I dunno, I feel like being well-versed politically should be a lot like being able to wash your own clothes in a washing machine or cook your own food, in that sure, there are some tasks that are important for people to be specialists in, but other tasks which are just considered life skills.
Those skills aren't actually basic life skills at all. We built machines to transform them into basic life skills so that people who would otherwise spend a lot of time on them could do other things.
I am tentatively interested in lawmaking robots but I understand there are some potential drawbacks to that approach.
Political involvement and civic responsibility are life skills we should cultivate and promote, and the governmental system should be one that endeavors to be simple enough and accessible enough that those life skills guarantee a pretty heavy capability for engagement.
This, to me, sounds basically like "we should be able to do our taxes on a postcard." If you want the government to do very little, you can make it very easy to understand. If you want the government to literally wield the accumulated power of the workers and reify their will, I am not sure why you would expect it to be possible to make that simple. Their will isn't simple!
To the degree that government complexity just arises out of mulcting, then we should eliminate it. But I think the point of disagreement here is mostly that I think most byzantine bureaucracy arises out of a genuine desire to have the government do things, and doing the right thing the right way is not fundamentally easy to do. It seems facile to imagine otherwise!
A dedicated political class is almost always going to concentrate power, and I don't really trust like that. I don't see how you avoid the formation of a political class if your society has lawmaking as a highly specialized, highly time-consuming event that only a trained few can participate in.
To be blunt, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that direct democracy won't lead to a political class either. There were plenty of politicians in ancient Athens, and the people chosen by lot to preside didn't end up mattering as much as the people who decided to make it their business to have political opinions. If democratic participation is voluntary, then the people with more motivation to participate will simply end up with more control, as anybody who's attended an Occupy meeting can tell you. If democratic participation is mandatory, people will still seek out political parties to limit the demands that participation imposes on them. Both of those pressures exist today, so it's not like I made them up.
Your desire seems to be for a different class of new socialist human who has a stronger civic ethic. I think this does not give much credit to today's humans. Most people would like to participate in our democracy, but it doesn't mean they all want to make policy.
I think Samoyed's got it on the money, in that connecting political parties to knowledge about subjects represents an error of attribution. You're attributing expertise and knowledge to political parties, when that isn't the case. We don't need political parties to tell us what to do about climate change-- we need climate scientists to do that. I don't believe political parties represent the best way to communicate the concerns and knowledge of climate scientists to the lay person.
I don't think most policy problems are amenable to scientific solutions. Even with climate change, the problem is not necessarily convincing people of the science (I think assuming that gives too much credit to the denialists) -- it's convincing them to accept significant short-term costs, and identifying who can most easily bear those costs. That question is not scientific -- it's governmental.
There's another issue to explore, and that's the fact that it MIGHT be tedious to keep track of all the political nuances of ALL topics for SOME people, but MOST people have a hobby horse or two that they actively like to dig into, even if it's not a professional thing. I like digging into environmental legislation, for example. I mean, shit, most of us aren't socialist academics but we like and are informed about socialism. If you have parties that package together a bunch of positions, you're likely to have to accept positions you don't agree with to further the ones you do. That's an awful compromise especially when someone admits they have neither the time nor the inclination to get politically involved. It makes more sense by far to go to the people in your community who are politically involved in the subjects you aren't to get their opinion. You can probably find someone in your community who just loves transit code so goddamn much even if they're not professionals just like you like socialism without being an academic specializing in Marxist analysis.
The system you're describing is literally how political parties operate, though. People looking to community experts is not fundamentally distinct from looking to political parties. Political parties are, by and large, made up of people who were once community experts. I don't particularly have a problem with handing over my power to a given community expert, but recognize that's literally the point of representative democracy -- to find those people and empower them to make policy decisions. That guy in your community who you want to put in charge of the transit code is just a representative by another name.
Honestly, I think this is going to be part of an attitude adjustment. People see keeping up on politics as this monolithic, dreary task-- and yet they don't see spending forty hours of the week, at minimum, not counting commute, making someone else money so they can live as something monolithic and dreary. I think people will have more energy and capacity to engage in political subjects than they expect.
Mandatory selling of labor being bad doesn't mean mandatory civic participation is neccessarily good. I would suggest it is more likely to mean the opposite! Once freed up from work, many people may find they want to engage in politics. But just as many people may find they don't. A system that builds sensibly around the people who don't is likely to have greater success. After all, if we replace 40 hours of work with 40 hours of politics, we haven't really gained much.
Specialization of labor is fine, but society being structured so that we are all required to be specialized in something to sell our skills on a market is not.
Something something Marx cattle rearing something something no jobs
Like, duh