Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > Your definition of bureaucracy as democratic centralism is a nonsense, and > symptomatic of the degeneration of the Left.
Thanks for the compliment! My heart will be warm for hours. > Bureaucrats are not elected, > but appointed functionaries, and if perchance they are elected, then almost > per definition it is not a free election, but a "stage-managed" or "rigged" > election which excludes anybody not in the favour of the bureaucrats. I didn't say anything about elections. "Democratic" centralism of the corporate, governmental, or "Leninist" sort doesn't involve any elections except as a mere formality or an elite function. Thus the scare quotes around "democracy." Top bureaucrats are largely self-selecting. > Any democratic organisation which functions on the basis of majority rule > obliges subjects to accept and work with the decisions of the majority. If > that was not so, the organisation could not "function as organisation", it > could not organise things. _Truly democratic_ centralism is not what I was talking about. > The term "centralism" adds nothing except that > the bureaucrats like to have an authority over and beyond the will of the > people. That makes no sense. We need centralism whether it's (truly) democratic or not. You can't fight global warming, for example, without _some_ sort of centralism. What's important is not to make everything decentralized (as in money libertarianism on the right or anarchism on the left). Rather, the central power needs to be subordinated to _true_ democracy. > BTW Lenin did not invent the concept of democratic centralism, the idea was > already used in the German social democracy, and Lenin's concept changed > quite a lot across the years. I knew that. I even published an article on the subject a long time ago. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
