Some questions about delegate democracy

Hey friends! Thanks for everyone's thoughtful replies to the questions I posted. I'm in the middle of writing some responses but it's been taking me a while. I'll post them soon though.

Yeah sorry, I'm confused by what I mean myself. I hope I'm not some kind of authoritarian without noticing it

I think that people through a process maybe like consensus should go to meetings and come up with mandates in their assembles for their delegates to deliberate in favour of and that people should be able to recall their delegate and approve, reject or modify any decisions they make and that delegates should be able to be recalled at any time. Assemblies where people vote for delegates and mandates should be frequent and everyone should be allowed to participate in the writing of these mandates.

Would for example a council system that maybe functioned something like this be too authoritarian?

1. Every month people go to a meeting where they discuss ideas, proposals, concerns and opinions they have. I sort of imagine a process like consensus could be used to collectively put together a mandate. If consensus wasn't possible I hope that a mandate with the majority and minority positions would be drafted, and delegates would be sent to go deliberate in favour of the majority and minority positions who would divide their council's vote proportionately between themselves based on how many people voted for each mandate.

2. Delegates would go to a higher council and basically repeat the process where delegates would state their mandates and then use consensus to try to put together one list of agreements. If consensus could not be achieved they would vote and the minorities would put together a list of their positions and how they think the list of agreements should be changed.

3. The delegates would return to their councils and present the list of agreements as well as the positions of the minorities. Then through a process like consensus people could approve of the list of agreements or mandate their delegate to go deliberate in favour of certain modifications or additions to be made to the list of agreements or to reject it. If there was disagreement majority and minority mandates would be drafted and majority and minority delegates would be sent to deliberate in favour of them.

4. Delegates would meet in a higher council and report the results of the votes within their councils. If the majority of people were in favour of the list of agreements being kept the way it was then it would be possible to pass the list of agreements and once that was settled councils could begin to put the plans into action. If there wasn't a majority in favour of the decision or the majority thought the minority had important concerns or wanted to have consensus then they might try to deliberate and make modifications to the list of agreements which would have to be sent back to their councils for another round of consensus.

Here are a few quotes that I think I generally agree with but maybe I'm not correctly understanding them.

"This character is reflected in the practice of all proceedings. The councils are no politicians, no government. They are messengers, carrying and interchanging the opinions, the intentions, the will of the groups of workers. Not, indeed, as indifferent messenger boys passively carrying letters or messages of which they themselves know nothing. They took part in the discussions, they stood out as spirited spokesmen of the prevailing opinions. So now, as delegates of the group, they are not only able to defend them in the council meeting, but at the same time they are sufficiently unbiased to be accessible to other arguments and to report to their group opinions more largely adhered to. Thus they are the organs of social intercourse and discussion."- Anton Pannekoek, Workers' Councils

I think that having delegates deliberate and listening to the concerns of others from other councils is good and that one of the benefits of having delegates is that they could perhaps spend longer amounts of time discussing conflicts and concerns which could maybe lead to people coming up with decisions that might make everyone happy.

I think delegates should have a certain amount of leeway to modify the mandate they were sent to argue for or to even vote against it in some circumstances. For example if people wanted their delegate to vote for a bridge to be built over a river but delegates from other councils convinced them that this bridge would be dangerous or have a really negative effect on their communities I think it would be okay for them to decide the bridge was a bad idea and then return to their council and tell them that they voted against the bridge for such and such reasons. If their council found these reasons to be unsatisfactory people would be able to reject this decision and send them or another delegate to go vote and argue for the bridge once again.

I think it's important that delegates are actually able to deliberate in favour of certain positions and to be on the watch out for proposals from other delegates that would go against those positions. This isn't to say they have to completely agree with their mandate- for example I think it's possible for a delegate to argue for mandates they found acceptable where they made big compromises with their opposition. I personally wouldn't want my delegate to be my dogmatic messenger but someone I could trust to express my opinions and concerns properly.

"In delegate democracy, delegates are elected for specific purposes with very specific limitations. They may be strictly mandated (ordered to vote in a certain way on a certain issue) or the mandate may be left open (delegates being free to vote as they think best) with the people who have elected them reserving the right to confirm or reject any decision thus taken. Delegates are generally elected for very short periods and are subject to recall at any time. " - Ken Knabb, Joy of Revolution

"But when the issues are not particularly controversial, mandating will probably be fairly loose. Having arrived at some general decision (e.g. “This building should be remodeled to serve as a daycare center”), an assembly might simply call for volunteers or elect a committee to implement it without bothering with detailed accountability."

- Ken Knabb, Joy of Revolution

I think that sometimes delegates might have loose mandates that are left open to do a general thing (ie. bottom council might not come up with a plan themselves on how to switch to green energy but they might mandate that their delegate come up with one themselves or through deliberation with other delegates. Maybe this is too vague but I personally would be okay with voting for this).

I also think that I might be okay with delegates being allowed to sometimes vote how they think best as Knabb says with that vote being subject to the approval, modification or rejection of their council. I don't see what the problem with giving a delegate responsibility to make decisions when they would have to report back their decisions after which they could be recalled and every little decision they make could immediately be cancelled by their councils by just a vote in their general assembly. In my view what they would be doing is nothing more than what everyone would do in a consensus process where someone makes a proposal (in this case a delegate).

I do however think it is really important for people to be able to change their delegates and mandates as often as possible.

"For more complicated matters, committees can be elected to look into various possibilities and report back to the assemblies about the ramifications of different options. Once a plan is adopted, smaller committees can continue to monitor developments, notifying the assemblies of any relevant new factors that might suggest modifying it. On controversial issues multiple committees reflecting opposing perspectives (e.g. protech versus antitech) might be set up to facilitate the formulation of alternative proposals and dissenting viewpoints. As always, delegates will not impose any decisions (except regarding the organization of their own work) and will be elected on a rotating and recallable basis, so as to ensure both that they do a good job and that their temporary responsibilities don’t go to their heads. Their work will be open to public scrutiny and final decisions will always revert to the assemblies." -Ken Knabb, Joy of Revolution

I'm not sure exactly what Knabb means in this quote but it makes sense to me that councils made of democratically elected, mandated, recallable delegates whose proposals can be rejected and/or modified at any time could serve a role like this.

I think that delegates should sometimes be able to receive proposals from other delegates- ie. A delegate from another council proposes that we all put solar panels on the roofs of our buildings and then all the delegates would discuss them in depth (ie. Have a discussion about the potential downsides, examining the proposal to see whether this would violate certain rules or positions their council had, perhaps delegates would modify the proposal if it did violate rules or just because they thought it would improve the proposal etc.) And then give a temporary vote in favour or against the proposal which would then have to be approved by the council. For example I think a delegate who had a mandate to pursue greener energy should be able to hear a proposal for solar panels and then deliberate in favour of it, propose any modifications that they think would help and then present this proposal to their own council.

I think this preliminary discussion would be useful for fixing potential problems or conflicts on certain proposals and I think for example it would be useful if my delegate had interrogated a proposal beforehand and could for example point out specific good or bad things about the proposal or how they thought it should be improved, etc.

This is more sketchy but I think sometimes it might help if delegates could give a good guess of whether or not their council would approve of a certain decision for coordination reasons- for example a delegate could say that they thought their council would want solar panels and so somebody would then begin counting how many solar panels they would need. I think this could be slightly dangerous in some cases because you wouldn't want delegates to give a tentative go ahead to actions that might accidentally wreck something on you- ie. Someone starts producing solar panels through an environmentally destructive manner and it later turns out no one wants solar panels and that they can't be re-purposed).

I also think that periodic meetings between delegates would be useful even if their councils had no specific goals for them- it might be useful for them to just update each other on what is going on or maybe even brainstorm ideas which could be then discussed in councils for consideration.

"Normally those periodic meetings would not last more than a few hours. They dealt with concrete, precise subjects concretely and precisely. And all who had something to say could express themselves. The Comite presented the new problems that had arisen since the previous assembly, the results obtained by the application of such and such a resolution . . . relations with other syndicates, production returns from the various workshops or factories. All this was the subject of reports and discussion. Then the assembly would nominate the commissions, the members of these commissions discussed between themselves what solutions to adopt, if there was disagreement, a majority report and a minority report would be prepared."- Gaston Levall, Collectives in the Spanish Revolution

"Mandated here means that the delegates from workers' assemblies and councils to meetings of higher confederal bodies would be instructed, at every level of confederation, by the workers who elected them on how to deal with any issue. They would be delegates, not representatives, and so would attend any confederal meeting with specific instructions on how to vote on a particular issue."- An Anarchist FAQ

I think I'm okay with these two quotes as well except I don't know what would be wrong with giving a delegate some general instructions instead of having to be specific all the time.

How would people in the minority or people who changed their minds be able to make proposals to change the list of agreements between councils then?

For example let's say there was a list of 100 agreements between all the councils in a region and within one of the councils there was a group of say radical environmentalists who wanted to modify say 30 of those agreements and add something like 20 new agreements.

Would the only way for them to do this would be to go to each say monthly meeting and then every time make everyone vote on each of those proposals one by one?

This seems like it would be an annoying and time consuming system.

What's worse is that it seems like when that council sent delegates to go meet with delegates from other councils all of those delegates would have to go back to their own councils and make them vote on each of these 50 proposals one by one because people would not be allowed to give delegates any instruction or agenda on whether they wanted the list of agreements changed in some way or if they wanted it to stay the same or somewhere in between.

I know it causes problems but i feel like it would be just so much easier if people just had to vote for one list or platform of 50 proposals rather than having to propose them all one by one.
I also think it might be the case that people wouldn't be able to hear every single proposal others from their entire regional, national or even international federation were making.

I think if you gave your delegates some instruction on how you feel about the list of agreements between councils they would be able to patiently hear concerns and proposals from other councils and would be able to deliberate and see if they were compatible with their mandate or if perhaps it would make sense in some cases to change the mandate. If delegated thought it made sense to change the list of agreements they would report this back to the council who would have the right to reject, modify or support those proposals.

Even if people felt it was necessary to listen to every proposal someone in the world was making i still think that this process could save time by allowing delegates a chance to synthesize many different proposals, resolve some disagreements and also learn about the proposals which could be useful for people discussing proposals their delegate voted against in their councils.
I just feel like it would be so much easier to just say "I like this platform" over having to vote for a million different things every month.

I'm worried that the system you're describing would result in endless meetings because there would be no way for people in the minority or people who changed their mind to group all their proposals into one agenda and therefore they would instead have to force everyone in their federation to basically vote on each proposal one by one every meeting or special rules would have to be put into place that would make it really hard for people to make new proposals or changes to the list of agreements.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill. But I still think having the ability to EASILY change the list of agreements is really important, perhaps even more important than being able to easily get rid of corrupt delegates because I actually can’t imagine how a delegate could be corrupt without actually messing around with the list of agreements- for example a delegate could only engage in corrupt behavior if they say added things to the list of agreements that said that delegates should receive some unfair special treatment or power or they made agreements that were vague enough to be deliberately misinterpreted.

This is just rhetorical but I almost think if you had to make a choice it might even be better to have a system in which it was extremely difficult to remove corrupt delegates but they could easily be completely controlled and over-rided by changing mandates rather than a system in which delegates could easily be removed but it was really hard to change the corrupt mandates that they made which were against people's wishes.

Disregarding corruption it's possible people might vote for mandates they later want changed for a few reasons for example maybe:

- They had a change of mind
- They initially accidentally voted in favour of something without realizing what would happen if they did
- Changes in situations made them think changing them makes sense
- There was a miscommunication or a misinterpretation of the mandate between the delegates and people in their councils
- The ideas seemed good at a glance
- They were unaware that they even voted for certain things- maybe they lost track because of how things they had to vote on in a general assembly one month or whatever
- Maybe the proposal was too general (ie. people probably aren't going to be mandating the colour of every building that is made) which led to delegates or people from other councils to make an honest attempt to fill in the blanks but this turned out in a way people didn't want.

It would be one thing if it was just a wrong decision that wasn't too important or that they could change it later on. For example the IWA has international congresses every 3 years and I have to imagine sometimes people vote for things they regret but they could live with that decision for a few years without it causing them too much distress. I still think that this is a little unfortunate and it seems a bit like alienation to me but maybe I’m being a little dramatic.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is how something like DAPL could happen in an anarchist society. Hopefully in the future people won't be building huge pipelines but I don’t think it’s out of the question that somewhere in the world in an anarchist future there might be a construction project that was controversial and environmentally destructive that some people voted in favour of because they thought it might be helpful. For example many people wrongly supported the pipeline because they thought it provided jobs for people who needed them and that building pipelines was actually an environmentally wise decision because pipelines are technically less dangerous than transporting oil through rail and other methods. I don’t think you could wait 3 years for another congress in a situation like this and I think you would want to make it as easy as possible for people to change their vote.

I think that if you don’t make it easy to change lists of agreements it would mean that people would necessarily have to spend tons of time discussing and closely examining the lists of agreements, almost as if they were lawyers because if they accidentally voted for decisions that were wrong they would be mostly stuck with them.

The biggest reason why I think it is important and maybe this is just a stupid liberal in me but I think that this would actually make councils a useful place for activism. People in their general assemblies would be given the chance to tell others why something is wrong and they would have an avenue to change it.

I don’t think that making it easy to change and to have delegates regularly meet to deliberate on issues (perhaps allowing minority delegates to sometimes rehash issues more than once) would eliminate the need for direct action or lead to situations in which the majority is never severely wrong even after long discussions but I think that this would really help with those situations and perhaps lead to us avoiding them more often.

I understand not wanting to make blueprints that we can't change or people can't add their own ideas to but do you think all hypothetical discussion about what potential problems a libertarian society might have or what it might look like between people is bad?

For example Is it too much of a blueprint for individuals to advocate that we should maybe have mandated recallable delegates and councils/communes?

One of the reasons I brought up the idea of minority delegates is because one of the main criticisms I've read of syndicalism and councils is that it unintentionally is really vulnerable to "vote distortion" even more so than parliamentary systems where the outcome of votes made at the top by delegates would not be actually representative of the total vote at the bottom.

I really like the IWA but I think that it suffers from this accidental problem as well. For example in order to pass a mandate in local you need at least 2/3rds of the vote to support it and to pass a vote in the national you would need 2/3rds of the mandated delegates to vote in favour of it. This means that it's technically possible if in 2/3rds of the locals 2/3rds of the people supported a proposal that everybody else opposed it could get passed even though 43.5% supported it. With each higher level of federation this distortion can get worse so for example if 2/3rds of the nationals supported a proposal even though only 43.5% of the vote within those nationals supported that proposal and 1/3 of the nationals opposed it the proposal would be able to pass even though 28.7% supported it.

Conversely it's possible for proposals I think in Solidarity Federation to not pass even though 86% support them and for proposals in the whole IWA to not pass even though 94% support them. This would be extremely unlikely, requiring that almost 2/3rds of locals/nationals vote unanimously for a proposal and then almost 2/3rds in the other locals/nationals to also be supportive of the proposal.

If the IWA was to expand its membership it might need to make intermediate federations to manage this which could lead to even further distortion. I know that the IWA says that locals and nationals should try to reach consensus but I don't think this is always possible- people are going to have to vote, and I think that the most important decisions are going to be ones in which people cannot agree, making vote distortion an even bigger issue.

The IWA I think tries to deal with this problem by saying that locals should try to sort out their problems and come to a consensus but I think that this is flawed because the issues that people cannot agree on, and thus are going to have to vote on are likely to be very important issues. It seems like a problem to me that the most important issues are going to be decided by a voting process that has a significant potential to distort the vote.

I don't agree with Paul Cockshott on many things but I remember a while back he wrote an article (that I can't find anywhere) where he makes an interesting point that not only does vote distortion lead to undemocratic decisions but that it itself may give an advantage to authoritarian, centralist and dogmatic ideologies and groups. Although there were obviously other factors he claims that vote distortion helped the Bolsheviks take over the soviets where they were then able to intentionally more undemocratic.

I support minority delegates because I think it's good to include everyone in decision-making and to have those in the minority from different councils be able to coordinate.

But more importantly it's because if you had minority delegates you would basically eliminate this problem of vote distortion.

Free from the alienation of capitalism and the disappearance of paid employment, the nature of work and play will fuse, as humanity is transformed for the first time into whole human beings. Political skullduggery will pass into history.

First off in a system that DID have workplace councils everybody old enough to participate in the commune councils would be members of workplace councils or councils that were of a similar type. People who didn’t work for whatever reason or who do what is currently unpaid work would have their own councils. Absolutely no one would be disenfranchised by these types of councils organized around common activity/ affinity/ interest. For example maybe there would be councils for seniors or something. If you didn't care about voter anonmity you could give people who chose not to be a member of a council those extra votes in a commune council.

I don't know if children would be allowed to vote in communes- maybe they would always be allowed in which case there might be a type of workers' council for children at their school or something.

I think this has even been kind of the case historically- Sylvia Pankhurst nearly 100 years ago advocated for councils for "household soviets" so women who were housewives could be represented in the council system (she also advocated for simulataneously getting rid of the role of housewife in a socialist society); in many revolutions there's been councils for the unemployed, students, peasants etc.

"Household Soviets
In order that mothers and those who are organisers of the family life of the community may be adequately represented, and may take their due part in the management of society, a system of household Soviets shall be built up."- Sylvia Pankhurst, A Constitution for British soviets. Points for a communist programme

"But this time, the soviets were reproduced on a much wider scale--appearing among peasants, soldiers, even students and housewives--and were joined by other forms of workers' organizations."- Amy Muldoon How workers' power was organized

"The organization of the councils must be such that they embrace all of society. Assemblies will have to be constituted not only in work areas but in other areas as well. The delineation of the various tasks, powers, membership, etc., of these different forms of organization will be one of the first priorities of the assemblies."- Point Blank!- The power of the councils

The IWW for example doesn't exclude people not currently working or doing unpaid labour:

"(1) I am a student, a retired worker, and/or I am unemployed; can I still be an IWW member?

Yes. According to the IWW Constitution, under Article II (Membership), Section 1(b):

No unemployed or retired worker, no working-class student, apprentice, home- maker, prisoner or unwaged volunteer on a project initiated by the IWW or any subordinate body thereof shall be excluded from membership on the grounds that s/he is not currently receiving wages."

I worry that maybe people who didn't work who might participate in a commune might not want to be part of a workers' council for the not currently working because they might fear stigma over that but I don't know.

Do you not think that in a libertarian-communist society it wouldn't take some sort of federated cooperation to run a healthcare system or railways?

I'm not even against decentralization, deindustrialization or even primitivism as goals (I'll admit I'm personally somewhat still hopeful that current or future technology could be used to alleviate some suffering around the world) but I think given that we're currently living in a highly interdependent global economy to support our basic needs I think that we would need to be cooperating on an international level even if our end goal was to eliminate this interdependence.

I think there would still need to be cooperation to determine for example how to best divide our limited resources between different industries- how much do we devote for healthcare, how much we devote for making residences for people to live in, etc and what is the best way we provide those things or what combination of resources should we use to build those things ie. how much should we devote ourselves to producing steel and other materials.

It's interesting that you oppose workplace councils and instead just support the idea of regional councils/communes because I sort of thought it could be a good potential solution to the problem of people belonging to multiple councils- just make everyone part of only one council where all matters would be discussed.

However there's a few problems I have with this idea:

-I'm worried that there wouldn't always be people in your neighbourhood council who also worked at your workplaces, or that there'd only be a limited number. This would mean that in this setting you would be losing out on hearing their perspectives on issues which would be really relevant to you.

- Let's say that a decision being proposed at your neighbourhood council in your opinion might negatively effect your workplace. If you were the only one in your council you would be forced to speak publicly in the general assembly or maybe even have to attend the next higher level of council yourself because there was no one else in the council who had your perspective or could properly deliberate in favour of it. Even if there was a couple of other workers from your workplaces who were in your neighbourhood council your options would be limited.

In a workplace council you'd get to hear all the different perspectives of others who work in your workplace and you could participate in the discussion or sit back and vote in favour of one of the various different positions that might have been arrived at. It'd be a lot more likely that you would hear a perspective you agreed with and could vote in favour of.

I also think if instead of having delegates from different workplaces just expressing the concerns from 1 workplace you had everybody in a commune who might all work different jobs tell their delegate all their concerns from for example 50-100 different workplaces this would be really difficult for the delegate to understand and remember all this information and to not only state these concerns but also to deliberate in favour of them, determine whether proposals from other delegates conflicts with these concerns or make compromises that would best include all those concerns.

I'm not entirely against this idea but I think it would additionally be annoying and time-consuming if people had to give their delegate basically a 500 word essay or do some kind of interview or deliver a long speech about how a decision might affect their workplace or what their desires as workers were. Cornelius Castoriadis is often quoted as saying this (I copied and pasted this from the Anarchist FAQ):

"It might be claimed that the problem of numbers remains and that people never would be able to express themselves in a reasonable amount of time. This is not a valid argument. There would rarely be an assembly over twenty people where everyone would want to speak, for the very good reason that when there is something to be decided upon there are not an infinite number of options or an infinite number of arguments. In unhampered rank-and-file workers' gatherings (convened, for instance, to decide on a strike) there have never been 'too many' speeches. The two or three fundamental opinions having been voiced, and various arguments exchanged, a decision is soon reached.

[Political and Social Writings, vol. 2, pp. 144-5] "

I don't think this would always be the case though. For example if everybody in say a 100 person communal council worked at different workplaces making different things in different ways it makes sense to me that everyone might each have their own unique concerns about how decisions might affect them as workers. I feel like this means that everyone would probably have to speak at these meetings because there wouldn't be anybody else there who would know how they felt.

I think that every workplace as well would need to have at least some democratic coordination with other workplaces anyway as well.

I also think that delegates from a workplace, especially if there was delegates for minority positions as well would have better intuition over what their fellow workplace councils would want so when they went to discussion meetings with delegates from other workplaces I think there would be less chance that delegates would make wrong decisions that would later have to be corrected because they would have shared the same experiences with other people in their council and would not be having to also deliberate on behalf of a ton of other people who work a bunch of unique jobs they didn't work at.

I think it would just be a good idea in general for delegates from all the different workplaces to get together and discuss worker concerns and production.

Again this is only really a big problem with secret ballot. If people are perfectly happy to vote publicly and spend a significant time in meetings discussing and arguing about how a decision might affect them at their workplace then I don't think this is as much a problem. But if people don't want to do this

I'm worried that there won't be anyone to deliberate in favour of people's concerns as workers and there wouldn't be any balance between what people want as workers and what they want as consumers of goods and services.

I'm worried the way you describe it two things would happen: people who were not wanting to speak up at meetings for whatever reason would have their workplaces negatively affected by decisions their commune delegate made. Secondly if everybody did speak up this would make these meetings really long and probably almost everybody would have to practically be acting as their own delegate whether they wanted to or not.

I still think workers' councils have problems though. My only thought to deal with my original question would be that everybody would have to be part of the same number of workers' councils at a time or that people could only vote in one of them at a time or something. But I don't know.

EDIT: Sorry for bumping my thread, I edited a word and I guess that counts as a new post?