The only viable forms of government i see now is a benevolent enlightened dictator or a scientocracy.

The only way to remove manipulation is to remove emotion from politics. So you either need someone who knows what needs to be done and can't be influenced otherwise, or a system that is not easy to influence, like one based on facts and evidence.

Enlightened dictator is a high risk high reward type of deal though, even if he is awesome then there are no guarantees afterwards. Basically rolling dice. Of course you need to do other things too, like restricting the influence of money in politics, but even with decent politicians the masses are vulnerable to manipulation by various interests. That really is the Achilles heel of democracy. So the system needs to be transparent and based on the scientific method. It really is the only way to remain impartial and objective.

We have a long way to get there however, so I think a short term solution is to invest in education. I know it's kind of a platitude and also imperfect, but history and research has shown that education really is the defining factor between the good and the bad. A democracy needs an educated populace, monarchy was fine and natural for certain times because it pretty much the only thing that could have worked when 95% of the populace was illiterate and relatively stupid. Sudden democracy in the Middle Ages would have been a disaster. Unfortunately there seems to be a trend of anti-intellectualism recently is certain places like the UK and US. Make no mistake, whether it is deliberate or not, it is exactly what many interests want. Dumb people are much easier to manipulate.

> The only way to remove manipulation is to remove emotion from politics.

I don't think that's the only way. At least, I think there's a few things to try first.

If information dissemination is being exploited due to new technology, first we should try to fix that in various ways. There are various other problems that might or might not have full or partial solutions as well.

When you have a hole in the henhouse that lets a fox in, the first step is to try to close the hole and possibly trap or kill the fox, not to stop raising chickens. Even if new holes are occasionally dug, as long as it's still worth it to grow chickens, you don't just give up.

The thing is, I think it's the only real way to achieve anything of lasting impact.

There will always be ways to exploit various systems, you can only react, not prevent in those cases. Because of entropy, complexity is always increasing. It means that not only are the problems going to be getting harder to address individually but that new problems and systems will be created at an exponentially increasing rate. Those problems are superficial in nature and more like symptoms in any case, than real causes. You have to address the root of the problem and that is human nature. Instead of chopping of the heads of a hydra, shoot in in the heart or something.

As long as politics can play on emotions, people will be liable to act irrationally and thereby manipulated.

While I myself would make a wonderful monarch and encourage you all to nominate me as your king or queen, sadly I am not immortal and the problem you describe is a real one.

I personally think the solution may be to remove the idea of representation from government, because the perverse incentives for anyone at a structural node are tempting and human nature is fragile. You can try to engineer corruption and rent-seeking with rule systems, but as we've seen in many Communist countries taking money out of things doesn't necessarily get your a more equitable or sustainable society.

I see a future with a much abridged legal code that is maintained somewhat like Wikipedia or a version control system, and whose implementation is built around blockchain technology and a narrowly-defined ethical calculus. However I can only handwave this for the time being as the challenges of computation legal and governmental systems are non-trivia, not to mention offering the many novel problems that would surely ensue.

This is partly why I am an anarcho-Communist, in favour of decentralised planning or to a lesser extent market Socialism.

I'm not sure what to do about giving the vote to people; arguably democracy is very good, but I would rather have per-commune direct democracy (with instantly recallable delegates or without) rather than a representative democracy.

In short, I want to do away with voting for masters, as it will be unjustified authority no matter which way it's taken.

Edit: can people please explain why they are downvoting? It would be nice to know so I can improve the quality of my posts in future.

You're being downvoted on the basis of your ideology, which I imagine is somewhat unpopular here. Your posts are of otherwise good quality. It would be nice if people started a dialog instead of silently downvoting, but I guess that would take more effort...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the traditional nomenclature is anarcho-syndicalist. Or are you marking a difference in your beliefs from those. Am I just hung up on semantics, or are you espousing there will somehow be no competition between communes/factions without some central oversight body. I would wager that's highly unlikely.

Anarcho-syndicalism is not the same thing as anarcho-communism, though they overlap significantly both in terms of ideological content and as non-exclusive identities.

> This is partly why I am an anarcho-Communist

You believe in an oxymoron?

Anarcho-Communism isn't an oxymoron; people often (because Lenin) confuse Communism as an ideology with the practices of certain regimes which notionally were oriented toward achieving Communism (but never progressed beyond the phase they described as Socialism, which is distinct from Communism) and which leftist critics (including, among others, non-Leninist Marxists and other socialists) described as not even that, but State Capitalism.

In Marxist Communism (and, with variations that are important but not relevant to this discussion, it's derivatives through Leninism), "Communism" is the desired stateless end-state, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in which the workers seize control of the means of production through the State—Socialism—is a transitional stage used to get from Capitalism to Communism.

Non-Marxist Communism seeks the same stateless end goal by other means; Anarcho-Communism is, in a sense, among the purest forms of Communism, since it seeks fairly direct (not necessarily immediate, but constsntly in the same direction and not the out-and-back "empower the State to destroy the State" approach) transition to the statelessend end-state.

Anarcho-Communism is not an oxymoron; Communism is by definition a stateless and indeed classless society, as described by Marx and Engels.

While I feel this is deviating from the topic at hand, I have always had some questions about how a society could be classless. Even a kindergarten was made into a class society based solely on eye color after the teacher mentioned that eye colors meant certain things about a person. In a communist society, even if wealth were equal, there are many inherent factors that differ between people due to their unique genetics and life histories. Consider just charisma and attractiveness. Someone who was rich in both would still be in a vastly superior position compared to someone who lacked both, and would be able to secure themselves an overall better life (at least on average). The only way I could see full equality of outcomes would be with some power in charge directing it, and even then the one heading that power would still be superior.

Consider something else, reproduction. While not all people want to have children, it is a major desire of many people. How do we ensure equal opportunity of reproduction to all who wish to have children?

The kind of class Marx was referring to is that of economic class, that is, class created as a result of the relationship to the means of production. Marx's view was that throughout history, various groups of people have definitive relationships to their means of sustenance - that is, who provides for them, so that they survive? In slave society, it was the slave master providing to the slave, for example. In today's society, the largest group of people, the proletariat, sustain themselves via the bourgeoisie employment in the form of wage labour.

I do not think that Socialism itself does away with the problems of humanity, but it does away with the power relationship between proletarian and bourgeois, and also all those other historical classes.

Communism isn't about equality of outcomes, it's about having the ability to apply your labour in the way which you are able to, in order to provide for yourself. Of course we must work to live (which is unfortunate, but Socialism helps mitigate that by voluntary means). It is totally fine, in my opinion, to have more than the other person next door. In a Communist society, the only reason why you would have more is because you worked harder, put more hours in, or were more efficient at what you do than the other person.

With regard to children, I don't know how to answer that question, and I don't know if there exists such a way by voluntary association which leads to such an outcome as perfect equal opportunity for reproduction. I would be very interested in finding a way, though.

Well, this is the basic problem. Marx and Engels had a vision of society governed by the better angels of our nature, not to mention a relatively simple economic understanding of the world due to the technological limitations of their day.

Karl Marx died in 1883 so while he was probably able to make guesses about how steam engines would be deployed in the future he never lived to see an actual automobile. Adam Smith's economic insights were likewise somewhat limited by the technology of his day; one has to be careful not to attribute knowledge that we only enjoy with hindsight to economic theorists of earlier eras.

I don't think that most of Marx's analysis of capitalism falls flat in the face of modern developments; some of it of course do (such as his theorised 'Asiatic mode of production' which didn't exist) but for the most part I think a Marxian analysis is a cogent one, at least from what I've seen. Marx was in a good position to envisage how technology would develop, having seen the result of the industrial revolution himself. Marx intended for his analysis of capitalism to hold regardless of time frame; arguably, and indeed into the future beyond capitalism taking the form of the theory of historical materialism.

Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron in the understanding of most anarchists. It seems that type of capitalists have appropriated the "anarcho" bit, while it does not make sense in that construct as "anarcho's" are not down with unrestricted acummulation private property (which evidently leads to oppression).

"Ideologically, Republicans are as liberal as they come, outside of the Libertarians."

This statement is true in the same way 'Anarcho-Communist' is. Care to guess how?

Please don't take discussions further into general ideological territory. This rarely begets good discussion and is strongly discouraged on HN.

Submissions are mostly discouraged, but a civil discussion has no reason to be. It can easily go off the rails, but a lot of that is also based on how it's originally framed. This seems fairly open to discussion in a positive way, so I take the stance the mods seem to lately, which is "wait and see". We all have the tools to try to suppress the flames (or fan them, but that's where a little personal responsibility comes in) as needed.