Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

popular will via the ‘people’s budget’. It is highly likely that military R and D
would be an area where such exchanges would become critical.
In order to claim to represent the people, governments would have to
strive to make their overall state expenditure reflect the distributive spread
of the people’s budget. In the longer term, the introduction of such a scheme
would reconfigure the anatomy of political parties by breaking the historic
mould of class forces from previous centuries. Representative democratic
government would be required to implement the spending preferences of
the people and compete on the basis of their ability to achieve maximum
value. The social learning associated with the distribution of responsibility
would require a phased approach and some attention to ring fenced core
requirements relating to historic commitments (such as military pensions
for example) in the first instance.
The desire for ever more participatory mechanisms is evident throughout
the network of networks we have engaged with here. The anatomy of the
UK General Election outlined above shows how the mass classes of the
twentieth century have fragmented as difference becomes dominant. Claims
to represent everyone whilst in office by one party simply lack credibility in
the face of difference and become derisory caricatures in the context of a
worldwide war on the poor which commenced in 1976 and has been continuing
ever since. In the United Kingdom, an individual coming of age in a
year when there is a general election can make a cross on a ballot 13 times
by the time they are 68 years of age assuming a general election every
4 years. For knowledge economy workers in an informationally complex
society this is hardly an expression of informed choices. Politicians are a
professional elite whose upper echelons are prone to ‘autonomous’ acts of
executive authority. Vired voting would begin to redress this asymmetrical
relationship translating individual choices into tangible expressions of
collective will with material implications.
Conclusion: intellectual destratification
The map is not the territory 161
Staying stratified is not the worst thing that can happen; the worst that can
happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which
brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done:
Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find
an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation,
possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and
there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot
of new land at all times.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2002: 161)
In our brief excursus on the (revolutionary) reforms offered by ideas of
participatory budgeting through vired voting we have sought to give a
concrete example of how the desire for participation and autonomy might
translate into practices that are consistent with yet undermining to the