"The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches."
~John Dewey

#Democracy #SocialEcology #ParticipatoryDemocracy
https://towardsautonomyblog.wordpress.com/2025/04/30/choosing-by-lot-and-the-politics-without-titles/

With the antics and atrocities committed by Trump since the start of his second term, there has never been a better time than today to implement a system of participatory democracy, or at least a political system in which political representatives are chosen by sortition. I honestly think it would be very difficult to achieve an outcome as bad as the one we have now.

"In governance, sortition is the selection of public officials or jurors at random, i.e. by lottery, in order to obtain a representative sample.

In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Sortition is often classified as a method for both direct democracy and deliberative democracy.

Today sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common-law systems. What has changed in recent years is the increased number of citizen groups with political advisory power, along with calls for making sortition more consequential than elections, as it was in Athens, Venice, and Florence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

#Democracy #ParticipatoryDemocracy #DirectDemocracy #Sortition

As we head into an Australian Federal Election year, with the world on fire & political institutions crumbling, I thought I’d reshare this piece I wrote late last year. Partly as a reminder to myself.

We can build our new world in the compost of the old. Let’s do it.

#democracy #MutualAid #Climate #ClimateAction #DirectAction #Nonviolence #ParticipatoryDemocracy #Spokescouncil #consensus

https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/turning-the-ship-around-with-a-rising-tide/

"How could a two-party system built on patriarchal, colonial, Christian values of another era ever properly represent the diverse nation Australia has become?" - Tim Dunlop

https://substack.com/home/post/p-152932375

#auspol #ParticipatoryDemocracy #Independents #politics

"Genuinely democratic parties aren’t brands, businesses, or elite factions seeking to earn votes but institutions through which members cooperate to shape their society. Some difficult compromises will still be necessary — democratic participation only guarantees a fair hearing and an equal part in collective decision-making — but the character of these compromises will be fundamentally altered. While liberal parties offer compromises that they hope members will accept, democratic parties reach compromises through members’ deliberation — members of democratic parties don’t support policies, but decide them.

Democratization begins by no longer speaking of “the party” earning our votes but of “our party” enacting our joint decisions. The view of the democratic citizen-member is “This is my party, along with my friends and allies, which we use to govern our society; its staff are our employees, its elected members are our spokespeople, its policies are our decisions, and its victories are our victories.” To the extent that this is not yet true, the work of democratization is not yet finished."

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/political-parties-schumpeter-democracy-liberalism

#Democracy #Liberalism #RepresentativeDemocracy #Politics #PoliticalParties #DeliberativeDemocracy #ParticipatoryDemocracy

"We work constructively, we work collaboratively... we're not dragged down by ideology; we're lifted up by trying to find solutions to the major challenges we have"
- Sophie Scamps MP, just one of many community-backed independents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YxxKo3pYaA

#ParticipatoryDemocracy

Did you know there's Greens in the UK House of Lords!?! Extraordinary!

And one of them, Australian-born Natalie Bennett, has written a book all about radical politics, called "Change Everything". Lots of ideas about #democracy and #ParticipatoryDemocracy, dismantling #capitalism, #UBI, #disarmament and more.

I'm going to be interviewing Natalie (Baroness Bennett, mind you!) on July 9, on Zoom.

Register to join us here:
https://www.greeninstitute.org.au/events/change-everything/