Collective Allocation: Consensual Revolution

The Second Book Written About Llovizna

On a balmy tropical evening in April, 2023, five families met for dinner, music, and a conversation about economics. In particular, they discussed they way in which they wanted their community to operate when it reached the size and level of organization that they knew (based on the centuries of community building that their combined experience represented) would initiate the patterns that, over time, would calcify into the status quo—the economic game played by the community.

This group, Comunidad Ecológica del Río, wanted to be ready and able to control this transition, to consciously and intelligently create the rules of the system that was to be.

I’m a member of CER, so I’ll go ahead and drop the dramatic third person perspective.

That night I had the opportunity to present the budgeting system that we’ve used for years in my family—a form of Collective Allocation called Llovizna—to the rest of the families of the Comunidad Ecológica del Río. The community accepted my vision, and since then we’ve been working together to lay the ground for an unprecedented experiment in collective economics.

My second book on the topic, Consensual Revolution (2023), is based on the presentation I gave that night.

“The only technologies that are strictly required for this variation of the system are tarot cards, symbolic objects, coins, pens, and paper” - Consensual Revolution, Wesley Dawson 2023 // Photo by Content Pixie on Unsplash

Consensual Revolution is more concise than its predecesor Economic Democracy. At around thirty-five pages total, it might be better described as a zine, or pamphlet, than a book. It was designed to be an easy-to-understand primer on the system and the rational behind it, presenting the whole concept, as in the following excerpt, as both a gift and a game:

“Sistema Llovizna is a gift. Because it truly is a gift, you may use it like one. You may take it along with you on your journey, or you may leave it here unexplored. You may modify it or use it differently than I do. All that I ask is that you understand it before you decide.

“Llovizna is a gift, and it is also a game. A game like Poker, like the Stock Market, like the Federal Budget and Appropriations Process, or the allocation process of the Junta de Control Fiscal—a game that moves resources as it is played, changing the fate and behavior of each player in the process.

“The main difference between Llovizna and those other games, those other systems, is that Sistema Llovizna is profoundly, naturally and directly democratic. It is an elegant and consent-based method of managing the structure and budget of an organized collective that aligns human empathy and intuition in such a way as to increase transparency, alignment, diversity, respect and service leadership. The only technologies that are strictly required for this variation of the system are tarot cards, symbolic objects, coins, pens, and paper.”

—Collective Allocation: Consensual Revolution, Wesley Dawson 2023

This book, along with its predecessor Economic Democracy are available to my paid subscribers to download and share at will. Every month or so I’ll publish an article like this that includes a link to one of my published texts. I have a few other texts that I may make available, as well, such as Llovizna rulesets in English and Spanish, examples of how the system can be translated into “legalese,” and other related texts.

Thanks for subscribing, for reading, and for helping create new pathways, both neural and cultural!

‘Til soon,

Wesley