Here I explore alternative forms of social organization in a socialist / communist society, not some orthodox definition of the term from/for/shaped by different times.
Democratic centralism == coherence: there is a single interpretation imposed at some level of coordination.
consciousness likely has this role in our brain, but this is not the case at the level of our society or state under capitalism.
Link to originalEvery regulation has an optimal layer where it needs to take place. Some stuff needs to be decided very high up. Some stuff needs to be optimally regulated very low down, depending on the incentives.
DemoCent approximates a scale-free, small world organizational structure.
Illustrations
Democratic Centralism and Collective Intelligence
An individual cell only “sees” local chemical gradients. It optimizes locally. But when cells communicate and coordinate, they form a collective agent with a much larger cognitive light cone (an organ, an organism) that can perceive and act on patterns invisible to any individual component. Local knowledge gets shared, aggregated, integrated, and turned into coherent collective action.
The same thing from a different angle: A fragmented agent has contradictory beliefs, can’t coordinate its own subsystems, acts incoherently. A coherent agent has an integrated world model and can actually pursue goals across time and scale. Markets/capitalism are blind in a specific sense—they optimize through local price signals without any global model. The economy as a whole doesn’t know what it’s doing. This works okay for some things but catastrophically fails for coordination problems requiring long-term collective action (climate, infrastructure, public health, science, education, etc).
Democratic Centralism:
→ Individual workers have local knowledge (their workplace, their conditions, their community)
→ Democratic discussion aggregates and integrates this into shared understanding
→ Centralized action allows coordinated response that no individual could achieveThe “democratic” part is the information flowing up—local knowledge getting shared.
The “centralism” part is coherent action flowing down—the collective acting as a unified agent rather than a swarm of individuals doing their own thing.In contrast:
→ Pure horizontalism / anarchism: limited coordination, can’t scale, everyone reinvents the wheel, local knowledge never gets integrated
→ Top-down bureaucracy: information doesn’t flow up, the brain gets disconnected from realityYou need:
- Shared perspectives / world model / goals
- Organization that aggregates local knowledge into collective understanding
- Coordinated action based on that integrated model
This is applicable from a team to a revolutionary party to the whole of society.
bureaucracyOS is a viral operating system because it prioritizes bottom-up alignment over getting things done
most orgs have bottom-up alignment and top-down decisionmaking, but the opposite is more effective
@danallison I like your idea but it seems like alignment still needs to be top down — I don’t think collectives are good at defining a mission
emergent systems are awesome — but emergent systems rely on having narrow constraints
human beings are at their creative best when they have broad agency within narrow constraints rather than narrow agency within broad constraints
the other parts of the 2x2 matrix are also bad:
narrow agency and narrow constraints (gridlock)
broad agency and broad constraints (anarchy)
the problem is that defining useful yet narrow constraints is hard — particularly because narrow constraints tend to be edgy whereas collectives tend towards smoothing
@danallison on the contrary, humans have narrow constraints — we live ~80 years at ~20 degrees celsius; to survive we need to drink water, eat food; doing so requires land or some amount of money; money is itself a system with fairly narrow constraints
@danallison pretty much everything related to human civilization works within narrow constraints
the fact that we share these constraints is what creates alignment, e.g. we all pretty much agree that we need to invest in farming, plumbing, grocery stores, hospitals, air conditioning/heating
our narrow constraints + broad agency leads to shared goals and a diversity of behaviors/actions
It’s not hard to imagine how a large corporation could effectively function without a CEO making top-down decisions if there’s a reliable way to quickly harness the collective wisdom of the employees to make those decisions.
This is not the same as bottom-up decisions, but rather the collective acting as a singular entity. So it’s still top-down, but the top and the bottom are comprised of the same people.
References
Some Q&A with claude abt whether DC might be scale free / small world: https://claude.ai/chat/514c21b3-86a0-46c8-86c7-6c2024b47a54