Jim Devine: >when you advocate "measureable proposals," are you saying that we need to >develop "recipes for the cook-shops of the future"? I thought you were >against utopianism.
Utopianism means blueprints for how society should be run. Stating that there are 2 billion souls on earth and given 2 trillion gallons of available water, we must strive to guarantee sufficient drinking and sanitation necessities for all these souls is not very "utopian". It would only be utopian if we came up with the precise political forms to implement this goal. All we need to do is look at how water is used today and project intelligent alternatives. This means drawing upon *scientific* input from hydraulic engineers, etc., not disciples of Fourier or Bakunin. For example, the Green Revolution is a complete misuse of water. So are big hydroelectric dams. Opposing such waste is not utopian. It is rock-solid realism. Utopianism would involve something like this: --- Suppose we work in a ball bearing plant. It is time to figure out how much steel we need, how to apportion our tasks among ourselves, and how to organize our day. Yes, these decisions affect on people beyond our workplace so that consumers of our product, producers of products we use, and also citizens in the vicinity impacted by our byproducts, should all have a say-by all means. But should we workers in the plant wait for authoritative instructions from municipal assemblies who are neither knowledgeable about our plant nor use the ball bearings that we produce, and should we influence the outcomes ourselves only via our participation in those local assemblies, separated from our jobs and co-workers, as if we had no greater stake than other folks? Should those who actually use the ball bearings have no greater say than those who don't? This seems to me so overwhelmingly odd a proposal to entertain that the pressure causing the Libertarian Municipalists to rule out workers in workplaces having any direct power over workplace outcomes via their own workers councils, and to rule out consumers having impact via consumers' councils as well, must be very compelling indeed. full: http://www.zmag.org/lm.htm Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org
