Slow and Steady…

Hello Austin PPS!

I’m happy to write that we will be having our first meeting of 2009 on Tuesday, January 27th at 7pm at the Austin Can! Academy (2406 Rosewood Ave. 78702; 1.5 miles east of I35, across from the Millennium Youth Entertainment Complex) in room 108 (signs will be posted). Over the last several months members of the collective have been discussing the best way for APPS — now in its 3rd year — to move forward, and I’m excited about what the spring holds for us!

Proposed agenda items below.

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Austin’s reaction to Israel’s ongoing massacre in the Gaza Strip has been impressive and shows a great deal of promise. Looked at through a participatory, strategic lens, we can see several positive elements worth highlighting, along with some areas for improvement and goals to aim for as we move forward.

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Yep, planning indeed.

Recently I had a conversation about parecon in which in passing I mentioned that the participatory planning process would be a way of, well, planning an economy. This set off an automatic alarm bell for my coworker. Plan an economy? According to him, we don’t need planning committees, planning boards, or anything of the sort to tell us how much of each thing should be made and what price everything should be. The beauty of the market is that when you’ve got people making things and people wanting things, almost magically there emerges from this interaction a price, an agreement, about how much each thing is worth, which in turn determines the supply and demand of economic goods and services. At least, that’s how he put it.

While of course I disagree that the market represents an objective, accurate, or just arbiter of social cost and economic investment, I also don’t believe in any kind of central planning process, whether that be through boards, committees, or coordinators. What kind of a role, then, does that leave for planning in a good economy?

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I think this song sums up a lot of what we’re trying to overcome through a focus on vision and strategy. It’s not that people don’t know the world is a mess (”Now we see everything that’s going wrong with the world and those who lead it…”), or don’t care (”It’s not that we don’t care, we just know that the fight ain’t fair…”). The task is showing them that something better exists and that attaining it is feasible (”We just feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it…”); in other words, overcoming cynicism.

Plus, it’s catchy Check it out (lyrics below the fold): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPOBMzMTP4U

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In June 2007 I was interviewed at the U.S. Social Forum about the Austin Project for a Participatory Society — then in its 6th month – by Lydia Sargent of Z Communications. I had pretty much forgotten about it until today when, much to my surprise, I saw my name on the ZSpace top page. The clip is 11 minutes long and, after I got over the slightly weird feeling you get when you see yourself on video (or is it just me?), I thought was actually pretty good. As we approach our second anniversary I wonder how a new interview might differ from the first.

Smaller version (ZSpace top page)

Large (permanent link)

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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Mitchell and Bree from the Chicago Area Participatory Economics Society (CAPES) came to Austin the weekend of October 10th. Mitchell was taking part in the FlowTV media conference, including moderating a panel discussion on the conversion to digital TV. Fortunately we found enough free time to hang out and chat about parecon and how we were organizing toward it (facilitated in no small part by them crashing at my apartment).

A couple of things about the visit:

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