Slow and Steady…

Hey everybody,

I know we’ve had a couple of spammers join the group in the last couple of weeks. I remove them immediately but I apologize for the inconvenience.

Incidentally, we haven’t set a date for our next meeting yet — it may have to wait until after the holidays — but I’d like to get together and talk about the group and possible activities and projects we could pursue in the spring. More talks? Coop panel? I’ve been in touch with John Gibler who wants to do some events in March to promote his forthcoming book, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt. Not exactly ParSoc but he is interested in meeting with local activists to talk strategy. If anybody wants to help me set stuff up for that please let me know.

One recent thing that’s happened is that Dan and I have started participatory society blogs. Mine is at www.austinpps.org/blogs/marcus and Dan’s is, surprise, at www.austinpps.org/blogs/dan. Also, Dan set up a blog aggregator that gathers blog entries from several participatory society organizers. It’s called Planet Parecon and is at www.austinpps.org/blogs. We are currently in the process of looking for writers to generate content. Check it out!

Hope you all are well!

Marcus

I wanted to share this event announcement sent out by the Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective. Way to go guys!   -mcd

BOOK LAUNCH:
Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, edited by Chris Spannos.
Rhizome Cafe. Sunday, November 23, 5:30 pm

Come celebrate the launch of Chris Spannos’ book, Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century (AK Press). Chris, a founding member of the Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective and former Vancouverite, is remembered by many people in the community for his contributions to Stopwar.ca, Pacific Cinematheque, Co-op Radio’s Redeye program, and more.

We’ll have music and dancing, there’s food and drinks, and of course we’ll hear from Chris as well as other contributors to the book.  Find out what exactly a participatory economy and society is, hear proposals on how we can get from here to there, and find out what projects and experiments are already in the works.

We hope to see you there!

Sponsored by:  The Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective
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I had an idea for an event.  What if we did something that was sort of a primer to the whole participatory, parsoc stuff.  We could give a brief background on the history and ideology of the new left and where these ideas came from, a brief overview of our social theory (totalism/complementary holism), the development of parecon and its basic values and institutions, and the last couple of years of groups like ours starting up and organizing.  We could talk about our group, what we’ve done and what our experience has been, maybe even read the chapter I wrote for Real Utopia.  And we could have an open discussion with people about what APPS, other parsoc groups, and the Left could and should be doing.

Maybe something like this would give people a good entry point and maybe give us some fresh ideas about where to go from here.

Halloween was a trip this year, literally. I had to fly to Dallas for a one day training on a software program my school uses. Luckily it was quick, actually helpful, and I met some good people. In fact, things went so smoothly I forgot it was Halloween.

That is, until the shenanigans began.

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