In which Andre Goldman, Reverend Stephen Du Bois, Bert Dillinger, and Lydia Luxembourg discuss RPS economic, ecological, and international vision.

[Author’s Note: This is the fourtheen excerpt froma work titled An Oral History of the Next American Revolution. This excerpt will also provide the substance for a forthcoming  RevolutionZ episode. The oral version will include spontaneous interjections made by the host on hearing the material aloud. The hope is the episode will help to make plausible the possibility of winning a new world and to simultaneously provoke those who hear it to  contribute to discussions about vision and especially strategy for social change.]

Economic Vision

Andre, what about RPS economic vision?

RPS says economic activity must of course produce desired goods and services, whether toothbrushes, public transport, health care, dinners, or dungarees. But RPS felt economic activity must should produce desirable self-management, which is people collectively compatibly determining their own lives. It should produce equity, which is people having a fair sure of society’s benefits and burdens. It should produce solidarity, which is people enjoying and providing mutual aid for one another. And it should produce diversity, which is people enjoying and respecting a multitude of social and cultural answers to how to celebrate, communicate, and worship.

So an economy doesn’t just produce stuff, it produces changed people and social relations?

Exactly, and that was indeed the thinking. A very succinct text might just say RPS economics proposes to carry out production, consumption, and allocation in a classless, equitable manner. It seeks to deliver to each actor self-managing say. It seeks to produce not only desired goods and services, but also desirable solidarity and diversity. But you are right that the logic is it produces goods and services and changed conditions, but also changed people and we wanted it to do all that consistent with our values. 

So that’s kind of a qualitative statement of the broad aims, all the second approach to vision wants, but am I right that the third, RPS approach would then ask what can do that, indeed, can anything do that?

Yes, that was indeed how RPS members thought about it. And to accomplish the ideals we of course knew, as did many many before us, that workplaces could not be controlled by a tiny class of owners above the whole process. There was nothing new in recognizing that that would subvert the values, but it was true and so it was part of our thinking. It meant, however, that we would of course need venues where people can determine their actions in accord with other people doing likewise. We found such venues in workplace and also community councils of the sort we have often seen in historical risings in the past. The idea was not only that owners would be gone, but that each actor would, in accord with RPS values, have a say in decisions proportionate to the impact of the decided issue on them. We called that aim, self management.

So it isn’t that everyone decides everything one person one vote, nor is it anything goes, you just do whatever you choose?

Again, exactly. To use a workplace example, sometimes few workers would be the most affected constituency and decide their own actions though in context of overarching decisions by the whole workplace council. Our team sets our workday, but we do so in light of the whole workplace schedule and the agreed work that needs to get done. Sometimes the whole workplace council would be directly involved and decide, for example, work hours for all. Sometimes decisions would be by majority vote. Other times they would be by consensus or by two thirds or whatever. The point would be for the decision procedure used to best approximate people having a say proportionate to the effect on them. And so various patterns were tried and tested in diverse workplaces created on the RPS model.

But beyond having workplace self management, RPS economics wanted to also change work itself. This was also about getting to self management and about the class issue, right?

Yes, in the usual corporate pattern, about 20% of the workforce does overwhelmingly empowering tasks while 80% does overwhelmingly disempowering tasks.

What does that mean?

Well, the former do work that conveys to them confidence, social and conceptual skills, knowledge of the workplace and its possibilities, and effective decision making habits via empowering tasks. The latter do work that diminishes confidence, reduces social and conceptual skills, reduces knowledge of the workplace and its possibilities, instills habits of obedience, and exhausts them, via disempowering tasks.

Elaborate please, that is pretty abstract…

RPS members like everyone in society had had extensive personal experience that some jobs have better conditions and more enjoyable and engaging work than others. This type differential could, however, be offset by income considerations. Earn more for enduring more onerous conditions. But we knew a second aspect of work that people regularly experienced, how empowering your work was, would be harder to deal with.

Why?

Because of what you mentioned earlier about economics. It can change people in ways with nasty consequences. So when some people who work within a corporate arrangement become ready to govern, others become ready to be governed. The 20% who do overwhelmingly empowering tasks tend to set agendas, make proposals, and dominate discussions. They are the managers, accountants, engineers, administrators, doctors, lawyers, and others with empowering situations and a larger than socially justifiable level of income. The 80% who do overwhelmingly disempowering tasks carry out instructions and become bystanders regarding decisions. They do work that reduces their confidence, social skills, and knowledge, and exhausts them. They short order cook, push stuff on and take stuff off assembly lines, deliver packages, dig trenches, collect garbage, and clean up after others.

But isn’t this just the way it is? And what causes some to do one and some to do the other?

This difference derives from people’s position in the division of labor. It can be changed. RPS calls the empowered twenty percent the coordinator class and calls the disempowered eighty percent the working class and RPS feels there can be no self management or equity if this class division persists. For that reason, RPS focused not only on the ills of private ownership as a core aspect of what decides economic type, but also on this division of labor into empowering and disempowering jobs because our concepts highlight role structures and asked their implications, and our values highlight impact on people’s ability to participate.

RPS members saw that eliminating the capitalist owners’ relative monopoly on property was of course essential to having everyone participating comparably rather than owners ruling all others. But we also saw that ending ownership would not alone significantly alter the coordinator/worker hierarchy. For a person, or for a group of people to own and rule over huge centers of productive capacity gave them monopoly control of workplaces and resources which precluded the outcome we sought and we all knew that. It wasn’t a new insight. But RPS also felt we had to no longer have a coordinator class that monopolizes empowering work. Everyone should own equally, of course—which really meant no one should own means of production—but, beyond that, everyone should in their work have comparably empowering circumstances. This type thinking emerged, I suspect, largely because its initial advocates felt that what was often called 20th century socialism had undergone ownership changes that eliminated capitalists, but had not ended class rule. So they realized we had to also break the coordinator class’s relative monopoly on empowering circumstances. Rather than segregate empowering tasks into a relatively few jobs that a relatively few people would hold, we had to spread empowering tasks through all jobs by establishing what RPS called balanced job complexes. 

[Narrator: I interject: Andre’s recounting is certainly congenial to me, but I have thought about these matters forever. Would it be sufficient for those who have ben subject to conditions and training and constant messages that this division of labor was unavoidable. If you wanted the fruits of economic production you have to acknowledge the obvious. That is, that this division of labor is necessary. No other way can deliver the goods. I hope Miguel gets a bit further into this.]

Can you explain that, Andre, by more real world examples?

Sure Miguel. Instead of Joe or Jane being schooled to conceive and to make daily decisions that impact others, to receive information and do tasks conducive to being a confident decision-maker, and to connect to others who enjoy the same benefits, and Dwayne or Desiree being schooled to endure boredom and take orders, to do repetitive tasks that lack information and limit connections and confidence, to follow decisions made by others, and to connect only to others who suffer similar exclusion, RPS says we all ought to do a mix of tasks where each person’s package of tasks is comparably empowering to everyone else’s. We called that balanced job complexes, or sometimes, for short, balanced jobs.

[Narrator: I interject: It seems this was another core feature. First self managing councils, second balanced jobs, that RPS added, beyond just values, to settle on an economic vision. I wonder if others, really everyone in RPS could describe it at least as succinctly but compellingly as Andre does.]

Andre continues: With balanced jobs, each person would do a mix of tasks they are capable of and comfortable at. The mix you would do and the mix I would do and the mix everyone else would do, would be balanced from one person to the next for the empowering effect of work on the worker doing it. This balancing or spreading of empowering tasks among all jobs rather than just a few jobs would occur not only inside each workplace, but across workplaces as well. We would all have responsibility for an array of tasks that sum to a comparably empowering overall situation. Due to that, we would all be comparably prepared by our daily work life to confidently participate in workers and consumers councils and in other social engagements as well.

So you have briefly outlined a new approach to making decisions and a new division of labor. But what about income and wealth? What is each person’s rightful claim on the social product? How much should we get? What is responsible and fair? What works? And I hope you will also discuss doubts people had with us, after we get the overall vision conveyed.

RPS said people who are too young or too old—or who are otherwise unable to work gainfully—should get a full income anyhow, which wasn’t particularly new, but also that people who can work should have an income share that depends only on the duration, intensity, and onerousness of their socially valued labor, and that part was new.

If I work longer, for example doing overtime, I should get more. If I work harder, for example at a faster pace, I should get more. And if I work under worse conditions, for example at an open furnace, I should get more. And I shouldn’t get income for work that doesn’t produce outputs that others value. I shouldn’t get paid for work I can’t do sufficiently well or that produces what people do not want. I should get income only for socially valuable work. And for that work, again, I should earn more for working longer, for working more intensely, or for working at more onerous tasks. That approach is fair. It is the same norm for all. It can’t generate overly wide income differences. It also provides sensible incentives. That is, it gives us reason to contribute to society’s product what we sensibly can—our effort in other words, is well directed—and it conveys to consumers and producers alike indicators of people’s work and consumption preferences.

But what about getting a really high income because what I do isn’t just liked, it is loved or really, really important?

It was, of course, a frequent question. RPS said I shouldn’t be remunerated as an athlete, a singer, or anything else for which my abilities don’t allow me to produce outputs others want to have. I should be remunerated only for anything I do well enough for my efforts to be socially valuable. But in addition, I shouldn’t get income for being an owner (that’s gone), or because I have the power to take it, or for having great talents, say, or due to the actual value of my desired output.

If I want to consume more out of the total social product than average I should be able to do so only by virtue of working more hours, or more intensely, or perhaps doing some more onerous tasks, as long as I work in a balanced job and as long as I arrange my activities compatibly with my workers council, but the rate of pay per hour of socially useful average intensity work under comparable conditions should be the same for everyone. If you are born with a great voice or incredible strength or reflexes, or even great mental facility, well, that is luck in the genetic lottery. You should not get the joy of that and, on top of such luck, get great income. Equity calls for income differences to reward effort and sacrifice, but not to reward genetic endowment or better equipment, and so on. Of course there is a longer story but RPS intellectually settled on this as fair, which means as consistent with its central values. But we realized as well that this type remuneration was needed to facilitate consumption matching production, to convey sensible incentives, and to unearth and convey essential indicators of people’s preferences for leisure and for different kinds of work and different products.

[Narrator: I interject, again, one wonders how they grew support for such vision. How were objections addressed?]

Okay, but what about allocation?

Allocation is about determining what and how much to produce and consume, and who gets what specific things. RPS members knew we needed to replace markets and central planning with a system that could get allocation accomplished consistently while preserving RPS’s other institutional aims and promoting RPS values. RPS felt, that is, to have as goals council self management, balanced jobs, and equitable remuneration was all well and good, but if we settled for an allocation system that would subvert all of that—such as markets or central planning—then we’d subvert our own goals. The idea here was simple and applied over and over, in realm after realm. Key institutions that have major effects on people’s circumstances had to be compatible with other such institutions. It wouldn’t do to seek political institutions incompatible with desired gender relations, nor the reverse—nor would it do to have some economic institutions incompatible with, and therefore oriented to subvert and replace other economic institutions. It wouldn’t do, for example, to have unbalanced jobs within self managing councils. The former would subvert the latter. Similarly we knew we couldn’t combine market competition or central planning’s authoritarianism with equity and self management. The former would subvert the latter.

So regarding allocation, we settled on advocating cooperative negotiation among workers and consumers councils in place of currently and historically more familiar options. Each council would announce desires and then modify their offers in light of what others offered. Various structures would help with assessing costs, benefits, and preferences. There would be no center or periphery, no top or bottom. Actors would collectively self-manage their production and consumption in light of emergent measures of personal, social, and environmental costs and benefits. Personal motives and behaviors of allocation would mesh compatibly with those of self-managed councils, balanced jobs, and remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor.

Again, can you make it more specific, less abstract?

RPS favors workers and consumers in their workplace and neighborhood councils making known their desires and then steadily updating their offers in light of others’ offers in an unfolding negotiation. Workers propose their activities to provide bicycles, food stuffs, violins, toys, services, water, concerts, or whatever else. Consumers indicate their desired consumption of bicycles, food stuffs, violins, toys, services, water, concerts, and whatever else. Then community and industry agencies summarize their proposals’ costs and benefits. Workers and consumers in their councils assess the estimated costs and benefits and learn of new jobs and products so they can self-manage production and consumption in light of their personal, social, and environmental effects and accordingly adapt their offers. Is there extra desire for what we propose to produce, or insufficient desire for it? When there is a workable mesh of proposals from producers and consumers, it becomes a plan to implement. Of course, as the year proceeds, the plan gets updated as circumstances and tastes change, but the updates too, when needed, are collectively, cooperatively, self managed as are choices about longer term issues like investments in future potentials.

So, while I am of course grossly summarizing, RPS argued that this economic vision for decision making, division of labor, income, and allocation could accomplish production, consumption, and allocation without class division and in accord with people’s needs and desires as well as with ecological sustainability and social harmony. RPS members in workplaces and communities began to agitate for reforms leading toward the preferred full results. This was by no means easy. Everyone used markets and other current practices and arrangements and had grown up with them and accommodated to them. To make a case that we had to replace old familiar features took time and serious attention. In some cases this has already taken us to partial cooperative planning, for example, where federations of changed workplaces within industries mutually negotiate their connections and where communities and surrounding providers in what some have called communal arrangements cooperatively negotiate their entwined production and consumption. If the RPS claims for the benefits of full-scale participatory planning prove true, as I and other RPS members believe they will, then the overall RPS economic vision, of course filled out with lots of contingent details in different workplaces, industries, and locales will be a worthy alternative to capitalism and also to what has been called market or centrally planned socialism, which we call coordinatorism.

[Narrator: I interject: So there is the broad strokes visionary logic. Settle on guiding values. Find what obstructs desired values. Conceive alternatives deemed essential to fulfill the desired values. Then, in practice and based on experience and experiment, seek all that and as well, when able, append to all the core scaffold of defining features contingent details sometimes regarding aspects even of those core features and of course going in many ways beyond those core features.]

Andre, come on. It can’t be that this vision arose and won support without dissent. What was that like?

[Narrator I interject: Gotta admit, when the oral history interviewer as questions you want answers to, you have to smile.]

Andre replies: You are quite right, of course, Miguel. Outside RPS, resistance to these ideas typically claimed that equitable remuneration would provide insufficient incentives to elicit creativity and productivity; that balanced job complexes and self management would sacrifice quality for false justice; and that participatory planning would sacrifice efficiency and even viability for false solidarity.

Replies that surfaced in countless exchanges, debates, and presentations, came down, ultimately, to demonstrating that equitable remuneration is not only morally sound and socially positive, but also able to deliver needed information and to elicit desirable levels of both work and creativity. Balanced job complexes and self management are not only morally sound and socially positive, they also unleash huge swaths of human creativity and capacity rather than wasting either. They eliminate not only injustice but also incredible waste associated with class division. And participatory planning will not only eliminate the motivational, informational, anti social ills of markets, the authoritarianism of central planning, and yjr ecological irrationality of both, it will also positively unearth the information needed for sound choices and mesh compatibly with equitable remuneration, self management, and classlessness.

Can you describe a little how this went, what these debates with external critics criticizing from outside RPS were like?

An external critic would say things like: Your aims are morally nice, attractive, arguably even elegant, but they are incredibly unreal. For example, your equitable remuneration seems fair, but it would not elicit creativity and productivity. We’d have impoverished fairness. Your balanced job complexes and self-management would avoid the class division you bemoan but they would also sacrifice quality. On both cases, we would control our own suffering due to loss of outputs. Then your participatory planning would involve everyone but it would also squander efficiency. We would preside cooperatively over chaotic haggling  that would waste endless time. Your views are nonsense on stilts!

Someone in RPS might start to answer: On the contrary, equitable remuneration is morally sound and socially positive as you acknowledge, but it will also provide appropriate incentives to work harder, longer, or at more onerous tasks producing socially valued products…which is exactly what good incentives should do. Paying for genetic endowment doesn’t get us to improve our inborn talents. Even paying for better tools doesn’t cause the recipient of the pay to improve the tools. That can be accomplished by way of recognizing the social benefit of better tools.

But then another critic might say, perhaps, but balanced job complexes are ridiculous. If the more capable have to do a fair share of disempowering tasks, we will lose some of their productivity. If the less wise help make decisions, we will get less intelligent decisions.

These are real and fair concerns, the RPS member might reply, but no, balanced jobs and self-management are not only fair, they will also unleash otherwise stunted human capacities of the 80% whose capacities are otherwise squandered and they will eliminate wasteful class conflict. We will lose productivity from about a fifth of the population due to their not doing only what they are best at and instead sharing less empowering task. That is true. But we will gain from four fifths of the population doing some of what they become best at and not doing only what is disempowering—as well as from the benefits of not being class divided. Similarly, participatory planning will not only involve everyone, it will eliminate the motivational and informational ills of markets, the authoritarianism of central planning, and the ecological irrationality of both.

[Narrator: I interject: As a full discussion, this would be too succinct. I would guess Miguel didn’t want to seek more and then more again, and again, because he knew it could get book length, and not only here, discussing economic vision, but other visions as well. The irony is economics is often thought more difficult than other topics, but it is actually easier because it can be more precise, less variegated. Miguel could keep on with economics, seeking, more evidence and logic, even math proofs, for example, but it would go too far. With other areas that didn’t exist but the range of possibilities was much greater as the interviewees indicated. At any rate, did these future revolutionaries clarify how they thought about vision enough so readers could assess their methods and results, go deeper, develop their own thoughts? That is the real question, the real standard Miguel and his interviewees may have met, or not. I found the discussion fair and balanced which you could probably tell from the very few interjections so far.]

You mentioned earlier that there were critics inside the RPS organization and project, as well. Can you give some indication of those?

Sure, within RPS, among its members, debates around economic vision were mostly about the implications of different visionary commitments for strategic success. No one got too animated, or really animated at all, about the values. They were shared. Similarly, those within RPS who challenged the emerging vision did not often claim that if implemented it would be harmful or even less desirable than some other approach. Instead, what we might call internal critics tended to feel that at the outset of RPS, at the then current stage of history the proposed vision risked alienating too many people to the detriment of RPS’s advance.

For example, such a critic might say, I get that we need full classlessness, but I think we can’t afford to lose coordinators’ potential support. I prefer to currently offer a less controversial vision that’s closer to current potentials so we don’t immediately overly challenge coordinator class advantages due to rejecting the corporate division of labor. To that, I might have responded, for example, of course it would be idiotic to write the coordinator class off. We want lawyers, doctors, engineers and the rest involved. But for us to not admit our full aims would be dishonest and, more, it would repel many workers, corrode morale, and worst of all risk entrenching coordinator rule. Why can’t we tell the truth about what we want and also reach many coordinators without risking workers feeling jettisoned? Some critics’ fears that the full vision will cause some coordinators to not relate to RPS are correct. But as each year passes I believe more coordinator class members will join us and because we refuse to compromise or vacillate on the associated issues, classlessness will remain our goal.

So one side was saying we should be more careful not to alienate coordinator class identified people. We cannot afford their absence from activism both for reasons of numbers, and also for reasons of needing various skills they now monopolize and can bring. The other side, and I was on it, agreed that welcoming coordinator class involvement was important and desirable, but argued that to welcome coordinator involvement without being clear about our ultimate aims would not only be manipulative, it would also interfere with attaining what was sought on two counts.

First, the duplicity would repel many. But second, and ultimately primary, to seek coordinator involvement without simultaneously addressing the dangers of coordinator cooptation of the entire project invited disaster. To advance without coordinator class folks involved would be difficult, so we should certainly try to avoid too much of that. However, to advance with coordinator class involvement but without attention to the potential for it to subvert our other aims invited a kind suicide. If we had anti-capitalist but not anti-coordinatorist economic vision, we would wind up with no victory or with a project subordinate to coordinator class interests and aims, as has happened in the past even against activists’ best intentions.

The second position ultimately won overwhelmingly. And this was a case in which it was hard to maintain the minority position at the same time as pursuing the winning one. The best we could do was to have a standing committee for continually re-evaluating visionary commitments and their strategic implications in light of learning more about each from RPS developments more generally. And we did that. And it wasn’t long before the emphasis moved toward discerning further essential aspects of the favored vision, with the minority positions to drop balanced job complexes and to drop participatory planning pretty much declining into complete inattention. What remained at all times however, was a focus on how best to grow and develop RPS in accord with attaining its ultimate goals.

This must have involved some losses, no?

Yes, I should add that some did leave the organization over these issues. But I think it is fair to also note that few if any of those who did so were working class. And that while each person who left over this difference operated for a time in progressive political ways, as they fell back into daily life coordinator involvements they tended to fall away from dissent, or when they decided to persist in it, they rejoined RPS. The fear that the full vision would cause some coordinator class people to not relate positively to RPS was correct—particularly for the folks arguing it. But for many others, and more as each month and year passes, the predication was wrong. And the danger that catering to and as a consequence elevating coordinator values and structures would impose, was evident, not only from thinking it through, but also from history.

Indeed one of the most celebratory dynamics occurring throughout society is not just old coordinator class members signing up to RPS, but their teaching their worthy skills to worker’s and dispensing with their non worthy practices and attitudes. It has been quite parallel, for example, to whites joining the fight against racism and to men joining the fight against sexism, but often in the case of class, with even larger personal material losses, and far less historical precedent.

But you mentioned internal resistance to participatory planning and didn’t clarify what that was, and how it worked out.

In one sense it was quite similar. Advocates ran into resistance to the idea of cooperatively negotiating economic activities based on fears from critics that it would “take too long.” Where some wanted participatory economics without balanced jobs, or, say, with income options that would let at least some get rich compared to others, in this latter case it was to have the benefits of escaping markets and central planing without incurring the resistance that some would have to participatory planning’s having consumers propose their consumption choices and all participants assess proposals by others to modify their own toward meshing. In an extreme case, the critic would say let’s do it but without consumer proposals by instead  having computers and experts calculate calculate consumer wants, instead. And in a far less extreme case, let’s do it but without conveying qualitative as well as quantitative information during the planning process so as to reduce time spent. In fact, let’s have consumers and producers each concern themselves only with their own situations assessing about others, only the effects of their proposals on prices. You can no doubt feel already that it would take us too deeply into planning, I think, to fully rehearse the positions. But summarized, it was for the critics roughly how do we get the benefits of participatory planning (and avoid the catastrophic debits of markets or central planning, but without running up against doubts. Sort of like it was how do we get classlessness, but without balanced jobs or confronting the coordinator/worker class division? The interesting part, at least to my mind, was that in addition to being far too easily side-tracked by doubts, the critics especially of participatory planning got caught up in references to “efficiency” meaning overwhelmingly don’t waste time that they failed to understand or remember, for a time, that efficiency as a useful concept means accomplish what you want without wasting what you value. So saving time which is often good was, when done at the expense of, for example, solidarity or even classlessness not good and actually not efficient.

Okay, you are right we shouldn’t get too deep into all that here. Readers can consult more exhaustive presentations and debates. But still, most generally, is what you seek for economy “socialism,” but with a twist?

If by “socialism” you mean the first type with central planning or market allocation and a corporate division of labor that empowers some and disempowers most, then our twist is such a huge basic transformation that using the same term “socialism” for that and for our vision would be senseless. Yes, these two visions each get rid of private ownership, but beyond that, they totally diverge. And if by socialism, you instead mean the kind, like Bernie Sanders and what were called Social Democrats openly advocated, then our twist is a fundamental enlargement and enrichment that gets to the heart of matters rather than stoping at corrective policies without changing underlying institutions.

Still, many must have wondered, is RPS seeking “socialism” or not?

RPS seeks a goal profoundly different than the first thing that was called “socialism.” That was authoritarian, class divided, market or centrally planned corporate-style economics—plus, usually, a compatible one party state, ala the old Soviet Union. It was often called 20th century socialism and RPS rejected its institutional commitments. And the RPS goal also differs profoundly by being much much more than the second thing that was called socialism meant, which was, ultimately, still capitalism but with a government trying to seriously alleviate pains and even significantly benefit working people. That was often called social democracy.

Are you dodging the question? It is not a good look.

No, I am not, Miguel. I am just being honest. The issue is complicated but only due to the words having multiple meanings. Ultimately, some in RPS called our economic aim “participatory socialism” and in doing so they tried to alter the word “socialism’s” connotations. I do that sometimes, but other times, like many other members of RPS, I call our economic aim participatory economics and our overall aim participatory society to avoid confusion over the word “socialism’s” various connotations.

The key point, though, is that in either case, we all seek the same new system, and that’s what matters most. You know my own understanding of the RPS economic vision goes back to some books that in turn go back many decades. Perhaps when this oral history appears, someone will append references. Otherwise just search “participatory economics” and you will find plenty.

[Narrator I interject: And so as a participatory economy advocate, it is unsurprising I didn’t have much to interject in this section, either that, or I would have gone on way too long…]

Reclaiming the Ecology

Stephen, how did you become deeply involved in ecological activism?

I happened to be in Haiti during a massive hurricane in 2016. I saw water swamp hopes, wipe out homes, and take lives. It was devastating. I remember literally seeing a person drown miserably, too far away to help. I felt utterly impotent and learned the hard way that nature does not fight according to our rules. And it was not just depressing, but frightening, and then, in short order, infuriating. The last emotion, not so priest-like, I felt for a few reasons. On the one hand the local poverty and lack of serious international help made the damage even more devastating than the winds and water entailed. On the other hand, I realized due to directly experiencing it, that the storm itself wasn’t just nature howling. This storm and so many others like it since, owed significantly to corporate elites making earth-distorting decisions. Can you imagine someone standing up on a hill and calling forth a hurricane or tornado to ravage others. Strip away all the bull, and that is exactly what the fossil fuel industry executives did, or at the very least, allowed.

I was only 15 for that hurricane, but I had already heard a bit about global warming and climate change in school and from my parents. Still, I was a kid, and everything seemed possible. Nothing seemed so bad that I should be deterred from my daily wants. I had personal world’s to conquer. Global warming was beyond my reach. But the hurricane changed that.

I was right there. I felt its fury. I couldn’t say to it, okay, I have had enough, stop already. It was relentless. I now had an experience to go with what I had read about global warming. Global warming wasn’t just scientific blather and paranoia or fear mongering. It wasn’t a scam. It wasn’t abstract and exaggerated. It was horrendous disasters crushing humans and places. It was as real as rain. Just much, much more deadly.

I had a hard time even righting myself from the experience. If you haven’t been in a really major storm, it is shattering, assuming you allow the whole thing to register. And I did. And so I was shattered. But then I gained back some equilibrium, and I started to read about the interconnections of living things and their environments, and about the effects of human choices on the both.

If being in the storm was frightening, and it was, then reading and thinking about global warming, as compared to my prior practice of just letting it all slide by, was even more frightening. Calls for action weren’t alarmist. If we didn’t change our ways, devastation would rain down from the skies and rise up from the oceans. It would be even greater than the horrors of war, which, I was also coming to understand, were almost incalculable.

So, I became Green, and then seriously radical.

Did you feel there was a turning point from just witnessing ecological decline to being on a path toward ecological success?

I think that that is a very good way to pose the question because it perfectly captures the reality. The more I read the more it felt that most people were either delusionally denying the obvious, or that they admitted it at least somewhat but just went on about their lives in the belief that whatever will be will be. Doing anything to affect the possibilities was beyond them. It was the alienation of our times.

I soon realized this was precisely the popular state of mind that a corrupt, unjust, and in this case effectively suicidal system needed in order to maintain its ways without serious interruption. Yet even knowing that didn’t always rouse people from being quiet. People knew, often, the situation, and even its utility for elites and disastrous consequences for themselves. But so what? They still felt powerless, albeit also morbidly depressed. I soon realized that to alter our deadly trajectory people would have to see a clear path to a better situation. They would have to see how they could lend their energies so their contribution would matter.

Which is why I think the turning point when was significant sectors of the population not only came to believe in the reality and immense danger of global warming and, indeed, of ecological dissolution more broadly, but also to realize there was a route to survival and dignity that they could meaningfully contribute to.

Of course, some people honestly thought buying a long lasting light bulb or keeping their thermostat down, or taking short showers, was all they could or should concern themselves with. But most people knew that was barely even stopgap. Most people knew the economy had to transform away from fossil fuels toward carbon free renewable energy among many other associated changes. And most people knew that such transformations would require massive public pressure—and then a new system.

So the issue for each person was, can I contribute to generating that pressure within my means, and worth my time, given my likely personally very modest impact? And this possibility, even this inevitability of their own personal efficacy, is what RPS had to get people to see if they would become part of the broad movements and of RPS itself. When that message got through to millions of people—not reams of documentation about climate disasters and abysmal prospects, but a simple message about the changes that could correct the faults and especially the activist behaviors that could make those change happen—I think we passed the turning point.

But was the agenda no growth, anti-growth, or what? And was the vision just about economic change, or other dimensions as well?

Along the way, this was confusing and confused. Regarding economic institutions, it was pretty clear. It meant decisions had to account properly for ecological implications, for using resources, generating pollution, and so on. Ecology had to be accounted. And that meant participatory planning had to have core features that facilitated doing so. And while discussing all that here would take us afield, it was indeed core to the economic vision. But beyond that there had to be room for political decisions mandating certain ecological practices and preventing others. That too was in the vision. Institutions needed to permit and indeed foster people being concerned not only with now, but with tomorrow, and with well beyond tomorrow. At the same time, some formulations tried to capture all that but missed. Saying no growth or more degrowth was confusing. It was taken by its best and most popular adherents to mean basically what I have conveyed. Function ecologically sensibly. But the words themselves tended to focus attention on output per se, which wasn’t constructive compared to focussing on output that did excessive harm. We actually often had to grow industries, like for alternative energy, as well as for products bearing on well being, even as we reduced or literally eliminated industries whose output was, for ecological reasons, counter-productive and even suicidal. RPS bridged the linguistics problems to arrive at the substantive agreement about aims.

Still, no growth, degrowth, or what?

If you insist on using the word growth, I would say post-growth. Meaning we needed to take our eyes and concepts away from growth and place them on the ecological consequences of production and consumption as well as on its immediate social and material consequences for producers and consumers.

War and Peace

Bert, what do you think are the prospects for world affairs with a full RPS victory in the U.S.?

Back during the U.S. war on Vietnam and Indochina the government used as a pretext what they called the Domino Theory. The idea was that if a country fell into the hands of the Soviets, in turn more countries would fall into their hands to everyone’s detriment. So, if Vietnam went, Thailand, Indonesia, and then Japan, would follow due to emboldened Russian imperial conquest. It was idiocy, of course, as it was stated, but a variant of the same refrain had considerable truth. That was called, I think for the first time by Chomsky, the threat of a good example.

His idea was if a country could extricate itself from abject subservience to U.S. (or other) domination, then what might follow? What lessons might be learned by other countries to fuel further defections? If Vietnam could show that it was possible to escape U.S. domination, why not other countries, not only in Indochina, but all over the world? Of course, in this interpretation of the dynamic, what elites feared was a good thing, and trying to prevent it was a horrible thing, but this different image of countries falling like dominoes, meaning, freeing themselves from subservience not least spurred by the prior successes of others—had some basis. The U.S. reply was to make the carpet bombed human cost of extrication too high to contemplate.

There are many conceivable dimensions of a U.S. full RPS victory for world affairs. First, and most direct, with the U.S. no longer pursuing imperial ambitions and instead driven by sentiments of solidarity and internationalism, a main cause of international violations will be removed. The largest though not the only obstacle to peaceful world affairs will be gone.

Another impact, however, is, ironically, the threat of a good example. If the population of the U.S. can escape tutelage to old structural institutional forms to create a new society, then why not others as well? Of course, we already see this happening all around the world, and a case can be made, for that matter, that that early Vietnamese example, though not ultimately fully successful for Vietnam, and never really adopting RPS-style content, did spread lessons and aspirations worldwide that later arguably even fueled RPS itself. I happen to think, or perhaps it is just that I like to think, that was the case.

At any rate, I think full RPS victory in the U.S. will shortly follow, or precede, comparable victories for new social forms in most if not all of the world. Once some, indeed many, major countries are on the side of justice, how long can injustice prevail? It loses its material defenders and, even more, it loses its aura of inevitability.

What then is the positive RPS view on international relations?

It is ultimately a pretty simple extension of RPS values from the national to the international arena. The aim is self management, classlessness, inter communalism, and feminism for all. But no approach can undo centuries of distorted economic and social development in minutes across the globe any more than we can do that overnight in one country. But as countries adopt new institutions and dynamics, there is no worthy reason why some should endlessly retain giant advantages from the past and others endlessly retain giant deficits. So, the main international point is to find a way to redress inequalities so that we live in a world where there is equity, solidarity, self management, and diversity not only within some countries, but within all countries, and across their borders as well. Som the usual RPS question, how do we do that?

History will reveal a full answer, but one aspect will surely be engaging in international trade in a new way. Trade—when not overtly horrendously vile as in exploitative extraction and colonial domination—should yield overall benefits for all involved. Exchange should occur when one party which has some item should choose to enter an agreement to provide it to another party that lacks that item, but has others to exchange, where overall benefits outweigh overall costs. But how should the overall benefits of such an exchange accrue to the two parties?

In market transactions, and in international market and geopolitical relations, even when grotesque overt looting isn’t occurring, the benefits of trade accrue in accord with bargaining power not justice. The bulk of the benefits therefore go to the more powerful party and the gap between a more powerful actor and a weaker actor thereby widens. If I start with more, I get more benefit, so even though you get some gain, my advantage grows. In the face of that, a simple, manageable, RPS approach is to reverse the pattern. The bulk of the benefits of international trade and all international exchange should accrue to the poorer country, every time. That plus direct transfers from wealthier to poorer countries would be the essence of international agreements among RPS-style countries operating in a better future.

Patti, as an anti-war activist did you believe when joining RPS that it would usher in an end to war? Do you now think it will?

Suppose I asked you, Miguel, did you believe when becoming involved with RPS that it would usher in an end to crime? Do you now think it will?

I hope you would answer, as I would, no. I did not believe that. I thought it would hugely diminish crime not only because people would have enhanced social motivations and desires, but also because people would never be desperate for income, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, there would be no way to benefit materially from crime on any significant scale. For example, excessive wealth accrued by theft or any other crime would be immediately evident to all because it could not arise from legal, morally sound behavior. When you see great wealth, you would see a person who is benefitting from crime. Period. The social lives of citizens would engender far greater mutual aid, or perhaps better put, would not stifle such sentiments. But, still, there could be all manner of pathologies leading to violations, or to honest disagreements, or to fierce anger, and so on, so I suspect you wouldn’t have said we will wind up with no crime, just that we will have vastly less crime and much better policy for dealing with it.

So by analogy you might think I would answer, with RPS success the odds of wars and otherwise violent engagements between countries would diminish hugely, but war will not disappear. But I actually think, and I hope, that despite the seeming analogy, a couple of additional factors bearing on war between countries as compared to crime inside countries will make that expectation too cautious.

One factor is that war is a collective undertaking. It is not some lone person doing something criminal. War involves large and even vast numbers of people. What’s more, war depends on prior involvement in things like arms production and military organization and training. I think the collective scale of war preparation and war-making mean that the reduced motivations for war, and the reduced mentalities willing to accommodate to war, and the reduced preparedness for war, will literally mean an end to war. You could have, I suppose, lone advocates of war, like you can have lone criminals, but once social relations are transformed, I don’t believe you will have whole countries even able much less willing or eager to wage war.  

What have you felt to be the most important steps already taken on the road to no more war?

In a general sense the steady emergence of RPS-like movements and organizations in countries all over the world seems paramount to me. It is precisely the way these organizations link concerns about attaining peace with concerns about attaining justice and link both with positive program and vision seeking new institutions that matters even more than single issue efforts on behalf of peace in this or that world conflict zone, as important as those are.

Of course, diverse efforts against specific hostilities and wars have also been pivotal, but if I had to pick one thing that has turned the corner toward literally eliminating war it would probably be the massive campaigns to transform military bases around the world into vehicles for social programs of reconstruction and protection against natural disasters. Those campaigns not only are anti war and anti-injustice, they offer positive alternatives and make clear that arguments against change on these fronts are not about what is possible, but only about what will best benefit the rich and powerful.

I have been privileged to attend numerous demonstrations and participate in many campaigns—and not only in the U.S.—around demobilizing or retooling bases. For me, seeing not just the anti war sentiment, but the sense of possibility and optimism these nourish has been profoundly moving. Connecting desires for ecological sanity and equitable reconstruction to anti war desires, while also watching out for the well being of the soldiers and their communities and whole countries affected, has been so exemplary that it just keeps gaining ever more support. It causes me to think the aim peace for all time is within our grasp. The next really big dance may well be on the graves of the world’s last masters of war.

Growth Oriented Vision

Lydia, would you like to add any final comment about the core ideas, values, and vision of RPS before the oral history shifts back to examining more contextual historical events?

Well there is much more to say, of course. Books upon books have been written, but I think the overview you have elicited has been good, albeit demanding due to being so succinct, and I would like to add only two things which may not be as evident as they should be..

First, RPS vision has always been rooted in a clear statement of values. It has always been about determining what we desire for humanity—in the shape of guiding values—and then trying our best to implement institutions consistent with those values. This is actually different than many other visionary approaches. It is not unusual, for example, to look at the present and find instance after instance of undesirable attributes, with visionary thinking then being to adapt from what we have to arrive at replacements, one after another.

Our difference from that approach is that in RPS we ask what do we want. If it is unreal or impossible, okay, we try again. But once we settle on what we want, we don’t then keep letting habituation with what we see all around us curtail conceiving what is needed to attain what we want.

I guess it sounds a little academic but it really isn’t. It is the difference between vision that tinkers with the present and often fails to get much beyond that, and vision that desires a vastly better future and isn’t mentally saddled by the chains of today. Another virtue of the values first approach is that it speaks to people in a way rooted in their humanity rather than in a way that arises from assessing their inhumanities. It is positive rather than negative. It celebrates aims rather than excoriating shackles. Oh, it does the latter too, of course, sometimes, but the positive aspirations drive the process. And this is one of the key things RPS brings to the table, beyond very specific commitments.

You said you had two things you wanted to add…

Yes, the second thing I would like to say is that concepts, values, and vision are free creations of human thought and discussion. They are not or should not be products of the will of a king, priest, or a god above, or even of a wise sage. Only collective assessment, testing, and advocacy can establish their worth. But their being human creations also means they can be flawed, time bound, and otherwise need frequent renovation. Values may embody misconceptions that render one or more contrary to our intents. Concepts may have insufficient scope, make unwarranted simplifications, or diverge from accuracy. Vision may be unattainable or internally contradictory or vision could have unforeseen negative consequences. RPS recognizes its own possible fallibility. It constantly tests and upgrades its commitments.

Here is how I think of it. Scientists are just like all the rest of us. They sometimes have biases that distort their perceptions. They sometimes develop self-serving ways of seeing or psychological commitments to pet ideas, or even to ideas which their reputations or positions depend on. But science is supposed to serve truth. It is supposed to always seek to alter itself to find and correct flaws and develop new understanding. To continually self renovate, science doesn’t merely say to scientists, be good. Innovate, don’t perpetuate. No, science incorporates diverse arrangements, roles, and incentives meant to create an enquiring, flexible, and always forward-reaching mindset. It doesn’t always work, to be sure. But it is a priority in a way that doesn’t exist, say, in religious studies or in old style politics of the past, even and perhaps even most forcefully in the ones that called themselves scientific.

My point is that RPS very self consciously sees its concepts, values, and vision the way science sees its theories. We try to make them as optimal as we can, but we try not to become so wedded to our beliefs that we try to ward off improvements just to preserve the past and our connections with it. Not all of us do this equally well, and no individual does it perfectly, but because RPS prioritizes this kind of flexible and growth-oriented approach, and because it sets aside resources and time explicitly for the purpose, it most often attains the sought flexibility. This RPS approach is opposite to the usual talmudic approach to ideology. It is anti dogma. Anti-sectarian. And I think it is a key RPS virtue, perhaps even the most important one, certainly one that played a big part in my becoming and remaining a member.

Bert, you are a physicist. Do Lydia’s words here resonate for you, too? Does your science work have any impact on your political work?

I think Lydia has it quite right and I only wish all physicists always understood her point, though I think most do. Even if we don’t all always admit it, Rabbit holes can capture scientists too. 

In my life in science I have to conceive ideas, figure ways to test them, induce people or myself to do the tests, examine the results, and then either rejoice in the merit the ideas displayed, or move on to other ideas more likely to address the test results.

Revolutionary politics should work similarly, but difficulties arise. In social situations the number of variables is often too high to get clear results. Often you can’t arrange experiments to give definitive information about what works and what doesn’t. Even in physics it typically pays to keep respectable ideas around after they seem to fail in case new information makes them important again or examining them again reveals a new angle on information that yields valuable insights. Tthis is even more true in political activism where definitive results are much harder to come by. We should test ideas and constantly try to improve them, not to ward off criticism as if finding fault would be harmful.

There is another instructive proviso. When we lack good evidence, in science or in movement building, we are sometimes left with nothing but intuition and a speculation. If those are carefully broached and tested, no problem. They induce insights or not. But if we tend to get wrapped up in our speculations, lacking evidence for them but proclaiming them as if they are some kind of gospel, then we are on the road to sectarianism. WE go down a rabbit hole with very slick walls. Don’t take speculation for more than the guess that it is.

On your other question, I don’t think my physics has any lessons for people conducting their daily affairs. The life and times of elementary particles and cosmological models is way too distant from the life and times of activists and social visions to have relevance for that. Actually, physics has been rife with speculation, for a  bunch of decades now, sometimes yielding a kind of scientific sectarianism. But I do think the approach of scientists, at its best, to both new and to old ideas, and to evidence and logic, and, again only at our best, and to each other as well, does have lessons for people conducting their daily affairs and particularly for people trying to improve society. And I think Lydia enunciated those lessons perfectly. I think RPS’s desires to eliminate the coordinator/worker class division may prove the best guarantor of logic and evidence above and beyond speculation and dogma since the birth of modern science. I guess we will see.

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