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What Hacker News says
- > It's the sad truth that greed is the largest part of it, which enables the oligarchs
Slightly related, and for anyone that might accuse the OP of using the term "oligarch" as too modern or too politically-motivated, I highly suggest Robert Michels's "Political Parties", a book written more than 100 years ago and whose subtitle says it all: "A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy".
I've just finished reading it (it had been on my to-read list for a couple of years now) and it's fascinating how prescient the writing in there is.
- This is equally an argument against forming any organization, isn't it?
Michels' classic Political Parties is a fascinating and depressing look at that problem. This stuff, problems with democracy, was fretted over 100 years ago, not so much nowadays, since democracy was redefined as what is called 'democracy' in the mid 20th C.[0]
"The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, stating "Who says organization, says oligarchy." ... "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
All organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Democratic attempts to hold leaders accountable fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, and the ability to both control information about the organization and what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members." [1] (lightly abridged)
[0] see Michael Saward, Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
- //Breaks resolution never to comment on political subjects on here again
The first thing to do in going about non-futilely answering and discussing the question would be to broadly define liberalism, about which there are presumably many different definitions/ideas/understandings, to bring to light some of the presuppositions that debate would otherwise be a blind struggle over. (That's an assumption of mine.) Is it to be just 'what we have in the western democracies nowadays'? But it means different things in different regions and countries. Is it something people aspired to in the 18th C and we've not achieved, or achieved and lost, or achieved and have moved on? (In discussions of 'Has communism failed?' the huge gap between what the word meant originally and what the Soviet system became is central, and even that is not a simple question to answer. It depends which definition you use.) Maybe every system fails.
That reminds me what I was reading today in the comments on the agile theory vs reality story. Radical cool new ways of doing become their own opposite when set in stone and blindly followed. Which reminds of how in the USA the Amendments are usually touted to justify some asinine practice nothing to do in spirit with the original Amendment in any way, and more usually its opposite.
Democracy itself is hardly a total success or free of contradictions, exploits, shortcomings[0]. Depends which sense you use; there are wholly differing definitions of democracy used by the major writers/theorists of the subject.
And failed relative to what?
The shortest and quickest answer, here a good one I think, is that given by Betteridge's Law[1] — No.
But it depends.
[0] A couple of very readable and more-relevant-than-ever classics on this theme: Michels' Political Parties (1911) and Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- Sadly, and fortunately, there is no such thing as "avoiding centralization", the evidence is overwhelming:
== Politics & Sociology (power concentrates in organizations)
- Robert Michels, Political Parties (1911) origin of the "iron law of oligarchy": even democratic groups tend to end up run by a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
- Jo Freeman, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (1970/72): leaderless groups develop informal, unaccountable elites unless they make structure explicit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
- Max Weber, bureaucracy & rational-legal authority: why modern societies gravitate to rule-bound, hierarchical administration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational-legal_authority
- James G. March & Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (1958): classics on bounded rationality and why attention/decision bottlenecks yield hierarchy: https://www.amazon.se/-/en/James-G-March/dp/0471567930
== Economics & Political Economy (why markets/platforms centralize)
- Ronald Coase, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937): firms exist (and grow) when internal coordination is cheaper than market exchange: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...
- Oliver Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies (1975): transaction-cost economics: asset specificity & opportunism push activity into hierarchies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1496220
- W. Brian Arthur, "Increasing Returns and Lock-In" (1989): small early advantages + network effects => path-dependent monopolies: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2234208
- Katz & Shapiro, network effects (1985/1994): compatibility and standards help explain winner-take-most dynamics: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/systems.pdf
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014): when r > g, wealth concentrates; proposes progressive wealth taxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
== Networks, Complexity & Information (why hubs and hierarchies emerge)
Albert-László Barabási, Linked (2002): preferential attachment makes networks develop hubs (central nodes) http://networksciencebook.com/chapter/5
Herbert A. Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity" (1962): complex systems often become hierarchical because modular hierarchies are easier to evolve and manage https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/...
W. Ross Ashby, "Law of Requisite Variety" (1956): controllers need at least as much "variety" as the environment and it often pushes toward central coordinating mechanisms (or many distributed ones with enough capacity) http://pcp.vub.ac.be/books/AshbyReqVar.pdf
Gilbert & Lynch, proof of the CAP theorem (2002): in distributed computing you can’t have perfect consistency + availability under network partitions and real systems centralize/compromise to cope: https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Gilbert/Brewer2.pdf
Robert K. Merton, "The Matthew Effect" (1968): cumulative advantage: success attracts more success, reinforcing centralization of recognition/resources https://garfield.library.upenn.edu/merton/matthew1.pdf
== State power, legibility & infrastructure (why governments centralize)
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998): states seek legibility and large projects favor central plans and standardized populations/landscapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State (literally anything by Jim Scott -RIP- will be useful)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch (2010): communications industries cycle from openness to centralized "information empires" https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empire...
== Technology & platforms (contemporary centralization)
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (2017): explains how platform business models + data/network effects produce concentration https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504...
== When decentralization can work
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990): shows conditions (clear rules, monitoring, graduated sanctions, polycentric governance) under which decentralized, federated management of shared resources succeed https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/governing-the-commons/A...
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the literature making a counterpoint is abundant / overwhelming but that feels bleak considering when reading these works, systems thinking )the basis for "la technique") favors centralization
- Have you read Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) - well worth reading and rereading. The theme of it in a way is "that people do not know objective truth, and can be fooled by propaganda" It's about things he observed in WWI, the role of the media, the failure of the media, the start of the propaganda age.. My point is - none of these problems are new. Lippmann was writing about very similar problems 100 years ago. (In that and his other early books, e.g. Liberty and the News - on how somehow, we don't require journalists be qualified, although they have such a vital role in democracy.) It's hard to think that democracy is possible, given these problems.
(Saward in his Democracy says that Schumpeter in the mid-20th C simply redefined 'democracy' as 'whatever they now have in countries we call democratic', thus avoiding the worrying about democracy that produced the fascinating books of the early 20th C on problems with it. e.g. Lippmann's, Michels' Political Parties)
