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
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
cybersin
democratic cenralism.excalidraw
Messy quick notes
red_wolf — 17/06/2024 15:32 right, so what does :joscha_bach_plinz: say that consciousness is: Self-reflexive attention as a tool to form coherence in a representation. How do we connect this to a democraticaally planned economy? Well, intro to Marxist economics, the following came up: there is a difference between what's good for the individual capitalist and what's good for the capitalist class as a whole This same principle applies to neurons. (paper about this) So what is necessary is for some kind of structure to emerge, which integrates and plans the activity of the individual parts - which all have their own interests. Ok, how is it different from hierarchies like the state or managers we have currently? Well, in short, if you leave the system to an anarchic competition, you'd just end up with cancer.08/08/25: To the last point I would now add that anarchic competition/cancer is caused by lack of coherence/alignement/shared constraints/shared goals.
Takeaway
→ Die kapitalisten sind vernetzt, die Arbeiter nicht… Es braucht eine organisation!
→ Leute ansprechen: Was denkt ihr von Klimakrise / Krieg / … Denkt ihr das es besser wird? … Dann müssen wir etwas tun, damit sich das ändert! → RKP/RKI aufbauen