I’ve been mulling over two possibles avenues for the making of a participatory economy, separate from government. I welcome criticism.
A. The first approach is ParEcon at smaller scale. A consumer cooperative, such as a grocery store, encourages its members to submit consumption proposals, which we might call their “Plan.” This isn’t that different from Amazon subscriptions in practice. By deciding ahead of time what the consumers need, the store will then know what to stock. And this could be extended to foster local production, by advertising to local producers what is in demand.
B. (A) could be scaled to a credit union, which would ask its members to submit consumption proposals. The results of these proposals would then inform how to distribute capital for local production. Since the risk typically associated with loans is being minimized, interest rates on loans may be minimized or eliminated; in other words, loans for production may be replaced by recoverable grants. And since many credit unions already belong to larger federations, said federations may serve as the scaffolding for a federative society (assuming these credit unions can be reformed, such that leadership is accountable to its members).
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These are intriguing proposals. Thank you for writing them and posting them.
Let’s take proposal (A) first. Consumer cooperatives that I know and have been a part of remain ensconsed – in practice and in principle – in the market systems which we are all beholden to. In order to implement proposal (A), we would need a group of people in a cooperative to know that this would be a venture more than just to create a cooperative business but to create a new economy. I frankly think this would be the more difficult task: finding and/or educating a fairly large group of people dedicated to doing this.
But assuming that’s done (and that alone could be a project years in the making), then you would need the infrastructure for receiving and aggregating proposals and for the cooperative to act on those proposals. That’s also a serious task (perhaps made more feasible in software) but assuming that can also be done, it would mark a potentially serious power center in the economy.
And it would reverberate in all sorts of ways: this cooperative business could develop and announce its own indicative prices, and compare them to the more widespread market prices. It could transform people’s relationship – and perhaps reliance – on money. Money, I think, would still need to be necessary for getting the resources fueling the business, but here people would see and know it would be a means rather than an end; the business could build and grow a reservoir of cash not for profit but as a means of leverage for developing a participatory economy, holding the cash away from bad actors and towards pro-PE ends and community needs.
Proposal (B), I think, generalized the ideas of proposal (A) more broadly – allotting resources and determining for any enterprise. But the overall principle I think is the same, and there’s more: You could stitch together separate PE-based credit unions into larger entities still, all knowing their role, and all guided with the purpose to transition into a participatory economy. In fact, this might be the start of something that has been damned rare: a credible, tangible proposal for transition, and potentially a giant leap in the work on transition theory. I’m suddenly interested in exploring this further and doing what I can to make this happen.
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I’m glad these ideas made an impact! However, I can’t take all the credit. The overarching strategy is heavily inspired by Proudhon’s mutualism, with PE grafted on top of it. (Mutualism as strategy, PE as vision.)
I would imagine that a federative software system built on a protocol like ActivityPub would lend itself to the type of economic coordination that we’d want. Each instance of the software would retain full “ownership” of its data within the federation. Picture a decentralized, PE-based alternative to Instacart (or Amazon, as previously mentioned).
Given that credit unions already want to limit their risk, I don’t see why this couldn’t be treated like a “product” that is marketable to those that are existing. There are obviously caveats/limitations going this route, which also leaves open starting new credit unions or similar cooperative financial institutions with the goal of constructing a new economy enshrined in their constitutions.