Looking Forward. By Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel

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  4. Participatory Consumption

 

 

I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree, Indeed, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all.

-Ogden Nash

Song of the Open Road

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Participatory Case

 

In participatory Martin Luther King County (MLK), all citizens belong to their neighborhood council, their ward council, and the MLK council. With this structure, not all ward or county council members need to attend all ward or county council meetings. Sometimes, for really important issues, decisions are made by a referendum of all members. Other times, only representatives sent by neighborhood councils to ward councils or ward councils to county councils vote. Meetings are always open and for important issues they are televised before referenda. In addition, one county workplace is the Collective Consumption Facilitation Board (CCFB), which is empowered to facilitate decision making regarding county collective consumption. The CCFB is governed by the same participatory rules as any other workplace. Each neighborhood and ward council has its own smaller CCFB to facilitate their collective consumption decisions, and the same holds for cities, states, and regions.

 

So there is the "level" of each individual, the "level" of the neighborhood, the "level" of the ward, and the "level" of the county. To fully understand collective consumption requires relating it to the planning of all economic decisions which we discuss later. Here, however, we can describe relevant local institutions and the logic of some of their procedures.

 

MLK county determines short- and long-term collective consumption priorities and plans. It chooses between projects like new athletic complexes, cultural centers, hospitals, schools, bus systems, or no new construction at all.

 

The county council makes decisions by referendum of the whole council on a variety of proposed project menus. Competing collective consumption alternatives arise out of communications between the CCFB and county council representatives from neighborhood councils. The CCFB has data about prior years' plans as well as projects that were not approved last year. A first set of options includes a continuation of plans in progress, a listing of other plans previously desired but delayed, and a list of proposals for possible new collective consumption projects received by the CCFB from neighborhood councils, individuals, and workplaces during the year.

 

Planning procedures (discussed in the next two chapters) then refine these many possibilities into more precise options so that choices can be made by a county referendum. Although additional participation by citizens requires more of their time go to managing collective consumption, they spend less time influencing these collective participatory plans than they previously spent compensating for the lack of social services induced by profit-motivated market decisions.

 

Once the county's collective consumption decisions are determined, ward and neighborhood councils consider issues such as improving collective day care facilities, scheduling food delivery, reseeding parks, changing pool schedules, building a new movie complex, and enlarging the local library. Neighborhood CCFBs facilitate such decisions by listing options and enumerating their likely effects. Instead of the whole county participating, only members of the affected ward or neighborhood cast "ballots," though ultimately each neighborhood's plan is summed into the plan for the whole county, and then summed into the plan for the whole society.

 

The difference between capitalist Jefferson Park County and participatory Martin Luther King County should be clear. In the capitalist case, collective consumption succumbs to the will of government bureaucracy and powerful private interests. Definition of options and their refinement into final choices rests with "professionals" subject to pressure by private lobbies. Most citizens are estranged from decisions, which accommodate only the wills of powerful elites motivated by a desire to maximize only their own profits and status.

 

In Martin Luther King County, individuals, neighborhoods, and interest groups submit ideas for collective consumption projects. Workers serving on the CCFB refine these options into coherent possibilities whose effects can be compared. Their workplaces are structured so that CCFB workers have no vested interests to advance, and in any event final collective consumption is debated by everyone who wishes to participate and final decisions are made by democratic votes sensitive to the different effects decisions may have on different constituencies.