- this is an extract written by Pat Korte and Brian Kelly from the book 'Real Utopia' by Chris Spannos
Liberating Theory
Liberating theory is a holistic framework for understanding society that looks at the whole of society and the interrelations among different parts of our social lives. Society is comprised of four primary spheres, all of which are set within an international and ecological context, and each of which has a set of defining functions:
- The political sphere: legislation, adjudication, and collective implementation.
- The Economic sphere: production, consumption, and allocation of the material means of life.
- The Kinship sphere: procreation, nurturance, socialisation, gender, sexuality, and organisation of daily home life.
- The Community sphere: Development of collectively shared historical identities, culture, religion, spirituality, linguistic relations, lifestyles, and social celebrations.
Within each sphere there are two components. The first component is the Human Centre, the collection of people living within a society. Each person has needs, desires, personalities, characteristics, skills, capacities, and consciousness. The second component is the Institutional Boundary, all of society’s social institutions that come together to form interconnected roles, relationships, and commonly held expectations and patterns of behaviour, that produce and reproduce societal outcomes. Through theses institutions come together to help shape who we are as individuals, our human consciousness empowers us with the capacity to transform society’s institutional boundary.
Vision for a Participatory Society
To overcome the cynicism and hopelessness that currently define our generation, we need a flexible and widely shared radical social vision to provide people with hope and inspiration. To build alternative institutions that prefigure a participatory society, we must have a clear vision of what a future society will look like so that its defining features can be incorporated into our organisational structures. If we don’t have ideas for how social life could be organised in the future, we obviously cannot embody the seeds of the future in the present. We cannot develop we also cannot develop effective strategies to get from the dominant institutions of the present to the revolutionary institutions of the future if we haven’t outlined the defining features of future social institutions. We want to abolish institutions that produce and perpetuate oppression, but to make the jump from resistance to revolution we must outline the goals of our revolution.
Participatory Politics
As an alternative to both Leninist-style dictatorship and representative democracy, we offer a polity in which every citizen plays a crucial role in the political process, with each individual having as say proportionate to the degree which they are affected by outcomes. A federation o f nested councils will replace the authoritarian state and be used to efficiently organise political life while fostering maximum participation. In addition to society providing all citizens with adequate time to participate in the political process, all individuals will have equal access to empowering opportunities, to a diverse range of single-issue and multi-issue organisations with varying social agenda, and a media system that is under direct democratic control of the people and serves to foster greater participation and to better indoor the decision of the public by presenting a diverse range of ideas and opinions, as well as the views of competing groups.
Participatory Economics
Instead of capitalism, we offer an economic system built on values of solidarity, equity, diversity, self-management, and efficiency. To replace markets or central planning, Participatory Economics utilizes federations of workers’ and consumers’ councils in which each individual has a say in decisions proportionate to the degree they are affected by the outcomes. Allocation of goods and services will be accomplished through a social, iterative planning procedure called participatory planning. Through this planning process, workers and consumers will collectively develop, propose, revise an implement a coherent economic plan. Social ownership of the means of production will replace private ownership. To ensure equity, workers will be remunerated according to effort and sacrifice, and in some cases according to need. To break down the corporate division of labour and prevent the rise of a coordinator class, job complexes will be balanced to ensure a relative level of empowerment, confidence, knowledge, and quality of life among all members of society by requiring each worker to complete a mix of both rote and empowering tasks.
Feminist Kinship
Feminist kinship relations seek to free people from oppressive definitions that have been socially imposed and to abolish all sexual divisions of labour and sexist and hetero sexist demarcation of individuals according to gender and sexuality. Society must be respectful on an individual’s nature, inclinations, and choices and all people must be provided with the means to pursue the lives they want regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or age. Feminist kinship relations are dependent on the liberation of women, queers, youth, the elderly, transgender, and inter-sex individuals.
To extend liberation into daily home life, a participatory society aims to provide the means for traditional couples, single parents, lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender, inter-sex, and queer parents, communal parenting, and multiple, parenting arrangements to develop and flourish. Within the home and the community, the task of raising children must be elevated in status, highly personalised interaction between children and adults, should be encouraged, and responsibilities for these interactions must be distributed equitably throughout society without segregating tasks by gender. A participatory society would provide parents with access to high quality day-care, flexible work hours, and parent al leave options allowing them to play a more active role in the lives of their children.
The liberation of woman and society requires reproductive freedom. Society must provide all with the right to family planning without fear of sterilization or economic deprivation, the right to have children through unhindered access to birth control and abortion, and the right to sexual education and healthcare that provides every citizen with information and resources to live a healthy and fulfilling sexual life.
In a participatory society the full exploration of human sexuality would be accepted and encouraged. A participatory society would encourage the exercis e of and experimentation of different forms of sexuality by consenting partners.
Intercommunalism
We will not be reborn into a perfect society after a revolution, and our society’s long and brutal history of conquest, colonisation, genocide, and slavery will not be transcended easily. To begin the step-by-step process of building a new historical legacy and set of behavioural expectations bet ween communities, a participatory society would construct intercommunalist institutions to provide communities with the means to assure the preservation of their diverse cultural traditions and to allow for their continual development. Under intercommunalism, all material and psychological privileges that are currently granted to a section of the population at the expense of the dignity and standards of living for oppressed communities, as well as the division of communities into subservient positions according to culture, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, will be abolished.
The multiplicity of cultural communities and the historical contributions of different communities must be respected, valued, and preserved by guaranteeing each sufficient material and communicative means to reproduce, self-define, develop their own cultural traditions, and represent their culture to all other communities. Through construction of intercommunalist relations and instututions that guarantee each community the means necessary to carry on and develop their traditions, a pariticipatory society assists eliminating negative inter-community relations and encourages positive interaction between communities that can enhance the internal characteristics of each.
In a participatory society, individuals should be free to choose the cultural communities they prefer and members of every community shall have the right of dissent and to leave. Intervention shall not be permitted except to preserve this right for all. Those outside a community should be free to criticize cultural practices that they believe violate acceptable social norms.
For more information visit the International PPS website