Session the Future of the World Social Forum - preparing, conducting, follow up

 
 
Picture of Vera Vratuša
Re: abs Thomas, "Politics and the Utopian Laboratory"eng; Política y el laboratorio utópico es.
by Vera Vratuša - Wednesday, 28 October 2020, 4:03 PM
 

Your answer dear Thomas is more than helpful for the discussion of one of your main ideas concerning the building and realization of "a participatory, radical democracy that extends across all social domains" .

 The contemporary examples that you mention, Kerala in India, Porto Alegre in Brazil and Mondragon in Spain, present important still existing achievements of participatory democracy. They however present  democratic participation achievements within local regions of respective countries. Would  it not be interesting to explore the influence of the change in respective country’s governments on this local  democratic participation experiences, or experiments, if you prefer this expression?

I posed the question mentioning the Yugoslav self management experiment which existed from 1950 to 1989 because it had ambition,  in the formal legal sense of the respective Constitutions, to implement both economic and political democracy through the participation of workers, peasants and intellectuals in management of reproduction process in industrial, agricultural, educational, health, cultural and other organizations of associated labor, as well as through participation of citizens in the management of all levels of government, from neighborhood communities, communes, regions, constitutive multiethnic and multi confessional republics, up to the level of the socialist federal republic, through the system of elected and recallable delegates having received imperative mandates from their constituencies.

Elements of internal contradictions of this elaborate system of integral self management were becoming ever more visible at the latest from the middle of 1960s to the middle of the 1970, when centrifugal forces became ever stronger, leading to final dismantlement of self management with social property, through the tragic and bloody civil war from 1991 to 1995 and 1999 NATO military intervention with depleted uranium coated bombing. I have tried to analyze these internal and external destructive forces in the text "The Intrinsic Connection Between Endogenous and Exogenous Factors of Social (Dis)Integration: A Sketch of the Yugoslav Case” available at https://www.academia.edu/10495220/The_Intrinsic_Connection_Between_Endogenous_and_Exogenous_Factors_of_Social_Dis_Integration_A_Sketch_of_the_Yugoslav_Case .

Would you agree dear present and eventual future participants in this discussion that Yugoslav self management experiment and the lessons that can be drawn from its failure three decades ago, are still relevant for the actual attempts at scaling up and in the last instance globalization of the “participatory, radical democracy that extends across all social domains" ?