Original title (which I find a bit too click-baity):
Socialism: Let’s Not Resuscitate the Worst Mistake of the 20th Century
My personal pet idea about how to neutralize the state (and by neutralize, I mean “make neutral”, not “disappear immediately”) is to try returning from elections to sortition. Perhaps locally at first, then regionally, then a bicameral parliament with an elected and sortitioned half, until after many iterations, only sortition remains (singular leaders like presidents and prime ministers would obviously need to go). Upon success, there would still be a state, but not a state steered by borderline psychos, but a random sample of the (hopefully educated) population.
A long time ago, in a certain city-state where the term “democracy” originates from, it was considered oligarchic to elect representatives. Instead they were chosen by lottery, and only military leaders were elected. Modern politicians of course, would shudder at the thought of their kind being drawn by lot, and modern military leaders might not like being elected either. We have somehow stumbled to the point where we choose civil administrators using a method ancient democrats considered suitable for choosing warlords. And indeed, we get wannabe warlords using this method, and sometimes real ones.
Switching democracy over to sortition is, of course, a pathway short of revolution - it requires campaigning and constitutional change in almost any state, and one can expect long-term resistance - but the end result doesn’t slip away immediately after one electoral cycle, after power has corrupted those who sought to correct it. Sortition tends to eliminate political parties (read: at most times, most parties will oppose sortition). It tends to hinder corruption and make lobbying cumbersome.
In sortition, you can’t advertise your way to power with generous donations, the composition of a representative body can’t be altered by owning the media, a lottery is fairly hard to manipulate with bribes, and a lottery can be cheaply repeated with nobody losing anything they worked for, since they didnt climb to power (doing that requires certain psycholoogical traits which aren’t healthy), but power came to them by chance.
Another pathway is of course building up autonomy in low-level societal structures, so that those could take over functions gradually.
So I admit: I’m a reformist anarchist who doesn’t shy away from asking people to vote (because it’s easy, just don’t expect much to happen) and thinks it might be possibe to wind down some states using their own mechanism, while others must wait till failure. I don’t expect it to happen fast.
Full agree on sortition. However, you don’t want to end up with a republic, but it’s sortition. I think another key aspect is having some direct democracy, such as yes/no votes on the adoption of laws produced by the selected bodies.
However sortition does not remove the effect of media.
