Professor Wolfgang Streeck: What Should Capitalism Studies Become? 

Subsidiarity. The more electors per representative, and the further away the decisions are being made from the voter's home, the less representation per elector and the less appropriate and useful the decisions made are for the electors. It's an information transmission problem, as well as a problem of having enough decision-makers to make sure that enough decisions are made, and made with close enough attention to the human details.

Patrick Holt How can information technology help in improving the system ?? Then Parliamentary democracy is not pure democracy where people elect 'representatives'.

I don't think it can, to be honest. Any kind of digital voting or vote-counting allows for easy election fraud, whereas paper ballots counted by hand in public are more checkable (physical copy) and much harder to steal or count fraudulently. Parliamentary democracy is not pure democracy, very true, but direct democracy is much harder to arrange and co-ordinate for more than a few hundred people. On one hand delegating tasks to someone whose job it will be full-time is natural, because then it will have their full attention, theoretically, like any other kind of preofessional public servant, and partly it suits people's life-balance preferences. What I mean is, not very many people want to spend a lot of their time in public meetings listening to speeches and presentations of detailed information for them to then vote about. Most people want to spend more time at home with their families and friends, and find political meetings like that another tiring job on top of their other work. As with the soviets of 1917, and the French revolutionary assembly, ordinary people tended to drift home, leaving the zealots and extremists, and better-off individuals who could afford the time more easily, in charge by default, even though they were unrepresentative and their views less popular overall. So I think some kind of representative system is inevitable for anything at all large scale, let alone anything global. Going for bigger geo-political units allows for more say over international businesses, more negotiating clout, but it means more centralisation and less direct and local democracy, so the question is what kind of trade-off is tolerable whereby we regain control over big business but don't lose local sovereignty and representation which is more responsive to voters. The EU, for instance, is big enough to bargain from a position of strength, but because it is hardly democratic at all, it has been captured by the monopolists and neo-liberalism the same as most national governments. The chief thing working internationally against rentierism and corporate domination is the anti-capitalist movement and socialist ideas in general, which are international, and allows for international co-ordination by populations voting and militating for similar governments in the near future.

Patrick Holt Do you see a resurgence of Socialism in the near future, NOT the 20th Century Socialism which had flaws but a new socialist vision for 21st Century which is in line with the present times??

Of course. It's happening right now.