Who Decides If this Prison Gets Built?Genuine Democracy Versus Fake Democracy: the Difference is Who Decides the Important Questions
Egalitarian revolution means ensuring that the vast majority of ordinary people are the ones truly calling the shots in society, not the minority who value greed and domination of the many by the few
Genuine democracy versus fake democracy: who decides, is the question raised by decisions like this one about a prison:
In an egalitarian society a question such as, for example, whether to build a women’s prison like this one slated to be built by HDR, Inc., would be decided by the local assembly of egalitarians in the local community where the prison might be built.1 The people with a right to participate as equals in that local assembly are (to switch optimistically to the present tense) all the adults, and ONLY the adults, who live or work in that local community who share the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and truth and fairness and justice—i.e., the vast majority of people in most places. Furthermore, there is no other governmental or any other body that can make laws or policies contrary to those of the local assembly that people in the local community are obliged to obey.
This is in stark contrast to today’s fake democracy in which the people with ANTI-egalitarian values of greed and domination of the many by the few have the real say on questions like whether to build this prison.
Our government is dominated by anti-egalitarians because only anti-egalitarians get the funding from Big $ to win elections. Only anti-egalitarians sit on the board of directors of corporations such as HDR, Inc. that exist to make the rich share-owners even richer at the expense of the have-nots.
Egalitarian genuine democracy (described further here) calls for the local assemblies of egalitarians to be sovereign because otherwise it is easy for anti-egalitarians to gain the real power, as I explain here. The reason why only people who share egalitarian values can be in an egalitarian government is explained here. The fact that voluntary federation is perfectly capable of creating order on a large—even global-scale—is explained here.
What prevents the majority from oppressing the minority in egalitarian genuine democracy?
If a local assembly by majority vote decides to oppress other people or do anything that violates the principles of egalitarianism, then the egalitarians in other local assemblies have every right to:
1) declare that the majority who voted for oppressing people are not true egalitarians, and
2) use whatever force (including violence) is required to stop the oppression (and to use militias for that purpose as discussed here.)
Why we need a good government, and not “no government,” is what I explain here.
Please use the comment button above to express your thoughts about all of this. :)
Please note that Marxists disagree with all of the above because their view of ordinary people is the opposite of the egalitarian view. Egalitarians know that the vast majority of ordinary people have egalitarian values and would LOVE to have an egalitarian revolution (as I prove here) so those values will shape ALL of society and not just the little corners of the world that egalitarian people have any real control over today. Marxists, in contrast, believe that ordinary people are brainwashed by capitalism and its terrible ideas of greed and racism and homophobia and transphobia, etc., and therefore they are part of the problem, not the solution. Marxists thus believe that the purpose of revolution is to enable MARXISTS, not ordinary people, to have the real say in society, so that with Marxist social engineering one day in the future ordinary people will be different from how they are today and finally fit to have the real say in society. I discuss why Marxists believe this here, and I illustrate how Marxists, in recent practice, apply this wrongheaded view of people here with terrible consequences.
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to have real, not fake, democracy.
In such an assembly there would be people with diverse ideas and knowledge and there would likely be a very robust and interesting discussion/debate about whether to build this prison. If I were present in this assembly, I would be very interested in hearing what others said before deciding how I would vote. The assembly might even—only if it wished!—invite anti-egalitarians with some expertise in prison construction to be questioned. I don’t know if I would agree with the abolitionist feminists in the above Beacon article or not. Note that the first comment in that article is by a person, possibly egalitarian in their values, who wrote,
““Whenever we remove someone from the community, we’re severing families.” How many “families” were “severed” by the crimes committed by the incarcerated women? A little balance would be in order in this article to describe some of the crimes that led to the incarcerations.”
But whatever such an assembly decided would most likely be a whole lot more sensible and better for ordinary people than the decisions our current fake democracy of, by, and for the rich hands down. That is for sure! Today the people making such decisions are the ones who use the police to cow the have-nots into submission, and this is true even when the police have a reputation for being good, like in Boston. Furthermore, the prisons are part of a racist scheme to turn white have-nots against non-white have-nots by making it seem that non-whites are a “criminal race,” as I discuss here.