Richard D. Wolff

The key idea of sociocracy is that it is possible to combine elements of hierarchical decision-making with the democratic notion that decisions concerning a group must be arrived at via the participation and consent of all the group's members. This is done via sets of overlapping circles of consent structured to achieve specific goals. I am in agreement with the key idea and believe that sociacracy offers one way to pursue a practical achievement of the combination of efficient and democratic decision-making. Where I perhaps diverge is in my focus not only on how to structure decision-making but on what will be the content or nature of the decisions to be made. Life is an infinite set of decisions to make; it is not possible to make them all in a sociocratic (or any other) method. So we focus explicit decision-making on prioritized objects, particular things to decide together about. For me, high on the list of such prioritized objects is the organization of the production and distribution of surpluses in production. This is not a topic I associate with sociacracy or its literature. So for me the question is: how might sociacracy deal with the democratization of the organization of the surplus? I would thus love to read or hear about the possibility that sociacriacy might be the concrete realization of a democratization of the surplus such that the class exploitation of labor by non-laborers (of slaves by masters, of serfs by lords, and of employees by employers) would be overcome.