The Tokyo based People’s Plan Study Group (PPSG) is a network of a few hundred activists and action-committed intellectuals, engaged in the search for alternative, human-centred social, economic, and cultural systems. The PPSG was established in 1998 and developed out of the network of activists and processes that made up the PP21 initiative (People’s Plan for the 21st Century), which was a predecessor to the World Social Forum and which officially dissolved in 2002.
PPSG maintains a commitment to transborder solidarity, and sees itself as linking to other likeminded people and groups throughout Asia and the rest of the world, working to identify the transformative potentiality and capacities of the people and providing critical evaluations of past movements for social transformation.[i]
In its consciousness raising efforts and search for alternatives, it brings together activists from different movements for seminars, roundtables and strategic discussions, serving as a ‘networking institute’ for activist communities. Concomitantly, PPSG maintains an active listserv among its several hundred members, each of whom receives a hard-copy of its quarterly periodical, featuring thoughtful analyses, critiques and proposals. Further, it continues to produce knowledge on radical-democratic alternatives, most recently through an 18-month collaborative project that resulted in a book on Twelve Proposals for an alternative Japanese society.
While PPSG seeks to reach beyond borders, its cognitive praxis lacks the capacity and the international connections to act transnationally. Its board of directors continues to be comprised of activists based in Japan and its constituency is for most part contained within Japan’s national borders. In such a context, the resources of the group are directed primarily at consciousness-raising among the local population and their projects do not generally venture far beyond national domains.
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Endnotes
[i] See http://www.jca.apc.org/ppsg/en/, accessed February 11, 2015.