Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I’m not talking about the movie/show The Watchmen. I’m referring to the ancient philosophical question “quis custodiet ipsos custodes” or “who watches the watchmen”. Go read up on that elsewhere.
For those of you who don’t know and need a summary here, it’s a question often posed in reference to the fact that the person or people in charge of making sure the rules are honored have nothing preventing them from disobeying the rules. There’s never anything preventing the person guarding your treasure from stealing some of the treasure, for example.
What’s the best remedy to this that you can think of?
Unironically communism. The more things are held in common the less incentive there is for people to steal, especially if you can ensure providing a decent or at the least constantly improving standard of living while making examples out of those who hoard wealth or violate the public trust (see china executing a few corrupt billionaires every now and again).
This is more a question regarding political organization than economic organization.
A one party state generally doesn’t provide the best checks and balances to itself.
A state with two corporate captured bourgeois parties constantly sabotaging each other is arguably a lot worse
What is to stop the one party from being captured by corporate interests?
What if we had 12 parties that were all captured by corporate interests?
Everything can be corrupted, the apparent amount of choices doesn’t make the choice any better or worse
So Watchmen watch the Watchmen?
We can all be watchmen
The amount of political parties doesn’t mean there’s any actual checks and balances, having a direct effect on the system does
The discussion is about checks and balances. So what kind of checks and balances would be there?
A more direct democracy would do wonders, but we could start off with “the watchmen should know and follow the law”
Good question.
If the one party is founded and sustained by people who are sworn enemies of said corporate interests, there ensues an existential power struggle between the party and the corporations (foreign, domestic, or most often both), that typically ends up reaching beyond the borders of the country in question.
If the one party quickly becomes captured by foreign interests, chances are the party was founded with that intention.
Apply this lens to the last 107-119 years of history, and most of it will become much clearer.
So who watches the watchers? In a way we all do. But instead of this being a mere idealistic aphorism, there are mechanisms in place to ensure it. We enculturate people to value equality and not valorize themselves above others, we minimize the potential benefits of corruption and keep the punishments consistent, we ensure that the watcher is not a lifelong position, we ensure that watchers do not become a separate class, we subject the watchers to oversight and approval of those who are watched, and we set up the processes so that they only function when people are working together.
This is so much more extensive than the asymmetric and byzantine setup that passes for “checks and balances” in liberal democracies. Is it still possible for things to go awry as a few bad actors try to bend the framework to favor themselves? Yes, absolutely. And that is a challenge to the people setting up the framework, to keep the wrong people out initially and to make it strong enough that it can keep its integrity once the founders are gone.