The Call to Action
Don’t Give Them Bread: A Cooperative Plan for the Future
by Dr Lynne Wrennall
Executive Summary
In these key points below, we outline the main features of what DGTB is aiming to achieve and the main reasons that support the approach we are taking.
- The greatest challenges of our time threaten our species and our planet. Quid Remedium? We do what our species has always done to survive, we cooperate (Harari, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2022).
- The concept of polycrisis (Morin & Kern, 1999) refers to the mutually exacerbating relatedness of contemporary problems. It is inefficient, demoralising and even counterproductive to address problems in an unsystematic manner.
- Economic Democracy releases human creativity, serving as the pivotal point, a point of maximum leverage, offering the greatest potential to solve the multitude of problems plaguing our lives, from the merely annoying, to the catastrophic.
- Democracy is essential for quality assurance within a society.
- Economic Democracy is the only mechanism that we have to connect production decisions with people's needs, in a manner that cannot be distorted, corrupted or subverted.
- Decision-making around the entire process of production of goods and services, not only distribution, is crucial to human well-being. If we do not produce appropriate goods and services, it makes little sense to discuss distribution, equitable or otherwise.
- True sovereignty lies in production and consumption. It is only fitting that these irreducible interests of human beings become the fundamental organizing principles of society, forming the bedrock of a genuinely democratic society.
- Cooperatives are the institutional form of Economic Democracy. Ultimately what they produce, are lives worth living.
- Cooperatives stimulate greater motivation, because people are choosing for themselves, the aims they are working towards, and in turn they choose more noble aims, than merely serving the profit motive (Weber, Unterrainer & Höge, 2020; Autin et al, 2022; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Spear & Thomas, 1997).
- Organisations that are democratically run have proven themselves more able to produce public goods, merit goods and positive social impacts, reducing moral hazard and negative externalities (United Nations, 2014; Novković, Prokopowicz & Stocki, 2012; Spear & Thomas, 1997:466; Perotin, 2018; Arzeni, 2007:4).
- Political Democracy cannot survive without Economic Democracy.
- The way to return governments to democracy, is to establish democracy within the organisations that influence and control governments.
- Democratic procedures provide the means to resist hostile capture of organisations, corruption and predatory value extraction.
- Economic Democracy structures a democratic mechanism into the heart of economic activity, to produce outcomes that more closely align with the needs of people and the planet.
- Alienation in the workplace will be eliminated by work designs which provide Balanced Job Complexes, in which all roles equitably empower workers to make significant decisions and foster the development of a wide range of competencies, at different levels of complexity and desirability (Albert, et al. 2002; Albert, 2004; Albert, 2021; Albert & Hahnel, 1991; Albert & Hahnel, 2017; and Hahnel, 2022).
- Alienation is most able to be reduced in the Cooperatives envisaged in this plan because it operationalises the three sources of human happiness (Pink, 2010; Autin et al, 2022; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Deci, Connell & Ryan, 1989; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Deci, et al 2008):
2.Balanced Job Complexes develop mastery and;
3.Economic Democracy provides the opportunity to design work that can provide meaning and purpose.
- Our plan is to establish a strategic organisation that will transfer organisations from private or public ownership into cooperatives which would be democratically run by workers, and consumers/ service users or through universal membership.
- What makes this proposal unique, is that donations would be in the form of organisations, to be transferred into cooperatives. Hence the strategic organisation will be termed Don't Give Them Bread, because doners will be donating the entire bakery.
- The beneficiaries rather than the donors will decide for themselves how their needs will best be met.
- Releasing people's potential and maximising productivity requires employee financial ownership and real participation in decisions (Summers & Hyman, 2005: 52; Logue & Yates 2005).
- The project is situated not only in changing the lives of its immediate participants but within the larger scale of developing organisations which can buttress the social organisation of democracy itself.
- The project focuses on developing the social architecture which extensive research has shown provides the basis of human happiness and fulfilment (Pink, 2010; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Deci, Connell & Ryan, 1989; Deci & Ryan, 2000; Deci, et al 2008) and indeed, provides the basis for human survival (Harari, 2016, 2018, 2022).
The Full Report can be Downloaded Here: Image from Freepik
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