Advocating for ACT

  1. DeLeonist
    DeLeonist
    Hi there

    Regarding increasing the exposure and support for ACT, I think two prime areas for advocating for Anarchist/Communist Technocracy in the current sociopolitical environment are:

    1) arguing the merits of a revolutionary perspective with "Zeitgeist Addendum" types (who may favour a gradualist or alternative economy approach).

    2)arguing the merits of technocracy with traditional leftists, who often see technocracy as unrealistic, utopian or "crackpot".

    I was wonderring what thoughts, strategies or experiences other ACT supporters have in relation to these two groups??

    I recently had a discussion with some older generation marxists which might be of interest. They started off very skeptical of technocracy but seem to have ended up a little less so (i am Jad in the discussion).
  2. Cult of Reason
    Cult of Reason
    Well, most of the results of 2 can be seen on this forum (though my activity in doing it has waned in the last year and a half).

    IIRC, my strategy was: show the similarities first, and then explain Energy Accounting. Later, when discussing organisational structure, be careful of the parts that can be interpreted as authoritarian or elitist and, depending on your personal view of the subject, discard some parts or add others. For instance, the original Technocrats sounded quite anti-democratic in some instances, had one guy who was supposed to oversee everything from the top (and I discard that) and did not really say much about how the non-social elements would be handled, so I added a second structure to the design for ACT.

    I have avoided the ZA types because I do not have the time for more than one forum, because they seem to have conspiracy nuts and because I do not feel I have the energy to argue for the revolutionary approach.

    Also, when Serpent posted my article there, they did not seem to be able to stay on topic or, except for one of them, read the article at all. The one who DID read the article then started going on about organic farming (which was not particularly relevant)... I was not impressed.

    Serpent's post is here: http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/...33431&limit=10

    It can also be found by searching for: zeitgeist movement haraldur
  3. DeLeonist
    DeLeonist
    [FONT=Times New Roman, sans-serif]Yes, the ZM people do seem a bit of an insular bunch, as if the "truth" was revealed in the movies without any historical antecedents or any need to explore anywhere else. Nevertheless, and as was said somewhere else on Revleft, I think that names like Marx and Lenin have too many negative associations in the mind of the general public in the West, so the seeds of a new revolutionary consciousness may lie in movements such as ZM.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, sans-serif]Agree with you that best strategy in engaging the interest other leftists in technocracy lies in initially showing similarities of technocracy to other strands of communist/ anarchist thought. In relation to energy accounting, some may think this goes against the notion of labor being the source of value, but I don't see this as a problem as the labor theory of value was meant to explain the capitalist mode of production and not a post-capitalist, maximally automated society.[/FONT]

    [FONT=Times New Roman, sans-serif]By the way, the links to your post-scarcity report do not seem to be working - says file is no longer available publicly.[/FONT]
  4. Cult of Reason
    Cult of Reason
    By the way, the links to your post-scarcity report do not seem to be working - says file is no longer available publicly.
    My filehost kept unsharing it. Here it is on rapidshare:

    http://rapidshare.com/files/21849700...ersion_1.0.pdf