On Tue, May 20, 1997 at 20:40:01 (PST) peter donohue writes: >Instead of debating whether a "national parliament" or >"democratically-elected planners" might reach "the socially efficient >resolution," wouldn't it be more useful to discuss building organizations of >popular power that might cultivate and learn through multiple centers of >decision making and various "logics of action?" >Especially, since decision making AFTER the revolution will be determined >largely by those organizations of popular power we build today? ... I can't comment on the literature cited (some of it sounds a bit off), but this last paragraph is pretty much what I suggested---that even though a plan might have a "locus of scope" (converting to English, "scope") that were global, delegation/fragmentation could occur to a great extent. Also, the notion of building organizations "that might cultivate and learn" is precisely what I meant when I wrote that Mill saw the practice of democracy as a "question of development". I think it would be very useful to discuss this "building organizations of popular power" (BOPPing?) today. I do think that either before doing this, or coincident with it, we need to examine (as I've stressed in my exchanges with Wojtek Sokolowski) current institutional barriers to their implementation and operation, and in a nod to Wojtek, any (orthogonal) psychological/sociological barriers to using these institutions (though, my guess is that the barriers you find will be highly dependent on the nature and form of the institution, but that's just a guess). Bill
