/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2809682
What is the title of that section? Oh yeah, Democratic Centealism a dead end Bht we aren't talking about Demcent are we you slimy little rat. Here's the part Mr.Epstein censored:
> Lenin's notion of democratic centralism, whereby the outstanding class conscious members of the working class, organized in a communist party, are elected through a system of workers councils to form a worker's government is fundamentally flawed. It seeks to build a democracy on an institution of class rule: elections. The fact that the vote is restricted to workers does not stop elections being an aristocratic system in the classical sense. Politics becomes a matter for the politicos. Like all aristocracies it degenerates into a self-serving oligarchy, and is eventually replaced by an honest bourgeois plutocracy.

Yes recall with unrepresentative elections is rightly rejected, but the right to recall randomly selected representatives is still progressive and legitimate.

Not that it matters, as it is common fucking sense that if an atomwaffen person is randomly selected by sortion, as is democratic, you want to be able to vote to remove him from his position, but Cockshott clearly states this in his lecture embedded. In addition:
>The first and most characteristic feature of demokratia was the rule by the majority vote of all citizens… As Burnheim argues, the principle should be that all those who have a legitimate interest in the matter should have a chance to participate in its management.
That means recalling selected citizens. AHHHHHHHHHHHH

>>2809888
demcent != vanguardism. demcent is a far more general concept. the institution of globe spanning planning is an aspect of demcent. it doesn't take much thought to realize why this must be so. the need to enforce a global CO2 constraint is enough to realize this

>>2810306
That movie fucks

>>2810306
I did read the book. sortition is a very interesting tool to uphold democratic centralism

>>2809888
>What is the title of that section?
Irrelevant.
>you slimy little rat. Here's the part Mr.Epstein censored
Take your meds.
>Yes recall with unrepresentative elections is rightly rejected, but the right to recall randomly selected representatives is still progressive and legitimate.
"Progressive and legitimate". You just played the internet tough guy and two seconds later this vague shitlib talk. Recall and election are both meritocratic selection.
>>The first and most characteristic feature of demokratia was the rule by the majority vote of all citizens… As Burnheim argues, the principle should be that all those who have a legitimate interest in the matter should have a chance to participate in its management.
>That means recalling selected citizens.
It is certainly not explicitly said there and I also don't see how that follows. If it follows for you, can you make an argument as to why voting for a person does not follow as well. You certainly haven't made a logical argument here. (You sound to me like somebody who believes that range voting with scores zero to minus nine is an innovative and fundamentally distinct method from range voting with non-negative values.)

>>2810306
Again, recall was not in the book.

>>2810572
Recall under demcent is different from recall under Democracy. You conflate the two which makes you slimy.
Progressive means the elimination of class distinctions and an increase in automation. This is not liberal concept. Ask a CPC member if legitimacy is a liberal concept.
You're just using bikeshedding to try to challenge fundamentals and reintroduce the elections as legitimate which makes you a rat. 🐭

>>2810733
do not besmirch the noble rat

>>2810733
>Recall under demcent is different from recall under Democracy.
Are you having a stroke? If you meant to write "under bourgeois democracy": The right to recall in the USSR was practically meaningless as the bureaucratic hurdles were to high, as Cockshott & Cottrell had pointed out in TANS (relevant section already quoted in >>2809682).

>>2811640 (me)
*too high

>>2811640
You are the one who is bestricken. Democratic Centralism is not Democracy. Recall is good. There is no such thing as bourgeois democracy. The people will vote to recall selected citizens they don't want to serve. Randomly selected citizens who have a stake in management decisions will serve to make those decisions. Voting by phone will not be a high bureaucratic hurdle. Random selection is progressive because it moves to eliminate the class distinction between managers of systems and those affected by them. Recall is progressive because it gives those affected by management decisions a collective veto over randomly selected citizens.

>>2811897
how to stop The People (tm) from collectively deciding to dissolve random selection and recall out of spite and laziness?

>>2811902
Epsteinite talk.

>>2789841
I have trouble following the Manhattan thing he talks about. Anyone have some insight into this?

The "logic" of the last couple posts:
<Hey guys, what if we first draft two people by lottery and then select one of them?"
>Bourgeois, reactionary, you are basically Epstein for thinking this.
<Hey guys, what if we first draft two people by lottery and then deselect one of them?"
>Based, revolutionary, you are the dialectical Einstein.

>>2811934
Look at a square grid on paper. Think of the lines as streets. Mark a point at one crossing roughly in the middle of the paper. Go a couple blocks North, a couple blocks East, and mark another crossing. Let's pretend the world is flat, then: Euclidean distance = air distance = the shortest line connecting the two points. Manhattan distance means following the streets.

If we move 3 units North, 4 units East, then the Length of the trip is…
…for a bird: N² + E² = L²
3² + 4² = 25
L = 5
…on foot: N + E = L
3 + 4 = 7
L = 7

Think of using all of a given budget for obtaining various quantities of two commodities, X and Y. You can graph all the possibilities on paper. A bundle gets a point with an x-coordinate representing the amount of commodity X in that bundle and the y-coordinate representing the amount of commodity Y in that bundle. One extreme would be spending all on X, the other extreme would be spending all on Y. All the other possible spending-all-the-money bundles lie on the straight line connecting the two points.

Look at the origin of the graph (where x and y are = 0). The bundles we are thinking about are equal in money terms, but have different air distance from the origin. So this equality is not captured by Euclidean geometry.

>>2811934
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry
It's a heuristic method. You can ask AI about these things, it's pretty good when it comes to explaining mathematical concepts and why they work to predict outcomes.

>>2812787
Thank you for your acknowledgement, but I have a sense that you still don't fully understand. Election is an aristocratic function and recall is a democratic function.
From Cockshott:
>It was quite clear from classical political theory that election was an oligarchic or aristocratic principle. It involved the deliberate selection of the 'best' people, the aristoi, to high office. And who are our 'betters' but the upper classes, the more educated, the more wealthy, etc. Any system of election is inherently biased against the lower classes and favours the upper classes. Elections are inherently oligarchic and elitist.

>Let's look at the principle of recall… it is mainly of use in dealing with manifest incompetence or corruption. Individuals who are manifestly incompetent or corrupt can be replaced. The reason why it is of limited use is that in order to effect the right of recall you actually need to get an awful lot of signatures [votes…] That may be worthwhile, it may be of some advantage, but my contention is that wherever this exists it doesn't radically change the class character of the political system. It's mainly a control on corruption.

>>2812796
>Election is an aristocratic function and recall is a democratic function.
The quoted snippets merely say that recall does not fix elections and do not praise recall to high heavens. Elections and recall are both methods of sorting people into the deserving and undeserving. Recall is a type of election.

My actual position is that the qualities of election methods are dependent on scale in such an extreme way that it feels kinda fraudulent to even use the same names. One may write two texts to describe two election methods, one to be used by eleven people to choose one among them and another to be used by eleven million people, and one may choose to make these texts identical except for a few numbers. One may then use the same name for the methods (that's what everybody is doing and isn't that intuitive?), but the two very different scales will work out in very different ways.

At a small scale, elections work out okay-ish or better (there are some interesting alternative voting methods); at big scale elections are horrendous. With sortition it's the opposite. Imagine filling a single position instead of a committee… And this is why you are jumping at the opportunity to add some electastic sauce to sortition, doing this in the form of a recall mechanism. Understandable, but you seem to have a taboo or weird mental block against saying the sauce is what it is.

>>2812840
no one deserves anything, least of all you.

>>2812790
>You can ask AI about these things, it's pretty good when it comes to explaining mathematical concepts and why they work to predict outcomes.
I've done that before but I always get scared I'm tricking myself into thinking I understand but really I'm just making myself even dumber and more confident at the same time

what do people in here think about liquid democracy?
>you can give/retract your endorsement of a representative at any time
>endorsing someone essentially gives them your voting power
>you can retract your voting power on any issue and vote on only that issue directly
here's one implementation: https://liquidfeedback.com/en/ one trait of this particular implementation is that there is no voting secrecy. personally I see this as a positive. secret ballots are liberal cowardice

>>2813032
this is aristocracy (elections) not democracy. Secret ballots are a fundamental right long established to protect citizens' right to vote freely without reprisals. Honestly read a fucking book before you come in here attempting to invert reality with your newspeak.

>>2813055
>voting freely without reprisals
no. stand for your fucking opinions

>>2813032
LD is a good system but it needs a pretty heavyweight bit of accountability behind it otherwise it'd be very prone to corruptions and scandal.

What LD needs is a serious online interface so you can actually manage where you're delegating when and where, I do not want to have the same guy managing my vote on tech subjects as the guy I would delegate to on alcohol law and i want to vote myself on gun control.

>>2813032
also i dont think abolishing voting or delegation secrecy is a good idea. There's been plenty of open-source software examples of why seeing names on github etc. can cause problems

>>2813349
Interesting PDF, thanks!

>>2813388
in that case you'll have to ditch any kind of computerized remote system, because there's no way to guarantee voting secrecy that way

>>2813713
why not?

>>2813032
Already discussed in the older /cybercom/ threads:
https://archive.is/xBFYY
https://archive.ph/Afx5a
ctrl-f liquid

>>2813799
>why not?
it's the standard position in CS

>>2813799
if you have a system connected to the network, it's an inherent security risk

I think some of the sortition fans in here place too much stock in Paul Cockshott Thought. democracy can only be won after the population has been appropriately indoctrinated. to institute "democracy" in the USA for example, where a sizeable part of the population are MAGA, would be disastrous. I do not want to give MAGA people any kind of power. we must reeducated the people first. only then can we possibly speak of democracy. to think freely is great. to think correctly is greater

>>2814034
The video is realistic, given the absolute state of current tech, yet i feel not all of the pessimism is entirely warranted. If bitcoin can digitize currency, so would a sufficiently clever voting scheme be able to work. Here's my crack at it:

1. Voters get issued two keys over a secure channel or from their local seat of government.
   
2. The first key is used to symmetrically encrypt and sign a message containing the vote.
   
3. The second key is an access token to a public gateway server, that anonymously forwards the message to a secured counting server and expires the token in case of success.
   
4. The counting server then identifies and decrypts the message.
   

The necessary infrastructure could be spread out over multiple counties. This does not assuage fears about infected end users, but it does makes intrusion harder, provided the gateways are well cared for. It would also enable the creation of large-scale digital marketplaces for votes…

>>2814106
anon people much smarter than you have already thought about this problem very hard and concluded that nothing beats pencil and paper if secrecy is a concern. 1) and 2) in your scheme ensures the state knows exactly who voted for what. it also doesn't guarantee votes are actually counted correctly since the actual counting is inscrutable
a lot of these issues go away by abolishing secret votes. that doesn't mean we might not want to use secret votes for some things. but importantly, it is practically impossible to do correctly with computers

>>2814274
>anon people much smarter than you have already thought about this problem very hard and concluded that nothing beats pencil and paper if secrecy is a concern.
Probably, but thinking about it is fun regardless.

>1) and 2) in your scheme ensures the state knows exactly who voted for what.
The anonymity aspect hinges on the fact, that only the department issuing the keys to a specific voter, ideally exactly one person, who prepared then sealed the documents, has ever seen both at the same time. Neither of the keys would later be associated with an identity, since the only information left over is the number of keys in circulation and the number of received votes less than or equal to it.

>it also doesn't guarantee votes are actually counted correctly since the actual counting is inscrutable
What the scheme leaves behind after votes have been issued, is a set of cryptographically verifiable messages. Handling this data would be more complex than ensuring the physical security of ballots, but you still have tons of options involving secure checksums, redundancy and cryptographic ledgers.

This is more or less how i would picture it working:

1. A central goverment authority prepares a list of keys based on the total number of registered voters.
   
2. Your local government securely receives its alloted number of keys and is responsible for giving them out to the voters.
   
3. The voters connect to a gateway run by the local government, which forwards its messages over a secure government netwok, until reaching the central government authority. If you want to leave a paper trail, hook up a line printer to every server along the way, which records a secure checksum of every message.
   
4. The program at the end of all this isn't very complex and should thus be easily audible: Get a list of keys and encrypted messages to decode, then sum the votes from the individual messages.
   
   

To commit forgery of a vote, an attacker would need have a vote encryption key and either an access key or the ability to inject votes without anyone noticing. Deanonymizing voters would take a large-scale effort to infiltrate local government, record key identities and look them up from the internal voting record, which i think is in the same scope as someone bribing the postal service to deanonymize mail voting.

>>2813032
You can have ballot secrecy but only for non-delegated votes. Delegatees have a higher responsibility and sacrifice their privacy. If you want privacy you can take it back at any moment through an individual vote.

>>2814605
yes a hybrid system could work. but there's another important factor: cost. how often could we feasibly hold secret votes on things? once per year? one per month?

How to deal with gluts and shortages? The obvious way is via price adjustments (also my fav because I'm a bore), but some people propose enacting per-head limits or a combination of mechanisms. Each mechanism is also a measurement of sorts. When just one mechanism is used, how intensely the mechanism is used is also a general measure for the size of this or that glut or shortage, so one can make comparisons across the economy and this helps with prioritizing. But how to estimate excess demand for two products while for one product the price is raised and for the other a per-person limit is applied?

It is possible to use a combination of mechanisms to deal with supply-demand mismatches and still have a measure of the intensity of these mismatches for the whole economy if and only if these mechanisms are arranged into a rigid hierarchy. For an example of how this can be done, take a look at the following monstrosity.

This requires that people do not use cash, but a system of electronic accounts tied to the individual which makes possible to have individualized rewards and punishments. People living together can opt into linking their accounts to a simple algorithm that automatically gives them the result they would get when coordinating perfectly their purchase behavior to maximize the rewards and minimize the punishments and swapping items between them. (This is not the same as a shared budget account as the individual budgets remain firmly in the hands of the individuals.)

The hierarchy distinguishes between 11 cases, these being 5 levels of glut + 5 levels of shortage + the normal case with the normal price.

GLUT LEVEL 1: The price is still the normal price, but payment of ½ the price is deferred to 30 days later without interest charge.

GLUT LEVEL 2: Same as level 1, but there is also a rebate offer for one extra unit per person bought within 3 days of the first unit of just paying ½ the normal price without having to pay the second half later. (This is also applied retroactively.)

GLUT LEVEL 3: Now the price is set to ½ the normal price in general and not just as a rebate. (The rebate effect is not stacked on top of that. Deferred debt from the product obtained at glut level 1 is deleted.)

GLUT LEVEL 4: Price set to 0.

GLUT LEVEL 5: Price set to negative.

And now to the shortage levels.

SHORTAGE LEVEL 1: The normal price still exists, but individuals who buy a second unit within 3 days have to pay 2× the normal price.

SHORTAGE LEVEL 2: The price is set to 2× the normal price for everyone.

SHORTAGE LEVEL 3: Keeping the price at 2× the normal price and there is a limit per head within a 30-day period.

SHORTAGE LEVEL 4: Taking all the crap from level 3 and adding a waiting list or lottery.

SHORTAGE LEVEL 5: Production canceled.

Any idea what we should name this? I feel pretty meh about it, so I would like a name that reflects that. Don't overthink the details in the above, a lot of these choices are arbitrary. The point is, if you want a measure and you mix mechanisms, then you need to have a hierarchy.

>>2814920
>SHORTAGE LEVEL 5: Production canceled.
wut, shouldn't you increase production instead? by say investing in MoPs

>>2815223
yeah but why would you stop production when demand is non-zero?

>>2815300
How would you then define a situation of being in a persistent maximal shortage of something then? If "it's not produced anymore" is not part of that description, then adding these words makes the description sound more extreme, no? So without these words, the situation is not at the most extreme.

This is supposed to classify gluts and shortages. The levels are not a set of instructions what to do. ("When we are at level _, you will do __.") Note what is not described: buffer stocks, inflows and outflows, even though that would make a lot of sense. So this is classification by actions. ("When we are doing __, this means we are at level _.")

>>2817188 (me)
Ahem, FUCK AUTOFORMATTING.

>>2817188
>it's not produced anymore
if something isn't produced then there is nothing to do. I'm not sure I understand how this is even a problem. people could put in investment proposals for MoPs to produce that thing. but perhaps it is a thing that is not to be produced, like say nuclear waste?

>>2817207
>but perhaps it is a thing that is not to be produced, like say nuclear waste?
It's a classification scheme for shortages of goods and shortage level 5 means shortage of the most extreme type. And you ask this. Do you buy nuclear waste at the store.

>>2817210
>Do you buy nuclear waste at the store.
I can buy smoke detectors which contain a form of nuclear waste

Vivek Chibber is one of the most influential nominally socialist writers in the US. He is one of the founders of Catalyst, a theory journal of Jacobin. Here is an interview (or "interview", as the other person sounds more sycophantic than ChatGPT and just agrees with everything) where Chibber argues against central planning, doing the usual sleight of hand of equating decentralized with market mechanisms:
https://jacobin.com/2026/05/central-planning-soviet-union-socialism
Actual quote by him from that:
<Normally in capitalism, what do managers do? They want to make profits. The way to make a profit is by trying to sell, at the lowest price possible, the best-quality good that you can.
This is false. The goal in capitalism is to maximize profits, which is very different from trying to maximize output while breaking even.

<That planner has to get everybody else to follow his directions because it only works if they listen to what he is saying.
He talks of "the central planner" as if that were a single person.

<When you start with saying, “We need so much steel,” in order to make that steel, you have to know everything that goes into making steel. And it’s all integrated. In order to have all those things go into the steel, you have to ask, “Well, how many blast furnaces do we need?” For the blast furnaces, you have to ask, “How much coal do we need?” For the steel to be made, you have to ask, “Okay, once all that steel is made, where’s it going to go? Who’s going to use it?” Trains, automobiles, and so on.

<In economics, these are called complementarities or linkages. Everything is linked. If you screw up one of those links, it radiates all across the economy. So you have to be able to handle complexity at a level that just boggles the mind.
In economics, complementary goods are goods that go well together with other goods, the opposite case of competition. E. g. If you are got a stand selling pretzels and Coke and you make the pretzel cheaper, demand for your Coke goes up. Anyway, the connections that Chibber speaks of are very much visible in the input-output tables of a planned economy. This is a strength of the planned economy.

<As it happens in the Soviet Union, everything went wrong all the time.
🙄

<Because of the uncertainty and the possibility of breakdown in the provision of inputs, manpower, things like that, managers have an incentive to lie when they give the information to the planners.
The same issue exists between departments of all but the very smallest companies.

<In a planned system, when the needed inputs, raw materials that every enterprise needs are not forthcoming, planners cannot be shielded from the responsibility of that enterprise or workplace not delivering and coming through. That means planners are in a difficult situation where they can’t come and say, “I’m going to let you fail.” Because now in that region, every worker, and every worker in connected enterprises who will suffer from yours being shut down is going to turn around and get really angry at that planner, at the planning bodies, and so on. You could have a constant civil war going on.

<So for the planner, it’s easier to say, “Look, just do better next time. I’m not going to let you go under.” This is called a soft budget constraint.
it seems to not occur to Chibber that it is possible to punish a specific manager without taking apart the factory he managed.

He argues for market socialism because:
<Centrally planned economies were built not to have slack.
But are the concepts of central planning and having no slack actually connected by logical necessity, one leading to the other? The answer is no. This felt connection is a very important "argument" for him, he drones on and on about it.

Chibber finishes with this:
<If we’re actually serious about changing the world, people on the Left, Marxist or non-Marxist, but people who are actually trying to fight for socialism, should be the most remorseless and the most merciless when it comes to facts. Unfortunately, we’re a long way from that right now.
I fully agree with that at least.
…
Cockshott just made a response video to Chibber, gonna watch it now.

>Reply to Chibber
shots fired

>>2819557
>09:44 If the market system was more rational in its use of resources, if its information transmission was more effective as the Austrian school - Hayek, Mises and now Chibber - claim, then the market economies would have raced ahead of the USSR. But actually the opposite is the case!
oh snap

Another reply to Chibber: https://goingtomeettheman.blogspot.com/2026/05/information-problem-reconstructed.html