The Cooperative Way - The means by and for the many
cocreating tools and techniques for participatory process

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  cooperativeway.org has moved to Wondertree's new Xserve...still seems a little sluggish, but we have the potential for a blazing system now!

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• Chapter 1: Broadstroking the Revolution
  

  Road Mapping ‘the’ Revolution -
  Transitioning to Participatory Economics Today

  A Works’ Treatment – Please Help Me To Finish It ASAP!
  www.cooperativeway.org – this will be a ‘wiki’ (Drupal) book, editable as a deliberative development.

  Introduction
  To be written by Robyn Hahnel or Michael Albert

  Prologue

  We live in a time when social and actual storms abound. They come at us from all directions, but we have no one source of consolidated response, yet the consequences are shared. In a world of distributed new media communications it is possible to get all hands on the tiller to steer us clear of the storms and to ensure that no one hand uses a lever to trigger a new storm. But where are the systems that allow us to include the perspectives and expertise of all operants, that we might navigate this morass of consequences?
  The trends and possible systems that can take these new media tools and turn them into cultural and productive practices will be the focus of this work. It is a political economy of participation, co-operation and direct, democratic communications.
  The basic posit throughout this book is that no truly democratic body would do business with another that has democratically chosen to externalize its waste downstream onto them. That when we are not at all at the whim of the amorphous invisible hand, but, instead, working in networks of consciously cognizant councils, we will only accept actions that respect the needs and considerations of all. This is of course the Parecon model of Michael Ablert and Robyn Hahnel.
  Dr. Albert and Dr Hahnel have charted the course, I will attempt to lay out some sail designs and riggings that might get us there in some good time. Certainly time is of the essence. Collapse is doubtlessly nigh, whether it be the collapse of planetary life support systems and/or that of social cohesion. With the former’ degradation we will likely need co-operative systems and cultures in place to prevent the clambering of us masses over each other. We will need to move away from a day to day of outmaneuvering, underhandedness, competition, and exploitation (capitalism), and into a culture of participation, co-operation, collaboration and mutual aid (Participatory Economics/parecon).
  The day to day practices that capitalism requires can never imbue a culture that can implement true democracy. We must build economic systems that will allow for us to conjure and recognize community. Margaret Thatcher was largely right, there are no more communities, only individuals and families, but do we really want the rich human experience of socialization to be so reduced by capitalism? Or do we want to be able to break out of the little boxes of our self interest and connect again? Unfortunately and fortunately it is not merely a preference any longer, we must have the benefit of alls’ perspectives and effort. We need unity of effort which can only come from inclusive decision making, where everyone’s interests are heard and transferred into the actionable decision.
  Assuming agreement, let us move onto the purposes of this book, which is praxis. How are we actually going to actualize parecons and generally a connected world of compassion? How will we leverage a people’s economy from the current one? Can we ride the wake of capitalism without getting stuck in its wind shadow? Are there opportunities in current transition economies that make this time ripe for the birthing of new memes out of reified productive means? I’ve been seeing for years that the answer is a resounding yes!
  So where are these “yes’”? Certainly new media and the distributed nature of contents’ encoding and decoding is a big resounding yes for the possibility of change in the very modus operandi of our socio-economic make up. The energy crises (a sector that fuels the information economy) is also a resounding yes to change if leveraged by distributed processes of production and ownership. Open Source and holoptic networks are already in use across capitalist enterprise and should be consolidated into federated parecon systems. Currency and markets are more democratic with greater access to information about trends, we see the Chicago Board of Trade, the NYE and other exchanges lowering the entrance requirements into the game with things like the mini contracts.
  Many distributed processes are already included in capitalist processes, helping capitalism to burst threw new barriers but also challenging the base assumptions of ownership. Why not use these inherently iterative and distributive processes of value creation for the efficiency of Parecon economies. Surely peer to peer models of production belong more within a democratic model then an exploitative one.
  In Mandarin kanji the symbol for disaster is almost identical as the one for opportunity. If capitalism faces a crisis in these new modes of production shouldn’t moral people be ready to redirect it’s wealth into models that will provide for the interests of life to maintain themselves, to have a say as much as we have a stake?
  Distributed networks are inspiring people to collectivize their knowledge and culture. If the way we think about our art, experience and ideas is collective, how long before that structures our thinking about other modes of production? If we collectivize our day to day interaction (at least online, with cell phones, etc.) how long before we start to look for the models that allow for an immediacy of democracy that allows for the constant maintenance of those commons? The assumption of this work, of course, is not long.
  More recently, the commons has been discredited because it has no keeper, it belongs to everyone but no one is beholden to its care. The first thing to contest in this argument is that capitalism never had any interest in the maintenance of the public good. The public venue for discourse was wiped off the map. During the 1990s something like 90% of corporate revenue growth was from the privatization of public assets. More importantly to this work though, there weren’t distributed communications systems for deciding on actionable policy let alone the actual modes and times for action. There wasn’t a good way to bring together everyone that cared about a national forest to arrange what kind of care let alone the how, when and where of the group effort.
  We now see the power of participatory, distributed communications systems when wikipedia can provide encyclopedic works almost on par with the conventional, or when thousands of volunteers can successfully coordinate a decentralized disaster response effort as we saw with the Asian Tsunami, and, after the government’s non-response in New Orleans, with hurricane Katrina. These are grand efforts, which come together relatively overnight because of the passion of engendered participation and peer recognition. This book contends that the major piece required to extend these ‘radical’ forms of production from the information economy to the capital and ‘commodity’ economies are new forms of co-operative finance and strategic positions in certain corner stone sectors of the economy.
  If we have distributed, co-operative control of food and fuel, we can back our own currency; there are mechanisms enshrined in the current system that will enable the advent of our own democratically controlled currencies (even ones recognized by the IMF!). If we control our own media we can popularize the ‘brand’ of sustainable, symbiotically democratic life on Earth. Economic entities that systemically allow for the interests of all life to dominate the markets, not just in some amorphously hopeful proletariat way, but by actual steps that lead to the exponential growth of parecons and, more generally, an economics of ecology. These steps will be used for our embarkation on an adventure that will be an open discussion (through the web site at www.coooperativeway.org) of joyously hopeful action.

  Chapter 1 Treatment: Taking in the Canvass

  What would it take to win a whole new world? A world that engenders and, indeed, requires the most desirable of human values just to operate in it? What it would take to win that world is the focus of this book and a revolutionary movement and economy now under way in British Columbia. We are going to explore the very real steps that will get us to that world, and map out how quickly, how effectively, at what financial expense and costs to human beings who participate.
  What comes first: the chicken or the egg? That’s basically the theoretical problem at the heart of most of this work. Really that’s just an entertaining question for the beginning of a book that must be kept from the academic grips of this writer’s environment. More succinctly: Do the values we want come before the environment that allows them to exist as a wide spread culture? Can entities based on trust, mutual-aid and equality thrive in a socio/economic environment that is structured around competition, greed, and posturing? Can the highest thought and course