http://bostonreview.net/BR31.2/baiocchi.html _The Citizens of Porto Alegre by Gianpaolo Baiocchi_ as another view on meetings.
On 10/20/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
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> On Oct 20, 2006, at 11:13 AM, Andy F wrote:
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> > The complaint about the meetings (and yes, they suck) sounds like, "I
> > want to have communal control over my destiny, but only if it's not
> > too much trouble." Maybe that's just realism.
>
> People want to delegate decisions and get on with their lives, not
> engage in endless dickering and bickering. You could never sell
> radical economic change if it meant more work. And that balanced job
> complexes stuff sounds hopelessly complex to negotiate.
JM: Is there any choice but to have meetings?
For us, in relatively privileged positions, forced meetings feel a little like forced schooling. But isn't that precisely the problem? One can imagine school as something enjoyable and fun. I certainly love to learn things with other people. Then why did I hate school so much? I certainly love to make things with other people. Then why does it sound like I would hate Hahnel-Albert type meetings so much? Boring meetings - this is my experience of what the Hahnel-Albert cooperative would feel like. But it is not the experience of many people in the world, and many of the places I have been.
But first, no matter what someone will have to go to meetings. And those people will end up giving themselves the best pay no doubt. I was once a manager at a corporation and my job consisted of two things -- Going to meetings and making work-life hell for the people below me. If the corporation had been honest this would have been included in my job description. So with all of the meetings that managers are paid go to in order to whip themselves in line, why shouldn't a different society pay people to go to meetings to actually run the world democratically? We are always going to have to pay someone to go to meetings.
If the choice is only between being/having a boss or going to meetings I would choose to go to meetings. I have never had a boss who was not either incompetent or indecent or sometimes both. This was true no matter where I worked -- an office, a bookstore, or a factory. I'd prefer not to have a boss, and think that it would be best if, somewhere in that distant future none of us have bosses. Given this preference for not having a boss I just don't see any other choice except meetings.
I have read Hahnels and Albert's books and I think they try to specify too much. There are too many meetings specified in their books and I wonder if this is the way they run South End Press, and Z mag?
But I have also seen cooperatives in South America where the workers actually seem to like to go to meetings -- maybe it's the beer they serve for lunch and the fact that people shout at each other, talking all at once, like my family at dinner. Yet they seem to come to decisions. I have been to My questions is - are there successful cooperatives where democratic management actually works and where there is a balance between delegation and democracy? From what I have seen there are a few.
I have also been to direct democracy neighborhood meetings in Brazil. Such neighborhood councils demand a high level of participation from Taxi Drivers, factory workers, maids, etc and they make decisions on allocations of taxes, through direct democratic decision making. Yet they seem to work. ( For a good report on this see http://bostonreview.net/BR31.2/baiocchi.html _The Citizens of Porto Alegre by Gianpaolo Baiocchi_ . I can attest that he reports on these meetings accurately.) I have seen direct democracy work to a limited extent in these cases.
But my tendency is to agree with Doug in the case of the U.S. But not for his reasons. I think quite simply Doug's view of these things accurately reports an attitude of most of us college educated Americans. "Meetings" are simply entertainment for most people who don't own televisions or telephones. Thus going to church is "fun" for many of my poorer Brazilian and El Salvadoran friends. For us "meetings" such as "church" or a union meeting or the PTA or even a picnic were things that were forced on us. We go to such meetings dragging ourselves as a matter of duty. My impression in Brazil was that the neighborhood meetings were invigorating, fun, good entertainment. The same could be said of factory coop meetings I attended. I just can't imagine United Statsians having the same attitude without some kind of revolution in mind. Maybe this is anecdotal evidence that Putnam was on to something.
Personally there are some meetings I hate and some I love. I always hated manager meetings, on the other hand I do like meetings where people have a good discussion.
>
> As I say every time this comes up, I don't see how we can get from
> here to there. I do see how we can introduce more democracy and
> openness to market relations - to socialize the market, as Diane
> Elson put it. That means opening corporate books, introducing more
> worker control, regulating business practices, etc.
Well I agree with this completely.
But the sort of
> top-to-bottom transformation that Parecon represents, given present
> arrangements and consciousness, seems hopelessly utopian (in the bad
> sense).
I don't know about "the bad sense" but it seems to me hopelessly Utopian because it is too detailed, too specified. Yet there may be some things to think about in it.
Jerry
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> Doug
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