Talks at Goldsmiths and the Anarchist Book Fair

Thursday, 29 October 2009 16:01 Last Updated on Monday, 09 November 2009 19:38 Written by Robert Miller

I have recently given 2 talks on behalf of the PPS. The first was at Goldsmiths University and I gave it with Ed. The second was at the Anarchist Book Fair and I gave it with Jason. Both of these talks were on parecon and both went very well. These were the first talks that I have given (aside from a talk I gave to 5 people on the grass at Climate Camp) and I learned a lot from them.

Goldsmiths

Of the 2 talks the one at Goldsmiths was more challenging. This was mainly due to the fact that it was to university students and I am only 16. But the talk went down mostly quite well. We finished the talk in about 40 minutes and had another 40 minutes of questions and answers. In terms of what people thought of it there seemed to be the split that I had expected: a couple of people completely agreed with what we were saying, a couple of people completely disagreed and most people kind of agreed but didn’t fully understand – which is reasonable after only having heard 40 minutes of something. There were maybe 20 – 30 people at the talk.

Anarchist Book Fair

This talk was definitely easier – partly because I was more confident because it was the second one and partly because it was to anarchists so most of them were naturally pro the ideas that we were talking about. We only had 50 minutes for the talk so we got the talk part done in half an hour and spent 20 minutes on questions and answers. The biggest challenge of it was talking slow enough for the people translating it into sign language and still getting it all in. Most of the people at this talk seemed to agree with what we were saying and most of the questions were just asking for clarification. There were maybe 25 – 40 people at this talk – that is a very rough estimate.

Questions and Answers

At both of the talks most of the questions were about balanced job complexes. This seems to be the most controversial idea. Most of the questions were along the lines of “isn’t it to have doctors, who have spent years training, spend half their time sweeping the floor?” or “but everyone can’t do everything”. Most of the questions on BJCs were easy to answer but I suggest that everyone who is giving a talk prepare for a lot of questions about them. There were also quite a few questions on social cost and how pricing works. This is probably the most complicated part of parecon so I suggest that everyone giving a talk spend a fair bit of time preparing for how to explain this. There were a couple of other random questions but none were too difficult to answer at either talk.

Overview

I felt that both talks went very well. We managed to explain everything that we wanted to and we had satisfactory answers to every question both times. At the end of each, but a little more at the anarchist book fair, people came up to us to congratulate us and tell us how good the talk was and how much they liked the ideas. In fact, in the Goldsmiths talk we even had one guy at the front, who hadn’t heard of parecon before, helping us answer questions. If I were to do anything differently I would have spent longer getting my notes and the power point slightly more in synch and working on the changes in the power point. But overall I was very happy with both talks and I think that they both went down well with the audiences.