[PeDAGoG] Paths to a just and sustainable society - organisational models
Christine Dann
christine at horomaka.org
Sun Oct 10 22:00:20 CEST 2021
Thank you, Ashish. This is very helpful. I have made a document which
puts together your replies and those sent to me personally by another
PeDaGoG member, and with her permission I will share them with you/the
list.
Meanwhile I have been looking at new examples of how to organise
'change' communities. This is the latest one -
https://www.deepmedicinecircle.org/ - which has come out of the
collaboration of Rupa Marya and Raj Patel on their recently published
book /Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice/. (Which is
the first example I have ever read of a text written by non-Indigenous
people which takes Indigenous knowledge systems seriously alongside the
'new' sciences - which also take the interconnectedness of all things as
a given. So essential reading for any alternatives thinker/activist, IMHO.)
The Deep Medicine people seem to be organising the way Tyson Yunkaporta
recommends in /Sand Talk/ - bonds of two, making more bonds of two,
until eventually the circle forms 'organically' out of positive existing
relationships. They also have the 'action circle' nested in a 'circle of
advisors' and then a wider group of supporters.
As a different sort of example I have looked at Momentum Community -
https://www.momentumcommunity.org/ - which has a more typical
'corporate' structure for delivering 'services'.
I am also reflecting on what I am (re)reading about politics today in
Amitav Ghosh's 2016 book the /Great Derangement Climate Change and the
Unthinkable/, which seems to have become even more relevant (as well as
prescient) in the past five years. I will write an article for the RED
website on how and why this is so.
Christine
On 10/10/21 10:36 pm, Ashish Kothari wrote:
>
> Hi Christine, apologies for the long-delayed responsd to your qs. Some
> thoughts below your 4 qs ... these are re. local communities, mostly
> in rural areas. For urban situations, or for middle class movements,
> payments that are able to sustain the people who take up special tasks
> for alternative initiatives are much more common.
>
> ashish
>
> On 30/09/21 2:54 am, Christine Dann wrote:
>> This is a really valuable discussion. My take on it is that there
>> will be no one size that fits all. Ted Trainer assumes that local
>> level communities can form and provide most of the necessities of
>> life (including democratic governance) solely or mainly through
>> voluntary effort. There are indeed excellent examples of such
>> 'voluntarist' communities in existence (as there have been for over
>> two centuries in most parts of the world) but so far they have never
>> gone to such a horizontal scale as to make any significant dents on
>> the market-state and capitalist industrialism.
>>
>> Contrast the voluntarist efforts to create eco-villages and
>> communities in heavily industrialised countries with the
>> organised/professional efforts to 'eco' existing villages in rural
>> India, as described by Sujit Sinha in his 'Living Utopias Videos'
>> post to the PeDaGoG list on September 29. (Excerpt below).
>>
>> Can we learn from both types of initiative?
>>
>> My experiences of being involved with so-called 'pre-figurative'
>> initiatives in Aotearoa New Zealand (alternative currency markets and
>> services, Transition Towns, co-operative enterprises, community
>> gardens) is that if they are to go to scale, and persist, volunteer
>> effort is not enough. Organising and managing a successful market,
>> week after week, is a lot of work, and while many people may be keen
>> to volunteer on the day, most people in today's market-state
>> societies are busy earning their livings (and raising children) and
>> have limited time to volunteer. Especially when it requires skills
>> they may not have, such as accounting for money, raising vegetables,
>> facilitating meetings, etc. This means that voluntary work is too
>> often done by people who have time to spare, rather than the best
>> skill-set for the job. There can also be problems around
>> accountability with volunteers who are free to make up what they
>> think is required as they go along. Further, matching volunteers with
>> the tasks to be done, and motivating them, is a skill all in itself -
>> but it goes largely unrecognised and unrewarded. Hence lots of
>> well-intentioned and well-designed projects can fall over or not
>> reach full potential through lack of sufficiently skilled personnel
>> committed to making them work - week after week and year after year.
>>
>> So my big questions are
>>
>> (1) how do the long-lived examples of just and sustainable
>> communities actually operate?
> I am not sure what you mean by 'actually operate'. If you mean
> processes that help run such communities, these are v. diverse, from
> institutions of governance and management to 'leadership' to teams for
> day to day management to others. I am giving here the link to a book
> of case studies from India that may help in better understanding of
> how some of the alternative initiatives work:
> https://kalpavriksh.org/publication/ecologies-of-hope-and-transformation-post-development-alternatives-from-india/
>
>> (2) are they really all based on voluntary effort alone?
> This depends on what you mean by 'voluntary', and what task/service
> is. Where it is about leading/holding resistance movements, or
> building community systems and infrastructure, it is often considered
> part of community life, and since everyone (including those involved)
> benefits, people don't necessarily think of this as a task that needs
> renumeration. Where it is acknowledged that special services/task take
> away from the ability to make a living, in many communities, there is
> some contribution by the rest of the community for services rendered
> by a member, such as grain, or help in managing other aspects of life
> that would suffer due to the time being given. This is traditionally
> sanctioned. Where such traditions have broken down, a certain monetary
> contribution may enter, either by the community or as provided by the
> state. Importantly though in these diverse situations, the spirit of
> voluntarism is important; the service (of leadership, or maintaining
> group dynamics, or managing accounts, etc) is not a job, it is a part
> of being in the community, often rotates, and is imbued wiht a sense
> of doing something for/with the community rather than because there is
> some pecuniary or material benefit from it. Having said all this,
> however, we have found that 'leadership' does often come with heavy
> personal cost, and while this is partly 'compensated' by significant
> respect and recognition by teh community (and outsiders), it may not
> be adequate when the personal loss is material, or
> emotional/psychological.
>> (3) if not, what methods do they have for recognising and
>> recompensing the necessary skills of community building and
>> maintenance, as related to the provision of necessities and the
>> democratic governance of the community?
> This is also v. diverse. Recognition can come in the form of higher
> social status, special position in community events, being nominated
> as representative to the 'outside' world, additional powers, etc. But
> both traditionally and in modern systems, there may also be mateiral
> /financial benefits (or 'compensation' ... which I find a strange term
> if the spirit of voluntarism prevails... its a rather capitalist way
> of looking at work done for one's community!). Community forest guards
> appointed over a long term (i.e. where the task is not rotated amongst
> all families), for instance, may get some honoraria. Many traditional
> systems of paying in foodgrains have broken down wtih
> commercialisation, and it is not easy to convince everyone in the
> community to restart with when a fresh initiative to conserve
> ecosystems, or manage the commons, starts... so then monetary payments
> may be resorted to. It is in the context of these rapidly transforming
> situations that your qs. becomes esp. important, and where, with all
> the caveats re. the state that the discussion below has brought in
> (esp. agreeing with Carlos), some support from govt may be sought, as
> long as it does not enable the state to dominate community decisions.
>> (4) are these methods usually culturally specific, and/or are they
>> (or some of them) transferable?
> What we feel is that it is not possible to 'replicate' these methods,
> but it is posisble to learn from them, adapt them to one's own
> circumstances (cultural, economic, ecological, political), and create
> in a sense modified or new methods. What is perhaps most important is
> to see what ethics/values/principles have worked (or not). For
> instance the princple of consensus decision-making at the radical
> democracy (face-to-face community) level (Mendha-Lekha, which Sujit
> cites, is famous for this), could be adopted, but how this will work
> in one's own collective may differ from where one has learnt it from.
> This can be called 'outscaling' instead of upscaling or
> replication.... and then scale can be achieved by linking these
> diverse local inititives with each other through networks and
> platforms of horizontal collaboration.
>>
>> It's spring time here in NZ, and I just learned a Maori proverb:
>> "Koanga tangata tahi, ngahuru puta noa" (At digging time just one
>> person; at harvest time surrounded by others.) So it seems that even
>> pre-industrial, pre-state societies grappled with the issue of who
>> does what valuable work when. But they mostly 'solved' it - until the
>> colonists arrived and destroyed their societies.
>>
>> Nevertheless - in our efforts to build more just and sustainable
>> societies, can we afford to neglect or ignore this important
>> dimension of social reality?
>>
>> Christine
>>
>>
>>
>> "I want to tell the whole group about my recent experience of a
>> workshop with village level activists and the kind of materials and
>> pedagogy used and the next level challenges we will face. I think
>> this might be of interest to the whole group and people might have
>> experience and ideas to share.
>>
>> Due to relaxations in lockdown I was able to conduct a two whole day
>> , face to face , workshops with 60 people . About 2/3^rd of
>> participants were working at village level in 6 districts of the
>> state of West Bengal , one district each of the states of Odisha and
>> Jharkhand. So there were three language groups. 1/3^rd were the urban
>> staff of an NGO which works in these rural areas , primarily trying
>> to create village discussion forums , to take forward many of the
>> ideas of “alternatives to Industrialism”
>>
>> In three sessions I circulated a one page note with 10-12 main points
>> each on Amish ( USA) , Kibbutz( Israel) , and Mendha village ( India
>> – maharashtra ) . These notes were in vernacular language. In groups
>> of 6-8 persons they read the note, discussed , and came up with
>> written comments and questions in about 20 minutes . As I collected
>> the notes and started discussing , I showed them slides of still
>> images of Amish ( not many available) and a 5 minute clipping from a
>> film called “Raising the Barn” . For kibbutz also still images. And
>> for Mendha a short 10 minute film. Each of these sessions went on for
>> more than 2 hours with lots of animated discussions. The short note,
>> the still photos , the short film were really helpful. We had planned
>> to do Zapatistas but ran out of time.
>>
>> These activists would like to tell these stories and initiate
>> discussions at district, sub-district and at village forums which
>> they are trying to create. But they need more “detailed stories” of
>> such cases in the vernacular so that can handle all kinds of
>> questions . In India Vikalp Sangam has already started writing
>> detailed case studies in some state languages and also making
>> audiovisuals. "
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 30/09/21 2:39 am, Carlos Tornel wrote:
>>> Thanks Ariel and Tom!
>>>
>>> As I was saying to Ted, I just want to clarify that I'm not
>>> advocating nor think that struggling to achieve state power is the
>>> way through - We have the experiences of Bolivia and Ecuador with
>>> indigenous or indigenous backed governments that tried to take
>>> control of the state only to find that the state operates in a
>>> global capitalist context which meant for many of them an increase
>>> forms of extraction and forms of violence against them and the very
>>> nature that they gave rights to. So I do agree with Ted that this is
>>> not the way forward, as well as with many Latin American thinkers
>>> who argue along the same lines (Holloway, Esteva, Dinerstein, etc).
>>> What I was thinking about was more in the lines of what can we still
>>> demand of the actually existing state or use the tools that already
>>> exist within it, to achieve some of the goals we want to achieve.
>>> I'm thinking particularly about some indigenous communities'
>>> struggles that are suing the state or demanding their rights be
>>> granted and respected. These are of course tools that were built by
>>> and "inside" the master's house, so I wouldn't say these will
>>> necessarily lead towards a more just or equal world, but they are
>>> nonetheless tools we can use to resist as we move forwards in the
>>> creation of a new world. So long story short, should we just ignore
>>> the state or can we 'use it', not to conquer state power, but to use
>>> the tools at our disposal keeping in mind that the ultimate goal
>>> should be societies that are rid of the state?
>>>
>>> This might refer back to the point Ariel was making about what can
>>> be mediated with existing institutions. Although I'm not sure that I
>>> agree with what Tom was mentioning. Why assume that life-saving
>>> medicine of technological innovations such as solar panels of
>>> broadband need the State? Just thinking about this in 10 year
>>> anniversary of Occupy shows that people can organize food systems,
>>> health clinics, reflection and discussion groups all without the
>>> state, universities of hospitals. Of course this doesn't mean that
>>> we should get rid of the hospitals now, but we can surely work our
>>> way forward so that all these institutions that are not necessarily
>>> there for our well-being but to create and exacerbate our
>>> dependencies on them can be rethought or simply cese to be needed in
>>> the not so distant future?
>>>
>>> Apologies for the long response but I do appreciate the chance to
>>> continue this debate and listening to other folk's opinions!
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>>
>>> C.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> El mié, 29 sept 2021 a las 14:14, Tom Abeles (<tabeles at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:tabeles at gmail.com>>) escribió:
>>>
>>> I would be concerned, living in such a world, if I needed
>>> life-saving medical services from vaccines to heart surgery.
>>> Similarly, I would be concerned without universities, research
>>> and technology which has given us solar panels, broadband
>>> internet and similar which is imbedded in much of what we use on
>>> a daily basis. The Buddhist Gross Happiness Index ponders these
>>> issues.
>>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 7:20 PM Ariel Salleh
>>> <arielsalleh7 at gmail.com <mailto:arielsalleh7 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Nice point Carlos.
>>> Considering how states are historically sex-gendered
>>> institutions may offer a way forward that mediates yours and
>>> Ted’s position …?
>>> Ariel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 28 Sep 2021, at 6:58 am, Carlos Tornel <tornelc at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:tornelc at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all and thanks Pallav for sharing this article!
>>>
>>> I'm relatively new on some of the lists, but I thought I
>>> could share some thoughts after the reading.
>>>
>>> I found the article quite useful for thinking about how we
>>> can start to build a post (growth, capitalism, extractive,
>>> etc.) society. I have faced similar questions and concerns
>>> when advocating for a convivial or a communal society in
>>> different spaces, such as what do we do with state power?
>>> With armies, the military, nuclear weapons, etc.? How do we
>>> move away from the Hobbian reality of power and the state?
>>> Several of the anarchist and degrowth proponentes (although
>>> not so many have looked seriously at this link until
>>> recently) have formulated proposals against this, i.e. try
>>> to reduce our dependence on the state and progressively move
>>> away from it. However this brings back the debate we've been
>>> having for some time now in Latin America, should we seek to
>>> take back the state or not? My own opinion is that we
>>> should, through several of the proposals presented in the
>>> article, such as food and energy sovereignty, we can
>>> progressively start to move away from the state, leading
>>> towards more convivial societies. However it does seem that
>>> the state will have to play a part in this transition, so
>>> perhaps we need to think of the transition from one society
>>> to another in different scales and with different agencies:
>>> I.e. What should we ask from the state? What can we do
>>> ourselves in local and communal terms and how can we
>>> continue to build networks of solidarity or communitarian
>>> entanglements at the regional, and even global level.
>>>
>>> My thanks again Pallav for sharing and to Ted for a very
>>> insightful and useful analysis.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Carlos
>>>
>>> El sáb, 25 sept 2021 a las 5:06, Pallav Das
>>> (<dpallav at gmail.com <mailto:dpallav at gmail.com>>) escribió:
>>> The "eco-anarchist" transition strategy relies on
>>> “prefiguring” the new social forms in the existing society.
>>> The most effective way to get people to see the sense and
>>> the merits of the new ways is to establish as many examples
>>> of them as possible here and now. This approach minimizes
>>> the chances of violent conflict; if we persuade large
>>> numbers to the alternative then radical change in structures
>>> might be brought about peacefully.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Friends,
>>>
>>> A new article, "The path to a just and sustainable society"
>>> has been uploaded to the "Radical Ecological Democracy"
>>> website. In the second part of his discussion on
>>> “Eco-anarchism”, Ted Trainer lays out the core
>>> characteristics of a post consumer capitalist society,
>>> operating on the principles of “The Simpler Way”. Please
>>> share the article with your networks and join the discussion
>>> on REDlistserv. The author is copied here in case you would
>>> like to contact him directly.
>>>
>>> https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/the-path-to-a-just-and-sustainable-society/
>>> <https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/the-path-to-a-just-and-sustainable-society/>
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Pallav
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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> --
> Ashish Kothari
>
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