The Isocracy Network

What do we mean when we say the word ‘Technocrat’?

Liberal society - that is to say, ‘liberalism’ divorced from its current political turmoil and only made to carry the weight of its taxonomic origins - is a society in which peoples’ freedoms are maximized to the space that political realities allow for. We take for granted certain realities: That the defense of a state and/or polity must be provided for, that breaches of the social contract must be curtailed and investigated, and that things like economic transactions must be as fair as can be managed.

This means that a great deal of our social expectations rely on the ability to outsource ‘enforcement’ to a higher power. If one is robbed in the street, or if a company fails to live up to its expressed responsibilities in a contract, there are bureaucracies, Systems of Power, to appeal to. We have placed trust in these Systems of Power for the explicit sake of being able to, with a kind of implicit democratic motive, appeal to these bureaucracies to enforce the structures that make liberal society work.

by Lev Lafayette and anonymous

On the morning of Friday September 1st, the Isocracy Network initiated a petition on CommunityRun, a website owned by the social activist group "Get Up!". The petition was written by one our members, a medical practioner who wished to remain anonymous, and was launched by the group's president. The petition itself was a request to the Australian Medical Association and in particular, the the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency "to review the registration of Dr Pansy Lai as a Paediatric Medical Practitioner for violation of its code of ethics and violation of the Declaration of Geneva by her participation in the recent 'no' campaign against marriage equality in which she willfully spread misinformation and non-scientific evidence in order to promote the discrimination of LGBTIQ people in Australia".

The petition itself attracted significant media attention. Predictible, The Australian raised the matter of whether it constituted bullying and an attack of free speech. Remarkably the article claimed that "the petition, which received more than 5000 signatures in the first five days"; given that the article was published less than four days after launch, it was quite illustrative of the accuracy of almost everything that comes from that rag. The article also engaged in the hyberbole claiming that the petition was calling for the paediatrians deregistration, indicative of the reporter's extraordinary ignorance of the scope of actions that fall under such a review. Still, yellow journalism desperately needs a readership, and the greater the scandal-mongering the greater the ignorant hordes that gobble up such trash, and so the story was distributed far and wide among many media outlets across the country.

A presentation by Kosmos Samaras, assistant state secretary of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party, to the 2017 Annual General Meeting of the Isocracy Network

by Marian Weaver

Any way you slice it, the postal plebiscite is a nasty, but effective, piece of political maneuvring. Let’s leave aside the idea of the direct plebiscite - the Parliament won’t pass that legislation. This is, of course, precisely why the government has fallen back on the postal option.

It’s a win-win situation for the Coalition, albeit an expensive one ($122 million). The postal plebiscite is voluntary, which means many people just won’t bother sending back their ballots. You only have to look at other countries who use voluntary voting to see that only those who are particularly motivated tend to show up on polling day, or send in their postal votes. At the last US presidential election, less than half of registered voters turned out (46.1%), and that was considered relatively high. Assuming a similar turnout for the postal plebiscite (and this is by no means guaranteed), less than half of Australia’s eligible voter population would be sending in their ballots. These would tend to be organised groups with an agenda to push, rather than individuals - and while some of these would be extremely pro-Marriage Equality, there are also numerous, influential groups who are already involved in mounting campaigns of shrill misinformation and scaremongering to convince people that a positive outcome would threaten all sorts of social disasters.

I’m here today to define the boundaries and fringes of democracy in Israel and the Australian Jewish community.

Over the course of my short life I’ve moved across the political spectrum, from the far-right fringe where I was included in the democratic process, to the BDS-supporting left where I am largely excluded. So who’s allowed in and who’s kept out? Where are the boundaries? Let’s look at the case study of right-wing outcast Baruch Goldstein:

In Ramadan 1994 Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, West Bank. Armed with an automatic Galil rifle, Goldstein opened up on the crowd of worshippers, massacring 29 Palestinians and injuring 125 more. Eventually a Palestinian knocked him out cold with a fire extinguisher and he was beaten to death.

It's important to emphasise that the overwhelming majority of Israelis firmly condemned the massacre. The prime minister of Israel at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, addressed Goldstein posthumously “You are not part of the community of Israel... you are not part of the national democratic camp... Sensible Judaism spits you out... You are a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism.”

[Note: I am not a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, nor of their Libertarian Socialist Caucus. However, I do sympathize with their agenda, so I have borrowed the DSA-LSC logo, which will hopefully get some of my readers to check them out.]

My views are a bit eclectic. I draw inspiration from libertarian socialism, municipal socialism, ordoliberalism, social democracy, and market socialism.

I think rules and social order matter. I think we need rules that create uniformity in order to allow for rational economic planning by individuals and businessmen. The institutions and rules of society ought to create a self-regulating framework or “invisible hand” that makes it unnecessary to actively intervene in the marketplace most of the time. Furthermore, people should be provided with a basic safety net that guarantees their wellbeing. Social welfare is a necessity. This is the ordoliberal and social democratic aspect of my thought.

Social democracy traces its roots back to the General German Workers' Association, founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, and the International Workingmen's Association, with which Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and their respective followers were associated. Social democracy traces back to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany, founded in 1869. "Social democracy" was originally a catch-all term for a broad range of socialist ideologies and movements, but Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels convinced the Social Democratic Workers' Party to embrace Marxism as its official ideology. The Social Democratic Workers' Party joined the International Workingmen's Association.

The acronyms in the title stand for Fully-Automated Luxury Communism (FALC), Rising Income through Cybernetic Homeostasis (RICH), and Libertarian Social Democracy (LSD).

Fully-Automated Luxury Communism (FALC)

The FALC philosophy is something that I learned about through Aaron Bastani, although I am not sure who exactly coined the term. Bastani advocates "full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated." FALC theorists offer us a Utopian vision of the future.

The idea of a job guarantee is nothing new. As far as I can tell, the idea was first put forth by Louis Blanc in The Organization of Work in 1839. When unemployment increases, some people have suggested that it would be proper for the government to step in and create more jobs. Personally, I don't support the idea. As a left-libertarian, I see liberation from work as being of extremely high importance.

Under capitalism, the majority of the wealth tends to accumulate into the hands of a few privileged people at the top, and the rest of us get left behind. The wealthiest people in our society usually either enjoy the privilege of some sort of monopoly or else inherited a great deal of wealth and privilege from someone who enjoyed such a monopoly. All private property over land is a monopoly privilege. The property owner is allowed to monopolize his land and the natural resources found therein. If there happens to be gold or oil on that land, the property owner will become rich beyond compare. Bankers and descendants of bankers enjoy the benefits of wealth accumulated through a money monopoly, since the bankers were/are the only ones allowed to create money. Similarly, certain people have become wealthy because of the artificial privilege of owning a patent or copyright. If I build a machine and patent the idea, I can prevent a person on the other side of the country, who doesn't even know about my invention, from selling his own similar invention which he came up with independently entirely through his own ingenuity. I can allow him to sell his machines and demand a share of his profits or I can keep him from selling his product at all and enjoy a monopoly for myself. These artificial property relations, created by legislation and maintained by adjudication and law-enforcement, create inequality. It is such legal privileges and artificial property arrangements that allow some people to accumulate large amounts of wealth while others go without.