Peter Hollings wrote: > ... What I can say is that there is now a ferment > of activities like this seemingly inspired by a loss of confidence in big > government solutions, economic distress, and the twin fears of peak oil and > global warming. Many of them seem to be converging in terms of themes: > anti-corporatist, anti-big government, anti-FED, favoring local > community-based forms of governance and production, etc. ...
there's been a "ferment" of decentralists against "big government, big business, and (sometimes) big labor" for a long time. The three (or two) "bigs" may be to blame for global warming and (if it's actually happening) peak oil, but it's hard to see how decentralized solutions would work. Suppose that the way to slow down global warming is to impose a steep tax on carbon use. How is this going to be imposed by a decentralized system? > One thing I wonder is how these approaches will reconcile themselves with > the need to "scale up" as necessary for industrial production, R&D, etc., > assuming we are still to enjoy the benefits of such things. Maybe a solution > to the latter would be worker-owned production. There is a large > worker-owned industrial company in Spain (whose name escapes me) that might > be a possible model. I used to be into worker-owned production and to some extent, Mondragon (whose name escaped you). But the point of worker-owned production is to improve work conditions, increasing democratic control over a gigantic percentage of our life-times. There's absolutely nothing about worker ownership that deals with the externality problem (pollution, etc.) -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
