DMSG’s Views on Democracy

The main problem with democracy in an increasingly technological world is that people know less and less about how the world works. This is natural, because as beings with finite time and memory, we can’t possibly know everything. At the end of the day, a computer scientist knows as much about plumbing as a plumber knows about computer science. The opinions they might form on each others’ fields are functionally worthless, beyond what they might like to see on the consumer end. As society gets more advanced and government regulations become more comprehensive to deal with increasingly complex industries, we know less and less about the world. In a country where huge portions of the workforce are very specialized, the large majority of our knowledge relevant to how the world works revolves around what we do for work. We study to break into our careers, we use our knowledge to provide a surplus to our employers, and overall, the majority of technical information we know is about what we do for a living. The age of the college-educated renaissance man, where science was in its infancy and it truly was achievable to know “everything,” is over. In its place we have thousands of variants of the worker bee, most of which perform niche functions and know not much beyond that. 

Democracy worked for the renaissance man, in small localities where people were familiar with how the town was run and the extent of law and science could be confined to a shelf. Nowadays, when 80% of the American population lives in cities and the largest industry by value added is classified as, “miscellaneous professional, scientific, and technical services,” the case is completely different. Political parties take advantage of this growing ignorance of the world around us, by often just having their largest corporate sponsors come up with the correct opinions on any matter of technical subjects beyond our daily skillset. Topics such as Net Neutrality and Nationalizing Utilities are a good example of subjects that people form opinions about more on the basis of media than anything else. I don’t work at the FCC or Google, and I certainly don’t trust CNN or Fox to accurately give me the scoop on what Net Neutrality means for the consumer. In contrast, because I work around power lines as a contractor for electrical utilities, my opinion on the matter of nationalizing utilities is a lot more nuanced. If democracy can’t account for these gaps in our knowledge, and lets corporations puppeteer political parties into pushing their talking points onto us, then democracy needs to be dismantled. 

Technocracy, whereby we allow workers to vote on what they do know and share their own perspectives, is a far more favorable alternative in the eyes of DMSG. Technocracy, a system run by those in the know, where the weight of an individual’s opinions extend as far as their credentials and work history will allow, is better suited to the modern world. However, traditionally “technocratic” governments aren’t without their issues either. The problem with traditionally anti-democratic systems is that, by shrinking the selectorate and establishing criteria for who can participate politically, we typically wind up consolidating power in the hands of politically connected non-workers. In the Soviet Union, when Molotov’s stay-at-home wife Perl became the Minister of Fisheries, and then the Minister of Light Industry, you clearly see a breakdown in what was supposed to be a technocratic system. Unlike capitalism, where the shareholders can at least be expected to appoint someone knowledgeable about the industry to decision making positions in their company, the USSR and countless other Marxist-Leninist regimes relied on a feudal system that placed family members of politicians in decision-making capacities of entire industries. Needless to say, appointing the politically connected isn’t technocracy in action. Truthfully, technocracy probably wouldn’t be able to be implemented under a Vanguardist regime, because a political movement led by full-time party staffers isn’t a workers’ movement. These virtually unemployed layabouts who repeat the party line on any given issue aren’t helping the proletarians, but are rather diverting their energies from meaningful change and putting them at risk. 

At the end of the day, a proletarian movement must be led by proletarians. At the end of the day, as workers become more specialized, we become ever more qualified to be technocrats in our own fields. Our careers and hobbies are oftentimes the best glimpses into the world that we have, and are perhaps the only places untainted by the monodominant perspective of the Professional-Managerial Class (and its pathetic aspirants). While our perspectives as proletarians may seem limited by our positions on the ground floor, the truth of the matter is that reality can only be observed from the ground floor. It’s the scientists recording phenomena that advance science, rather than the administrator in charge of their funding. It’s the stenographer in the courtroom that gets a full, unbiased picture of the legal trial, rather than the man reading the news about the case. At the end of the day, the worker’s voice matters because it reflects the true nature of reality. Any meaningful alternative to democracy should take note of that, because it otherwise runs the risk of collapsing under its own weight as unaddressed inefficiencies that only workers would’ve noticed start building up over time. A true technocracy would need to be formed from the voting pools of labor unions at non-private institutions, with people selected by worker’s classification to ensure their information on the subject was up to date, and from there the truth could be hammered out in legalese. A system built by workers, for workers, with no money to lose or win by designing a more efficient system, is optimal for everybody at the end of the day.