Chomsky & Varoufakis

So DiEM25 will do something radical: having seen the CVs some of you sent in, it’s obvious most volunteers are very smart and skilled people. Use these skills and self-organise to promote DiEM25. We trust you. Don’t wait for tasks but get together with a few other members, use your own intelligence to figure out how you can make DiEM25 a success, and then don’t wait for approval, just do it!For DiEM25 volunteers are much more than volunteers, help us develop DiEM25 together.DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives (DSCs)Our idea is not new. It harks back, among others, to the Scottish Enlightenment’s idea of ‘spontaneous order’, certain ideas or practices of self-management and cooperatives, and to Rick Falkvinge’s ‘swarms’. At DiEM25 we are giving these notions of self-organising participants  a new twist, combining physical meetings at Town Halls (where Coordinating Committees eventually emerge) with digital ‘platoons’ of DiEM25 members doing their bit to promote our Manifesto’s goals. Hope you like our neologism: DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives (DSCs)

There is one danger in all this that, together, we should avert: Attention-seeking activists should not be allowed to subvert DiEM25’s purpose or to ‘crowd out’ members who care more about the substance than their own image. Attention-seekers will maximise whatever behaviour can get them attention. Therefore, if you see people who are being provocative for the sake of it, just to draw attention to themselves, do not give them the gift of your attention. Instead, immediately turn to other people who are quietly doing something good and encourage them. This way, we shall build a culture that selects against self-seeking behaviour and in favour of activities that promote our common, Manifesto, goals.

However, in order to close the model mathematically, the only way to solve the equations is by making assumptions that distance the model from really existing capitalism. So for instance you have to assume that there’s no time and there’s no space, because if you allow time to interfere with your model, or space to enter, you end up with indeterminism. In other words, you end up with a system of equations that cannot be solved or that have an infinity of possible solutions and then you have no predictive power. You can’t say, “well, this is what’s going to happen.”[…]So the gurus, the popes, understood that this theory was examining a postcapitalist world, a world without labor markets, a world without the, you know, labor exploitation, without monopolies, without even the slightest of capacities to alter prices on the behalf of employers, of entrepreneurs, of conglomerates, a world without firms. Because what is a company? A company is a market-free zone, it’s a hierarchy, it’s a small Soviet Union with Gosplan and central planning. If you look at Google, if you look at Microsoft, that’s what it is.