Bottom up democracy is a democratic system whereby local officials are elected at a grassroots level. These officials then elect regional officials, and so on, until the top layer of government is reached. Bottom up democracy has been criticized by a BBC article as rarely, if ever, actually succeeding[1536].

Soviet democracy

Russia -- after the 1905 Revolution-- developed a bottom-up democracy based on the unit of a soviet, a workers' council: it could be called council communism. See Soviet democracy. In Alan Moorehead's http://www.ditext.com/moorehead/4.html The Russian Revolution (1958), the following passages describe the origin of soviets:
"The other event concerns Trotsky. Directly the strike got under way in October, 1905, he came back secretly to Petrograd and joined in the work of organizing a general strike committee which was to act as a headquarters for the workers. Delegates, each representing five hundred men, were elected in the factories and sent to a central council or Soviet, and this Soviet now controlled the strike in Petrograd. It distributed arms and supplies, took charge of policy, issued its orders in the form of printed bulletins, arranged for guards and demonstrations, and acted, in fact, in much the same way as an army headquarters acts in the field. The idea of a Soviet was not new -- Axelrod and others had canvassed it some time before -- but this was the first actual experiment in giving the workers a central direction in an emergency, and although it only lasted a few weeks it set a pattern which was to be followed in 1917.

A similar body was set up in Moscow, but the Petrograd Soviet was the important one, and it was very largely controlled by the Mensheviks. Its first two presidents, Zubrovsky and Khrustalev-Nosar, followed more or less along the Menshevik line, and Trotsky shared the practical leadership with Parvus. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd tried at first to boycott the Soviet -- Lenin, whether at home or abroad, had no love for any organization which he could not control -- but finally they came in when they saw which way the wind was blowing."


These councils nominated and elected delegates who represented them in higher councils, until one reached the supreme council -- the supreme soviet. The soviet system, however, was betrayed by Lenin after the 1917 October Revoluton, who in January 1918 convened and then dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly when it was realized that the Bolshevik party did not have a majority. This betrayal was, in fact, a coup. This gave rise to the Russian Civil War and a top-down dictatorship by Lenin.

Chomsky's views

According to Noam Chomsky, a linguist and a very prolific left wing American writer and activist, there is a distinction between bottom-up democracy and top-down democracy. However not everyone makes this distinction. In particular, Chomsky critizices the US for its intolerance for any form of bottom-up democracies in its international policy <ref> Democracy Enhancement], Z Magazine, May-August, 1994</ref>. In fact, Chomsky charges the US for intervening in the democratic processes of Latin American countries.

Chomsky further, controversially, claims that anarchism is not a protest against government, but against top-down forms of government.<ref> "The Relevance of Anarcho-syndicalism", Noam Chomsky interviewed by Peter Jay, The Jay Interview, July 25, 1976. </ref> . Anarchy is a wide movement, ranging from anarcho-capitalists, through anarcho-socialists to complete anarchists, so many individuals who call themselves anarchists would disagree with this unilateral interpretation.<ref> </ref><ref> </ref><ref>Rothbard, Murray. Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol IX No. 2 (Fall 1990)</ref>

See also

Grassroot democracy

Anarchism

References

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