Their method of local organization is very similar to the Zapatistas, or more recently, Rojava - both also shift the focus of governance onto the local level, where it can be done by the community itself as much as possible.
The details of the system in Rojava are better documented - they have a written constitution, for starters, but there's also more media scrutiny because of the war, producing some very detailed write-ups. Both can be fascinating to read:
These systems (most explicitly Rojava) are similar to Murray Bookchin's [0] ideas on libertarian municipalism. Basically, control over economy and environment is mostly devolved to the local level, with citizen's assembly and that sort of thing. It does seem to work well in practice, which is really encouraging.
It's obvious now that we need a fundamental reorganization of our political economy for both material well-being and the climate. Something along these lines would probably be the best. The future will hopefully be much, much, more local in physical production and distribution. In such a scenario it would only make sense to keep power democratic and on the local level.
It's part borrowing, part convergent evolution - Ocalan was moving slowly in a similar direction for a while before discovering Bookchin, but when he did, it seems to have accelerated that process substantially.
And yes, I find it very encouraging that in places where the system is being experimented with, it's proving to be fairly stable, neither breaking up nor sliding into totalitarianism. Well, Rojava is not particularly stable - but that's mostly about Turkey, not about their internal politics.
Yeah, it seems like the direct-democracy aspect is pretty essential to avoiding totalitarianism. More local control means popular will is laundered through less levels of representation. Rojava is fairly stable for its situation, but I actually find it fairly encouraging that they have been able to punch above their weight in self defense, even if they aren't a match for neighboring nation-states.
I see a lot of parallels between political organizations, organisms, computer systems, etc. A larger system with vertical integration is more efficient at producing the result. In our life it manifests itself in affordable mobile phones, being able to launch a satellite, small amount of time necessary to understand contractual expectations, etc.
But the larger the system - higher are the stakes if something goes wrong - eg. economy in 2000 -> 2008 -> 2020. In nature usually there are external factors that seem to do well at keeping systems from growing too much. I wonder what could be an equivalent in the political environment (without Darwinism and constant death of many to find the fittest ones).
I'd say organisms are not so much vertical organized but homeostatic, the likes of cybernetic control of old cyberneticians. Like the brain doesn't say each cell what to do, cells share the environment, each signals their state, needs and reach to their local environment. In that sense you would share information (on production, on the state of the environment, on needs) and each local community would react in accord to move that shared environment towards homeostasis. But even organisms aren't perfect, think of your body, when you consume great amounts of carbs your body secrets insulin in a negative feedback and actually overshoots sending glucose levels bellow optimal which eventually fixes itself after several cicles of self correction.
There still needs to be large-scale integration for things like complicated industrial production. Also, communication technology will only get better, so long-distance virtual collaboration should actually get easier.
However, most things people need can be produced on a local scale. Large-scale organization can and does happen from the bottom. However, I feel like the future that is necessary for us to adopt just involves much less physical production and movement on a global scale.
To a very large extent, some things we take for granted probably just aren't workable long-term, either from an environmental or human risk perspective. Constant travel, cheap flights, ordering googaws from Amazon, etc. Most things people need can be produced locally or mostly locally.
Housing, food, furniture, boots, clothes, etc can all be produced to very high quality without using inputs from other continents. Sure, it involves more human labor in comparison to capital, but it is far cheaper once externalities are factored in. Besides, a huge proportion of our population does jobs which are literally useless. Redirecting that labor towards productive and more fulfilling ends would be great.
They are treating the forest as a common pool resource; see "Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action" by Elinor Ostrom.
"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind, (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight,) the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the Public Councils, and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another."
Being against parties was a cliché of 18th century thought. Edmund Burke first pointed out that parties could be more than just conspiracies against the public interest:
Party is a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.... It is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect. Therefore every honourable connexion will avow it as their first purpose, to pursue every just method to put the men who hold their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the State.
Slightly offtopic: it's unfortunate when people, perhaps technically brilliant people, come up with naïve solutions to political problems, showing little awareness that there are long and sophisticated traditions of thinking about these issues.
Perhaps a simpler move would be to stop party affiliation being published in the ballot paper.
Then if you wanted to vote for your local Tory / Republican / whatever you have to look them up, find out their name - and even compare policies.
This is not banning parties (Parties do at least have value as stability mechanism) but it discourages blind partisanship at least
Edit : it is also testable - one could randomly do this on ballots across nations and watch the outcome. I doubt the null hypothesis is same results as ballots with party affiliation.
I'm embarrassed that I haven't thought of this much before. Imagine everyone running as independents and Congress being all independents. It could work.
It's how municipal governments in Ontario work, and the focus in the media really is on the individuals and their actions. Obviously, sometimes it's obvious which party a candidate would belong to if there were parties[1], but that doesn't really matter.
Since there are no parties, there can be a larger variety of candidates with different viewpoints that can overlap, rather than just two extremes. And of course, councillors vote individually, which means the mayor has much less power than a party leader (each councillor is free to vote against the mayor at any time).
I really like this system, and am curious how it would work on a larger scale.
[1]: For example, Toronto mayor John Tory was leader of the Progressive Conservative party in the Ontario legislature from 2005-2007, so it's obvious he'd be a Tory.
But they end up voting in left or right blocks. Since the amount of has been reduced by half you see it more often. John Tory appoints people to positions with higher status and perks (like head of the ttc). To get these positions you agree to support Tory's plan. The few who cross him will get no plum roles if any.
It doesn't work, because parties offer an advantage, and you can't truly ban them without banning freedom of association. At best, you can ban overt expression of affiliation, so all candidates are nominally independent - but it'll still be obvious who's who.
The idea is not to ban any alliances of any sort (which is what happens when independents team up) but rather to strongly avoid groupthink and the not-people-beneficial-but-default actions that a stronger bloc always takes.
When independents team up for long enough, because they have enough in common, you get a party as well, with all the attendant features. Groupthink doesn't stem from formal affiliation - after all, most people in US who fall into it are not formally members of either party.
It sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it's mathematically unstable and doesn't form any sort of equilibrium (Nash or otherwise). Any participant can gain an advantage by grouping up with one other participant. Once everyone has grouped up into pairs, they will then group up again and again, ultimately creating a two party system.
I think that's a silly notion. Many countries have political systems with many political parties, e.g. Germany has 14 and Denmark has 11.
Certainly these parties often pair up to form government in (reasonably) established political blocks, but it still allows for intra-block disagreements and even parties from different blocks working together on issues they care particularly much about.
We have far more than 14 active political parties. Most of them are founded for very narrow and specific issues (Tierschutzpartei -- "party for animal welfare", Die Violetten -- "party for mysticism/esotericism"). Some operate only on a regional level, like the SSV -- the party of the danish minority in Schleswig-Holstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Schleswig_Voters%27_Asso...). On the municipal level it is not uncommon to have candidates without party affiliation -- some of them organize in "loose parties" that are more a coalition of individuals than a real party (Freie Wähler).
I think the tendency to form coalitions and compromises than hyperpartisan confrontations has its roots in the voting system. We have a system of proportional representational voting -- not first past the post voting. This allows for more flexibility on the stance of single members on some issues. It is not unheard of to have 2 or more blocks in the same party that have very different opinions on specific issues. While this might be true for any representational system, first-past-the-post voting tends to focus on one issue that becomes the core of identification for some.
From what I've seen, once parties are dropped from the ballot (it's common to have positions where party isn't listed) people seem to stop caring about them. I've seen hyperpartisan areas where people will never vote for party B over party A when party affiliation is listed on the ballot, but when it's not listed they end up happily vote for someone from party B over A. Removing parties from voting would make it less likely that so many issues break down among strict partisan lines, and would make compromise much more likely because not every piece of policy would be tied to a political identity. Factions would still exist, but they would be much more fluid and adaptable.
The voting system does determine how many and what types of parties you end up with.
FPTP as in the US will always yield a two party system in the long run as thats the only way you can “win” in it.
More elaborate systems would get you an equilibrium of multiple parties, with much better overlap of what people want to their representatives.
Grouping would indeed always happen, but you wouldn’t need to go to 50% of society to get what you want, so the wants and political speech can be much more varied and relevant.
> FPTP as in the US will always yield a two party system in the long run as thats the only way you can “win” in it.
I don't think that's true. If you simply removed the de facto state endorsement of parties - if you only listed candidates by name on the ballot and moved to a California type open primary instead of having partisan primaries - you probably wouldn't end up with two parties like we see today.
Party primaries are a good example of this. They're also FPTP, but that hasn't lead to the emergence of two subfactions because such a thing is hard when it's not entrenched in the ballot. Instead primaries have much more loose coalitions of groups and endorsements that shift around in every election. Even in a particular election there are often more than two.
Well there are of course always tweaks, but FPTP just has those incentives and you inevitably trend towards those bad outcomes and problems.
I mean the video explains it way better than I ever could, and there are a bunch of other political systems and the maths behind them explained ELI5 style.
This is one of the more famous results in political science: Duverger's Law. It's normally phrased as "in a first past the post system, the number of effective parties tends towards two".
It's... a useful model. It turns out not to work in practice everywhere, though, as there are complicating features with geography and ideology that tend to add parties. Canada, for example, has 2 and a half effective parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP) in general, and more in Québec. The UK also has two and a half (Con, Lab, Lib Dem) plus powerful Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties, plus an entirely different party system in Northern Ireland. So 'tends towards' is going a lot of work.
I think we start seeing that in the U.S. with younger congress members not being satisfied with lumping them all together with more traditional politicians. Who knows, maybe we will get that here too.
EDIT: Also, if the system tries to equalize at two parties, why we do not see a similar process inside parties themselves?
If the parties have stable factions and their internal elections are FPTP, then sure. The two right-wing factions of the British Labour party just rolled over the party's left-wing by running a joint slate of candidates while the left slates split the vote.
Having said that, electoral politics within parties doesn't tend to be as important as other things: bureaucratic control of the party machinery, for example.
Why even allow grouping (politically) into pairs? The town could just ban non-politicians from expressing political speech entirely (as a social norm, not a law.)
Politicians could still speak politically in the form of campaigning; but they'd not be allowed to make reference to other politicians' positions on things; only to speak about their own beliefs on how things should be/how things should work.
For anyone who isn't an actively-campaigning politician, the only political speech you'd be allowed would be (private-ballot) voting. Anything else would get you shunned by the community.
Yet, here you are, a non-politician according to your HN profile, engaging in political speech. To be fair, you're not breaking the law or even a social norm... but it's not consistent with your position.
All of the sorts of reasons that motivated you to have an opinion enough to post here are reasons why this wouldn't work. Moreover, where do you draw the line between "layperson" and politician? How does one make the transition?
I understand the desire, and appreciate that you see the unreality of the idea... all I can really say in conclusion is... well... nice try.
It’s a social norm—everyone enforces it, and everyone also punishes those who don’t enforce it. Compare/contrast: being punished for using a cellphone in an Amish community.
If you disallow grouping openly, people will group surreptitiously and the impact will be much the same. Some form of power structure always develops in any grouping of people, whether it is open or hidden and this has been widely documented in anthropology.
I think the most famous one was a write-up about power structures in women power movements in the 70s (I forget the author's name) another one more recently examining Valve software.
The commentary here seems to miss a certain basic point about the situation with Cheran (and many other regions of Mexico, where I live, that are controlled by autodefensas groups and other types of local vigilante security groupings).
What the people of Cheran did is worthy of applause, because it brought some measure of peace in the middle of a desperate situation of insecurity, extreme violence and governments that at both the federal and state level are almost catastrophically corrupt on guaranteeing security.
However, for this very reason it's a sad thing to see. The single most basic debt to society that a government owes in return for paying taxes and agreeing to its rule is a monopoly on violence that's fair and sufficient enough to prevent rampant criminality, yet Mexico suffers from the latter so severely that large swathes of the country are firmly outside the government's supposed rule of law, and make small towns and regions have no choice but to take measures like these.
Who knows how sustainable this is, or its long term ramifications. What it definitely does do is further weaken that same government's capacity for reestablishing its main responsibility.
The government of Mexico of course knows this, and so do the state governments that supposedly have authority over places like Cheran. For this reason (and for reasons of extreme corruption) they not only resent vigilante efforts like these or any attempts by private citizen groups to defend themselves with weapons or by other means, but also often actively, violently try to impede them "legally" despite not being able to replace these localized security measures with a useful reformation of their own.
This is done under the pretext that non-state armed security groupings are dangerous to public safety, but curiously, the same efforts at curbing heavily armed groups outside the law seem to evaporate when it comes to curbing the power and rampant impunity of cartels that also control whole regions much more viciously.
One of the reasons why? Unlike the people of Cheran or many private citizen defense groups, these cartels are typically colluding with the same politicians that claim armed vigilante activity as dangerous. The cartels also have their own similar reasons for disliking armed civilians who tend to retake peace from corrupt gangsters and politicians.
Radical, indigenous, feminist, anti-colonial, self-organising. I think that's the real lesson, that almost all the problems were brought in from outside by exploiters and that the armed decolonization of the town was the real liberation.
It's not an ideal situation: you can't have a zero party state, that always turns into a one party state. The actual situation of control will turn out to be a set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town, but analysing this will be impossible for journalists. It's also why it's very difficult to replicate.
According to the BBC's laughable propaganda. Not according to any of the people actually involved. Even then there's nothing colonial about Mexican cartels stealing from Mexicans.
>The actual situation of control will turn out to be a set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town
What a bizarre notion. Why and how would that suddenly occur?
That the uprising was started by women is corroborated by other, older sources as well,[1] and is not a misportrayal by the BBC. That Cheran is populated by the indigenous Purépecha people is also supported by other sources, including the Mexican legal system that upheld the town's autonomy. I cannot find anything else in the article that would support what you are saying. Can you provide some quotations?
Look at the photos in the article. See how it is mostly men but they focus on the one woman in the big group of men? You have to be very suggestible to buy such an obviously conjured narrative.
There are 8 photos in the article (not including the map); women are shown in 4 of those; there is exactly 1 photo where they focus on one woman at the front of a line in a parade (with multiple lines). To put that in perspective, there is also 1 photo that focuses on a man surrounded by men and women.
There are also 2 photos of one woman each, but they were just two of the people who were interviewed (and one of them was an instigator of the revolt). There no conjured narrative here that I can see. If every other source were saying that there were no women involved in the revolt, and the BBC were inserting women into the story, then it would be a conjured narrative, but that is not what is happening here.
Oh, the wording is all mine, inferred from this fairly thin set of news reports. But:
- radical: doesn't get much more radical than an armed uprising
- indigenous: they're Purepecha. This is very important. While they're Mexican nationals, and would be called Mexican by Americans, they're not of Spanish descent. They're descendents of a tribe unconquered by the Aztecs. Racial discrimination against people of indigenous descent is common all over Latin America.
- feminist: all the news coverage points out that the initial uprising was initiated by women.
- anti-colonial: outsiders of a different ethnic background coming onto traditional tribal land to steal natural resources? With the collusion of the police? Sounds pretty colonial to me.
It's crucial to being exempted from normal politics such as elections. "arguing before the courts that there were provisions in Mexican law that permit indigenous communities a form of self-government based on their customs"; sounds analogous to the semi-autonomy of Indian reservations in the US.
>> "set of family relationships embedded in the matriarchy running the town"
So it looks like I overstated this a lot, but if you refer to the NBCnews article above it's a "council of elders". And they don't have parties? Family is a party you're born into. It's more or less the default arrangement of pre-bureaucratic politics. It's hard to avoid even in modern states. Add up all someone's in-laws and second cousins and it's easy to get to hundreds of people, which goes a long way in a community of 20,000.
BBC: "Most people who live in Cheran are from the town. Social mores dictate that locals marry locals - there are very few outsiders here. Families are large, and they are close. Everyone knows everyone else. And that is the foundation of the town's unity."
NBC: "Patricia Hernández, a taco vendor and mother of four, accepted the challenge to be part of their government when her neighbors chose her to represent their fogata. She is now one of four women who will govern Cherán for the next three years as part of the twelve-person council known as K'eri Jánaskakua.
"Before the government didn't take us [women] into account, until we were the ones who started this new government seven years ago," said Hernández to NBC News. "We said 'Ya Basta!', (Enough!) to put an end to this violence."
(more feminism! with machetes!)
It doesn't "suddenly occur", it was always there, it just took a lot of adversity to mobilize it to the level of armed self-government.
Some of them. Most of the community is mestizo. And their ethnicity has literally nothing to do with it at all. It isn't an indigenous movement, it is a community protecting itself. Do you think the non-Purepecha residents don't count? That they were not part of this action?
>all the news coverage points out that the initial uprising was initiated by women.
No, plenty of news coverage is factual. You're just looking at the "news" that is trying to use it as a feminism story.
>anti-colonial: outsiders of a different ethnic background
The outsiders have the same mix of ethnic backgrounds the community does.
>Before the government didn't take us [women] into account
Notice how the word that is necessary to make that sentence mean what you want was inserted by the "journalist", not said by the person being quoted? "Before the government didn't take us [the people] into account..."
>It doesn't "suddenly occur", it was always there
It has never been there. There are actually several anthropology texts on the Purepecha, they were never matriarchal or anything remotely resembling it. Nor were the Spanish, although there's not much in anthropological studies on them.
>doesn't get much more radical than an armed uprising
I would like to nitpick that the idea that there exists a threshold of terribleness for local power structures beyond which it's perfectly reasonable to use or threaten violence against the people propping them up is one held by a heck of a lot of people on the North American continent. Of course people disagree about where to draw the line but the concept itself is pretty mainstream.
Edit: I guess I'm really nitpicking that "radical" implies something novel, new or fringe which does not fit the circumstances here.
Surely the local power structure is mainstream by definition? "Radical" doesn't imply "novel", but it does imply a much greater belief that the ends justify the means, and an opposition to the status quo. Radical is a modality of politics. Description of something as radical is not necessarily an endorsement or censure.
The American revolutionaries were radicals. The protesters with guns demanding that Kentucky reopen its shops are radicals. The Unabomber was a radical. Nelson Mandela was a radical.
(There's a much longer point to be made about how armed revolution is an event and the subsequent politics is a process, and that lots of places fall over when it comes to the long haul of building a working politics after the revolution. I'm glad this community seems to have avoided that.)
I always thought organized crime works in such a way that, at any given layer, a person could only provide evidence of criminal activity of their peers at the same layer, and maybe a bit of dirt on their bosses a layer above - but they couldn't bring enough legally admissible evidence to impact the higher layers. So if a random bottom-tier gangster starts to testify, everyone above them on the ladder just denies knowing them (and each other). The legal system can't proceed, and meanwhile someone from the gangster's family suffers a fatal "accident".
If a single testimony could cause everyone mentioned in it to be subject to intense government scrutiny, then society would stop working because griefers would abuse it.
Ah, you've heard of swatting and the Church commission.
(The secret is that police have a huge "bayesian" filter for who they consider likely to be a criminal, so little or nothing can trigger intense scrutiny for some people whereas blatant criminality by "respectable" people is ignored)
This reminds me of "Cartel Land" movie¹, which depicted similar events (in the same Mexican state of Michoacán, BTW) a few years before, mostly around José Manuel Mireles Valverde².
Not initially, but now maintained, yes. Safe to assume illegally imported (at least the rifles), and certainly illegally used according to Mexican law.
Mexico is an interesting case because it's constitution protects gun ownership, but increasing revisions and laws limit it more than, say, France. These laws were passed in response to a massacre... by the government.
This is an attempt to jam a radically different situation into a one dimensional faultline of US politics, rather than learn anything from the town itself.
They weren't armed. They only had machetes, "In those early days, we didn't know anything about using guns." I grew up with tons of guns, you don't have guns and at the same time know nothing about them. Had they guns they would have used em instead of shooting fireworks at the gangsters.
The details of the system in Rojava are better documented - they have a written constitution, for starters, but there's also more media scrutiny because of the war, producing some very detailed write-ups. Both can be fascinating to read:
https://corporatewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Strugg...
https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...