Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id545632683
he thought that it was necessary for a socialist movement to organize around ideas of democracy and ecology.
id545632734
Democracy needed to be a matter not of representation of people going into voting booths and sending representatives to Washington to make decisions on their behalf where they could easily become corrupted. He thought that power had to stay with the people in their localities. He argued for citizens’ assemblies, or what I like to call “assembly democracy”—
id545632750
a democracy organized around people in assemblies making decisions about their communities, and then over broader areas. The assemblies would send mandated delegates to confederations, where decisions could be made in the aggregate for larger areas. The purpose was to ensure that power flowed from the bottom up and not from the top down.
id545637888
he synthesizes the best of each different strand and takes the best from various traditions. He asks: can you take the best of the environmental movement and infuse that with some of the important insights of Marx and the best of direct democracy in Athens?
id545638009
his work answers numerous questions, like: How can you take the insights of Marx without adopting the kind of rigid, dogmatic authoritarian Marxism of the 20th century? How can you adopt an ecological worldview without being a primitivist who romanticizes early societies and gives up the benefits of modern technology? How can you take the good in the Anarchist tradition without the individualism? In each case, trying to synthesize these insights and steer away from extremes towards this wholly new and dialectical, if you will, approach that weaves these strands together
id545644548
He thought that the economy needed to be put in the hands of bottom up, self-governing bodies based on the assembly. He wanted technology to be decentralized
id545643803
He wanted automation to be small scale. It was about decentralizing and breaking up cities to small-scale cities that are integrated with agriculture.