Thread by @MesMitch

The two most poisonous realities of modern industrial society are 1) the fundamental split between management and managed, government and governed, and 2) the vast array of mechanisms by which all aspects of our existence (subjective and objective, spiritual and material, all of

them defined by that management/managed dichotomy) are co-ordinated to systemic ends which are not shaped by human needs.

Our pseudo-democracy is pseudo precisely because it purports to give a population control over a set of mechanisms which came into being to control

populations - to conscript them and put them to work to systemic ends. The liberal nation state came into being to do just this, reflecting a set of needs defined by an emerging capitalism.

A real democratic intervention would involve reversing this centralization.

Technology, created and controlled by capital, created the need to bring the co-ordinating state into being. Technology has advanced to the point where this can be reversed, with humans collectively and democratically managing themselves on the local level, and with the "whole",

to the extent it continues to exist at all, reduced to something decidedly less than the sum of its parts. Less in terms of control and governance, less in terms of its symbolic role in shaping our understanding of the world....

As formal worker involvement in management

increases, it can reach a tipping point: workers can erase the management/managed distinction itself, and transform companies into actual democracies. Worker co-operatives, or something like them. True democracy is really only something that can exist within institutions.

Democracy that grants control over institutions, institutions that themselves remain hierarchical, will always be something else - something that exists on a spectrum of semi-democracy that includes the United States and the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.