RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 300 NAR 15 Future Seeds Planted Today: Possible Elements of Revolutionary Program
Ep 300 of RevolutiopnZ is the fifteenth in the Next American Revolution Sequence. This time Bert Dellinger, Emiliano Feynman, Leslie Zinn, Barbara Bethune, Robin Kunstler, Anton Rocker, and Harriett Lennon discuss social media, mass and alternative media, health, clinics, and hospitals, courts and police, education, workplace makeovers, and allocation innovations as instances of planting seeds for the RPS future in the present. I again interject comments every so often.
Have you ever heard anyone ask, "yes, things are horrible, but what can we do about it?" Here is what RPS organizers did in their time to win gains and prepare to win still more gains on the road to attaining a participatory society. Can their future programmatic choices provide insights into our current possibilities? Can their future successes usefully inspire our potential current choices? Miguel Guevara, the interviewer, thinks so. I hope so. Give a listen and perhaps check out the text on ZNet too, to decide for yourself.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 300th consecutive episode and it's the 15th in our Next American Revolution sequence. Episodes in that sequence are remember chapters from an oral history and as well include some comments from myself. Called for identification purposes interjections as we go along. So in this episode titled Some Contextual Program, burt Dellinger, amaliano Feynman, leslie Zinn, barbara Bethune, robin Kunstler, anton Rocker and Harriet Lennon discuss internet, media, hospitals, justice, education, workplace makeovers and allocation as instances of planting seeds for the RPS future. So Miguel starts by asking Bertrand Bert what was the origin of the phrase planting the seeds of the future in the present, and what does it mean? I think it was originally an anarchist slogan, miguel, but whatever its source, it certainly means the attitude, social relations and structures we plant determine our harvest. If you want daisies, plant daisies. If you want roses, plant roses. Conversely, if you plant reeds, you won't harvest daisies or roses, no matter how well you water the weeds. We should not plant seeds today which will become other than what we want tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Suppose an RPS project needs funds. Why doesn't it sell drugs or porn to get the needed revenue? Some would say it is because those practices are immoral. But the more instructive reason is because the mindsets and practices associated with selling drugs or porn would breed tendencies contrary to our aims. Suppose a media project needs funds, why not sell ads? Selling ads means selling your audience to commercial outfits and that means you have to attract audience that has disposable income and you have to ensure that your content doesn't leave that audience disinclined to buy what advertisers offer. Selling ads subverts your project. To save it, this type calculation comes up often in electoral campaigns.
Speaker 1:Daily and major tactical choices, and even deciding how to make decisions To intelligently navigate current matters requires clarity about the basic features of the society we seek. Without that clarity we can't think wisely about the seeds we are planting. We might ask if some policy works today, where. For it to work today means for it to activate or to get some immediate sort result. But if we couldn't judge which seeds have future fruits we desire and which seeds will subvert the garden we seek, such present-focus strategizing would be incomplete. This is why vision matters so much to RPS. I interject, I have to admit. This kind of assertion seems so utterly obvious to me that I tend not to understand why so many people feel it irrelevant, extraneous or downright false. Save for highly improbable accident and luck. To get what you want requires that you seek what you want not just in the moment but for the future. Miguel now takes up Internet program. Emiliano, what was the RPS attitude toward the internet and social media? How did planting seeds of the future play out in that realm when RPS was forming Miguel?
Speaker 1:The internet was a mixed bag for creating a better society. Positively, the internet facilitated popular participation and disseminating information. It made it easier and cheaper to announce actions and to convey instructions. It facilitated spreading analysis, strategy and vision. These benefits were significantly compromised, however, by the tremendous volume of junk news and nonsense content that complicated finding valuable content. Then AI took squalid and lying content a big step further.
Speaker 1:Also negatively, the internet rewarded extreme brevity to leave room for ample advertising. Users became acclimated to short, shorter and shortest. Declining attention spans in turn produced still more brevity. It fueled a downward spiral. And then came clickbait, lying titles, basically part parcel and accelerator of all the rest. The search for the legal tender was in command. Additionally, corporate surveillance tracked people's internet use to amass gigantic databases which were sold to advertisers as well as used for spying by the state. This degraded privacy. Finally, though many thought internet browsing and YouTube viewing were fundamentally decentralizing and decommercializing very quickly, they instead conveyed more ads even than TV and magazines had, and the ads were far more intrusive and manipulative. Centralization also accelerated as the huge bulk of traffic went through few sites, until even with a nearly infinite selection of little venues to visit, traffic was nonetheless overwhelmingly about 10 or 15 sites, not to mention Facebook, trying to replace the whole of the World Wide Web with Facebook-housed versions. Then the internet, plus smartphones and social media, elevated nastiness, escalated bullying and produced narcissistic vapidity, even as they also, for those who could avoid the pitfalls, provided much needed information, training, entertainment and popular outreach. So it was a very mixed bag.
Speaker 1:People might disagree about how to weigh the relative debits and virtues, but, whatever the balance, some people began to think and this was still way pre-RPS why not try to remove the debits while enlarging the virtues? Why not provide services that would elevate substance and solidarity while retaining ease of use and scope? Of course RPS folks put up websites and produced and disseminated podcasts, and of course we tried to ensure that commenting and forums were civil and that clickbait and ads were absent. Nonetheless, many of us worried that, even as we were trying not to contribute to bad habits, on balance on this front we might be having more negative than positive effect. On balance, on this front, we might be having more negative than positive effect.
Speaker 1:The number of left sites that began to employ clickbait and short pieces and to have endless links for jumping about at the expense of maintaining any real focus kept growing. Sites did it in pursuit of greater outreach, but was it a real gain to have more readers for shorter durations? So RPS decided to create our own people social media where we would facilitate inexpensive networking, outreach and debate without including ads, data mining, spying, personal vituperation, manipulation or the constraints and pressures that generated an inclination towards short and thin. But how could we do that? The answer that various tech-oriented folks in RPS came up with rehashed some earlier attempts. We would create our own version of Facebook and Twitter, combined in one system, with transparent features and with revenues beyond costs going to progressive and left-sponsoring projects, of which there would be dozens and then hundreds. Each sponsor would become a source for cross-constituency connections, all respecting and even promoting the content of the rest. We would have no length limitations, no ads and no spying. Our system would be international, since there were no national borders to internet connectivity.
Speaker 1:So RPS folks first created a system participatory links it was called that went into use in the US somewhat over 10 years ago and then immediately welcomed people, social movements and organizations in other countries to join. The process was what you might anticipate from RPS folks. They got together, wrote software, enlisted a bunch of people who would do the work, got a first version in place and then offered it up. The system operated with balanced job complexes and kept things inexpensive for users, while pledging that, beyond workers' equitable wages and funds sufficient to cover server and other production costs, all surplus revenues from the low monthly fees would, if there were any, go to the many sponsoring organizations, of which RPS was only one. Sponsoring organizations, of which RPS was only one. At first.
Speaker 1:The effort had to overcome old habits and biases Perhaps hardest of all. At first we lacked the benefits of scale which existing systems had but which our new project could not gain until it had time to grow. This was a familiar catch-22. On the one hand, the value of using our system depended on how many people already used the system. On the other hand, whether each new person who heard about the project wanted to use, it depended on its value. You couldn't attract people based on the system's value without having already attracted people to give the system value. In this sense, the success of new social media was like the success of RPS itself it depended on first participants taking a leap of faith to join before sufficient scale made participating really beneficial. The technology had to be good, but I think that was the least of it. What really allowed success was a steadily escalating desire for something new. A subset of potential participants perceived in it a nearly full social media glass, even while our new system was in fact technically nearly empty. This optimistic audience provided the base that foreshadowed real value for all who signed up, which in turn ensured a steady march into viability.
Speaker 1:Miguel replies come on. There must have been other difficulties in actually creating this system. I wasn't involved with the details, miguel, but I had a couple of friends who were, and you were right in one sense. They would tell me about analysts hassling over all kinds of technical issues, from database design to features to appearance, and I would tell them don't let ideas and disputes about how to attain an imaginary perfection subvert your momentum toward attaining realistic excellence, though for a time. I admit that my advice mostly fell on deaf ears.
Speaker 1:When a group is creating something valuable, often each participant sees differences with other participants as monumentally important. Because they are so focused on those details, they tend to lose the external forest for the internal trees. They think anything less than perfect will slide into disaster and anything other than their way was imperfect. My guess is the process of developing participatory links took twice or even three times as long as it would have taken had all those working on it been seeking what they wound up with from the start. Still, they got it done and thereafter, if my friends are to be believed, they pretty much forgot about all the earlier disputes, save for a few key, modest differences that were still being explored for possible inclusion later.
Speaker 1:People are complex when creating a new social media system or, for that matter, a political campaign or RPS itself. Countless differences arise and it is often hard to distinguish nitpicking from more serious differences that have major implications. Seeking a new world doesn't free one from that kind of complexity or from sometimes needless hassle. But we could and we did minimize waste by becoming less egocentric and more willing to embrace diversity. Miguel turns to Leslie. Leslie, what about media more generally, two big trends began in the early days of RPS that continue to this day. We renovated the many alternative media projects that were already operating and we created some new, larger-scale projects For projects already operating. We adopted RPS-style attitudes and practices, which mainly meant instituting equitable remuneration and balanced job complexes.
Speaker 1:But it was difficult. First, the leaders of various projects were often their founders, or at least people who had worked tirelessly for years and sometimes even for decades. Imagine telling them they could no longer have soul or even just disproportionate control or enjoy what they thought were totally justified higher incomes than others got For staffs and sometimes for users too. Confronting such time-enshrined leaders' dominance was no picnic. The leaders were not enemies and had a ton of accumulated skills. When we urge such a leader to cede control so as to attain self-managed decision-making for the rest, or to accept a fair share of disempowering tasks so as to eliminate class difference, or to receive only equitable income so as to promote equity and solidarity, tensions rose. The leaders felt their compliance would hurt their institution. They believed in their own indispensability and they wanted to keep their familiar situation, and sometimes they were at least partially right. In the short run, change could impact quality, but ultimately, the main point was that it did not matter what their motivation for wanting to preserve their past ways was.
Speaker 1:Rps communicated that in the longer run, and often even right away, among many other reasons, for a media institution to have good editorial content regarding coordinator class, working class interactions, to be an instructive model and to fulfill everyone involved, change had to come. Partly, the needed change was about issues of race and gender, which had already been percolating for decades, so that resistance to those entreaties was at most tenuous. The controversial change was about class division and on that issue the battle was intense and the changes sought for remuneration and especially for division of labor and decision making weren't only controversial for media leaders. They also put pressure on staff members who had to become newly involved in decisions and to do empowering tasks and to generally bear more responsibility. Miguel asked did you go through all that personally? Yes, miguel, very much so.
Speaker 1:Very early on In my workplace, I was one of a few decision makers when these sentiments arose. I am not at all proud to report. I said to their advocates what the hell are you talking about? I have given my life to this project. Some of you have been here a few years or a year or a few months. You want to fucking displace me. You think that is fair. You think it would benefit our work to push aside my ability, knowledge, contacts and experience. My reasoning seemed to me morally and logically unimpeachable. It took me a while to realize it wasn't. It wasn't an easy time for me, or for most others in the project for that matter, but in the end change came. It had to.
Speaker 1:What first won me over was realizing that before the change, our daily news and opinion work had said literally zero, not a single thing, about the dynamics of working class coordinator class relations. In fact, it has said nearly nothing significant about workplace self-management, division of labor and even markets. That shouldn't have been so surprising. When an institution has an attribute, in this case a corporate division of labor and all it entails that serves those with authority and also parallels ills in society, then that attribute will tend to be out of bounds for internal discussion. So I realized that even if I ignored or doubted the gain in value of our institution being a model, even if I ignored or doubted the gain of its changed impact on its participants, and even if I ignored or doubted the need to plant the seeds of the future in the present. Still, the changes had to happen, even if only on behalf of improving the quality of our editorial product, which, ironically, is just what I had thought I was defending when I opposed the change.
Speaker 1:Oh, there was some truth in my initial reservations. Sometimes an organization changed so precipitously and even callously that the organization suffered. But on balance, the main problem wasn't the rashness or inflexibility of those seeking classless projects. The main problem was the obstinacy of those who counter-productively defended class stratified projects instead of lending their support and experience to the new aims. In time, I not only understood the need for change to ensure the value of media's product, but also for its value as a model, its impact on those doing the work and for planting the seeds of the future and the present. Of course, it all got easier the more successful cases there were.
Speaker 1:Was the situation similar, leslie, for newly emerging media efforts, for new projects? Miguel, the same issues arose, but now you didn't have folks who were already entrenched, so you didn't have the difficulties to challenge their tenure raised. You started with nothing and you defined what you wanted. That didn't mean there was no tension and difficulty, but it was different. A typical new media project would start with people from different backgrounds. Some had more knowledge, skill, confidence and contacts than others, and those few would quite naturally become dominant unless there were very good structures to elevate everyone's participation. This is why, when projects began and saw themselves as radical and in favor of solidarity and collectivity and had good inclinations as to what to produce but didn't adopt balanced job complexes, then, even against their sincere desires, before long old ways resurfaced.
Speaker 1:The lesson was that we couldn't afford to ignore institutional features. I interject. This kind of impetus began much earlier, including in my own experience. It was never simple to enact. People enter workplaces with prior training, expectations and habits. So in a very real sense, even starting something new from scratch was not in fact starting from scratch. Instead, some folks carried coordinator-type habits and expectations, others carried worker-type habits and expectations, even if they also had desires to attain better Worse. All around such early efforts. In every direction there was nothing similar. Everything said that is ridiculous. You are idealistic fools. Come over here to get a bigger salary, to get more influence. Leslie continues. One powerful positive example was when folks got together and decided to generate a national network of local news, opinion talk and discussion podcast shows. It was done from the start in a way embodying the value of RPS and, as a result, the participants were highly engaged and positive. The product was rich and diverse and the growth rate was incredible.
Speaker 1:Did you ever personally feel strange devoting so much of your on-air time to promoting RPS views? Did you ever feel like an agent of RPS in media, leslie, rather than a media person doing her job? It's a very fair question, miguel, and maybe I am not the person to judge that about myself. But no, though I considered the possibility, ultimately I did not often feel that way. However, I also thought that how I felt probably owed a lot to the rate of growth of RPS. My self-definition and mandate was to provide news and analysis bearing on achieving social change.
Speaker 1:I was a member of RPS from its origin and because RPS grew so fast, my media tasks very naturally included covering it, addressing its views and hearing from its participants. Even if I wasn't a member simply on news grounds, rps would have been a main focus. Addressing it, interviewing its members and reporting its campaigns and views followed naturally because RPS was developing so fast and was so relevant and important. So my personal desires matched up with my media responsibilities. Abiding the latter meant I was fulfilling the former, but suppose RPS's growth had been much slower Then. My desires to enlarge and aid RPS would have pushed me to give it more coverage than RPS's early influence would have alone warranted. Would I in that case have emphasized RPS as much as I have? And if I did, would I have felt like an agent of RPS more than a capable media person? I would have done it, I believe. How would I have felt while doing it? I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:Is a right-wing or a left-wing columnist, for reasons of their political allegiance, not a media person but only an ideologue? Or is the person both? Or is she even just a media person? My feeling is, everyone who does media, indeed everyone who communicates, has views, and those views inevitably and I would say quite reasonably and rightly impact what she chooses to communicate about and even what she says. We should all strive for honesty and accuracy in what we offer, of course, but what we actually think is also what we think is honest and accurate, unless we really are an unthinking shill for some stance, for our desires to cause us to be dishonest or inaccurate is wrong whoever does it. But way short of that kind of violation of communicative ethics, what we highlight, our tone and certainly the lessons we draw and aims that we propose, all inevitably and rightly reflect not only seeking to be honest and accurate but also to advance what we personally find important and even what we personally favor. Our values and aims inevitably inform what we do as worthy media people. We should admit and explain that, not make believe it isn't so. So I think my answer would have been had RPS grown more slowly and been less influential, I would nonetheless have pushed it hard, but I would always have made clear that I was doing so not based on an assessment that is news it was already that influential but because I felt its intelligence and values and what I hoped it would become already made it that worthy. So I guess I would have been what I have been, which is both an honest media person and a forceful advocate of RPS. But in the case of RPS growing much more slowly, the latter factor would have been more central to my choice.
Speaker 1:Miguel next opens a new topic of focus Barbara, what about hospitals? What seeds did you plant there? There were two main sites of direct medical struggle clinics and hospitals. The clinics we worked with were sometimes already established and sometimes newly created, just as with media, in the latter case it was possible to create the new institutions in the mold of RPS values and norms. Right from the start, the main issue was finding employees who desired that type workplace. The benefits for people who got on board were in the quality of relations that employees and patients enjoyed and in the showcase effect wherein each newly designed clinic prodded and provided insights for other clinics to get going. Clinic prodded and provided insights for other clinics to get going. But the debits were for some employees lower pay and for others more pressure, often because we were doing something society as a whole considered borderline insane and certainly didn't support. With already established clinics, a subset of employees would want to transition, but others typically the doctors and administrators who enjoyed higher pay, better conditions and greater say would not want to.
Speaker 1:The dominant dynamic was that once there were many successful newly designed clinics, resistance to change in old clinics grew more difficult to justify. You couldn't claim anymore that the proposed changes would harm patients. So you couldn't claim anymore that the proposed changes would harm patients. So you couldn't claim that your motive for rejecting proposed changes was to protect patients. Since the new clinics worked better for patients, opponents of change had to argue that the huge disparities in income and influence they wanted to preserve were morally warranted, which, as you can imagine, grew steadily more difficult.
Speaker 1:Changing large hospitals was more complex. Hospital struggle had people on both sides. Some wanted change, some defended past practices. Nurses typically wanted more say and more training to deliver more medical care and typically welcomed doing a fair share of disempowering work. Actually, in most cases they already were doing more than their fair share. Nurses were eager to be the kind of collectively self-managing worker. A new RPS-style hospital required, but to be sure it wasn't all nurses. Lifestyle hospital required, but to be sure it wasn't all nurses. Some felt instead that they didn't want more responsibilities or were afraid they would fail at them. I interject this kind of caution and doubt was still more prevalent in factories, where much of the working class workforce would initially think that calls for self-management, balanced jobs etc were just trying to extract more work on the one hand and to palm off onerous responsibilities on the other hand.
Speaker 1:It was a common phenomenon to encounter sentiments like that in advanced organizing situations, transitional situations, revolutionary situations among some and oftentimes most of the workforce Barbara continues, doctors typically argued against such changes and owners and boards of directors did so as well. Most maintenance and other staff and time sided with nurses, but often hesitated for fear of repercussions and, it must be admitted, due to accepted doctors' claims of superiority. It took major struggle to win modest steps on a new path. To win open budgets, new pay rates, review boards composed of employees and the right of employee assemblies to make many decisions, much less to win steadily enhanced on-the-job training programs and to reapportion tasks into new job definitions. All that involved strife and struggle. We held consciousness-raising activities, we invited advisors from transformed clinics. We organized patients and communities too. We held strikes and sit-ins. There was decades back way before RPS, a slogan about quote, revolution within the revolution. I don't even know what it meant back then, but now to me it was applicable. The RPS process had many aspects, but one was a kind of mini-revolution inside each RPS-affiliated institution.
Speaker 1:Hospitals were but one example. Emiliano, what were the biggest health industry problems to overcome, asked Miguel. In the private hospitals, miguel, the first intransigent and militant opponent of change, was owners trying to protect profits. When employees fought for costly changes at the expense of profits, owners battled. When employees fought for open books, owners battled. When we fought for higher wages. Owners battled. So that part of the struggle was about almost all employees against all owners. Part of the struggle was about almost all employees against all owners.
Speaker 1:The second intransigent and militant opponent of change was a subset of the coordinator class employees in the hospitals. This was the hospital administration, accountants, lawyers and many doctors where, for the most part, the more established and highly paid doctors were, the worse they initially were. The owners had only property as the basis for their advantage. After a point it was almost impossible for them to convincingly claim that their property warranted their profits and power, much less at the expense of patients. It was clearly self-serving immorality.
Speaker 1:The second group had an actual, substantive argument. They could claim they were essential to the hospital because they had indispensable talents and knowledge. They could argue that for them to do fewer empowering tasks or to receive less pay would diminish the quality of care for patients. It was even true in some cases, up to a point in the short run. If the surgeons in some hospital were doing 100 surgeries a week but cut back to 50, what the hell would happen to the patients? That concern was correct as far as it went. You couldn't unilaterally drop doctors' contributions so precipitously, so quickly in the name of attaining classlessness, without it having severe negative effects.
Speaker 1:We had two counter-arguments First, over time we could make the change by having more people trained to do the needed work. And second, the amount of newly trained doctors needed could be reduced if hospitals were not delivering inessential surgeries simply to generate extra income and profit, a very common practice. Due to the above considerations, a campaign aimed at the owners could demand all it wanted right off and it was being responsible. But if a project aimed at the coordinator class working class division demanded all it wanted right off, while it would have been justified as a counter to injustices imposed on the workers, immediate gains would have been offset by immediate damage to patients. Therefore, the second project had to win a trajectory of changes, including winning training programs, winning changes in medical schools and hospitals, and winning changes in diverse policies and hospitals, and winning changes in diverse policies. So that was how we pursued our aims. Winning would be hard, we knew, but over a period of about 20 years we have won gains to the point where seeing complete victory no longer requires great imagination. Instead, we can easily see complete victory as a product of our current trends. What requires great imagination and even great self-delusion is to think we are going to welcome back the old patterns. Remember the slogan not going back? Well, it was that on steroids. What were some turning point victories, mariano? Along the way it varied from issue to issue and hospital to hospital.
Speaker 1:Where I had most involvement, I think the big turning point was when tasks began being reapportioned. At first it was quite modest. What doctor tasks could nurses immediately take on? What tasks could we reduce or jettison due to their not aiding health? What might doctors do with their newly freed time that would involve them more in the rote and less fulfilling parts of hospital work. It wasn't that the initial changes had great impact. They were materially quite modest, but nonetheless I think the turning point was that we established the need to evaluate and make decisions about the division of tasks in hospital work. After establishing that need, I felt it was all downhill to get to a really healthy hospital.
Speaker 1:I remember the first meeting I was at where the agenda was to argue for or against evaluating the division of labor to try to make hospital jobs better for health and for employees. There were raucous fights about every suggestion that came from the nurses and employees. Some of what the doctors had to say, was incredibly classist and degrading of others. And yet I sat there elated. I knew the key step had been taken. Once it was legitimate to look at job roles and reapportion tasks to create a better hospital, it really was foregone we would win all the way to balanced job complexes and self-management.
Speaker 1:There just wasn't any way to sensibly argue against such a change. At most one could delay it, which was in any case often warranted, pending training. You really thought you couldn't lose, asked Miguel. Okay, miguel, back then perhaps I needed to feel that to carry on, and I know that even now we could still lose. The trouble was, as long as our changes were modest, daily conditions mostly continued reinforcing the coordinator-worker division and all the mindsets associated with it. If there was no counter pressure to offset that continuing impact, things could stall and then devolve. My optimism wasn't just because we had temporarily won recognition of the legitimacy of carefully and patiently altering job definitions. It was because we had won that and we workers knew the score. Our victory was what we called a non-reformist reform victory. Its full meaning and value resided precisely in its future, and we workers were hell-bent on ensuring that we followed an unswerving trajectory toward a fully reconceived workplace with no class division.
Speaker 1:Barbara asked Miguel what about social policies, insurance and pharmaceutical policies? This was different because the public where they lived, miguel, as consumer recipients of health care, played a much greater role. The first step was winning single-payer health care for all. Then came a similar victory around all dimensions of insurance. But the really profound confrontation because it was with some of the most powerful corporations in society and provoked much broader debate and conflict was to gain control of pharmaceutical production and distribution, which had after all become among the most blatantly and egregiously harmful industries in society.
Speaker 1:You might think if you get free medical care and single-payer coverage, what difference do the prices of the medicines as set by the pharmaceutical companies make? Well, the answer was just because the individual patient was no longer paying directly for the medicines. The government still was paying for it, with funds that should have been spent on valuable projects rather than funneled to pharmaceutical owners who charged, inflated prices, prices or even caused addiction and ensuing chaos and death, as with the earlier oxycodone and fentanyl experiences. But what could we do? Tell people to boycott medicine? Not a very appealing stance. Have workers in medicine manufacturing workplaces cut off the flow of medicines that would destroy the sick to save them. The owners would legitimately claim we couldn't survive without what they provided. People would suffer immeasurably without medicine.
Speaker 1:If we were going to win the battle, we needed an approach that would steadily build support, win gains and eventually fully win without rendering pain and suffering along the way. What could that be? Suffering along the way? What could that be? We started Medicine for Health, not Profit. We demanded that the government impose price controls on pharmaceutical companies and that it take over any company that violated those controls. Corporate fear of this, well before the left had gotten anywhere near calling for it, had been at the heart of elite rejection of single-payer health care all along.
Speaker 1:Still, our problem was how do we mount sufficient pressure on the government for to impose such requirements on pharmaceutical companies, especially without boycotting the companies or calling for work stoppages at them? The answer was wide public campaigns that pinpointed company heads and owners and other decision makers, revealing their hypocrisy and calling on them to alter their policies. We did this to raise consciousness and to win gains too. Plus, we enacted campaigns to force the government not just to adopt health care for all but, as the single buyer of medicines, to use its bargaining power to continually force lower prices at threat of nationalization if the companies did not comply. But what pressure could get the government to act in such a way? Partly risk at the polling booths, partly realizing that to ignore the ongoing and growing struggle against the pharmaceutical companies would not only cause the movement to grow even stronger, it would also cause it to enlarge its focus beyond health care. Of course, on our side, our task was to have our movement do just that.
Speaker 1:In any event, once the policies were won, which we successfully did, miguel introduces yet another topic. I interject I get the feeling that Miguel wasn't perhaps turning from one interviewee to another in one sitting, but maybe did them separately and then collected the material into a chapter, in this case a chapter with material for many interviews. In any case, miguel asked Robin what emerged in the legal system from the plant, the seeds, mentality and agenda. It was very similar to other realms, but with its own slant. Of course, the main focus had to be revising our approach to prosecution but, as with other situations, this could occur by changing the court system or by creating alternatives parallel to the current courts court system, or by creating alternatives parallel to the current courts, for the former part of it was changing laws and punishments. Another part was renovating the approach to prosecution and adjudication.
Speaker 1:In this area of RPS activity, however, things are still pretty germinal. After winning changes and penalties, particularly for victimless and non-violent crimes, and thereby hugely altering the life of the court and dramatically reducing the incredible price to individuals and to society of incarcerations, things were significantly improved. But then came need for a deeper renovation of the whole process to start to bring it into line with civilized values, including stronger guarantees for the accused, made real by collectivizing criminal law procedure and having the state pay the now far more sensible bills on all sides. The main change in mentality was to shift from a tone of revenge against violators and narrow material and organizational self-advancement on the part of practitioners to rehabilitation and sentencing and incarceration and equitable remuneration for practitioners so they could reclaim sensible motivations. Much was underway before RPS surfaced, but the breadth of RPS membership and its cross-discipline focus added greatly by enlarging the battle lines from families trying to help the accused and inmates to mass movements of prisoners and families, and then to student movements among prospective practitioners in criminal justice programs and law schools, plus solidarity from other movements, all fighting for global changes in the system.
Speaker 1:What about the prisons and jails, asked Miguel? The problems were well known, miguel. More people in prison than in colleges was an incredible blot on society. Half to two-thirds of those in US prisons would not be in prisons in Europe, even if they were guilty of what they were arrested for. Horrible poverty and subordination, alongside cultural exhortations to become rich, led to perpetual depression followed by desperate acts. Stupendous hypocrisy and ripoff on all sides regularized the mindset of me first and screw you. Markets rewarded and regimented that sentiment and even punished its opposite. Incredible abuse and overcrowding inside prisons made them schools for future crime. Being a more effective criminal was something you could learn in prison, and future crime was the only available avenue toward better than bare survival. After release that many inmates had.
Speaker 1:The horrors of it all, like you would find with serious examination in almost all sides of modern life, went on and on. Inmates were virtual slaves. They worked for the state for nearly nothing. They had every moment of their days supervised by authorities free to punish them however they wished and whenever they wanted. Courts were assembly lines that produced prisoners who filled cells to keep the whole complex churning.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest turning point was when prisoner activism inspired prison guards, who were typically notoriously hardened and made callous by their own less than ideal conditions to nonetheless mount solidarity strikes supporting prisoner actions against overcrowding and slave labor. Of course, many guards were made so brutal and dismissive by their experiences. They defended the grossly confrontational prison system, but others somehow retained or rediscovered their humanity, and that, plus knowing firsthand the horror that was incarceration, caused them to begin to dissent. They began to reject their own circumstances and also the circumstances of prisoners. This was not unlike when police more broadly began to have misgivings about repressing rallies, marches, strikes and demonstrations, not least due to realizing that the protesters' demands more often than not were not only sensible and desirable but also for gains. That police also needed Sympathy from those the state paid to keep order, for those rising up against that order was a sure sign fundamental change was coming.
Speaker 1:Would there be crime in the society you seek? Would there be police and courts? It's a good question, miguel, because back before RPS, many on the left tended to answer that there would be no crime, no police, no courts. When you listened to them it was as if for them this had to be true, because they thought that otherwise their whole orientation was at risk. It was some kind of blessed, almost religious belief. Others of us were always confused by that. Why did astute people feel that to admit there would still be crime, there would still be need for police work, there would still be need to adjudicate disputes, albeit all reduced by huge amounts, would be a slippery slope toward admitting that there is no alternative to class, race and gender division and injustice?
Speaker 1:It is true that you have to believe people are capable of goodwill, solidarity and self-management to believe in the RPS vision for society, but it isn't necessary to believe that humans, in complex circumstances, would never generate antisocial actions or sentiments. Not only is it not necessary to believe that, it's absurd. We know from all history that people can do vile things. People have, after all, done a hell of a lot of vile things. Now, of course, when you switch from institutions that make behaving in vile ways the best and sometimes even the only route to well-being or even survival, to institutions that make gains from vile behavior nearly impossible to accrue, you get much, much less vile behavior. You might even say that all you get that is vile in the new situation is overt pathology or drunken violence or jealous violence and so on. But even if that proves true, that is still not nothing.
Speaker 1:We don't fully know, even with all the considerable experiments that we already have, what the dawn and maturation of a just and peaceful society will mean for many aspects of human relations. But I don't see any reason to think that literally all crime will disappear, that there will never be tense standoffs, criminal violence or boiling anger at unfair behavior. I see no reason to think we won't need people trained to handle difficult conflictual situations, to discover the perpetrators of crimes and to constructively and fairly adjudicate complicated disputes. I also believe there will be massively less crime for many reasons. People won't do it out of desperation to gain livable conditions, nor will people be able to criminally amass great wealth, since having such wealth would evidence having stolen it. Since in a good society there would be no legal path to amassing great wealth, no dangerous situations and, just as with doing a kidney transplant, there is no reason to say that everyone should be ready to deal with crime and dangerous situations.
Speaker 1:The argument before RPS said police have means to exploit their situation at the expense of others, so we need to not have police. Well, pilots could exploit their situation, so could doctors, so could a whole host of different folks. The issue isn't some abstract possibility of wrongdoing, but whether a pursuit doctoring, policing, piloting or whatever is organized in such a way as to propel its practitioners into paranoid, hyper-aggressive, self-inflating, anti-social viewpoints and give them as well incentive to exploit those circumstances. Getting rid of ill conceptions, eliminating exploitable circumstances, eliminating inessential functions, are essential steps. Eliminating policing per se, properly redefined, is not a sensible step.
Speaker 1:Now Miguel takes up education, bert. Universities and schoolings more generally were also subject to renovation, weren't they? Yes, miguel. As RPS was being born, universities and schools had all the problems they had had for decades past. They were repositories of dull drill, extinguished feeling, narrowed vision, destroyed character. But there was one new problem as well the attention span and inclination of students had seriously deteriorated. I and many friends who were teaching back then found that we couldn't usefully give lectures any longer. The problem was that the students would sit in the lecture halls these are large classes I'm talking about and would have in their laps phones, tablets or even laptops, and they would give far more attention to those than to the lecture.
Speaker 1:Lectures required sustained attention. The electronic doodads in their laps fostered, flitting from thing to thing. These students were sitting there, texting, emailing, watching short videos, listening to music, browsing, click, click, click. They jumped from one brief focus to another. It was so habitual they became driven to avoid the operational dissonance of trying to maintain a serious, sustained focus, and from colleges it seeped downward to become the norm in high schools too.
Speaker 1:As faculty, we had to find ways to nuggetize our messages so as to accommodate the short focus of our students, but that path only cemented the dynamic. It must have been incredibly frustrating, bert. It was very much so, miguel. You know, people are born ignorant, no doubt about that. But we are made stupid by faulty education. To see students drift away was like being pummeled daily by failure incarnate. It was very hard to not grow angry and even hostile toward the students. It was as if they literally killed curiosity. It was as if they would rather die than think as free beings.
Speaker 1:But in truth, the trend was not confined to young people. But here was what I wanted and sometimes did say to those young people you text, email, watch videos, listen to music and browse. You click, click, click. You shift your focus so habitually. You avoid serious, sustained attention. You aren't multitaskers, you are flitters. Why are you even here? Why am I even here If I nuggetize content to try to reach you. It only adds to the electronic doodad dynamic of your flitting from thing to thing. We are, of course, all born ignorant, but you are making yourself stupid by your faulty choices. You can do better.
Speaker 1:I saw it in my own family over and over, at a Hollywood gathering, for example, whereas when I was young in my home there would be joking around, of course, and TV too, sure, but there would also be serious talk about matters of intellectual interest or serious issues of the day. In particular, the young would be curious. They would want to hear reasons for what was going on around them. They would ask questions, listen to and even further question the answers they got. And ditto for adults.
Speaker 1:But in the immediate pre-RPS period it was quite different. Kids would sit on a couch with a tablet, laptop and phone and with the TV on they would flit from one thing to the other. They couldn't even focus on something they still were interested in, much less have sustained interest in something substantial. They were almost proud of social ignorance. Party and play Shop till we drop. Flit from Facebook to Twitter, to TV, to website and back. Do it again. Screw evidence, hold views based on tweets, no little. Investigate nothing. If you have to consider an issue, okay, rely on the first thing you find online or, worse, rely on an influencer. After all, they dress nice. You know what kids learned. They learned how to bully or to watch bullying and do nothing about it.
Speaker 1:And while parents weren't quite as screen-bound, they too were more into gossip and mass culture than to anything lasting. It really was a sad state of affairs. Internet influencers were role models, and it virally spread to adults as well Not everyone, of course, but it was too widespread, albeit to differing degrees, to ignore. Ideas became annoyances that oppressed short attention spans. Imagine that News became a reason to laugh or scream, but not to think. Trump exacerbated it all. Most often, we just passively accepted. At most we mechanically reacted. We would send a tweet but not act. We became bit part actors and usually not even that More, like disinterested spectators. Short attention spans precluded serious discussion. Selfies flourished, so did depression, and chief narcissist Trump epitomized the horrible trends. Looking back, it is a wonder RPS emerged.
Speaker 1:I think the large-scale escape from all that began with the massive Black Lives Matter activism of 2020 that courageously acted, no less during a pandemic. I am sorry for ranting, but honestly I think ranting is appropriate. I felt it too, said Miguel. I well remember, and I likely succumbed to it to some degree also. But what about schooling? Okay, miguel, returning to schooling.
Speaker 1:All this greatly aggravated what was the situation, which was that schools socialize and sometimes transfer lessons and skills, but mainly they deliver students suitably packaged for restricted future lives. They imbue racism and sexism and roughly 80% come out of school educated to accept tedium and follow instructions, because those are the two main prerequisites to being a desirable hire for an owner who is trying to fill working class jobs. The other 20% receive particular knowledge suited to accounting, medicine, engineering or whatever, but also develop a disposition suited to maintaining dominance over workers below, while seeking to please owners above. Schools that delivered folks ready for those future roles didn't over or under-prepare graduates for their tasks. Graduates weren't the best they could be, but pegs molded to fit slots, fixated on the cash nexus, whether viewing it from below or from above.
Speaker 1:So educational transformation was, in many respects, like it was for other domains. It ultimately had to be comprehensive. Often this meant creating new schools from scratch. Many RPS folks, and others too, set up neighborhood schools, did group homeschooling or initiated summer schools and other such innovations for children and also workmates and townsfolk. Some even created new institutions for higher learning. But transforming education was also about battling inside existing schools. Public school teachers, community college teachers and, in the initial stages, especially grad students at many colleges and universities were a bit like the nurses in hospitals. Many were ready and eager to be productive workers of a new, self-managing kind, and they were ready to fight for it with strikes and other actions. But educational transformation was also somewhat more so than were many other transformations, was also somewhat more so than were many other transformations intrinsically about what society overall would be like. Education will, in any society, prepare people to participate. A good education that generates confident and capable adults requires a society that wants and needs confident and capable adults.
Speaker 1:Massive teacher strikes preceded RPS and paved the way for teacher activism extending into community life. Minds changed, so educational transformation had two powerful advocates. On the one hand, students, teachers and families battled directly for their own better results in their current or new institutions. On the other hand, people all over society battled for the future of society. From early on in the history of RPS. Both factors were at play, by way of movements seeking to develop new educational institutions or to steadily alter existing ones and also demand broad educational policy changes. We sought to fulfill students and teachers by producing new citizens who would demand new social relations. The latter effect was the long-term revolutionary aspect of our non-reformist approach to education. Where has it led, ask Miguel. Changes are still happening, miguel, of course, but some big gains have been vastly increased involvement of communities and parents in schooling and learning.
Speaker 1:You probably remember not just the demand to open schools but the occupational and community programs that were then enacted at night. But the occupational and community programs that were then enacted at night. Fait accompli all over the country Early on, these campaigns demanded opening thousands of schools in the afternoons and evenings for all kinds of activities and learning, not only by students but by adults too. But then we realized what the hell? Why are we asking anyone? The schools are there. We should just go in and use them, and we did. Police would kick us out, but within days we would just go back Soon. We invited police to take and sometimes even to teach courses, which in many places did wonders for dimming their ardor, for repressing our takeovers, and in some cases even gained their active support.
Speaker 1:Reduction of class size and a steady increase in numbers of teachers was another huge game. Education should uncover and nurture people's curiosity and talents in whatever directions people desire, plus the infusion of a critical mindset into classroom pursuits. Higher education, like grade school education, had to become relevant to people's fulfillment rather than to people passively preparing to fit into unfulfilling slots waiting in society. Partly this was a matter of the approach of faculty Should we hammer in facts to no benefit, as in the past, or should we foster comprehension and critical thinking to huge benefit for the future? You might think this would have been trivial to attain. Who would want to regiment rather than facilitate? But it wasn't trivial because many existing teachers had become habituated to old ways, adept at them and were scared of failing at new ways. But it had to happen and it did. Another big change was a matter of what students pursued, what they had available to read, who they had available to talk with, what they could attain, the whole notion of learning as a mutual project and of caring for the place of learning as a collective pursuit, and especially the idea that society should bend its roles to the outcome of enlightened learning, rather than schools curtailing learning to accommodate the inflexible roles of a restrictive society. To accommodate the inflexible roles of a restrictive society totally changed the relations among all the actors.
Speaker 1:Just as with other institutions, what do you think was the turning point after which you felt that you were no longer battling against the odds. The odds were now on your side. I think, miguel, there were quite a few. For example, the first occupation of a public school it was in Denver, if I remember right with the ensuing mass meeting to determine what uses the school could be put to at night was won. You saw that happen and you knew right away that it would spread and the ramifications would be profound and irreversible. And what an immense change in terms of people's involvement and the attitudes people had to schools and to education that first one and then another occupation of schools led to.
Speaker 1:Similarly, I think the campaign by RPS to provide alternative online curricula that challenged the prevalent social science and history texts had a huge effect. Lots of kids came into class highly knowledgeable about the flaws in the old lessons. This began in San Francisco and Boston, but then spread very rapidly. It put immense pressure on faculty to do better and most faculty began to see the potential of real learning and to want to provide it. For me, another key happening was when students on the campus where I was teaching at the time, nyu, called a strike, shut down the place and then reopened it for a full week of nothing but faculty-student discussion of faculty-student relations and the purpose of education and implications for how it should be conducted. It was incredible. The students didn't just call for discussion. They came to the sessions profoundly well prepared. They chaired, they had ideas. Instead of one week, it went for two weeks. The students won respect at an entirely new level and they convinced faculty of their aims. The feeling of community that emerged, which was helped along by all kinds of social events that the students conducted each night, and sometimes during the day too, was itself incredibly powerful.
Speaker 1:But the commitment to what was called student-faculty power in place of administrative power was fundamental. I remember hearing one student's speech at the opening of the strike, announcing the week-long plan. She said we don't want idle discussion During our strike. We will share sessions, we will present our own ideas. We will convince faculty of new aims and create a new sense of community. Attend our social events, attend our classes. We demand preparation for balanced job complexes. We reject classist separatism. We want solidarity and self-management, not arrogance and profit-making. We require renovation of the faculty, the curriculum and of the town gown interface. This strike will end when our campus is reborn. Commit to student-faculty power, reject administrative power. Democracy is coming to New York University. Well, I have to admit I had tears of joys in my eyes hearing that Our students were now our teachers.
Speaker 1:Campus innovations mirrored an augmented public, schools being open to communities. Universities met the demands of local residents for programs as well as for research and resources for local activism. Rps said. Instead of education defending system maintenance, education should propel system change. Instead of squashing most students into passive conformity while making the rest elitist, education should address the real needs and potentials of all students. That was, and it is, our attitude to schooling. Perhaps most surprising and also profoundly important were the campaigns by students in elite professional schools demanding preparation for balanced job complexes and for solidarity in place of elite control and classist separatism. Those were stunning indicators of human solidarity and they were critical to the emerging participatory mentalities and policies of all of society.
Speaker 1:Also critical, but more familiar and rooted in activism that preceded RPS, was the upheaval of student and academic life regarding the role of women and racial relations, but that too changed somewhat. Earlier, the campus focus was largely on the tone of daily life, on affronts, on what had been called, I think, microaggressions, as RPS agendas began to have an influence. This changed to a focus on the underlying social relations, the composition of faculty, the course curriculum and particularly, and most innovatively, on what had earlier been called the town-gown interface. This mirrored public schools opening to the community. Now it was universities providing programs for local residents and research and resources for local activism. All in all, instead of education being a bulwark of system maintenance, education started to become a propellant of system change.
Speaker 1:Elites had always understood this danger and had always fought as best they could to prevent it. But our day came, and once it was sufficiently in motion, it became self-fueling and unstoppable. Self-fueling and unstoppable All the way back in the 1960s and 1970s. Shortly after the upheavals of those times, elites who evaluated the situation decided that a big part of the turmoil's cause was that public schools had, due to the space race and emphasis on enlightened education that it had spurred, become a very serious social problem. Public schools were graduating way too many students who expected to utilize their intelligence and initiative in society. When these students encountered the regimentation and subordination characteristic of typical daily life pre-RPS, they just didn't fit. They were round pegs being shoved into square holes and many said no, not with my life, you don't. And so emerged the cultural and political rebellions of those times. Elites looked at that and said we can't ever have that again, too risky for us. We have to reapportion school funds, change curriculum and impose rules on teachers, all to ensure that the next generation and the one after that and so on accept and even welcome their limited lot in life rather than questioning and rejecting it. And elites acted on that self-serving agenda and for decades it actually worked roughly as they wanted. It led to poorly educated graduates who felt lucky to get work at all, and to the hypocritical and ignorant mess that was the US educational system by about 2010, say, much less under Trump. Rps pursued an opposite approach. Instead of squashing most students into passive conformity and making the rest elitist, rps's aim was to conduct education based on the real needs and potentials of all students, nurture desires and insights wherever they lead.
Speaker 1:Miguel next addresses Anton about workplace program. Anton, where do we stand regarding new workplaces? I don't know any full accounting. Just before RPS began, I read there were perhaps 300 large and effective worker co-ops in the US, but maybe there were more, I don't know. Other than for a very few, these weren't full-fledged RPS-style workplaces. More typically, they were dominated by coordinator-class officials, albeit having considerably more worker participation and more equitable remuneration schemes than mainstream corporations. They had no clear redefinition of job roles and had barely any awareness of issues regarding interfacing with markets. The latter two absences distorted the aspirations of workers across virtually all these fledgling efforts as RPS emerged. Unsurprisingly, co-ops were nonetheless the quickest workplace converts, not having owners, something that was true of all non-profits, which were similar in various respects to the co-ops and sometimes overlapped completely. The owner aspect of opposition to an rps trajectory was absent. Likewise, co-op workers already had a rhetoric of workplace participation and democracy, if not the full reality of it, which meant they were at least partway to an RPS stance. The step to move further was to embrace full self-management, including transforming the division of labor and becoming aware of the pressures of markets and of ways to ward off those pressures and eventually transcend them. So RPS workplace progress had three paths Take worker co-ops, another step, organize inside corporations for a trajectory of RPS-oriented changes and set up new, fully RPS-identified and structured workplaces. One of the largest factors affecting the speed of such developments was each effort's willingness to see itself as deserving society-wide emulation and its participants agitating not only for their own individual project but for others to become involved where they were as well.
Speaker 1:I remember an early trip to a workplace in Columbus, ohio. I arrived and got a tour from a few employees. The firm had been in grave trouble and the owners had decided to sell off the assets. The workers felt they could salvage the firm for themselves. The firm could have become a worker co-op of the limited sort, but partly because of the advanced awareness of some of the workers and partly because many of the coordinator class staff decided they wanted to leave due to thinking that without the owners it would all collapse, the new firm moved pretty quickly in more radical directions. This was pretty common in the period of the late 2020s and 2030s. Sometimes, workers would make incomes equitable and institute workplace democracy and councils, but ignore job definitions and operate with little change regarding market competition. Other times, the transformation of a firm would be more complete, including implementing balanced job complexes and full worker self-management. In the former case, the struggle in the workplace would persist, largely as a context between coordinators and workers, who were still structurally at odds. In the latter case, the struggle was instead workers against old habits and the pressures of markets and banks.
Speaker 1:But what I want to note and what I encountered in my Columbus trip is different. Talking to those workers about their efforts to redefine work and social relations was exciting and joyful, to be sure to be sure. But there came a moment when I asked how their relatives and friends outside who still worked at typical capitalist corporate workplaces regarded their efforts. Were they having success organizing such folks to consider following their new path? And now came a shock.
Speaker 1:The workers who were so proud of their achievements and so happy about the redefinition of their workplaces virtually unanimously said they didn't talk about their project with those they knew outside. They said folks at other firms would do something similar to what they were doing, only if the firm they were interviewing met hard times and the owner decided to cash out like theirs had, leaving no choice for them but to take over or become unemployed. I asked if they would take a job in a corporation if I offered it, giving up their project, no longer having any say, no longer having new type jobs, but in return suppose I would give them much higher pay. They all said don't be ridiculous. Life depends on income, sure, but fulfillment, pleasure and justice are not measured by wages alone. I said okay, if you feel that way, why can't you explain the benefits of transforming their workplaces to your relatives and your friends, so that they would begin to pursue such aims even in profitable firms, rather than only when their owners abdicate? They shrugged, literally and they said that, just like we didn't, other workers also just won't get it until they become desperate.
Speaker 1:I'm still not sure what was at work in this early mindset, but it was obviously deadly for change. Perhaps it was a variant on hopelessness, but it was coming from people who, oddly, had great hope, at least for themselves. Maybe it was a way to avoid the discomfort of clashing with relatives and friends, even if it might be on the road to greater well-being and unity for all friends. Even if it might be on the road to greater well-being and unity for all. Or maybe they literally believed what they were telling me, that as long as there were profit-seeking capitalist firms to employ folks, folks would not seek something different and better. I didn't, and I still don't really know their reasons, but I knew that if it persisted, it would mean that each transformed workplace would remain an isolated phenomena without wider impact, because those involved would not take their insights to others.
Speaker 1:Rps realized this worker reticence had to be overcome. A co-op transforming a corporation undergoing internal struggles and a new firm getting up and running would each have to report their efforts and experiences. They would each have to see their task as not simply reconstructing their own firm, but also inspiring others to do likewise. Isolated firms of greater equity and justice than in their past were positive things, of course, but what really mattered was having each such beachhead become a prod for attaining more. I interject here again is this eyes-on-the-future evaluative mindset? It seems so central to RPS's success, such a pivotal thing to achieve? To what extent do we, in our time, have it or not? Anton continues.
Speaker 1:Such implications were that RPS emphasized creating workers' councils and then federations of all workplaces that had such councils, where the federation would take responsibility for mutual aid, mutual defense and even mutual insurance. When this happened, the whole picture altered. So before RPS, there were about 30 million small businesses in the United States. About 20,000 had more than 500 employees, and I think this didn't count schools, churches, universities, most hospitals, public service industries, etc. Today, I would guess, there are perhaps 5 million well-established RPS small businesses and another 10 million that are struggling with transforming and that could join the RPS count without much more change. Rps ideas battle for influence in nearly all the rest too, and there are about 3,500 person or more RPS-oriented workplaces and another 5,000 with very substantial struggles going on, and all 20,000 include RPS-style campaigns and in most cases, already have at least some council organization. And though the situation is more advanced in educational, health and other public service domains, it exists in auto plants and the like as well. In short, rps economics are spreading in the form of actual RPS institutions, advanced face-offs inside non-RPS institutions over becoming one and less advanced but still quite serious organizing efforts in the rest, and the momentum is now all ours.
Speaker 1:Miguel now turns to allocation. Harriet, what about arriving at connections among all these efforts and also, in particular, at new ways to allocate in the economy? Our allocation question was how should we connect RPS-ish or fully RPS workplaces to one another? How could we go from competitive market allocation to cooperatively, collectively negotiated, participatory planning? What early steps would advance that process? We realized not far into the development of RPS that the real issue was how do we make changes in the economy that generate not only more just outcomes now, but also a mindset and structures that could melt into the future we desire. We knew every great dream begins with a dreamer, but we also knew a dream you dream alone remains only a dream, a dream you dream with others that can become reality. On the one hand, various measures like price controls, constraints on competitive behavior, pollution controls and other diverse ecological requirements, minimum wage laws, open books requirements, very progressive taxes and duration of work laws could all constrain market operations and simultaneously, if proposed and discussed with the intent firmly in mind, point toward non-market possibilities. So all those were typically part of RPS efforts. But I think you are asking more about the initial emergence of participatory planning-like structures. Yes, I am, says Miguel.
Speaker 1:Consider a small-scale case, miguel. For example, in a neighborhood, consumers and typically this would be renters in large apartment complexes start to get together to use their collective power to win better circumstances, but also to share their assets to everyone's advantage and to mobilize for all manner of struggles. So in these cases there would emerge food co-ops where large groups pooled their buying capacity to extract better rates from suppliers. But then something even more interesting and progressive would happen. After all, using bargaining power to get better prices, helped folks in need, but it didn't establish a fundamentally new way of operating, just a new balance of power by overcoming, disempowering fragmentation. The more fundamental change came when workers near communities began to negotiate outcomes with one another. Of course, sometimes this was pretty easy, since the workers in the RPS workplaces were also consumers and sometimes lived in the apartments that were organizing, but not always. Sometimes, instead, the apartment councils and the worker councils often, but not only food producers were some distance apart and didn't have overlapping memberships. Still, new practices spread from neighbors with some trust in workers they knew, to people who had had no prior contact, and these new practices were not to compete in a zero-sum exchange based on power, but instead to negotiate exchanges taking into account the relative circumstances and impacts on all involved. This was a huge step.
Speaker 1:I interject there is obviously a problem for allocation that Harriet and Miguel are end-running. You can't really have a little version of participatory planning, since participatory planning intrinsically involves all of the economy and new institutions, mediating and so on. But I think they are indicating some of the kinds of programmatic steps that might lead toward it. Some of the kinds of programmatic steps that might lead toward it. My guess is when interviewed, that was the stage things were at Harriet continues.
Speaker 1:At first it happened only quite locally, but nonetheless the associated practices and mindsets had more general relevance. Rps's broad and skeletal version of cooperative negotiation of economic inputs and outputs began to develop some practical substance. People started to have personal experiences of what it could look like and mean. People began to realize the extent they were hindered by their familiar, seemingly unavoidable realities. At the same time, popular movements for oversight of economic sectors, for example what was called participatory budgeting to oversee government expenditures, had a similar dynamic. Again, those involved consciously decided their preferences based on discussion and negotiation, rather than succumbing to competitive bargaining power. Co-ops and consumer councils network together to build grassroots dimensions of participatory planning. Simultaneously, restraints on prices and salaries and new ecological practices won by movement campaigns foreshadowed national federations of worker and consumer councils implementing the tools for planning overarching outcomes like public goods investments, for example.
Speaker 1:So you ask now, where are we? We still have mostly private ownership, miguel Miguel. Markets are still in place and operating, but the most dynamic and exciting parts of economic life, the parts that people admire and wish to be part of, are largely RPS-oriented. There is, you might almost say, a proud and hopeful RPS economy operating in parallel to a moribund holdover capitalist economy. We are no longer odd upstarts, considered more or less weird and hopeless as compared to apparently permanent and sensible corporate actors. No, we are the future and everyone knows it. Everyone is more or less patiently and eagerly carrying through with transforming lives and relations. The change is clearly coming for all.
Speaker 1:Of course, there is still plenty of fierce opposition, but it has the character of an aging athlete trying to hold off father time. We don't want to fight to the death with the adherence of the old. We simply want to keep on diminishing their sway, reducing their holdings and updating, bringing up to date their mentalities, even while we also welcome them whenever they see clear to realizing that it is their only dignified and workable path to join our endeavors by entering jobs, positions and roles of the RPS sort. But I should say that this approach of building the new alongside the old is not without risk. While there are still owners, they conspire as their natural pursuit to block and reverse our advances. That we know their disposition guides us to restrict their options and to continually win new purchase from which to fight, leaving them no means to blunt our progress. This explains as well why RPS has given so much attention and energy to growing our own media and contesting old media and to enlisting our supporters into police forces and the military and addressing the views of opposed citizens not owners, but average folks with continual, respectful attention, constantly taking our progress with them as our measure of success, not the stridency or brilliance of our repeating our own virtues while our opponents stay hostile.
Speaker 1:I interject here as elsewhere, miguel's interviewees describe beliefs and events designed to both improve the present and reach toward a very different future. All in all, it seems to me their descriptions and lessons offer not just long-term fundamental vision and not just more immediate program, but even many aspects of how to accomplish each. Of course, it isn't some kind of blueprint, it isn't an only path, nor does it remotely pretend to be. But is the essence of it plausible for our world? I don't see why not. Could our actions in the present usefully and productively orient in light of what these interviewees describe properly and wisely adapted to present circumstances? To me it seems they could. But what seems certain is, if not, then with what goal and broad path in mind should we operate? That is the question they are trying to provide us some help addressing. That said, this is Michael Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.