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published by:
popular education for a free society
What is Social Ecology? | Vol. 3, No. 1
Economics in a Social-Ecological Society
By Peter Staudenmaier
Communal Self-Management in Practice
In this scenario, workers’ councils play a crucial role in the day-to-day administration of production, while local assemblies have the final say in major economic decisions. All members of a given community participate in formulating economic policy, which is discussed, debated, and decided upon within the popular assembly. Social ecology foresees an extensive physical decentralization of production, so that workers at a particular enterprise will typically live in the same municipality where they work. We also foresee a continual voluntary rotation of jobs, tasks, and responsibilities and a radical redefinition of what ‘work’ means. Through the conscious transformation of labor into a free social activity that combines physical and intellectual skills, we envision the productive process as a fulfillment of personal and communal needs, articulated to their ecological context. Along with the rejection of bosses, profits, wages, and exchange value, we seek to overcome capitalism’s reduction of human beings to instruments of production and consumption. Social ecology’s assembly model encourages people to approach economic decisions not merely as workers and consumers, but as community members committed to an inclusive goal of social and ecological wellbeing.
While the broad outlines of communal production are established at the assembly level, they are implemented in practice by smaller collective bodies which also operate on an egalitarian, participatory, and democratic basis. Cooperative households and collective workplaces form an integral part of this process. Decisions that have regional impact are worked out by confederations of local assemblies, so that everybody affected by a decision can participate in making it. Specific tasks can be delegated to specialized committees, but substantive issues of public concern are subject to the discretion of each popular assembly. Direct democracy encourages the formation and contestation of competing views and arguments, so that for any given decision there will be several distinct options available, each of them crafted by the people who will carry them out. Assembly members consider these various proposals and debate their merits and implications; they are discussed, revised and amended as necessary. When no clear consensus emerges, a vote or series of votes can be held to determine which options have the most support.
Social ecology’s vision of a moral economy centers on libertarian communism, in which the fruits of common labor are freely available to all. This principle of “from each according to ability and to each according to need,” which distinguishes our perspective from many other anti-capitalist programs, is fleshed out by a civic ethic in which concern for the common welfare shapes individual choices. In the absence of markets, private property, class divisions, commodity production, exploitation of labor, and accumulation of capital, libertarian communism can become the distributive mechanism for social wealth and the economic counterpart to the transparent and humanly scaled political structures that social ecology proposes.
In such an arrangement, the interaction between smaller committees and working groups and the full assembly becomes crucially important to maintaining the democratic and participatory nature of this deliberative process. Preparing coherent proposals for presentation to the assembly will require both specialized work and scrupulous information gathering, as well as analysis and interpretation. Because these activities can subtly influence the eventual outcome of any decision, the responsibility for carrying them out should be a rotating task entrusted to a temporary commission chosen at random from the members of the assembly.
Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.
Published by the Institute for
Social Ecology