Participatory Democracy - The Experiment

Constructing, living, and demanding Participatory Democracy in the #spanishrevolution Camps

Michel Bauwens

23rd May 2011

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It is now Thursday and the camp has lasted for almost five days without police intervention. Today more than ten thousand people showed up. The square has been entirely occupied, the external communications commission has encouraged people to make their own signs and proposals and hang them around the walls, metro stations and ads. The tents have grown everyday and the facilities are better (for example, private companies have donated portable bathrooms for the camp) and well organized, with maps explaining the location of each commission. The flow of people has gotten progressively bigger, and because the media has finally paid attention, older people are appearing and are very curious about what the younger generations have to say. To their surprise they seem to agree with most of it and are willing to participate actively. Best of all, what seemed to be the problem (the lack of concrete political solutions) is turning out to be the strongest point: the assemblies have started producing, out of popular debate and participatory democracy, solutions for different aspects of life in society. Some of these were already floating about several webpages affiliated with the movement (the Proposals section of Democracia Real Ya, for example) but now they have been generated by autonomous popular will and voted for consensus by the general assembly, giving them the power of legitimate ideas. They will be posted here as soon as they are made official.....

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/constructing-participatory-democracy-in-the-spanishrevolution-camps/2011/05/23

Strike action ups pressure on cuts

Friday, 06 May 2011 14:40 Last Updated on Saturday, 07 May 2011 09:48 Written by Joe H

In protest over persecution of Union organisers working on the London Underground, the RMT will be striking on the tube for six days starting on Monday the 16th of May. This is one of the biggest strikes in a series of industrial actions going on around the country. While the papers might grumble about disruption, people who are worried or concerned about cuts (which is most of us) need to stop and think about where our interests really lie. For most social justice activists, supporting the strike will go without saying -- but are we doing enough to win others to our side?

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Groups like ours are standing with the RMT, and agitating for more co-ordinated Strike action. The National Shop Stewards Network has written an open letter calling on the TUC “to carry out last year's conference policy an co-ordinate the strike action that's needed now". Such strikes will convince those in power that the anti-cuts movement is ready to do more than protest. The NUT is also ready to strike, and others will follow. These are the kinds of actions that can make it difficult for the government to continue with its pro-big business policies. So difficult, we hope, that they will be forced to back down.

On the practical side this means going along to support pickets, rallies and events and agitating rank-and-file members into more involvement, pushing leaderships (who can often personally benefit from compromise) into positions that really represent their members' interests.

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The PPS-UK stands for a worker and consumer-run economy. Under Participatory Economics there would not be any disputes between bosses and workers, because the workers would be the bosses. The economy would not be run by massive corporations who are set up to seek profit at any cost, or by a top-down bureaucracy. Instead production would be negotiated between workers and consumers, such that the interests of all are taken into account. Going to work would mean controlling our own lives and freely playing our part in society, not signing our lives over to someone else for eight hours a day on the threat of shame and poverty. Some might say that people will always find a way to oppress others, so there's no point in changing the system. They say that capitalism has improved things even if it's not perfect. We say the same things could have been said about slavery. But, after struggles and setbacks, we got rid of that oppressive economic system. Now it's time to move on once again. The struggle against cuts is one place where we can push in this direction by winning real gains, while convincing more people of our cause and increasing the size and organisational clout of our movement for more radical change....

http://www.ppsuk.org.uk/

Commons as a Different Engine of Innovation
From P2P Foundation

* Speech: The Commons as a Different Engine of Innovation. Remarks by David Bollier

Source: The Illahee Lecture Series, 2011/. Searching for Solutions: Innovation for Public Good. Portland, Oregon. May 11, 2011

This evening, I'd like to get innovative about how we think about innovation itself. The corporate cliché is to “think outside the box.” That is such an inside-the-box way of thinking! I say let's get rid of the box! Tonight I want to talk about a new vector of innovation: how we're going to manage our dwindling, finite natural resources and arrest the pathological growth imperatives of our economy while recovering a more sane, socially constructive way of life for human beings. Now there's a radical innovation challenge!

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But the commons is showing that you don't need markets or government to create something that has great value. The commons is, in fact, a very different value proposition, one that is dedicated to generating indivisible, socially embedded common wealth. The commons are not “tragic,” but highly generative it's just that the common wealth is not necessarily privatized and monetized....

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Over the past two decades, the commons has moved way beyond the dry abstractions of the social sciences. It has become a robust, highly diversified transnational movement. I’d like to give you a sense of its breadth – and then circle back to explain why the commons is such a powerful vehicle for innovation – and how it differs from market-based innovation.

Let’s start first with the diverse commons of nature. There are an estimated two billion people whose daily survival depends upon access to fisheries, forests, irrigation water, rivers and lakes, wild game and farm land that are managed as commons. Yet amazingly, the popular introductory economics textbooks by Samuelson & Nordhaus and by Stiglitz & Walsh entirely ignore the commons!

http://p2pfoundation.net/Commons_as_a_Different_Engine_of_Innovation

Bolivia’s Road to Revolution

By Dr. Hugo Salvatierra

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Those who did not read or write taught us how to make a revolution.

After more or less 20 years, we undertook a reconsideration based on both victories and defeats. We wanted to make the revolution for the people. But suddenly it was the people who wanted to make their own revolution. We never imagined that in 40% of the Bolivian territory, even today, Indigenous peoples exist with collective ownership of the land. And we wanted to collectivize the land. Why did we die, so many generations of Bolivian fighters? Perhaps we had a mistaken reading of the national reality because our understanding was that the social struggle expressed itself in the struggle between workers and capitalists. It is a classic formula of Marxism. But the social struggle has various expressions. The class struggle has various expressions. The military dictatorship, the defeats in Chile were necessary in order for us to all learn a lesson – or many lessons. We understood that the science of Marxism is not a dead letter. It is not dogma. And it was necessary that those who did not know how to read or write ended up teaching us how to make a revolution.....

http://transformingpower.ca/en/blog/bolivias-road-revolution-transcript-speech-hugo-salvatierra

Social movements and their stance towards the MAS government

Bolivia Information Forum

Recent conflicts between unions and the government over wages have raised questions about the relationship between the Morales government and the social movements on which it is based. Social movements reflect strong communitarian traditions in Bolivia and underpin democracy at the local level. But their interests do not always coincide with those in government. Who are the social organisations, what is their relationship with those now in power, and what sort of tensions arise?

A communitarian tradition

In much of the Andes, and in Bolivia in particular, a strong sense of the collective prevails. People come together to get answers to their demands and mutual help systems (ayni, mink'a) ensure that individuals and families can achieve more together than on their own. This is at its clearest in rural communities, where villagers often still farm the fields together, or collaborate with one another in maintaining access roads to the community. Decisions taken in a communal meeting are binding on all those in the community, and ensure strong organisation from the bottom up. The same principle applies to politics, through channels of participation up to the national level.

Trade union organisation has also played an important role since the first half of the 20th century. This is the case particularly of organisations where the labour relationship is foremost, (such as in the case of miners and workers in manufacturing), but is also the case with agrarian unions, formed after the 1952 Revolution, which adopted the trade union model. Not only have labour unions stood up for workers’ rights, but they have played a key role in Bolivia’s political development. They had a strong influence in shaping events during the revolution in 1952. Through the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), the country’s national trade union congress, they provided the kernel of resistance to military dictatorships between 1964 and 1982.

The labour movement suffered a heavy blow in 1985, when the government of Víctor Paz Estenssoro brought in stringent adjustment measures; these included dismantling a large part of the public sector, with massive redundancies in the mining sector. It also resulted in the closure of small factories and a shrinking of the state apparatus. This seriously affected the miners’ union in particular which was the backbone of the COB. With much of the population thereafter self-employed and working in the informal sector, labour organisations lost much of their political muscle.

But new forms of organisation were quick to emerge. The Law of Popular Participation, approved in 1994, sought to encourage participation in deciding the use of municipal funds and in providing oversight of their use. The municipal arena became a new area for participation of local organisations, both rural and urban. It was also a learning ground for many, providing a framework for people from local organisations to participate in political decision making. These organisations were however local and territorially-defined - campesinos, neighbourhood committees - rather than labour-based....

http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2011/06/social-movements-and-their-stance.html

Commons beyond Growth

3. Juni 2011 — Silke Helfrich

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to participate in a panel-discussion on the theme „Market, Plans and Solidarity Economy“ at the Attac Congress „Beyond Growth“ in Berlin. As initial speakers we had a time slot for a short introduction and, in view of the rather overblown title for the discussion, I decided to concentrate on the relationship between the practice of commoning and the growth debate and thus put forward some of the following thoughts. There was a good resonance in a overcrowded lecture theatre. Since I had no time to share the whole thing, here it is for reading and comment.  (German version)

Summary

• Commons reduce money-induced growth because they make us more independent of money. The more we produce commons, the less we or the state has to pay for goods.


• Commons reduce population-induced growth because they are associated with a multiplicity of sufficiency strategies which create prosperity by sharing.


• Commons escape the growth compulsion, because all those things that are produced as commons, do not have to be made artificially scarce. And there is no incentive for artificial scarcity because commons are not produced as goods to be exchanged but they foster and maintain social relationships, satisfy needs and solve problems. Directly.

Thus far the vision of the future – but we have not got there yet. In the here and now a lot more must be thought through, discussed and fought for. Therefore, in what follows I will briefly give my reasoning.
„The truth is that there is as yet no credible, socially-just, ecologically sustainable scenario of continually growing incomes for a world of nine billion people.“

according to economist Tim Jackson (Jackson 2011: 98) who recently created stir with his book „Prosperity without Growth“. Jackson works through calculations which demonstrate why the idea that we can continue to grow as we have before is an impossibility.

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And that brings me to the Commons and thus „Beyond the market and state“
The commons must be understood as being what they are first and foremost – diverse, self determined and self designed, largely robust, (re-) productive social systems. They embody another operational mode.

Whoever thinks and lives in a commons way consistently asks

• What do I/we need? Not what can I sell?


• What can I share?


• What can I make available for general use?


• Where and how can I co-operate?

http://commonsblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/commons-beyond-growth/

Democracy 2.0: Iceland crowdsources new constitution

by Jérôme E. Roos on June 11, 2011

Just two or three years after its economy and government collapsed, Iceland is bouncing back with remarkable strength.This week, the small island nation earned praise from foreign investors despite allowing its banks to collapse and refusing to pay back some of its debt — belying the dominant idea among Europe’s ruling class that bank failures and defaults necessarily engender disastrous economic consequences.

Now, in an historically unprecedented move, the government has decided to draft a new constitution with the online input of its citizens — essentially crowdsourcing the creation of Iceland’s real democracy. Rather than just involving voters at the end of the process through a referendum, the Icelanders have an opportunity, through social media, to be directly involved in the writing process. It’s the ultimate affirmation of participatory democracy. It’s Democracy 2.0.

How did Iceland get from there to here? And what are the lessons for Europe’s troubled periphery?

Back in 2009, months after the greatest banking collapse in economic history, the people of Iceland took to the streets en masse to denounce the reckless bankers who had caused the crisis and the clueless politicians who had allowed it to develop. Quietly, as the world was busy watching the inauguration of President Obama, the people of Iceland overthrew their government and demanded a referendum on the country’s debt....

http://roarmag.org/2011/06/iceland-crowdsources-constitution-investors-spain-greece/

Transforming relationships for the Aquarian age

Posted on June 12, 2011 by iyeshe

A conversation with Maria and Kamyar while preparing breakfast one morning in Axladitsa’s open kitchen brought me to an insight about how to articulate what needs to shift in our relationships if we are to successfully navigate the transition into the future we long for.

quote: Part of the work in the dawning of the Aquarian age, then, is to learn to transform our collective ways of relating. Here is some of what I am learning about that:

- The days of the lone hero as leader are over. We are starting to learn what it means for leadership to emerge from the collective. This requires us, as individuals, to awaken to our expectations of ourselves and others regarding leadership.

- Working collectively does not mean inclusion of all in all cases. There is a need for discernment in when to invite participation and when to maintain a semi-permeable membrane. In advanced post-modern societies, there can be a huge, politically-correct pressure for blanket inclusion. There are times when this needs to be resisted.

- Ability to work well in a self-organising collective is a function of maturity. Adults operate at different levels of maturity and there is a threshold beneath which participation in certain kinds of group (e.g. core groups undertaking interventions in complex systems) is counterproductive. Again, in our politically-correct societies, treading this minefield requires a nuanced understanding of adult development and cristal clarity about what degree of maturity is needed in what circumstances. As a corollary, practices of radical humility are also needed if we are to fend off the real danger of elitism.

- When working with complexity, a crucial ingredient in relationships is intimacy. In all the professional environments I know, fear and mistrust are rife. People perceive authentic expression as a high-risk behaviour, so developing the degree of intimacy needed to function well together in a complex world is a real challenge. We don’t yet know enough about how to establish and maintain healthy intimacy in collective work, so some action research around that would be welcome. I am learning that calling for authenticity in high-risk environments is an act of leadership that often pays off. People are hungry for what’s real, and hurting inside from the lack of meaning in the story our civilisation is telling us about why we are here and what we are for.

http://iyeshe.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/transforming-relationships-for-th...

Chris Spannos: A New Social Historical Moment

August 16th, 2011

By Chris Spannos

Introduction to a multi-part commentary series exploring our present situation, the process of social transformation, and the autonomous project for a participatory society.

Widespread skepticism about the foundation of society’s structure combined with social and material crises and an information revolution seem to have placed us in a unique historical moment. Fragmenting confidence in ruling relations and defining institutions are happening on a scale suggesting that we may be experiencing what Rosa Luxemburg described as the “passage of an historic period from one given form of society to another.”

The risk of not taking current fragmentations seriously would be to under-react to this potential tipping point and its likely consequence of accelerated barbarism. Exploring potentials, pregnant in our times, for organizing against current problems and for advocating and winning support for an alternative vision of a new society will be explored in the coming commentaries....

Neoliberalism, Austerity and Participatory Democracy

By Sveinung Legard

It is often argued that the period in which we live is not suitable to the struggle for participatory democracy. After decades of neoliberal reforms that have privatized the public sector, weakened workers rights, and deregulated financial markets, the welfare states in Europe and North America stand in a very weakened position. What remains of earlier welfare reforms have been put under enormous pressure by the current economic crisis, particulary in countries such as Ireland, Spain, Greece, the US and Great Britian, where ”austerity measures” have been adopted that threaten the exiction of the welfare state itself....

http://new-compass.net/articles/neoliberalism-austerity-and-participatory-democracy