A Program Seeking Participatory Allocation

Michael Albert

Participatory planning is the allocation component of participatory economics. Producers and consumers organized in councils cooperatively negotiate labor, resource, and output allocations. The procedure organizes economic choices and simultaneously fosters participatory self-management. That's the vision, but visions result from long years of organizing, educating, and fighting for short-range demands that embody the vision’s basic principles and bring us incrementally closer to their realization,

So what short-run demands can foster participatory planning? Eight broad areas of change stand out for me.

 

Council Infrastructure and Knowledge Base

Participatory planning stands on two primary pillars: democratic participatory councils and wide dispersal of all information relevant to economic decision-making. Thus, to establish or strengthen workplace or consumer councils or to enlarge access to information supports participatory planning. For example, efforts to win workers’ rights to meet and/or convene their own on-the-job rank-and-file organizations are very positive. And likewise efforts to “open the books” in a firm or in government economic institutions are also part and parcel of developing norms and consciousness supporting participatory planning.

Market Prices

One reason to favor participatory planning is that it gets prices right. Rather than over-valuing goods with negative public effects or under-valuing those with positive public effects, parecon properly accounts for impacts “external to the buyer and seller” including specifically accounting for the full social impact on workers and the environment. So to intervene in markets to move prices toward true valuations promotes participatory planning. For example, demands to tax goods with bad environmental or human by-products (such as liquor, cigarettes, or cars), or to subsidize goods with desirable impact external to the “buyer and seller,” such as health care, socially valuable skills training, parks, low-income housing, and education, are all “pareconish.” In other words, parecon consumer or other movements should critique not only prices inflated by monopoly power, but even prices that are reasonable in market terms but unreasonable in social and human terms.

Qualitative Descriptive Information

One of the methods parecon employs to ensure that its indicative prices reflect true social costs and benefits as well as guard against alienated behavior and mechanistic ignorance of the human dimensions of economics, is to incorporate into planning not only quantitative indicators, but also qualitative information about what goes into producing goods and what their consumption means to people. It follows that demands about honest and comprehensive labeling and advertising, particularly to include information bearing on the conditions of workers or impact on broader social relations, can also be foster the values and mindsets of parecon, contributing to preparing for its full implementation. Imagine honest labeling and advertising--truly honest…

Sharing and Solidarity

One of the ills of market exchange is that it presses all actors toward individualist rather than collective consumption, even when this is harmful not only socially, but to the direct participant. Parecon, in contrast, is as able to offer collective as private solutions. For example, are private autos better than decent public transit for inner city travel? On a smaller scale, does it make sense for everyone in an apartment complex to be almost totally isolated from everyone else, getting no benefits from sharing collective goods? Does it make sense to pay for the tremendous redundancy of everyone having their own instance of every imaginable commodity?

Workers’ councils aren’t the only place where citizens can usefully conceive and fight for worthy demands. Not only can consumer movements fight about prices and provision of qualitative information, as indicated above, and about government budgets and related matters, as indicated below, they can also locally conceive how their members might benefit from pooling their resources and sharing purchases collectively. The only struggle in this instance is with old mindsets, but the resulting increase in social interaction, fulfillment, and solidarity, is certainly part of building a pareconish mentality. 

Human Needs not Profitability

In parecon, unlike capitalism, collective consumption and investment are handled within the general planning process that gives each person proportionate input. This leads to collective consumption and investment interactively oriented toward the well-being and development of all actors. Thus, demands which seek to put people above profit in government economic choices are pareconish, whether we are talking about reducing war spending and curtailing sops to corporate power, or expanding social spending on housing, health, welfare, education, social infrastructure, or art. 

Democratize Budgets

One way to affect government budgets is to agitate on behalf of better choices, as suggested above. Another way is to alter the processes by which town, city, county, state, or national budgets are proposed and then decided on. Demands that increase public involvement and empowerment, particularly via fledgling council structures that could grow into parecon institutions, can improve our lot in the present and also lay the groundwork for a preferred future. The demand isn’t for input into an unimportant subset of the budget, of course, but into how options are proposed throughout the budget, and of course into making decisions about all proposed options, as well.

 

More Leisure Less Labor

Markets intrinsically pressure actors to work longer hours and enjoy less leisure. Competition does this nasty job, generating strong incentives to overwork and ensuring that if a few do raise their labor hours, all others in related endeavors must do so as well, lest they suffer irreparable losses. Think of current high-powered law firms to see that this occurs even against the desires of powerful people. The lawyers are pushed into trying to endlessly raise their billable hours, taking on as many new clients as can be had, even beyond their own manic personalities and greed. If they relent, some other firm may become more powerful, gobbling up market share, and the non manic firm runs the risk not merely of having more leisure at the cost of less income (which many and maybe all its members would prefer), but of losing their firm entirely. Thus we see an upward spiral in work hours per week and a decline in vacation time. And this occurs despite increasing productivity that could sustain high output without excessive labor allotments. Comparing 1960 to 2000, we could have the same per capita output now, but work literally half as much, say a four hour workday or two weeks off every month, or a year on and then a year off, alternately over our lifetimes, for example.

Parecons generate no such pressure to expand work hours regardless of growing productivity. The choice of upping output without limit (not to mention with most people not sharing in it) or having a life, is not biased to the former by competitive survival needs. Thus, demands over workday length, length of the work week, vacation time, and time more generally are not only good ways to redistribute wealth, they are also means to get at this leisure destroying feature of our economy, and to propel pareconish calculations and aspirations.

Participatory Allocation in our Movements

As with every other dimension of economic or other focuses of movement struggle, it is necessary to incorporate in our own efforts the aims and structures we propose for the broader society outside. What can that mean in this case?

There is no allocation in each movement project and organization other than what we have mentioned in earlier commentaries regarding remuneration or allocation of tasks. But what about between our projects and organizations? What determines how many resources go to left print versus radio versus video, or to particular efforts in any of these left media? What determines how many resources are at the disposal of struggles around police violence and matters of race, or reproductive rights and matters of gender, or international relations and matters of war and peace, or domestic or global economics and matters of class? And what about allocations for local as compared to regional or national projects?

In the broad progressive or left community there is often no self conscious “allocation planning” of any sort at all, much less participatory planning. Allocation issues most often aren’t even openly raised, much less democratically decided. In fact, a key determinant of current left allocation is competitive fund raising and related essentially market and power defined dynamics. But just as having a parecon movement implies that within each institution we should seek balanced job complexes, just rewards in accord with effort and sacrifice, and participatory self management, shouldn’t it also mean that we attempt to imbue in the left project as a whole with elements of mutual aid and sharing and social planning?

As with other internal innovations, incorporating participatory allocation features in our movements won’t be easy, nor accomplished overnight. After all, at the moment progressive and left operations, projects, organizations, and “businesses” are barely more entwined and socially planned than are their corporate counterpart institutions in the mainstream. At a minimum, then, without prejudging precisely what can and ought to be done, it seems quite fair to at least suggest that there is considerable room for innovation and improvement regarding movement “planning” and mutual benefit.