[lbo-talk] The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

Tayssir John Gabbour tayssir.john at googlemail.com
Tue Aug 26 11:03:18 PDT 2008


On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 12:38 PM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I daresay the anarchists may have happened upon the problem of human
> group dynamics. :)

Many have, yes. ;) It's easy for people to underestimate it.

In the recent book _Real Utopia_, people pointed out how poorly we're socialized to deal with each other as equals. (I consider that an interesting challenge rather than demotivation -- I'm sure we're far less sexist and racist than we were not too long ago.)

"In my experience, interpersonal conflicts within egalitarian

collectives are vastly more prevalent and difficult to address

than most people think or hope. Apart from our complete lack of

business experience and knowledge when Mondragón first started up,

I would argue that the nature and long-term threat of

interpersonal conflicts was one of the things we most

under-estimated, were most surprised by, and were least prepared

to deal with. Why that is, and how different things might be

between our present difficulties under capitalism and a

long-established parecon, is not intuitively obvious. No doubt

there are forces which shape and constrain conflict resolution

under capitalism, including within our own alternative

institutions, which may be absent in a future participatory

economy. For starters, none of us has been raised, right now, to

deal with one another as equals. We need to acknowledge that there

are actually skills and training involved to deal with one another

openly, with respect, to cut through the baggage of our classist,

racist, sexist socialization, to transcend the harmful elements of

our own pride and egos, and so on. Acknowledging this is not the

same thing as resolving it."

"Participatory Economics in Theory & Practice," Paul Burrows

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15987

"Any person who has participated in a non-hierarchical kind of

organization, even a small one, knows that, in the absence of

mechanisms that protect plurality and foster participation,

"horizontality" soon becomes a fertile soil for the survival of

the fittest. Any such person also knows how frustrating and

limited it is to have organizations in which each and everyone are

always forced to gather in assemblies to make decisions on every

single issue of a movement -from general political strategy to

fixing a leaking roof. The "tyranny of structurelessness", as Jo

Freeman used to say, exhausts our movements, subvert their

principles, and makes them absurdly inefficient.

"Contrary to the usual belief, autonomous and horizontal

organizations are more in need of institutions than hierarchical

ones; for these can always rely on the will of the leader to

resolve conflicts, assign tasks, etc. I would like to argue that we

need to develop institutions of a new type. By institutions I do

not mean a bureaucratic hierarchy, but simply a set of democratic

agreements on ways of functioning, that are formally established,

and are endowed with the necessary organizational infrastructure to

enforce them if needed."

"Autonomous Politics and its Problems," Ezequiel Adamovsky

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/3911

Tayssir



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