For context: I live in a 330-unit HOA (all in one building) and politics within this large neighborhood is highly contentious. Participation in Board elections and other voting remains very low, which contributes to the dominance of a social clique that has controlled the HOA’s Board for the past 5 years.
That being said, I don’t think this spells the end for participatory society. I think liquid democracy might be the solution for neighborhoods as large as these, where it’s difficult for everyone to know each other. However, it’s more likely that a person knows someone who knows someone else… which is conducive to liquid democracy, and likely a powerful tool when attempting to choose officers or delegates from amongst the larger pool of people.
I would turn to sociocracy and adapt it to contexts like these. In other words divide the whole HOA into 55 groups of 6 people for example and create a hierarchy of circles until you get down to a single circle of 6 people.
If there is an important weakness in à Parecon are the social skills needed for it to work seamlessly.
Thanks for bringing up sociocracy. The nice thing about your suggestion is that it would be less likely to atomize anyone within the larger group. It would also prevent the emergence of new classes: those who don’t participate (vote-givers) and those who do (vote-receivers).
I would say that some goods are naturaly related to neighbors, other goods related to our families, other to our friends, other to classmates, and so on. There is no silver bullet, or single social group that can and must manage all our economic goods. We naturaly play more roles in society then just consumers and workers, and so can build more types of social groups that can manage economy. This reduction of humans to just two social roles, consumers and workers, was done in modern era, mostly by capitalism. To make profit consumption and labour must grow. Which is not bad by itself if it balanced by other roles and priorities which is not nowadays.
That is why I think that democratic self-management principle and participatory planning procedure should work across full varieties of social groups then just neighbours and workers councils.
For instance: you may want to manage utilities or HOA together with your heigbours, provide mutual care withing your close circle, organize vocation together with your friends, decide childcare with your wife, plan education with your teachers and classmates, plan leisure time with groups of similar interests, decide parenting goods together with other parents in your kindergarten, etc.