Is anyone interested in building an intentional community that implements parecon? Does parecon scale down to small communities?
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I’d be interested in exploring this idea. At the moment I could not move to one, but I’ve given a lot of thought to this idea so would at the very least be able to participate in a discussion about the ins and outs.
Then I suppose you should at least have one workers’ coop and one neighbourhood council to prefigure Parecon. Do you have enough resources to build them in reality?
Need land, buildings, farming equipment. People with excellent interpersonal skills and with all manner of abilities in farming and food preservation. It’s a big enough undertaking.
Glad there is some interest! I see intentional communities as a way to immediately begin building the better world we desire without waiting for everyone to be ready. Plus people want to see things being used in practice before they will be inspired to join in.
With regard to finances, it would have to be executed similarly to co-operatives today: as non-profits, LLCs, apostolic orgs, and there’s even some places that have specific co-operative entities. I understand that DFI is technically not okay in the DEP book but there’s no feasible way unless someone essentially donated with no strings attached. As long as the terms of loans are economically feasible (which may be challenging), the members should be able to slowly regain economic freedom.
My main question is how do you handle worker councils that exist in two separate economies? Each worker council has credits that they earn from internal purchases but also currency they earn from international trade. In DEP, it seems like trade only occurs as part of annual planning process but that’s not conducive to typical capitalist transactions. Perhaps there should be an approximation of international consumption in the planning process?
These funds would need to be collected and used for loan repayment and to engage in incoming international trade which would surely be necessary for a small PE community. Does this engagement in capitalism remove too much economic control from the constituents or is it possible to balance this? Any thoughts to how this could be organized?
I notice that this post is related to your previous post Digg/Reddit Content Site - Project Ideas - Participatory Economy Forum.
My feeling is that your questions are good, but there are no definite answers to them yet due to the lack of practice. We, of course, are happy to see somebodies else are willing to practice such a prefiguration to accumulate experience for the whole DEP community.
A valid point, I am just looking for ideas for how it might work regardless of whether the ideas are vetted in any way. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from Mondragon that folks could share? I’m not familiar with the intricate details for how any syndicate has functioned in relation to external forces. That might be where I head next in my research!
Coincidentally I am going involved in a similar project from Brazil, it is still in it’s infancy but maybe we can do something together.