Here in Canada (Vancouver) we’ve started with a cultural initiative (ParticiParté – ParPar) which achieves two things: 1. It gives people, with(in) their communities, an experience and language of ‘we collectively/collaboratively create together’. We do away with the audience|performer dichotomy and instead provide the space and tools for participants to create Experience in the moment together– we have brought together some of the most creative cultural workers on the W.Coast to come up with some killer theatrical-community-games which will be at the major festivals this summer. 2. It garners a campaign community which can hopefully be turned towards voting directors onto the major credit union boards who’ll act as proxies for member based, deliberative-participatory decisions from issue to issue. These are highly split elections in some cases, elections with very low membership voting in almost all cases, so voting in such directors should not prove too difficult. One other thing, these directors commit to federated tender, that is they commit to do business with other participatory co-ops whenever possible.

Through the big multi billion $ credit unions and co-ops we achieve a diverse participant base representing significant actors in all sectors of the economy. This should allow us the birth or own economy (free of markets) through federation and some moves for strategic provisioning industries (energy, food, clothing). With enough of a capacity in the consumer goods we instituted a democratically planned currency, which, through the laws of neo-annexed Canada, allow for it to be IMF backed and thus allow for a transitional international trade system based in and determinisitically structured towards equity, solidarity, say proportionate to stake, and diversity.

The other strategic sectors are actually relatively easy to achieve scale in with only minor transitional tweaks to the current constitutional structures of executivism (representative democracy inclusive). We will need to finance a lobby wing in important jurisdictions to be able to maintain basic and small positions any attack on our participatory reorientations of democratic laws will be incredibly unpopular. The many of scale participatory networks we can achieve very quickly will make any ‘representative’ body that rigidly maintain old standards of control and governance look desperately out of step, making lobbying representatives a fairly easy task. There are even moves we can make from currently available positions to establish ‘pools’ of skilled workers that will go in ready to work within balanced job complexes and even remuneration based on effort and sacrifice. Full participatory venues require these two re-organizations of the valuation and division of labour, for as soon as you have transparent (holoptic) and equitable discourse you expose inequity (for which every business school has a plethora of techniques for preventing so that pay scales can be maintained with out mass de-moralization and even higher turn over rates). And if you want participatorily governed organizations, everyone needs to have an idea of a productive from multiple perspectives to be able to make informed perspectives (not to mention that specializing in one cubicle for 20 years is boring as f**k almost no matter what you do, or that hording of the rewarding tasks by a co-ordinator class is just immoral).

Back to culture, because, believe it or not, every other strategic sector can be attained fairly easily and at scale. At scale super easily if tied in through a cultural movement which isn’t nearly as available as participatorily federated ‘finance’, food, energy, clothing and housing is already.

There are no major cultural industry entities that participatory modes can get into immediately as in the other key industries. So we, I think fortunately, have to create our own cultural centre of gravity from which to coalesce open source and new, distributed network media around. I believe that by demarcating a new type of event with it’s own, member driven symbolisms, we get a whole new environment through which to communicate reflexively as a community movement full of solidarity and belonging. This enables us a loyalty to participatory producers who’s use of these codes to demarcate membership with the political economic of life also harkens to the new levels of meaning brought in participatory venues (whether those venues are festivals or a network of producers and consumers). Not only is this a mark of the meaningful reciprocity of meaningful solidarity/inclusion it roduction becomes a cultural discourse through the participatory design of products by consumers. Producers can harken back to this sublime involvement in community where the emphatic inclusion of all’s input give new levels of meaning to people’s life, and by doing so, invite participation in the design and distribution of consumer items. Festivals, in all their participatory activities might become design charettes of sorts where industrial, fashion and cultural products are designed in collective processes. This will totally re-form distribution and pretty well do away with marketing even in the cultural industries where I’ve been wondering about promotional/education necessity by artists for the general ‘consumer’ (but that’s just the thing, art becomes a participatory, community process, in it’s creation, reification, and distribution) even in parecon. Federated participatory producers can then use these

We can even slip our motifs/brand into the venues that aren’t ours but which slip our culture into that event and allow our participants to feel at home whether it be, Liverpool @ Manchester, the Super Bowl or Canada vs. Russia. Ultimately members of federated networks will bring our communities into pop culture, whether it be new form chants sung by football firms or rally regalia use at the rink.