Blog PostsParecon and Transition Towns
By Aaron Stark at Mar 09, 2009 |
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Just a quick thought for the morning... is anyone involved with Parecon/ParSoc also involved with the Transition Towns movement? Here in Southeast Michigan, there is an active Transition Towns Michigan group.
I don't know much about this movement, but here is are a few statements from their website:
"It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?"
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"After going through a comprehensive and creative process of:
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awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
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connecting with existing groups in the community
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building bridges to local government
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connecting with other transition initiatives
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forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc)
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kicking off projects aimed at building people's understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
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eventually launching a community defined, community implemented "Energy Descent Action Plan" over a 15 to 20 year timescale
This results in a coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life that strives to rebuild the resilience we've lost as a result of cheap oil and reduce the community's carbon emissions drastically."
It seems like there is some overlap in goals at a very high (and admittedly vague) level of abstraction-- both Transition Towns and ParSoc/Parecon are interested in remaking community and political life.
The major difference that Parecon would have with Transition Towns, (as with many "pro local economy" groups) is on the class question, of course. As Michael Albert succinctly described recently in this post, one of the major goals of Parecon is classlessnes. Nowhere in the Transition Town literature is there any statement that moving towards balanced job complexes, council organization of work and community, participatory planning instead of markets, are goals. Instead, they are focused on transitioning to a world using less petroleum, on a community basis.
(And parenthetically, a rant I have against many "localization" groups championing small business and small communities is that small businesses can be just as exploitative to workers and the environment as big businesses, and that small communities are not necessarily models of tolerance and diversity. Doug Henwood had a recent interview with Jim Kunstler in which he went into some of this.)
However, a Parecon will not be implemented overnight, and "small businesses" would likely overlap with Parecon cooperatives for a while. (I will need to go back to my copy of "Real Utopia" to remind myself of all the essays on strategy that have already been written...) For the next few years at least, education about Parecon within this movement, and Parecon cooperative implementation in a subset of Transition Town communities, might be the best we could hope for.
Does anyone know if any work is being done on this front?
Parecon and Transition
By D'Arcy, Steve at Aug 17, 2010 20:22 PM
Hi there,
I've been involved in co-founding a parecon-oriented group, the now-defunct London Project for a Participatory Society (in London, Ontario, Canada), and also co-founding (as a member of the local "Initiating Committee") a local transition group, Transition London Ontario.
The "transition movement" is "eco-localist." People who are interested in the relation between parecon and eco-localism generally may wish to read Robin Hahnel's excellent article, "Eco-localism: A Constructive Critique."
In my view, there are many strengths and weakness of eco-localism in general, and the transition movement in particular. The main strength of the transition movement, which has led me to be interested in fostering it, is that it is mainly oriented toward "civil society," that is, grassroots, local community organizations, in which people "self-organize" (to use what I think of as the marxist term) in order to address social problems, rather than relying on either corporations or the state. It is in that context -- fostering community-based self-organization and "autonomous" grassroots capacity-building -- that the transition movement can play a very productive role. This can mean building skill-sharing networks, community gardens, various forms of "mutual aid" (to switch over to an anarchist vocabulary), bike repair co-ops, "free schools," and so on.
That's the main strength. (I've written on ZNet, about how I see the above as a part of a long-range anti-capitalist strategy -- for me, but certainly not for most participants in such projects. See "Environmentalism as if Winning Mattered: A Civil Society Strategy")
The main weakness of the transition movement, or rather, the main limitation, is that it completely leaves out the whole aspect of the politics of transition which consists of, not just "by-passing" corporations and the state, but actually opposing them and wrenching social power away from them. The transition movement does not really address the importance of protest, class conflict, and building oppositional social movements. Having said that, neither does the co-operative movement, or the parecon-experimentationist movement (if you know what I mean: building parecon institutions). There is a role to play for building "prefigurative" alternatives, which does not involve protest, but neither does it preclude or prevent protest. As long as one doesn't think that the transition movement can substitute for or replace the broader activist Left (which some people do think, unfortunately), I don't think this limitation is a big problem. I'm simultaneously active in Climate Justice London (a protest group) and Transition London (a transition group). And that's important to me, as you might guess.
Thanks, by the way, for bringing up this topic, which I think should be more widely discussed.
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Re: Parecon and Transition
By Ji, Swaraj at Aug 21, 2010 06:56 AM
Yes, even in my initial investigations into this movement, I've noticed the absence of any recognition that centralized systems will eventually resist localization because centralization is the basis for their power. Vandana Shiva, who has presented at Transition Towns events, clearly has a strong understanding of this from her own organizing, and she says outright that the damming and interconnection of rivers in India is part of an attempt to exert control by centralizing water resources behind large dams, and her movements are actively opposing that project.
One must believe, however, that the transition movement will eventually encounter such opposition, and will then have to deal with it. But the positive content of building from the bottom up in local communities with local projects will serve them well in that situation. And without such positive content, there really is no alternative (TrINA).
Gandhi knew this when he organized public sanitation, literacy, newpaper and other local projects throughout India, and built the national industries for the weaving of cloth and the making of salt. Shiva does this every day with her networks of thousands of Indian farms.
The path for the U.S. may be different from the path for India or for the mostly small English towns presently involved in the Transition Towns movement, but certainly there is much of value, and much to be learned, in those approaches.
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Parecon May Be Under Consideration for Transition Network Use
By Ji, Swaraj at Aug 17, 2010 18:49 PM
In the present Transition Initiative primer,
http://www.transitionnetwork.org/sites/default/files/TransitionInitiativesPrimer(3).pdf
we find:
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Most of us recognise that we need to be looking beyond the traditional hierarchical models for the Transition Initiatives, but we haven't got the time to spend all our efforts figuring out what that'll look like.
Within the small group running the Transition Network organisation, we've adopted a temporary hierarchical structure, with a parallel process to find a more suitable model that we'll adopt in time and that may be adoptable/adaptable by the individual communities that head off down the transition trail. Chaordic, Natural Step, Viable System, Mondragon, Cooperative, Parecon and others are all in the mixer for this.
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The above, by the way, was written about two years ago; I don't know what they are up to with it by now.
My understanding is that small business is just one small part of the mix. They especially emphasize working with local government. The focus is definitely on making communities better able to cope with peaking oil and climate change, but the locality of the approach has de facto political effects in terms of the possibility of economic democracy. From what I've read thus far I am very impressed.
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Re: Parecon and Transition Towns
By Stark, Aaron at Mar 11, 2009 07:18 AM
Thanks for your comments, Matt and Michael. I'm going to try to attend a couple Transition Town events in the next few months, to learn
more about the movement.
From my limited research so far, it seems like there is a "survivalist" element to the movement, which is perhaps not so progressive. However, the local group has also hosted
events about communities in Cuba and Brazil that have transitioned away from heavy use of petroleum. So, like any other movement, there are probably good and bad tendencies.
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Re: Parecon and Transition Towns
By Loewen, Matt at Mar 09, 2009 17:20 PM
I don't know if any work is being done on this front. I like the connections youre making though. I've thought about similar community organizing initiatives such as city repair in Portland, and how these types of initiatives, could be coupled with Parecon.
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I AGREE
By McGehee, Michael at Mar 09, 2009 14:01 PM
PARECON ACTIVISM WITHIN SUCH INITIATIVES COULD BE PRODUCTIVE
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