Socialism is Jazz
- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 9 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
i thought this article had some strong insights although i wouldn't agree with its conclusions
Quote:Miller warns against the temptation to "build or to seek a blueprint, a Big Plan, for how 'the economy' should work." Put in these terms, systems thinking does seem like a bad idea. After all, a blueprint sounds so static, so rigidly engineered, so authoritarian. And Big Plan, of course, evokes Big Brother. But we don't need to think of the process of envisioning a new economy in this static way. Instead, it's better to think of it as something akin to playing jazz. When jazz artists improvise, they don't follow the same score note by note. But they do have a common set of musical guidelines to work within – tempos, modes, phrasing, and so forth. If we think of system visioning like jazz, this means no one can say exactly what the song will sound like in advance, but it also requires us to establish and agree upon a general framework to ensure the result isn't chaos, and that people don't tune us out.The guidelines start with common values like those articulated by Miller, including cooperation, democracy, ecological health, and pluralism. But to be useful in the political-economic world, we have to materialize values in the form of specific policy ideas, legal frameworks, and institutional models. Such proposals won't specify the exact notes we'll play, just the general guidelines. For example, we can call for constitutional guarantees for environmental sustainability (and even indicate what that might mean) without specifying the various ways in communities may choose to achieve sustainability. Starting from their common values, it is not only possible but likely that checkerboard revolutionaries could employ democratic processes to develop consensus around such macro-level policy and institutional proposals for a new economy.
The story of one promising new organization points the way toward how that might be accomplished.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.