Austin PPS blogs — Dan

How many people total are involved in ParSoc activism?  On the one hand, Parecon: Life after Capitalism sold quite well and, at APPS, whenever we put out an open call for new members, we get people who have long been interested in the subject coming out of the woodwork to show up at our meetings.  On the other hand, the active world of people participating in Parsoc activism seems almost vanishingly small, perhaps no more than 100 people worldwide–way smaller, say, than the number of people involved in neighborhood councils here in our little town of Austin.  The same people write chapters in Real Utopia, show up on the IPPS mailing list, are Z sustainers, and show up at Z functions like the parecon/parsoc classes over the summer.

This isn’t meant to be discouraging; for me, this realization was the opposite.  For a long time, I was discouraged about the state of Austin Project for a Participatory Society because I kept getting the impression that around the world, PPS activism was a large and growing force, and we must be doing something wrong to not be growing like weeds.  When I realized how small the parecon world really was, it was like a great burden lifting off of me.  Not just because of the creeping insecurity that I was doing something wrong, a bad activist, but because it showed that a small group of people can come together to build something pretty big.

Since then, our focus at APPS has not been reaching out and getting new people to hear about Parecon.  We still do that to some degree, but not so much.  It has instead been on coming up with projects that we could carry out which we think will showcase the great benefit of thinking strategically.  Perhaps it’s delusional–having failed to bring masses of people to our meetings, we’re pretending that the goal is undesirable.  But I don’t think so.   I think that it’s more delusional the other way around–at the beginning of our group, having succeeded in getting lots of people to our meetings, we deluded ourselves into thinking we had accomplished something.