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a The first condition of demarchy being possible is that the society in which it is to be instituted be reasonably democratic in its social attitudes. While recognizing that people may differ greatly in particular abilities, the demarchist does not believe that there is any group of people whose capacities entitle them to a position of special or wide-ranging power in the community. At the base level choices made by people of no special ability are likely to be reasonable provided they are based on sound knowledge. They may need expert advice, but the judgement about whose advice to take is appropriately made by lay persons.
b The productive technology of the society must be ample to provide a good deal of time and resources that can be devoted to public debate and decision-making.
c People must value the opportunity for effective participation in matters that interest them and be prepared to leave other matters to those who have those interests, provided they are satisfied that the system is fair and effective.
d People must be anxious to avoid rigidity, bureaucracy and concentration of power. They must want to avoid giving power to the state if other social mechanisms will produce common goods reliably and fairly.
These broad conditions are already secure in the “advanced” countries of both the “first” and “second” worlds. They all profess democratic ideologies and democratic sentiments are deeply grounded in much of the micro-structure of life. They all support enormous military and bureaucratic superstructures and could easily support the costs of demarchy. The tenor of discussion is mostly sensible and tolerant. People do not particularly love the state. It is more difficult to speak about the so-called third world, however. In many cases standards of education and knowledge of the mechanisms of large-scale societies may be lacking, as well as other conditions. It is difficult for a Westerner to be sure. Let us stick to the “first” and “second” worlds, which in any case dominate the third world militarily, economically and ideologically.
It is quite striking how easily demarchy can be explained to people without any special acquaintance with political theory, and how readily they can see it as a system that could work once it was instituted. It involves no great assumptions about the possibility of a radical change of consciousness. It does not presuppose a great moral renewal, much as one may hope that it 122would lead to a stronger and more effective moral sensibility. Most people think that there are enough people already who have the qualities necessary to make the system work. It is not difficult for people to see demarchy as an attractive proposal that might indeed solve many of our socio-economic and political problems. Unfortunately the very simplicity and plausibility of the proposal undercuts it. It is very hard to believe that the answer to our most pressing problems is so simple and so bland.
A movement that would make a “world-historical” change ought to rest on some great religious revelation or metaphysical world-view, make claims in the name of sacred and inalienable rights, call for vengeance on the oppressors, have colour and drama. It should be complex, mysterious and elusive, allowing many different forces to be harnessed together as each sees in the whole what it longs to see. It ought to have clearly identifiable enemies, people of flesh and blood who can be hated and demons to be exorcized. Its programme should be symbolized in a great symbolic act. At least, so the historical record suggests.
But perhaps the days of that kind of politics are passed. Certainly, it is no longer possible for most mature and reflective people to believe in that kind of vision. Just as, for the most part, we believe that progress in curing the ills of our bodies depends on understanding the specific mechanisms by which they work, so our general experience of social life inclines us to look for particular practical mechanisms to deal with the functional problems of social life. We know better than to take a simple mechanical view of these matters. Beliefs, hopes and fears are important. We know, too, that mechanisms outside the simplest ones of physical mechanics do not have entirely predictable consequences or conditions of operation. Only experience can show their powers and limitations.
In these circumstances one might hope that a significant change in our society’s ways of operating might be brought about by convincing people that there are definite procedures that are at least worth trying because they promise to solve many of our most important problems. The great difficulties in bringing about such a change are twofold:
a The first steps. How are we to get the new procedure a decent trial? Not many people are going to be interested in trying a new form of democracy unless they can be shown instances of its working in practice, not just in some utopian community committed to it on principle, but in normal circumstances.
b The interests opposed to it. Obviously, if we are proposing to replace all our political elites, most of our bureaucracy and the private ownership of land and large capital, all the ruling strata in society have an interest in opposing us. It seems too much to hope that one could fight all of these opponents at the same time and win. 123
The two difficulties are closely intertwined with each other. They cannot be met head on, but only obliquely, and only with a good deal of luck. What I hope is that it may be possible to get the process started by finding areas of responsibility where the present ways of doing things manifestly fail. It will be in the interests of those who bear the stigma of that failure to try to get rid of those responsibilities to whatever institutions are willing to accept them. One of the great virtues of demarchy is that it can, unlike centralized forms of socialism, be introduced in a piecemeal way, provided there is sufficient agreement that it is worth trying in a particular area. Even where centralized socialism now exists it is possible that the powers that be may find demarchically constituted bodies an attractive solution to the problem of making concessions to demands for decentralization and democracy without the threats to stability that electoral democracy entails in such a situation. Demarchy might minimize fuss and provide a gradual transition to a more democratic society.
It is not unusual for authorities to foster institutions that, if they were to grow, would threaten their power. Often they are seeking a counterbalance to an immediate threat, buying support, placating discontent or putting off the day of reckoning. Often they assume that the new institutions could never grow into a substantial threat. It was inconceivable to the monarchs of the ancien régime that mere merchants and manufacturers might usurp their authority. No doubt our present politicians and bureaucrats see themselves as functionally irreplaceable. In a sense they are, as long as their functions are reproduced by the practices in which things get done. Any authority with this sort of confidence in itself is open to a process of attrition. It is willing to let go specific areas of power for immediate and tangible gains, thinking thereby to secure its ultimate authority. In the long run, however, an authority that is only an ultimate authority is powerless. Everything is decided before it can intervene. The cost of overturning what is already decided are too great. Often the authority no longer has the capacity to generate positive alternatives. It makes a show of doing something, but is really a rubber stamp.
Where, then, can we make a start in this process of undermining existing power structures without confronting them? One obvious place is in the general areas of health, education and welfare. Contemporary capitalism is at the moment conducting a very successful counter-offensive against the growth of the welfare state, abetted by popular discontent with bureaucracy and high levels of taxation. That offensive is unlikely to have much long-term success once its results become manifest. Once the quality of health care, education and other services available to the ordinary voter declines dramatically there 124will be a reaction. Private medicine and education have become extremely costly as the private bureaucracies of the health insurance industry join with the professions to increase the slice of the GNP that the industry as a whole appropriates.
Both private and state supply and control of these goods breed bureaucracy and high costs. In either case people are going to demand better value for their money. The demand is going to focus on the state, because even if it can extricate itself to some extent from supplying these goods, it is inextricably implicated in controlling their production. The professions and the institutions through which they operate exist in their monopoly forms only through a great network of legal and administrative provisions ranging from licences to practice to tax deductions, drug regulations and assignments of professional responsibility. They everywhere depend on substantial public subsidies, tax concessions and facilities.
Faced with responsibilities they cannot evade but cannot meet, it must be very tempting for politicians to attempt to off-load some of their tasks on to institutions for which they are not responsible. The obvious move is to turn them over to existing lower-level local authorities, states, provinces, countries or municipalities. But this move produces neither better service nor much less bureaucracy nor reduced costs. The higher authorities cannot escape all responsibility since there is already an established practice of their making grants for such purposes to lower-level authorities. Neither authority wants the responsibility under the conditions which the other imposes. Neither can evade it. So it is tempting for both to link for a third party on which to impose the burden.
In these circumstances it might appear quite attractive to harassed politicians to arrive at a fixed formula for funding entirely independent agencies to take care of the problems. One way of making clear that these agencies were entirely independent and governed by those directly involved as producers and consumers would be to put them under demarchical control. If there were sufficient public demand for demarchy in such areas as health and education the politicians might see it as a welcome way out of an insoluble tangle of problems.
The great advantage that demarchical bodies have over elected ones in areas where there are highly entrenched and active interest groups is that the demarchs are much less vulnerable to pressure groups. They do not have to worry about re-election or party funds or exchanging favours. They can act as independent judges assessing the merits of proposals. They are thus likely to be able to work at a local level and on a relatively small scale while enjoying the relative freedom from local pressure groups that is the great advantage enjoyed by centralized authority. On the other hand they can avoid 125the disadvantages of centralized authority, namely excessive inflexibility and proliferation of bureaucracy.
There is another very fruitful area where demarchic practices could be introduced immediately without any great upset of existing social relations. In most countries there is already a very large range of authorities called “quangos”, quasi-nongovernmental organizations. These are committees appointed by government but with some degree of independence from government in their operations, which range from giving advice to running public enterprises such as airlines or ports. These authorities are often a facade meant to camouflage what really happens by giving the appearance of outside supervision of the bureaucracy. They often provide opportunities for patronage and rewards to loyal supporters. Sometimes they provide alibis for government and sometimes they perform substantial functions. Their proliferation, however, is evidence of the public pressure for governmental accountability. If only there were sufficient pressure governments might be forced to constitute many of these quangos on a demarchical basis. Over time such bodies would be likely to gain in prestige and independence if they worked as they are supposed to in the theory of demarchy. Once it was rolling the movement towards demarchy might accelerate rapidly.
It is no part of my thesis that demarchic forms are appropriate for every kind and size of organization. Many organizations will find other means of decision-making appropriate. There could still be an important role for political parties in a demarchical regime. They would attempt to mobilize pressure on a variety of authorities so as to produce a coherent shift of overall policy in a certain direction. They would try to stimulate their members to take an active interest in the political process, and particularly to challenge the formulas of representation and the scope and limits of authorities, whenever it was in their interest to do so. Some parties might be closely knit pressure groups demanding strict adherance to a programme. These would tend to have a very centralized form of organization. Others might be broadly based movements devoted to pervasive and open-ended concerns about such matters as the environment or the position of women in society. These might be organized demarchically.
An especially important area where demarchic organizations might prove valuable is trade-union activity. The trade unions could play a crucial constructive role in the restructuring of society if only they could represent collectively the broad interests of the working class. The obstacles to their doing so are mainly clashes of interest between various sectors of the working class, industry against industry and trade against trade, inhibiting the 126formation of any authorities that can pursue long-term class goals effectively. The unions for the most part avoid facing up to these conflicts of interest by addressing all their demands to employers or government and leaving the sorting out of incompatible demands to those authorities or to the blind interplay of market and political forces. Existing forms of union organizations cannot cope with these problems. Large unions are open to all the disabilities that are produced by electoral politics and bureaucracy. Small unions lack the resources to engage with the wider issues in which workers are involved.
The scope of union activities could be vastly enlarged without bureaucratic centralization if numerous specialized bodies were set up on a demarchical base by the unions themselves. For example, there might be a system of tribunals to deal with demarcation disputes, to restructure union organizations in the light of technological and demographic change, to settle conflicts about relativities of pay between workers and so on. Various broadly based specialized agencies might investigate and develop programmes to deal with pervasive problems such as sexism and racial discrimination, marginal forms of labour, and so on. Other bodies would organize pension funds and make investments in worker-managed enterprises, gradually transforming the relations of workers to capital.
The importance of workers taking the initiative in restructuring their situation can hardly be overestimated. The key theses of revolutionary socialism, that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the class itself, and that the existing forms of government must be smashed and replaced by better ones, are of undiminished importance. What is missing from the strategy I have outlined is the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That doctrine has always been in strong tension with the doctrine of the self-emancipation of the proletariat, since it has always been clear that there is a danger of the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into a dictatorship over the proletariat. If my arguments about electoral democracy and voting are correct this transformation is not just a danger that can be averted by resolute action. It is virtually inevitable. The consequence of abandoning the dictatorship of the proletariat is to be forced to abandon the perspective of traditional political revolutionary action—the more or less violent seizure of state power. But sudden revolution became part of the doctrine simply because it was the standard nineteenth-century form of radical action. The alternatives, parliamentary politics or utopian experiments, were seen correctly as ineffectual or counter-productive, except for limited intermediate purposes. My argument is that these are not the only alternatives. 127
At the lowest levels in a demarchy the people who gain power are self-nominated as candidates and are selected for office by sampling procedures that take account only of their possessing characteristics that make them representative of some group affected by the decisions that that office takes. There is no test of competence. So many quite incompetent people will nominate, with as good a chance of selection as the most competent.
Imposing any particular tests of competence would immediately make the sample less representative. Such tests would almost inevitably emphasize formal qualifications, which are often irrelevant and often the means by which privileged groups maintain their power.
There are two kinds of incompetence. The worse is the sort of stupidity that may be quite pervasive in a person’s character. But that is relatively infrequent. If the members of a committee dealing with relatively local and down to earth questions about specific goods were a reasonable sample of the community in terms of ability and character, there is no reason to doubt that they could handle them. Most of the people who now deal with these problems are fairly ordinary in these respects. Moreover, as every academic should know, high theoretical capacities do not correlate strongly with practical good sense.
The other sort of incompetence relates to specific tasks that require particular knowledge, skill or other qualities. I have argued that it would be worthwhile for people to gain knowledge in an area if they had a chance of having a significant say in it. Moreover, since demarchic bodies would be specialized, it would be much easier for the decision-makers to “do their homework” than it is in present elected bodies, which normally have to face a wide variety of unconnected decisions about most of which they can know almost nothing. As for skills, the strengths that are needed are those of assessing evidence, negotiating compromises and making decisions. These are not technical skills. They demand a certain intelligence, and also a certain character, which are normally developed by people who take an active part in the ordinary affairs of life rather than just drifting through it. It seems fair to expect that the people who take an interest in public affairs will come predominantly from among those who are active negotiators in their everyday lives.
A committee does not have to consist of uniformly competent people, particularly if its role is largely adjudication and supervision. Very often a few enthusiastic and able people make the running, and come up with the new ideas, the decisive arguments, the critical questions and the constructive 128compromises. The advantages of giving these people their opportunities seem to outweigh the probability that now and then there will be grossly incompetent committees.
It is possible that the reckless or incompetent may ignore expert advice. It is also possible that ordinary modest citizens may be “snowed” by the experts, or that committees may contain too many experts. Over-representation, of course, is a matter of the sampling procedures adopted, and should be corrected by appeals to arbitrating bodies to adjust these formulas. Being over-impressed by experts is now a relatively rare affliction. Notoriously, they differ quite disconcertingly. In any case, it is very easy to institute requirements for relatively wide opportunities for comment before decisions are taken in most cases.
It is probably not so much the expert consultant that people who fear experts are worried about but the entrenched expert, and especially the bureaucratic experts who now determine so much of the agenda, the advice and the options of politicians. Demarchy would break down these positions of power by removing centralization. There would be many little bureaucracies, each under much more intimate and interested surveillance than our present bureaucracies, even at the local level.
It is very difficult to imagine life without the state, but if it is possible the problem of bureaucracy should be greatly diminished. It would be possible to go a very long way towards getting rid of bureaucracy almost entirely, if most of the implementation of demarchic decisions was contracted out to various firms who would compete for the business. The main difficulty in doing so at present is that letting contracts is a notorious source of corruption in both bureaucrats and politicians. However, this corruption depends on three main conditions: secrecy, a network of reciprocal favours and specific kinds of power. All of these could easily be abolished under demarchy. The key in each case is to deprofessionalize power. Once the people already in power have no control over who their colleagues are going to be they will not be able to enforce secrecy. The members of demarchic bodies get to their positions not through networks of party and bureaucracy but by lottery. The hoards of favours owed and expected, of loyalty to an organization and of long-term career prospects have no hold over them. So it is most unlikely that overt bribery could be hidden or that the subtler forms of careerist corruption could be maintained.
Demarchic bodies would not be accountable, because they would not be eligible for reappointment. Within the bounds of criminal law they could do 129what they liked, and suffer no consequences of their actions. This is, perhaps, the central objection to demarchy. The answer is inevitably complex.
First, if the people who make a certain decision are statistically representative of those affected by it, then if it is a bad decision they are likely to be at least as badly affected by it as anybody else.
Secondly, even in our present political structures and bureaucracies the main way by which accountability is enforced in regard to specific decisions is simply the force of public opinion. Those who make decisions have to give reasons for them. Nobody wants to appear autocratic, eccentric or stupid. Whether this force of public opinion is in fact adequate is largely a matter of how open proceedings are, how independent the communications media can be and how much people care. In a demarchy all these factors might be expected to be very strong.
Thirdly, there is a regular turnover of the members of a demarchy, and anybody who is concerned about the way a committee behaves has as good a chance as anybody else of joining it. So the reaction to arbitrary behaviour on the part of a committee would normally be a rash of nominations from people who objected to that kind of behaviour. The situation would be self-correcting.
Fourthly, in most large matters a committee would need funds from higher bodies, and these could hold it accountable for the ways in which those funds were used. Similarly, as I have repeatedly emphasized, specialized demarchic bodies would be interdependent with other demarchic bodies which would withhold co-operation in improper actions, especially those that affected them in some way.
Finally, those who behaved irresponsibly or unresponsively as representatives on lower-order bodies would not be likely to be nominated by their peers as suitable for higher things. If they were ambitious this would constitute a sanction. In any case it would limit the damage they could do.
One question that is often asked about demarchy is, Does it rest on a conflict model or harmony model of society? There is often a presumption behind the question that it presupposes harmony and is therefore hopelessly utopian. In fact the assumption is that society is full of a variety of conflicting interests, but not mortally antagonistic interests.
It is crucial to note, however, that it does not make any claim that present society is fundamentally one in which the dominant problems are of the prisoner’s dilemma kind, that is, situations where each party pursuing its own interest without regard to other parties is likely to lead to a worse situation than could be achieved by co-operation. It may well be that Marx is right. 130The structure of capitalist society may be irremediably conflictual. I believe that it is, and that demarchic control of the major productive enterprises is necessary. How that might be brought about is another question. What I am arguing is that, if it were, the resultant society would be largely free of degenerating conflicts of pervasive and powerful significance.
As for present tactics, my thesis is that it is necessary to establish in the present society instances of the practices and procedures that are appropriate to a post-revolutionary society. To those who believe that capitalist society is redeemable once the market is given a fair trial, the problem of public goods is crucial, and demarchy offers some prospect of supplying them in a way that undermines rather than reinforces state power. Those who persist in the illusion that “democratic centralism” as Lenin envisaged it is viable might at least consider whether demarchy might not prove less dangerous in practice.
The truth is that it is extremely unlikely that any single model of “society” is appropriate. There are hosts of different kinds and levels of relationships involving very different patterns of power, interdependence, need, action and opportunity. To adapt demarchic principles and practices to each of these is an exercise I leave to the reader’s imagination.
People of conservative inclinations are inclined to criticize demarchy on the ground that those who volunteer are likely to be the sort of people who are at present radical political activists. A formula that selects people according to background could well result in a group being selected that, in spite of their diverse backgrounds, were primarily representative of political views very untypical of those they were supposed to represent. This does sometimes happen even in electoral contests where the electorate is apathetic and typical members of the electorate do not run for office.
The first answer to this objection is that in a system of choice by lot it is very much easier to stand for office. The very daunting problems of campaigning, buying support and facing all the unpleasantness of the electoral struggle are eliminated. So many people who are not willing or able to go through that ordeal could and probably would stand. The electoral process is more likely to eliminate ordinary people than the choice by lot. If there is a much wider and better informed and more detailed participation in political life, the standard of debate will improve, frustrations will be diminished and sweeping half-truths will have much less appeal.
Granted that in an electoral system those between whom one must choose are not a representative sample in any case, the question comes down to this, Which system offers the better chance of controlling the unrepresentative tendencies of representatives? 131
Before attempting to answer that question, it is instructive to look at the fear that radicals tend to have that demarchy would lead to conservative government, because the average person is conservative. It is minorities that bring changes in society, for better or for worse. Only minorities can lead people from routine acceptance of what is to a vision of what might be. That is beyond dispute, but the minorities in question may be very different minorities in different contexts. It is not at all uncommon to find people who are generally conservative having radical views about specific issues and people who are mostly progressive finding themselves in a conservative position on some matters. Very often those areas in which their views are out of harmony with their overall bias are areas in which they have a special interest or experience. They have formed an independent judgement and not gone along with the received opinions of their socio-political group.
It is very probable that it is just in those areas where they have some experience and some strongly held personal views that people are most likely to want to hold office. So the sample chosen from a set of volunteers is likely to contain many people who are not representative of unreflective stereotypes, whether conservative or radical. They are likely to be a minority in their degree of concern about the issues and their willingness to envisage solutions that certainly would not be chosen by most people who are not so strongly affected by those issues.
It is very striking how easily even those who are in principle in favour of reformist, activist politics repress concerns that do not touch their experience. Often they simply say that there are many more important issues and that time should not be wasted on peripheral matters. The great virtue of demarchy in this respect is that it abolishes the distinction between centre and periphery. Every matter is dealt with in specific terms, not in terms of generalities that cannot reflect its importance to those involved.
The response to the radical’s fears is not in conflict with the response to the conservative’s fears. What I am suggesting is that neither unreflecting conservatism nor unreflecting radicalism is likely to be dominant in a group of people who are motivated to volunteer for this body rather than some other by their different experiences, hopes and fears about the specific issues this body faces. Of course, on balance, these people will also be people with much clearer and stronger overall political views and aspirations than most of those they represent. But it is reasonable to assume that they tend to exhibit the range of views that their less reflective and interested peers would have if they had more stimulus to think about these questions. So, if people’s interests are what they would choose if they had full understanding of their situation, 132choosing one’s sample from the more reflective and concerned members of the various interest groups is likely to give a sample that tends to represent real interests rather than uncritical first thoughts or received opinions.
This means accepting a certain degree of what might be considered paternalism by those who want democracy to be a matter of instant responsiveness to people’s present desires. It is not likely to appeal to the spirit of the chant “When do we want it? Now!” But all of us who are in the least critical of our own impulses and acknowledge the dangers of myopia and inertia will prefer that our reflective selves rather than our present selves will be what count in public decision-making. Certainly we should by and large prefer that other people’s reflective selves prevail rather than their impulses and prejudices that take no account of our point of view or completely misunderstand it.
In some particularly difficult matters we might even prefer a decision about conflicting interests to be taken by a group that had experience of a similar conflict but in a different area. For example, in the classical conflicts about locating airports it might be very difficult to arrive at an acceptable formula comprising all those groups affected by the question, and it might be feared that the representatives would not attempt to arrive at an optimal solution but simply at the one that best suited the majority of those who happened to be selected. In such a case it might be sensible to turn the decision over to a jury of people from another city whose backgrounds matched those of the people affected in the city where the decision had to be made. In other words, it would be rational to accept a representation that was likely to produce optimal solutions even at the cost of immediacy of representation. In the long run, in a fair political process, one would be more likely to secure one’s interests by agreeing to procedures designed to produce optimal solutions than by procedures designed to ensure that each group got an equal chance to have its way.
Such a convergence towards a representation of interests could be expected only in the long run. In the short run, it might well be the case that there were great divergences between what various decision-making bodies in cognate areas decided, and between most of these decisions and the majority view in the corresponding constituencies. In part this is to be expected because the majority views are likely to be inconsistent or impractical in so far as they go beyond mere acceptance of the way things are. But a good deal of the divergence will also come from the fact that different directions of change may be chosen. There are often open choices where what will appear best is partly a matter of what establishes itself as new and interesting. What we will prefer is not always predetermined by our present preferences. It 133depends on the ways in which we, our experience, our ideas, our situation, our relationships and the people we are involved with, change in the process of bringing about some new state of affairs.
In such cases there is no determinate interest to which a series of states of affairs might approximate ever more closely. If we have any overriding interest it is that the range of possibilities open to us should be expanded. We may be able to participate concretely only in one definite disjunct of a set of possibilities, but we may still be enriched by sharing in the experience of others who have chosen other possibilities. So we travel to get some experience as observers of what it is like to live differently from the way we live. None is clearly right. To attempt to reduce the variety to some unitary optimum would be stupid. The inherent problem with any planning based on needs is just that it is utterly incapable of taking account of this open-ended and self-fuelling development of needs. The flexibility of demarchy makes it ideally suited to cope with these problems. At the same time it can avoid the dangers of leaving things to the market, since it can feed into the market prices of goods considerations that the market itself cannot register.
The impersonal criteria of both government and capitalist bureaucracy inexorably tend to impose uniformity on the solutions given to our problems, in the name of economy of administration and production. Decisions are reduced to matters of routine application of procedures. This inherent tendency of large organizations is reinforced by the dispersion and homogenization of their clienteles. The amount of influence any consumer or small group of consumers has over the policies of these organizations is so small that consumer preferences are not strongly voiced. There is no forum for discussion of possibilities and alternatives, so most consumers do not know about such things. By and large they merely react to the alternatives offered to them, since it requires very great effort to do otherwise and there is little hope of success.
By contrast, if government administration and productive resources were in the hands of decentralized agencies representing informed and interested consumers it is to be expected that a great variety of possibilities would be explored.
Many of these, as we have seen, would not be chosen by the people affected if they were polled directly. What I am postulating, however, is that a situation rich in variety would be more acceptable to most people than one of a narrow range of variation, even if much of this variety is produced by decisions that do not represent the opinions of those affected by the decisions at the time. If our long-term desire for variety is to be satisfied our short-term desires 134must often be overridden, since our short-term desires are often uninformed, unimaginative and cautious.
The question remains, can the unrepresentative tendencies of ostensibly representative bodies be controlled under demarchy? If we say that these bodies not only may but ought often do things that are not in accord with the opinion of the majority of those they represent, where do we draw the line and how do we enforce it? The basic answer is by public debate. We are entering an era in which much more informed debate about public issues is becoming possible. In particular, the development of cost-benefit analyses made possible by the use of computer models is potentially of great importance. It is now possible to produce quite easily complex evaluations that show how costs and benefits vary as assumptions are varied in different combinations, to compare different models of the same situation and explore alternatives much more clearly.
People without any special analytical or mathematical skill can examine these possibilities if they are given access to the right facilities. When we are dealing with specific costs and benefits of particular concrete proposals, even if there is considerable disagreement about the weighting attached to various costs or benefits or about the likelihood of certain assumptions approximating to the facts, the consequences of these differences become much more definite. There is much less place for the sort of vague argument about what might happen, based on vague fears and unspecified assumptions, that has so often prevailed in the past.
People are going to expect that anybody who claims to make a rational decision will make quite explicit what their assumptions and preferences are. The more specific the projects under evaluation the more likely it is that we are going to be able to make these requirements stick. It will be easier to force complete disclosure of information and of the rationale of decisions by provisions for prosecution for non-disclosure if necessary. But more importantly the ability of a large number of people to make good use of what is disclosed will be increased immeasurably.
The decisions made will still represent definite choices of assumptions and values, and the results will vary accordingly. But for the most part silly decisions should be eliminated. The decisions should represent at least genuine possibilities that have sound attractions even if they are very often mistaken. The major hope of personal gain for those who actually take the decision will be the hope of being vindicated by the outcome of one’s choices. In such circumstances decision-makers will surely heed any considerations that show that their projects are likely to fail. Moreover, they will be watched continually by their predecessors, especially if they overturn their decisions, 135and by those who aspire to be selected but have so far missed out. There will be many voluntary groups proposing schemes, questioning decisions and agitating for new priorities. A committee whose authority rests not on force but on public acceptance will have to make a good showing of meeting all the arguments that are relevant to its decisions.
There remains a good deal of vagueness about what kind of responsibilities demarchic bodies have. In many contexts the role of decision-making bodies may be a judicial one of deciding between conflicting proposals rather than initiating any itself. In other contexts the responsibility of the governing bodies will be that of supervising an expert organization of a permanent kind. In others it may be a matter of hiring professionals on special limited contracts, of allocating resources to voluntary organizations, of organizing co-operation between different agencies and so on. Often the same objective may be attainable in different ways, for example by a body setting up its own organization or by hiring outside organizations to do it. In each case the specific responsibilities that flow from a particular objective and particular procedure for attaining it will be different. The kinds of skill, information and answerability will differ.
The judicial approach will emphasize impartiality, care in evaluation and justifications of decision. The executive approach will emphasize efficiency, effectiveness and sound design. Choice between experts will be justified in terms of conceptions of the task, ways of keeping the experts responsive to public needs and sound evaluation of their performance. As each body would have a great deal of discretion about its mode of operation there could be no uniform way of evaluating them. The evaluation of each would have to be in terms of the soundness of its choice of approach to its problem and the competence of its performance in its self-determined task. The limits within which it can determine its own task will, however, be set by prevailing opinion.
This flexibility might contribute to a certain efficiency and effectiveness at the micro-level at the cost of a substantial loss of efficiency and effectiveness in the overall balance of the political economy. Breaking up conglomerates into specific task teams and giving those teams a free rein might produce much better decisions in most specific cases than a large bureaucratic organization with its rules, its entrenched procedures and its organizational inertia could normally produce. But it is clear that a great deal of brain-power, emotional investment and information processing has to go into making the system work well. It is by no means clear, the objector may allege, that it is worth 136sacrificing the economies of scale in decision-making and in production and incurring the costs of pervasive decentralized supervision.
The answer to this objection is, I believe, crucial. In part it harks back to questioning the efficiency of large-scale organizations, in part it pleads that advances in handling information greatly reduce the cost of decentralized control, but above all it denies that most of the work involved is properly reckoned as a cost.
To take the first point first, there is no doubt that large-scale organizations can and do achieve great economies in handling sheer quantities either of information or of materials, at the cost of a great deal of standardization. In particular, information has to be processed in terms of clearly defined categories, measures and procedures if the result is to have any validity. It is a common complaint that a bureaucracy generates an enormous amount of information of very limited relevance, because of the narrowness of its base, the crudeness of its metrics and the limitations of the procedures used to process it. We can have a lot of information about our society if we are prepared to shape our lives to the requirements of the information-gathering machines. Similarly, we can have what we like very cheaply if we are prepared to adjust our preferences to what the productive machine is geared to turn out.
There is some reason to think, however, that advances in automatic controls and in data processing have tended to undercut the technical advantages of large-scale units. Modern multi-purpose programmable machines are not tied to a single operation as earlier automatic machines were. So small runs of specialized products become quite feasible simply by varying a programme. Uniformity is not technologically favoured to anything like the same extent as before. Similarly, smaller plants are possible because, the overheads of complex control mechanisms are being reduced rapidly as such equipment becomes cheap and the expertise needed to handle it becomes less and less esoteric.
Similarly with information retrieval and processing. It is now possible to have very powerful programmes constructed, quite cheaply, that can be used on cheap computers, to gather and use a range of information that only the largest organizations could afford until quite recently. The development of computer technique has put these programmes at the disposal of people who are much less skilled than was previously necessary, and no doubt the trend in this direction will continue.
Even if the cost in time, effort and information of running a system of decentralized decision-making were to prove considerably greater than for 137centralized systems, that cost should not count against demarchy if all the benefits are considered. The most assured of these is probably the likelihood of a varied and interesting society full of varied possibilities. If my contention that demarchy can lead to the elimination of the state proved correct, the cost would be worth paying many times over. Even in the short run the smallest hope of getting rid of the state must count for a good deal, granted the virtually infinite dangers inherent in the state system. These are benefits for everybody.
Many people will find a much more personal benefit in the opportunity of participating significantly in public life on conditions that they can easily meet. People are prepared to pay quite heavily for the opportunity to have interesting work, especially if their basic needs are guaranteed. The notion that everybody should have an active say in everything that affects them is utterly impracticable and pointless. Our capacity for being affected by agencies vastly outweighs our capacity for doing anything significant to control the things that affect us. We can all do a few things well, and, what we need in a form of social organization is the opportunity to do some of the things that we can do well, and to be seen to do them well.
What demarchy does is give everybody a chance of having a place for a time in a small group where his or her voice can make a real difference deciding about matters of public importance that interest those making the decisions. Not everybody need feel the need to participate, even though the work of those who do would be suitably compensated and recognized. Society would lack the great “world-historical” political and military figures of the past. Just as many hanker after the illusions of religions that they can no longer believe in, no doubt many would feel a loss that Napoleons and Bismarcks, Lenins and Hitlers would no longer be possible, that human life would be reduced to human scale and the mythic element relegated to imagination. The easy transcendence of identification with “great” men and great collective entities would fade. No doubt many would feel that being a big fish in a small pond for a small time is not enough. Fortunately the system could and would continue to work well without such people.
The typical practices of a society, especially those practices that are seen as most effective in achieving the things that are most important to it, influence the character of all the other practices in that society. It is natural to hope that methods that are seen as effective in difficult matters will prove able to deal with other matters as well. We are given to arguments by analogy and the analogies we find convincing are those that are most salient in our experience. Moreover, it is a disreputable tendency of lower-status occupations to borrow the trappings of those to which more importance is attached. In aristocratic 138societies all kinds of activities aspire to “a touch of class”. In nineteenth-century Germany the military enjoyed such prestige that professors donned ceremonial swords in place of the traditional clerical garb. What might we hope for if demarchy were to become the dominant mode of public decision-making and the acknowledged paradigm of social rationality?
Beyond the specific benefits that demarchy might bring to a society, it might be hoped that it would promote a spirit of tolerance, rationality and uncontentious equality that would greatly enhance the peacefulness, security and openness of social relationships. People would feel free to differ while remaining within a broad consensus about the way decisions were made and power controlled. No hard and fast global divisions would separate people, no systematically antagonistic relationships cut across social ties. People would have great freedom in moving from group to group. The collective experience would be rich and widely shared. Women and minority groups would be drawn easily and rapidly into public life, and the public sources of racism and sexism would be undercut. The feeling that the problems facing humankind could be solved would be reinstated.
At the same time the meaner and more dangerous kinds of democratic sentiment would be discouraged. It is neither a presupposition nor a likely effect of demarchy that everybody should be regarded as everybody else’s equal in every respect. If demarchy invites any person to nominate for base-level public offices without preconditions of any kind, it is on the presumption that the proportion of stupid, malevolent or irresponsible people nominated is in fact statistically likely to be small, and that there will be enough people on a reasonably typical committee with enough of the qualities necessary for the work it has to do. There is no assumption that everybody’s opinion has the same claims. At the same time, it recognizes that there are no experts who have the right to pronounce on these matters. They have to be sorted out by a rational social process, a continual debate and testing designed to bring out the best of what each is capable.
The whole tendency of demarchy is to replace the rigid legal electoral and administrative procedures of state democracy, which tend to standardize and atomize people, by flexible, responsive, participatory procedures that permit and foster maximum variety. Even if the amount of work to be done is in aggregate considerably greater under demarchy than in standardized systems, it will mostly be interesting work. The net effect on contemporary advances in computer control is to deskill a great deal of work, as well as eliminate a lot of repetitive work. The same technology can be used to open up different avenues for skill and to eliminate not merely repetitive work but the narrowing of choice to a small range of possibilities. It is clear, however, that these developments will not take place through large organizations, since they need 139to use technology to standardize operations and simplify the problems of control. Only demarchy avoids the dominance of large organizations and makes the development of alternative technologies possible.
Finally, giving to a much wider range of people, to everybody who wants it, the opportunity to acquire and make significant use of a range of intellectual skills and capacities for co-operating with other people would vastly increase the distribution and quality of those skills in the community. So we might expect a great increase in voluntary organizations and co-operatives of all sorts. The lack of identification with any one community would be compensated by the rich variety of communities to which one would belong and the ease with which new communities could be formed.
In such a community rights to exclude others would be less valued than rights to be included in those groups one wanted to join. In many contexts the free-loader problem would no longer be significant, since much of the work that went in to providing public goods would be rewarding and rewarded. There would be no need for taxation since the costs of public goods would be met mainly by rents on public assets. There would be no opportunity for censorship or secrecy in public affairs. The socialist dream could well be realized without either the unrealistic assumptions that everybody would be co-operative spontaneously or that state coercion to cooperate could be used without danger. The society could afford to ignore those who went their own way as long as it did not involve positive criminal activity.
It would, then, be a society of both freedom from coercion and freedom to do a great many things that most people have never been able to do before, a society of positive freedom. Its main problem would be not that of controlling individuals but of controlling organizations. But since that control is to be exercised primarily from below it does not give rise to any additional apparatus. In the long run social control of organizations is to be maintained by individuals and groups, especially other organizations, refusing to recognize or co-operate with them once they step outside their proper role. These matters will be contested. There will be tension and strife. But granted well-established procedures of arbitration and a spirit of flexibility, problems can be solved and disruptive tendencies contained.
At the same time, the strongest elements of the liberal tradition are maintained. In particular, the individual is in no way a mere element of any organization, and especially not of any total or sovereign organization. Because the trustees of productive resources do not usually engage in production but lease resources to co-operatives and entrepreneurs, there is ample opportunity for initiative and diversity, competition and the fulfilment of individual purposes. What is prevented is the emergence of concentrated 140power based on ownership of productive resources and exploitation of the economically weak.
Culturally, such a society need not be committed to any ideological orthodoxy of either a collectivist or individualist sort much less to any attempt to subordinate cultural activity to ideological purposes. To the extent that it proved capable of stimulating an awareness of the importance of variety, experiment and innovation it would continue to carry forward some of the most characteristic motifs of bourgeois culture. To the extent that variety and experiment were seen as something done not against social pressure but in an atmosphere of cooperative exploration of the possibilities open to us it might transcend the narcissism of much of our present thinking and feeling.
Demarchy is a practical proposal which is compatible with a wide variety of philosophical conceptions. Nevertheless there are many that it excludes and some that fit closely with it. It fits most naturally with a fairly complex version of historical materialism that emphasizes the importance of relatively “material” factors, technology, forms of power and organization, as constraints on and opportunities for collective action. Human beings have not made their own history by conscious design, nor is it likely that they will ever have the knowledge and organization necessary to do so in every respect. It is not even desirable, perhaps, that they should. Facing the challenge of the unexpected will always be both inevitable and a vital source of renewal and transcendence. We shall always need to struggle to conserve what we have and to realize our potential in new ways.
Demarchy emerges at the present moment as an historically specific response to the problems and possibilities that have emerged from our present productive and organizational technology and the dissatisfaction and aspirations that are connected with them. It is the form of organization appropriate to a very complex society that generates a host of structures of interests and possibilities. It offers a way in which these might be fulfilled with the maximum diversity in unity that is practically possible. But it rests on no assumption that any global, overriding force, either ideal or material, ensures its triumph. If it comes about it will be because the old order is increasingly incapable of handling the problems it itself generates, and because substantial social forces struggle for it and against the forces that resist it. The forms that struggle will take are largely unpredictable. The concrete sites and issues on which struggle will arise are even less predictable. Demarchy is a proposal, not a prediction.
Demarchy makes a radical break with all those traditional political philosophies from the Greeks to the present that have made some geographically circumscribed sovereign community the highest form of social organization. They were right in so far as the material constraints 141on production and communication made any wider form of organization pointless or repressive or impracticable. In Aristotle’s time the alternative to the city state was the military empire. Production was concentrated in small, largely self-sufficient communities, communications of every kind were slow and unreliable. There was no way of establishing democratically controlled community on a wider scale than the polis. Only a military organization could control a global community.
Moreover, as Hegel, that great admirer of the polis, emphasized, the particular community could hold together as an absolute only in the face of its radical opposition to other communities. In the long run the unity and supremacy of the political community over its members and its territory can be affirmed and renewed in practice only in war. War, said Clausewitz, is carrying on politics by violent means, but he might equally have said that politics is simply carrying on war by non-violent means. The only way to get rid of war is to get rid of both the ideal grounds and the organizational bases of all total communities. It is not enough to attempt to limit the power of such communities, since even the most limited state must cling to its ultimate rationale as the monopolist of violence and sovereignty in its territory.
Sovereignty has always had as its function the preservation of existing entitlements to property and power within its territory. It represses those who challenge the existing order which has always been based on various forms of exploitation of people’s labour through the control of the resources necessary for human survival and flourishing. Demarchy is an attempt to put those resources in the hands of those who need them in a way that ensures the maximum freedom of action for all. It is an attempt to get beyond the traditional concepts of ownership that have their origins in the private ownership of natural resources without concentrating that ownership in any organization that can use it as a means of exploitation and repression, whether that organization be a small commune, a nation-state or a world government. Provided we can voluntarily keep our members within reasonable bounds, our means of production are now so various and so bountiful that we have the technical capacity to assure to everybody decent conditions of life on the basis of voluntary co-operation suitably rewarded, without the need for centralized repression.
Demarchy does not presuppose the sort of unanimity of moral ideals and material cirdumstances that egalitarians from Rousseau to certain anarchists and socialists have thought necessary for a wholly democratic community. Nor does it presuppose an all-embracing rationality such as both Kantian and utilitarian morality envisaged. It provides a way by which each person or group can pursue its own interests and preferences by negotiation, competition and co-operation with others in the context of a network of 142democratic authorities. Individuals can give effective expression to their needs and aspirations in the multiplicity of material particulars which they influence.
The moral unity of the wider community should, like its knowledge, its art and its material prosperity, emerge from the creative efforts of a host of interacting individuals and groups, each attempting to achieve its own distinctive possibilities rather than some illusory totality or legal rationality. The greatest good of the greatest number is not something that can be produced either by centrally planned political action or by mere competition. The rights that matter are to be established, articulated and safeguarded not by some unitary moral or legal system, but in the struggle of individuals and groups to find the best way of resolving their concrete problems.
Demarchy, then, rests on a rejection of most of the salient features of traditional political philosophies, because most of these have incorporated assumptions about economic, military and social realities that are no longer warranted. At the same time it rejects their cognitive pretensions, their restrictive assumptions about rationality, their vacillations between scepticism and dogmatism about what we are and what we can hope for. Like science and art, the sort of philosophy that demarchy coheres with is open and experimental. What can be remains to be discovered. The process calls for continual, detailed reflection, speculation, evaluation and struggle. We have no assurances of ultimate success, and indeed no clear idea of what would constitute success. The very criteria of success themselves are constantly changing, not arbitrarily, but in the light of new and unforseeable problems. But by the same token we have no reason to think that we must fail. We have only just begun the task of discovery.