On the 27th of August, the IRC ##marxism channel on Freenode celebrated its first team debate. If this doesn’t mean a lot to you, check the ##marxism debates page for more information.
Basically, ##marxism is a channel on IRC–a text chat protocol–where Marxists and, admitedly, quite a few fellow travellers, meet to discuss politics, theory, etc. Since we don’t have a single viewpoint, we often end up arguing, and somehow we began celebrating formal debates on issues of interest. So far we’ve debated the class nature of the USSR, the role of the party, and, this time, sortition. We have reasonably readable logs for all the debates if you care to read them.
Sortition and its relation to democracy is something that’s been coming up quite often, so we decided to hold a debate on it. We also used it as a dry run for a future debate on the European Union, since we’d never conducted a debate with teams before. While some things may have gone a little bit smoother, it was well enough for a first attempt–and I’ve cleand up most of the “messy” things from the log so it’s more pleasant to read. If you’re interested, check the html log of the debate, or, if you prefer, read the log in PDF.
