[iDC] What is Left? / What Does a Distributed Politics Look Like?

[Janet Hawtin]

On 9/19/07, Stephen Downes <stephen at downes.ca> wrote:
>
>  Well OK.

Ripper Stephen thanks many thoughts.

>  I have always described myself as 'left' and I have been described as
> everything from a Marxist to a 'moderate socialist and radical democrat'. I
> have run politically from the left side of the spectrum, and when asked to
> describe my politics, will either choose 'very liberal' or 'socialist',
> depending on what the choices are. So I am in a position to offer a
> response.

>  In any case, we are in such a state of flux that it probably makes more
> sense to speak, not of what the left is, but what it ought to be. Not so
> much from the perspective of political advocacy - as in, 'we ought to save
> the environment' and 'we ought to support labour' - but as in what ought to
> be thought of as the foundational views of the left. Because it's very easy
> to get this wrong, and misleadingly wrong, by glossing what is the
> fundamental distinction.

It is a kind of good citizenship.
A respect for context. For aspects of our ecological and social
systems which may not have voice or vote but are a part of our
custodianship.

I am responsible for myself, for my impact on others, I do useful things.
Is the set of starting points for me.
Not that I'm good at them but that context is important.

>  Or another example, a commonly made distinction between right and left,
> specifically, that the right is about 'individuals' while the left is about
> the 'collective'. It is very tempting to take this definition, and the term
> 'socialism' suggests that the left concerns itself mostly with society,
> mostly with the affairs of groups, or more, in advocating the rights of
> groups over those of the individual. But to simply state the distinction
> thus is to miss some important differences between the right and the left.
> Because the right will advocate for the rights of the group when it suits
> them - when promoting nationalism and patriotism, for example, or when
> appealing to people's religious convictions. And it leaves the left open to
> a straw man attack, that it is not concerned with the rights of the
> individual, which is simply false.

Both are industrial model systems which value the vantage point of a
small number of people from the top of an abstracted summary of 'what
is'.
imho Both approaches do not have useful fingertip knowledge from that
whole of system perspective and so the voices which are most audible
are those of the abstraction systems themselves. Lessig describes this
as government only being able to hear 'as money would tell it'.

They are also systems where we abdicate our own responsibility for 'what is'
And as our systems of governance become more insistent on only hearing
voices from within the echo chamber (see AU APEC meeting) the public
is functionally disenfranchised.

Government spending is not on provision of long term infrastructure
and custodianship but more focused on seed funding and launches for
projects which will 'look after themselves' after the political launch
moment is done with.
And the public watch big brother teen idol and other kinds of
abstracted circuses representing participation in governance.

>  Another common way of distinguishing between left and right is to
> characterize the left as the party of 'equality' while thinking of the right
> as the party of 'privilege'. This certainly has historical origins. But it
> again allows for misinterpretation. We are familiar with the misuse of
> 'equality' as a means of preserving privilege, for example. Opponents of
> affirmative action argue against the practice on the grounds that it results
> in 'unequal' treatment. The simple doctrine of 'equality' needs to be
> refined, to become something like 'equality of opportunity' or
> 'proportionality'. With each refinement the basic justice of the position is
> obscured, as the practice seems to allow more and more unequal treatment.
> And then there is the clincher, that to any simple observation, people in
> fact are unequal, and that no amount of 'social engineering' is going to
> change that.

I think because we have abdicated our authority choice and action to
wider systems we have lost skills in personal social justice.

The fences and roles of industrial models provide a community of
compliant people with a balancing community of maverick people who
kick an insensate big system.
This means the discourse of the folks who are not compliant tends to
be about conspiracy of system because both positions (compliance and
maverick) are
grounded in the industrial structure.
This means people comply or kick.

I think the opportunity offered by networks, distributed communities and
collaborative practice are a kind of rediscovery of ourselves as
responsible contributors. Chomsky wrote in 1971 about people able to
angage in industry as free people. I think we have some opportunities
to experiment with those skill based and negotiated communities now.

We have system in ourselves and individuality in ourselves.
We choose what purpose to collaborate in and participate in negotiating
'fit for purpose' contributions and criteria for those projects.
We are learning not to kick because we are peers. We are all people having a go.
We are all individually responsible for custodianship.

>  Atomism is an important doctrine and is at the heart of most of our
> contemporary structures and institutions, which is why parties of the right
> are today characterized as 'conservatives'. Atomism is, at heart, the
> doctrine that the qualities of the whole are are not the consequence of
> properties of the whole, but rather, are a consequence of the properties of
> the individuals that make up the whole. Just as, say, the nature of the bar
> of lead is not the 'leadness' that the bar as a whole somehow possesses, but
> rather, is the result of the nature of the individual lead atoms that make
> up the bar. In the same way, if a society is, say, 'just', it is not because
> of some obscure property of being a 'just society', but rather, is made up
> of the 'justice' in each individual member of society.

Yes and of their ability to get good information on what a just
outcome looks like.

>  As follows: the right, on the one hand, celebrates the individualism of
> each atom, but at the same time, depends on the purity of each atom. If the
> 'leadness' of a lead bar is mad up of the 'leadness' of each of its atoms,
> then atoms that are not lead make the bar less lead-like. The nature of a
> lead bar comes from its individual atoms, but the value of a lead bar is
> derived from each of its atoms being the same. This is why it is essential,
> from the perspective of the right, to preach the apparently contradictory
> doctrines of individualism and conformity.

Yes this is the industrial logic.

>  Again, I want to stress that this theory is what informs our social and
> political structures. Essentially, our institutions are made up of 'atoms'
> of similar types. Hence, in a democracy, each person receives a vote, but
> the government is formed by people who all vote the same way. Similarly,
> religious faith is a personal decision - this is enshrined in various
> constitutions - but religious faiths are characterized as people who have
> all reach the same religious point of view. And nations, being composed of
> people who have the same race, the same language, the same culture, are
> typically depicted as people who have the same religion as well. Which is
> where we get not only the idea that the United states (say) is a 'Christian
> country', but also, the idea that it would be stronger if it were more
> Christian.

Which is interesting given the kinds of things we are learning about
monoculture in other contexts. I have been reading a book called
Pandemic about bird flu
and it speaks to this kind of normalising habit.

>  We can see here how the depiction of the left, or of left-leaning causes,
> as a 'mass movement' simply plays right into this picture. By accepting the
> idea of 'mass movement', we are either accepting that political movements
> are made up of masses of same-thinking individuals, or we are presenting
> some sort of (fictional) 'general will' that will be ascribed to, or imposed
> in some way, on the individuals comprising the mass. And there then comes to
> be little to choose from between a fiction imposed by the left and some set
> of principles, whatever they happen to be, articulated by the
> self-designated representatives from the right. Moreover, since the
> representatives from the right have generally some advantage of wealth or
> position, it appears that there must be something to what they are saying,
> because they have achieved this position and wealth.

It is a humanist perspective in the short sighted sense.
There is no custodianship, ecology, wider social responsibility in that math.
Some trees are taller and some are wider. Some are hardwood etc.
Measuring one dimension, economic height, is what our systems are
designed to do.
If money was food we have ideas around what too much food looks like.
We do not have a concept of 'enough' for money.
There is an email chain thingo going around where a child and father
wish each other well.
"May you have enough"
Which I thought was something I could stand to hear more of.
In part just because when people are content there is room for caring
of other aspects,
and in part because it is a recognition of these dimensions of
contribution which are not usually audible. Ownership and
responsibility for self in context.

>  Historically, the left has achieved success by emulating the strategies and
> tactics of the right. The difference has been in the determination of the
> beneficiaries of those strategies and tactics. Thus, when the industrialists
> made themselves wealthy by owning the means of production, members of the
> left sought to seize the means of production. When the right wing resorted
> to military means to assert its dominance, the left resorted to military
> means in kind. When the right adopted the mechanism of the democratic vote
> (supplanted by influence-generating systems to sway voters) the left also
> adopted the mechanisms of political parties and propaganda. But what is
> important, is that none of these strategies - not unionism, not communism,
> not social democracy - defines the left.

Industrial entity A v Industrial entity B
Neither with a commitment to whole of system?

>  So what does? My own view is that, philosophically, we could see leftism as
> a blend between the ideas of Immanual Kant and John Stuart Mill. And,
> specifically, the following: from Mill, the idea that the greatest social
> good is achieved when each person is able to pursue his or her own good in
> his or her own way; and from Kant, the idea that each person is, and ought
> to be treated as, an end, and not a means. These are, I think, principles
> with which proponents would agree - and more, principles with which, when
> pressed, proponents of the right would disagree. Because, while at first
> glance these principles appear to be atomist principles, they are not, and
> they are not in the way that signifies what (to people on the left)
> constitutes the fundamental flaw of conservative philosophy.

Yes this is what I took from Chomsky
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m9lQIEYRCQM

>  We need to look at Rousseau to understand this. "Man is born free, and yet
> everywhere he is in chains." Why is this? Where does our imprisonment, our
> enslavement, come from? From the requirement to be the same. From the
> requirement that we constitute, in our atomism, one of the whole. When
> proponents of the right argue for, say, the freedom to pursue the good, they
> do not mean a person's 'his or her own good', but rather, some sort of
> absolutist declaration of what constitutes 'the good', whether it be derived
> from religion or from misguided sense of national purity. And when
> proponents of the right consider the 'value' of a person, they see this
> value as conditional, based on a person's natural abilities, based on
> whether they 'contribute to society', based on whether they are of the right
> faith or the right nationality. People are means to make a company great, to
> make a nation great.

Impact on others.

>  The fundamental principle of the left is that each individual person is of
> value in and of him or her self, that this value is unconditional, and that
> derived from this value ought to be certain (socially constructed) rights
> and privileges. This is the origin of the doctrine of equality, this idea
> that each person ought to have an equitable share of the pie, a fair shot at
> the brass ring, or a right to a say at the meeting. This is the origin of
> the idea that social systems that leave people in poverty, in starvation,
> dispossessed and enslaved, is fundamentally wrong - not because of some
> higher principle, about the nature of the world or of society, but because
> of the simple truth, that each person, including the indigent, has a basic
> and fundamental standing in society.

And as a species in ecology we have not chosen to think this way about
the mix of biodiversity in our system either.

>  But why? You may ask. The answer is two-fold. First, in atomism, the who
> may never be more than the sum of the parts. Atomism is a quantitative
> philosophy. We don't ask what, where or why, we ask, "how much?" And second,
> because atomism is a philosophy based on sameness, the whole may never be
> better than the best of its parts. The best a bar of lead can get is to be
> as good (as pure) as the best lead atom in the bar. The point of atomism is
> not merely individualism, but that some individuals in society set a
> standard, to which the rest ought to aspire. But also, it is the idea that
> the decisions made by such a society, will be the decisions made by
> individuals, with which the rest will concur. The best decision, the best
> ideas, a society can have, are the ideas articulated by an individual, to
> which the rest will adhere.

Or the negotiated choices based on open and accurate information about
very diverse values. Fit for purpose.
Finding means to have rule of law or common ground in a context where we
need to also be able to have diverse ecological and cultural responses
is a part of
the new skills and distributed politics I feel we need to develop.
I do not think we have developed systems to date which effectively
govern at the scale and from the vantage points that are currently
used. The processes do not have the focal length and clarity or
fingertip knowledge to be responsive, responsible.
We need a kind of humility in economics and governance which brings it
back in touch with the ecologies and communities which contribute to
them.

>  But we know the weaknesses of each of those two parts. First, we know that
> (to use the popular slogan) the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
> That a population - or even a mass of metal - has properties that are over
> and above the properties of its individual atoms. And second (and
> crucially), we know that these properties are better than the properties of
> any individual in society. 'Better' not so much in the sense of 'ethically
> good' (though a strong case could be made for this) but, more concretely,
> 'better' in the sense of 'more accurate'. If the ship of state is governed
> by one person, the captain, then it has a greater probability of hitting an
> iceberg than if it is governed by the whole.
>
>  What the left has lacked for many years (what it has always lacked, in my
> view) is an articulation of why the whole is greater than the sum of the
> parts, of how that whole comes to be expressed, and in the context where the
> fundamental principles, just articulated, are essential elements of that
> articulation, and not accidental correlates that could, in a contingency, be
> ignored. In other words, it needs an articulation of why the whole is
> greater than some of the parts in such a way that the essential liberty and
> standing of the individual is never threatened.
>
>  And that is accomplished by defining the whole as the result in autonomous,
> thinking, communicating, rational autonomous agents, rather than merely
> passive elemental atoms. Where the whole is created, not by what we are, but
> by what we do, such that where the actions of each person are seeing always
> as contributing to the whole, not merely 'adding to' it or 'subtracting
> from' it. By viewing, in other words, society, not as a mass, not as a
> machine, but as an ecology, a network.

Yes.

>  In an ecology and in a network, the properties of the whole are not created
> from the sameness of the components, but rather, as a result of the
> interactions of the components. Consequently, the properties of the network
> are not contained in any one individual in the network. The network is not
> some big copy of an individual of the network. Nor does it operate under the
> guidance and direction of one entity in the network. If we think of a
> forest, for example. It is made up of a mixture of trees and shrubs and
> birds and bears. There is no one part of the forest that the rest copies.
> There is no 'sameness' in a forest, except at very superficial levels. And
> the forest isn't governed in any sense by any of its members, or by
> anything. The forest becomes what it is as a result of the interactions of
> its members, such that every entity in the forest contributes to what the
> forest becomes.

Yes

>  From this perspective, we can now begin to articulate a political position,
> based on the premises describing what makes for an effective network - or,
> say, what makes for a healthy forest. These are principles that govern the
> effectiveness of networks in general, of which a society is only one
> example, and hence can be described, and studied, empirically, Hence, what I
> offer here is only my first estimation, based on an understanding of
> mathematical, computational and physical structures of networks. These are
> properties of the individuals in a network - and I think, we can see, that
> the combination of these four properties, adds up not only to a formula for
> successful networks, but also as a formula describing the basic dignity of
> each member in society.

>  First, diversity. A successful network fosters difference, not sameness.
> There is no presumption of a 'pure' prototype, a creed or a faith, a
> doctrine or fundamental sent of principles to which all members of a society
> must adhere. One of the fundamental principles of Marxism is indeed a
> principle of diversity, not equality: "from each according to his means, to
> each according to his needs." Intuitively, we understand this. We know that
> a forest needs to be composed of a variety of trees and animals; when it is
> composed of a single type of tree, and few animals, it cannot survive, and
> must be tended, and even then is more likely to be wiped out by a virus or
> disease. Diversity is what Richard Florida writes about when he talks about
> the 'Creative Class', the most productive element of society.

The Pandemic book has been useful for me with these ideas.
I think we are not being responsible in our approach both to
custodianship of diverse ecologies or indeed to the kinds of patterns
which are authentic and structural parts of this system from a genetic
perspective. There is imho great risk in unpacking
life forms especially with no due care or even interest in impact beyond profit.
Collapse of bee hives in the USA might be a wake up call from this perspective.

>  Diversity is what propels some of the major planks of leftist thought: the
> idea that we live in a multicultural society, the idea that we ought to
> encourage and endorse people of minority faiths, values and statuses. The
> encourage of diversity is part of what propels a leftists' celebration of
> gay-lesbian causes, aboriginal rights, minority rights, and more, while at
> the same time encouraging people in the expression of their religious
> beliefs, not to mention expressions of culture and identity in art, music
> and drama.
>
>  Second, and related, autonomy. Where the individual knowers contributing of
> their own accord, according to their own knowledge, values and decisions,
> rather than at the behest of some external agency seeking to magnify a
> certain point of view through quantity rather than reason and reflection.
> Without autonomy, diversity is impossible and sameness becomes the
> predominate value of society. Autonomy is fundamental to human dignity, for
> without it, a person is unable to contribute in any meaningful way to the
> social fabric.

Agreed
The challenges for us are around finding ways to negotiate effective outcomes
without relying on fences to participation. I think free software and
wikipedia are very interesting experiments in this kind of social
practice for a common outcome.
As more people become more experienced in negotiating for a specific
purpose and choosing their forum based on their own goals I think we
will be able to be more sophisticated and subtle and constructive.

Currently there are people who enter participative spaces either
overtly interested in disruption or authentically coming from a
perspective where they assume right of way.
Both of these challenges feel like they could be worked through if
there is no overall benefit in disruption and if right of way is not
rewarded. Engineering systems for effective support of negotiated
diverse and constructive work is an important aspect of distributed
politics.

>  Autonomy underlies the left's interest in social justice and equality.
> People who live in conditions of poverty and dependence cannot express their
> will. The right wing often depicts the free market merely as the (best
> possible) means to distribute resources, howver, the market, as it now
> exists, has become the means through which we employ scarcity in order to
> create relationships of power, where one person, the one with the resources,
> is able to deprive the second person of his or her autonomy. Wage-labour
> isn't simply about the inequality of resources, it is about the capacity of
> one party to impose its will on the other. Leftists believe that market
> exchanges are and ought to be exchanges of multual value, not conditions of
> servitude imposed by one against the other, and hence seek the
> redistribution of resources in order to maximize autonomy.

Yes

> Third, interactivity. Knowledge is the product of an interaction between the
> members, not a mere aggregation of the members' perspectives. A different
> type of knowledge is produced one way as opposed to the other. Just as the
> human mind does not determine what is seen in front of it by merely counting
> pixels, nor either does a process intended to create public knowledge.
> Without getting too far from the topic of this discussion, knowledge is not
> merely the accumulation of facts and data, nor even the derivation of laws
> and principles, but rather, is the recognition of states of affairs.
> Recognition is not possible without interactivity, because recognition
> entails an understanding of the relations between points, which requires
> several perspectives on those points.

Yes decisions based on detail as well as a sense of context which are
more explicit and authentic and less binary.

> Interactivity lies behind the leftists insistence on matters of process. It
> is not simply the case that 'the results matter', because without process,
> getting the right results is a matter of luck, not policy.  An interactive
> process values and respects the rights of each of its members to speak and
> be heard. It is therefore a statement of the fundamental freedoms of society
> - of expression, of the press, of assembly. It is also the value that
> fosters respect for the principles and structures of society, the laws and
> institutions. It's why we have trials - where the matter can be discussed
> and brought out into the open - rather than mere rulings, and why things
> like arbitrary detentions and sentencing are contrary to the principles of a
> just society.

> Fourth, and again related, openness. The is, in effect, the statement that
> all members of society constitute the governance of society. From a network
> perspective, the principle of openness entails a mechanism that allows a
> given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted
> with by others. It is not simply a principle of connectivity between the
> members - though it is in part that - but also the principle that there is
> no single channel or proprietary mechanism through which that connection is
> established. It is, at its base level, at once the principle that there
> ought to be a language in which to communicate, but also, that no person
> should own that language, and that there ought not be any particular
> language.

Yes which is wny authentically open standards for information and
technology are so important. Interoperability and data integrity
should not be compromised by profit in distributed systems. That kind
of lock in is too expensive. It costs clarity and flexibility.
It is corrupting in the sense of breaking up of data with noisy
artefacts and in the control of data sense. We need to separate the
message from the vehicle and presentation in a legal and product
sense.

> In computer science openness means open standards and open source software;
> in political discourse it means open processes and accessible rule of law.
> It means that the mechanisms of governance ought to be accessible to each
> person in society, which results in policy running the gamut from electoral
> spending limits to voting reform to citizen consultancy and open government,
> and ultimately, direct governance by the people of their own affairs,
> self-governance, in the truest sense.

Yes.  Governance being a process of ensuring clarity of information flow and
access to mixes of viewpoints, experiments, ideas which might inform
local practice.

> These may not be the only principles, and they may not be the most
> fundamental, but I offer them as a statement of what it means, and the most
> elemental level, to be left. These principles offers us some sort of hope in
> society, a hope that we as a whole can be better than the best of us, but
> also with the understanding that this is made possible, not through
> repression and control, but only through raising each and every one of us to
> the highest level possible, to participate most fully and most
> wholeheartedly, in society.

There certainly is no hope in systems which do not value these principles.
On the most fundamental level they are unhinged from their foundations
and are operating like a wheel which has come off a car and is
bounding down a road with its own momentum regardless of local risk or
wider impact.
Ecology is the fundamental system on which we build and we are unable
to hear or to be effective custodians in the current systems. This is
not sustainable.
Generating broken states for fun and profit (oil or any other
strategic advantage)
is a corruption of the ecology of a species in a local context and has
impact on the wider ecologies in that space.

Thinking about our choices with regard to power in the no
nuclear/solar/wind/water sense and power in the economic industrial
government sense I think that you could probably call me a
conservative. If you permit me to reclaim that word for meanings which
are more
grounded in ecological and social and biodiversity and in caring about
the impact of our actions on our planet long term.

Janet