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Title: Majority Rule Author: James Herod Date: January 2001 Language: en Topics: democracy
Majority rule is just a voting procedure for resolving disagreements
within a deliberative assembly. Sometimes it might be combined with
other rules, like those requiring unanimous or two-thirds votes on
certain issues. But what voting procedures were used to select the
voting procedures? That is, what rule was used for the vote to select
majority rule? - majority rule, unanimity, two-thirds, or what? And how
was that decision made? We are clearly in an infinite regress here.
In reality, the establishment, for any assembly, of the original
procedures for voting usually happens by fiat or by revolution (given
the rarity of unanimity). Thus democracy can usually only be established
in-between regimes. In the case of the US constitution for example, the
fifty-five members of the constitutional convention decided that the
constitution would be considered adopted if nine out of the thirteen
colonies approved it, with the constitution simply being imposed by
force on the remaining four colonies. (As it happened, only two colonies
refused ratification at the time, North Carolina and Rhode Island, both
of which had ratified by 1789, and 1790 respectively.) In the case of
international treaties, the writers of the treaty usually include rules
for adoption in the treaty itself, stipulating how many countries need
to ratify the treaty before it comes into force. This works of course
only if the treaty contains enforcement powers, so that the terms of the
treaty can be imposed by force on nations who don't ratify it. In the
absence of enforcement powers, a nation can simply ignore the treaty.
National parliaments do have enforcement powers of course. A
nation-state is by definition a monopolizer of violence, so-called
legitimate violence (that is, the parliament defines its own violence as
legitimate and everyone else's as illegitimate). National governments
have armed forces, intelligence agencies, police, and secret police at
their disposal to enforce the will of the parliamentary majority on the
minority in the parliament and on everyone else in the nation. Any other
police or armed forces within the nation are declared illegal. In the
setting of the nation-state system, minorities who refuse to go along
with majority decisions have only one recourse (other than simply
disobeying and facing fines and prison) - civil war. They can attempt to
secede from the nation (from the decision-making unit), and establish a
nation of their own, with its own parliament (a separate decision making
unit).
The situation is somewhat different for sub-national organizations like
corporations and voluntary associations. Unless the decisions of these
groups can be linked to national laws, and thus be enforced by the
national government (and many decisions of capitalist corporations are),
they cannot be imposed by force, since the organizations have no
policemen to arrest and imprison those who disobey. About all they can
do is expel the disobedient from the organization, revoking their
membership. Members of an organization who come to disagree too severely
with the policies of that organization (however established, either
through majority rule or management), simply leave the organization, as
a rule. A minority can also attempt to expel the majority of course, and
this happens all the time (as in a takeover). Associations are rather
often taken over by minorities within them which contrive in one way or
another to force the majority out of the project. There are also the
numerous cases of splits within an association, wherein a minority
leaves in mass and establishes another organization. The history of
political parties, especially on the left, is replete with such splits.
The principle of majority rule can itself sometimes lead to a split.
Let's say that a small group of people get together and establish an
association in order to accomplish certain goals. They are all agreed
upon these goals (tasks, objectives), and they also agree to govern
their association by direct democracy, using majority rule to resolve
disagreements. The founders therefore are very clear about what they
want to do. But new members of course are needed, in order for the
project to grow and accomplish its objectives. So new members are
recruited, all of whom have to agree to the original objectives and
established voting procedures as a condition of being admitted as
members. Nevertheless, the recruitment and admission process is rather
different than the deep commitment to certain goals that brought the
original founders together, and over time, a majority can slowly emerge
in the project which wants to take the project in a different direction
than the one originally intended by the founders. Founders can thus find
themselves in a situation, through the principle of majority rule, of
losing their project, and all the years of effort that went into
building it. They are faced with the dilemma of either leaving this
project (the one they originally founded) and starting all over again in
a new one, or of leaving and abandoning their goals altogether, or of
staying in and working toward goals that they didn't originally endorse.
It is because of the possibility of this happening that founders of
projects sometimes eject majority rule and choose instead some kind of
elite rule, whereby the original founders of a project can keep control
of it. This is actually the predominant organizational form in our
society, in corporations and in all hierarchically organized
associations. These organizations recruit people to work on the project,
wage-earners for corporations and members for voluntary associations
(because almost all human projects require more than one or a few
persons in order to be accomplished), but control of the organization
remains in the hands of a few. In the case of corporations, majority
rule (workers control or democracy at the workplace) is obviously
anathema to capitalists because it would destroy their objective of
making profit. Even if the worker-controlled enterprise stayed in the
market and continued to make profit (rather than switch to cooperative
labor and leave the market), the profit would not go to the original
owners, but would be appropriated by all the employees. This is why
capitalists fight the movement for workplace democracy tooth and nail.
It's a life and death struggle for them.
In non-capitalist organizations, elite control may enable the founders
to keep the organization on course for quite some time, but ultimately,
it is no guarantee. Why? Because disagreements can emerge among the
original founders, as new situations and new issues arise, over what
direction the organization should take in light of these new
circumstances. So the belief that elite control of an association is a
solution to the problem of splits is ultimately an illusion. Before
long, we always end up right back at majority/minority dynamics
regarding the goals and procedures of the project.
The same process will be at work in our neighborhood assemblies. Assume
for example that at the very first meeting of a neighborhood assembly a
proposal is made for a certain set of voting procedures, and that this
proposal wins unanimous support. Every member of the assembly agrees to
resolve disagreements in this certain way and to abide by decisions made
like that. What happens then if a new member moves into the neighborhood
or a child reaches maturity and starts participating in the
deliberations of the assembly? Are the voting procedures going to be
voted on anew every time a new member comes into the assembly? Surely
not. New members will have to accept the procedures that already exist.
The assembly may decide to change them periodically, but that is a
different matter. Thus the unanimity has disappeared because new members
did not explicitly agree to abide by the procedures (although I suppose
acceptance of the procedures could be made a condition for membership).
But what if the procedures were voted on anew with the addition of every
new member? Wouldn't the unanimity eventually break down anyway? Surely
so. It's easy to see then that even if an assembly starts out unanimous,
as regards voting procedures, it is unlikely to remain that way, because
sooner or later a person will come along who will disagree (or some
original member will change their mind), and thus break the unanimity.
Original unanimity is therefore no solution to the problem of splits and
disagreement. There is no escaping disagreement, and the
minority/majority dynamics these disagreements create.
As an aside: What if a majority emerges in an assembly that doesn't like
democracy any longer, doesn't think direct democracy works very well,
doesn't like majority rule? Instead, this majority wants to elect
leaders and turn over decision making to them (or even worse, wants to
simply accept leaders without even electing them). Can a majority in
such an assembly use majority rule to abolish majority rule? Obviously
not. This would be totally contradictory, and would represent in fact a
coup, a counter-revolution, if they were able to get away with it. A
majority which favors tyranny cannot use majority rule to justify its
preference. But what if a majority in an assembly did so vote? What
then? The minority that wants to keep democracy would have to revolt,
reject the majority decision, and struggle to defeat the anti-democratic
majority.
This shows us that even if there is unanimity to begin with about
accepting majority rule as a way to resolve disagreements, this
unanimity can break down. Actually, it can break down around almost any
intensely felt opposition to a majority decision, and not just when the
majority decides to abolish majority rule. This example shows us also
that democracy, if we ever get it, will involve us in an unending
struggle to keep it, although that struggle may lessen in intensity as
we gain decades and hopefully centuries of experience with it, and
democratic values permeate deeper and deeper into our cultures and
personalities.
Let's throw another ingredient into the mix. Let's assume that our
neighborhood assembly does not have police at its disposal, so that the
majority cannot impose its will on the minority by force.
A digression: We might want to remind ourselves that the earth was
covered for tens of thousands of years with hunting and gathering tribes
of human beings, and they had no police forces. Also, for the past
several thousand years, the vast majority of humans have lived in
peasant villages, and societies comprised mostly of peasant villages,
and there were no police forces there either. The empires that were
sometimes superimposed on these peasant societies had police, tax
collectors, and soldiers whose reach extended, usually quite
superficially, down into peasant villages, but the villages themselves
were free of police, and they managed just fine.
The situation started to change rather drastically with the emergence of
capitalism in Europe nearly five hundred years ago. Capitalists required
governments which could monopolize violence through armed force, in
order to defend and enforce capitalist imperatives. So police power, and
violence, extended deeper and deeper into the society. Peasant villages
were slowly destroyed in Europe over the past several centuries. They
were nevertheless still quite prominent even as late as the second world
war, and it has only been since then that this destruction has been
carried, on a large scale, to the rest of the world, with peasant
societies disappearing almost everywhere. The last half century has seen
the final rout of the peasant world in most of Europe, with the process
well along elsewhere.
The European settler governments that formed the United States are a
somewhat different case, in that they rapidly destroyed whatever
hunting-gathering tribes and peasant villages that were already here,
while the settler society itself never had autonomous peasant villages.
This society has been capitalist from day one. US citizens then have
been living so long in a social order founded on violence that it's hard
for them to believe that there could ever be life without it. They have
never known anything else, and have no memories of a peasant society
before capitalism.
I sketched the above history just to remind us that police forces are
not an inherent, inevitable, universal feature of human life. We lived
without them once, and we can do so again. But just try to convince
someone living in the United States, for example, that we could arrange
our social life in such a way that we wouldn't need police, and see how
far you get.
To return now to the issue I had raised right before this digression: if
neighborhoods do not have police forces to impose the will of the
majority on the minority, what bearing does this have on the relations
between the majority and the minority within our assemblies?
In the absence of an armed police force to impose majority decisions
through arrest, fines, and imprisonment, we will certainly want to be
careful though to avoid the following peculiar situation: It could come
to be thought that members of an assembly who disagree with a decision
of the assembly don't have to abide by it. In other words, the decision
of the majority is not thought to be binding on the minority. Wouldn't
this embody perfectly the principle of 'self-assumed political
obligation'? - each individual will only obey those decisions which they
have personally agreed to.
But then why have an assembly at all? Why go through all the trouble and
expense of building meeting halls, gathering together, debating the
issues, and voting, if the people who vote against a proposal can ignore
it? At the core of 'self-assumed political obligation' therefore must
lie a commitment to procedures for resolving disagreements. Without this
commitment to these procedures, and the commitment to abide by decisions
that are made following these procedures, democracy is impossible. All
you have is a hall full of fanatic individualists who waste their time
discussing and voting, only to do just what they each wanted to do
anyway. There are plenty of such fanatic individualists already around,
persons who would never commit in advance to a procedure for reaching
cooperative policies, believing as they do in the absolute sovereignty
of the individual, wherein they do only what they want when they want.
Such persons are as great a threat to democracy, perhaps even a greater
threat given contemporary culture, than tyrants.
We have already seen however that a commitment to abide by a procedure
for resolving disagreements, say majority rule, can breakdown too, in
extreme cases. Certainly, if a majority decides to murder a circle of
members of the assembly, those targeted for execution are not going to
stick by their previous commitment to majority rule. It will break down
too if a majority decides to abolish democracy in favor of tyranny. In
fact, it can break down on almost any extreme rejection of a majority
decision by the minority.
In deliberative assemblies therefore, which are based on free
association and voluntary compliance rather than compulsion and
violence, what it really boils down to is that on every issue the
minority must decide whether or not to go along with the majority, even
though they may disagree. On routine matters, the decision to go along
might be assumed to be routine too. But in cases of severe disagreement,
whether or not to abide immediately comes to the fore.
There is another peculiar situation that we must avoid (which is really
the same situation, but from another angle): It could come to be thought
that the assembly must reach 'consensus' on every issue. The only
practical meaning of consensus (although this is rarely admitted by its
proponents) is unanimity. The belief that every last person in an
assembly must agree to a proposal before the assembly can act is surely
one of the most destructive and misguided beliefs to have emerged in the
opposition movements in the past few decades. What this belief often
ends up doing is holding the entire assembly hostage to a minority of
one, or a minority of a few. It also results in extreme pressure being
brought to bear on dissidents. The debate starts to become dishonest and
compulsive.
Not every person has to agree with every decision. All that is needed is
for every person to agree to go along with the decision, even though
they disagree with it. This is a much different thing, and retains an
open and honest expression of disagreement. Whereas rule by consensus,
so-called, tends to suppress such disagreements.
What is needed in our deliberative assemblies is a measure of the
intensity of opposition to any given proposal. To my knowledge, this has
almost never existed so far. Intensity varies in both degree and number.
There could be a majority of fifty-one intensely in favor, and a
minority of forty-nine mildly opposed. There could be a majority of
ninety mildly in favor and a minority of ten intensely opposed. And so
forth. It is this mix that is crucial in majority-minority dynamics in
deliberative assemblies.
We need a two-stage voting system. The first vote measures approval or
disapproval of the proposal. The second vote measures the intensity of
opposition -- disagree but willing to go along, disagree and willing to
go along with minor changes, intensely disagree and not willing to go
along, and so forth. This would give the assembly the knowledge it needs
to proceed. If it finds that there exists a small minority that
intensely disagrees and refuses to go along, then it knows that it has
to back up and rethink the proposition. It knows that it has to struggle
to compromise, and work through the issue until a proposal can be
devised that everyone can agree to go along with, even though some may
still disagree with it. This would also bring into the open any minority
that regularly blocks majority decisions, and would lead to political
struggle around this issue, with the possibility that the minority, or
majority itself, might be changed. This would be an open and honest
voting system, rather than the vague, often manipulative and dishonest,
struggle (often without even voting!) for so-called consensus.
If no compromise can be reached that an intensely opposed minority can
agree to go along with, then obviously the assembly cannot have a policy
on that issue, not without further political struggle to resolve the
disagreement. But given the imperatives of cooperative social life,
everyone will become acutely aware of the necessity of having collective
decisions, if we are to succeed in carrying out any project. It is the
rare instance when we can each do our own thing.
Democracy has been a long time coming, and will still be a long time yet
in coming. By democracy I mean, not just majority rule, but the use of
human intelligence, by everyone, to consciously shape the cultural and
social arrangements within which we live. We will never have complete
control over our social lives of course, even with the most thoroughly
direct democracy possible, because of the phenomenon of unintended
consequences. But we can move a long way in that direction.
The idea of democracy existed already in antiquity, and was practiced
briefly then. It has reappeared sporadically since then, in medieval
towns, in the guilds of the middle ages, in many peasant villages (and
undoubtedly elsewhere too, for example in the League of the Iroquois).
It was not until modern times however, with the emergence of the belief
in popular sovereignty, that democracy started to gain serious ground.
Democracy, in the sense of majority rule, has never yet been achieved on
the national level anywhere. But the parliaments of the ruling class
have been forced to steadily include more and more elements of the
population, or at least representatives of those elements, first non
propertied white males, then women, then blacks and other ethnic groups,
then young adults down to the age of eighteen, and so forth. The ideas
of democracy in general, and even of majority rule in particular, have
become widely accepted and deeply rooted in contemporary culture.
Perhaps someday we will be able to create the reality to match our
dreams.