Natural and social structures of human autonomy and their technical mediation

[xram54]

Hi Michael,

While I appreciate your reading of Habermas and your very deep
interest in philosophical questions, I'd like to point out that we are
by far not there yet, so the problem is imo not to prove that autonomy
is good for the perspective of mankind, I doubt that many people think
otherwise, but rather that the ld-concept is good enough to achieve a
state where we can build an autonomous proccess to tackle the utopian
problems of mankind. Your reading of utopian literature reminds me
very much of the philosophically inspired works of post-capitalistic
utopia/dystopia in sowjet science fiction, e.g. Lem or the
Strugatzkis. I have often looked up to the sky and asked myself what
enormous perspectives we have and how little we can actually imagine
about our future.
The problem though is that we are not there yet, infact several very
important questions have to be solved in the near future, being it our
relationship to nature (climate regulation) our biological
constitution or social autonomy. Capitalism has no answer to that. In
fact even when Habermas is refusing to take the implications of
hegelian dialectics and a total metasubject, as well as it is thought
in marxist traditions in regard to labour, he still refuses to turn
back towards german idealism: "V. Ernster ist das Bedenken, ob nicht
mit dem Begriff des kommunikativen Handelns und der transzendierenden
Kraft universalistischer Geltungsansprüche ein Idealismus wieder
hergestellt wird, der mit den naturalistischen Einsichten des
Historischen Materialismus unverträglich ist. ... Auf diesem Wege
werden auch die in der Sphäre der gesellschaftlichen Arbeit gewonnen
Problemlösungen ans Medium verständigungsorientierten Handelns
angeschlossen. Auch die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns rechnet
also damit, daß die symbolische Reproduktion der Lebenswelt intern mit
deren materieller Reproduktion rückgekoppelt ist. [More serious is the
concern, whether with the term of communicative action and the
transcendent force of universalistic claim of validity is restored,
which is incompatible with the naturalistic insights of historical
materialism. ... In this way also the solutions gained in the sphere
of labour are bound to the medium of consent-oriented action. The
theory of commuicative action also counts on the fact that the
symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is internally regenerated by
its material reproduction.]" p. 374, Jürgen Habermas - Der
philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt a.M. 1988. (I
don't have the english translation, so sorry for bad english.)
I don't want to push a marxist perspective on liquid democracy as I
think that it is very much arguable in what situation we are today and
this is by no means necessary. But what is really clear, although
being out of the scope of Habermas' metadiscussion of the discourse of
modernity, is the fact that we live in capitalism and that the
mechanisms of our reproduction undermine every democratic endeveour.
Habermas includes the historical materialistic perspective in his
analysis, but binds it to his theory of communicative action, he does
not drop it! There have been many very democratic social experiences
during proletarian revolutions in the past, e.g. in the french
commune, in the first russian revolution of 1905 or during the spain
civil war or even 1968. Although they always were limited locally they
included many of the terms discussed in liquid democracy (for example
revertable delegations in the sowjets or the commune), but were
completely killed off by capitalistic reaction or a state party (read
state capitalistic owner) (likely because of the lacking medium of a
universal powerless discourse).
So my proposal would be to define a more political and not only
technical discourse of how to achieve a democratic society with the
tools of liquid democracy at hand. The internet (which is deeply bound
to foss) imo very much universalizes the concept of democracy and a
powerless discourse, so it is worth a new attempt. Regarding to
Habermas, a powerless discourse is capable to organize society
including the control of its economic basis.
During my recherche for a more serious democratic society I have so
far inspected liquid feedback, adhocracy and votorola (and some
others). In my opinion your approach is the best atm, as it is both
decentral and very flexible in regards to communication/discourse
(semantic wiki). This is not by accident, but because of the profound
theoretical interest of yours, which is absolutely necessary instead
of mathematicizing the process.

In my opinion several things need to be done for a true (e-)democratic
model of society to work:

1. Although the agenda of liquid democracy excludes political
statements, it is in fact the core leftist position of emancipation
ever since the french revolution. This does not mean that liquid
democracy needs a leftist program, but on the opposite, that the past
experience of leftist struggles need to be taken into account for the
attempt of the concepts. In my opinion this means that no platform
ever will get many users if it has nothing to offer, meaing if it does
not affect power. It is the same with political programs of parties
and the long history of radical democratic concepts. While
theoretically you can change the world with them (and many read like
that), practically power (or reproduction if you want) is designed in
ways that force you into false compromises until only the surface of
your program is left, thus the central term revolution in the marxist
tradition. The weakness of (leftist/democratic) political parties
comes from their deficit to act democratically and at the same time
control the political economy/system of power. If ld should have only
little success it will be discredited and attacked from "everywhere".
My Thesis is therefore: We do not only need a well designed open-
source platform, which allows a well defined new powerless internal
discourse, but also a political institution to realize it externally,
powerfully. The only thing it has to do is to act for the actual real-
world legislative possibilities of its platform, not for any policy.
This is a very serious political fight for autonomy, but not without
necessity/reason...

1.1.
So instead of simply advertising the new "web 2.0"-like legitimizing
possibilities of liquid democracy for the power of all existing
institutions (whitehouse 2.0) including businesses (adhocracy,
liquid_feedback), which are in fact ruled by their owners and are by
no means democratic (still we should not exclude them from
participating in a votorola network imo), ld/votorola should focus on
its true users. On people that are marginalized and exploited (read
democratically underrepresented if you want) and cannot help
themselves in the current system, but would build a majority in a
truely democratic structure and give the platform a true basis. Your
decentral neighbourhood fits in very well here. All we have to do is
to lobby for their direct democratic access in existing institutions,
being it state or private and allow them to implement the ld/votorola
structure inside their own institutions themselves. But as long as the
decisions made on any e-platform (especially on non-state ones) will
have barely an effect, people won't waste their time there as
political issues vanish as well. I haven't found a truely successful
platform yet (liquid_feedback of the german pirate-party has some
content, but is still small and powerless (and imo for that reason in
a deadlock situation)).

Questions:

a. As far as I understand, it is possible for every organisation to
run their own pollserver and their own wiki. Is it possible to allow
voters of selected other pollservers to participate in the poll, while
others are excluded? Especially to reference to and vote for polls on
other wikis? (cross-vote) Is it possible to have several accounts for
several structures of organisation, for example one for your town, one
for your union and another one for greenpeace, or can one account be
selectively activated within several different pollservers?

b. Have you thought about founding a political enterprise to support
basic democratic structures all over the world from the perspective of
the "users" a.k.a. the truely democratic subject (being it really poor
people or even descending middle class milieus)? I don't talk about
these proposals to build a software company run it inside businesses
and everywhere and sell services (like e.g. echo), but rather a
political organisation which purely tries to push basis-democratic
structures and helps to spread the decentral usage of votorola/ld?

c. Is it in the current design possible to bind the votes on the
pollserver to external direct democratic legislations (e.g. electronic
passports in germany?/e-petition platforms)? This would allow to
directy hit the state system once a poll is ready from inside of the
platform. Of course this will likely be stopped legally by the state,
but in general every possible mechanism of power should be plugable
into the decision process (pollserver/voting mechanism) and they
cannot avoid democratic influence completely.

1.2.
Those people that are discriminated against today have often problems
to speak for themselves and formulate correctly. They are not stupid
but they are hold stupid. So the platform will have enormous conficts
on it and many people will try to stop others by formally rejecting
them and lobby their own policy (Wikipedia is a partially negative
example). It is very important that the platform itself allows a
collective learning process and does not exclude anybody by design.
The lack of internet access might be a problem, but this is difficult
to deal with and might improve in the near future. I think that your
communicative delegation is a very nice solution towards an admin-free
political p2p-wiki-structure. Nice about the wiki concept is also that
you can include information e.g. reformulated from Wikipedia + your
own perspective and not only find political positions but also collect
background knowledge around your initiative. If it is possilbe to
cross-vote, one could easily install his/her own mediawiki and
pollserver and avoid censorship that way.

Questions:

a. In fact not only several drafts might differ in some points, but
also the terms in different lifeworlds might differ very much. Is it
possible to reference to articles on other wikis, e.g. Greenpeace
(having its own wiki and pollserver) activists might support an
installation of solar power for the village within their own ideology,
while the villagers (having their own wiki and pollserver) might
support for similar reasons but within a different terminology of
their village's perspective, while the union of solar workers  (having
their own wiki and pollserver) might support ... Can they
transparently reference the same position from their different servers
(wikis) with their own drafts and background information? (cross-poll)
This is especially important for international issues.

Cheers,
xRam

p.s. Couldn't you setup your own mailing list? I had to create a
Google account just for this post and I don't like Google's sniffing
nose very much, especially in regard to political action.

p.p.s. Sorry if this looks a bit out of topic, but I think that your
question for autonomy and your work very much point to the same
direction as mine. I'd really like to combine autonomous political
action with theoretical studies for myself, too. And I'd really like
to do both in an open way, so I hope this might finally work out here
for me.