From: Jerry Levy (Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM)
Date: Wed May 23 2007 - 08:27:06 EDT
I agree you can not rely on abundance. But you need to propose a workable social practice. If you are deciding ex ante on production, the decisions of all the participants have To add up to a feasible plan. At the very least in your committee scheme each Committee would need a budget of social that they had at their disposal and proposed Production would have to fall within that budget. -------------------------------- Hi Paul: Decisions about the overall size of the budget and its division for alternative purposes would be a *huge* social issue in *whatever* scheme is devised -- participatory or authoritarian. Saying that it's "socialism" won't make those issues go away. The most important question, from my perspective, is the role that citizens have in the process of economic and social decision-making. Thus, before the Committees get their budgets there would have *already* had to be a democratic process that allows citizens themselves to decide the size and composition of the budget. ----------- Then you have to have a mechanism to allocate the budgets to committees. I think that such deliberative processes are only feasible for a) the major outlines of the public budget for free services could be voted on by the population b) within the free services some sort of committee or dikasteria structure could decide on sub-budgets I think it would be very cumbersome for much consumer goods allocation though. ----------- For all of society, it would be a learning experience. We can expect that there will be a "learning by doing" curve that will be experienced. The Zapatista slogan is relevant: "Walking we learn". In solidarity, Jerry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu May 31 2007 - 00:00:08 EDT