On the second thought, it would be more "tactical" (interesting) to post the list of those 10 principles for your judgement first without mentioning the source ...

Some comments in response to Bruce's post:

Decentralization does not mean lack of "infrastructure". It just means that the "infrastructure" (government) is decentralized, i.e., all that concerns the local group/community is decided only by them, no higher levels of governance have any business in that. Where interests overlap, higher level coordination kicks in.

The same about personal liberty. Note that is is limited by the condition "not to do any harm to others". That is, one's unlimited freedom (liberty) stops when other persons' freedoms begin. The same as above, when interests (freedoms, liberties) overlap, coordination is necessary.

Of course, I do not advocate that we transform ourselves in a trade union (syndicalism). But those principles seems to be universal to me. They may be more easily implementable among the trade unions because the workers are already quite equal among themselves. But these seems to be principles accepted by most modern anarchists except perhaps for some fringe groups. And these are direct-democratic principles to me.

The third largest trade union confederation in Spain, CGT, [www.cgt.es], is organized on those 10 principles. It has 70 thousand members and represents one million workers. So you see that such DD can work well in large groups. They use them not as a closed doctrine, but as guiding principles.

The main purpose of my original post was to show that they may be many other groups thinking direct-democratically. We should not pick up and dwell on differences among us and them, but try to find what we have in common, and join forces around such common democratic principles.

Of course, the question is why to stick with labels, such as anarchism, that were discredited by their enemies. But the same can be said about the term Democracy. It has also been completely discredited ...

Mirek

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2007 09:58AM by MiKolar.