We should press for advertisement reform while having certain co-ops already advertise in a responsible way. We need to elect politicians that will support the co-op movement by endorsing them, facilitating their inception, and most importantly shunning the corporate world. We should also press for changes within current co-ops. I need to do a lot more research on co-ops vs. corporations. I just met someone who works at a worker-owned co-op. But we need more explicitly democratic co-ops, in the sense that they are accountable to the community and not just the workers.

Imagine an energy co-op for your entire city, that provided cheap, reliable electricity, because it didn’t work for profit, and was accountable through democratic structures to the city. Or better yet, imagine they did go for a slight profit, which was redistributed through a direct voting mechanism, via internet perhaps. Everyone gets an equal share to give to some project, road, organization, school, hospital, or back to the company if they wish. Now imagine all your good and services are provided this way, and that all providers are federated so all their profits go into the redistribution pool.

I believe eventually this system would lead to sets of consumer and worker councils that democratically decide what to produce and how. Michael Albert outlines a system called ParEcon, short for participatory economics. It is made up of a series of nested councils. The family is the smallest council, then neighborhood, city, county, state, and so on. Each family would send a member to the neighborhood council, each neighborhood would send a member to the city council, and so on. Decisions would be made at the lowest level possible. Decisions that affect one community more than another would be weighted in favor of the affected community. Albert puts it like this – you want to put a picture of your family on your desk. Should anyone else in the office have a say in this? No, it affects only you. You want to play music all day. This affects others, they should have a say.

Another component is the consumer and worker preference. You as a consumer, predict what and how much you will consume over the next year. Workers predict how much they will produce of each product over the year. The two will initially be far apart, so there will be several iterations of preference submissions until a feasible plan is found. This attempts to combine the flexibility of a market system, without the competition and unpredictability, with the control of central planning, without the vanguard class.

Of course it could neither be implemented directly or in precisely the way he outlines it, but I believe a strong co-op base provides the framework for the next step in economic evolution.

We need to be thinking realistically about how to press for economic democracy. It should be an issue at the forefront of the world’s consciousness. This isn’t some far off idea that maybe our grandkids will experience, it is the next popular struggle, women’s suffrage, civil rights, economic democracy. We need a vision, along with tangible steps to achieving that vision. Think hard and think big.

Paul, thanks for posting this.

Richard, the ideas you express seem wonderful, in theory. Do you have personal experiences you could share where you’ve been successful at generating the this same kind of energy I see in your writing, in other people? – Thanks.

I think education, access to information, the time to absorb the information, the training to understand the information, the energy to retain the information, etc… are all key components to a successful democracy AND key components in setting up a successful democratic economic system. I’ve been finding it really difficult to encourage people to learn as much as they can. Any ideas?

My hope is that the energy put into my writing energizes whoever reads it. The people that give me feedback tell me it inspires them to question more and believe less. There are those who hate it of course..but I like to think its because they hate the ideas, and I try to view it like this. People that disagree are much more likely to respond, so hopefully to the extent those who disagree hate it, those who agree (but don’t respond) are moved by it…but who knows. You tell me.

I haven’t gone out and talked to as many people as I would like about the issues. My goal is to become a help create and support multiple economically liberating projects, and mobilize support through public events and community involvement. I’ve really only given one real speech in my life, and it was on teachers during my high school graduation. The feedback was really positive and it’s encouraged me to try and practice my public speaking skills to possibly one day hold an office or garner support for economic democracy.

As far as a personal experience goes, I went to high school in a very small, and mostly close-minded town. I don’t know if I energized people I knew, as much as led them to question previously granted beliefs. And this was before I knew any of what I know now. I’ve really only been aware for about a year, so there’s a long way to go. To get people questioning I respectfully questioned their beliefs, encouraged them to explain them to me as specifically as possible, and then responded with alternative explanations. I’ve never reflected on this actually..thanks for helping me know myself a little better

But regarding the movement we’re talking about it. I think the most important part is creating a sense of exigence. Talking about what will happen when oil peaks is particularly salient. Watch a movie called “A Crude Awakening.” Brilliant movie. Criticizing capitalism is important, but we should be careful to not treat it the way we do a rainy week. Something unfortunate but ultimately inevitable. Reuben Weinzveg posted a great Harper’s article about a general strike that mentions this pattern of thought.
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/0081720
We all just need to practice talking about the issues though. Practice asking questions and responding with alternatives. Learn a few startling facts. Let the people you talk to know their ideas are important, and just questioning in general is important. I guess the most important thing though, is to not be discouraged too much by people that remain apathetic. They may not care now, but when the time comes they’ll remember what you said, and turn to you.

Paul – I agree with you, the next big step forward is not armchair philosophy but to actually develop working alternatives. For me, the growing movement towards worker-owned non-hierarchical and self-managed businesses is a massive step in the right direction because it provides a glimpse of a better way to organize our production. What I’d really like to see is that movement growing and taking things to the next level – setting up credit unions that would provide bridge loans to workers seeking to purchase the businesses where they work and convert them into collectives, providing legal support and know-how to one another, really build it into a movement. Why is it that all over america skilled workers are being put out of work and factories left empty as manufacturing jobs get exported? Why not have the unions and the workers simply buy the factories from the corporations that are abandoning them in favor of cheap labor elsewhere, convert them into non-hierarchal self-managed worker-run collectives, and let the people who work there continue to work there but without the boss’s?

In Argentina this is actually happening – after the massive economic collapse in 2001 thousands of factories all over the country were shut down as capital fled abroad and millions were pushed into unemployment, but instead of sitting on their asses and moaning about it the workers there broke back into their old workplaces, started the machinery back up, and kept right on working – only for themselves instead of their former bosses. Now, six years in, many of those new collectives have turned around and used the profits from their businesses to actually buy the factories and infrastructure from the bosses and are 100% legal.

My questions are

(1) why was it illegal in the first place? The fact that private property laws would force skilled workers into unemployment while the means of production sit vacant is such an incredible indictment of capitalism it’s almost beyond words. Far from being criminals, those workers are heroes and through their labor they helped prevent one of the worst economic crisis in south american history from spiraling out of control and wiping out the economies of the entire region. They are heroes in every sense of the word.
(2) Why aren’t we doing this here? How many factories and businesses have been closed since the passing of NAFTA and the creation of the WTO as “american” corporations have fled abroad looking for easy access to slave labor maquiadoras? Why in the world are we letting all of that infrastructure – which was often built at public expense through massive corporate welfare – simply rot while workers starve? It’s insane.

The revolution is here, right now, we’ve just got to get off our asses and actually make it happen.

Gives me chills to think about. I’ve wondered the exact same thing. If these unions are complaining so much about lacking wages, and unjust treatment..why don’t they build their own business? By not doing so they’re supporting this owner/worker distinction. I don’t mean to belittle the unions, but they and we just have to take a step forward.

Its exciting to have someone with similar ideas lynx. Credit Unions, factory takeovers, just production of goods. All the pieces are there, and they are slowly coming together. Its all definitely in an infant stage, but there is something physical and tangible to work with here.

I joined a group called Rice for Peace recently. That’s rice university not the food. I’m hoping this can be a good vehicle to starting some of these projects, like supportive credit unions. Thats probably the biggest and most important task, don’t you think lynx? These projects all need some starting capital. We need a fair version of the venture capitalist system as well, for projects too large for credit union loans. We need funds for all kinds of things, which is why I suspect that a compromised profit margin is needed. Ideally we would just all work for around 40,000 dollars a year, and thus prices would be set accordingly. In these beginning stages though we need to efficiently recycle resources. If people are aware of where this money is going, they will feel no qualms about handing over some profit…I mean come on, look at the masses that shop at JC penny and mcdonalds. People just need an honest alternative that improves communities.

There are a couple of economics graduate students in the group, so I will be gleaning their knowledge about the feasibility of one of these projects, and then through college and other activist networks try to get one off the ground. Perhaps the wealthy progressives would invest in the projects. Lynx, have you, or anyone else for that matter, know about existing credit unions, open to everyone, co-ops that provide necessary services, or anything like that?