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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