The plan is essentially to elect parecon aligned candidates/facilitators to the boards of credit unions and co-ops, while also building our own on the group participatory o-ops, and then use those big co-ops and credit unions to create further reinforce a Federation of Participatory Co-ops who’d only do business with other FPCs whenever possible and help start up, through loans and direct business patronage, new participatory co-ops. One of these co-ops to get a lot of contracts off the bat would be a participatory media and ‘marketing’ co-op which would popularize the FPC concept with consumers. This way we grow the support for of scale parecon institutions along with being able to popularize parecon institutions and provide the day-to-day grounding in new culture. People can be rejuvenated and economically sustained in healthy, exciting to participate in, ground-up Alternative Institutions.
Part of forming this web is ensuring that each parecon firm does business with other parecon firms whenever possible. With very little effort we can win some big nodes as per the big credit unions and co-ops. Imagine our own printing co-op sponsored into existence by $2 million in guaranteed business from the 5 initial co-ops, or maybe they notice that together they pay out %1.5 of their expenses for paper stationary, so they find paper mill workers and help them buy out a mill. The consumers at the outdoor gear co-op come together and agree to buy a jacket for $5 more to finance workers’ to buy out a faltering textiles factory in Indonesia. The media co-op getting $60 million a year, from initial co-ops, to do the marketing (and of scale business and professional services) for them as a Federated brand/idea. This hopeful message of an economy planned by we the people quickly garners %30 of consumers in a region who’ll always look for a Federated Participatory Co-op (FPC) to patron when they need a particular good or service. From a core of just a few co-ops that we gained in small election campaigns or by organizing workers to start their own co-ops (co-ops are generally governed by a democratically elected board of directors – 1 member = 1 vote, with little more than %6 member turn out and very split votes for multiple candidates), a Federation of Participatory Coops now has the widespread support to easily extend itself into broader things like our own manufacturing (actually Canada already has a large insurance co-op), grocery stores, (which gives parecon a populace base by which to do food planning and integrate into agriculture), etc.
With enough credit unions in densely populated latino working towns we can easily compete with Western Union and put hundreds of Billion$ in remittance payments through participatory development of local economies in Latin America so that people don’t have to leave their families on perilous journeys North to settle for the U.S. Just by facilitating many Participatory Co-ops in
A federation of a few initial large and central participatory co-ops and credit unions can provide these nodal ‘corners’ or anchor institutions for others to come along and put in the connective web tissue if you will. Political economy denotes a network of production, exchange and consumption. Let’s call the initial few (5) big credit unions and co-ops that we win elections for, and/or help workers organize themselves into ‘tier one’. Tier one can sustain about 15 other participatory co-ops (tier 2) with tier one disbursements (business to business) that tier one can directly patron as per tier one operational needs like stationary, IT systems support, legal, marketing, etc. Tier 2 + tier 1 can in turn support a greater diversity of parecon goods and services firms without hefty loans, but through their needs as an economic network of 20 firms. So now another 20 business types (tier 3) can be identified as supportable by the expenditure budgets of the first 20 (tier 1 + 2). This is now an organism that co-evolves spontaneously through other peoples symbiotically adding themselves onto the basic network exoskeleton to form a stronger and stronger body with greater and greater ability to maintain itself and grow. At this points of business to business, individual consumers can start to confidently see most goods and services provided by the Parecon Federation which means that we can look to set up an exchange system or ‘currency’ based on RES (remuneration based on effort and sacrifice). I think it can all start very quickly by respective communities organizing themselves to win their Federated nodes by self-organizing for their own economic day-to-day well being, and/or campaigning in the small and very winnable elections of the boards of the credit unions and co-ops in their region. We can incorporate and move into them right away with just a little movement focus.
Along with the credit unions and big co-ops, another place we can start is the cultural and communications sector (memes – defined as a cultural units of information). We need some cultural reference points for an understanding of participation that people might be able to conjure and engage in participatory organization and planning. The cultural movement will also afford us a campaigning community which will achieve approximately $350 billion in scale for federated parecon(s) in short order, just by electioneering for half of the credit unions - co-ops in
We mentioned the memes – or cultural units of information - and I’ll introduce the idea of the meme economy. That is to say that the production of knowledge, culture, ‘law’, efficiencies in methods, etc., all belong to the memes economy. We recognize that the productivity gains realized in the information economy have propelled our current (“information”) economy by leaps and bounds (in capitalists terms). A lot of this economic growth is firms researching better models of organizational structure and behaviour that are congruent with the opportunities in new technologies. The shift in our cultural agreements for the way we interact across time and space, which is often induced by the adoption of new technics (technologies and their logically arising use techniques) like the fax, cell phone, the internet(s), or parecon is a complex re-negotiation of our memes or the strands which form new narratives, even completely new structures of meaning. Some communications academics have estimated the memes economy to be worth as much as one third of GDP, especially in advanced economies in this ‘information age’.
Because re-negotiating the basic cultures of interaction, or rather the ways we form agreements and organize around socio-economics are what we are mostly concerned with in transitioning to a participatory society (parsoc) and parecon, I propose the Memes Facilitation Co-op (MeF Coop). MeF Coop would be a large ‘conglomerate’ (to use an old term) comprised of multiple worker divisions such as legal, media production, communications strategy, computer programming, council and social/deliberative network facilitators, etc., etc.,. I envision it as an alternative institution and something of a counter institution. It’s primary aim is to immediately use our acquired credit unions to organically translate that “top down” position(s) into “bottom up” cultural practice so that people can be excited to fill those tier 1 FPCs with participatory practice (BJC, RES, say proportionate to stake, etc.,), thereby dissolving them of any “top-down” institutionality, but mostly so that the new cultural-methodology can gain wide enough space to network and propagate itself. The Memes Facilitation Co-op can fund this media and cultural production because it has it’s own structural revenue coming in from all the co-ops in Federation for marketing and professional services. This way it has it’s foundational revenue, and then it can finance cultural products like movies, news, festivals, etc, on top of that basic marketing and professional services revenue. Because it’s the marketing arm with guaranteed contracts from a whole network of ‘participatory’ co-ops, it can start to create its own media, just to service its own advertising needs. Instead of paying out massive advertising fees to capitalist newspapers, online media companies, film production houses, etc., it starts to do all that itself, just so it can fulfill it’s own advertising clearing house purposes for the Federation of Participatory Co-ops.
MeF Coop can help with grass roots movement building, which I believe is most effectively done in fun, cultural sites like party scenes, participatory theatre, radical kinship circles, community based sports, festivals, etc.,. ParticiPartay (ParPar) or ‘The (Co-operative) Way’ is a cultural community under way in Vancouver which is forming new kinds of art and events, the very formats of which communicate the power and effectiveness of collective, inter-subjective realization of our will (instead of a strong performance audience dichotomies or ‘passively let some one do it to/’for’ you’). More grass roots, underground cultural scenes in Vancouver, especially in the ‘People’s Republic of East Van’ have been moving in this direction for a while and these scenes grow into some of the more popular, regular events in the region. Events like WorkLess Parties and their
As a mass communications arm, MeFCoop would foster the growth of a popular movement where everyone would know someone who benefits from parecon institutions making attack from the state or elite dulled and indeed counterproductive in that such an attack will only make them and their institutions less popular which in turn delivers less resources to maintain institutions of force with.
The trade union movement has demonstrated that improved labour and wage standards in enough of the labour force pull up wages in a whole region. In this way, alternative parecon institutions can structurally help reform efforts in capitalist institutions. Although I don’t see why we don’t simply transfer public demand to the same goods produced by FPCs in re-occupied over-capacity which is rampant in most industries (and as per the logic of a competitive market place, which due to hyper competition, keeps itself blinded to and thus constantly violating Say’s law of overproduction).
I believe that the main salient feature which has kept police and paramilitary forces on the blatantly unjust protest-battle lines I’ve been on is that “some order must prevail and these punks certainly don’t represent some kind of ‘order’” (that kind of cynicism and good double time pay of course). But I think we are likely to see defection and refusal of orders when the violent state troops are ordered to attack participatory institutions that are successful, comprised of the cops’ family and friends, and popular operation across a nation (transplanted National Guard or RCMP without roots in a community will not attack those institutions which people in their families back home are also connected to). To some degree this happened even in the dirty 1930s where many police refused to bust heads and evict people. Also the traditional currencies of power-over structures will be weakened and thus be less of a carrot for troopers, due to more of the economy’s exchange ‘velocity’ being occupied by parecon exchange. Along with this ability to prevent attacks and the strategy of using some of the same infrastructure elites use to move their capital, MeFCoop can also use its legal and lobbying means to parry and counter.
MeFCoop would be such a central or important entity in the parecon movement that great lengths should be taken to make sure that it is required and equipped for very advanced direct democracy in keeping with participatory principles of co-governance. Such advanced direct democracy apparati would ensure that MeF Co-op ‘consumer’ members would have ‘constitutional’ say in editorial and discoursive policy, as well as probably being much of the primary producers of content or campaigns. Additionally MeF Coop might be mandated to hold a good portion of its worker positions open to rotation of representatives from other industries to ensure that communications infrastructure meets inter-sector exchange needs. We’ll get more into the nitty gritty in Chapter ??, including questioning the wisdom of adopting such large and ‘centralized’ or scaled spontaneous bodies as MeFCoop.
MeF Coop[1] could get under way quite quickly with a boost from the initial large co-ops that form Federated Participatory co-op to co-op (business to business) networks. The initial FPC co-ops that we go for, namely the credit unions, have major needs for services and goods which fall in the realm of the meme economy such as legal, marketing, Information Communications Technology (ICT), etc. Just in our region here in Western Canada I anticipate that there is an easy $120 million dollars in annual contracts that MeF Coop could garner from a handful of existing co-ops. This is quite a revenue base and economy of scale to operate at, one more able to advance movement communications and needs than our little anarchist journals and cobbled together web sites based on donations, subscriptions, free labour from contributors etc.,. With 20 people in the Legal division of MeF Coop we can start to see how a few lawyers can be freed up to work on moving legislative changes through (especially in minority government situations), especially with the back up of MeF Coop’ wider communications capabilities to lobby and create public pressure. We can work to maneuver a government, whether quietly or very publicly, with MeF Coop’ contacts in the media… Media outlets who’s budgets we fill by paying to carry Federation announcements/invitations or ‘advertising’ with.
We take the view that the medium is the message: that even if the content of a cultural happening isn’t parecon that the collective modes of producing that content will communicate our ability to find coherence of values that we can act on together… Values that are mostly about the processes of working out common ground from which we can build on.
We hope to take this participatory cultural format to the scale of major touring festivals. It is thought that this won’t be difficult as many festivals and artists are very open to new ideas and community involvement. These festivals can, again, allegorize the modalities of participatory exchange but they will also, hopefully, serve to create preferred consumer loyalty and participation in product design, metrics for the demand of goods and distribution of parecon federated goods. This will chiefly be achieved through popularizing the motif/’brand’ of parecon across these festivals and cultural media venues by including people in the creation of that brand’s meaning or design ‘referents’. This simply reflects the participatory consumer council system which allows for consumer members of Participatory Co-ops to be involved in the design, distribution, pricing and surplus value (profits) of their goods (the corner stone of developing a loyal consumer base).
By including people in the formation of the meaning and design of the federation’s logo/motif/brand we bring much more of a sense of belonging and identity to it. Making our signifiers participatorily will allow people to feel like the motif(s) is (are) in respectful discussion with them as a full (or potentially full) member of that discussion and will anchor that all firms using the motif are open for meaningful interaction in the design, production and distribution of the good(s) the co-op is involved in. This is important as we need prominence distributed across many local, regional, and national venues to re-induce the modalities of participation in individuals so that there are enough collective reminders in the day-to-day public sphere which can stand as shared reminders and safe (mediated) interaction points of participatory culture. An environment composed of ever-present parsoc symbology will make it safe to engage participatory modes without risk of socially marginalizing oneself in the sea of competitive, hyper-individualism: Basically a symbolic environment which creates an ever present assurance that ‘participatory values are in full, systemic affect in this street, theatre, shop, venue; you won’t get screwed or look silly for using or trying to learn cooperative modes of socio-economic interaction in this public space’. This, of course, helps propagate the participatory memes, and invites many in the shared public space to learn more, and to risk involvement.
Very quickly we have consolidated participatory business-to-business and consumer-loyalty networks to represent maybe as much as %30 of exchanges touching %70 of the population (Co-ops in Canada, Britain, France, New Zealand, Australia, etc., already have much higher GNPs than in the U.S. (%5), i.e., from 11% in Canada, to 21% in Britain), our currency has grown and has greatly destroyed the “velocity of money” basis that keeps the high multiples of credit and debt creation in the fiat system afloat.
Next blog post will be on tactical strategy for initial movement focus of limited spring board means, and address what I see as misinterpretations of historic Marxist-Lenonist and coordinator prone (even within anarchist traditions) strategy… And how parecon institutional codes, along with this historic moment, provide a different situation to make such strategies, even as reified by anarchist philosophy, less appropriate. It’ll also address how I believe we’ll be able to compete with market firms while still having descent parecon work places with full, inspirational .
A widespread identification or sense of ownership of the Federation’ motif use in messaging a distributed production process will take the burden off of any one central body or oligarchy of entities to spread its use in the world (making MeFCoop a less centralized body). This is a basic feature of distributed networks; faster and efficient spreading of most everything but especially cultural norms (cultural norms being little other than ethical discursive processes and thus the validity of communicatory action – see chapter 5). Also we won’t suffer the same inefficiencies of capitalist advertising, which, due to audience resentment at being manipulated, has to have its systems of meaning (style) completely revamped all the time. We’ll engage a much more integrated discussion on a participatory ‘brand’’ power in chapter 3. Sufficed to say the motif will be useable by any federated body (that meets parecon standards) to communicate its membership in the community of solidarity, via emphatic inclusion/participation. Motifs will be developed through democratic design of the narrative and graphics online, at popular cultural events, etc. The basis of the brands’ message is populist and speaking to a process of inclusion; no message or process will ever divest those who are affected by it again as long as we all patron the cooperative network that maintain the reciprocal freedom of all through discourse (say proportionate to say), along with the popular approval for the practical outcomes of that discourse by all who’re affected. I hope I’m right in predicting this will be very popular as we certainly need mass participation in the re-envisioning of a healthy planet and civilization (through sensual processes of engagement, the Earth and Civilization will hopefully become symbiotic creatures) not to mention the more efficient distribution of resources to enact those visions for biospheric rejuvenation made coherently actionable by the solidarity and equity of parecon.
[1] We might consider changing the pronunciation of co-op to ‘coupe’ to demarcate the evolution of co-ops’ old ‘democratic’ form to participatory form and make it a more expedient pronunciation.
