Systemic Change Model by Chompsky' Protégé

If resource allocation is the crux, and systemic change is the call, then economics is the matter. What you all in Copenhagen are really calling for with "Systems Change, not Climate Change" is an economic model which structurally encourages intelligent, uncorrupted decision making, with the decision for the allocation of resource determined by those who will be most affected by the decision. Participatory economics (parecon), with the interlocking logic of its core principles and mechanisms, is the most serious alternative which achieves this.

In being called home after the WTO blockade in Seattle by my family for Christmas from the, I felt nothing but a hopeless stupor as the winter rain blurred the view through the windows of the bus speeding away from 6 months of my life. Going home to family and friends that were ramping up for Quebec City, and Canadian intelligence soon to be knocking at my family homes' door. Knowing that what we'd done in Seattle was barely worthwhile, as we'd not proposed an alternative to what we had stopped.

Being a blockade tactician with Earthfirst! I was surprised at the sinking feeling after such a resoundingly successful blockade. Looking back at my flight into Seattle on June 5th to meet with Seattle Anarchist Response, and analyze the conference centre, it all felt like some weird losing war in which I was merely a lowly victim of one battle.

I took to the mountains to lick my wounds and grasp for hope: we arguably were responsible for successfully stopping another clear-cut of old growth forests and saving 10s of thousands of hectares of wilderness... But still that gnawing feeling. Indeed the market price for lumber ramped up in the housing market bubble and even Clayoquot Sound (a world heritage site of the U.N.) came under the chainsaw soon after our win in that particular valley.

Prices went up and our rainforests were cleared because it wasn't real communities which makes decisions, but the process of buyer vs. seller that does. An inherently oppositional and thus violence engendering mechanism which makes no consideration but that based on lowest price for the buyer and highest price for the seller. Not a very intelligent syntax by which we can use to discuss systemically about a given issue is it?

I was down from the forest blockade one weekend when my brother handed me Parecon (Participatory Economics): Life After Capitalism. I remember that time so vividly. All of a sudden I had a reason to hope again. I felt like there were two skips in each step I took.

Since coming up with a transition strategy for realizing parecon and pounding away at it for a number of years that skip has turned back to a saunter. Very few people actually care enough to risk their bourgeois arrangements for a new economic endeavour under new values of economic exchange. Very many activists only want to react to what is wrong, not go into business and organize economically. But in all of you in Copenhagen I see those who are willing to risk. Indeed you are all thirsting and renewing the call for systemic change. But, I ask myself, do they know what new system they might be headed to in that call, let alone how that system will actually work and how we'll get there?

Noam Chomsky' protégé from the late 60s at MIT - Michael Albert - and Robyn Hahnel have mapped the destination - parecon. I have attempted to chart a course and figure out some sail designs and riggings so that we might get there in some reasonable time. Those sail riggings and designs are a new kind of co-operative, the incorporation for which we have hammered out here in Canada with much work. It is a participatory cooperative which goes beyond the workers' capitalism we've seen in post WWII Yugoslavia and now in Bologna, Mondragon, etc. Workers' capitalism, which has resulted in roughly the same kind of special interest corruption as we have now in corporate capitalism.

The basic idea is a federation of co-ops which only do business with each other whenever possible and which enrolls consumers who become very loyal due to the meaningful participation they are encouraged to as consumers. Whenever we find that we are putting a lot of resources out to non-federated product or service in the market economy we finance workers to start up a co-op in federation to supply it and immediately send them all the business. All the ParOps (Participatory Co-ops) exchange based on the participatory mechanisms for remuneration and exchange not based on market assumptions and values as all to often happens in co-op federations.

Those new mechanisms would be remuneration based on effort and sacrifice, not based on owning the deed to property or having more market bargaining power; influence over a decision in proportion to the affect that decision will have on a party - so islands and peoples at the poles, the Himalayas etc., would have more say in carbon emissions. Next is balanced rotation of roles, not a coordinator, executive class as we have now in the elite leaders who will prance into Conpenhagen and make decisions independent of all you people who have been there for the full conference; and distribution of investment via participatory planning of relevant worker and consumer councils. This includes social investment as being planned by people in their communities. Chomsky's funded journal zcommunications.org hosts probably the most serious discussion on how a new participatory political model would interact with the new economic model. Read more about all of this at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/topics/parecon . Really go figure it out, I don't say it dogmatically, I say it sadly; this is the only real complete systemic alternative that exists.

So unless you're going to devise another model for economics I think we are morally required to figure out parecon and a way to realize it.

Naomi Klein has pointed out that what the state negotiators are essentially saying to civil society, is "ya, you and what army". This is it, although a street protest or even some simultaneous blockades as I've found a few times, don't constitute an army. An army needs to be fed, an army needs to be clothed, an army needs to be transported. Do we have our own means to make such provisions? I have organized in mass movements, and even in the largest we didn't quite have the resources to keep going or cover all the bases.

The reality is a lot of activists have bloated credit card bills after these international actions. Thus everything we do, even protesting their system, gives more back to their system, such as the interest payments you all are going to make on your credit cards for the trip to Copenhagen, the tickets bought from the airlines who could've gone to algae bio-fuel long ago (and if parecon existed we would've decided to go to biodiesel long ago), etc., etc.

Until we have our own participatory airline co-op, our own food delivery system that can send well produced food to you all in Copenhagen that doesn't do we really have our own army? Do we really hold their feet to the fire? Now, I dumpster dive, have a large garden, bee hives in my and my families' gardens, etc., etc. But I still order $2,000 in bulk grain from organic farmers operating in the market. These organic and fair trade operations are rife with the same kind of B.S. we see in any corrupt market operation. Not all but I dare say most organic and fair-trade operations are corrupted by their engagement in the market-place. Even as radical as my efforts are, I'm still not quite supporting our own, human model for food, and neither are you supporting your own systemic change in Copenhagen. Really at these events we're whining at the corporations and leaders, essentially begging them for change while using their property, their land, their food to beg with. They rightly look at us protestors and scoff ‘what a joke'.

The national negotiators tell themselves, "are these protestors actually hammering out these political agreements year in and year out? No! They don't have viable alternatives because they don't have to come up with them, that's my job!" (this is a great example of why Balanced Rotation of Roles are so important in parecon).

I submit that we can't provision for our own ‘army' until we can provision for ourselves via a new economic model which isn't the market. The only real economic alternative which isn't merely a Capitalism 2.0 proposal is participatory economics (parecon). Sad but true, the only complete economic model ever devised.

If we start to create our own provisions within a parecon federation of co-ops then I think we've got something, we can answer the challenge of "you and what army". If you all don't talk about that at Copenhagen as part and parcel of your call for systems change, I fear many of you are in for a dose of the same blues I had on the rainy day bus ride home from Seattle.

Good luck, and keep up the good work. Thank you!
Greg Dean
www.freethenet.ca
www.cooperativeway.org