Interactive Eco-Anarchist Utopia

[Bernie Gunther]

Yep, also the point is not particularly to reduce the amount of time they have for doctoring. If anything improved access to education and focus on socially useful study vs stuff like 'business studies' would increase the overall amount of doctor-time availability. Look at Cuba for example ...

The point of the 'balanced jobs' thing is primarily to prevent a 'coordinator class' arising which monopolises decision-making even though the means of production are jointly controlled.

 

[jimadore]

Love the concept but human nature wont' let that happen

 

[soulman]

The problem with Parecon, or Participatory Economics, is just like the description it's based on economics. If you want to see a society without managers/rulers/some kind of dominant class, you need to remove the financial profit motive, and allow people to do what they enjoy without financial gain being the motive.

 

[soulman]

Bernie I don't understand why you're trying to draw links between Parecon - a money based system, and Kropotkin, and the Council Communists.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Well, I'm trying to put together something that's a plausible and concrete answer to the question 'What sort of society would you advocate and how would (a whole bunch of specific) things work in the absence of capitalism'?

So, Kropotkin and the nice fit between some of his ideas, especially in FF&W with modern notions of eco-villages for optimising sustainability and complementary ideas in architecture was kind of the starting point. That stuff feels like it hangs together really well at the local level and to cover basic subsistence needs sustainably, but most advocates I'm familiar with resort to what seems to me like a bunch of vaguely hopeful handwaving when they try to answer questions about large scale stuff. Questions like 'how are we going to build and then supply raw materials for computer chip fabrication plants, launch satellites and lay transatlantic fibreoptic bearers, in order that future society can have networked computers in it?' seem to be a real challenge when looked at purely from the point of view of Kropotkinite eco-villages.

Parecon I took as a kind of placeholder answer to questions about how you organise large-scale production and consumption relations in a way that isn't either some sort of capitalism or a USSR-style central planning economy. I haven't seen anything comparable in the anarchist and green traditions, although some of Richard Douthwaite's stuff might be a start. Parecon has the significant advantage, for my stated objectives, of being worked out in enough detail that you can give concrete and somewhat plausible answers to most of the usual objections, so I figure it'll do until something better becomes apparent to me. If you can point out something better, I'll happily go and read it.

Some things about it made me uncomfortable though, so I did some digging and found that some of the key ideas in Parecon, although obviously not the whole thing, were taken from the Council Communists. It was those ideas, particularly the stuff regarding what you might call governance, that I was drawing on in the answer at the top of the page, so I quoted Pannekoek rather than the parecon guys.

 

[soulman]

I spent some time looking at parecon a while ago and my conclusion was that while it offered something that I thought could be a temporary, or partial bridge, to a society where we could live without money, that's not how the authors saw it. I guess that's North Americans for you.

I prefer the European models that either see capitalism to be overcome, or as something that has and is being lived beyond the everyday.

 

[TESLA]

http://www.thevenusproject.com/

Anyone know anything about this Resource Based Economy?

 

[888]

Have you read up on the 'parpolity' side of parecon? I think they discuss a lot of this stuff there.

I don't really like Parecon much but at least it's a worthwhile effort - Parpolity on the other hand is horrible.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The problem most people seem to be having with this is Parecon, which really isn't the main thing there from my point of view.

What I was trying to get right was sustainability, direct democracy and so on, while having an architecture (in the broadest sense) that seemed to me like it would be reasonably pleasant to inhabit.

The problem is you need some sort of system for resource distribution that isn't going to turn back into capitalism, so if someone can point me at an alternative to Parecon that might be able to replace it functionally in the society proposed above I'd be very interested.

 

[soulman]

This feels like a blast from the past Bernie, although looking at the dates it isn't that long ago really. Reading it again I still don't understand why you think people would need some kind of blueprint or 'green print'.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Well, I necroed it because I recently started tinkering with this stuff again. I'm not sure that people 'need' a blueprint, but to my way of thinking trying to imagine a concrete answer to the question 'What sort of society would you like to see replace capitalism?' is an worthwhile exercise for a number of reasons.

First, I enjoy this sort of thing for its own sake. Secondly, it's potentially useful, if only for the purposes of arguing with right wing trolls, to have something concrete in mind, even if you have no chance of getting there.

 

[Fruitloop]

Worth exhuming IMO. I will rejoin shortly.

 

[soulman]

Well, I necroed it because I recently started tinkering with this stuff again. I'm not sure that people 'need' a blueprint, but to my way of thinking trying to imagine a concrete answer to the question 'What sort of society would you like to see replace capitalism?' is an worthwhile exercise for a number of reasons.

First, I enjoy this sort of thing for its own sake. Secondly, it's potentially useful, if only for the purposes of arguing with right wing trolls, to have something concrete in mind, even if you have no chance of getting there.

I'm disagreeing with you on this bernie because I think you've misunderstood what Kropotkin was doing. He wasn't describing the future he was using where he found himself to show how simple things like mutual aid and voluntary cooperation are important to everyday life.

Colin Ward got it and tried to do the same thing

 

[Bernie Gunther]

So, why should I be constrained to doing the same thing as Kropotkin?

I don't have an enormous orange beard either

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm disagreeing with you on this bernie because I think you've misunderstood what Kropotkin was doing. He wasn't describing the future he was using where he found himself to show how simple things like mutual aid and voluntary cooperation are important to everyday life.

I agree that this is what Kropotkin was doing. What he says is useful to use to point out to people how much they are themselves cooperating already when they try to tell you that competition is the natural order of things. You can use it, in other words, in an attempt to shape the future.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't have an enormous orange beard either

You've ruined my mental image of you.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

You've ruined my mental image of you.

More sort of dark brown and white, like an old badger

 

[littlebabyjesus]

More sort of dark brown and white, like an old badger

Good. I like that one better anyway.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Seriously though. I can see Kropotkin wasn't proposing a concrete utopian society. I don't think there's anything wrong with having a bash at it though or pinching his ideas where they're helpful for that different purpose.

I perfectly well recognise that even if I persuaded the masses to subscribe to this vision and try very hard to make it happen (unlikely) that we'd probably end up with something quite different due to the interaction of vision with reality. That's fine, it doesn't mean that trying to propose a set of concrete answers to the question of 'So what sort of society *do* you advocate?' isn't worth doing. It's all very well to say 'the workers/historical forces/whatever will figure it out as they go along' and for some purposes that may be the right answer. For other purposes though, questions like 'is it even possible to have an egalitarian, sustainable society in terms of resources and energy and scientific stuff like that without major depopulation and/or authoritarianism?' I think it's worth trying to say what one possible configuration might look like in concrete terms while trying to keep handwaving and optimistic waffle to a minimum.

In this case much of the interesting stuff (to me) is in the numbers. What's the right size community for direct democracy? What's the right scale to recycle phosphorus on? How many people can live comfortably on a given hectarage using permaculture/biointensive style agriculture and whatever industry they could plausibly run locally/sustainably with advanced technology? How many people's surplus production is required to have stuff like teaching hospitals and universities etc? How are you going to organise global stuff like keeping the internet working? I've tried as far as possible to model that stuff out sensibly and show how it could fit together to produce a reasonably decent way of life on page one. I thought it important to do that, because the reaction of a lot of people hostile to sustainability arguments is to characterise it as 'going back to the middle ages' and so on and I simply don't think that has to be the case.

 

[soulman]

‘In my experience there are two kinds of Green people. There are philanthropists (lovers of humankind), who see the revolution in communications and the collapse of the city economy as the opportunity for the greening of the dense Victorian city. And there are the misanthropists (haters of humanity), who want to pull up the drawbridge to exclude those urban hordes from ‘rural’ England, which they quaintly equate with a ‘natural’ environment. They want to keep those beastly city-dwellers in the urban ghetto. The rich, of course, know the advantages of both environments and have a country seat and a pad in town.’

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Sorry, don't get the relevance. Well, I guess I do if it's clear that what I'm doing is the former, but I'm not sure who is doing the latter.

 

[soulman]

Sorry, don't get the relevance. Well, I guess I do if it's clear that what I'm doing is the former, but I'm not sure who is doing the latter.

Sorry it wasn't aimed at you. It's a quote from Colin Ward that I thought might be worth adding to the mix.

 

[ska invita]

My 2p - the size stats look fair enough in your OP Bernie, and I personally don't see anything unusual about sharing out the jobs - do it in a co-op i work for now, and personally its nice to do a bit of physical labour once in a while.

The real issue here is the setting of a utopia in a future time, and the notion of coercion to take part in it (social cohesion in general). This is a major hole that needs plugging. What's to stop dissidents forming hells angel marauding gangs of death? Or capitalist dissidents to try and start things up again etc, etc.

There is an answer, and its in the work of Ken Wilber. I'll do my best to give a really basic version of the point: His charting of the history of life on earth shows an evolution of 4 interlocking aspects that all have to 'evolve' together to create a type of society. The four variables are Cultural, Social and (this gets a bit trickier) Intentional (which means the interior mental world of individuals) and Behavioural (biological potential for consciousness). He traces this back to single cell life form 'societies' up to now.

Its worth reading for yourself, to really get to grips with, and its not too important here to include any detail - i jsut want to make a general point - the point being that a society isn't just a product of stats and spatial arrangements, its a reflection of the internal psychic world of its participants.
If you want a world closer to utopia, the conscious state of the people has to be equally developed. Just as a viking raper and pilager wouldn't fit in to modern British society, so many modern people wouldn't fit in to a future utopian one.

Wilber fuses all the major strains of progressive academic work, such as political ideology, feminism, sociology, anthropology, psychology etc. with ideas about, for want of a better word, enlightenment, or the development of consciousness. I find his views convincing - I havent begun to do them justice here.

Anyhow, the mentality of the people in any utopia is the key component, and one that cannot be planned - but can be imagined!

Incidentally, the default to atheism amongst many 'progressive' people, in politics especially, means that discussion of higher states of consciousness and the like are a taboo - I think they form an important missing link in addition to talk of higher states of political formations. EDIT: general education has a key role here also - though naturally the things on the syllabus make a big difference...

*its late and im tired so hope that made some sense...

 

[soulman]

If you want a world closer to utopia, the conscious state of the people has to be equally developed. Just as a viking raper and pilager wouldn't fit in to modern British society, so many modern people wouldn't fit in to a future utopian one.

I haven't quoted your full post but I have read it a few times. I keep coming back to what I have quoted which I think are really important points.

I don't think human beings are ready for a classless, moneyless self-managed community.

Part of me thinks that capitalism is the problem. Then you look at societies not dominated by capitalism and see the same traits. So it's power relationships on many levels.

But then I look at periods of history where those power relations have broken down, during war or revolutions and new kinds of relationships and organisations have emerged that reflect another side to 'modern people'.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Please excuse the necro here, but there's another angle on the above discussion I wanted to open up.

There are mathematical constraints on the planning problem. At least as Gosplan frame it.

What I'm trying to get my head around is whether a system which does as much planning as possible locally (as any Council Communist derived approach, including the 'worked example' of Parecon, would) and only pushes the exceptions upstream, has the same issues.

I. We need a quantity to maximize. This objective function has to be a function of the quantities of all the different goods (and services) produced by our economic system.

Here “objective” is used in the sense of “goal”, not in the sense of “factual”. In Kantorovich’s world, the objective function is linear, just a weighted sum of the output levels. Those weights tell us about trade-offs: we will accept getting one less bed-sheet (queen-size, cotton, light blue, thin, fine-weave) if it lets us make so many more diapers (cloth, unbleached, re-usable), or this many more lab coats (men’s, size XL, non-flame-retardant),or for that matter such-and-such an extra quantity of toothpaste. In other words, we need to begin our planning exercise with relative weights. If you don’t want to call these “values” or “prices”, I won’t insist, but the planning exercise has to begin with them, because they’re what the function being optimized is built from.

It’s worth remarking that in Best Use of Economic Resources, Kantorovich side-stepped this problem by a device which has “all the advantages of theft over honest toil”. Namely, he posed only the problem of maximizing the production of a “given assortment” of goods—- the planners have fixed on a ratio of sheets to diapers (and everything else) to be produced, and want the most that can be coaxed out of the inputs while keeping those ratios. This doesn’t really remove the difficulty: either the planners have to decide on relative values, or they have to decide on the ratios in the “given assortment”.

Equivalently, the planners could fix the desired output, and try to minimize the resources required. Then, again, they must fix relative weights for resources (cotton fiber, blue dye #1, blue dye #2, bleach, water [potable],water [distilled], time on machine #1, time on machine #2, labor time [unskilled], labor time [skilled, sewing], electric power…). In some contexts these might be physically comparable units. (The first linear programming problem I was ever posed was to work out a diet which will give astronauts all the nutrients they need from a minimum mass of food.) In a market system these would be relative prices of factors of production. Maintaining a “given assortment” (fixed proportions) of resources used seems even less reasonable than maintaining a “given assortment” of outputs, but I suppose we could do it.

A good modern commercial linear programming package can handle a problem with 12 or 13 million variables in a few minutes on a desktop machine. Let’s be generous and push this down to 1 second. (Or let’s hope that Moore’s Law rule-of-thumb has six or eight iterations left,and wait a decade.) To handle a problem with 12 or 13 billion variables then would take about 30 billion seconds, or roughly a thousand years

Naturally, I have a reason for mentioning 12 million variables:

In the USSR at this time [1983] there are 12 million identifiably different products(disaggregated down to specific types of ball-bearings, designs of cloth, size of brown shoes, and so on). There are close to 50,000 industrial establishments, plus, of course, thousands of construction enterprises, transport undertakings, collective and state forms, wholesaling organs and retail outlets.
—Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (p. 36 of the revised [1991] edition; Nove’s italics)

This 12 million figure will conceal variations in quality; and it is not clear to me, even after tracking down Nove’s sources, whether it included the provision of services, which are a necessary part of any economy.

Let’s say it’s just twelve million. Even if the USSR could never have invented a modern computer running a good LP solver, if someone had given it one, couldn’t Gosplan have done its work in a matter of minutes? Maybe an hour, to look at some alternative plans?

No. The difficulty is that there aren’t merely 12 million variables to optimize over, but rather many more. We need to distinguish between a “coat, winter, men’s, part-silk lining, wool worsted tricot, clothgroup 29—32” in Smolensk from one in Moscow. If we don’t “index” physical goods by location this way, our plan won’t account for the need for transport properly, and things simply won’t be where they’re needed; Kantorovich said as much under the heading of “the problem of a production complex”. (Goods which can spoil, or are needed at particular occasions and neither earlier nor later, should also be indexed by time; Kantorovich’s “dynamic problem”) A thousand locations would be very conservative, but even that factor would get us into the regime where it would take us a thousand years to work through a single plan. With 12 million kinds of goods and only a thousand locations, to have the plan ready in less than a year would need computers a thousand times faster.

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

 

[rich!]

But, simplifying massively, you use linear programming to get the one best solution, and you use a wide range of day approximate methods to get a solution within 5% (say) of the optimum in a short period of time.

So this isn't a real challenge...