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    Joel Isaacs

    Picture of Joel Isaacs

    Joel Isaacs

    Living in Berkeley in the 70s I was part of a Situationist inspired radical group who wanted to put subjectivity and community back into the revolution. Skip forward. I read Zmag for 20 years. Six years ago I was reading Chomsky's Understanding Power. One morning I woke up frightened. I thought: "All those wild ideas I have about what's really going on in the world - they're all true!" A few years later I'd written a review of Michael Albert's autobiographical book Remembering Tomorrow, and then attended ZMI. Today, I'm working happily towards forming community (here in LA and on ZCom) and making space for the subjective in our work. I've put the subjectivity back into me! What I like best is collaborating with other people. I'm also very good talking with people about their projects and what they are involved in. I particularly like helping people and groups to do what they do more efficiently and effectively. For example, I can help groups to have better, more productive meetings; I'm good at strategizing and working thru blocks; I like brainstorming towards expanding and linking to other groups. I have a good sense of humor and can support people to attain inner peace even while we remain outwardly pissed at the great inequalities in society. We've had a small study group here in Los Angeles, and now we are planning to expand. We would like to start a Los Angeles Project for a Participatory Society. Anyone in the area interested in this please contact me. We will then start to give presentations about parecon and parsoc to other interested groups. I welcome people's ideas and experiences doing this.I'm also interested in collaborative writing, mostly of articles. Topics of interest to me now are: 1) The inefficiencies of capitalism.   2) Writing for the 80% who are not the owners or the coordinator class. 3) The coordinator class: What would they give up, what would they gain in a Parecon/Parsoc world?  4) Writing one of those small "beginner" books. This one might be called Participatory Society for Beginners: How it will look when we run our own lives.Give me a hit and let's see what we can do together!  (2023: Written about a dozen years ago.)

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