes it thus:

We may debate for 4 hours on the siting of a loo or the agreement of anything, but you know what it is? It's not the thing we're discussing that's important, it's the unity and democracy we're building on our way to get there, and the fact that we don't leave a voice out, and that every voice is heard. And then, when you're caught up in that - yeah, we do get caught up with our own form of bureaucracy and at first I rejected it, and thought, "God, give me a benevolent dictator. You know, someone who will push this through!" But then, you've done it often enough, and you're like, "Wow, I actually trust this!"

This kind of thing is something that I think would be the foundation of a genuine social and economic revolution leading to a post-capitalist (i.e. communist) society. As I understand it, similarly participatory democratic systems have been set up in the other "Occupy" camps, for example in the US. However well the system appears to be working, I do have some concerns - things that as far as I can see from the outside, do not seem to have been solved yet.

The first question I have is one that I have heard mentioned in the resoundingly negative by various campaigners for minority rights: "What are you doing to make sure every voice is heard?" Or, put another way, "How can you be sure every voice is being heard?" While I understand that there is a system to prioritise the voices of women and minorities in the "stack" (queue of people waiting to speak), I am unclear as to how it is ensured that there is a representative sample of such voices joining the stack in the first place. I am also unclear on what the reception is like for those voices and whether they are actually heard as openly as privileged voices are.

There are also the issues of shyness or introversion that might make a person reluctant to be involved in large group debates for various reasons (fear, in the case of shyness, just overwhelmed by peopleness in the case of introversion). There are people who are just quiet in general, for those issues or others, who need to be directly prompted to share their thoughts, even when they perhaps feel quite strongly about something, or have something very valuable to put into the debate.

From what I have read about previous experiments with participatory democracy or programmes (and seen in certain classes at school where these were supposed to take place) is that these people are easy to miss unless there is someone who is alert to their silence - people who are, in effect, in charge of the debate and can direct the appropriate question at the quiet person to ensure that they speak next. I have seen groups, or been in groups, both where the teacher/chairperson did this job very well, and also been in groups where they did not do it so well, and either I have been the quiet one who missed out, or else I have spotted a quiet person and tried to draw attention to their voice so they could be heard, by asking from the floor what they feel or know and wish to say. I have had to self-teach the art of being vocal, and in fact in one fairly recent group I was someone who had to be told to pipe down so that the quieter voices could be heard.

Another issue is with the scalability of direct participation. Occupy LSX takes 4 hours to reach a decision. I don't know how many people that involves, but I'm guessing we're talking in the low hundreds for the biggest gatherings? The town I live in has a population somewhere in the low tens of thousands. How are we to govern that many people through their own self-government via direct participatory democracy? How long would it take to make a decision? How many decisions can be reached in a day, and how many do you need to make in order to run a small town like where I live, function properly? While people are making these decisions, who is doing the necessary work to put the last lot of decisions into practice?

At some point, it seems, a shift from direct democracy to representative democracy would be inevitable just to keep things from becoming bogged down. Either that, or participatory democracy becomes a form of peer pressure in which not all opinions are freely voiced or fully heard.

This video from MsNikkiyork highlights some of the concerns I have about this:



MsNikkiyork starts by explaining the hand gestures that are used to signify assent, dissent or veto during a debate. After describing the veto gesture, she notes that,

In the beginning days there used to be a lot of people jumping up and going like this [makes the gesture] ... but it's a very diverse movement ... so you gotta actually be able to voice YOUR voice. Because the intention of that movement is to speak as one voice.

Which is the first hint I get that maybe freedom of speech isn't as free as they imply. And, personally, I am a stubborn bitch when I think I'm right. It sounds as though there's not much space for persuasion by argument (which is what you need to do to get me to shift).

Then we get a gesture for "direct question". Again, MsNikkiyork says:

When it was a smaller movement, that happened a lot, so people talking back and forth, now it's hardly possible to do that, but I guess it still happens.

After explaining the "human microphone", which is the system whereby people nearer the speaker repeat loudly the speaker's words so that people further back can hear them, and so on, MsNikkiyork also describes the General Assembly:

You go to the facilitator and have yourself put on stack ... with any opinion you are having. You could go there as a racist Nazi and say whatever you want. What you would have to face is that people go like this [dissent gesture] or this [veto gesture], but you know, that's up to you. So, it's very direct.

So then, you can talk, and with the human microphone, it becomes very obvious you can't just talk bullshit, because everybody has to repeat what you're saying.

So it becomes very disciplined, what people are saying. It also becomes very disciplined in the sense that people stop saying things that not everyone will agree with, or feel well with. So that makes it really, very basic, but also very strong.

So that sounds like the typical thing of dissenting voices actually being discouraged from speaking.

It also sounds like deeper, more developed, philosophies are also discouraged from being transmitted or expressed to the larger group. It is all very well having a few broad stroke ideals that you talk about a lot, but at some point you need to be able to get deep into the beliefs that uphold them, and into the practical consequences of them, and how you're going to resolve those. As near as I can figure, the committee/working group system is an attempt to resolve detailed issues in various specific areas of policy and action, but at that point not everyone is involved in those debates, and it seems to me that the depth and breadth of political thought must be restricted by such a system. Sure, a wide range different positions might be held, but there's no opportunity to get right into them and challenge and develop ideas together.

The danger I see in all this is a tendency towards groupthink - though MsNikkiyork says it's okay to disagree on things, there seems to be implicit in what she describes, a tendency to limit the scope for people to disagree and a tendency to lose nuance in the debate.

One more concern I have, not directly mentioned yet in the stuff I've read, is to do with the whole "no leaders" thing. Put simply, I don't believe it. While I believe that there are no appointed leaders or officially recognised authorities, what I also believe is that in any group there will be people whose voices are heard more frequently and with more support than others, and who may end up by force of personality or strength of their apparent support base, carry others along with them. I believe there are also people in any movement whose perceived knowledge, experience or confidence in some area will make them the de facto authority on that area, and culturally people start to defer to their opinions as well as to their knowledge, on those issues. Thus, leaders and authorities do exist in any group, whether they are recognised as such or not. Such people have the tendency to shape things around themselves in various ways, not necessarily by conscious will but simply because they are heard more frequently, and with greater support or deference, than others. Sometimes this is simply because that person tends to voice what others are thinking but not voicing, so the people's ready assent is not anything directly influenced by the leader, but rather zie starts to accrue an aura of leadership through repetition until you get to, "I agreed with hir last time, so this must be a good idea".

The concern to which this gives rise is a concern about accountability and power. When you know who your leaders are and who is influencing opinion strongly, then you can watch them and keep an eye on how they use the power that they have been given by the people around them. If, however, you claim that there are not leaders, and everyone is an equal part of the group, then the influence still happens but now we cannot see directly who has it and how they are using it. It becomes much harder to hold them to account for the effects that they have, because "everyone is equal".

Since I haven't been to an Occupy site (I may investigate the Occupy Brighton site next week, as the only one in easy travelling distance for me), I am not making these points as any criticism. In fact, I am making them in the hopes that they can and will be answered by the developments in participatory democracy that take place in Occupy groups - or have already been answered. Maybe, for example, my belief in the existence of leaders in any group is mistaken, and can be proved wrong by people who are there. Or maybe, ways have been found to keep leaders from acquiring power and followers where none are meant to be.

The point of this is not to say that the Occupy... experiments in participatory democracy have failed. I think that they do show that some system that functions at least as well as what we have now, could be envisaged. The point is more to say, "Can this be scaled up to a national government?" and "Can it be made to be something definitely better than what already exists?"