Collective Decision-Making and Supervision in a Communist Society

This article brings together my commitment to communism and my scientific work in the theory of social choice, particularly the measurement of voting power. I have been composing it, on and off, for several years: writing a few paragraphs, then putting it aside and turning to more urgent current tasks. Originally I used the term ‘socialism ’ in the title and the body of the arti-cle; but I have now changed this to ‘communism’. Let me explain why. The terms ‘communist ’ and ‘communism ’ have undergone a significant semantic shift since the beginning of the 21st century. For long these terms had been usurped and virtually monopolized by Stalinized ‘official communism’. For this reason, anti-Stalinist communists tended to avoid these terms as self-description and a description of the kind of society they strive for. Instead, they used terms such as ‘revolutionary socialists ’ as self-description, and ‘so-cialism ’ for their aim. (The term ‘socialism ’ was also usurped by Stalinists, but they never managed to monopolize it.) However, with the collapse of ‘of-ficial communism’, there has been a growing tendency to reclaim the forme