Governing/governance 1.0

16. The problem is not what form of state is the more appropriate for democracy, the question is how we want to be governed: Modern representative democracy is based on the idea that the many should be governed by being reduced to the few in terms of the traditional party system. Distributed democracy instead relies on the possibility of the self-governing of the people regarding the main issues of our lives in common.

17. The prerogatives of absolute command of a separate body of professional politicians and technicians cannot be the guarantee of a political process in the general interest. We have to get rid of the idea itself of the State as One: The power of the One as a master and manipulator of complexity is incompatible with the practice of democracy for the many by the many. Representative democracy has degenerated into a technocratic authoritarian system, a “government of the unchangeable reality”, that is relying on the administration of fear and submission.

18. Beyond a technocratic top-down federalism, we think a democracy of the commons has to rely both on the local dimension and the transeuropean one. Natural and artifical commons cannot be "nationalized", neither they can be managed by an oligarchic technostructure. A democracy of the many can only be a distributed democracy; it can only be achieved by expanding open and bottom-up networks for the common interest. There can be no One-and-only Power over the commons, but just a system of distributed democratic counter-powers deciding on the basis their continuous interactions, conflicts and negotiations.