p The democratic Utopia appeals to the ideas and ideals of the American Enlightenment, to the legal norms formalized in constitutional instruments, to the spirit of the mass democratic movements which existed in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. It reproduces and develops in an updated version some aspects of the Utopia of a farmers’ America.

p The basis of the democratic Utopia, the product of the search for alternative ways in which modern American capitalism could develop, is the notion of a society where political power is in the hands of the people, each citizen being directly involved both in the taking and implementation of the decisions affecting his interests (participatory democracy) and in “projecting” his own future ( anticipatory democracy).

p The relative weakness of the central authority (the state) which opened broad opportunities for local initiative, the power of communal tradition, and the protracted colonization of the American West helped to establish the participatory democracy idea as part of the national 147 awareness and as an important element of the political culture of the opposition. Most American Utopian communities have practiced the principle of participatory democracy in this or that form. This practice often gave rise to debate. This is how a member of the Ruskin Colony which existed in Tennessee in the 1890s, explained a principle the world of today could define as participatory democracy. In a representative democracy, the entire organic community yields its rights and functions to a small number of people who are only a part of it; but these people represent only a tiny portion of the intellect and the will of the community as a whole; in the final analysis, the inner workings of a representative legislature lead to a situation in which one person holds all power. But if all members of the community take part in government and if there is no representative legislature to impede this, it is possible to offer a role in the common task of government to the most capable people who would direct the will of the community. Naturally, here the ambitious and the powerhungry will also have a say, but this is no more than just in conditions of universal equality; besides, the opinion of the wise will not be suppressed by criminal moves of representatives.   [147•1 

p And so the search for a democratic alternative has often prompted Americans to look up to this principle, which some saw almost as a panacea for ridding the social fabric of domination by the bureaucracy and the state and for handing power back to the people. That happened in the latter half of the 1960s and the early 1970s too, when protest movements temporarily adopted this idea as one of their slogans.

p This was the direction in which the S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society) activists moved in the 1960s— witness the well-known Port Huron Statement. Some former activists of the New Left, grouped around the Working Papers for a New Society periodical, are working along these lines to this day.

p But it was perhaps Alvin Toffler who, in his Third Wave, undertook the most interesting attempt to present a model of a new society where the principle of participatory 148 democracy would be embodied concretely.

p Toffler proceeds from a fundamental precept shared by many modern American sociologists and political scientists of different hues—namely, that the political institutions existing in the United States and other industrial countries are overburdened, hopelessly out-of-date and no longer functioning. Therefore, in the course of the transition from "industrial society", or Second Wave civilization as he also calls it, to the new, Third Wave, society, the political structure is to undergo fundamental change. In the new society, Toffler holds, political activity should be based on three key principles.

p The first is minority power. Majority rule, the key legitimizing principle of the Second Wave, is increasingly obsolete. The leading role belongs not to the majority as a single and indivisible whole but to the minorities that make it up. The political system should reflect this.  [148•1  Toffler links this change to the “de-massification” of modern society; with this, he believes, both the legitimacy of majority rule and a possibility to "mobilize a majority or even a governing coalition" lose any meaning.  [148•2  "In place of a highly stratified society, in which a few major blocs ally themselves to form a majority, we have a configurative society—one in which thousands of minorities, many of them temporary, swirl and form highly novel, transient patterns, seldom coalescing into a 51 percent consensus on major issues.”  [148•3 

p But how can one actually ensure the participation of minorities in the decision-making process? How can it be made truly democratic? Here Toffler offers a variety of answers: "We may even eventually have to elect at least some of our officials in the oldest way of all: by drawing lots.”  [148•4  But, he adds, other, more modern ways can be found-for example, to retain the existing representative institutions while changing their terms of reference and decision-making procedures; they would be left with 50 percent of the decision-making vote, the other 50 percent going 149 to the “random” representatives of the nation. "Such a system," Toffler believes, "would not merely provide a more representative process than ‘representative’ government ever did, but would strike a devastating blow at the special interest groups and lobbies who infest the corridors of most parliaments. Such groups would have to lobby the people—not just a few elected officials.

p “Going even further, one might conceive of voters in a district electing not a single individual as their ’ representative’ but, in fact, a random sample of the population. This random sample could ’serve in Congress’ directly— as though it were a person—its opinions statistically tallied into votes. Or it could choose a single individual, in turn, to ‘represent’ it, instructing him or her how to vote.”  [149•1 

p The so-called semi-direct democracy is the second key principle of the future political system—when the will of the people is expressed both through their representatives and through their direct participation in the decisionmaking process at the legislative and executive levels. "Using advanced computers, satellites, telephones, cable, polling techniques, and other tools, an educated citizenry can, for the first time in history, begin making many of its own political decisions.

p “The issue is not either/or. It is not a question of direct democracy versus indirect, representation by self versus representation by others.

p “For both systems have advantages, and there are highly creative, as yet underutilized, ways to combine direct citizen participation with ‘representation’ into a new system of semi-direct democracy.”  [149•2  This system, Toffler holds, could be realized through the use of various technical procedures. For example, to the votes of the legislators voting on this or that draft legislation, could be added the votes of its opponents and supporters beyond the legislature, the end result expressing the will of the people.

p And finally, the third key principle underlying the new political system is that of "decision division", which neutralizes, to a certain extent, the current overload. The essence of this principle is simple: government should be decentralized and decisions should be taken at different levels 150 (decisions affecting local affairs—at the local level, and those concerning nationwide matters-at the national level). Some questions would probably have to be resolved at all levels simultaneously. It is also very important, Toffler emphasizes, to set up a system of transnational institutions, for today, the national state can no longer cope with many problems, such as monetary or environmental issues.

p Such are the outlines of the political system which, in Toffler’s opinion, could lead to true democracy in America if political change is complemented by changes in the organization of production, the dissemination of information, in education and the like. The corporations would have to operate within more rigid limits, so that the good of all society become a major motive with them. Industry should be decentralized and its output demassified. Demassification should also apply to other aspects of the social fabric, such as the so-called infosphere—that is, the sphere in which information is produced and disseminated: the mass media should serve the minorities because each minority has its own special interests and needs special information. Education should be geared to the modern level of knowledge and should shape the new social character of the individual of the future. This individual deserves to be described here at least in general terms.

p Toffler would like the people of the 21st century to grow up sooner and to "show responsibility at an earlier age". He sees them as evincing greater individuality and therefore "more likely than their parents to question authority". They will want money but will not work for money alone, they will be less consumer-minded and less hedonistic than the present generations. They will know how to achieve a balance "between work and play, between production and presumption, between headwork and handwork, between the abstract and the concrete, between objectivity and subjectivity". They will not be, Toffler explains, "a superhuman race of Goethes and Aristotles (or Genghis Khans or Hitlers)", but simply humane and happy people deriving pleasure from their work, from contact with one another and from being close to nature; people freely shaping their inner and outer world.  [150•1 

p It is interesting that Toffler, who advocated the creation of social Utopias in his Future Shock, defines his project as a “practopia” and not Utopia. "What we see here," he says in The Third Wave, "are the outlines ... of a wholly new way of life.... The new civilization sketched here can hardly be termed a Utopia.... We glimpse here instead the emergence of what might be called a ‘practopia’-neither the best nor the worst of all possible worlds, but one that is both practical and preferable to the one we had.... In short, a practopia offers a positive, even a revolutionary alternative, yet lies within ’the range of the realistically attainable’.”  [151•1  Indeed, Toffler does not describe the best of all possible worlds, but the way in which it is constructed can be easily called Utopian.

Toffler does not make the establishment of democratic society in the United States dependent on a radical transformation of property relations, on social revolution. He advocates change through reform, the latter carried out with direct participation and guidance by the people. Naturally, he does not present his project as an anticapitalist alternative. Nevertheless, the model he offers is incompatible, whether he is aware of it or not, either with the logic of modern capitalist evolution or with the objectives the corporations and the bourgeois state consciously strive to attain. And, while Toffler’s Utopia (like other projects within the mainstream of the democratic Utopia) fails to map out practicable ways out of the crisis, it does outline the ideas and ideals of the left wing of the American bourgeoisie.