Austin PPS blogs — Dan

A persistent theme in discussions of alternative economic systems is a trade-off between democracy and efficiency, with lateral structures considered more democratic, vertical systems more efficient.  There are, of course, some inefficiencies specific to vertical structures such as ineffective or corrupt leaders or a mismatch of priorities between the leaders and the led.

However, it’s certainly true that the more people involved in a decision, the more difficult making the decision becomes.  When three people decide something, there are three pairs of people.  When 50 people are involved, there are 1,225 pairs of people.  Subcommittees are used to avoid wasting everybody’s time, but they can become double time-wasters if the committee of the whole has to rehash everything from the subcommittee.  Parecon improves on this problem a little, by limiting input in decisions to those affected by them.  The committee of the whole never needs to address a problem that only affects those whose offices are on the third floor.  But there are still trivial decisions that nevertheless affect many people*.

Over the last couple decades, there have been real revolutions in addressing this problem.  The revolutions come in the form of fluid creation and rearrangement of small groups.  You can see this in “issue-tracking software” like bugzilla, software that creates tools for collaboratively addressing bugs in (other) software.  Individuals can easily join and leave the group of people involved in the discussion of the problem; people can post as much as they need to about one problem without affecting anybody not addressing the problem (as anybody not addressing the problem can leave).  Problems can merge (by marking one as duplicate of the other), or become related (by marking one as depending on another).

A more familiar example of this might be Wikipedia.  Similarly to bugzilla, by partitioning the concept of an encyclopedia into an unlimited number of “pages”, Wikipedia allows for the rapid creation of small groups.  Groups can be as small as 1, or they can rapidly scale to multiple people working on the same page.  If the page becomes particularly popular, many more people might work on it, or it might split up into separate subpages with different (but overlapping) groups working on each.  Without such software, it would be unthinkable for so many millions of people to collaborate on a project the size of Wikipedia.  Could you really imagine a mailing list or coordinating committee simultaneously juggling over 1m different encyclopedia pages?  Trying to filter the discussion for only those subjects you were interested in?  Despite relying on more traditional vertical structures for some things (such as maintaining the physical servers or deciding punishments for rule-breaking), Wikipedia has created a massive, lateral structure, with collaboration happening mostly in small groups.

This phenomenon–small groups within a large lateral decision-making structure–gets the best out of people–small group collaboration, without the inefficiencies of imperfect leaders.  Even as it has its own imperfections, Wikipedia has demonstrated that it is a far more useful and used project than any commercial encyclopedia could have hoped to be in the 7.5 short years it has existed.

In my next post, I’ll share my ideas for how to spread that revolution further, how to see it move out of the realm of spreading software and knowledge, and see it in other walks of life.

* OK, technically, this isn’t the same as a bike shed problem, but it’s pretty similar.

Last night, I went to a big party, Austin CoopFest, put on mostly by one of the housing coops, ICC.  In attendance were consumer coops small (Wheatsville–groceries) and large (REI), as well as student and non-student housing coops, alternative economics institutions (Austin Time Exchange).  And, of course, beer was provided by Black Star Coop, another consumer coop.  White Ghost Shivers–a quite fun old-timey band–headlined and a good time was had by all.  I even ran into an old friend from Boston who I didn’t know had moved down to Austin.

There was little that was explicitly coop-y about the whole thing; the coops who paid for booths probably did so partly to advertise to the student audience.  But I still think that events like these are one tiny step in the direction of setting up a participatory economy, by cementing the idea that coops prefer to deal economically with other coops, are willing to accept propping up other coops even at a loss, etc.

I do wish that the Credit Unions were there.  I don’t know whether or not they were asked to be, but the credit unions in Austin are easily the largest consumer coops, and it would be great if they started to feel that part of their “brand” as credit unions was being part of and giving support to the local cooperative economy.  Credit unions are hot right now with the financial sector collapse–I know that my credit union has been growing like crazy over the last year or so, and especially over the last few weeks.  It would be nice if people started to get that same reassurance from other coops–credit unions are solid and safe, because they are coops and democratically run; other coops must be too.

If this really happened, and there really was a functioning coop economy, I could imagine campaigns to get all the coops to accept certain principles.  A good, timid, first principle might be maximum compensation gaps.  That, say, coops in Austin accept a minimum wage for their employees of $8/hour and a maximum wage of $50 (=salary of 100,000).  If the coops aren’t tied together into a community, a push like this would be really difficult; it would be coop-by-coop, and essentially a campaign to lower a couple people’s salary.  But if they were tied together, this principle could be a broader campaign for fairness.

Well, a dream for now.

One of the things I’ve been frustrated about recently about Parecon activism is that I feel totally unprepared to answer the question: “so what?”  The reason, if I understood correctly, that most of us give for thinking about “end goals” is that having “end goals” helps point us in the right direction for the short and medium term.  That is, if we don’t know where we’re going, how can we possibly get there?

So far, most of my friends are with me.  Okay, we’re going to parecon.  Now, step 2 is: now that we know where we’re going, how *do* we get there?  Michael Albert tried to answer this question in some ways in Moving Forward, and that is why, of the Parecon books out there, I think it is my favorite.  But even so, the answers were still extremely abstract.

How would a movement informed by Parecon look different than one that wasn’t?  In short, supposing that you’re already convinced that you should be an activist, how does thinking about Parecon get you to the right place, whereas not thinking about it gets you to the wrong place?  In my next few posts, I’m going to explore some of my answers to this question, but I’d love to see other people talk about what projects they’ve conceived of or undertaken that help bring them closer toward Parecon.

There’s a lot of people out there in the world interested in Parecon.  There have been various initiatives over the last year or so to bring people who are interested in it together, to work together.  There is an International Project for a Participatory Society, consisting mostly of big thinkers writing magazine-style articles about how things would look differently in a Parecon world.  There is an email list of committed parecon activists.  There have been Z school courses in Parecon, bringing many of the world’s parecon activists to the same virtual space.

My hope for Planet Parecon is to fill a different niche.  Planet Parecon is a place where, yes, you can write long, impassioned, well-thought-out articles about how X people will do better under Parecon than capitalism, or the detailed strategy for constructing a pareconish Y.  But it’s also a place where you can quickly jot down your emotions after coming home from giving or hearing a lecture, where you can document your half-baked ideas while they’re on their way to becoming fully baked, where you can tell the world that you’re really excited it’s springtime in your hemisphere.

Why do I think it’s needed?  Because despite reading so many articles about parecon, proposals, etc., I still don’t know what most parecon activists do, nor does pretty much anybody outside of Austin know what I or my friends down here in Austin do.  (Short answer: not a ton, but we have a lot of fun doing it.)  Because a lot of pareconists end up making big proposals, but they’re so formal by the time they reach the rest of the world, that other people can’t feel like they can join in and make the proposal their own, or can’t feel like they can criticize it because it’s clearly the product of a ton of thinking.

In short, I want to know what’s on the mind of people working for parecon.  I want to find a way that we can work together, even without knowing each other, and sometimes the best way of doing that, is just knowing a little bit about what each other are working on, in case we happen to have the same interests.  If you are a parecon activist and have a blog about yourself and parecon, please let me know and I can add you to the Planet.