Imagine an Organization and Build It

Imagine an Organization and Build It
By Michael Albert

http://www.zcommunications.org/imagine-an-organization-and-build-it-by-michael-albert

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Imagine a better future. In your country of the future the economy is classless and promotes solidarity, diversity, equity, and self management. The polity generates and works according to participatory democracy and self management. It is anarchist. Kinship is feminist, with men and women fully liberated, sexuality liberated, children liberated. Culture is intercommunalist, without racism, bigotry, insecurity. You and your fellow citizens have new priorities, values, and aims. The institutions you live with, you work with, you celebrate with, you decide with, all have new roles that generate desirable outcomes rather than preventing them. Life is good. But how did it get that way?

Given what we endure right now in our current home countries, skipping forward and looking back, in the interim there must have been a revolutionary transformation of minds and institutions. How did that transformation happen?

Well, still looking back and considering our journey to our better future, it certainly wasn't the work of aliens or gods. Which leaves that it must have been done by people. However, it couldn't have been done by just a few isolated people. It must have been many people acting together. People informed. People knowing where they were going. People each with his and her own mind. People freely seeing eye to eye. People who learned from their experiences and put their learning to work.


http://www.iopsociety.org/

About IOPS

The International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS) is a revolutionary organization that aims to win a better world through flexibly exploring and advocating long term vision, building the seeds of the future in the present, empowering the lives of its members, organizing in an internally classless and self-managing way, and winning improvements, now, in current society even as we constantly seek a new society for the future.

http://www.iopsociety.org/about

About IOPS

The interim International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS) was launched in 2012 with the aim of propelling activism for winning a new world. IOPS is structured as a bottom-up, international organization, based on self-managing interconnected national branches and local chapters. Currently, IOPS is in an interim stage, and by joining IOPS you become an interim member. A convention, or series of conventions, will be planned within the next year, for membership to determine the organization's definition in more detail.

The IOPS Interim Organizational Description consists of the following key documents:

Mission
Vision
Structure and Program


http://www.iopsociety.org/mission

Mission

The International Organization for a Participatory Society (IOPS) is a revolutionary organization that aims to to win a better world through flexibly exploring and advocating long term vision, building the seeds of the future in the present, empowering the lives of its members, organizing in an internally classless and self-managing way, and winning changes in society that better the situations of suffering constituencies while also laying the ground work for more changes, and construction, to come.

Key Goals & Priorities

IOPS is anti capitalist, anti racist, anti sexist, and anti authoritarian. It centrally addresses economics/class, politics, culture/race, kinship/gender, ecology, and international relations without privileging any one focus above the rest.
IOPS seeks to transcend 20th Century market and centrally planned socialism with a new participatory society - or participatory socialism - that combines classless participatory economy, feminist participatory kinship, intercommunalist participatory culture, and self managing participatory polity.
IOPS flexibly explores and advocates long term vision sufficiently to inspire and orient current activity but does not advocate or seek to implement detailed blueprints that transcend movement needs and knowledge.
IOPS sees social strategy and especially tactics as largely contingent on place and time and therefore continually revises shared views in light of new evidence including regularly updating analysis, vision, and strategy.


I realize this is nothing new, and people have been organizing for centuries to bring about change, but it's an intriguing concept ..... and I like the mission.