Z Blogs
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
> I can't help but wonder whether any system can survive if it is too complex for the general public to understand. Is this serous? Parecon has a few key institutions and concepts, which a junior high school student could easily understand. To understa... (More) Comments (0)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
> In his model, Albert argues for balanced job complexes instead of a labor market. Balanced job complexes replace corporate division of labor – not labor markets. Hiring and also firing of workers is not a market exchange because the terms are not gove... (More) Comments (2)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
> 1. Ease of Communicating the Parecon Model to Others – Personally, I find that a major obstacle to many reforms is the inability to plainly summarize the proposed reform and the rationale for implementing it (i.e. as if one is organizing behind the prop... (More) Comments (2)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
The fourth student likes the ideas that, First, “participatory consumers must weigh the benefits of consumption requests against the sacrifices required to produce them.” Second, “participatory consumers must distinguish reasonable consumption requests fr... (More) Comments (0)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
Hmmmmm…these student comments are a bit longer than I anticipated…also a bit less in touch with the actual characteristics of parecon…but I started so I guess I will continue, though a bit more summarily than I had hoped, given these attributes. The Thir... (More) Comments (2)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
The second student worries about parecon's method of allocation. > For the purposes of making decision about allocation, Albert advocates 'decentralized participatory planning' (p. 122), in which members of a parecon, in their respective capacities as p... (More) Comments (0)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
In perusing the internet I found a pdf of comments by students, I think, of a sociology course (292) that used parecon for a reading. I thought I might briefly react to its contents in a few blog posts. The first student, after indicating his broad suppo... (More) Comments (0)
By Michael Albert at Jul 11, 2004
Recently on a number of occasions I have told people asking about how parecon the book and of course the model was doing, that it was an odd situation In the U.S., I have replied, while there is a lot of progress being made, especially as compared to the... (More) Comments (0)
By Michael Albert at Jul 10, 2004
I guess I am all out of patience and running dry on civility as well. Is it unreasonable to want to know where the left stands regarding capitalism and “other worlds”? Are various movements, institutions, media outlets, and constituencies anti-capitalist... (More) Comments (0)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
For what it's worth, polls in Iraq reveal very considerable and apparently growing support for withdrawal of the US occupying army, apart from the Kurdish regions. That doesn't mean withdrawal tomorrow. No one is talking about that, and it isn't even te... (More) Comments (3)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
The basic theory is incontrovertible. The only questions have to do with timing and cost. ... The date can be pushed back much farther if more costly (or maybe some to-be-discovered improved) technology is used. As for the estimates of cost, by reasonabl... (More) Comments (8)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
The sharp increase in focus on Iran's alleged threat (nuclear weapons, connections to terror, etc.) is very clear. ... The same has been true with regard to Syria (including last December's "Syria Accountability Act" passed almost unanimously in Congress... (More) Comments (5)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
Cuba was officially regarded as a security threat to the US until 1998, and when the Pentagon decided that maybe the US could survive a Cuban assault, the Clinton administration insisted that the threat must be defined as "negligible," but still real. Ba... (More) Comments (2)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
If the goal were security, Israel would have built the fence a few km inside its borders. It could then be a mile high, patrolled on both sides by the IDF, mined with nuclear weapons, utterly impenetrable. Perfect security. The problem would be that it ... (More) Comments (2)
By Noam Chomsky at Jul 10, 2004
The scheduled release of declassified documents in the official State Department history is 30 years. In practice it is a bit longer, about 35 years or so usually. Of course, not everything is declassified. Sometimes it turns out on independent investig... (More) Comments (0)


