Practical Democratic Construction

I have been wondering how construction and other forms of creating would work in a socialistic society. This question seemed to bring up several complicated points of the organization and management of both the tools of the trade and what would be done with them. Tools, from my perspective, are means of production and should be put under the workers' control. This is not so obvious when considering a hammer but is clearly obvious when considering a crane or bulldozer. These tools are capital that make production possible through either man-power or automation and as such they are the people's property. The question that comes next is how the community decides what to use them on.

Consider this scenario: a town's population has grown so large that there is a necessity for new homes to be built. The community would vote for the construction of the project and allocate tools for the job. This seems very simple but what system are we to use to build and allocate the tools necessary with as little need for outsourcing the creation and application of the job?

The first issue is the construction of new equipment when the old ones decay. This process does not have to be done on a nation-wide level or even a region-wide level. In fact, every city can produce their own machinery. There is a project called Open Source Ecology that seeks this concept in our current society as a way of dramatically reducing cost, both of the final product, the construction of the product, and the research to plan the product. I will allow the founder of the group to explain it in one short video and another more detailed one:





This settles the matter of how to construct the tools without worrying about how to co-ordinate large scale manufacturing with the people's needs. The next question that arises from these ideas is how to allocate these tools within the community. For this I turn to the idea of Tool Banks. How this could work in a socialistic society is that the people that have need of tools or if a committee needs to address a community need they would borrow a tool from the tool bank. This sounds simple enough in a socialist society but there are currently attempts to institute this idea in Capitalism. I think that if this idea catches hold that it would give people a better grasp of how society could be instead of accepting what is. I shall allow one advocate to explain it themselves:



These I think are excellent social advancements in organization.

Bump