I resonate with Nathan’s enthusiasm for the “play” that the Occupy movement experienced as it experimented with means of self-governance. It got me excited about his book about the Occupy movement (Thank You, Anarchy), which I just ordered.
This kind of play around making rules reminded me of Richard Sennett’s early book, The Fall of Public Man, in which he corrects our association of play with spontaneity. Sennett describes play as a psychic principle “which leads children to invest a great deal of passion in an impersonal situation governed by rules, and to think of expression in the situation as a matter of the remaking and the perfecting of those rules to give greater pleasure and promote greater sociability with others. This is play” (315). It’s also, as Nathan says, part of “democracy as a creative practice,” or as you put it, “democracy as a horizon.”
This interview helps me connect Nathan's interest in the cooperative internet and Occupy Wall Street, evidenced here, with his interest in the Mondragon cooperatives as evidenced by his foreword in Solidarity Hall's Reflections: José María Arizmendiarrieta. As he says in this interview about the homestead acts of the 1860s, along with his caveats concerning the fencing of Native American land, “if you want a political democracy, you have to have an economic democracy.”
I resonate with Nathan’s enthusiasm for the “play” that the Occupy movement experienced as it experimented with means of self-governance. It got me excited about his book about the Occupy movement (Thank You, Anarchy), which I just ordered.
This kind of play around making rules reminded me of Richard Sennett’s early book, The Fall of Public Man, in which he corrects our association of play with spontaneity. Sennett describes play as a psychic principle “which leads children to invest a great deal of passion in an impersonal situation governed by rules, and to think of expression in the situation as a matter of the remaking and the perfecting of those rules to give greater pleasure and promote greater sociability with others. This is play” (315). It’s also, as Nathan says, part of “democracy as a creative practice,” or as you put it, “democracy as a horizon.”
This interview helps me connect Nathan's interest in the cooperative internet and Occupy Wall Street, evidenced here, with his interest in the Mondragon cooperatives as evidenced by his foreword in Solidarity Hall's Reflections: José María Arizmendiarrieta. As he says in this interview about the homestead acts of the 1860s, along with his caveats concerning the fencing of Native American land, “if you want a political democracy, you have to have an economic democracy.”
Marvelous! I can't wait to listen!
Lemme know whatcha think! :)