Everything we do through our collaborative networks of communication and cooperation is at once economic and political. More, our collaborative networks directly create social relationships and now suggest the bases for true democracy.

This would not be the “direct democracy” widely touted as an Utopian ideal. It seems doubtful that each of us would take time out of our lives and our work to vote continuously on every political decision.

According to Oscar Wilde, the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings.

True democracy presents the possibility that we do the political work of creating and maintaining social relationships collaboratively through the same communication and cooperative networks we use to support our lives and our work now. Endless evening meetings are not required.

Creating social relationships not only appears to possess economic value but also forms the basis for all political work. Economic production and political production can coincide and the networks used suggest the framework needed to support society in all of its institutional roles.

The power of true democracy appears in the communicative and cooperative networks of social labor.

Everything we produce in common is more than just the results of our labor. Everything we produce in common also forms the precondition for all our future labor as well.

The divisions between agricultural and industrial workers, between the working class and the poor and all other artificial hierarchies based upon perceived differences dissolve in collaborative networks. The new importance placed upon knowledge, information, emotional relations, cooperation and communication make these divisions irrational, counter-productive and obsolete.

Absolutely, the physical differences that define the area of each activity remain. However, most people today can see the common bases that support all contemporary economic production.

Today, economic production itself produces the common relationships and the common knowledge required for establishing an institutional structure for true global democracy.

We can see no cooperation production without an existing commonality and the results of cooperative production is exactly the creation of such a new commonality. This is just like the case with communication, which cannot take place without a common basis and the result of communication is a new common basis.

The human race has been upon the progressive path towards true democracy for a very long time. The possibility for global peace has only recently arrived, we have all created that possibility together and now we only need to continue forward to reap the benefits of enjoying global peace in our lifetimes.