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

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Tue Aug 26 16:09:32 PDT 2008


yeah, but try talking sociology to any of them. they ignore the research and stick to ideologues, which is _really_ fucking irritating. not that ideologues have nothing to say, it's just that they say shit that's been said so many times before and write as if they discovered it. fucking annoying.

At 02:03 PM 8/26/2008, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
>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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