this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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This is why you have to insure the alignment of direct stakeholders and not overly broaden it above those who are directly impacted. You never want the same guy selling your food to be the same guy that verifies that it is safe.
A Stakeholder Socialist system, I think, is that ideal as it utilizes coöp commonwealths, democratic workerplaces, muti-stakeholder and syndicated ownership models, and federated levels of oversight such that power only escalates for things necessary and narrowly at that scope like interconnected grids or safety in international food trade.
The fundamental problem with stakeholder socialism isn't the ideas, it's the reality that the ideas need to supervene on. If you tried to apply this model to the USA today, there would be such a massive disparity in what we can do versus what we actually need that you would need some way to collate all the information and plan a path towards sustainability. And that's a central planning function. Remember that Marx wasn't advocating central planning because it was inherently good and exactly what socialism is. He was advocating for it because it's what is necessary to get us from where we are today to where it becomes to apply a distributed, dynamic, horizontal system like you're proposing. We all know the problems with horiontalism - existing imbalances will threaten equilibrium and horizontal attempts to address them will create systemic oscillations that will threaten the entire system's stability. Most horizontal systems collapse into a perverse vertical system with the power elite being defined by those who were sociopathic enough to destroy the horizontal system for their own benefit.
Instead, a centralized system needs to be designed and adapted over time to manage the extant imbalances in society, and indeed between the society and the larger world, until such time as the imbalances become small enough in magnitude to horizontal power structures can remain stable. But since we have literally never seen a stable sustainable horizontal system work at the scale of a single society for a couple centuries, we don't even have good theories as to what makes them stable and how they can fail and what we can about those failure modes. We need to test these horizontal systems out, gather analyses, and get empirical data about failure modes. And to do that? Yup. Central system. Unless of course we're OK with one of the failure modes being a return of sociopathy qua state bring out a new form of megalomaniacal fascism and forcing everyone back into a arms race for survival. I'm not, which is why I support a centralized governing function.