Exploring Libertarian Municipalism and Parecon...

[ZNet Editor's Note: In early November, 1999, ZNet posted an article by Michael Albert entitled Assessing Libertarian Municipalism. This page is devoted to discussion of that article. It includes messages received and rejoinders and explorations that ensued, as best we have been able to assemble them. Older at the top, newer as you go down.

One note on how these were transcribed. Exchanges have been by email, via listservs, and so on, and often include quoting. All messages have been reproduced in full below -- save for one proviso. Since whole threads are included, to keep redundancy to a bearable minimum, where a message quotes from the immediately prior message for context, that is included. But where a message includes accumulated quotation from further back -- often due to the writer's simply not deleting the material -- which doesn't bear on the immediate reply, that is removed. This is done similarly throughout. At any rate, any reader can see all the words of any exchange easily enough, by reading all the messages in turn. Where we noticed, we have also cleaned up typos and misspelling. Again, older at the top, newer as you go down the list.]

Anonymous Response forwarded to us
This appeared on some listserv and was kindly sent our way...

In an article on libertarian municipalism by Michael Albert some concerns were raised (see below) that I, so far, have not seen any replies to by adherents of libertarian municipalism. Is there a reply to Albert somewhere on the web?

Albert: "Insofar as libertarian municipalism is a vision for a new type polity, in addition to wondering why the authors don't discuss mechanisms for adjudicating disputes (the kind of thing that now leads to law suits) and handling difficult problems of enforcement-I also wonder why they feel that each citizen needs to be directly involved, face-to-face, in all decisions."

Well, perhaps if Albert tried reading and thinking first and questioning later, he wouldn't produce sentences full of confused notions like this, which would take an entire essay to straighten out. First of all, most of the disputes that end up in lawsuits today happen in the first place because of the hierarchical, class society -- one that is in addition heavily bureaucratized and statified -- that we live in, a society that necessarily creates myriad competing interests on many more levels than can be discussed here, on an e-list. People tend to forget that these competing interests are the main reason why law in this society is so insanely complex and obfuscatory; laws can literally be hundreds of pages long when written out, because of the myriad "loopholes" and "breaks" and "exemptions" that must be in place to serve the various interests with which the various legislators are each embroiled. This of course requires an army of state-technicians (lawyers) -- and yet another enormous bureaucracy ("legal system") -- to dispute and interpret, etc, all these various subsections of this and that and the other thing. In a rational society such as the one envisioned in libertarian municipalism this incredible waste of energy would no longer be necessary, as in a stateless, classless society, competing interests would be greatly reduced and ultimately, under conditions of libertarian communism, eliminated altogether.

In an LMist society, disputes would be resolved politically in the assembly or at a confederal level, depending upon the dispute. How this would be done exactly is not really for us to decide, as what we envision is a direct democracy. These are the sorts of issues that people in assembly will decide for themselves, as the build their new society. If "radicals" like Albert need to have every conceivable t crossed and i dotted in advance of a new society (why even bother to have a democracy if every detail is worked out in advance?) they might as well just join the Democratic Party and run for Congress, as their line of reasoning just runs them straight backwards into reformism.

To the greatest extent possible, enforcement would take the form of trying to reason with people in a rational political debate, in an authentically democratic forum, be it local or confederal, where, again, the people would decide. If recalcitrance remains an issue there are various other means of persuasion -- economic boycott, for example. And issues of human rights or counterrevolution would be resolved, if necessary, by means of the militia if means short of violence prove ineffective. Finally, too, as in every society known or imagined, there will always be a few dangerous or dangerously antisocial people who will have to be isolated from the society, in this case, of course, in the most humane way possible. Again, one would hope that in a different form of society, there would be many fewer people developing in this direction. But there will always be some. And even Bakunin, by the way, believed that there were some people who, by their own actions, place themselves outside of society and therefore its protections. So they would have to be dealt with as humanely as possible, but dealt with just the same. I would personally be much more concerned about political threats to freedom in the form of counterrevolution and the various ways that economic interests might re-emerge in capitalist formations if the resolve, consciousness, and vigilance of the citizenry were to decline.

Finally, if Albert would read, he would say that we do not insist that "every" citizen need be directly involved in "every" decision. What we insist on is a direct democracy in which every citizen would have the concrete opportunity to be as directly involved as he or she wishes. Not all people, even in revolutionary situations, engage themselves politically to the same extent. Some are totally engaged on one side and some, hopefully few, are not engaged at all on the other, with an entire range of engagement between. This talk of "every" citizen etc is simply childish. Even in the sections of revolutionary Paris -- one of the most democratic of historical situations -- during the most revolutionary times, there were many citizens who did not attend meetings, assemblies, rallies, etc, for various reasons, much less did "every" citizen man the barricades. The point is that, in a democracy, they can be engaged if they want to be; outside one, they cannot, even if they do want to be.

Albert: "While the general thrust of the assembly vision seems positive, why must it be exclusive? Why is it unwise to use other decision-making mechanisms as well, when assemblies aren't optimal? I am not sure, for example, why libertarian municipalism feels that no means of representation can ever be designed to function compatibly with popular assemblies, preserving democracy but functioning better in situations that transcend small group concerns."

While it's nice to know that Albert thinks "the general thrust" of direct democracy is "positive," apparently he's willing to settle for "representative democracy" -- in short, republicanism -- for decisions that are not "optimal" for the people themselves to decide. So, again, why not just run for Congress and drop the pretense of radicalism? He also ignores the entire subject of confederation which, in a directly democratic manner through recall and mandate, functions "better in situations that transcend small group concerns." (Notice we are still talking about "groups" here, while in LM, we are talking about the citizenry as citizens, not as members of "groups.")

In short, if Albert knew half as much as he thinks he knows about LM, he would not have raised these red herrings in the first place.

 

Albert's Reply to Per-Anders Svärd

I received a message from Per-Anders Svärd, as advocate of Parecon, in the mail...I'm not sure precisely by what route I got the message. It seems to have been written to a listserv and then forwarded to me. It refers to and reacts to an article that I wrote and placed on ZNet, and mailed to various folks... I am replying, via my email reply button. I don't even know where that means this reply is going...if anywhere...so I will try to be brief.

Critic: In an article on libertarian municipalism by Michael Albert some concerns were raised (see below) that I, so far, have not seen any replies to by adherents om libertarian municipalism. Is there a reply to Albert somewhere on the web?

The article was just placed on line, mailed somewhat earlier to a number of folks central to the social ecology project... Janet Biehl and Murray Bookchin both replied to me right away that they looked forward to responding to the points raised and hoped that a lively and productive discussion would ensue -- one that would be, in their words, "comradely and constructive"...but, because they are working on a book on deadline it would be some time before they could get to it. I replied, sure, that's okay, no rush, good luck with the book, I look forward to seeing it.

I wouldn't have expected reactions from anyone else so soon either.

Critic: "Well, perhaps if Albert tried reading and thinking first and questioning later, he wouldn't produce sentences full of confused notions like this, which would take an entire essay to straighten out."

I wonder why it is necessary to be uncivil, even in the first line of a communication, even before making a single substantive point. I trust that won't be typical of replies. I shall try not to follow suit...

Critic: First of all, most of the disputes that end up in lawsuits today happen in the first place because of the hierarchical, class society -- one that is in addition heavily bureaucratized and statified -- that we live in, a society that necessarily creates myriad competing interests on many more levels than can be discussed here, on an e-list.

I am quite aware that many of the types of disputes now adjudicated and many of the criminal actions now dealt with by law courts as well as modes of enforcement will not exist in a desirable future society -- but that doesn't mean that these functions entirely disappears. Not to me, anyhow.

Among economists there is a joke...an economist, physicist, and chemist are stranded on an island. They have lots of cans of food, nothing else to eat. They have no can opener. The physicist arranges a very complicated combination of rocks and levers to hit the can just right to get an opening large enough to pour the food out. The chemist devises a fire with a heat just such as to slowly crack the top from increased pressure, thus getting at the food. The economist says: "assume a can opener...."

For a visionary to say -- and I am not sure this is what you (whoever this is I am replying to) intend to say, but it is something many visionaries do say -- that there is economic plenty and thus no need for choice, or that there are people with perfect personalities so there are an insignificant number of disputes, or that there is essentially no violence, etc. is, I think, comparable to saying assume a can opener.

Critic: People tend to forget that these competing interests are the main reason why law in this society is so insanely complex and obfuscatory; laws can literally be hundreds of pages long when written out, because of the myriad "loopholes" and "breaks" and "exemptions" that must be in place to serve the various interests with which the various legislators are each embroiled.

Indeed, you get no argument from me on this. But then nothing I said in the piece suggests that you would. And all this tells us is that in a good society laws having to do with can dos and can't dos will be quite a bit simpler than now and that there will be fewer areas of dispute that require adjudication and that, as well, there will be less rationale and less cause for violence and crime and therefore less need for legal actions of that sort too -- but that still leaves us with describing those dimensions of the polity, nonetheless -- which was my point.

Critic: This of course requires an army of state-technicians (lawyers) -- and yet another enormous bureaucracy ("legal system") -- to dispute and interpret, etc, all these various subsections of this and that and the other thing. In a rational society such as the one envisioned in libertarian municipalism this incredible waste of energy would no longer be necessary, as in a stateless, classless society, competing interests would be greatly reduced and ultimately, under conditions of libertarian communism, eliminated altogether.

This is, in my view, like assuming a can opener. In a good society, the best I can envision, there will still be serious disputes, there will be conflicts, there will be jealousies, there will be pathologies....there will be need of means of adjudication, intervention, and even enforcement -- different than now, to be sure, which is why a vision of a better polity ought to talk about such matters, it seems to me.  

Critic: In an LMist society, disputes would be resolved politically in the assembly or at a confederal level, depending upon the dispute. How this would be done exactly is not really for us to decide, as what we envision is a direct democracy.

Well, okay, if that's the view, so be it. I don't find it very convincing, I admit, but others might. But in the book I read even that much wasn't said...there was simply no reference to the issues.

Critic: These are the sorts of issues that people in assembly will decide for themselves, as the build their new society.

You might as well say the same about the assemblies themselves, or about anything else. It is either useful to envision desirable institutions or it isn't. If it is, as I believe, then it would seem to me that just as law making bodies are a good thing to envision, for example assemblies, so too are legal institutions.

Critic: If "radicals" like Albert need to have every conceivable t crossed and i dotted in advance of a new society (why even bother to have a democracy if every detail is worked out in advance?) they might as well just join the Democratic Party and run for Congress, as their line of reasoning just runs them straight backwards into reformism.

Is this type rhetoric necessary? In any event, taking your point at face value, I fail to see how wanting to hear how a proposed desirable polity would deal with legal issues, among others, leads back to wanting only to ameliorate ills within our existing society.

Critic: To the greatest extent possible, enforcement would take the form of trying to reason with people in a rational political debate, in an authentically democratic forum, be it local or confederal, where, again, the people would decide.

So my neighbor is drunk and threatening me... My husband is trying to beat me to death... The person I jilted last week after a year long relationship is stalking me... Some pervert soul is killing people for kicks and I see him down the block... There is a dispute over x that involves two or let's say four folks and me...

In these cases I wait for an assembly meeting and take it there and try to reason with all parties with the whole town, or everyone who cares to, partaking of it. I am not impressed with this as a vision for judicial institutions...but maybe others are.

If your answer is, hey, your examples miss the point, in an LM society no one gets drunk, no one beats anyone, no one gets into a jealous rage, no one is homicidal, and no disputes that involve only a few people occur...I say that is assuming a can opener, which is to say, assuming away problems that are real and require attention.

If the answer is sure, that exists, it will need methods of dealing, but we'll wait and see...well, then I don't understand why LM is so adamant about many issues but about the legal and police functions of the state, usually thought to be among its most oppressive in past practice, it is silent. There may be a good reason, but I haven't perceived it.

Critic: If recalcitrance remains an issue there are various other means of persuasion -- economic boycott, for example. And issues of human rights or counterrevolution would be resolved, if necessary, by means of the militia if means short of violence prove ineffective.

Well, this to me just doesn't have much to do with real world circumstances of the sort I raised above, which could be enlarged ad infinitum...which is to say that I doubt the desirability of trying to deal with the sorts of problems noted above (a tiny sample of what might be listed) by economic boycotts and militias...

Critic: Finally, too, as in every society known or imagined, there will always be a few dangerous or dangerously antisocial people who will have to be isolated from the society, in this case, of course, in the most humane way possible. Again, one would hope that in a different form of society, there would be many fewer people developing in this direction.

Yes, we agree on this....

Critic: But there will always be some. 

Yes, again we agree, and so we need to have some idea of how that part of the polity functions, which is all I asked for in this segment of the article, which you have responded to. I don't see why doing so leads to this exchange...

Critic: Finally, if Albert would read, he would say that we do not insist that "every" citizen need be directly involved in "every" decision. What we insist on is a direct democracy in which every citizen would have the concrete opportunity to be as directly involved as he or she wishes.

In other words, it is desirable that everyone who wants to be directly involved in any decision they wish to be able to be involved, with everyone having the same vote and majority deciding. Yes, I understand, and it is not obvious to me why this is in fact important, much less a high priority, among other concerns I have with it. These are enunciated in the piece...and here you don't really treat them...for example, the desirability of each actor having a say proportionate to the degree they are affected instead of the mechanical one-person one-vote which makes sense sometimes, but not others.

And actually, what I read in Janet's book and quoted in the piece I wrote gives only one mechanism for decisions -- maybe there are others in the LM vision, or even in the book, but that's all I found. That is votes, majority votes, in assemblies. There are Congresses of delegates too, but in what I read all that happens there is the delegates come with instructions that they carry out--thus, they bring the results of votes in the more local assemblies so in fact the decision/vote was taken locally, and the delegates are merely bringing the results together -- I didn't understand why this was the approach, as I noted in the piece I wrote.

Critic: While it's nice to know that Albert thinks "the general thrust" of direct democracy is "positive," apparently he's willing to settle for "representative democracy" -- in short, republicanism -- for decisions that are not "optimal" for the people themselves to decide.

This doesn't really seem to me to be an answer...nor does the last phrase relate to what I wrote in the full essay. An answer would be an argument for why, as but one example, having recallable representatives elected in truly open and sensible ballots make decisions on behalf of their constituencies in some situations, cannot be anything but inferior to having ballots that everyone can vote on. Why, also, having votes that require something other than majority rule can't ever be more appropriate than having only majority votes.

Critic: So, again, why not just run for Congress and drop the pretense of radicalism?

Is this a general approach to addressing critical views and questions. Just keep saying that if someone disagrees with something you believe, then they must be a closet Congressional candidate?

Critic: He also ignores the entire subject of confederation which, in a directly democratic manner through recall and mandate, functions "better in situations that transcend small group concerns."

Actually I didn't ignore this. I quoted a description of it and then wondered about it. Yes, I would have thought this would have been the basis for a proposed solution for some of the kinds of concern I had. But when I read about federation it wasn't -- instead, it was a kind of human delivery system for a plebiscite. Now maybe I got the wrong impression, though I did quote the passages that led me to believe that the delegates -- sharply and explicitly distinguished from representatives -- were only permitted to voice the pre-stated, in writing no less, views of their constituents.

Critic: In short, if Albert knew half as much as he thinks he knows about LM, he would not have raised these red herrings in the first place.

Well, then I maybe I only know a quarter of what I think I know...

Response from Gary Sisco

Michael:

I apologize for the slowness of my response; I haven't been online much for a week or so. And I am sorry also for causing offense with my tone. I'm not at all sure about email as a medium for political debate, as there is something about its immediacy that tends to make prickly personalities, like mine, more prickly still. Anyway, to address what seem to be your main concerns:

Re assemblies and other representative bodies that you apparently think might need to exist at some confederal or other than municipal levels of society: It is true that libertarian municipalism rejects the notion of "representation" and insists that power must reside with the people in popular assemblies, be they town, city or neighborhood. The reason for this is quite simple, really, from our perspective, because libertarian municipalism seeks to create an authentic democracy, not simply "more democratic" versions of representational institutions. Once "representation" appears, an institution (and a body of people) exists apart from and over the citizenry -- an institution of rule, however one may fudge language. That is why in libertarian municipalism, confederal assemblies are composed of mandated and immediately recallable delegates, not representatives. The delegates are only empowered by the popular assemblies to fulfill their mandates by casting their weighted votes in accordance with the will of their citizens' assembly and to oversee the administration of policy decided by the confederated assemblies. These confederal delegates are expressly not empowered to create policy. As you know, we consider these distinctions between creation and administration of policy to be crucial points, and on this we do not compromise. The confederal bodies in libertarian municipalism do not exist over and above the popular assemblies. (By the way, this is a very traditional aspect of confederalism in libertarian tradition. Even if too often honored in the breach, this is the way the CNT and FAI, for example, structured their organizations.) So, yes, I suppose that, in a certain way of speaking, you might refer to votes of confederal bodies as being plebiscites. But, obviously, they would also be forums for debate and discussion, and there is nothing stopping delegates from returning to their assemblies if they encounter, for example, some good, perhaps unconsidered ideas in confederal debates that might change a local assembly's position on one thing or another. But the delegates would not be empowered to act on their own in ways that are not in accord with their mandates. They are not junior congressmen, and if they were to become so, then society would have moved, whatever language we choose to use, from being a democracy to at least an incipient republican form of statism (at best).

Re adjudication of disputes: Any civilized society requires law and some form of court system to adjudicate disagreements that cannot be otherwise resolved, or to deal with seriously antisocial behavior, and also, I might add, with counterrevolution -- democracies can be overthrown (or "evolve" into statist systems from lack of consciousness and vigilance) and in fact, historically, have always been (so far). Needless to say, these things would not look anything like the systems in place in the existing society: Indeed, in a propertyless, classless, and stateless society, the whole notion of "crime" would be radically changed and, in many cases, would simply cease to exist. (What would be the point of stealing in a society without private property and based on "from each according to ability and to each according to need"?) What precisely these institutions would look like and how precisely they would function is, to me, a debate that will need to take place and be decided by the people in their assemblies and confederations, in the process of creating their new society. Here, I can only offer personal opinions of what I would think an acceptable solution to the problem. I would hope for -- and struggle for -- a very public form of court, with very large juries (perhaps several hundred) chosen by sortition, and for "trials" where each side had ample opportunity to present its views and arguments. I would argue for a smaller group of "judges," also chosen by sortition, that would act more as moderators whose purpose is to ensure that the new society's accepted and democratically determined rules for such institutions are observed. I am well aware that many people are afraid of the notion of sortition. But libertarian municipalism also has a distinct view and definition of citizenship, as you know, as not just a legalistic category but as a way of being political in a democratic society. The process of creating that society and citizenry that we hope for is itself the school for creating educated, democratic citizens. Indeed, we can think of no other. Therefore, in a libertarian municipalist society, all adult citizens of sound mind would be viewed as competent to serve in these capacities (as, indeed, citizens are viewed as competent to serve as jurors -- not to mention as congressional delegates -- even in the existing society).

But, again, as to the actual makeup of legal institutions in a future society, it is not for me, or anyone, to decide these things in too detailed a way in advance. For one thing, I don't think any of us has sufficiently liberated our own minds from the shaping of our thinking that has necessarily taken place by having lived in the present system. We are all, even the most liberated thinkers among us, products of society, culture, and history. The best we can hope for is a distant view of what life would really be like in an authentically revolutionized democracy. In the same way that I find it unacceptable to use too much historical hindsight when criticizing the past, I also find it unacceptable to drag too much of the present along with us into the future.

As for your specific example of antisocial behavior -- a drunken nitwit stalking and terrorizing a woman -- again, I can only offer personal opinions. One, I don't think that there would be many people behaving in this sort of fashion after a long and conscious struggle on the part of many, hopefully most of the people to create a new society such as the one that we envision, if only because most people after such an experience would simply not countenance such behavior. Indeed, even in the existing society, such behavior can be dealt with very differently and more effectively when other people not directly involved in the relationship intervene. Public pressure and even ostracization can count for a lot, in my view, in stopping these forms of boorishness. For example, once a comrade and I lived in an apartment building in a medium-sized Vermont town, where most of the tenants were single mothers, most on welfare a good deal of the time, and none very much affected by feminism or anything of the sort. Many of them were also terrorized by former or current male companions. We got sick of that right away and began intervening on our own by basically informing the men that they were going to leave, right now, or suffer serious consequences; that if there was any more violence or terrorism against women in the building that they would have to deal with us, and that we would definitely cause them injury and pain if they came around again. For many of those women, it was the first time anyone had ever intervened on their behalf and it was very interesting to see what developed, as, eventually, some of them began to defend themselves and their friends -- once chasing a batterer from the building themselves with baseball bats. And for the men, it was definitely the first time they'd ever been confronted with other men (aside from cops). For them, too, I assure you it was an eye opener. And, at least in that building while we lived there, behavior that was considered traditional changed pretty damned fast. I suppose some would call it vigilantism, but I assure you it was much more effective than the current way of dealing with this problem. We chose to call it counterterror.

Gary Sisco
 

Reply from Albert to Sisco

I previously received comments from someone named Per-Anders Svärd about the article I wrote on Libertarian Municipalism (now also available on ZNet, linked from the top of this page). I replied in some detail...and now have received comments from Gary Sisco. These comments also seem to be from a listserv for Social Ecology.

> (Gary wrote:) I apologize for the slowness of my response; ... And I am sorry also for causing offense with my tone. I'm not at all sure about email as a medium for political debate...

With email is that you don't see facial expressions or hear tone. It is easy to take something as harsher than it really is, to reply in kind, and to then spiral out of control. On the other hand, email makes quoting very easy, and this can help.

> Re assemblies and other representative bodies that you apparently think might need to exist at some confederal or other than municipal levels of society: It is true that libertarian municipalism rejects the notion of "representation" and insists that power must reside with the people in popular assemblies, be they town, city or neighborhood.

But what does that mean? It seems to mean, as noted in my essay and last message, that the local assemblies must vote on everything. But then they are just a place for people to bring already-determined and written out instructions -- issue by issue. If so, there is no point, that I can see. That is, if LM requires that every issue is addressed and decided in local assemblies, why bother choosing delegates to take the votes to a higher smaller congress and announce them for a tally? It adds nothing...

As for the advisability of having all decisions decided locally, that's a different issue that I had many comments about in the essay and last message.

> The reason for this is quite simple, really, from our perspective, because libertarian municipalism seeks to create an authentic democracy, not simply "more democratic" versions of representational institutions.

This explains liking each actor to vote on each matter in their local assembly. But it does not explain, given that choice, what the purpose or value of confederal bodies at some higher level is. Nor does it tell us, even just regarding legislation, how normal human beings are supposed to live full lives and also concern themselves with every political decision-making matter -- legislative, judicial, executive -- that occurs at their own assembly level and also at every higher (more encompassing geographic level) up to the whole country. Nor does it tell us any of the information requirements or how they are met. Nor does it address what to me is the deeper issue of different actors rightly deserving to have different influence.

Obviously I am not saying you should have done all that in your reply -- but the problem is, I haven't been able to find where LM does it, at all...

> Once "representation" appears, an institution (and a body of people) exists apart from and over the citizenry -- an institution of rule, however one may fudge language.

This is a statement which could be true or false. But one has to argue it.

Suppose a syndicalist said to you, once a political institution appears, then a state exists, and states oppress, of course, so we can't have any political institutions.

You would presumably say: no, you haven't demonstrated any link between political institutions per se and statism, you have simply assumed it. You'd be right. But a similar rejoinder to you is that you haven't demonstrated that representation means reducing some citizens to insufficient influence over outcomes and elevating others to excessive influence over outcomes, you have only (vaguely) claimed it.

Suppose someone comes along and says here is a way to organize the polity so that it operates efficiently and with due respect for people's time and energy and in accord with information constraints and possibilities -- so that over time it legislates, adjudicates, executes wisely and in so doing also affords to each citizen influence over political outcomes in proportion as he/she/they are affected by them, and so that it accords with, as well, other values that we hold dear.

To me that is what one should be able to say about a political vision, including enumerating those other values. Now what allows you to say it is impossible that such a thing could include some elements of "representation"?

Bookchin is very elegant and clear in pointing up the error that some anarchists make in prejudging political visionary possibilities by equating political vision per se to statism (read, authoritarian domination of the many by the few) and then rejecting statism and thus also political vision. He says that IF political vision meant authoritarian statism, then yes, he'd have to reject political vision too -- but of course it doesn't.

Equating representation per se with bureaucratic elite rule is a comparable leap to the one Bookchin criticizes, structurally quite similar. It could be warranted, it might not be, but it can't simply be taken as a given.

But there are two different issues -- one is whether are desirable alternatives to having local assemblies decide every single issue at every level of polity. The second is whether this option itself, put so baldly as to be not just A method but THE ONLY method, is viable or even desirable.

> That is why in libertarian municipalism, confederal assemblies are composed of mandated and immediately recallable *delegates,* not representatives.

Using phrases like "immediately recallable," a nice one that I like too, without explaining the implementation of it doesn't really solve issues. It needs substance.

If a delegate is someone who runs back and forth carrying information about tallies -- you can replace them with a phone wire that conveys bits of information, and save a lot of time and trouble. If a delegate is someone who engages in discussion, exploration, and research along with other delegates, and in light of all that casts votes meant to accord with their constituency's desires and preferences in the new context of the delegates' discussion and debate, then I understand having the higher level bodies and think having them could be a good and essential idea...supposing one also has systematic relations and role definitions that preclude fixed bureaucracy, biasing of outcomes, etc.

> The delegates are only empowered by the popular assemblies to fulfill their mandates by casting their weighted votes in accordance with the will of their citizens' assembly and to oversee the administration of policy decided by the confederated assemblies. These confederal delegates are expressly not empowered to create policy.

Say the issue is the future of the Grand Canyon, or perhaps a new national law protecting some wildlife animal, or maybe some foreign policy, or a new judicial ruling, or all of them. My little assembly discusses these -- and a few thousand other agenda items -- and we have a vote on each. You are the delegate who we send up to some higher layer, and you get chosen again, and ultimately wind up at the national federated layer. You and the others can now either (a) present the tallies from your locals and go home -- which would seem to me extremely odd. Or (b) discuss the matters, perhaps utilizing new information from people whose job is to research these issues, certainly hearing new views from other assembly delegates, etc. Suppose you do (b) and it is hard for me to see any other reason for coming together. Now what? You can vote in light of it, with delegates free to change their vote to continue according with the preferences of their constituents as best they can read these in light of the new information. Or you can have everyone go home and do a new ballot after relating the contents of the discussion, as they interpret it. The first is called, generally, some form of representation. The second, which LM seems to advocate, seems to me utterly unworkable and, in any event, oddly redundant, the delegates having no real role. If you really want to do the second, televise the discussion and have a plebiscite...no need for delegates doing any tallying or vote carrying (and I think this is also a useful method that might fit in a better polity, not exclusively, but for certain matters).

> So, yes, I suppose that, in a certain way of speaking, you might refer to votes of confederal bodies as being plebiscites. But, obviously, they would also be forums for debate and discussion, and there is nothing stopping delegates from returning to their assemblies if they  encounter, for example, some good, perhaps unconsidered ideas in confederal debates that might change a local assembly's position on one thing or another.

Why discuss at all among a few delegates? If you do, for edification, pre-vote, why not have it be a televised discussion that everyone can benefit from?

Why not just go with the initial vote from all the assemblies (something which I think is literally impossible and unwise anyhow, in many instances, though sensible in others, but I am just flowing with you here)?

Where does the knowledge and information come from that each assembly has at its disposal for intelligently assessing every issue? Or that the higher order delegate senates have?

In your version, above, the delegates do have some power, to decide to question the vote they are carrying and go back to tally anew. Imagine it in practice... Any delegate can hold up any decision to go back and rediscuss and revote locally. With presumably hundreds of delegates what is to say that any decision would ever be taken? More, do LMers really think that every citizen (even any citizen?) wants to delve into the details of every judicial, legislative, and executive decision for every geographic realm that impacts their own, and to do this not just once, but repeatedly -- not just for critically important matters, but for all matters?

> Re adjudication of disputes: Any civilized society requires law and some form of court system to adjudicate disagreements that cannot be otherwise resolved, or to deal with seriously antisocial behavior...

Well, this may or may not be true -- I tend to agree that it is. But once you think this, or even think it is remotely plausible, then doesn't presenting a vision for a desirable polity entail presenting a vision for a desirable way of adjudicating disputes as well settling on and interpreting laws -- or else a demonstration that adjudication is of relatively minor import and can be ignored at small danger of hurting the vision proposed? This all seemed largely absent from LM.

> Needless to say, these things would not look anything like the systems in place in the existing society:

Actually, it probably needs considerable saying to come to such a conclusion. That is, even the most radical critic of contemporary relations could feel that while its economy is horrendous, it state is horrendous, its racism and sexism are horrendous, that its legal system has considerable merit (though largely masked by the impact of those others horrors). I tend to suspect, instead, along with you that, the legal system itself, even abstracted from the rest, needs considerable and in some instances fundamental changes. But that suspicion is far from being a compelling argument...

> Indeed, in a propertyless, classless, and stateless society, the whole notion of "crime" would be radically changed and, in many cases, would simply cease to exist.

This is where quoting matters...again. I don't honestly feel that here, or above, you are replying to what I actually offered. It feels more like you read it, took away some elements and impressions, and are reacting to those via a statement of your own views that is only barely a response to my actual concerns.

Of course what is a crime, and what crime is, would both differ from now.

> (What would be the point of stealing in a society without private property and based on "from each according to ability and to each according to need"?)

If everyone can have anything they say they want -- I need it, I get it -- then stealing is non-existent, yes, you are correct. But this is a dream world with no relation to reality. I want your winter coat. I want your child. I want your house. I want a 300 foot yacht. I want the Mona Lisa for myself. My community wants endless amounts of rum, or wants to shut down the airport that serves five million people which abuts our region, and so on.

> What precisely these institutions [legal] would look like and how precisely they would function is, to me, a debate that will need to take place and be decided by the people in their assemblies and confederations, in the process of creating their new society.

Fine...if LM is only saying that a nice part of winning a new society is establishing local assemblies that take up political matters and fight for just gains in the present and that become a key part of political structures celebrated in the future, so be it. That would be fine. I wouldn't have any confusion about that or argument with it. But LM claims to be a political vision -- and, even an economic one -- and even a strategy, and a pretty stringent and demanding one at that -- and if it is going to claim all that, it has to answer questions, it seems to me.

Suppose someone comes along and says I am for justice and equity, etc. and that's my vision. You say back, well, that's great, but what about direct democracy in local assemblies? They say, no no -- that's something to be decided by agents of change as they evolve the new world through their practice. Well sure it is, you say, and so is everything else. But what is going to guide that practice, what aspirations, what desires? At some point we need to have some clarity about what we want...much more clarity than saying we are for some fine values like justice.

And if this person is going to claim to you that they are offering a vision to provide hope, direction, orientation, etc., well, you will, I bet, rightly feel that they have to do better to be remotely compelling. Well, that's, I guess, what I am saying about LM insofar as it says its a vision of the polity even, much less that plus a vision for the economy and a strategy for change.

I think a political vision is very much needed. That is: a vision of how the polity of a good society would be structured and operate. Such an institutional aim would give us a touchstone for critique of the present. It would give us hope and aspiration. It would provide orientation to organize our efforts at change -- since they have to not only address the immediate world we encounter, but lead toward the one we desire.

Such a vision should, of course, be compatible with visions for a better economy, kinship sphere, culture, etc. But while I agree with you that the political vision (or any other), per se, needn't dot every i and cross every t of a future picture (and shouldn't, if it is going to avoid being arrogant nonsense) -- it does need to at least clarify basic defining institutions. In the political case, basic institutions for legislation, adjudication, implementation, etc. I think LM has done part of this, and I have some qualms with that, though I like some as well.

As to your own personal intuitions about a desirable vision...I think I will pass on commenting on them. I want to address LM as a viewpoint, only, at this point.

> But, again, as to the actual makeup of legal institutions in a future society, it is not for me, or anyone, to decide these things in too detailed a way in advance.

Why not say the same about law making or decision making. LM thinks it makes sense to decide, in advance, that there should be only one-person one-vote majority rule decisions, only local assemblies as the seat of decision making, and so on. I don't happen to find these allegiances compelling, but that aside, why in one aspect of polity does LM offer vision and in another say that it is unneeded. Perhaps there is a logic, but it isn't offered in the work I read which simply ignored, as I noted earlier, other aspects of polity...

> For one thing, I don't think any of us has sufficiently liberated our own minds from the shaping of our thinking that has necessarily taken place by having lived in the present system.

To use these kinds of arguments to defend not envisioning X (judicial institutions), when you have adopted a vision of Y (some legislative institutions), seems odd to me. What makes Y envisionable and X not?

A good answer, I think would be that Y is critical in the sense of being a broad defining institutional structure whose character is key to our having hope, desire, and strategic centering re the future. Fine...this means we shouldn't go into peripheral matters, and certainly not into matters over which there will be lots and lots of acceptable choices. I agree. But the defining institutions of adjudication and enforcement?

> We are all, even the most liberated thinkers among us, products of society, culture, and history. The best we can hope for is a distant view of what life would really be like in an authentically revolutionized democracy.

So what if I say that LMers' limited experience with representation has led them to reject it outright without even entertaining that there could be desirable instances...and that therefore all of LM is suspect. Your reply would presumably be, no, that is a very important aspect of a future polity and that you have therefore thought long and hard and are willing to put forth views on it. Fine, why not do that regarding other aspects also critically important?

As to your personal discussion of enforcement, again, I want to talk about LM, not individual's views -- but, yes, the idea of everyone having to develop the capacity to exercise the skills and talents needed to deal with all manner of disruptive and violent behavior, on the one hand, or asserting that there simply would be no such behavior, on the other, don't strike me as compelling answers to the question what happens to what we might call the "police function" in a good society?

Finally, I know there have only been two replies, and perhaps it is a function of lack of clarity in my original piece, but I do think we are focussing on issues of less fundamental import...of those I raised. Not that I mind discussing these, but I hope someone will take up the other more central matters, too.

Sisco Rejoins

Michael -- I have not much else to say in this discussion but wanted to clarify a couple of matters before taking leave to move on to other work. I shall try to be as brief as possible,  given the length of your own responses on these questions.

First, re delegation at the confederal level: No one ever said that the only thing a mandated confederal delegate would do is cast his or her votes, as if the confederal meeting were nothing but a transmission of the voting record of local assemblies. Again, here, we are running into the conflation of policy and administration. So, let me attempt to clarify this question, briefly, again. Before any confederal assembly meets, an agenda of all important questions -- ie, policy issues -- would be compiled and distributed to municipal assemblies, allowing appropriate time for deliberation, debate, voting, and instruction of delegates by the assembly re how they are expected to vote and what issues they are to raise and what positions they are to take, etc, at the confederal meeting. The confederal body then meets and votes, majority rule, on its forewarned agenda items.

Obviously, this would include deliberation and debate; it would not be just a proforma meeting that records votes of the local assemblies. For one thing, again I stress we are talking about the difference between policy and administration.

In libertarian municipalism, questions of *policy* are decided at the municipal level. At the confederal level, it becomes necessary to organize and coordinate the various ways required to *carry out* the broad policies decided by municipal assemblies. So, the policy questions are settled by the mandated delegates casting their weighted votes, majority rule. But this isn't the end of the matter but rather, in a way, the beginning.

Since we are talking about majority rule, the minority is bound by the decision (although, of course, it is always free to try to become a majority through persuasion, debate, propaganda, organization, protest etc if necessary). That is, the minority doesn't just pack up and go home.

Once a policy question is settled through the vote, the hard work of discussion and negotiation begins. Eg, How do we now implement this decision and organize an effective way to carry it out *that does not violate the policy mandate established by the majority of municipal assemblies*? These kinds of questions and issues would be debated and decided by the various confederal bodies *but they would never be free to establish broad questions of policy on their own.* And if the municipal assemblies thought that the confederal bodies had crossed the line and violated their mandates, the confederal body could be overruled by the municipal assemblies. Similarly, if a local assembly becomes convinced that individual delegates or groups of delegates had crossed the line or violated their mandates, these people could be immediately recalled and their delegative authority revoked, by a vote of the local assembly, which would then replace the former delegates with new ones. Hence we see that delegates have room to maneuver and decide implementation questions, so long as they do not stray outside the policy areas defined in their mandates.

No one has ever said that "everybody" need vote on "every" question. This is a red herring that is always tossed out in discussions of libertarian municipalism, or even of democracy as such. First, because "everyone" is not an adult. Second, because there has never been a time in history, no matter how radical or revolutionary, when "everyone" was politically engaged, or engaged over the same questions. Third, because ensuring that policy making power resides at the local level does not mean that "every" question must be decided there, since "every" question is not a question of policy or principle. If a municipality decides to build a bridge, the assembly does not have to decide the size of every bolt, the alloy structure of each steel girder, etc. Such a notion is obviously ridiculous.

On the other hand, one does not need to be an engineer to decide, after hearing information from all sides and engineering advice etc, whether or not a bridge is to be built. So, the question of where knowledge is to be found at the local level is another red herring. One could as easily ask where it is found at a non-local level through systems of representation.

Edward Kennedy couldn't build a lean-to to keep rain off people at a bus stop if his life depended on it, yet in his capacity as representative of Massachusetts to the US Senate, he is apparently considered competent to vote and decide on all kinds of questions, including those involving huge construction projects and nuclear engineering. Second, has anyone ever seriously considered "representatives" to be other than ordinary people on the level of simple brainpower? This is obviously not the case (and is increasingly more obvious with each passing election). I assure you that neither Ed Kennedy nor Bernard Sanders nor Trent Lott are possessed of any extraordinary knowledge or brainpower. Other than their political power, "representatives" *are* just regular people. In the current system, many of them are very pedestrian lawyers, for example. So what gives them any special knowledge or ability that other normal people don't have, to decide, say, on questions of health and safety of food practices and new technologies like genetic engineering? Must we have a body of "representatives" schooled in all of these questions for representation itself to function? Obviously not. That's why they establish committees, hold hearings and investigations, fund studies and think tanks, call upon experts for advice and questioning, and etc. So who is to say these kinds of investigations can not be carried out to the extent necessary at the local level? Just because someone is a "representative" doesn't mean they are some kind of special person with some kind of special knowledge that their fellow citizens are incapable of holding or obtaining.

Concrete example: I live in a Vermont town governed by town meeting. That is, the select board of the town (two smalltime dairy farmers and a trash hauler) cannot just decide policy questions on their own; even budgetary questions are decided by the people at town meeting, majority rule.

Lately, the town has been involved in a very emotional issue regarding the school system. Students in grades 7-12 have, since 1968, been schooled at a union school composed and financially supported by all the towns in the county (in short, by a confederation). Many people in my town (the largest town in the district and also the farthest away from the school, about 13 miles) -- indeed, a very substantial number -- want to withdraw from the union and have their own local school system, K-12. There have been numerous debates, proposals, informational meetings, letter writing campaigns, petitions, etc., for a couple of years about this. Finally, the petitioners some weeks back managed to get enough signatures to call for a special town meeting where the question would be decided on an up-down vote, yes or no, withdraw from the union or not. People met in the evening, on a work night, for an informational meeting, and, again two nights later on another work night, held a very orderly meeting despite the very emotional nature of the discussion in a very divided (on this question) town. There was a final presentation of the opposing views, with each side having time for its own "experts" to  pronounce on the subject (clearly, "experts" do not always agree with each other), time for citizens to debate and declaim face to face, in public, before the rest of the citizenry. And finally, there was a vote. The motion to withdraw from the union was defeated by a very slim majority. (By the way, these meetings also provided for free child care organized by citizen volunteers -- something that allowed for maximum participation by all who *wanted* to participate, and something, I might add, that is never done in supposedly progressive Burlington, although it was proposed as a platform item by the Burlington Greens years ago.)

Note that few if any of these citizens held any special training or knowledge about educational theory or what have you, although they had access to advice from those who ostensibly do. They were still able to calmly and rationally decide this question of policy for themselves. Nor was this a small issue for them to decide. It involved their very real concerns re local control of schools, the quality and nature of the education their children would receive, etc, and also, the fact that had they decided for their own local school system K-12, their property taxes would have increased 43% in the first year alone. (Property taxes are the most inflammatory issue in Vermont, by far.) This was no small decision; indeed, it was perhaps the most important single decision the town had made since voting to join the union in the first place, 30 years ago. Yet, it was decided, in an orderly fashion, by regular working people with no special training.

Now, had the town voted to withdraw from the union, which it very nearly did, the school board and select board would have had to enter into discussions and negotiations with both the state and *all* of the rest of the towns in the county as to just how this withdrawal was going to take place, and under what conditions, etc. All of these things, too, would have had to be debated and decided by regular working people in their capacities as selectperson or school board member -- and they would have had to do so within the policy decision established by the people in assembly at their town meeting. Plus, they would have needed to gain a majority acceptance of their implementation plan from a majority vote of each individual town's citizenry in assembly at their town meetings. All of that, too, would have been done by regular citizens with no special training or knowledge.

I, for one, would always be more comfortable leaving questions of policy to my fellow citizens than to some body of supposed representatives. for instance, on questions like war and peace. I doubt very seriously that adventures like Vietnam or the Gulf would happen if regular people in assembly were presented with bogus and easily demolished rationales like, say, the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Nor would they be under the enormous pressures to conform that are placed on "representatives," as regular citizens have no power careers to worry about. They are not concerned with whether they will ever get that chair on the Appropriations Committee or that boondoggle pork project their major money contributor wants, or what all. They would be concerned, first, with the blood their young were expected to shed and whether the reasons presented to them for the bloodshed were important enough to shed it in the first place. Similarly, I doubt very much if there would be an operating nuclear power plant in this country if it were up to the vote of regular people. It is very important that these matters of policy and administration be understood and remembered, if you want to critique libertarian municipalism, as they are crucial issues for this politics. I recommend that you reread Bookchin and Biehl's books and essays on this subject for further clarification.

Finally, regarding what I consider to be the minutiae of a future society, eg, who will police and how and how many police will there be and who will carry the garbage and how many people will sit on a jury and how will they be selected and etc. We could discuss these issues for centuries and still someone would be able to imagine one that we hadn't yet discussed. So I will just say this: What is the purpose of forming a democracy if every i has been dotted and t crossed and semicolon and comma agreed to already in advance? A democracy, from its earliest beginnings as an oppositional movement through its constitutional establishment and on into its future evolution and development as a new society is a *process* that unfolds (or fails) over time. It is people creating and self-managing their communities and society. They, not individual libertarian municipalists like myself, or even Bookchin, will be the ones who decide, fight for, and implement these kinds of decisions, as they create their new society. We can say what we think ought to happen, or what we think might happen or should happen. But we can't decide all of these things in advance, and even if we could, how would ever manage to convince "everyone" of all of these minutiae questions and our answers for them? I consider this line of discussion jesuitry.

So in closing, I would like to remind you that no social theorist of the past, including Marx or even the people who made the American revolution, ever put much effort into these kinds of details of the new society. Marx had precious little to say about what a communist society would look like or how it would be organized. Anarchists never had much to say about these things, either. The American revolutionaries in their fierce debates were not discussing judgeships and how juries were to be selected. I don't recall these sorts of mechanical issues being of prime importance in the Russian Revolution, or, indeed, in any historical revolutionary movement or event. Indeed, one wonders, if they are to be held to such demands in advance of a new society, how the American revolutionaries even managed to fight the revolutionary war, much less to write and implement the Articles of Confederation and, later, the Constitution, neither of which have much to say about these things. Yet, somehow they did. So I am wondering why libertarian municipalism must be held to this extraordinarily detailed kind of analysis.

I could ask of you many more detailed questions about your theoretical ideas, and continue to do so for as long as you want to continue, but what would be the point? I am interested in the social and political principles upon which a new and better society should be founded. In short, the matters that concerned all previous historical revolutionary movements.

 

Albert Replies to Sisco

> Michael -- I have not much else to say in this discussion but wanted to
> clarify a couple of matters before taking leave to move on to other work.
> I shall try to be as brief as possible, given the length of your own
> responses on these questions.

Okay...I hope I haven't gone on too long. I just feel I ought to take folks' comments seriously and comprehensively, addressing substantive points raised.

> First, re delegation at the confederal level: No one ever said that the
> only thing a mandated confederal delegate would do is cast his or her
> votes, as if the confederal meeting were nothing but a transmission of the
> voting record of local assemblies.

Well, people (Biehl and Bookchin) said about this what I quoted them saying...from the work I read, and as well they did not say anything else substantial that the delegates would be doing, and many times it was repeated, also in some of these messages, I think, that they would only vote on matters that they had written instructions about.

Okay, if they do something other than act as mere conveyor, what? Perhaps you will tell me below...

> Before any confederal assembly meets, an agenda of all important questions -- ie, policy
> issues -- would be compiled

Who by, with what rights? To me the fundamental questions about polity have to do with decision making procedures, on the one hand, and information flow and behavioral roles and interests, on the other... I guess I just don't feel they are dealt with fully in LM.

> and distributed to municipal assemblies, allowing appropriate time for
> deliberation, debate, voting, and instruction of delegates by the assembly
> re how they are expected to vote and what issues they are to raise and what
> positions they are to take, etc, at the confederal meeting. The confederal
> body then meets and votes, majority rule, on its forewarned agenda items.
> Obviously, this would include deliberation and debate;

Why?

That is, if they can only vote as they have been instructed to, why bother discussing and debating among themselves. If they can vote as they see fit, in light of new information, this contradicts what the materials I have read said, and, more, it makes them indistinguishable from representatives. That might be fine, but it isn't what LM claims.

> it would not be just a proforma meeting that records votes of the local assemblies. For
> one thing, again I stress we are talking about the difference between
> policy and administration.

What does stressing that difference mean?

Even in bourgeois circles people understand that while there is legislation -- passing laws -- and there is execution or implementing them, and there is really no fine impermiable line. The latter can totally abrogate the intentions of the former.

> In libertarian municipalism, questions of *policy* are decided at the
> municipal level. At the confederal level, it becomes necessary to organize
> and coordinate the various ways required to *carry out* the broad policies
> decided by municipal assemblies.

So, translating to our current world, the congress and senate and white house executive branch all become confederal delegations, if things like them exist at all.

All the law making and what not that they do now, either disappears or is really done locally, in assemblies.

The administration and execution that they do now either disappears, or is in their own hands, the delegate's hands however.

Well, I just think it is uncompelling as left vision on both implementation and legislation counts. On the executive side there is insufficient attention to what makes the outcomes represent the will of the people. And on the legislative side there is a lack of attention to the implications of saying that everything legislated is decided at local levels.

> So, the policy questions are settled by
> the mandated delegates casting their weighted votes, majority rule.

So regarding all of that, every law, every act of legislation, the decisions have been made locally...which is what I had said earlier and you seem to be verifying now...the delegates are merely carrying the votes.

> But this isn't the end of the matter but rather, in a way, the beginning.

Indeed, and so now there is the matter of carrying out the actions and work of the polity, supposing the legislation and broad policy can be arrived at entirely locally, currently called that of the executive and judiciary...and it seems to me that LM says very little about this--what comes after what you call just the beginning--nearly nothing.

> Since we are talking about majority rule, the minority is bound by the
> decision (although, of course, it is always free to try to become a
> majority through persuasion, debate, propaganda, organization, protest etc
> if necessary).

Yes, as with contemporary one person one vote elections. And as with now, if there is no attention to the processes and methods of setting the agendas -- what legislation is proposed, how it is proposed, etc., or the presssures and factors at play in decisions, it is problem. And as now, it is a problem if a majority decides something that overwhelmingly adversely affects some minority, as well...or so it seems to me.

> Once a policy question is settled through the vote, the hard work of
> discussion and negotiation begins. Eg, How do we now implement this
> decision and organize an effective way to carry it out *that does not
> violate the policy mandate established by the majority of municipal
> assemblies*? These kinds of questions and issues would be debated and
> decided by the various confederal bodies *but they would never be free to
> establish broad questions of policy on their own.*

In the original article I wrote I noted that I liked the intent of LM in many respects, indeed in most respects -- but I had doubts about whether the intent had been manifested in institutions. My feelings are unchanged. To say that those responsible for executing some law or policy should do it in accord with the intent is fine, of course -- but it isn't a reason much less an institutional reason for believing that they will.

> And if the municipal
> assemblies thought that the confederal bodies had crossed the line and
> violated their mandates, the confederal body could be overruled by the
> municipal assemblies.

None of this was in the material I read, as best I remember. I don't know if it is generaly LM viewpoint or your version of the vision. At any rate, recallable representatives do seem to me to represent one aspect of a desirable polity -- as do local assemblies and federations. I just think that much is left out if that's all we talk about, much that is critical. I haven't heard a serious argument for, and I don't see the attachment to one person one vote majority rule as a principle, either.

> Similarly, if a local assembly becomes convinced
> that individual delegates or groups of delegates had crossed the line or
> violated their mandates, these people could be immediately recalled and
> their delegative authority revoked, by a vote of the local assembly, which
> would then replace the former delegates with new ones. Hence we see that
> delegates have room to maneuver and decide implementation questions, so
> long as they do not stray outside the policy areas defined in their
> mandates.

With all respect, there is nothing new in these notions. They are nice, I like them, broadly spekaing, but they don't constitute a vision of polity, which is what LM talks about being -- or so it seems to me.

> No one has ever said that "everybody" need vote on "every" question.

Nor did I say that anyone said that...nor did I say it.

On the other hand, no doubt -- I should hope -- one wants a situation in which everyone can participate appropriately and their are no impediments, etc. The goal isn't to have formally allowed democracy and a small circle of friends making all decisions, surely.

> This is a red herring that is always tossed out in discussions of libertarian
> municipalism, or even of democracy as such.

Well, maybe it is but I am not privy to those discussions...and I didn't toss it, at least in the form you are rebutting.

On the other hand, I would say that I want a political system in which the wills of each and every citizen influence outcomes in proportion as the citizens are affected by the outcomes. That does seem to me a desirable goal... I call it particpatory self management...and the more closely we can attain it, in accord with our other aspirations as well, the better.

> If a municipality decides to build a bridge, the
> assembly does not have to decide the size of every bolt, the alloy
> structure of each steel girder, etc. Such a notion is obviously
> ridiculous.

Yes, it is ridiculous, but things are not really so simple because the decision to build a bridge, if taken in isolation from the human, social, and material costs of a bridge, or using misestimates of those, is very likely to be a dumb decision.

What this has to do, however, with points I raised, I don't know.

> On the other hand, one does not need to be an engineer to decide, after
> hearing information from all sides and engineering advice etc, whether or
> not a bridge is to be built. So, the question of where knowledge is to be
> found at the local level is another red herring.

I would much prefer that you show these red herrings you are concerned about in my words...I don't think that they would be on the end of any hooks dangled there. I don't think I am seeding the pond with herrings, red or otherwise.

The rest is simply rebutting views that someone has put forward, or that you anticipate being put forward, but that certainly are not mine. Or it is putting forward views, interesting, about how things might be done in some situations, but which aren't, as best I can tell from the LM materials I have read, stated in LM.

> It is very important that these matters of policy and administration be
> understood and remembered, if you want to critique libertarian
> municipalism, as they are crucial issues for this politics. I recommend
> that you reread Bookchin and Biehl's books and essays on this subject for
> further clarification.

Well, if they propose the things you indicate as LM, presumably you could just quote them. I didn't find it...

> Finally, regarding what I consider to be the minutiae of a future society,
> eg, who will police and how and how many police will there be and who will
> carry the garbage and how many people will sit on a jury and how will they
> be selected and etc.

Well, you might feel that broad statements about legislation and lesser ones about implementation are needed for vision, but that some understanding of adjudication and legal matters more broadly isn't needed, but I don't find just feeling that, or just stating it, compelling.

Perhaps an analogy will help.

I have spent a lot of time on economic vision. If I had confined myself to talking about, say, workplace organization, I wouldn't have called it economic vision. I would have called it a vision of a new workplace. And I would have noted that for it to operate and have merit it would obviously have to be embedded in a compatible surrounding economy lest the rest of the economy subvert the meaning of the innovations. To be able to say that Participatory Economics is an economic vision it seemed to me that it had to also address, for example, allocation and consumption...how exchange occurs, what the rates are, and so on. Not every detail, but the broad defining structures and institutions that delimit and promote economic relations and outcomes. In the same way that in describing capitalism, for that matter, one has to explain private onwership, corporate structure, the market, and not too many other features, as compared to getting into the innards of every nook and cranny.

This seems true, in almost exactly the same way, for envisioning a desirable polity. There will be an array of matters criticial to discuss, and beyond that there will be second order concerns, third order ones, and so on, down to minutia. To me envisioning just the legislative branch (even if I thought the vision of that was compelling and sufficient) isn't enough. It is a vision of that function, or part of it, but not of the polity as a whole. And surely matters of implementation and adjudication and enforcement don't constitute minutia.

We can agree to disagree about this, but there is no point making believe that I am demanding an endless foray into minutia just as if I had a vision of economic workplaces but said nothing about allocation and consumption and someone said to me, hey, regardless of the merit or lack of merit of the discussion of workplaces, as a vision of the economy it is horribly incomplete, you need allocation and consumption too, it would be unreasonable for me to dismiss them on grounds they were demanding endless minutia.

> We could discuss these issues for centuries and still
> someone would be able to imagine one that we hadn't yet discussed.

This way of arguing justifies anything and nothing. Why not stop envisioning, for example, having said only that there should be one person one vote majority rule, but nothing about assemblies, on the grounds that the latter is minutia? Why not stop with local assemblies, but nothing about votes or federations on the grounds that that is minutia? Presumably the answer is a belief that the nature of decision making forums or mechanisms is critically important to the political character of a society. Fine, most folks think that is true also for the nature of mechanisms of political implementation and adjudication. If you don't that is okay, but you need to explain it, not just state it, as if it is obvious. It isn't obvious to me, quite the contrary. So the answer to someone saying that LM or any vision has left out important dimensions of what it claims to address isn't merely to label everything beyond where you do choose to stop minutia -- it is to make a case that it is so.

And I have to say that I would find it astounding for anarchists to argue that the executive and judicial functions of polity are of such minor importance that we needn't address them in a political vision.

I don't know if others in LM are saying this as well. I would have expected a simple -- yes, that work needs still to be done and it is a bit presumptuous to say that we have a political vision while it is still not in place -- reply. Then we could have addressed the more interesting points, I think...

> So I will just say this: What is the purpose of forming a democracy if every i
> has been dotted and t crossed and semicolon and comma agreed to already in
> advance?

Well, why not say the same thing about having assemblies, or not having private property...why not say it about whether there should or shouldn't be workers councils, for that matter?

Crossing ever t and dotting every i in a vision before the fact, or even ever, in some senses, is nonsense. But saying that everything beyond what you propose for vision constitutes no more than crossing ts or dotting is simply because claim it, isn't convincing.

> A democracy, from its earliest beginnings as an oppositional
> movement through its constitutional establishment and on into its future
> evolution and development as a new society is a *process* that unfolds (or
> fails) over time.

Fine.

> It is people creating and self-managing their communities and society.

Fine...I don't think LM's attachment to one person one vote majority rule is actually in accord with that, for reasons offered in the essay, but I agree with the sentiment.

> They, not individual libertarian municipalists
> like myself, or even Bookchin, will be the ones who decide, fight for, and
> implement these kinds of decisions, as they create their new society.

Fine. But if you are going to put forward a vision and argue for it, well, it seems to me it ought to be address what you claim it addresses.... So if one wants to say something is a political vision, and it is only about legislative functions, it either means to be everything central and basic and is therefore saying only those functions are central, or it is overstating itself.

> We can say what we think ought to happen, or what we think might happen or
> should happen. But we can't decide all of these things in advance, and
> even if we could, how would ever manage to convince "everyone" of all of
> these minutiae questions and our answers for them? I consider this line of
> discussion jesuitry.

So to have a view of judicial matters, of police matters, of implementation of political law and policy is too detailed -- but we absolutely must have local federations (no other approach), delegates and not representatives, one person one vote majority rule, etc.

It is very hard for me to even see the basis for LM's casting some things as picky and other things as essential to a vision and program, much less be convinced by it.

> So in closing, I would like to remind you that no social theorist of the
> past, including Marx or even the people who made the American revolution,
> ever put much effort into these kinds of details of the new society.

Actually, those who made the american revolution did, in fact, put such effort into all sides of political vision, if my meager knowledge of that period serves me.

> Marx had precious little to say about what a communist society would look like
> or how it would be organized. Anarchists never had much to say about these
> things, either.

A person can certainly consistently take the position that the future is beyond us, vision is an imposition, and so on and so forth -- disdaining any visionary practice beyond enunciating broad values, sure. I think it is utterly wrong to do that, particularly in our epoch, but one can do it, and do it consistently.

But that is not LM...which instead makes very clear that it sees vision as exceptionally important. So you can't have two sides of one argument. You can't elevate the importance of visions when it suits LM, and denigrate it otherwise. You can say that somethings are worth envisioning and others too detailed or secondary, sure, but that requires some supporting case especially when it dismisses things almost everyone finds central.

If you want to argue that the matters I have brought up are peripheral and local assembly decision making is in contrast central, that's fine, go ahead and do so, but calling adjudication and implementation minutia or less dismissively, just perpipheral or secondary is not arguing the case, it is just stating it.

To me, for an approach locating itself in the anarchist tradition to say that the way a society handles disputes, law enforcement, and the implementation of political policies is basically secondary, much less minutia, sounds very odd...it requires more than just repetition to gain credence, if at all.

> The American revolutionaries in their fierce debates were
> not discussing judgeships and how juries were to be selected.

Perhaps you can show me either the word judge or the word jury in what I wrote...I doubt it. What I indicated was that having a vision for adjudication, implementation, enforcement -- alongside one for legislation -- seems central to me to saying one has a political vision, or even that one's vision for legislation is complete and plausible, for that matter, just as having vision for allocation and consumption is critical to having vision for workplaces much less for a whole economy. I didn't offer components of such a vision.

> I don't recall these sorts of mechanical issues being of prime importance in the
> Russian Revolution, or, indeed, in any historical revolutionary movement or
> event.

Fine, then why not remove the mechanical adoption of one person one vote from LM's allegiance on these grounds. Not to mention that arguing on the basis of a bourgeois and a leninist revolution what ought to be the characteristics of one seeking a truly cooperative and just society again strikes me as strange. Not ot mention that we disagree about the history, but that's simply a sidebar in this instance...

Why not address the substance raised, head on?

Why do you think that how a society adjudicates disputes, prepares and offers possible legislative options, implements political policy, enforces laws, are matters that needn't be addressed by something that calls itself a political vision?

> Indeed, one wonders, if they are to be held to such demands in
> advance of a new society, how the American revolutionaries even managed to
> fight the revolutionary war, much less to write and implement the Articles
> of Confederation and, later, the Constitution, neither of which have much
> to say about these things.

Well, let's just pass on debating whether the U.S. revolutionaries were concerned about the relations among and between legislation, implementation, and adjudication...since though I disagree with your claim, I don't consider their actions particularly germane.

> Yet, somehow they did. So I am wondering why
> libertarian municipalism must be held to this extraordinarily
> detailed kind of analysis.

To argue by dismissing points as "extraordinarily detailed kind of analysis" might very well be justified...but when what has been sought is even the most bare and basic attention to realms of polity generally considered of paramount importance, at the very least arguing it requires more than just pronouncement, it seems to me. At any rate, you can repeat the dismissal as many times as you like...it doesn't gain any more weight thereby.

> I could ask of you many more detailed questions about your theoretical
> ideas, and continue to do so for as long as you want to continue, but what
> would be the point? I am interested in the social and political principles
> upon which a new and better society should be founded. In short, the
> matters that concerned all previous historical revolutionary movements.

Yes, and I guess that you feel LM deals with these, and no others...

That's good. That explains your allegiance to it.

But it does nothing to promote mine.

 
Peter Staudenmaier Replies to the Original Albert Article

Hi Michael and everybody else,

This is Peter Staudenmaier, a social ecologist and sympathetic fellow-traveler of participatory economics who's also been critical of PE from a libertarian municipalist perspective. I'm sending this to the original nine recipients of your draft essay, as well as to the two social ecology listservs where your essay was also posted. Feel free, if you'd like, to post this on ZNet as well.

I'm pleased to see radicals from other traditions taking libertarian municipalism seriously and subjecting it to criticism, and I think your essay is a provocative contribution to the ongoing debate between PE and LM which Brian Dominick revived earlier this year. I especially liked your concluding comments on the commonalities between PE and LM, which are indeed encouraging. At the same time, I have strong reservations about your presentation of the LM vision, so I'd like to do some clarifying and rebutting. Before beginning my response to your essay, I should say two things up front:

1) My interpretation of LM, especially regarding economic issues, is somewhat atypical, and other LMists would reject several of the points I'll make here.

2) My familiarity with PE is a bit dated so it's quite possible that you've already covered elsewhere some of what I want to raise.

I think you're quite right that the LM vision is "incomplete", though I don't think that's as big a problem as you do. One of your essay's more frustrating aspects was that you take LM to task for failing to provide worked-out responses to questions of adjudication, enforcement, and so forth. That's accurate enough, but it's not really a fair point since neither PE nor the broader theory of complementary holism (do you use that term anymore?) have produced elaborate answers on this score either. Indeed I think it's fair to say that emancipatory thinkers in general haven't grappled adequately with such thorny questions. This is the sort of incompleteness we're all still struggling with, no matter what our basic ideological framework. As for the other sort of incompleteness - "why is there almost no attention to matters of kinship and culture?" - LM is a specific component of the broader social ecology vision, and Janet Biehl's book makes clear that it is best understood in the context of that broader vision. Social ecology has, I think, done better than most other left intellectual traditions at paying attention to kinship and culture, and in that respect bears comparison with the wonderful work you and your comrades did in Liberating Theory .

But there are, of course, substantial differences in LM's and PE's respective treatment of these issues, mostly centered on differing understandings of what 'polity' and 'politics' mean and what role they should play in a liberated society. I suspect, for example, that the reason you consider LM's relatively sketchy treatment of adjudication and enforcement such a serious oversight is that these functions are, in your opinion, central to the political sphere as such. LMists have a very different conception of the political sphere, as Janet explains in her book. The crucial difference, however, is on the question of the relationship between politics and the economy. In order to respond to your criticisms of LM on this count, I need to first take issue with one of your primary assumptions about LM's economic vision.

In your work on PE with Robin Hahnel, you've distinguished three main ways of organizing economic life: markets, central planning, and participatory planning. My biggest objection to your analysis of LM is that you implicitly classify LM as a variant of central planning: you write that "putting politics in charge of economics characterizes both fascism and Stailinism"; "this [Bookchin's view] is precisely the argument of the Soviet-style central planner"; "this political rule over economics would soon require local agents in the workplaces to administer the rules imposed from without - a layer of management, etc., just as was the case with central planning systems", and so on. But in fact LM represents, within the terms of your tripartite scheme, a variant of participatory planning. PE and LM share the goal of a grassroots democratic economy structured around active participation in planning decisions (what Castoriadis called "completely socializing the functions of direction") without relying on market exchange or a coordinator class. Where LM and PE part ways is on the question of the proper institutional embodiment of participatory planning. PE propses a council-based model, LM an assembly-based one. And here, I think, our genuine disagreements begin.

Your critique of the assembly model includes several distinct strands, and to try to do them justice I'm going to quote the relevant portions of your essay and offer brief answers to the questions you ask:

>Perhaps libertarian municipalism
>assumes that the volume of legislative and executive undertakings for such
>assemblies would hugely diminish in a better society,

Yes, we do assume that, and it seems an entirely warranted assumption in light of the huge proportion of present economic and social activity which serves no purpose other than maintaining current power structures. There's also a question of scale here, since local assemblies have a much more limited purview than the US senate.

>but pending demonstration of that, the fact that we can't each decide all things all
>the time suggests a reasonable need to delegate authority, and thus to
>figure out how to do so compatibly with our values.

The LM critique of representation is not a rejection of the neccessity for delegating authority. LM explicitly envisions any number of boards, commissions, working groups and so forth to work out the particulars of policy implementation. All we insist on is that important substantive decisions be brought to the full assembly for ratification, amendment or rejection.

>And the focus can't be just the actual voting, but the consideration
>of issues, preparation and investigation of implications, etc.

Certainly. I must say I don't believe it's LMists who have focused obsessively on the issue of voting mechanisms, but our critics. Most of an assembly's time will be spent on deliberation, not on voting.

>Consider again the U.S. Senate.
>Whatever people think of it, what happens in a transition to libertarian
>municipalism to all the various people working on assembling
>information and analyzing it preparatory to making decisions?

Their ranks expand to include all citizens.

>Is the transfer to libertarian municipalism one that leaves
>what's called the permanent government basically intact,

No. We reject the state in toto.

>altering only the voting actors from being a relative few
>representatives to being whole assemblies of citizens?

Yes. Why do you amalgamate these two very different processes?

>Or is all the work that is currently done by non-elected
>officials and employees simply no longer needed?

Not all of it, but much of it.

>If so, why is that the case?

Because much of it serves no worthwhile social function.

>And if the work is needed, then who does it for the
>envisioned assemblies and what is their power?

I take it you mean the more detailed work of assembling, processing, and presenting information. I think something like PE's proposed Iteration Facilitation Boards would fit just fine into an LM framework.

>Why does libertarian municipalism take for granted (a) that all decisions
>should be taken by a majority vote,

Because no practicable alternative is preferable (more on this in a moment).

>and (b) that the control of each
>institution in the society, regardless of how wide a constituency it
>affects, should be entirely in the hands of the assembly for the
>particular municipality in which it happens to reside.

"Entirely" isn't really accurate; "primarily" would be closer to what we have in mind.

>Put less abstractly: Why should a majority decide aspects of my life
>that affect only me?

It shouldn't. You've misunderstood LM here. The assembly has authority only over political issues, that is, the management of public affairs. Aspects of an individual's life that affect only that individual are none of the assembly's business.

>And why should a university or the Grand Canyon be
>totally under the auspices of those who happen to live where it sits?

Again, "totally" is inaccurate. Think of the local community as a sort of 'landlord' that hosts an important institution which provides services to a whole region. LM doesn't say that "institutions that affect a wide audience or constituency extending beyond the borders of a single municipality should nonetheless be entirely under the purview of the municipality where they happen to be situated", as you put it. We do say that such institutions must, at least, operate within the good graces of their host community, a principle which I trust applies to PE as well. Since the local community is providing, via land, labor, and materials, for the institution's existence and continued operations, primary responsiblity for the oversight of the institution lies with that community. Responsibility for running the institution in a day-to-day way is another issue, which I'll address below.

You object particularly strongly to LM's emphasis on majority rule as a voting procedure within the assemblies, since PE posits a different method of proportional voting. This is, of course, a basic divide within democratic theory, and I don't imagine we're going to settle the matter here. But I do want to point out, in contrast to your essay's portrayal, that there really are two contrary principles at stake here, and that LMists have good reasons for advocating majority rule and do not simply assume its superiority. In several passages you suggest that LM's majority voting is a misapplication of the maxim that "people ought to influence political decisions in proportion as they are affected by them". But LM rejects this maxim as a guide for procedural questions. It's not that we misunderstand or misapply this principle, which is crucial to some aspects of PE, but that we deny its validity in determining decision-making frameworks. We believe that simple majority rule, while hardly a perfect arbiter of conflicting wills, is procedurally preferable to its alternatives. Those alternatives, in our view, amount to either minority rule (two-thirds majorities, consensus process, etc.), or temporarily avoiding the problem (weighted voting). I know I'm not about to convince you on either count, I simply want to get the LM position straight.

I think you've also misconstrued LM thinking on the workplace and the day-to-day aspects of production. While we do reject workers' control as the organizing principle of a liberated society, LMists do not hold that the internal dynamics of particular enterprises, much less the shopfloor tasks of individual workers, are to be determined by municipal assemblies. This is, as you note, neither desirable nor practical. LM proposes that the general outlines of economic activity be subject to popular control through a democratic planning process - exactly what PE envisions. We simply disagree on the best institutional framework for realizing that goal. Nowhere does LM advocate making "significant economic decision[s] about the operations of a given workplace . . . solely in a geographically based assembly, especially without input from the workers in the plant who address the matter precisely based on their shared experiences there, or from the consumers of the product, assessing the product in light of their experiences with it". Under LM, such decisions are hardly made "without input" from the workers and consumers affected, since they participate in the assembly. You're quite right that it is "consistent with the underlying impetus of libertarian municipalism to assert that workers' views of their own situations as workers and consumers' views of their own situation as consumers are both critical to making just and sensible decisions about economic life"; such views inform the participation of every member of the assembly. You seem disturbed by this prospect of participation on the basis of civic responsibility, rather than on the basis of workerhood or consumerhood, but I don't see what is disturbing about it. I certainly can't agree with your claim that "if workers or consumers want some new procedure or product, the information can only sensibly come from them as workers or consumers." If I notice, while walking to the assembly, that the sidewalk pavement is in bad need of repair, must I report this to my fellow citizens only "as a pedestrian"? While the workplace and the household are the proper arena for arranging the particulars of production and consumption, they are not, in our view, the appropriate locus for general deliberation and decision about the overall economy.

A further point of divergence between PE and LM, which I think your essay somewhat obscures, is the mechanism of distribution. At one point you claim that "Bookchin is throwing out the baby (economic allocation institutions per se, including the good ones) with the bathwater (markets)". But of course LMists don't dismiss allocation institutions as such - which you tacitly admit, inasmuch as you go to some lengths to criticize the allocation institutions we do propose - we simply argue for a particular form of allocation, or more properly distribution, one which PE roundly rejects. Libertarian municipalists are communists. I realize that this makes us economic naifs in your view (though I'm not certain why; I can't recall you or Hahnel giving an argument against communism, except to assert that it's utopian and unfeasible), but it does help explain features of LM economics which you take to be mysterious. It accounts, for example, for the fact that "the Libertarian Municipalist vision also says nothing about how goods and services are valued for exchange and about how remuneration occurs". We see no place, in a full-blown LM society, for exchange value or remuneration of any sort. I must admit that I'm not entirely confident that a communist distribution system would, in fact, be feasible in the distant liberated future, but I don't see it as a priori impossible. Indeed I think it stacks up rather well against PE's effort criterion, which I've never found convincing, among other reasons because it creates the problem of how to measure effort and encourages duplicity. Your response to such concerns, that community scrutiny would discourage shirking, applies just as well - indeed better - to libertarian communism.

My final rejoinder to your critique of LM concerns the notion of subordinating the economy to the polity, which you note is central to the LM vision. To a large extent I think we're actually in agreement here; PE and LM share the goal of creating "methods of allocation in which instead of buyers and sellers each seeking to fleece the other or be fleeced, all actors instead cooperate in defining aims and actions that are socially desirable", though of course we still disagree on just which methods are most promising. We also agree that "we need economic institutions that provide a context in which producers and consumers will act socially and will not be competing and narrowing their choices in ways that subvert larger priorities and aims". But you go on to say that "surely we can't achieve these aims by subordinating the economy to the polity". Why not? The reasons you give in your essay all center on the potentially undemocratic nature of any set of political institutions. But I don't think this will get us very far, since the same logic applies to any set of economic institutions. Neither PE nor LM can offer structural guarantees that our respective systems will remain democratic and participatory.

This issue is intimately related to our differing perspectives on workers' control. LMists don't want so much to "transcend economics" as we want to transcend separate economic institutions that are removed from the rest of public life. We think this sort of separation preserves capitalist divisions which should not be carried over into a free society. In one of the earliest comparisons of LM and PE, Howie Hawkins described this intention of LM thus: "In the longer run, anarcho-communism seeks to progressively dissolve into the community the separate enterprises based on a social and geographical division of labor. By physically decentralizing production to create rounded communities that reintegrate production and consumption, agriculture and manufacture, natural beauty and urban amenities, mental and manual labor, means of livelihood and ways of life, the question of workers' control as distinct from community control is eventually rendered moot." (Howard Hawkins, "Community Control, Workers' Control, and the Cooperative Commonwealth", Society and Nature #3). This is one reason why LMists prefer a community assembly model to PE's worker and consumer councils. To quote Hawkins again: "as long as workplaces confront each other and consumption units as functionally differentiated interests, there is the real possibility that these units will seek advantage over each other, reintroducing competition, and leading eventually to regression back to capitalism with competitive markets and private accumulation." Thus it is not the case that LMists fear that "economics is intrinsically competitive and self-seeking, and that we should therefore have no power granted to economic institutions per se" as you put it. Rather we fear that separate economic institutions which are not subject to direct oversight by the whole community can end up taking on a competitive and self-seeking dynamic, and we therefore propose that any power granted to economic institutions be fully anchored within a broader context of democratic community power. This is what we mean by subordinating the economy to the polity.

Several of your responses to this position suggest that you think "the economy" is inhabited by some group other than the people who make up "the polity". But in LM these are the very same people. There is thus no need for "local agents in the workplaces to administer the rules imposed from without" any more than PE requires a "layer of management" to ensure that plans are implemented. Indeed this whole terminology of "from without" makes no sense when applied to LM. Where is the "without" (or "above") when the polity consists of every single person, including all workers and consumers? On this point LM and PE are remarkably consonant, and distinct from most other anticapitalist traditions. We both share the goal of realizing, in Castoriadis' words, "the possibility for people consciously to direct the economy, to make decisions in full knowledge of the relevant facts - instead of submitting to the economy, as is now the case." But you nevertheless consider LM's subordination of the economy to direct community control a "recipe for disaster". To substantiate this claim, you note that "putting poltics in charge of economics characterizes both fascism and Stalinism." It also characterizes feudal and tribal societies, as well as the communist society Marx envisioned on his better days; in fact it characterizes just about every social system throughout history that wasn't dominated by the market. The problem with fascism and Stalinism was hardly that the economy was subordinated to the polity, but that the polity was supremely undemocratic. You go on to quote Bookchin's argument that the community should "control economic life generally", and remark: "The first thing we might note is that this is precisely the argument of the Soviet-style central planner". We might also note that it is the official position of the Catholic Church. So what? At this level of abstraction, the apparent similarity is as meaningless as the superficial resemblance between PE and the rhetoric of the Titoist bureaucracy circa 1964.

LM does not envision an "imperial polity". Since economic processes are integrated into public life as a whole, and since all economic actors are citizens, there is nothing for the polity to "usurp". What is worrisome about a vision in which all major economic decisions are subject to democratic popular control, from the ground up, with no institutional hierarchies of any kind? Isn't your beef with LM really that it privileges resident assemblies over worker and consumer bodies? I don't want to turn the tables on you and shift this debate from a critique of LM to a critique of PE, but on this point I think LMists have excellent grounds for sticking to our assembly model. LM's distinction between policy making and administration allows for a large measure of leeway for workplaces and households in implementing collective decisions arrived at in assembly (something you didn't always seem to recognize, since you repeatedly insinuate that LM involves communal micro-management of workplaces and firms). PE, in contrast, makes the point of production and what we might call the point of consumption the arena for both immediate administrative decisions and larger policy decisions. It is for this reason too optimistic, in my view, about sustained participation by all members of society, over the long term, in economic decision making. The requirements PE places on all citizens, at the level of detail and in the specific technological format proposed, are likely to alienate many people from consistent engagement. I think a more realistic scenario, under a PE system, is that many folks would gradually cede effective authority to those of their co-workers or co-consumers who prove to be good at fiddling with proposals and iterations. You might reply that this problem of re-emergent elites or hierarchies could just as well affect an assembly-based system (and you've already raised the problem of the "dictatorship of the sociable"). But LM tries to account for that possibility precisely by integrating large-scale economic decisions into a single public arena, which seems to be your major complaint against it.

I am thus at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to this criticism, since our greatest strength is in your eyes our gravest sin, and for precisely the same reason.

I think I've gone on long enough for now. I appreciated your essay's tone of fundamental solidarity and genuine critique, and I look forward to your response.

Comradely, Peter Staudenmaier

 

Albert replies to Staudenmaier

Hi Michael and everybody else,

Hi Peter...

Before beginning my response to your essay, I should say two things up front: 1) My interpretation of LM, especially regarding economic issues, is somewhat atypical, and other LMists would reject several of the points I'll make here.

That may complicate the exchange a bit. I admit that I would like mostly to relate to what is considered by most the LM position, and not being immersed in it I fear getting muddled and referring to something that isn't as if it is...but I'll try to reply.

2) My familiarity with PE is a bit dated so it's quite possible that you've already covered elsewhere some of what I want to raise. 

Sure -- though the article I offered didn't go into any detail about PE.

I think you're quite right that the LM vision is "incomplete", though I don't think that's as big a problem as you do.

I don't know how big a problem it is -- if one at all. There is nothing wrong with offering a partial vision for some sector of social life, or a vision for one sector but not for others. After all, PE is just an economic vision, and I obviously think that's okay.

The problem arises if a partial vision claims to be something more and in so doing crowds out or even precludes people taking seriously things that it ignores. If LMers think that matters of adjudication say, need to be addressed but just that LM hasn't done so, then I have no problem on that score... I just didn't get that tone from what I read.

One of your essay's more frustrating aspects was that you take LM to task for failing to provide worked-out responses to questions of adjudication, enforcement, and so forth. That's accurate enough, but it's not really a fair point since neither PE nor the broader theory of complementary holism (do you use that term anymore?) have produced elaborate answers on this score either.

You are quite right. But PE isn't a political vision. It doesn't claim to say anything much about the state, legislation, the culture, kinship and it urges the need for people to address these matters in their own right. The feeling I got was that LM does claim to be a vision of what matters -- what we need to envision, particularly for the polity but also the economy. So the real question becomes, is LM saying this other stuff is unenvisionable, or is unworthy of attention, or is peripheral, or is implicitly taken care of by LM as it stands -- or does LM regard other political functions as important and in need of vision? If its the latter, then you are right and I merely misread and there is nothing much to do other than generate the new content. But if it is any of the former, then my concern remains.

Indeed I think it's fair to say that emancipator thinkers in general haven't grappled adequately with such thorny questions. This is the sort of incompleteness we're all still struggling with, no matter what our basic ideological framework.

That would implies that we agree these additional functions are important -- that we don't have a compelling political vision until we deal with them, and that people are still working on it. I would have no problem at all with that. I didn't see any sentiments like that in what I read, however...

As for the other sort of incompleteness - "why is there almost no attention to matters of kinship and culture?" - LM is a specific component of the broader social ecology vision, and Janet Biehl's book makes clear that it is best understood in the context of that broader vision. Social ecology has, I think, done better than most other left intellectual traditions at paying attention to kinship and culture, and in that respect bears comparison with the wonderful work you and your comrades did in *Liberating Theory*.

Again, I would have had no problem and wasted no words if the book presenting LM said that it was a partial vision of a desirable polity and that, as well, of course the polity isn't the only important facet of society or the only one that needs a vision.

That would be, as you note above, analogous to what Robin and I say about parecon being an economic vision, only. Again, though, I didn't get a feeling like that from what I read.

I suspect, for example, that the reason you consider LM's relatively sketchy treatment of adjudication and enforcement such a serious oversight is that these functions are, in your opinion, central to the political sphere as such.

I think that among others they are, yes... I also suspect that almost everyone, including in the anarchist tradition, has felt that in addition to decision making, the implementation of decisions and the debate of them and, as well, the enforcement of them including matters of law and order and adjudication are all what we might call centrally important political functions...

LMists have a very different conception of the political sphere, as Janet explains in her book.

I don't know which way you wish to have this point.

Either these other political functions are important and LM just hasn't addressed them yet. Or LM feels they are largely peripheral other than to the extent that LM does, at least implicitly, already address them.

I wouldn't have any problem with the first view. I am not even remotely convinced by the second, which seemed to me to be the one that actually abides.

In your work on PE with Robin Hahnel, you've distinguished three main ways of organizing economic life: markets, central planning, and participatory planning.

Three main forms of allocation institution, which is one part of what organizes economic life, yes. We also talk about some people's proposals to essentially disentangle the economy down to a face to face barter kind of system...

My biggest objection to your analysis of LM is that you implicitly classify LM as a variant of central planning: you write that "putting politics in charge of economics characterizes both fascism and Stailinism"; "this [Bookchin's view] is precisely the argument of the Soviet-style central planner"; "this political rule over economics would  soon require local agents in the workplaces to administer the rules imposed from without - a layer of management, etc., just as was the case with central planning systems", and so on.

Though I went into more detail, yes, that is the impression I got of the logic and even the intent of LM. The central planning bureau in LM is the federation of assemblies, but it is a central planning bureau in its logic, as far as I could tell. The idea, it seemed to me, was to have citizens acting in their geographic assemblies, administer economic life...deciding pretty much everything consequential.

But in fact LM represents, within the terms of your tripartite scheme, a variant of participatory planning.

Perhaps it does, but the descriptions I read certainly didn't lead me to think that.

PE and LM share the goal of a grassroots democratic economy structured around active participation in planning decisions (what Castoriadis called "completely socializing the functions of direction") without relying on market exchange or a coordinator class.

Well, that's good to hear. And I think it is true of aspirations of many folks, no doubt...but the fact that that is the desire doesn't mean that LM or PE has put forth institutional structures that are (a) in accord with its desire, or (b) viable. That has to be checked...

Where LM and PE part ways is on the question of the proper institutional embodiment of participatory planning.

Okay, let's see....but if we only part ways on "institutional embodiment" that would mean we agree on guiding values, which would mean we agree not only on solidarity, equity, and diversity -- and on classlessness, but also that in economic life actors should be in position to influence decisions in proportion as they are affected by them. That is certainly central to the view Hahnel and I have of how planning should occur -- and we call our answer to the need, participatory planning. I think in fact perhaps we don't agree on this, however.

PE propses a council-based model, LM an assembly-based one. And here, I think, our genuine disagreements begin.

Well surely it isn't in the name we give to these vehicles of collective expression. I mean we could have called workers councils and consumers councils workers and consumers assemblies...

The difference in this respect (and I think there is another about how much influence people should have over decisions) seems to me to be more that we have workers councils/assemblies and consumers councils/assemblies as well federations of each -- whereas LM has only citizens councils/assemblies and federations of them, and that PE has a clearly enunciated system of accruing, dispersing, and acting on information and proposals from individuals and groups to then move from disagreements to plans, whereas, to be honest, I think LM, at least as I read it, doesn't really have much of any mechanism for actually, in practice, arriving at economic outcomes.

Your critique of the assembly model includes several distinct strands, and to try to do them justice I'm going to quote the relevant portions of your essay and offer brief answers to the questions you ask:

I think the strands reflect different angles of approach, mostly differences between addressing LM as a political institution or as an economic one.

Yes, we do assume [that the volume of legislative and executive undertakings for such assemblies would hugely diminish in a better society], and it seems an entirely warranted assumption in light of the huge proportion of present economic and social activity which serves no purpose other than maintaining current power structures. There's also a question of scale here, since local assemblies have a much more limited purview than the US senate.

I agree that much will disappear, by all means...

As to local assemblies having a much more limited purview than say our current national government, however, that is not clear to me from what I read. The description I read says not only that local assemblies deal with their local issues -- but that they send delegates to higher level assemblies or senates or whatever, to deal with matters crossing over many regions or the whole country. It also says these delegates are able only to voice the views given to them by their local originating constituencies -- which means those local assemblies have to have passed written judgment, presumably with everyone voting, on everything that the delegates are going to address at any higher level. Perhaps, again, I am misreading or missing something, but that does seem to me to be what it said, and quite strongly, distinguishing itself from having representative procedures in just this way.

The LM critique of representation is not a rejection of the neccessity for delegating authority.

Well that is news to me -- again, maybe I am just reading it wrong.

LM explicitly envisions any number of boards, commissions, working groups and so forth to work out the particulars of policy implementation. All we insist on is that important substantive decisions be brought to the full assembly for ratification, amendment or rejection.

Well, if that is the case, then while some of my concerns would disappear, I have to admit others would take their place.

To me to ignore (and I didn't see anything written about it) the power that can accrue to people and organizational structures that have it in their grasp to decide implementation or to bring decisions while instead making others, would actually, arguably, be a step backward in comprehension, at least from the rhetoric that describes the logic of U.S. political institutions...which understand that to worry about legislation but ignore the power that an executive has makes no sense.

Certainly. I must say I don't believe it's LMists who have focused obsessively on the issue of voting mechanisms, but our critics. Most of an assembly's time will be spent on deliberation, not on voting.

That really doesn't answer the questions about voting that I raised, I don't think, nor about deliberations. Whole populations don't prepare the materials that people use to deliberate...the processes of information preparation and flow and deliberation certainly seem to me to be very important aspects of whether a political vision (even a limited one of legislation only) is desirable. Thus it seems to me it needs to be addressed, directly.

The other side understands this sort of thing very well -- as when the U.S. wipes out radio stations, meeting places, church assemblies, independent newspapers, and on and on, to create a context in which a populace can't even have informed opinions much less develop collective agendas...and then says, okay, let's have a "free election."

(Consider again the U.S. Senate. Whatever people think of it, what happens in a transition to libertarian municipalism to all the various people working on assembling information and analyzing it preparatory to making decisions?)

Their ranks expand to include all citizens.

Well, I have to admit I don't find this compelling at all, depending, I guess, on precisely what it means.

A good society is not one in which we say that everyone does everything, clearly. Take a police function, to get into something that may be controversial. To me saying we don't need police because no one will ever do something that calls for police intervention is pollyannaish. I suspect that you would agree. But then to say instead that we don't need any folks called police because everyone will fulfill this social function, also doesn't resonate with me. Just as it wouldn't resonate to say we won't have any folks called airplane pilots, or anything else that takes special skills and training so that having everyone learn them would be a terrible waste, and that not everyone is remotely interested in learning. The same goes for doing political data mining, so to speak...

I understand saying everyone develops a facility for decision making, for making judgments, and so on. But I don't understand when someone says everyone is going to be the type of researcher who assembles materials needed to rationally assess legislative or adjudicative or executive political issues (or to police...).

(Is the transfer to libertarian municipalism one that leaves what's called the permanent government basically intact?)

No. We reject the state in toto.

So we have no people whose responsibility -- in toto or in part -- is to research different political issues, present relevant information, or whatever. We have no judges, no police, etc. Well, this may make sense, but in what I read I don't think there was any supporting argument...and actually, I don't think this was explicitly claimed, either. Rather, these issues seem to be ignored.

(altering only the voting actors from being a relative few representatives to being whole assemblies of citizens?)

Yes. Why do you amalgamate these two very different processes?

I am not sure what you mean -- if everything is decided by everyone, each person meeting in their local assemblies -- I honestly think the picture is, well, dysfunctional. I gave examples earlier, maybe you'll address them below.

(And if the work is needed, then who does it for the envisioned assemblies and what is their power?)

I take it you mean the more detailed work of assembling, processing, and presenting information. I think something like PE's proposed Iteration Facilitation Boards would fit just fine into an LM framework.

It is just entirely different, it seems to me. Participatory planning has a very specific domain that it addresses, with very clear information to be conveyed, and with virtually no controversy about what the facts are, so to speak. Political decisions are very different...as are legal ones, adjudication, etc.

(Why does libertarian municipalism take for granted (a) that all decisions should be taken by a majority vote,)

Because no practicable alternative is preferable (more on this in a moment).

Every day, virtually all the time, you use alternatives, it seems to me...in your family, your workplace, and so on. I await more below...

(and (b) that the control of each institution in the society, regardless of how wide a constituency it affects, should be entirely in the hands of the assembly for the particular municipality in which it happens to reside.)

"Entirely" isn't really accurate; "primarily" would be closer to what we have in mind.

Okay, I agree that's as it should be, but why, in your view? That is, for an LMers why doesn't everyone everywhere get a vote if majority voting by all is our only viable decision making option? And how can they have some lesser input, unless, indeed, it is possible -- as I certainly agree it is -- to allow for that?

(Put less abstractly: Why should a majority decide aspects of my life that affect only me?)

It shouldn't. You've misunderstood LM here. The assembly has authority only over political issues, that is, the management of public affairs. Aspects of an individual's life that affect only that individual are none of the assembly's business.

I don't think it is me here that is missing the point...

You say it shouldn't but do you think that the only two possibilities are that an assembly has full say, with each member having equal influence, and that it has no say -- each member having dictatorial power and not colliding?

If the reason a local assembly shouldn't have a say over what I read tonight is because it overwhelmingly affects only me -- fine, should it have some but not total say over a decision I take which has some impact on others, but mostly affects me? That seems correct to me...but apparently not to LM.

for LM it seems that either issue are political or they are private. But in fact most impact some folks not at, some to a degree, and some quite a lot.

(And why should a university or the Grand Canyon be totally under the auspices of those who happen to live where it sits?)

Again, "totally" is inaccurate. Think of the local community as a sort of 'landlord' that hosts an important institution which provides services to a whole region. LM doesn't say that "institutions that affect a wide audience or constituency extending beyond the borders of a single municipality should nonetheless be entirely under the purview of the municipality where they happen to be situated", as you put it. We do say that such institutions must, at least, operate within the good graces of their host community, a principle which I trust applies to PE as well.

Sure...in PE people should influence outcomes in proportion as they are affected -- so the whole constituency affected by decisions involving such an institution should influence those decisions.

But I honestly don't think you are answering what I am raising.

How do the folks who get the benefits (or suffer the costs) of this institution which affects all of society have impact on its operations? I know how those who live in the local community do, through their assembly. I think they have too much. I would like to know how others have an impact...and why the amount each has makes any sense -- including the amount the workers who work there have.

You object particularly strongly to LM's emphasis on majority rule as a voting procedure within the assemblies...but I do want to point out, in contrast to your essay's portrayal, that there really are two contrary principles at stake here, and that LMists have good reasons for advocating majority rule and do not simply assume its superiority. In several passages you suggest that LM's majority voting is a misapplication of the maxim that "people ought to influence political decisions in proportion as they are affected by them". But LM rejects this maxim as a guide for procedural questions.

Alright, it is good to know what the differences are. I suspected this, but I admit I don't see on what basis it is rejected and when I have chatted with LMers they have always used the principle, more or less, to explain, for example, something you mention above, that assembles have no business deciding private matters of individuals. Why not? I have a ready answer, but what is LM's reason if not this principle?

You also said that local assemblies determine the decisions bearing on their region almost without anyone outside impacting their decision. Why? Why don't others have a say? My answer would be if the decisions don't impact others, or impact them only very minimally, then their say should be in accord with that. But what is LM's rationale?

I am looking for a rationale that applies in those cases, but for some reason doesn't apply universally.

It's not that we misunderstand or misapply this principle, which is crucial to some aspects of PE, but that we deny its validity in determining decision-making  frameworks.

Okay, good. But why? What is wrong with the principle. Rejecting it means that you think it is okay for some people to impact a decision a lot while it affects them less, and others to impact it less while it affects them more. Why is that okay?

We believe that simple majority rule, while hardly a perfect arbiter of conflicting wills, is *procedurally* preferable to its alternatives.

Okay, good, I know you all believe that, but why -- what is a reason, an argument, for why majority rule is better (presumably in attaining some values that you believe in) in virtually every situation, rather than its simply being one voting option among many, sometimes the best, sometimes not.

Those alternatives, in our view, amount to either minority rule (two-thirds majorities, consensus process, etc.), or temporarily avoiding the problem (weighted voting). I know I'm not about to convince you on either count, I simply want to get the LM position straight.

But you have only said you think each person being able to vote, and having an equal vote, and counting up to determine a majority is better -- you haven't said WHY you think that.

Suppose three people are going to a dinner. You are deciding on a restaurant. Two want to go to one that serves only peanut dishes, the third is allergic to peanuts and wants to go somewhere else. How should this decision be made -- one person one vote majority rule and then everyone is responsible to carry through the result? I don't think so. And the reason I don't is that one actor is vastly more impacted by the decision at hand.

Now there is no point arguing about whether we can or can't implement proportionate influence before deciding if we agree with it. What you seem to be saying is not simply that we can't do it really well -- in which case, in essence, you would be saying the closest that we can come is majority rule -- but rather that attaining it just isn't a good idea. I want to know why you think it isn't a good idea.

Why, that is, if we can develop institutions that vest each actor with influence over decisions proportionate to the degree they are impacted by them (by whatever mechanisms) should we instead opt to always use majority vote?

I think you've also misconstrued LM thinking on the workplace and the day-to-day aspects of production. While we do reject workers' control as the organizing principle of a liberated society, LMists do not hold that the internal dynamics of particular enterprises, much less the shopfloor tasks of individual workers, are to be determined by municipal assemblies.

So the workers participate in deciding what -- how long to work, what to produce -- or only how to implement what some assembly someplace instructs them about all the big issues? The latter is quite like central planning, I am afraid, again. Central planners did not, in fact, decide all the day to day, minute to minute issues that arise in a plant, of course. However, because decisions about those could utterly disrupt what central planners sought, central planners carefully installed, so to speak, in each workplace a layer of employees empowered to make those decisions and beholden to the planners, responsible to meet the planners aims, paid more and enjoying lots of other benefits for doing so, and so on.

If LM thinks that highly politically conscious workers are going to simply follow orders emanating from assemblies of people who are, in fact, neither distinguished by being explicit consumers of the product nor by being workers in the processes, and who, as a result, have marginal relevant knowledge of those two dimensions of the economic issues at stake, I think they are misunderstanding how people function. But, in addition, to think such decisions would be economically sound -- without explaining how they could become informed and reason to desirable conclusions, is, well, assuming the can opener -- to use the analogy I raised earlier in another reply I wrote.

This is, as you note, neither desirable nor practical. LM proposes that the general outlines of economic activity be subject to popular control through a democratic planning process - exactly what PE envisions.

No, it isn't what PE envisions...

We simply disagree on the best institutional framework for realizing that goal.

Yes we do disagree about the framework, but the one that LM proposes is one that is utterly ill-suited to accomplishing the whole task, for want of means and ability to account for all actors desires and conditions in the right degree.

And, of course, we again have the problem of, in turn, actors having disproportionate influence -- in the PE view workers who produce a good and those who consume it and are affected by its consumption are far more affected by the decisions at stake over that good than others (though everyone is affected to a degree). So PE's aim is to have a planning process that percolates each person's wills in the proper amount into the mix that arrives at decisions, using information mechanisms, etc. that also ensure that the outcome will be economically informed and sound.

LM's approach, as best I can see, reduces workers in plants to obedience regarding anything that the assemblies decree -- as to just what all the assemblies will be deciding, I admit I have no clear idea -- and gives equal say to all over every outcome, assuming it works as desired, which at first sounds nice but is actually not, I think because some people should have more say and some less, in fact...and also lacks either means of information dispersal or calculation, or comparison of options, etc. sufficient to yield desirable outcomes.

Nowhere does LM advocate making "significant economic decision[s] about the  operations of a given workplace . . . solely in a geographically based assembly, especially without input from the workers in the plant who address the matter precisely based on their shared experiences there, or from the consumers of the product, assessing the product in light of their experiences with it".

Well, it was my impression. I would be interested in a quotation which indicates what LM instead advocates... Is there even a paragraph in Biehl's book that discusses what workers as workers have a say over. I don't know, but my memory is no.

Under LM, such decisions are hardly made "without input" from the workers and consumers affected, since they participate in the assembly.

Suppose someone comes along and says that all decisions about every region, indeed every household, will be taken in a national assembly that includes every citizen and give each one vote. So now when you complain that it makes no sense operationally and in principle also utterly disenfranchises you from matters that most impact you if the whole population, one person one vote, decides how you are going to function inside your house, or how your neighborhood is going to set up its little league, or whatever, and someone says, nonsense you and all your neighbors are in the assembly, after all -- are you convinced by that?

Why should GM's workers give be impressed when being told that they are in assemblies as the answer to the query why they aren't able to meet as workers in the plant, share their experiences, arrive at their views about the plants operations, and then propose those mediating them, themselves, in reaction to the views of other actors affected by their plant, to arrive cooperatively at decisions? I don't think they should.

Aside from thinking this approach is simply out of touch with the reality of economic functions, I just don't think it is libertarian...I guess I would have to say.

You're quite right that it is "consistent with the underlying impetus of libertarian municipalism to assert that workers' views of their own situations as workers and consumers' views of their own situation as consumers are both critical to making just and sensible decisions about economic life"; such views inform the participation of every member of the assembly.

No, not in the sense I mean. Such views are specific to real conditions in real places. What is needed for anything either sensible or just, it seems to me, is for actors in institutions to together play a role in governing those institutions.

I don't follow how LMers can understand this type reasoning regarding a community -- Thus, LMers would scoff at the idea that a community should not have an assembly but instead simply be subordinate to the will of a national one--but not other units. Why wouldn't LMers feel, as well, that the population of a workplace needs a council...of their own?

You seem disturbed by this prospect of participation on the basis of civic responsibility, rather than on the basis of workerhood or consumerhood,

Participation in economic planning based on citizenship, yes, you are quite right -- I find it odd in the extreme. Participation in political functions based on citizenship makes good sense to me, however.

I think it is quite reciprocal to someone saying -- as I think I argued -- that everyone should decide political outcomes only from within workers councils. Both views seem to me to be equally devoid of merit...and for very similar reasons.

It is as citizens and in our roles in communities and neighborhoods and counties and so on, that we experience political impacts, in considerable degree, and it is there where we can most sensibly develop our attitudes about our part in these and share the attitudes with others and agitate on their behalf. And properly so. To say that everyone should impact political decisions but should do so only from within workplace councils would make no sense in moral or justice terms...and would also rob deliberation and debate of its logic and sense.

But it is as consumers and producers that we experience economic impacts, in considerable degree, and it is there where we can most sensibly develop our attitudes about our part in these and share the attitudes with others and agitate on their behalf. And properly so. To say that everyone should impact economic decisions but should do so only from within neighborhood political assemblies would make no sense in moral or justice terms...and would also rob deliberation and debate of its logic and sense.

but I don't see what is disturbing about it.

Well, I have tried to explain...I don't know what more I can say.

I certainly can't agree with your claim that "if workers or consumers want some new procedure or product, the information can only sensibly come from them as workers or consumers."

Okay, why don't you agree?

Would you agree if I said that if people want some new law it can only sensibly come from them as citizens, from their experience vis a vis laws...as compared to coming from them from within workers councils where they identify and are meant to identify overwhelmingly in terms of only their economic involvements? I suspect you would...but the logic is the same for the reciprocal formulation.

If I notice, while walking to the assembly, that the sidewalk pavement is in bad need of repair, must I report this to my fellow citizens only "as a pedestrian"?

Suppose you work in a car factory. You want a new approach to car production, a new pace of work, an innovation, a new rule about workplace norms, to produce more or less -- what do you do, bring this to the local assembly where you live to discuss it with people who have no idea what you are talking about? Doesn't it make infinitely more sense to bring it to a workers council which is involved as one agent in the determination of workplace outcomes and options? And shouldn't you and your fellow workers, if you decide there is something you want to do be the ones to propose it, to argue for it, and to have some level of say, together, collectively, in the decision -- with consumers also having some, and so on?

LM local assemblies are very much like PE consumer councils, and yes, they could certainly act as such for their domains...and thus your example above.

On the other hand, in LM there isn't anything that remotely resembles a mechanism that I can see anyhow, that would allow consumers as a whole to convey to producers as a whole the cumulative desire for more or less cars, air conditioners, or anything else -- much less a mechanism to weight this desire sensibly against those of workers producing the product and to arrive at some conclusion about what to do.

While the workplace and the household are the proper arena for arranging the particulars of production and consumption, they are not, in our view, the appropriate locus for general deliberation and decision about the overall economy.

What are the particulars? What about how much a given plant is going to produce? Who decides that, and how? Does it take into account the desires of those who work there, of those who consume the output?

A further point of divergence between PE and LM, which I think your essay somewhat obscures, is the mechanism of distribution. At one point you claim that "Bookchin is throwing out the baby (economic allocation institutions per se, including the good ones) with the bathwater (markets)". But of course LMists don't dismiss allocation institutions as such - which you tacitly admit, inasmuch as you go to some lengths to criticize the allocation institutions we do propose -

Actually, and with all due respect, I don't think LM has anything like a serious economic vision. I don't think it proposes serious means of allocation. I don't think it says anything serious about norms of remuneration, etc. I may be missing it, but I haven't seen it... I think it is mostly just hand-waving on this score... Is there anywhere in LM literature that discusses, say, exchange rates and how they are arrived at, and why those arrived at are accurate, just to give one example?

we simply argue for a particular form of allocation, or more properly distribution, one which PE roundly rejects. Libertarian municipalists are communists. I realize that this makes us economic naifs in your view (though I'm not certain why; I can't recall you or Hahnel giving an argument against communism, except to assert that it's utopian and unfeasible),

I suspect you are now saying LMers believe in people getting whatever they need, and giving whatever they can. Well, fine...if you can tell me even remotely how someone decides what they need and what they want to give (in terms of time and effort and so on) such that the sum total that people request matches the sum total that people are going to provide, I will accept it as a serious proposal. But without that...I'm sorry, but it isn't.

but it does help explain features of LM economics which you take to be mysterious. It accounts, for example, for the fact that "the Libertarian Municipalist vision also says nothing about how goods and services are valued for exchange and about how remuneration occurs". We see no place, in a full-blown LM society, for exchange value or remuneration of any sort.

Well, okay...then I guess we just have to agree to disagree. I would only ask how you think it is going to come about that there is even a remote connection between what people decide to take for consumption and what they decide to provide as labor.

I must admit that I'm not entirely confident that a communist distribution system would, in fact, be feasible in the distant liberated future, but I don't see it as a priori impossible.

I don't think it is possible, ever -- but even aside from that, it certainly isn't possible if people can say that they want any old thing and can offer to work any old amount, doing, again, any old thing they prefer. Is this the part of what you are presenting that you had in mind when you said many LMers would differ from you?

If that isn't what you mean, then you probably don't in fact mean that people can have what they need and work the amount they choose to...

Indeed I think it stacks up rather well against PE's effort criterion, which I've never found convincing, among other reasons because it creates the problem of how to measure effort and encourages duplicity. Your response to such concerns, that community scrutiny would discourage shirking, applies just as well - indeed better - to libertarian communism.

These are big topics, to be sure.... I am not sure why a discussion of the logic of LM would hinge on that of PE, so I don't want to get into that in the middle of this. We have written on it extensively, however.

If you are saying community scrutiny would prevent people from over consuming, that is only true if someone can say what over consuming is. In the absence of an allocation system that determines exchange values and budgets, how would anyone know that?

The problem with distribution according to need and work according to desire is that, on the one hand the former is limitless and the latter is limited, unless the former is mediated through attention to implications for the latter -- which is what an allocation system permits but LM does without. If everyone can have anything they ask for, why wouldn't the sum total of what is asked for dwarf what is available? If the answer is because people will understand that there is only so much and moderate their requests in accord, then we are back to needing an allocation system to accomplish precisely that mediation. If you don't know, for example, the "cost" of something (because there is no mechanism to arrive at exchange rates) there is no way for you to sensibly decide whether asking for it is warranted or glutinous. More, how do producers know how much to produce...actually, there are endless questions one could ask.

My final rejoinder to your critique of LM concerns the notion of subordinating the economy to the polity, which you note is central to the LM vision. To a large extent I think we're actually in agreement here; PE and LM share the goal of creating "methods of allocation in which instead of buyers and sellers each seeking to fleece the other or be fleeced, all actors instead cooperate in defining aims and actions that are socially desirable", though of course we still disagree on just which methods are most promising.

Yep.

We also agree that "we need economic institutions that provide a context in which producers and consumers will act socially and will not be competing and narrowing their choices in ways that subvert larger priorities and aims".

Yep.

But you go on to say that "surely we can't achieve these aims by subordinating the economy to the polity".

Yep.

Why not? The reasons you give in your essay all center on the potentially undemocratic nature of any set of political institutions.

No, that is not true at all. I don't think I said anything at all, in fact, to the effect that political institutions can't be democratic. My concerns center on (a) the fact that the LM approach relegates economic actors to insufficient say over what they are doing and are most affected by and gives them too much say over what they aren't doing and are least affected by, and (b) is utterly unworkable for want of mechanisms that allow actors to make decisions in light of needed information such as the true social costs and benefits associated with the production and consumption of items in the economy.

But I don't think this will get us very far, since the same logic applies to any set of economic institutions. Neither PE nor LM can offer structural guarantees that our respective systems will remain democratic and participatory.

Well, no. When my complaint is stated in my terms, as above, it turns out it is not applicable to participatory planning. And, more, while if I were to say I thought that the participatory planning system and structures should also fulfill all political or even just all major political functions, it would be subject to a more or less reciprocal criticism -- I don't say that.

This issue is intimately related to our differing perspectives on workers' control. LMists don't want so much to "transcend economics" as we want to transcend separate economic institutions that are removed from the rest of public life. We think this sort of separation preserves capitalist divisions which should not be carried over into a free society.

Why not say the same thing about households and subordinate them to assemblies? Why not say it about couples, for that matter, and subordinate their sex lives to assemblies? Why not say that you don't want separate geographic units and therefore eschew local assemblies opting instead to have only one big national one?

To say you don't want competing economic units -- I agree with, period. I don't either.

To say you don't even want solidaritous and social economic units in which actors share the situations of that unit's economic life acting as some kind of political institution adjudicating disputes in distant communities, or deciding legislation for them, I agree with again.

Saying that you don't want workers inside workplaces to act together collectively, to assess their situations and impact decisions about the life of their workplace and its actions, however, strikes me as utterly odd -- I have to admit. It is almost as weird to me as if you said you wanted the local political assemblies to govern family life or people's sex lives . Each strange choice disenfranchises people from having proper influence over an important part of their lives.

In one of the earliest comparisons of LM and PE, Howie Hawkins described this intention of LM thus: "In the longer run, anarcho-communism seeks to progressively dissolve into the community the separate enterprises based on a social and geographical division of labor. By physically decentralizing production to create rounded communities that reintegrate production and consumption, agriculture and manufacture, natural beauty and urban amenities, mental and manual labor, means of livelihood and ways of life, the question of workers' control as distinct from community control is eventually rendered moot." (Howard Hawkins, "Community Control, Workers' Control, and the Cooperative Commonwealth", *Society and Nature* #3).

Well, I am not going to argue with Howie in this message since he isn't here to reply and didn't choose this for himself, but I will say that while I think the above is really nice words, it is not good substance.

This is one reason why LMists prefer a community assembly model to PE's worker and consumer councils. To quote Hawkins again: "as long as workplaces confront each other and consumption units as functionally differentiated interests, there is the real possibility that these units will seek advantage over each other, reintroducing competition, and leading eventually to regression back to capitalism with competitive markets and private accumulation."

This is bookchin'a point, which I replied to in detail in the article. One might as well say the same thing about regions -- as long as they are allowed to function as entities they may war with one another and fight and so on. It is true as far as it goes, but it is a ridiculous counter to the view that it is desirable to have local assemblies. The issue is whether you have an overall institutional pattern (political or economic) that breeds competition between units or not.

To be honest, other than worrying about economic units competing and subordinating them to the polity, in point of fact I saw nothing about how LM actually prevents or even reduces the likelihood of workers in each plant getting together and trying to advance their own interests without concern for others. PE is very clear about how it does this, making such behavior exceptionally difficult, utterly contrary to the logic of the system, and, as well, very hard to turn into any real gains, and so on. But LM just says we will have the polity decide in its wisdom all the major economic decisions. Fine, now why do workers in each of these potentially fractious units bother to pay any attention to these decisions? Why do they bother to produce the amounts they are told to produce? And so on. More, the assemblies are deciding how much steel should be produced? How do they do that? How do they know what the plants are capable of? Why is the information they have believable? Where do they get it? And so on.

To be honest about it, I don't actually think LM has anything resembling an economic vision...

The only thing about economics that is really evident and forefront is some kind of very strong aversion to workers, perhaps even consumers, expressing their desires collectively with one another, as such, regarding the big issues of economics. That's really it...it seems to me.

Thus it is not the case that LMists fear that "economics is intrinsically competitive and self-seeking, and that we should therefore have no power granted to economic institutions per se" as you put it. Rather we fear that separate economic institutions which are not subject to direct oversight by the whole community can end up taking on a competitive and self-seeking dynamic, and we therefore propose that any power granted to economic institutions be fully anchored within a broader context of democratic community power. This is what we mean by subordinating the economy to the polity.

No, I don't actually think it is....

In a society with a participatory economy we indicate quite clearly and with no reticence that the polity can pass laws which restrict or constrain economic options. So in that sense -- the sense of the above paragraph -- the legal system, the polity, can obviously impact the economy and limit the economy, yes.

But LM is saying something much greater. It is saying that political institutions, as such, should also function as economic institutions and should, in that capacity, make the important decisions (thought there is no clarification at all of what the important decisions are).

More, the statement that economic institutions can be competitive and function in a way that is antithetical to all of our values is, of course, true. But to assert that the only possible solution to that is that political institutions take up the critical defining and delimiting economic functions is to say, it seems to me, that one believes that no economic institutions could accomplish that desirable end -- eliminating the competitive clash of the units and instead tying them together into cooperation.

You aren't offering an argument for that, it seems to me, you are just repeating it. I know that LMers say that. I just haven't heard an argument for it. Either you all are saying that you think competition between economic units is inevitable, and has to be reigned in by a polity, or you admit that economic units could function cooperatively and would like to see them do so, but feel that subordinating them to political assemblies is the only way.

If the former, PE is an argument that you are wrong.

If the latter, the problem is your solution is not really a solution. It gives away any hope of actually having a well functioning economy, on the one hand, unless it devolves more or less into central planning. And, on the other hand, it certainly gives some actors too much say and others too little over various decisions -- in essentially the same way that subordinating every community to a federation of workers councils would.

Several of your responses to this position suggest that you think "the economy" is inhabited by some group other than the people who make up "the polity". But in LM these are the very same people. There is thus no need for "local agents in the workplaces to administer the rules imposed from without" any more than PE requires a "layer of management" to ensure that plans are implemented. Indeed this whole terminology of "from without" makes no sense when applied to LM.

Well, we just disagree. This is precisely the kind of thing central planners used to say as well...and I think it was wrong for them and is wrong for you.

The reason we don't need a fixed layer of management in PE is because workers control their own lives in their workplaces and there are jobs that are balanced for empowerment--they aren't carrying out instructions from outside obediently without power of their own. They are doing what they have agreed is the right thing to be doing.

The reason such a layer is needed for the LM or the centrally planned model is that in each of these workers are handed instructions from outside the workplace and in which they have collectively had no say, which they simply have to obey -- although they can very easily subvert them to their own interest. Thus, because of this possibility of subverting the instructions and the good reasons workers will feel they have for doing so when they don't like the instructions, the managerial layer is needed for control, as an agency of the planners or the assemblies.

Where is the "without" (or "above") when the polity consists of every single person, including all workers and consumers?

The U.S. electorate could be every single person, but if it instructed you about how you should operate in your household without you being able, along with the other members of your household, to have a say over your lives there beyond just voting in the polity, you would feel it as a horrible imposition from without, rightly, because your say would be being reduced drastically from what it ought to be.

The same holds for a workplace being instructed by an assembly or federation of assemblies.

On this point LM and PE are remarkably consonant, and distinct from most other anticapitalist traditions. We both share the goal of realizing, in Castoriadis' words, "the possibility for people consciously to direct the economy, to make decisions in full knowledge of the relevant facts - instead of submitting to the economy, as is now the case."

Yep, and PE takes it very seriously and addresses how the relevant facts can be assembled and made available, and how actors can have the circumstances and personalities requisite to impacting the decisions, and how the give and take of discussion can be organized and conducted, and how decisions can be arrived at so that the outcomes are economically sensible and reflect decision making input of the proper proportion from all those involved.

But you nevertheless consider LM's subordination of the economy to direct community control a "recipe for disaster".

Yes. I think it is utterly dysfunctional in information and decision making terms and would inexorably lead -- if we rule out the existence of workers councils (which is, of course, also simply ridiculous as no revolutionary project is going to occur that doesn't lead to those existing) to what would be, in essence, a central planning model, including agents of the planners managing the workplaces.

To substantiate this claim, you note that "putting poltics in charge of economics characterizes both fascism and Stalinism."

That isn't quite fair, I think. Rather I argued the reasons, but then also pointed out the analogy, hoping to jar, I admit, the thinking of some folks by the analogies. If that seemed unfair, I'm sorry.

The problem with fascism and Stalinism was hardly that the economy was subordinated to the polity, but that the polity was supremely undemocratic.

There are two versions of using this type argument that are very different.

(1a) When bookchin says to some anarchist that the problem with institutions that carry out political functions hasn't been that they carry out political functions, but that they have done so via statist (authoritarian) means, I agree with him. The most extreme syndicalist doesn't agree but instead says, no, politics is a disaster intrinsically, so we have to have the political side of life subordinated to economic councils. The syndicalist is wrong...

(2a) When the LMer goes on to say that the problem of subordinating other dimensions of social life to oversight by polity (and in fact, it isn't oversight that LMers recommend, but complete subordination to and domination by polity) hasn't been with the idea that polity should trump every other social function, but with the fact that the actual polities other dimensions have been subordinated to have been authoritarian -- I say, no, it is both.

Now look at this parallel.

(1b) I come along and say, the problem with economic institutions functioning via an economic logic and economic agents hasn't been that they are economic, but that they are class divided, etc. I think you ought to be able to agree with that and that in agreeing you ought to hope and anticipate that someone can offer economic institutions that cause economic functions to be carried out cooperatively. Instead, you take a kind of "political syndicalist" position saying, no, economic logic and life is such that we have no choice but to subordinate it to the polity, to the assembly. It is very parallel to what the syndicalist wrongly argues for in 1a above, and it eludes me why LMers don't seem to see this.

(2b) And now some extreme syndicalist (do these folks actually exist?) comes along and says the problem of subordinating other dimensions of social life to oversight by economic councils hasn't been with the idea that economics should trump every other social function, but with the fact that the actual economies other dimensions have been subordinated to have been class divided. I say again, no, it is both...

You go on to quote Bookchin's argument that the community should "control economic life generally", and remark: "The first thing we might note is that this is precisely the argument of the Soviet-style central planner". We might also note that it is the official position of the Catholic Church. So what?

Well, okay, if you don't see that the logic and structure is the same means you ought to look at it awfully carefully, so be it....

At this level of abstraction, the apparent similarity is as meaningless as the superficial resemblance between PE and the rhetoric of the Titoist bureaucracy circa 1964.

No, that sounds good but it is false. In the first place I doubt much similarity and I'd in fact be very interested if it did exist.

In the second place, I am not talking about similar rhetoric, I am talking about a similar logic and structural choice.

LM does not envision an "imperial polity". Since economic processes are integrated into public life as a whole, and since all economic actors are citizens, there is nothing for the polity to "usurp".

It is quite like planners saying they aren't imperial because they are, after all, agents of the people's state....but more, they could actually add that the constitution of the workplaces gave the workers absolute power ...

What is worrisome about a vision in which all major economic decisions are subject to democratic popular control, from the ground up, with no institutional hierarchies of any kind?

What is worrisome is what I have said -- that (a) it apportions, if it worked, the wrong amount of influence to actors, and (b) it wouldn't work as stated and to get viable outcomes would devolve into a variant of central planning.

Isn't your beef with LM really that it privileges resident assemblies over worker and consumer bodies?

Not regarding politics, no. I think political functions should be carried out by political institutions.

But I react to LM's idea of how to make economic decisions more or less as you do to the extreme Syndicalist idea of how to make political decisions. It doesn't make sense, wouldn't work, and, at any rate, apportions the wrong say to the wrong actors also having people make decisions not where their knowledge relevant to those decisions comes from, but in an unsuited place.

I don't want to turn the tables on you and shift this debate from a critique of LM to a critique of PE, but on this point I think LMists have excellent grounds for sticking to our assembly model.

Maybe, but either I am dense and not hearing them, or I am hearing them and don't find them compelling.

LM's distinction between policy making and administration allows for a large measure of leeway for workplaces and households in implementing collective decisions arrived at in assembly (something you didn't always seem to recognize, since you repeatedly insinuate that LM involves communal micro-management of workplaces and firms).

I asked if it were the case. This doesn't really reassure me, though, just as it didn't regarding the earlier discussion of political implementation. To the contrary, I find it a strange hole, so to speak, in the approach. Even typical bourgeois discussions of polity understand that there are tremendous potential powers that can accrue to execution of legislation or adjudication about it, so much so as to swamp the legislation functions itself, so that one has to address the hows of execution and adjudication even if one is only primarily interested in some desirable outcome regarding legislation. This seems true to me too...

PE, in contrast, makes the point of production and what we might call the point of consumption the arena for both immediate administrative decisions and larger policy decisions.

Well, it makes the people, or the groups, the agents who decide, yes, but the process is social and its reach depends on the nature of the issue at hand.

It is for this reason too optimistic, in my view, about sustained participation by all members of society, over the long term, in economic decision making.

You think that people won't want to decide what they will consume for their budget, that they won't want to help determine the organization of their workplaces, etc. That they won't have opinions and register them about collective consumption and investment...well, I do think they will, yes. And unlike LMs approach to political decisions, PE is quite explicit about how all this occurs, why people are motivated to participate, how they come to have the means and information to do so, etc.

The requirements PE places on all citizens, at the level of detail and in the specific technological format proposed, are likely to alienate many people from consistent engagement.

I don't know how to say this, but this is just a statement...it could be true or not, but there really isn't a reason given, I feel like there is a lot of this afoot...

I think a more realistic scenario, under a PE system, is that many folks would gradually cede effective authority to those of their co-workers or co-consumers who prove to be good at fiddling with proposals and iterations. You might reply that this problem of re-emergent elites or hierarchies could just as well affect an assembly-based system (and you've already raised the problem of the "dictatorship of the sociable").

I can't imagine consumers letting others decide what they will consume, and I can't imagine workers not wanting to have a say in decisions about their work, and so on. That some folks will be more into dealing with the information tasks is certainly true, but not a problem...unless dealing with the information tasks conveys greater say, which it doesn't, in a parecon.

But LM tries to account for that possibility precisely by integrating large-scale economic decisions into a single public arena,

Now we are down to large-scale economic decisions -- well, that isn't what the book I read said, even remotely. If it is the view, then you would need to clarify what a large-scale economic decision is, and what isn't, and how the others are handled.

which seems to be your major complaint against it. I am thus at a bit of a loss as to how to respond to this criticism, since our greatest strength is in your eyes our gravest sin, and for precisely the same reason.

Well, I think actually the big problem is the rejection of the norm that people should impact decisions proportionate to the degree they are affected. That troubles me far more because it effects the political functions aspect of the LM vision.

Regarding the economic aspects, to be honest, I find them so divorced from what is involved in an economy that I just think they will, if LM develops and grows, drop by the wayside in due course.

I think I've gone on long enough for now.

Yes, this is a bit of a problem for me. I have this thing about treating folks to a full and responsive reply when I get messages, and doing so for lots of folks, along with other responsibilities, can become demanding.....

I appreciated your essay's tone of fundamental solidarity and genuine critique, and I look forward to your response.

I hope it helps.

 

Staudenmier Responds

 

Hi again Michael,

I have a lot to say about your comments on my response, and I'm worried about overwhelming you. But I'm convinced that we're still talking past each other on several points, so I've opted for thoroughness rather than brevity. Here goes...

> There is nothing wrong with offering a partial vision for some sector of social life, or a vision for one sector but not for others. After all, PE is just an economic vision, and I obviously think that's okay. The problem arises if a partial vision claims to be something more and in so doing crowds out or even precludes people taking seriously things that it ignores. If LMers think that matters of adjudication say, need to be addressed but just that LM hasn't done so, then I have no problem on that score... I just didn't get that tone from what I read. [ . . . ] The feeling I got was that LM does claim to be a vision of what matters -- what we need to envision, particularly for the polity but also the economy. So the real question becomes, is LM saying this other stuff is unenvisionable, or is unworthy of attention, or is peripheral, or is implicitly taken care of by LM as it stands -- or does LM regard other political functions as important and in need of vision? [ . . . ] I would have had no problem and wasted no words if the book presenting LM said that it was a partial vision of a desirable polity and that, as well, of course the polity isn't the only important facet of society or the only one that needs a vision.

I think that one of the biggest stumbling blocks in our discussion is a crucial difference in terminology, which in turn reflects different ways of analyzing society as a whole. Libertarian municipalists, and social ecologists generally, don't share your categorization into four spheres (community, kinship, economics, politics). When we talk about 'politics' and 'economics' we don't mean the same things you mean by those terms. The difference is probably most pronounced regarding the polity; you use that word for the most part descriptively, while LM emphasizes a normative sense of the term. In Liberating Theory you and your comrades write: "The political sphere includes the State with its military, judiciary, police, legislature, and public works; political parties; lobbying and public interest organizations, etc." Much of Janet Biehl's book is dedicated to formulating a radically different conception of the political sphere, one in which many of the features you consider constitutive are entirely absent. As your essay noted, LM is built around this distinction between 'politics' and 'statecraft'.

Complicating matters further, our view of what counts as 'economics' doesn't align very well with your use of that word either (I'll address this in detail below). I recognize that you're unconvinced by our alternative characterization of the political and economic spheres, but I'd like to enter a plea for not trying to fit our arguments into your categories. It's certainly possible that even within our own terms LM still has a lot of work to do in fleshing out details, and to that extent I think your criticisms of its incompleteness are on target. But I'm nevertheless not entirely comfortable with the portrait you present of LM's shortcomings in this area:

> in addition to decision making, the implementation of decisions and the debate of them and, as well, the enforcement of them including matters of law and order and adjudication are all what we might call centrally important political functions...

It's not as if the book you read ignores these issues; it mentions juries, executive commissions, and so on a dozen times. That seems to me an appropriate level of detail for a small book on a large topic. And there is more discussion of these themes in the wider LM literature. But I'll leave aside the political terrain for now and turn to the aspect of your rejoinder which troubles me most: your continued insistence that LM's economic vision, in its "logic and intent", is a version of central planning.

> The central planning bureau in LM is the federation of assemblies, but it is a central planning bureau in its logic, as far as I could tell. The idea, it seemed to me, was to have citizens acting in their geographic assemblies, administer economic life...deciding pretty much everything consequential.

The second sentence is an accurate depiction of LM; the first is not. To my mind these two sentences, which you take to be equivalent, describe radically different things. Once again I ask, if all citizens are administering economic life, why is the planning any more "central" than it is in PE? The economic entities which LM envisions are, after all, a good deal more physically decentralized than the ones PE envisions. It seems to me that a "central planning bureau" is a minority body that arrogates to itself all powers of direction, leaving the majority of the populace - those who do not belong to this bureau - with a merely executive role. But if, as is the case in LM, there is no divide between directors and executants, in what sense is the direction "central"?

Perhaps the misunderstanding here - if that's what it is - has to do with the question of how decisions made by assemblies are carried out:

> A good society is not one in which we say that everyone does everything, clearly. Take a police function, to get into something that may be controversial. To me saying we don't need police because no one will ever do something that calls for police intervention is pollyannaish. I suspect that you would agree. But then to say instead that we don't need any folks called police because everyone will fulfill this social function, also doesn't resonate with me. Just as it wouldn't resonate to say we won't have any folks called airplane pilots, or anything else that takes special skills and training so that having everyone learn them would be a terrible waste, and that not everyone is remotely interested in learning. The same goes for doing political data mining, so to speak...

I don't think the skills needed for "data mining" or policing functions are analogous to piloting planes (though I don't see why even that would be a "terrible waste" of social investment if for some reason we wanted to totally democratize flying), and I see no reason why they couldn't be carried out on a rotating basis.

> So we have no people whose responsibility -- in toto or in part -- is to research different political issues, present relevant information, or whatever. We have no judges, no police, etc.

Not as a career, no. These functions exist and are the responsibility of rotating groups of citizens. Is this less preferable than the alternatives?

> Well, this may make sense, but in what I read I don't think there was any supporting argument...and actually, I don't think this was explicitly claimed, either. Rather, these issues seem to be ignored.

Again, the wider LM literature addresses many of these questions, often via historical examples drawn from the revolutionary and communalist traditions. But Janet's book hardly ignores them; she discusses administrative bodies chosen by sortition several times.

> if everything is decided by everyone, each person meeting in their local assemblies -- I honestly think the picture is, well, dysfunctional.

Because the "everything" part is too much of a burden? I don't think you mean this, because it would seem to doom PE as well. I still think your real problem here is the "local assembly" part; but perhaps I'm missing what you're getting at.

> Participatory planning has a very specific domain that it addresses

The entire economy is "very specific"? Even if I accepted this, wouldn't it just mean that LM assemblies address two very specific domains (the 'economy' and the 'polity') rather than just one?

> with very clear information to be conveyed, and with virtually no controversy about what the facts are, so to speak.

I can't completely agree with you there, but that would bring us into murky epistemological waters which are probably best avoided for now...

> Political decisions are very different...as are legal ones, adjudication, etc.

Different in terms of information? How so? Can't they be handled by informed amateurs? Do you think they require, by their nature, professionalization? It seems to me that LM is in a way applying your insights into "coordinatorism" to the 'political' sphere. Do you think they don't apply there?

> Put less abstractly: Why should a majority decide aspects of my life that affect only me? It shouldn't. You've misunderstood LM here. The assembly has authority only over political issues, that is, the management of public affairs. Aspects of an individual's life that affect only that individual are none of the assembly's business. I don't think it is me here that is missing the point...

LM isn't the least bit ambiguous about this. The book you read distinguishes "family life" from "political life" (p. 9, repeated on p. 87), says clearly that the public sphere begins "outside the walls of private homes" (p. 18), and devotes an entire chapter (chap. 2) to the distinction between the "political" and the "social". You and I disagree about the philosophical underpinnings at work here - you favor a model in which influence on decisions is proportional to impact, while I prefer a model in which different entities have authority in distinct areas - but there's no disagreement, in this concrete case, on the practical effects. LM does not hold that majorities should decide aspects of individuals' lives which affect only them personally. Thus your rhetorical question at the head of this thread (from an essay which will be read by many people who are wholly unfamiliar with LM) still seems to me a misrepresentation of LM, unless you make clear that LM agrees with PE that such majorty influence on personal life is unacceptable, and differs only on the 'why'.

> You say it shouldn't but do you think that the only two possibilities are that an assembly has full say, with each member having equal influence, and that it has no say -- each member having dictatorial power and not colliding?

I don't think these are the only two possibilities, but I do think they're the two main options. There are areas of life in which public, democratic, collective decisions ought to apply, and areas where that's inappropriate.

> If the reason a local assembly shouldn't have a say over what I read tonight is because it overwhelmingly affects only me -- fine, should it have some but not total say over a decision I take which has some impact on others, but mostly affects me? That seems correct to me...but apparently not to LM. for LM it seems that either issue are political or they are private. But in fact most impact some folks not at, some to a degree, and some quite a lot.

I would say that what you read tonight is none of the assembly's business because it affects only you, plain and simple. I'm not persuaded by your principle that people ought to have influence over decisions in proportion to the impact those decisions will have on them (not least because I think this principle is impossible to put into practice). I had meant to avoid this debate in my original reply to you, since it's gone unresolved for a long time despite the efforts of many of the brightest theorists of participatory democracy, but I suppose there's no getting around it now. The somewhat contrasting principle underlying LM is that everybody who is affected by a decision ought to participate in making that decision. We don't introduce the notion of proportionality. This does indeed mean that people who are affected by a decision only "to a degree" have the same formal input into the decision as those who are affected "quite a lot." We think this is acceptable, and is the least unwieldy way to ensure broad participation. I think that in practice, much of the time your principle and ours will yield identical results.

> in PE people should influence outcomes in proportion as they are affected -- so the whole constituency affected by decisions involving such an institution should influence those decisions.

I agree with the conclusion, not with the premise.

> But I honestly don't think you are answering what I am raising. How do the folks who get the benefits (or suffer the costs) of this institution which affects all of society have impact on its operations? I know how those who live in the local community do, through their assembly. I think they have too much. I would like to know how others have an impact...and why the amount each has makes any sense -- including the amount the workers who work there have.

In the world LM envisions, it would be rare that workers at a particular enterprise live in another locale. But the problem remains for regional institutions, like research universities or large industrial combines, which can't be effectively decentralized. LM's mechanism for such instances is confederal bodies, which I agree is a somewhat unsatisfactory answer. We also expect that under optimal conditions - which we believe are encouraged by LM's institutional structure - members of a given assembly will when necessary take into account the interests and opinions of their distant neighbors.

In several passages you suggest that LM's majority voting is a misapplication of the maxim that "people ought to influence political decisions in proportion as they are affected by them". But LM rejects this maxim as a guide for procedural questions. Alright, it is good to know what the differences are. I suspected this, but I admit I don't see on what basis it is rejected and when I have chatted with LMers they have always used the principle, more or less, to explain, for example, something you mention above, that assembles have no business deciding private matters of individuals. Why not? I have a ready answer, but what is LM's reason if not this principle?

I can't speak for the LMists you've chatted with, but it would surprise me if they invoked the proportionality principle. That principle, as I understand it, involves a continuum model of decision making power: you have more or less power according to the anticipated impact of the decision. We use a discrete model: you either do or don't have power over a given decision, and if you do, you have the same as everyone else. The private/public distinction, which undergirds our rejection of assembly meddling in personal affairs, follows this discrete logic rather than your continuum logic. There are, of course, enormous problems with figuring out just which issues count as 'public' and which as 'private', but I don't think these problems outweigh those associated with measuring anticipated impact.

> You also said that local assemblies determine the decisions bearing on their region almost without anyone outside impacting their decision.

No, participating in their decision, in the sense of voting on it, not

impacting it. 'Outsiders' impact the decision by bringing their concerns and their arguments to the attention of the responsible assembly. I'd like to point out again that this would in any case be a much less common scenario in an LM society. If a decision directly impacts a whole region, then all of the local assemblies decide on it.

> We believe that simple majority rule, while hardly a perfect arbiter of conflicting wills, is procedurally preferable to its alternatives. Okay, good, I know you all believe that, but why -- what is a reason, an argument, for why majority rule is better (presumably in attaining some values that you believe in) in virtually every situation, rather than its simply being one voting option among many, sometimes the best, sometimes not.

I think there are two issues tangled up here. On the matter of the philosophical justification for simple majority as a decision making rule, there's an extensive literature which I'm afraid I can't recapitulate here. But LMists are scarcely unusual among revolutionaries in choosing this mechanism as the best available option. But more important, it sounds like (if I read the sentence above correctly, and I'm not sure I did) you're mixing up the results of a vote with the voting mechanism used to reach that result. Our disagreement is procedural : what's the most democratic and participatory device to use when wills and opinions conflict? It's not about "attaining values we believe in". The time to argue for the values we believe in is before the vote, during deliberation. If we lose the vote, that doesn't in itself mean it was conducted undemocratically.

> But you have only said you think each person being able to vote, and having an equal vote, and counting up to determine a majority is better -- you haven't said WHY you think that.

A majoritarian process balances two criteria of participatory democracy: widest possible breadth of enabled decisionmakers, and equal footing for all decisionmakers. In Looking Forward (p. 35) you write: "The only inflexible rules are those precluding methods that obstruct participation or deny equitable access of all workers to equal opportunities for fulfillment and influence." We think that nonmajoritarian decision rules deny equitable access of all participants to equal opportunity for influence, and that's why we're somewhat inflexible on the matter. But your "counting up" comment makes me think that perhaps I've given you the impression that LMists reject any but the simplest vote tallying methods. We only reject those which require supermajorities, because we consider them functionally identical to minority rule. If you're thinking of mechanisms like single transferable vote tallying - the process described on p. 104 of Looking Forward - those are completely compatible with a majoritarian framework. Indeed there are a number of complex versions of majority rule, any of which might be appropriate in a given situation.

> Why, that is, if we can develop institutions that vest each actor with influence over decisions proportionate to the degree they are impacted by them (by whatever mechanisms) should we instead opt to always use majority vote?

Once again it sounds like you're blurring procedures and outcomes (though perhaps I'm just not getting your point here). What you describe is entirely possible with a 50%-plus-one rule, and indeed happens regularly in bodies where such a rule applies, via informal influence that is exercised during deliberation. In your three-people-choosing-a-restaurant scenario, there is nothing at all objectionable about a majority format. If the other two disregard the third diner's allergy, they've made a stupid decision, but not by virtue of the voting procedure. Their mistake was failing to take account of or act properly on crucial information. By all means people who are likely to be disproportionately affected by a decision should raise the point in discussion, and other participants are expected to give proper weight to this consideration when they cast their votes. What LMists object to is the attempt to build preferred outcomes into the voting mechanism itself.

> I think you've also misconstrued LM thinking on the workplace and the day-to-day aspects of production. While we do reject workers' control as the organizing principle of a liberated society, LMists do not hold that the internal dynamics of particular enterprises, much less the shopfloor tasks of individual workers, are to be determined by municipal assemblies. So the workers participate in deciding what -- how long to work, what to produce -- or only how to implement what some assembly someplace instructs them about all the big issues? The latter is quite like central planning, I am afraid, again.

I don't see how. In PE, workplace collectives decide how to implement what some cybernetically linked mass of anonymous workers and consumers someplace instructs them, via the plan generated through your iterative process, about all the big issues. I don't find this objectionable, either in PE or in LM, as long as those doing the implementing participate in the instructing.

> Central planners did not, in fact, decide all the day to day, minute to minute issues that arise in a plant, of course. However, because decisions about those could utterly disrupt what central planners sought, central planners carefully installed, so to speak, in each workplace a layer of employees empowered to make those decisions and beholden to the planners, responsible to meet the planners aims, paid more and enjoying lots of other benefits for doing so, and so on.

All of which are explicitly proscribed by LM.

> If LM thinks that highly politically conscious workers are going to simply follow orders emanating from assemblies of people who are, in fact, neither distinguished by being explicit consumers of the product nor by being workers in the processes, and who, as a result, have marginal relevant knowledge of those two dimensions of the economic issues at stake, I think they are misunderstanding how people function. But, in addition, to think such decisions would be economically sound -- without explaining how they could become informed and reason to desirable conclusions, is, well, assuming the can opener -- to use the analogy I raised earlier in another reply I wrote.

Nobody has to "simply follow orders"; I thought we had made that clear. Everybody who follows them also takes part in formulating them. And if nobody in the local assembly uses whatever is produced in its factories, why are those items being produced? Who is using them? If it's solely people a thousand miles away, then shouldn't we move the plant? As for relevant knowledge of particular production processes, do you think such knowledge is incommunicable? If I work at the local power plant, and my fellow citizens are considering installing air conditioners in every residence, it's my responsibility to remind them that our generators have limited capacity (and if they don't listen to me, then they're in for a surprise next summer). And LM certainly doesn't fail to explain how citizens could become informed on economic questions and reason to desirable conclusions. Pages 106-107 of Janet's book discuss the informational prerequisites of assembly decisions and the tools for providing them. We don't assume any can openers, just an informed and active citizenry.

> LM proposes that the general outlines of economic activity be subject to popular control through a democratic planning process - exactly what PE envisions. No, it isn't what PE envisions...

That surprises me. Have I misunderstood PE all along?

> Nowhere does LM advocate making "significant economic decision[s] about the operations of a given workplace . . . solely in a geographically based assembly, especially without input from the workers in the plant who address the matter precisely based on their shared experiences there, or from the consumers of the product, assessing the product in light of their experiences with it". Well, it was my impression. I would be interested in a quotation which indicates what LM instead advocates... Is there even a paragraph in Biehl's book that discusses what workers as workers have a say over. I don't know, but my memory is no.

Her book also has nothing to say about what women, as women, have a say over. Perhaps you think that's also a glaring oversight, and you might be right. But by no means would it justify a claim that "LMists advocate men making significant decisions about women's lives without input from women." All workers and all consumers belong to local assemblies, and in the vast majority of cases to the very assembly which decides on their place of work and on the products they consume.

> Suppose someone comes along and says that all decisions about every region, indeed every household, will be taken in a national assembly that includes every citizen and give each one vote. So now when you complain that it makes no sense operationally and in principle also utterly disenfranchises you from matters that most impact you if the whole population, one person one vote, decides how you are going to function inside your house, or how your neighborhood is going to set up its little league, or whatever, and someone says, nonsense you and all your neighbors are in the assembly, after all -- are you convinced by that?

What is it that you find so absurd or repellent about such prospects? If the "nation" comprised only 200 people living in proximity, and if you dropped the red herrings about "inside your house", then I would happily embrace this scenario. Why wouldn't you? I don't see how such an arrangement would "utterly disenfranchise" anybody. In LM's assembly model, if a particular group of workers or consumers fears that their experience, knowledge, or desires are not being taken into account, then they simply need to speak up. I don't understand why you think PE has an advantage on this score; it's not as if your model allows for a single workplace, on its own, to dramatically affect the overall plan.

> Why should GM's workers give be impressed when being told that they are in assemblies as the answer to the query why they aren't able to meet as workers in the plant, share their experiences, arrive at their views about the plants operations, and then propose those mediating them, themselves, in reaction to the views of other actors affected by their plant, to arrive cooperatively at decisions? I don't think they should.

In LM, workers at a specific plant are not only able to do all of these things, they're encouraged to do so. But they're also encouraged to look beyond the horizons of their particular plant and try to take into account the needs of the rest of the community.

> You're quite right that it is "consistent with the underlying impetus of libertarian municipalism to assert that workers' views of their own situations as workers and consumers' views of their own situation as consumers are both critical to making just and sensible decisions about economic life"; such views inform the participation of every member of the assembly. No, not in the sense I mean. Such views are specific to real conditions in real places.

But surely these views can be made intelligible in other real places. The assembly is basically a different route for conveying the same information to the same set of actors. You recognize this possibility yourself when you mention "consumer councils where citizens can take into account workers' efforts and needs" (Looking Forward p. 64). We expect this to be the norm in a libertarian communist society.

> What is needed for anything either sensible or just, it seems to me, is for actors in institutions to together play a role in governing those institutions.

Yes, I think that's what enterprise councils are for. Janet doesn't talk about these in her book, and obviously I can't speak for her here, but at least some LMists foresee an important role for such bodies. The Northern Vermont Greens, for example, called for "worker control of the production process overseen by the municipal assembly." A workplace would be governed internally by its workers, but broad production goals and standards would be subject to community control.

> Why wouldn't LMers feel, as well, that the population of a workplace needs a council...of their own?

They do need one. It just doesn't decide 'policy'.

> Participation in economic planning based on citizenship, yes, you are quite right -- I find it odd in the extreme. Participation in political functions based on citizenship makes good sense to me, however.

I suppose it would make sense to me too if I believed in a strict separation of economic and political spheres.

> I think it is quite reciprocal to someone saying -- as I think I argued -- that everyone should decide political outcomes only from within workers councils.

I'm not sure I'd have much of a quarrel with that view if everybody belonged to a workers council .... but then why would we call them 'workers councils' anymore?

> But it is as consumers and producers that we experience economic impacts, in considerable degree, and it is there where we can most sensibly develop our attitudes about our part in these and share the attitudes with others and agitate on their behalf. And properly so.

"Develop our attitudes", yes. "Share them and agitate", no.

> To say that everyone should impact economic decisions but should do so only from within neighborhood political assemblies would make no sense in moral or justice terms...and would also rob deliberation and debate of its logic and sense.

How so? Is there something intrinsic to economic decisions that makes them impossible to consider except in one's capacity as either worker or consumer? Why must decisions about social production happen "within workers councils where [people] identify and are meant to identify overwhelmingly in terms of only their economic involvements"? Libertarian municipalists want to break this very identification.

> Suppose you work in a car factory. You want a new approach to car production, a new pace of work, an innovation, a new rule about workplace norms, to produce more or less -- what do you do, bring this to the local assembly where you live to discuss it with people who have no idea what you are talking about?

Eventually, yes.

> Doesn't it make infinitely more sense to bring it to a workers council which is involved as one agent in the determination of workplace outcomes and options?

That's a good first step.

> And shouldn't you and your fellow workers, if you decide there is something you want to do be the ones to propose it, to argue for it, and to have some level of say, together, collectively, in the decision -- with consumers also having some, and so on?

Absolutely. And the final decision is up to the assembly of all citizens.

> On the other hand, in LM there isn't anything that remotely resembles a mechanism that I can see anyhow, that would allow consumers as a whole to convey to producers as a whole the cumulative desire for more or less cars, air conditioners, or anything else -- much less a mechanism to weight this desire sensibly against those of workers producing the product and to arrive at some conclusion about what to do.

Since most production in LM is local, the mechanism is at hand. If there are significant numbers of consumers of a certain product who live elsewhere, their input arrives in the form of a report or consumption request, rather like PE.

> While the workplace and the household are the proper arena for arranging the particulars of production and consumption, they are not, in our view, the appropriate locus for general deliberation and decision about the overall economy. What are the particulars?

How much cheese you eat, who gets to use the VCR in the living room tonight, what time you go in to work, how various workplace tasks are distributed.... everything including the format and speed of production, but not the production goal.

> What about how much a given plant is going to produce? Who decides that, and how?

The assembly, which includes the workforce of the plant, through a process of democratic deliberation in which various production proposals are put forward, debated, and voted on.

> Does it take into account the desires of those who work there, of those who consume the output?

That's the idea, since those people are themselves members of the assembly.

> Actually, and with all due respect, I don't think LM has anything like a serious economic vision.

That might be; our ranks are not bursting with trained economists.

> I don't think it proposes serious means of allocation.

As far as consumer goods are concerned, Janet's book says they are to be "distributed according to people's need for them, guided by an ethos of public responsibility as well as by reason." Vague, yes, communistic, certainly, but unserious? Isn't this notion roughly analogous to "distributive maxim four" which you discuss (and reject) in The Political Economy of Participatory Economics? Surely you don't consider all distributive maxims save your own to be per se unserious.

> I don't think it says anything serious about norms of remuneration, etc.

We don't believe in remuneration for work performed. There would be little point to it in any case if goods are available according to a principle of usufruct.

> Is there anywhere in LM literature that discusses, say, exchange rates and how they are arrived at, and why those arrived at are accurate, just to give one example?

You mean for interregional trade in raw materials and unfinished goods? No, we haven't come up with anything on that yet.

> I suspect you are now saying LMers believe in people getting whatever they need, and giving whatever they can.

Uh, yeah, that's the idea, clearly enunciated in the book you read, which repeats Marx's maxim "from each according to ability and to each according to need" several times...

> Well, fine...if you can tell me even remotely how someone decides what they need and what they want to give (in terms of time and effort and so on) such that the sum total that people request matches the sum total that people are going to provide, I will accept it as a serious proposal. But without that...I'm sorry, but it isn't.

PE is the only allocation system I know of that strives for an actual "match" between production and consumption. Until it's been tested in practice, it might make sense to hold off on deciding which proposals are practicable. We're all familiar with limited forms of communism from our daily lives (most families operate internally on this principle to an extent, and a good number of friendships are based on it). I live in a 12 person collective household which practices a sort of culinary communism: as far as consumption goes, we all eat as much as we want to from the common stock. If our food buyer gets a case of cereal expecting it to last a month, and it's all gone by the 20th, then we have three choices: eat less cereal ("an ethos of public responsibilty"); buy more the next time and all pay (i.e. "work") more; get used to having no cereal for the last week of every month. If one housemate is eating two boxes a day, we have a talk about that. Is there something unserious about this system?

> I would only ask how you think it is going to come about that there is even a remote connection between what people decide to take for consumption and what they decide to provide as labor.

The one is constrained by the other. In a decentralized economy subject to public oversight, everyone is aware that if we want more stuff, we need to put in more labor. You're asking about aggregate production and aggregate consumption. The matter of scale aside, doesn't PE solve this problem in more or less the same way - all actors are aware that total production delimits total consumption? Of course, you have a great deal more of the details worked out. I'm happy to stipulate that if we lived in an LM society, I would argue to my fellow citizens for adopting PE's methods where applicable.

> Is this the part of what you are presenting that you had in mind when you said many LMers would differ from you?

No, not at all. I'm afraid we're all commies!

> Indeed I think it stacks up rather well against PE's effort criterion, which I've never found convincing, among other reasons because it creates the problem of how to measure effort and encourages duplicity. Your response to such concerns, that community scrutiny would discourage shirking, applies just as well - indeed better - to libertarian communism. These are big topics, to be sure.... I am not sure why a discussion of the logic of LM would hinge on that of PE, so I don't want to get into that in the middle of this. We have written on it extensively, however.

Right - I meant that much of what you and Hahnel have written could serve as a defense, mutatis mutandis, of libertarian communism.

> If you are saying community scrutiny would prevent people from over consuming, that is only true if someone can say what over consuming is. In the absence of an allocation system that determines exchange values and budgets, how would anyone know that?

Then I'm not sure what you mean by exchange values as part of an allocation system; don't we need just an accounting system (which could be denominated in labor hours, I suppose)? We certainly have nothing against budgets; indeed I think the major 'economic' activity of LM assemblies would be generating a sort of comprehensive municipal budget, which would encompass production goals, expected demand, and labor needs.

> The problem with distribution according to need and work according to desire is that, on the one hand the former is limitless and the latter is limited, unless the former is mediated through attention to implications for the latter -- which is what an allocation system permits but LM does without. If everyone can have anything they ask for, why wouldn't the sum total of what is asked for dwarf what is available?

That's what Janet was pointing to with "reason", "an ethos of public responsibility", and so on. She does discuss the issue for several pages.

> If the answer is because people will understand that there is only so much and moderate their requests in accord, then we are back to needing an allocation system to accomplish precisely that mediation. If you don't know, for example, the "cost" of something (because there is no mechanism to arrive at exchange rates) there is no way for you to sensibly decide whether asking for it is warranted or glutinous. More, how do producers know how much to produce... actually, there are endless questions one could ask.

Why won't we know these things based on last year's (or last budget cycle's) experience?

> But you go on to say that "surely we can't achieve these aims by subordinating the economy to the polity". Yep. Why not? The reasons you give in your essay all center on the potentially undemocratic nature of any set of political institutions. No, that is not true at all. I don't think I said anything at all, in fact, to the effect that political institutions can't be democratic.

I didn't impute to you the view that political institutions can't be democratic. I did impute to you the view that political institutions can be undemocratic - a view which I share.

> My concerns center on (a) the fact that the LM approach relegates economic actors to insufficient say over what they are doing and are most affected by and gives them too much say over what they aren't doing and are least affected by, and (b) is utterly unworkable for want of mechanisms that allow actors to make decisions in light of needed information such as the true social costs and benefits associated with the production and consumption of items in the economy.

Do you mean that such mechanisms are incompatible with LM, or that we fail to delineate the form they might take?

> But I don't think this will get us very far, since the same logic applies to any set of economic institutions. Neither PE nor LM can offer structural guarantees that our respective systems will remain democratic and participatory. Well, no. When my complaint is stated in my terms, as above, it turns out it is not applicable to participatory planning. And, more, while if I were to say I thought that the participatory planning system and structures should also fulfill all political or even just all major political functions, it would be subject to a more or less reciprocal criticism -- I don't say that.

It seems to me you've now reformulated your claim to: "Surely we can't achieve these aims by subordinating the economy to the polity in the inexcusably vague and structurally threadbare way which LMists propose." But I still don't know what you have against subordination as such. Because it messes up your four-part categorization of the social world?

> LMists don't want so much to "transcend economics" as we want to transcend separate economic institutions that are removed from the rest of public life. We think this sort of separation preserves capitalist divisions which should not be carried over into a free society. Why not say the same thing about households and subordinate them to assemblies? Why not say it about couples, for that matter, and subordinate their sex lives to assemblies?

Neither of these is a division created by capitalism, and in neither case does their persistence threaten to reintroduce capitalist dynamics.

> Why not say that you don't want separate geographic units and therefore eschew local assemblies opting instead to have only one big national one?

For practical reasons, to begin with.

> To say you don't want competing economic units -- I agree with, period. I don't either.

It's not just competing units we're worried about, it's separate units with particularistic interests. We want the responsibility for overseeing economic units to be an integral part of the democratic management of public life, so that their impact on the community as a whole takes precedence over their separate identity.

Saying that you don't want workers inside workplaces to act together collectively, to assess their situations and impact decisions about the life of their workplace and its actions, however, strikes me as utterly odd -- I have to admit.

We don't say this.

> It is almost as weird to me as if you said you wanted the local political assemblies to govern family life or people's sex lives .

Well, we do allow for a certain oversight role for communal assemblies in these spheres too. I think that in most communities you wouldn't be able to beat your kids, for example, or have sex with five-year-olds. I am not troubled by this, and it doesn't strike me as weird.

> Each strange choice disenfranchises people from having proper influence over an important part of their lives.

But much of what you're calling the "economic" shouldn't be an important part of an individual's personal life. In its broad outlines, it should be an important part of public life.

> In one of the earliest comparisons of LM and PE, Howie Hawkins described this intention of LM thus: "In the longer run, anarcho-communism seeks to progressively dissolve into the community the separate enterprises based on a social and geographical division of labor. By physically decentralizing production to create rounded communities that reintegrate production and consumption, agriculture and manufacture, natural beauty and urban amenities, mental and manual labor, means of livelihood and ways of life, the question of workers' control as distinct from community control is eventually rendered moot." (Howard Hawkins, "Community Control, Workers' Control, and the Cooperative Commonwealth", Society and Nature

>3). Well, I am not going to argue with Howie in this message since he isn't here to reply and didn't choose this for himself, but I will say that while I think the above is really nice words, it is not good substance.

Do you mean that the descriptions he offers are unworkable, or that the goals he enunciates are undesirable?

> This is one reason why LMists prefer a community assembly model to PE's worker and consumer councils. To quote Hawkins again: "as long as workplaces confront each other and consumption units as functionally differentiated interests, there is the real possibility that these units will seek advantage over each other, reintroducing competition, and leading eventually to regression back to capitalism with competitive markets and private accumulation." This is bookchin'a point, which I replied to in detail in the article.

No, the view you attribute to Bookchin in your article is that economic units as such exhibit this tendency to revert to capitalist forms. What Howie and I, and I think Bookchin too, are actually saying is that separate economic units run this danger.

> The issue is whether you have an overall institutional pattern (political or economic) that breeds competition between units or not.

We think that yours, potentially, does.

> To be honest, other than worrying about economic units competing and subordinating them to the polity, in point of fact I saw nothing about how LM actually prevents or even reduces the likelihood of workers in each plant getting together and trying to advance their own interests without concern for others.

You missed the chapter on "The Formation of Citizenship"? It might not be convincing, but it's more than "nothing".

> PE is very clear about how it does this, making such behavior exceptionally difficult, utterly contrary to the logic of the system, and, as well, very hard to turn into any real gains, and so on. But LM just says we will have the polity decide in its wisdom all the major economic decisions. Fine, now why do workers in each of these potentially fractious units bother to pay any attention to these decisions? Why do they bother to produce the amounts they are told to produce?

If they don't, then the assembly needs to rethink its decision.

> And so on. More, the assemblies are deciding how much steel should be produced? How do they do that? How do they know what the plants are capable of? Why is the information they have believable? Where do they get it? And so on.

Why are any of these issues problems for LM in particular? Assemblies get the requisite information in the same way that consumer councils do in PE. And why do workers in PE bother to pay any attention to the plan? Because they participated in formulating it, indeed their input is the very stuff of the plan. The same is true of LM. I don't see how any of this counts as an objection to LM specifically.

> To be honest about it, I don't actually think LM has anything resembling an economic vision... The only thing about economics that is really evident and forefront is some kind of very strong aversion to workers, perhaps even consumers, expressing their desires collectively with one another, as such, regarding the big issues of economics. That's really it...it seems to me.

Not at all. We have a strong aversion to reducing workers to their occupational role. And we are strongly in favor of workers and consumers expressing their desires collectively with one another, as citizens, regarding the big issues of economics. What did you read that suggested otherwise?

> More, the statement that economic institutions can be competitive and function in a way that is antithetical to all of our values is, of course, true. But to assert that the only possible solution to that is that political institutions take up the critical defining and delimiting economic functions is to say, it seems to me, that one believes that no economic institutions could accomplish that desirable end -- eliminating the competitive clash of the units and instead tying them together into cooperation.

Not "no economic institutions", but no separate economic entities or production units.

> Either you all are saying that you think competition between economic units is inevitable,

Between separate economic units, those that aren't embedded in a broader communal framework.

> and has to be reigned in by a polity, or you admit that economic units could function cooperatively and would like to see them do so, but feel that subordinating them to political assemblies is the only way.

As opposed to subordinating them to workplace assemblies, yes. Not the only way, but the preferable way.

> If the former, PE is an argument that you are wrong.

Not until we try it out on a large scale. Pending demonstration to the contrary, I think Howie's got a good point. Do you really think this is not even potentially a problem for PE? What we warn against is workplaces confronting each other as functionally differentiated units in respect to broad questions of social investment. To overcome this danger, we propose putting those economic decisions which are not specific to a particular workplace in the hands of all workers collectively, along with any non-worker neighbors, in a concrete format: local resident assemblies. You propose, in contrast, putting these very same economic decisions in the hands of all workers collectively in a concrete format: cybernetically facilitated iteration rounds. I recognize that you think your proposed format makes much more sense than ours. But why do you insist that we're really aiming for something entirely different? We both want to subordinate the same processes to the will of the same people, don't we? Isn't it the format that differs?

> Several of your responses to this position suggest that you think "the economy" is inhabited by some group other than the people who make up "the polity". But in LM these are the very same people. There is thus no need for "local agents in the workplaces to administer the rules imposed from without" any more than PE requires a "layer of management" to ensure that plans are implemented. Indeed this whole terminology of "from without" makes no sense when applied to LM. Well, we just disagree. This is precisely the kind of thing central planners used to say as well...and I think it was wrong for them and is wrong for you.

But those central planners really were "outside"! They stood above the rest of the society and made the decisions for everyone else. Nothing like this exists in LM.

> The reason we don't need a fixed layer of management in PE is because workers control their own lives in their workplaces and there are jobs that are balanced for empowerment--they aren't carrying out instructions from outside obediently without power of their own. They are doing what they have agreed is the right thing to be doing.

And so are workers in LM. Do you dispute this?

> The reason such a layer is needed for the LM or the centrally planned model is that in each of these workers are handed instructions from outside the workplace

Aha! You mean outside the workplace . In that case I plead guilty: we do in fact believe that it is legitimate to make decisions about economic matters outside of the factory walls. But then so do you. PE has any number of crucial economic decisions being reached outside of individual workplaces - from neighborhood consumer councils to industry council federations. And your model explicitly recognizes that larger units reach their decisions first, thus establishing the parameters within which smaller units can maneuver.

> and in which they have collectively had no say, which they simply have to obey

I don't know how the book you read gave you that impression. As LM envisions things, all workers have a say, individually and collectively, in coming up with the "instructions" which they themselves then follow. Under no circumstances does any worker have to "simply obey" a set of economic directives which she or he played no role in formulating, unless he or she chose not to participate in the planning process.

> Where is the "without" (or "above") when the polity consists of every single person, including all workers and consumers? The U.S. electorate could be every single person, but if it instructed you about how you should operate in your household without you being able, along with the other members of your household, to have a say over your lives there beyond just voting in the polity, you would feel it as a horrible imposition from without, rightly, because your say would be being reduced drastically from what it ought to be.

I wish you'd drop this "in your household" line. LM is no more invasive on home life than PE is. I'm nevertheless a bit taken aback by your broad claim here. Even in today's society, I cannot torture small children within my household. I do not consider this a horrible imposition from without. But to address your point: negotiation and compromise are an integral part of any democratic process. No participant in such a process can expect her or his wishes to simply carry the day without being modified in some way by the wishes of others. In economic life, that's what democratic planning procedures are for - to mediate and harmonize the disparate goals of all producers and consumers. When the issue is, for example, how many shoes or refrigerators or bicycles to manufacture next year, we think the proper forum for conducting a democratic planning process is the full assembly of all residents in face to face deliberation. I fail to see why shoemakers should have more formal voting power on this question than shoe wearers. This will indeed sometimes mean that the bicycle shop will be expected to produce more bicycles than its current workforce would like. Perhaps that would be an unhappy situation, but I don't think it would be either undemocratic or inordinately intrusive. It seems to me that PE deals with similar situations in a similar way: work teams or sub-councils within one enterprise have to negotiate with their co-workers in other teams and other sub-councils in order to come up with a proposal for the full workplace council. The fact that all workers are expected to follow the plan which is eventually decided upon is hardly an indication that PE is subtly totalitarian, since all workers took part in shaping the plan to begin with. Exactly the same is true of LM.

> The same holds for a workplace being instructed by an assembly or federation of assemblies.

But not for a worker being "instructed" by her workplace assembly?

> if we rule out the existence of workers councils (which is, of course, also simply ridiculous as no revolutionary project is going to occur that doesn't lead to those existing)

Yes, but do we build the new society around them? That's the question.

> When the LMer goes on to say that the problem of subordinating other dimensions of social life to oversight by polity (and in fact, it isn't oversight that LMers recommend, but complete subordination to and domination by polity) hasn't been with the idea that polity should trump every other social function, but with the fact that the actual polities other dimensions have been subordinated to have been authoritarian -- I say, no, it is both.

I think what you're saying here is that you have a theory of what should and should not fall within the domain of "the polity." I might be more convinced by this theory if I knew why you think "the polity" should deal with 'moral' issues but not economic ones, and why you think the two can be meaningfully distinguished. The force of this particular objection to LM depends entirely on accepting a fundamental cleavage between "the economy" and "the polity." We think this bifurcation is itself a legacy of capitalism. Even conventional marxists agree that "capitalism has driven a wedge between the economic and the political [ . . . ] capitalism is marked by a unique differentiation of the 'economic' sphere" (Ellen Meiksins Wood, "The separation of the 'economic' and the 'political' in capitalism", chapter 1 of Democracy Against Capitalism ). Indeed, Wood argues that "the evolution of capitalism [can be] viewed as a process in which the 'economic' sphere is differentiated from the 'political'." But the same argument has also long been made outside the marxist tradition. Polanyi held that "the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere" is unique to capitalism (or what he called "market society"): "It might be argued that the separateness of the two spheres obtains in every type of society at all times. Such an inference, however, would be based on a fallacy. True, no society can exist without a system of some kind which ensures order in the production and distribution of goods. But that does not imply the existence of separate economic institutions; normally, the economic order is merely a function of the social, in which it is contained." (The Great Transformation, p. 71) Libertarian municipalists seek to overcome the division between the economic and the political rather than carrying over this vestige of capitalism into a free society. We think it makes sense to call the management of these re-integrated entities "politics", which in our terms means direct democracy.

> You go on to quote Bookchin's argument that the community should "control economic life generally", and remark: "The first thing we might note is that this is precisely the argument of the Soviet-style central planner". We might also note that it is the official position of the Catholic Church. So what? Well, okay, if you don't see that the logic and structure is the same means you ought to look at it awfully carefully, so be it.... I am not talking about similar rhetoric, I am talking about a similar logic and structural choice.

I can't understand why you think that libertarian municipalists, who come out of the anarchist tradition, have neglected to look carefully at the history of Soviet-style central planning. I think it is you who's not looking carefully here. The charge that LM is similar in "logic and structure" to central planning flies in the face of your own description of the constitutive features of central planning regimes. Allow me to quote you: "In centrally planned economies, there is no democratic circulation of quantitative or qualitative information. Central authorities determine what is to be known and what isn't as well as who is to know and who isn't." (Looking Forward p. 68); "planners determine economic goals [and] managers within each factory oversee the implementation of these goals. There is a division between the conceptual work performed by planners and managers . . . . and the executionary work of the working class itself which carries out the plans and orders of others." (Socialist Visions p. 253); "central planners obstruct participation. Central planning isolates people from one another and propels elite rule." (Looking Forward p. 63) Perhaps you could point to passages in the literature on LM that suggest anything remotely like factory managers, central authorities, planners, planning bureaus, orders, a division between directors and executants, obstacles to the democratic circulation of information, or a dissociation of those with the power to determine knowledge from those deprived of knowledge. And perhaps you could explain how directly democratic citizen assemblies obstruct participation, isolate people from one another, and propel elite rule.

> LM does not envision an "imperial polity". Since economic processes are integrated into public life as a whole, and since all economic actors are citizens, there is nothing for the polity to "usurp". It is quite like planners saying they aren't imperial because they are, after all, agents of the people's state....but more, they could actually add that the constitution of the workplaces gave the workers absolute power ...

No matter what Soviet bureaucrats said, they were not in fact agents of the people's state, much less of a workers' state, because no such thing existed in the Soviet Union. They were wrong when they claimed such things. Do you think the factual claim in my statement above is wrong? Where, in LM, are the workers who are not assembly members? Where are the executants dispossessed of a conceptual role? Where are the coordinators who have authority over production? Where is there any group or any subsection of society with any institutional power? Where is there any hierarchy whatsoever of some people over other people? LM rejects coordinatorism just as firmly as PE does - if not more so, considering your response to Gary Sisco on the question of separating administration from policy making. It doesn't make sense to accuse us of being, in effect, too anarchist, too decentralized, too suspicious of respresentation, and of being closet central planners.

Isn't your beef with LM really that it privileges resident assemblies over worker and consumer bodies? Not regarding politics, no. I think political functions should be carried out by political institutions.

Even if I thought it made sense to perpetuate a divide between the economic and the political, I don't see how they could possibly be disentangled in practice. Part of the intention of LM is to create a 'moral economy', a system which "ceases in fact to be economic in the usual meaning of the word" (Bookchin, "Market Economy or Moral Economy?"). This re-integrated understanding of economic and political action would by no means leave the latter unchanged and merely subsume the former under it: "a moral economy must become a school for creating a new kind of citizenship: economic citizenship as well as political, productive citizenship as well as participatory." We want to fundamentally reshape both the 'political' and the 'economic' realms and make both of them public affairs for all people to decide on collectively in a grassroots and participatory fashion. Why are you so intent on keeping these two realms of social life cleanly separated?

> PE, in contrast, makes the point of production and what we might call the point of consumption the arena for both immediate administrative decisions and larger policy decisions. Well, it makes the people, or the groups, the agents who decide, yes, but the process is social and its reach depends on the nature of the issue at hand.

What I was trying to get at is not the groups of people who are agents in PE, since in my opinion this is not a point of divergence between PE and LM. I was pointing to the contexts in which they exercise their agency. In PE, those contexts are primarily the household and the workplace, along with neighborhood consumer councils. I have no quibble with this arrangement when decisions concern what I've been calling the particulars of production or consumption, but I am not impressed with it when decisions concern the formulation of broader economic policy for whole communities. When "the nature of the issue at hand" is, say, setting basic priorities for local industry, agriculture, or services, PE proposes that people deliberate through the same forums and via the same media as they do when deciding on household budgets or task rotation at their workplace. I think you see this as one of PE's strong points; I consider it a weakness.

 

Albert Replies

> Hi again Michael,

Hello Peter...

The single > is you...the double >> is me, apparently....

> I have a lot to say about your comments on my response, and I'm worried about overwhelming you. But I'm convinced that we're still talking past each other on several points, so I've opted for thoroughness rather than brevity. Here goes...

I don't mind -- it is important matters. The problem is I have to reply pretty much immediately and in full in a sitting -- else I get infinitely behind vis a vis incoming mail. So I hope my reaction won't be less thought out and careful than they ought to be...

[ Everything above and below, other than this brief note, was written in order...but on reaching the end, or as far as I got, I returned to here .... You were right, It was too much for this format. Probably as much my fault as yours. Where are you located? What would be far more porductive, I think, would be to find a way to get together in person.....]

>> There is nothing wrong with offering a partial vision for some sector of social life, or a vision for one sector but not for others. After all, PE is just an economic vision, and I obviously think that's okay. The problem arises if a partial vision claims to be something more and in so doing crowds out or even precludes people taking seriously things that it ignores. If LMers think that matters of adjudication say, need to be addressed but just that LM hasn't done so, then I have no problem on that score... I just didn't get that tone from what I read. [ . . . ] The feeling I got was that LM does claim to be a vision of what matters -- what we need to envision, particularly for the polity but also the economy. So the real question becomes, is LM saying this other stuff is unenvisionable, or is unworthy of attention, or is peripheral, or is implicitly taken care of by LM as it stands -- or does LM regard other political functions as important and in need of vision? [ . . . ] I would have had no problem and wasted no words if the book presenting LM said that it was a partial vision of a desirable polity and that, as well, of course the polity isn't the only important facet of society or the only one that needs a vision.

> I think that one of the biggest stumbling blocks in our discussion is a crucial difference in terminology, which in turn reflects different ways of analyzing society as a whole.

Okay...

> Libertarian municipalists, and social ecologists generally, don't share your categorization into four spheres (community, kinship, economics, politics).

Yes, I know...

> When we talk about 'politics' and 'economics' we don't mean the same things you mean by those terms.

Yes, but if we are both talking about the world, then the concepts we each use somehow mean to capture all that is important and central in it, from the point of view of social change. They have to overlap then, in sum...and I think they do.

> The difference is probably most pronounced regarding the polity; you use that word for the most part descriptively, while LM emphasizes a normative sense of the term.

By polity I actaully mean the part of society that carries through what we might most broadly call the political function -- it turns out that writ large that is essentially all of society, though we can also talk about the defining aspects of polity, and then it is much less. Just like by economy or kinship sphere or community I mean the parts that carry out those respective functions. Again, writ large each is essentially everything, but if we are talking about defining aspects and central features, than each is unto itself, for the most part.

> In Liberating Theory you and your comrades write: "The political sphere includes the State with its military, judiciary, police, legislature, and public works; political parties; lobbying and public interest organizations, etc."

Yes, and writ small -- capturing just its essentials it will be those aspects that define the nature of politics and the enacting of political functions -- and different people could disagree about what those are...

> Much of Janet Biehl's book is dedicated to formulating a radically different conception of the political sphere, one in which many of the features you consider constitutive are entirely absent.

And that is fine is the function they do is peripheral or even counter productive. My view of a desirable economy doesn't have banks or irs and so on and so forth through countless institutions -- and what it does have changes the meaning of things like consuming and produciting, prices and exchange, etc. But it does, I hope, accomplish desirable economic functions and in a way that propels values and outcomes we favor. So my inclination is that a view of a desirable polity should do the analogue -- accomplish desirable political functions in a way propelling values and outcomes we favor. I anticipate meanings changing, new institutions, old ones missing, etc. The problem was there are basic political functions that seemed to me essentially untreated in what I read. It wasn't explained why they weren't needed -- a claim I don't believe without a good case for it -- and how they are accomplished wasn't indicated. That could still be fine, if the vision calls itself partial, but LM doesn't.

So I woulnd up feeling -- what happeded to adjudication and enforcement -- if they are dropped, why? If they are present, how? If they just aren't yet treated, why isn't that stated?

This is not the core of my concern, however, because I assume the latter is the case...

> As your essay noted, LM is built around this distinction between 'politics' and 'statecraft'.

Yes, but adjudication is no more statecraft -- though it can be done in ways that further statecraft, than legislation (which LM deals with) is statecraft...

> Complicating matters further, our view of what counts as 'economics' doesn't align very well with your use of that word either (I'll address this in detail below).

Well, here I have to admit, I am more concerned -- I tend to think it isn't just a matter of not getting around to something but a far deeper disagreement.

> I recognize that you're unconvinced by our alternative characterization of the political and economic spheres, but I'd like to enter a plea for not trying to fit our arguments into your categories.

But I truly haven't Peter.

If someone says to me where are banks in parecon -- I can't say back we don't use the concept, don't impose it on us. I have to say back the thing banks do is gone or utterly altered in parecon. Here is what we jettison, here is what remains in altered form, and here is why we gain.

That's what I was looking for, one way or another, re adjudication, say.

> It's certainly possible that even within our own terms LM still has a lot of work to do in fleshing out details, and to that extent I think your criticisms of its incompleteness are on target. But I'm nevertheless not entirely comfortable with the portrait you present of LM's shortcomings in this area:

Okay, but WHY?

>> in addition to decision making, the implementation of decisions and the debate of them and, as well, the enforcement of them including matters of law and order and adjudication are all what we might call centrally important political functions...

Okay, so I am saying I expect someone who says to me here is what the political vision is to explain either how it amends and accomplishes these functions -- to explain why they are accomplished outside the new polity -- to explain why they are jettisoned, no longer needed to be accomplished -- or to explain why they are of little importance so though they will be accomplished we don't have to worry about how, that is a matter of details for later.

I didn't see any of this...

> It's not as if the book you read ignores these issues; it mentions juries, executive commissions, and so on a dozen times. That seems to me an appropriate level of detail for a small book on a large topic.

Well, then we can agree to disagree -- unless I really read wrong in which case I wish you would fill me in.

I bet LM advocates simply cannot explain how the process of adjudication, enforcement, etc. take place, or why...

> And there is more discussion of these themes in the wider LM literature. But I'll leave aside the political terrain for now and turn to the aspect of your rejoinder which troubles me most: your continued insistence that LM's economic vision, in its "logic and intent", is a version of central planning.

Okay, but to be honest, you have only told me above that LM isn't properly subject to the criticism, you haven't offered any evidence at all that it isn't. So I have to say on this score I remain concerned...

>> The central planning bureau in LM is the federation of assemblies, but it is a central planning bureau in its logic, as far as I could tell. The idea, it seemed to me, was to have citizens acting in their geographic assemblies, administer economic life...deciding pretty much everything consequential.

> The second sentence is an accurate depiction of LM; the first is not.

Well, I guess that depends on what you mean or I mean by the terms.

In context what I was saying was that in central planning there is an apparatus, outside the economy's workplaces which makes decisions and instructs the workplaces in what to do -- and they obey. That is the heart of it. In fact, a central planning board can use any of quite a few mechanisms to decide what instructions to issue -- it can poll citizens or just a maximum leader, it can examine store shelves or ideological prescriptions, it can bias in various ways or manifest absolute perfect insight into the needs and capabilities of the population, resources, etc. etc. But ultimately orders go to workplaces, information about the ability to fulfill them goes back to the planning apparatus, orders go back to the firms -- any they obey.

In central planning, every instance we have ever seen -- and for totally predictable reasons -- the planners are an elite, and there is in each workplace an extension of them in a managerial/administrative layer beholden to the planners not the workers. They engaged in the give and take, and then enforce obedience.

So, what I was saying is that in LM there is this vast (society spanning) network of municipal assemblies responsible, as best I could read it, for developing the plan -- that is, for deciding economic inputs and outputs of different units.

(a) A very large part of that operation will have to be done by specialized groups, and (b) The relationship is that of central planing -- a mechanism bossing the workplaces (c) There will emerge a layer of rule in the workplaces

Thus, the core attributes of central planning.

> To my mind these two sentences, which you take to be equivalent, describe radically different things.

But Peter, I actually described, in more detail than above, why I felt it was fair to say LM would either be economically dysfunctional or economically a good version of central planning.

> Once again I ask, if all citizens are administering economic life, why is the planning any more "central" than it is in PE?

And with all due respect, you are right we are talking past each other.

All economic actors are involved in the determination of inputs and outputs, etc., in even the most stalinist central planning model. The workers by saying yes we can do that or no we can't -- by way of their bosses. The consumers by indicating that they want items or not...as well as other manifestations.

What makes it central planning is that the economics actors don't engage in activity and make decisions directly about economic outcomes -- rather what they do (given greater or lesser importance) filters through another entity -- call it the federation of assemblies, or the state, or the planning board -- which makes the decisions. More, this apparatus is not function as producers and consumers, but on an ostensibly higher plane concerned with "society."

Finally, just because someone says that this planning mechanism will embody the wills of everyone in some sensible proportion doesn't make it so. (a) It has no mechanism to even remotely be able to embody the wills in the proper proportions (that is, in proportion as actors are affected, and by definition doesn't even try to do that). (b) To function at all it will require a large apparatus of calculation and decision making -- but not every citizen deciding each and every action of the economy. That is simply utter nonsense... Local assemblies in some neighborhood in Des Moines cannot plausibly concern themselves with casting a ballot regarding every or even every major economic choice, each taken as a separate thing to decide. Now if they are going to do less -- and leave a lot to the initiative of producers and consumers, LM has to explain the interface between. But LM rejects that...and so I say that in fact LM would in practice either starve the population or in short order evolve a central planning system -- one much better than if beholden to a stalinist state, of course, but one nonetheless.

It is a subtle point raised to try to clarifiy -- perhaps not a good idea.

The basis point is that LM doesn't accord actors self-managing power over the decisions that affect them in proportion as they are affected by them -- and in this respect I think its structure doesn't live up to its aspirations.

> The economic entities which LM envisions are, after all, a good deal more physically decentralized than the ones PE envisions.

Well, no they aren't...in that respect they are similar because PE has exactly the same kind of geographic units -- consumer councils, but also adds producers councils of workers in workplaces, industries, etc. But what is also different is that PE accords actors different impact, incorporates means of even having opinions about economic outcomes (that is, for example, information, exchange rates, and so on).

> It seems to me that a "central planning bureau" is a minority body that arrogates to itself all powers of direction, leaving the majority of the populace - those who do not belong to this bureau - with a merely executive role. But if, as is the case in LM, there is no divide between directors and executants, in what sense is the direction "central"?

In the Stalinist model what the advocate says is that the state is an agency of the people. You are saying the federations of assemblies are the people...but there is nothing that remotely indicates how these federations can have or exercise even remotely sensible opinions about economic inputs and outputs -- how much steel, how many t-shirts, what rates of remuneration of workers, and on and on and on. What they would do, in my view, is elaborate a mechanism that can acquire the needed information and hammer out viable proposals for in puts and outputs. These then would be voted on by the federations -- basically a matter of saying yes we can or no we can't...in practice.

You understand that if you have a one person one vote democracy and it dictates who some little town should conduct its life without any regard for the fact that though the vote was 60-40 for x nationally, in the town it is 80-20 for y -- that is not real participatory democracy. It is an outside imposition on the town, unless of course what is at stake affects those outside more than those in the town.

Just extrapolate to the economy. You have some kind -- unstated -- of mechanism by which you expect the whole population to cast a judgment about each workplace's agenda...this is not real participatory democracy, real self management. What is central about it is there is this "central" entity that dominates every local aspiration even if the latter is more affected by the choice.

And this is only at the philosophical level - the level of giving it every benefit of every doubt re actually operating and meeting needs.

> Perhaps the misunderstanding here - if that's what it is - has to do with the question of how decisions made by assemblies are carried out: Actually, that may be true regarding their political actions/choices -- but regarding economy my problem is that they are deciding at all...and I doubt that can be remotely sensible. If somehow they can have sensible decisions, and if we ignore that those trump the rightful input of local actors who would have more say rather than exactly equal say with everyone else over many facets of their own situations (less say over some others), then execution arises.

>> A good society is not one in which we say that everyone does everything, clearly. Take a police function, to get into something that may be controversial. To me saying we don't need police because no one will ever do something that calls for police intervention is pollyannaish. I suspect that you would agree. But then to say instead that we don't need any folks called police because everyone will fulfill this social function, also doesn't resonate with me. Just as it wouldn't resonate to say we won't have any folks called airplane pilots, or anything else that takes special skills and training so that having everyone learn them would be a terrible waste, and that not everyone is remotely interested in learning. The same goes for doing political data mining, so to speak...

> I don't think the skills needed for "data mining" or policing functions are analogous to piloting planes (though I don't see why even that would be a "terrible waste" of social investment if for some reason we wanted to totally democratize flying), and I see no reason why they couldn't be carried out on a rotating basis.

So you think everyone becoming a pilot, everyone becoming a policeperson, everyone becoming a piano player, and on and on and on makes sense?

I know you don't...

The only thing it makes sense for is some role which if it weren't done by everyone, or at least freely and easily accessible to everyone, would violate people's rights to a full and desirable life, etc. etc. individually and collectively.

We don't say that having kids should be done by only a few, and we don't say only a few should make decisions, for such reasons.

But there is not reason to have everyone pilot, nor police (assuming we can figure out a way to do that function that benefits from specialization -- only some folks learning it -- but doesn't incur costs from specialization.

>> So we have no people whose responsibility -- in toto or in part -- is to research different political issues, present relevant information, or whatever. We have no judges, no police, etc.

> Not as a career, no. These functions exist and are the responsibility of rotating groups of citizens. Is this less preferable than the alternatives?

I don't know -- but without indicating what these functions are, what levels of training they require, or why even with just the training of normal schooling and life (as with broader decisions making) we are all able to do them well, and so on -- it isn't a compelling picture.

To say that we are going to have folks rotate through jobs tell me virtually nothing -- people rotate through courts and the cia now. To say it will happen on a quick timeline, certainly says a lot, but also raises tons of questions about quality and even viability.

>> Well, this may make sense, but in what I read I don't think there was any supporting argument...and actually, I don't think this was explicitly claimed, either. Rather, these issues seem to be ignored.

> Again, the wider LM literature addresses many of these questions, often via historical examples drawn from the revolutionary and communalist traditions. But Janet's book hardly ignores them; she discusses administrative bodies chosen by sortition several times.

We just disagree, I think....

If you want to direct me to something that gives a fuller picture of how the diverse political functions are achieved -- much less how assemblies have the slightest idea what to say about the number of pencils or metric tons of steel to produce...I am happy to go look.

>> if everything is decided by everyone, each person meeting in their local assemblies -- I honestly think the picture is, well, dysfunctional.

> Because the "everything" part is too much of a burden? I don't think you mean this, because it would seem to doom PE as well. I still think your real problem here is the "local assembly" part; but perhaps I'm missing what you're getting at.

In PE I work in some job and I consume in some living unit and region. I make or contribute to decisions about how I feel about my consumption, that of my living unit and neighborhood, etc. I also make or contribute to decisions about how my work team functions, what our workplace does, etc. I DON'T try to assess the situation of another workplace as if I were there, or another region as if I were there. I have means, in fact, to check the inner conditions if it bears on my choices, but I don't try to make decisions for other individuals or collectives, only for me.

This is hugely different than in LM in which each assembly is as best I can see equally involved with every other in deciding (with input from workers only as members of the assemblies) a whole economic plan. Either some entity is going most of it and most assemblies not much, or all assemblies are do the equivalent of what the central planning bureau does in a typical central planning model. If it is the former, it is just central planning with a wrinkle. If it is the latter, then the whole society is spending the equivalent of a full time job on economic planning....

You are right about one thing here -- some people who read about parecon think we are proposing something like LM, but we aren't.

>> Participatory planning has a very specific domain that it addresses

> The entire economy is "very specific"? Even if I accepted this, wouldn't it just mean that LM assemblies address two very specific domains (the 'economy' and the 'polity') rather than just one?

No. Actors in a parecon are focused on entering proposals about their own actions and desires. The mechanisms of the model are such that their impact on outcomes will be proportionate, as best one can accomplish this I think, to the effect on them.

In LM actors (politically and certainly economically) are each trying to decide for all. Regarding economy, there isn't even a pretense that they are trying to manifest their own preferences about their own situation. To the contrary, LM "brags" about curtailing workers from doing just that. The idea instead is that LM actors are looking out for all of society...but in practice, with all respect, at least regarding economics, it is fanciful at best.

>> Political decisions are very different...as are legal ones, adjudication, etc.

> Different in terms of information? How so? Can't they be handled by informed amateurs? Do you think they require, by their nature, professionalization?

Suppose we are deciding about an economy whether some global attribute -- will it have balanced job complexes or not. That is like a legal decision. But when an economy is up and running, most decisions are not like that -- rather they are choices about consumption and production in which some actors are very centrally involved and affected, and other actors are much less and more distantly impacted. So in the economy we need mechanisms that can assemble the needed information (in this case relative costs and benefits associated with production and consumption) and give actors appropriate input for deciding the outcome.

Now I suspect that same is true for SOME political matters, but for some others it is a more global we all decide something that affects everyone. So that is one point.

Another point is that in PE we do have division of labor. Folks don't all do everything. They do all make decisions. They do all have balanced job complexes. But there are folks who work with information transfer bearing on the economy and others who don't. There are folks in facilitation boards and other structures who are providing what we might call meta economic services (like helping people find jobs, etc. -- and others who don't. But there is a very clear explanation of why such choices are not only efficient and good in letter folks specialize as they choose -- but, because of balanced job complexes and other factors, don't lead to any kind of differential in powers much less class division.

So, when you ask does someone playing various roles in adjudication or in enforcement or even in aspects of legislation need special training and skills and interest -- I don't know, but I would certainly have to guess, yes, by all means. And that means that we would need to find ways to provide that training, have that expertise, yet not have it lead to disproportionate impact on decisions or otherwise negative outcomes. These are questions that just don't come up in LM, as best I could see.

> It seems to me that LM is in a way applying your insights into "coordinatorism" to the 'political' sphere. Do you think they don't apply there?

They most certainly apply there. Yes. But I don't see the issue being addressed well...is my point.

There are people who address the economy and say we will address that issue by the following rule -- those who do manual work are the salt of the earth and should be regarded as such. It's blather because the structures they propose, whatever their true intentions may be, yield power and class differentials, entreaties aside.

There are others who say, sure, big problem, we'll rotate the managers into the fields and the janitors into the suites now and then. Same thing, blather...in my view.

Might just as well talk about capitalists being sensitive....

So if someone is going to pose a political vision and wants to be taken seriously, in my view, around the issue of whether the political visions is "statist" (authoritarian) or not...they have to explain how needed and desirable functions are successfully accomplished without incurring statist implications....

I think you all try to do that re legislation, but nothing much else -- at least in what I read.

And you really aren't doing it here, either, Peter...

>> Put less abstractly: Why should a majority decide aspects of my life that affect only me?

Now, the above was me switching over to what I suspect are the underlying serious issues that we may or many not agree about.....

>> It shouldn't. You've misunderstood LM here. The assembly has authority only over political issues, that is, the management of public affairs. Aspects of an individual's life that affect only that individual are none of the assembly's business.

The above was you, answering...

>> I don't think it is me here that is missing the point...

Me and now below, your longer answer that I need to react to.

> LM isn't the least bit ambiguous about this. The book you read distinguishes "family life" from "political life" (p. 9, repeated on p. 87), says clearly that the public sphere begins "outside the walls of private homes" (p. 18), and devotes an entire chapter (chap. 2) to the distinction between the "political" and the "social".

I know. I know. But why? Just by fiat? Just because? Or is there a reason why the polity doesn't decide these matters as a polity? I think the reason will show up to be if it did so it would violate the norm (among others) that people ought to have a say in the decisions that impact them proportionately as the decisions impact them.

I think the same norm applies to whether the polity as a polity (a geographic amalgamation of the wills of the citizens) would be deciding economic matters -- as compared to producers and consumers as producers and consumers doing so.

> You and I disagree about the philosophical underpinnings at work here - you favor a model in which influence on decisions is proportional to impact, while I prefer a model in which different entities have authority in distinct areas -

Wait a minute.

You attribute to me, rightly, a general norm which one might accept or reject but which certainly distinguishes me from most other folks -- but you attribute to yourself something that doesn't distinguish you from anyone at all, as best I can see. A leninist, stalinist, social democrat, anarchist, fascist, and you and I would all say what you say of yourself, above...

PE is very clear that there would be a polity and other spheres of social life in any society with a PE, of course, and that these would impose on economic possibilities, even, as well as being responsible for other matters.

> but there's no disagreement, in this concrete case, on the practical effects.

The practical case is whether the polity should decide for families about their functions inside their homes. What is that we agree -- not just that folks wouldn't like it, presumably -- but that the practical affect is draconian. The polity, at best a manifestation of all the wills in the land, would be deciding my breakfast and your living room arrangement, something only affects virtually only me and you. That is the obvious violation.

Okay, fine, now why does the polity, as a manifestation of all the wills in the land, decide what I consume, or what my neigborhood consumes, or what my work group does, or the output from my workplace?

In these cases it would be draconian in the same sense -- (and impossible in the same sense, as well, I think...but that is a different point).

> LM does not hold that majorities should decide aspects of individuals' lives which affect only them personally. Thus your rhetorical question at the head of this thread (from an essay which will be read by many people who are wholly unfamiliar with LM) still seems to me a misrepresentation of LM, unless you make clear that LM agrees with PE that such majorty influence on personal life is unacceptable, and differs only on the 'why'.

The question is fair, I think, as I raised it. I KNOW LM doesn't think the polity should impose on the family. More, I SUSPECT that LM doesn't think the policy should impose on localities, either -- thus the national polity doesn't trump the local polity regarding decisions mostly affecting only the local population. My point is why? Why does this concern for proper allocation of influence apply to these matters but not economics?

I think the answer is that LM thinks that in economics if you abide this obvious norm there is hell to pay -- because the economic actors (workers) will be perverted by exercising their will in the proper proportion in their institutions. But I think that is because LMers make the same mistake regarding the economy as they decry SOME anarchists making regarding the state. They assume that the only way workers or consumers can manifest their desires as workers and consumers is competitively in a manner which might give them the right influence but which deteriorates into bad results. The thing is, that's false.

>> You say it shouldn't but do you think that the only two possibilities are that an assembly has full say, with each member having equal influence, and that it has no say -- each member having dictatorial power and not colliding?

> I don't think these are the only two possibilities, but I do think they're the two main options. There are areas of life in which public, democratic, collective decisions ought to apply, and areas where that's inappropriate.

Why do you think this?

Why don't you say, then, that the national polity should trump every local? If it should in some instances and not in others, what is the difference?

> I'm not persuaded by your principle that people ought to have influence over decisions in proportion to the impact those decisions will have on them (not least because I think this principle is impossible to put into practice).

If you say it is impossible, so you then fall back on something less wonderful but doable -- fine. Then we have to discuss possibility. If you say you don't like it because you think it is not moral or desirable, then we have a different discussion.

But PE does it, in fact, for economic decisions -- as much as conceivable, it seems to me, and way more than any alternative I have every heard about.

As to politics...I wouldn't rule it out without trying, and I honestly think that's what LM has done. So it is either on grounds that LM rejects it as a desirable aim -- and if so I would like to know why. Or because LM thinks, without trying, that it is impossible. This is to me is very analogous to advocates of markets and central planning ruling out any alternative allocation option apriori, as if it is self evidence. It throws away a higher aspiration with no arugment of evidence -- not something I respect.

> The somewhat contrasting principle underlying LM is that everybody who is affected by a decision ought to participate in making that decision.

In that case if I read something that either increases or decreases my humanity or knowledge, it will likely affect many who I encounter. If I choose to have a child or not, it will do so.

If there is no clarification of amount of participation -- you have no real norm, I think.

Sure folks should impact decisions that affect them -- but how much.

> We don't introduce the notion of proportionality. This does indeed mean that people who are affected by a decision only "to a degree" have the same formal input into the decision as those who are affected "quite a lot."

Why not try for better? That is inefficient -- why do I want to waste my time on stuff that I don't know about and that doesn't even impact me peripherally? And it is authoritarian, why do I want to have more say that the impact on me warrants, leaving others with less say than the impact on them warrants?

> We think this is acceptable, and is the least unwieldy way to ensure broad participation.

Fine. Where is the argument for that. Where is the powerful and compelling explanation for why you chuck a worthy ideal and settle on something that is so far from ideal -- it seems to me? Is it because you can't do better...why? I haven't seen an explanation. Is it because you don't see it as much of a sacrifice. Fine, then why bother with local assemblies having more say about their local affairs, as the LM description does, in fact, indicate.

Janet describes what I think is an utterly ridiculous image of local communities controlling institutions which happen to be situated there, even big parks, or colleges for the whole country... not those who work, not those who consume, for some reason the neighborhood. Why?

> I think that in practice, much of the time your principle and ours will yield identical results.

Well it doesn't even yield remotely similar results re the economy.

Re the polity, if it turns out that either due to difficulty or due to most decisions being essentially equal in impact on all, you could be right. But I certainly wouldn't want to prejudge the case...

And I actually think a consistent application of your principle as it is carried out re the economy by LMers would in the polity make LMers ill, because it would mean national determination of local outcomes without localities having any input other than as members of the national polity.

>> How do the folks who get the benefits (or suffer the costs) of this institution which affects all of society have impact on its operations? I know how those who live in the local community do, through their assembly. I think they have too much. I would like to know how others have an impact...and why the amount each has makes any sense -- including the amount the workers who work there have. In the world LM envisions, it would be rare that workers at a particular enterprise live in another locale.

Please...LM now dictates that you have to live in the neighborhood where you work? Company towns? But even if it were true, it still wouldn't do much because LM has the actors deciding as citizens, not as those directly impacted by the work and products -- unless you want to say, no, wait, LM is saying that the local folks are impacted and so they get most say. But then, the whole thing falls utterly apart, it seems to me ---- unless one constraint trumps all other concerns about participation, the constraint being to insure the producers and consumers don't assess decisions and manifest their preferences as producers and consumers on grounds that if they do their behavior and certainly the outcomes will be perverted. But this can't be some kind of principle -- it requires argument. And the only arguments offered are about workers and consumers views as constrained by profit seeking market competition...which is simply not relevant.

> But the problem remains for regional institutions, like research universities or large industrial combines, which can't be effectively decentralized. LM's mechanism for such instances is confederal bodies, which I agree is a somewhat unsatisfactory answer.

But Peter, it isn't unsatisfactory, it is incoherent.

You are either saying that a federation (whatever that is...in the model I read it is just local folks carrying orders from their local assemblies) has full say (which is worse than central planning in that it means an institution without any means of accumulating relevant information is deciding in a vacuum -- in addition to precluding participation from all those affected (even your own norm being violated) ----- or, your own norm is met because ultimately every assembly and federation is in on every decision, but then it is just dysfunctional, and still lacking means of information, etc. etc.

Peter, I admit, I am having trouble with this discussion. As best I can tell LMers really have paid no serious attention to economics simply elaborating a political vision and lopping economic responsibilities onto it. That's, in all honesty, how it looks to me.

> We also expect that under optimal conditions - which we believe are encouraged by LM's institutional structure - members of a given assembly will when necessary take into account the interests and opinions of their distant neighbors.

Peter, this is blather...and it is exactly the kind of blather that characterizes discussions of central planning. (a) It says folks with disproportionate power over outcomes will accommodate their choices to a fair assessment, and (b) it ignores that they have no means to do so, in addition to no reasons to.

>> In several passages you suggest that LM's majority voting is a misapplication of the maxim that "people ought to influence political decisions in proportion as they are affected by them". But LM rejects this maxim as a guide for procedural questions.

The above is you from before -- but since we have now taken our discussion further, I will add to my reply from before, which is immediately below....

No, with all due respect, I think LM applies the maxim at least as best it can, sometimes, but not others. You rule it out for the economy due to some belief that workers and consumers must not impact decisions as workers and consumers. But you incorporate it, a bit mechanically, vis a vis assessing how much control over what to give local assemblies versus larger confederations of assemblies, among other things...

>> Alright, it is good to know what the differences are. I suspected this, but I admit I don't see on what basis it is rejected and when I have chatted with LMers they have always used the principle, more or less, to explain, for example, something you mention above, that assembles have no business deciding private matters of individuals. Why not? I have a ready answer, but what is LM's reason if not this principle? I can't speak for the LMists you've chatted with, but it would surprise me if they invoked the proportionality principle. That principle, as I understand it, involves a continuum model of decision making power: you have more or less power according to the anticipated impact of the decision.

So, the polity doesn't dictate personal decisions...yes, right.

> We use a discrete model: you either do or don't have power over a given decision, and if you do, you have the same as everyone else.

Oh, then in that case every decision in any local polity can be overruled by any larger polity, and the nation. I think Janet ruled that out, as obviously untenable.

I hate the phrase dictatorship of the majority because it is often horribly misused -- but in this case it is quite applicable.

> The private/public distinction, which under girds our rejection of assembly meddling in personal affairs, follows this discrete logic rather than your continuum logic.

So there is some abstract rule that just says no polity relvant to the home, huh?

Pardon, but I don't believe it. The home dweller decides to cage his kids, to rape his partner, to build bombs in his basement, etc.

All of a sudden your polity is going to take an interest, I will wager, and you are going to say of course, and so it should, these acts have broader ramifications than on merely the person undertaking them, and require broader involvements in assessment, even enforcement.

> There are, of course, enormous problems with figuring out just which issues count as 'public' and which as 'private', but I don't think these problems outweigh those associated with measuring anticipated impact.

Peter, it is just one pronouncement after another...but where is some argument, some reason to believe?

I say that participatory planning does a great job of according each actor economic input in proportion as they are affected by economic choices, and also providing them conditions and information commensurate to their doing so. I describe the institutions for it and say, okay, is there a problem? I also take the alternatives and show, among other things, that they don't attain this allocation of influence, not even remotely.

Now, if accomplishing this for the polity is comparably difficult, fine, then we ought to do it. If it is way more difficult, impossible -- then we can't do it, but perhaps we can get as close as we can. If it is a bad idea for politics, okay, why?

>> You also said that local assemblies determine the decisions bearing on their region almost without anyone outside impacting their decision.

> No, participating in their decision, in the sense of voting on it, not impacting it. 'Outsiders' impact the decision by bringing their concerns and their arguments to the attention of the responsible assembly.

So, take the case of the university or the library of congress, or an airport, or pike's peak. The whole world conveys its feelings to the local geographic assembly and then they unilaterally decide -- or everyone everywhere decides? If it is the former, what is the means, I am curious, by which among all those outsiders who bring their concerns and arguments to the attention of the local assembly -- the workers at the university do it?

> I'd like to point out again that this would in any case be a much less common scenario in an LM society. If a decision directly impacts a whole region, then all of the local assemblies decide on it.

Virtually every economic decision impacts everyone, to some degree. In your discrete system this means everyone casts a ballot, with equal say as everyone else, on virtually every decision. This is just not tenable...

>> We believe that simple majority rule, while hardly a perfect arbiter of conflicting wills, is procedurally preferable to its alternatives.

No, you don't. You don't believe majority rule takes precedence over the desires of a family about its own household, unless there is some very compelling reason. But you also don't think it takes precedence for the nation over a locality about decisions bearing on that locality, again, without some very compelling reason.

That is my guess...correct me if I am wrong, please.

>> Okay, good, I know you all believe that, but why -- what is a reason, an argument, for why majority rule is better (presumably in attaining some values that you believe in) in virtually every situation, rather than its simply being one voting option among many, sometimes the best, sometimes not.

> I think there are two issues tangled up here. On the matter of the philosophical justification for simple majority as a decision making rule, there's an extensive literature which I'm afraid I can't recapitulate here.

Well, then I guess I can't reply, either.

You and two friends about about to eat out. You want to go to the peanut emporium and so does your pal, but the third is allergic to peanuts. Do you vote -- one person one vote and if through some idiocy or insensitivity the two of you vote emporium, then the three of you have to go there?

Or does your friend get to trump your desires because the impact on him is so much greater?

> But LMists are scarcely unusual among revolutionaries in choosing this mechanism as the best available option.

Again, this isn't an argument...everyone in the american political system advocates one person one vote, too. So?

> But more important, it sounds like (if I read the sentence above correctly, and I'm not sure I did) you're mixing up the results of a vote with the voting mechanism used to reach that result. Our disagreement is procedural : what's the most democratic and participatory device to use when wills and opinions conflict? It's not about "attaining values we believe in". The time to argue for the values we believe in is before the vote, during deliberation. If we lose the vote, that doesn't in itself mean it was conducted undemocratically.

It depends...difference situations are different.

We have a ten percent blacks, say, in a population. They argue mightily for not having jim crow. Then we have one person one vote and jim crow passes.

Do we just say that it is a good mechanism but ignorance needs to be overcome, or do we not like the mechanism? I don't like the mechanism....

If we can't do any better, fine. But you can't just say we can't do any better as a kind of apriori rule...and it seems like you should hope we can do better.

Now for the economy LM doesn't even meet its own norms, in my view, but it certainly doesn't do better, so to speak. I claim PE does. So LM ought to hope that is true, it seems to me, and ought to look to see if it is so.

>> But you have only said you think each person being able to vote, and having an equal vote, and counting up to determine a majority is better -- you haven't said WHY you think that.

> A majoritarian process balances two criteria of participatory democracy: widest possible breadth of enabled decision makers, and equal footing for all decision makers. In Looking Forward (p. 35) you write: "The only inflexible rules are those precluding methods that obstruct participation or deny equitable access of all workers to equal opportunities for fulfillment and influence." We think that nonmajoritarian decision rules deny equitable access of all participants to equal opportunity for influence, and that's why we're somewhat inflexible on the matter.

Other than one person one vote majority rule most certainly does preclude every actor from having equal influence -- that's true. And that's why one would choose it in cases where every actor shouldn't have equal influence.

Who decides in a workplace team schedules? Who decides the precise allocation of tasks in to jobs. Who decides, how much work is done per hour, day, weak. How decides whether a proposal for a new organization is undertaken? Who decides how much people are remunerated. I could continue --- If it is everyone who is affected, one person one vote majority rule -- then, in fact, virtually everyone in the economy would have to become knowledgeable about all these matters for every workplace and every team, and so on -- and the decision for each would be no more impacted by the people directly involved than by every other person. (That's applying your norm without putting in the proviso that workers shouldn't be making decisions as workers...which simply reduces the whole thing to dysfunctionality...)

>> Why, that is, if we can develop institutions that vest each actor with influence over decisions proportionate to the degree they are impacted by them (by whatever mechanisms) should we instead opt to always use majority vote?

> Once again it sounds like you're blurring procedures and outcomes (though perhaps I'm just not getting your point here). What you describe is entirely possible with a 50%-plus-one rule, and indeed happens regularly in bodies where such a rule applies, via informal influence that is exercised during deliberation.

No, sorry, we aren't on the same page. Take the examples I gave above for economic decisions and tell me who the folks are who all vote equally, the forum, etc., and show me how the work teams and others even impact it at all, much less so that outcomes (what trust) manifest primarily their insights and preferences.

> In your three-people-choosing-a-restaurant scenario, there is nothing at all objectionable about a majority format. If the other two disregard the third diner's allergy, they've made a stupid decision, but not by virtue of the voting procedure.

Why not say the same for a dictator...wise men should rule and it will always be good except when it is bad....

But the key point is that in the three restaurateurs there is such intimate communication that unless some are really nasty (but of course, precisely the places where decision making mechanisms matter are where there are serious differences) you will get a sensible result. But it is paternalistic -- the one's greater needs depend on the good will of the others...

But in LM, certainly regarding the economy, there is simply no means of information transfer discussed, nor any institution to facilitate it -- in fact, there is the opposite, a comittment that workers should not groups and function as workers in decision making, and ditto consumers.

> Their mistake was failing to take account of or act properly on crucial information.

Yes, and you can say the same about a benevolent dictator.

I thought anarchists believed in people controlling their own lives -- not in their being beholden to others understanding their desires and ratifying them -- unless, of course, the choice impacts others also, and comparably.

> By all means people who are likely to be disproportionately affected by a decision should raise the point in discussion, and other participants are expected to give proper weight to this consideration when they cast their votes.

It would be an improvement over LM's economic approach as it is stated -- but this isn't part of LM. LM, instead, prevents workers as workers, in the teams they work in, expressing their views, and ditto consumers. And it even claims that this is an essential and valuable achievement.

What you are saying above is that the greater desires and implications for a small group directly involved has to become the knowledge of everyone involved in each decisions -- which is everyone, for most decisions. This just isn't real...even if it were desirable.

> What LMists object to is the attempt to build preferred outcomes into the voting mechanism itself.

Nonsense. You have A PREFERRED OUTCOME you want to build in: that to the extent possible each decision include input from everyone affected. You may have another, that to the extent possible that input be equal to everyone else's affected. (I think sometimes you do, sometimes not.)

I have a different PREFERRED OUTCOME I want to buld in: that to the extent possible each decision include input from everyone affected in proportion as they are affected.

It isn't as if you are opting for some kind of neutral decision-making mechanism and I am opting for one with implications. We are both opting for one with implications.

>> I think you've also misconstrued LM thinking on the workplace and the day-to-day aspects of production. While we do reject workers' control as the organizing principle of a liberated society, LMists do not hold that the internal dynamics of particular enterprises, much less the shopfloor tasks of individual workers, are to be determined by municipal assemblies.

>> So the workers participate in deciding what -- how long to work, what to produce -- or only how to implement what some assembly someplace instructs them about all the big issues? The latter is quite like central planning, I am afraid, again.

> I don't see how.

Some outside institution sets all the broad parameters and constraints with the workers having no special input or say, much less power, and then, within the parameters and constraints established from without, the workforce make choices to meet them. In fact, in central planning the workers are of course not going to be eager to do that...and their emerges a layer of administration beholden to the planning apparatus and responsible for implementation.

The difference, among other things, is that in PE is that the participatory plan involves only a give and take among workers and consumers, no outside agency other than the individual and collective units of workers and consumers -- and each worker and consumer impact outcomes (as much as possible and in this case it is quite close) in proportion as they are affected by them.

The choice of how much to produce, etc. etc. taken in central planning outside the purview of the workers arises in PE precisely from the workers formulations of their attitudes about all the others issues (their work arrangements, etc., as well as consumer needs). There is much more, of course, but this is central to our current exchange.

> In PE, workplace collectives decide how to implement what some cybernetically linked mass of anonymous workers and consumers someplace instructs them, via the plan generated through your iterative process, about all the big issues.

Well, no. Rather, workplace collectives engage in an exchange with others workers and consumers, themselves essentially negotiated a mutually acceptable range of options, and doing so with input power that is proportionate to how much they are affected. Now, there is no reason for you to just accept that, of course -- but it is the claim, and close examination will bear it out for you, I think....

> I don't find this objectionable, either in PE or in LM, as long as those doing the implementing participate in the instructing.

I think maybe we aren't making much progress...and I am not sure we are going to...in this discussion.

In PE workers are participating in the decision about their workplace directly, manifesting their preferences in light of their immediate understanding of the impact on them and also on others. Their influence (this is a matter of how exchange rates emerge and other factors) is proportionate to affect on them. And there is no competition, etc.

In LM the best a worker can hope to do is to stand up in one local assembly (among thousands passing judgment) and, what?, describe their whole work situation, entreat based on the impact on them...I don't know what you have in mind.

But just think of it this way....suppose each local geographic unit had only one means to affect the decisions that impact them. They have to send some proportionate number of folks to a gigantic assembly carrying votes, and then they can plead their case -- and everyone there goes home to their locals and conveys it for them, and then a vote -- and everyone goes back and tallies. And then if the whole polity decides by majority that in their locale they have to do x -- despire no big impact on anyone outside and a huge impact on them, they have to abide it.

That's more or less the LM model for the economy -- except without even that much mechanism for information transfer.

>> Central planners did not, in fact, decide all the day to day, minute to minute issues that arise in a plant, of course. However, because decisions about those could utterly disrupt what central planners sought, central planners carefully installed, so to speak, in each workplace a layer of employees empowered to make those decisions and beholden to the planners, responsible to meet the planners aims, paid more and enjoying lots of other benefits for doing so, and so on.

> All of which are explicitly proscribed by LM.

Actually, it was also proscribed in the Soviet constitution. That is simply irrelevant. If one chooses insitutions which have certain implications, then either the written norms bite the dust of the institutions do...

>> If LM thinks that highly politically conscious workers are going to simply follow orders emanating from assemblies of people who are, in fact, neither distinguished by being explicit consumers of the product nor by being workers in the processes, and who, as a result, have marginal relevant knowledge of those two dimensions of the economic issues at stake, I think they are misunderstanding how people function. But, in addition, to think such decisions would be economically sound -- without explaining how they could become informed and reason to desirable conclusions, is, well, assuming the can opener -- to use the analogy I raised earlier in another reply I wrote.

> Nobody has to "simply follow orders"; I thought we had made that clear. Everybody who follows them also takes part in formulating them.

Peter, I have to say...I am at wits end to relate to this further. I hope you won't take it wrong, I just don't know how to communicate about it.

Suppose I proposed (which I don't) workers syndicates as a polity. Everyone who doesn't work can attend one near them, so there is no problem on that score, everyone can participate. All political decisions are taken via these syndicates that of course, are mostly economic institutions stemming from economic involvement. Suppose you said to me, in response, are you kidding? You expect in an otherwise free and open and liberatory society some local community to follow orders about its local political life (a) taken in an institution that is overwhelmingly not about and has no means to deal with political matters, and (b) taken in an institution in which the local community folks are not able to express themselves based on their community involvement and in unity with others (spread all around) but only as economic agents, and (c) taken in an institution which robs them of greater say in their local conditions that affect them more than the others deciding --- and then I reply, what's the problem, they can all participate, they don't have to just follow orders, they help make the orders.

The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it is quite close.

> And if nobody in the local assembly uses whatever is produced in its factories, why are those items being produced? Who is using them? If it's solely people a thousand miles away, then shouldn't we move the plant?

And if it is partly some local people and partly some distant people...what...we give all local people huge say (what happened to everyone gets the same) and all distant people no say?

> As for relevant knowledge of particular production processes, do you think such knowledge is incommunicable?

I think it is not functional to think that every citizen should know enough to enunciate the interests of every other citizen -- or consumer or producer.

And that aim is very very different than that each should be able to enunciate their OWN preferences and to have means to take into account reported implications on on others and others preferences, at least in the economy, and I suspect in the polity too.

Ultimately, I guess don't know what to say, again, Peter.

Maybe we just have to advocate our respective views about economics and see what happens.

> If I work at the local power plant, and my fellow citizens are considering installing air conditioners in every residence, it's my responsibility to remind them that our generators have limited capacity (and if they don't listen to me, then they're in for a surprise next summer).

Broadly, I agree. But I want an economic plan not to be dependent on random entreaties by folks to ohters in some non-economic setting that occur if and only if there happens to be someone around to do it...and I don't want the option that people can just ignore either producers or consumers and come up with something that is utterly out of whack, and so on.

Jeeez -- you weren't kidding me about overwhelming me with the volume, were you....

>> Well, it was my impression. I would be interested in a quotation which indicates what LM instead advocates... Is there even a paragraph in Biehl's book that discusses what workers as workers have a say over. I don't know, but my memory is no.

> Her book also has nothing to say about what women, as women, have a say over.

Correct, but her books indicates that that realm is outside the polity, largely, while it indicates that economics is inside...

> Perhaps you think that's also a glaring oversight, and you might be right.

Nope...though I think it should note a bit better why it isn't addressed, amybe....

> But by no means would it justify a claim that "LMists advocate men making significant decisions about women's lives without input from women."

You are quite right. But what justifies saying that about workers is that the book is very explicit about the need to prevent workers from being decision makers as workers, per se.

> All workers and all consumers belong to local assemblies, and in the vast majority of cases to the very assembly which decides on their place of work and on the products they consume.

Peter, now you have a local assembly deciding on their place of work and the products they consume. One person one vote across the society just took a hike, and instead we have a local assembly deciding the operations of local workplaces and the consumption of local citizens, one person one vote for those in the assembly, no impact for those outside.

Suppose it is a steel plant. You have the local assembly having to do the work of the soviet planning bureau -- it has even less moral justification (due to being only local not representing the whole affected nation), and obviously much less capacity to accumulate relevant information. On the other hand, if you say all assemblies decide, then you are being truer to the stated norms of LM, but it becomes operational insanity (and still not giving proper impact to actors).

>> Suppose someone comes along and says that all decisions about every region, indeed every household, will be taken in a national assembly that includes every citizen and gives each one vote. So now when you complain that it makes no sense operationally and in principle also utterly disenfranchises you from matters that most impact you if the whole population, one person one vote, decides how you are going to function inside your house, or how your neighborhood is going to set up its little league, or whatever, and someone says, nonsense you and all your neighbors are in the assembly, after all -- are you convinced by that?

> What is it that you find so absurd or repellent about such prospects?

What? Maybe I am unclear. The above state that the whole U.S. population votes on all decisions about every region, one person one vote...and you want to know what I find absurd about it? You want to put in a new extension on your house. Do you make the decision alone? Do your neighbers get a say? Does a conservation agency? The whole country, one person one vote???????

> If the "nation" comprised only 200 people living in proximity, and if you dropped the red herrings about "inside your house", then I would happily embrace this scenario.

But it isn't 200 people...

> Why wouldn't you?

And I still wouldn't. Suppose 200 hundred are shipwrecked on an island.

Many many decision will be one person one vote, but not all, by any means. Why? Because it makes no sense to give everyone equal say over things that don't impact them and impact others a whole lot.

> I don't see how such an arrangement would "utterly disenfranchise" anybody.

But writ large...I just feel like this is hopeless if you won't even agree that to have the whole country deciding one person one vote if we in our little community are going to have a local ordnance about which day to have a solely local holiday on, or whatever, would abridge people's rights -- what can we do?

But I also feel there is just huge inconsistency.

Suppose the whole country decides it wants some kind of electricity that creates grotesque impact on the local environment and it votes to have it produced in your local town. That doesn't abridge your rights?

I am tired at this point, I admit...I have to speed up....

> ...In LM's assembly model, if a particular group of workers or consumers fears that their experience, knowledge, or desires are not being taken into account, then they simply need to speak up.

Fine, go back to the example of having economic syndicates be political institutions and see if that answer would assauge your distaste for the proposal... I don't think it would. I don't think it should, but not in this case either.

> I don't understand why you think PE has an advantage on this score; it's not as if your model allows for a single workplace, on its own, to dramatically affect the overall plan.

No, but what it can dramatically impact is its own operations, and it can impact the whole thing in the right proportion.

The advantage it has is that it is an economic institution designed to accomplish economic functions while propelling desirable values. It incorporates attention to the required information flow, the necessary preconditions for actors to participate, and the actual means for actors to impact outcomes individually and collectively, that impact them.

LMers write about how it is critical that citizens as citizens in their locals, where they are impacted, and together with others also impacted, manifest their preferences in the polity. Right, I agree. Some silly syndicalist might say no, that's wrong, everything should be done via economic structures and in terms of our economic roots...but they would be wrong.

LMers are like a mirror image of this syndicalist, however -- ruling out economic life being impacted by people rooted in their economic situations. It totally befuddles me except insofar as I understand it as a manifestation of the very explicity and totally wrong claim that workers as workers and consumers as consumers can and will only impact economic decisions in ways yielding competition and distorted outcomes. But that is just an error...

>> Why should GM's workers give be impressed when being told that they are in assemblies as the answer to the query why they aren't able to meet as workers in the plant, share their experiences, arrive at their views about the plants operations, and then propose those mediating them, themselves, in reaction to the views of other actors affected by their plant, to arrive cooperatively at decisions? I don't think they should.

> In LM, workers at a specific plant are not only able to do all of these things, they're encouraged to do so. But they're also encouraged to look beyond the horizons of their particular plant and try to take into account the needs of the rest of the community.

Sorry -- in LM workers are very explicitly prevented from impacting decisions from their workplaces, in terms of impact on them. That is a touchstone of what I read.

More, there is nothing in LM which provides anyone sensible information about the economy upon which to base judgments about other's interests. No attention to exchange rates, to real costs and benefits, to norms of remuneration, and so on.

>> You're quite right that it is "consistent with the underlying impetus of libertarian municipalism to assert that workers' views of their own situations as workers and consumers' views of their own situation as consumers are both critical to making just and sensible decisions about economic life"; such views inform the participation of every member of the assembly.

>> No, not in the sense I mean. Such views are specific to real conditions in real places.

And your answer is just like a syndicalist saying sure people's inputs as citizens (as compared to economic actors) is important, and everyone is welcome to bring their view to the syndicate to express them and vote in light of them....

> But surely these views can be made intelligible in other real places.

So says the syndicalist to you -- are you moved by it? I bet not...

> The assembly is basically a different route for conveying the same information to the same set of actors.

No. It isn't. At least not as enunciated. LM has no comprehension that I have seen of what information actually is required for economic decision making, of where it comes from, of how to convey and communicate it. There is nothing on these matters.

> You recognize this possibility yourself when you mention "consumer councils where citizens can take into account workers' efforts and needs" (Looking Forward p. 64). We expect this to be the norm in a libertarian communist society.

In parecon it is very explicitly communicated how consumers can access such information and why it is in their interests to do so -- in LM nothing remotely like this is discussed at all, much less compellingly.

I just don't see what LM says about economy as much more than folks looking at what they have for the polity and then saying, hey, it can do the economy too and it better, because otherwise those workers councils will ruin our polity -- a very odd fear, in my view...once we get beyond oppressive economic options.

>> What is needed for anything either sensible or just, it seems to me, is for actors in institutions to together play a role in governing those institutions.

> Yes, I think that's what enterprise councils are for. Janet doesn't talk about these in her book, and obviously I can't speak for her here, but at least some LMists foresee an important role for such bodies. The Northern Vermont Greens, for example, called for "worker control of the production process overseen by the municipal assembly." A workplace would be governed internally by its workers, but broad production goals and standards would be subject to community control.

Egad....now the whole thing is changing...maybe I am just getting tired. If you make the assemblies into what are essentially -- regarding the economy, consumer councils, and you have "enterprise councils" (that is workers councils) in workplaces, and if your approach to the economy then tries to have these each interact to arrive at good economic outcomes, you are well on the road to parecon. But I didn't see anything like this in Janet's book...or up to this point in any reply to the essay I wrote.

>> Why wouldn't LMers feel, as well, that the population of a workplace needs a council...of their own?

> They do need one. It just doesn't decide 'policy'.

You mean it doesn't decide politics -- fine. No problem.

If you mean it does participate in deciding the role of its workplace -- that eludes me.

>> Participation in economic planning based on citizenship, yes, you are quite right -- I find it odd in the extreme. Participation in political functions based on citizenship makes good sense to me, however.

> I suppose it would make sense to me too if I believed in a strict separation of economic and political spheres.

There is no strict separation of anything at all from the rest. Your separated households are economic, political, cultural, and so on.

But just because everything is in some sense everything, doesn't mean we don't have special institutions to focus on particular functions.

>> I think it is quite reciprocal to someone saying -- as I think I argued -- that everyone should decide political outcomes only from within workers councils.

> I'm not sure I'd have much of a quarrel with that view if everybody belonged to a workers council .... but then why would we call them 'workers councils' anymore?

I urge you to bring this to Janet or Murray and see their response. With all respect, I think they will be horrified at the idea -- which I also broached earlier in this message as a hypothetical.

And I don't like it either...for that matter.

>> But it is as consumers and producers that we experience economic impacts, in considerable degree, and it is there where we can most sensibly develop our attitudes about our part in these and share the attitudes with others and agitate on their behalf. And properly so.

> "Develop our attitudes", yes. "Share them and agitate", no.

And why not? Do you really want to tell workers in a plant that they shouldn't group and have collective opinions, and that they shouldn't expect to be able to manifest those in the overall process of decision making?

I am at a loss...

Why not say citizens can develop their attitudes toward polity where they experience laws and norms and so on, but they should only share their views with others and agitate for them in their workplace defined syndicates.

>> To say that everyone should impact economic decisions but should do so only from within neighborhood political assemblies would make no sense in moral or justice terms...and would also rob deliberation and debate of its logic and sense.

> How so? Is there something intrinsic to economic decisions that makes them impossible to consider except in one's capacity as either worker or consumer?

No...not impossible. But there is something that makes it absurd, yes -- the information flow, the relations, the proximity of effect.

It is just reciprocal to the syndicate problem...

> Why must decisions about social production happen "within workers councils where [people] identify and are meant to identify overwhelmingly in terms of only their economic involvements"? Libertarian municipalists want to break this very identification.

Wanting to not have that identification determine our attitudes to cultures or kinship or national laws -- I agree. But it means nothing whatsoever -- or is literally draconian -- to say you want my view of my work load to not have any relation to my assessment of its impact on me.

In fact, PE is an economic arrangement in which by considering my circumstances where I work and consume, in light of available information, etc. I will also have to take into account impact on others, and vice versa. But it is precisely due to the structure, the information made available, the means of determining exchange relations and remuneration, that this comes about.

We agree that a good economy or society such generate solidarity -- but PE has structural means to do it--regarding information transfer, the material interests folks have, the roles they play, whereas I think that regarding economy LM not only doesn't, but has contrary effects.

>> Suppose you work in a car factory. You want a new approach to car production, a new pace of work, an innovation, a new rule about workplace norms, to produce more or less -- what do you do, bring this to the local assembly where you live to discuss it with people who have no idea what you are talking about?

> Eventually, yes.

>> Doesn't it make infinitely more sense to bring it to a workers council which is involved as one agent in the determination of workplace outcomes and options?

> That's a good first step.

So we do all the steps of a parecon, then we cart our opinions over to the assemblies...each of us to one that we are in -- but no one to all the others. And then what?

>> And shouldn't you and your fellow workers, if you decide there is something you want to do be the ones to propose it, to argue for it, and to have some level of say, together, collectively, in the decision -- with consumers also having some, and so on? Absolutely. And the final decision is up to the assembly of all citizens.

The assembly of all citizens is going to decide, one person one vote, on every innovate workplace proposal...not to mention doing all political functions for society.

I am sorry, but I do think we maybe just have to agree to disagree....

>> On the other hand, in LM there isn't anything that remotely resembles a mechanism that I can see anyhow, that would allow consumers as a whole to convey to producers as a whole the cumulative desire for more or less cars, air conditioners, or anything else -- much less a mechanism to weight this desire sensibly against those of workers producing the product and to arrive at some conclusion about what to do.

> Since most production in LM is local, the mechanism is at hand. If there are significant numbers of consumers of a certain product who live elsewhere, their input arrives in the form of a report or consumption request, rather like PE.

Not like PE, because in PE we realize that all production isn't local -- that that prejudges a major set of issues, likely, in many cases, in a horribly inefficient not to mention ecologically damaging way.

Peter, economies must include transactions, some stuff going here, some there....there is nothing in LM about exchange rates. Nothing about remuneration. There just isn't an economic model, good or bad...

>> While the workplace and the household are the proper arena for arranging the particulars of production and consumption, they are not, in our view, the appropriate locus for general deliberation and decision about the overall economy.

>> What are the particulars?

> How much cheese you eat, who gets to use the VCR in the living room tonight, what time you go in to work, how various workplace tasks are distributed.... everything including the format and speed of production, but not the production goal.

Well, once you do the goal, then you have done format and speed, largely... Once you do the goal, you have the overall amounts...and you can't just say this much cheese for me and you.

But more, there is no way to enunciate goals rationally -- that is, a list of sought outputs, it seems, for you -- unless you have a way to evaluate all the items. There is no mechanism like that described in LM, other than to assume LM is a central planning model or would devolve into one.

I wonder something, and I hope you won't take this wrong. Is there ANYONE who subscribes to LM who has a serious background in and time committed to understanding economic institutions, roles, norms, outcomes? An economist by focus?

>> What about how much a given plant is going to produce? Who decides that, and how?

> The assembly, which includes the workforce of the plant, through a process of democratic deliberation in which various production proposals are put forward, debated, and voted on.

On what basis? Is there some way that it evaluates the input output relations of the economy, some way it knows and accounts for the implications of different choices. Where do these proposals come from?

It isn't a model, Peter -- for any economist, it is, to be honest, hand waving.

>> Does it take into account the desires of those who work there, of those who consume the output?

> That's the idea, since those people are themselves members of the assembly.

You have this answer for every query...but the syndicalist can give the same answer for every query about how he/she could possibly think that workers councils should govern the political life of the country.

In fact, in this domain, I don't think it is much different than advocates of the U.S. poltical system saying everyone is part of it...or, even better, old Soviet planners pointing out that the workers in each plant had the right to do whatever they wished, by their constitution...

>> Actually, and with all due respect, I don't think LM has anything like a serious economic vision.

> That might be; our ranks are not bursting with trained economists.

Ooooops, I guess I just got that answer to my query above.

>> I don't think it proposes serious means of allocation.

> As far as consumer goods are concerned, Janet's book says they are to be "distributed according to people's need for them, guided by an ethos of public responsibility as well as by reason." Vague, yes, communistic, certainly, but unserious?

Yes, it is unserious. Why? Because allocation is about determining relative exchange rates, valuing items in terms of -- one hopes -- their true social costs and benefits, and, as well, distributing them on some basis. The above is not an economic model, it is a hope or aspiration about a norm for distribution, and not very filled out even on that score, as you agree.

> Isn't this notion roughly analogous to "distributive maxim four" which you discuss (and reject) in The Political Economy of Participatory Economics? Surely you don't consider all distributive maxims save your own to be per se unserious.

Yes, it is, quite.

But a distributive maxim is not an economic system or model or institutional description. It is a value, something one hopes to implement.

It is like someone saying we are for justice or for equal participation and then saying -- okay, that's our polity. One needs to explain who the relevant functions are actaully accomplished, and once one gets serious about that -- not the tiny details, but the big issues -- one has to address matters of decision making, information transfer, and so on.

>> I don't think it says anything serious about norms of remuneration, etc.

> We don't believe in remuneration for work performed. There would be little point to it in any case if goods are available according to a principle of usufruct.

Yes, well...

>> Is there anywhere in LM literature that discusses, say, exchange rates and how they are arrived at, and why those arrived at are accurate, just to give one example?

> You mean for interregional trade in raw materials and unfinished goods? No, we haven't come up with anything on that yet.

No I mean regarding everything....

How does anyone have an opinion about what should be produced in what quantity without understanding what has to be forgone to do it?

>> I suspect you are now saying LMers believe in people getting whatever they need, and giving whatever they can.

> Uh, yeah, that's the idea, clearly enunciated in the book you read, which repeats Marx's maxim "from each according to ability and to each according to need" several times...

Yes, but it is so devoid of operational implications for a real economy that one thinks seriously about, that I just didn't credit it as what people are actually favoring.

>> Well, fine...if you can tell me even remotely how someone decides what they need and what they want to give (in terms of time and effort and so on) such that the sum total that people request matches the sum total that people are going to provide, I will accept it as a serious proposal. But without that...I'm sorry, but it isn't.

> PE is the only allocation system I know of that strives for an actual "match" between production and consumption.

Eery allocation system strive for that, in fact...including markets and central planning.

With all respect, and with a smile that I am sure would enable this to be said between us in person with good feeling -- you guys do need to get some economists aboard...

> Until it's been tested in practice, it might make sense to hold off on deciding which proposals are practicable.

Not if we can think about something and decide with great confidence that it would be a mess...no, if we can do that, we oughtn't pursue it.

> We're all familiar with limited forms of communism from our daily lives (most families operate internally on this principle to an extent, and a good number of friendships are based on it).

I agree...but they are not large economies.

> I live in a 12 person collective household which practices a sort of culinary communism: as far as consumption goes, we all eat as much as we want to from the common stock.

Yep, but what determines how much is in that common stock? And what determines how much is produced by the farmers?

> If our food buyer gets a case of cereal expecting it to last a month, and it's all gone by the 20th, then we have three choices: eat less cereal ("an ethos of public responsibility"); buy more the next time and all pay (i.e. "work") more; get used to having no cereal for the last week of every month. If one housemate is eating two boxes a day, we have a talk about that. Is there something unserious about this system?

Yes--if you are talking about an economy, most certainly.

>> I would only ask how you think it is going to come about that there is even a remote connection between what people decide to take for consumption and what they decide to provide as labor.

> The one is constrained by the other. In a decentralized economy subject to public oversight, everyone is aware that if we want more stuff, we need to put in more labor.

No, in a parecon that is the case, and the links are very clear and explicit, and choices are taken in light of them, among others.

But in an economy that lacks exchange rates and in which people just get what they want and work however much the like, there is no such match...nor even any such relation.

It is of course nonsense....so what you really mean is a system where people take what they want within the limits of what is possible and responsible -- and people give what they can with the same context.

That is what parecon in fact not only permits but makes most desirable for actors.

> You're asking about aggregate production and aggregate consumption. The matter of scale aside, doesn't PE solve this problem in more or less the same way - all actors are aware that total production delimits total consumption? Of course, you have a great deal more of the details worked out. I'm happy to stipulate that if we lived in an LM society, I would argue to my fellow citizens for adopting PE's methods where applicable.

You know I think if you really look closely at it you will come away saying, more or less, this does what I want done -- though a little differently than I anticipated. And then you would need to assess is there really some good reason that rules out this option, or can't we just go with it, appended to a good polity.

That's what I would have expected -- but there is some kind of powerful obstacle residing in the worry about workers overriding the polity with syndicalism...

>> If you are saying community scrutiny would prevent people from over consuming, that is only true if someone can say what over consuming is. In the absence of an allocation system that determines exchange values and budgets, how would anyone know that?

> Then I'm not sure what you mean by exchange values as part of an allocation system; don't we need just an accounting system (which could be denominated in labor hours, I suppose)?

No.

Peter I have to move on now...I would utterly love it if you would take a look, for example, at the parecon instructional, or maybe even the political economy instructional.

Again, with all respect, it is as if I asked whether in the polity isn't it enough that we have decisions makde, who cares the exact input or numbers of people or information availabilities...

> We certainly have nothing against budgets; indeed I think the major 'economic' activity of LM assemblies would be generating a sort of comprehensive municipal budget, which would encompass production goals, expected demand, and labor needs.

Yes, well, there is noting in LM that would permit an undertaking of that sort that was actually resulting in judgments based on true social costs and benefits -- at least that I can see.

>> The problem with distribution according to need and work according to desire is that, on the one hand the former is limitless and the latter is limited, unless the former is mediated through attention to implications for the latter -- which is what an allocation system permits but LM does without. If everyone can have anything they ask for, why wouldn't the sum total of what is asked for dwarf what is available?

> That's what Janet was pointing to with "reason", "an ethos of public responsibility", and so on. She does discuss the issue for several pages.

Reason requires accurate and appropriate information as well as a context in which it can operate. Thus, in markets the information is skewed and the contest provokes, in fact enforces, narrow competition.

A serious proposal for allocation has to address information, roles and their behavioral implications, and so on. LM doesn't have one for the economy.

>> If the answer is because people will understand that there is only so much and moderate their requests in accord, then we are back to needing an allocation system to accomplish precisely that mediation. If you don't know, for example, the "cost" of something (because there is no mechanism to arrive at exchange rates) there is no way for you to sensibly decide whether asking for it is warranted or glutinous. More, how do producers know how much to produce... actually, there are endless questions one could ask.

> Why won't we know these things based on last year's (or last budget cycle's) experience?

(a) because LM makes no mention of it -- but (b) because last year could be off from it ought to have been, and this year, based on last, could take the trajectory still further off...as with both markets and central planning.

The question is, what is it about proposed economic institutions that causes the rates of exchange -- how things are valued -- to actually represent a proper manifestation of people's preferences and desires?

In LM, there is no answer--in fact I think no one even realizes there are questions like this. In markets and central planning there is a horrible answer, which skews outcomes to benefit elites. In parecon, I think there is a good answer...

>> My concerns center on (a) the fact that the LM approach relegates economic actors to insufficient say over what they are doing and are most affected by and gives them too much say over what they aren't doing and are least affected by, and (b) is utterly unworkable for want of mechanisms that allow actors to make decisions in light of needed information such as the true social costs and benefits associated with the production and consumption of items in the economy.

> Do you mean that such mechanisms are incompatible with LM, or that we fail to delineate the form they might take?

No, as I indicated, I think that central planning mechanisms are not only compatible with what LM says its demands, but would emerge as its actual choice -- unless LM removed the rule that workers and consumers can't impact decisions as such.

> It seems to me you've now reformulated your claim to: "Surely we can't achieve these aims by subordinating the economy to the polity in the inexcusably vague and structurally threadbare way which LMists propose." But I still don't know what you have against subordination as such. Because it messes up your four-part categorization of the social world?

No, what I have against it, as it is enunciated, even very vaguely, is that it says working peole shouldn't make the decisions that affect them, and likewise consumers, where they are affected -- instead they have to go off into a political institutions and make them in some generic social way.

I have tried to be clear... I think in principle it abrogates participatory self management by apportioning the wrong level of influence, and in practice it would either be chaos or central planning--unless some of the binding rules were bent, and then I think the aspirations would quickly lead toward something like parecon if not parecon itself.

>> LMists don't want so much to "transcend economics" as we want to transcend separate economic institutions that are removed from the rest of public life. We think this sort of separation preserves capitalist divisions which should not be carried over into a free society.

>> Why not say the same thing about households and subordinate them to assemblies? Why not say it about couples, for that matter, and subordinate their sex lives to assemblies?

> Neither of these is a division created by capitalism, and in neither case does their persistence threaten to reintroduce capitalist dynamics.

This is where the real underlying attachment surfaces -- LMers seem to feel that by recognizing an economy per se, by having decisions making about economics in economic institutions, one is somehow succumbing to a capitalist logic.

If you could make an argument that by having workers councils or consumers councils express their desires for their workplaces or for their personal or collective consumption automatically (no matter what allocation system we use, even participatory planning) they will be on a slippery slope toward instilling competitive surplus appropriation pressures as the touchstone of all social life, or even just of only economic life (that would be enough, actually) then, yes, you would have reason to say we cannot have workers councils there we must have extra-economic institutions that decide economic plans, and surely the best is the most democratic and participatory.

But ou can't make that argument, because it is false -- and it is false in the same way that it is false for someone to say that having a political institution means having a state, and authoritarianism, by definition...

>> To say you don't want competing economic units -- I agree with, period. I don't either.

> It's not just competing units we're worried about, it's separate units with particularistic interests. We want the responsibility for overseeing economic units to be an integral part of the democratic management of public life, so that their impact on the community as a whole takes precedence over their separate identity.

If you put it this way -- we want the outcomes of economic decision making to take into account the well being of all those affected, direct producers, consumers, the ecology, communities, etc. of course I agree.

But you go further, you say we can't do that unless we prevent workers from inputting their views and desires specifically as workers, and likewise consumers.

It is, I think, really sort of lazy -- in the same exact sense as the logic of central planning. We will get decisions that take into account everything they ought to, with right valuations and right amounts, not by finding a way to have everyone express themselves where they are impacted plus mechanisms that mediate all that into what everyone agrees are desirable outcomes -- but, instead, by having a supra mechanism that starts from the social good and winds up there.

It is precisely the argument of central planners against markets...

>> Saying that you don't want workers inside workplaces to act together collectively, to assess their situations and impact decisions about the life of their workplace and its actions, however, strikes me as utterly odd -- I have to admit. We don't say this.

Bookchin and Biehl due, I quoted them saying it very explicitly. I think you do in places too, though at other moments it may sound just as odd to you.

Now if you fall back and say, sure, they can make decisions within the limits set by the assemblies -- it is the same as what the central planner says....

>> It is almost as weird to me as if you said you wanted the local political assemblies to govern family life or people's sex lives .

> Well, we do allow for a certain oversight role for communal assemblies in these spheres too.

Right, as I noted way earlier -- and you do it because it is right to in certain contexts, in light of effects on different actors. I have no problem, but you have a difficult time, I think, explaining why with a norm that then doesn't abrogate other requirements you have.

> I think that in most communities you wouldn't be able to beat your kids, for example, or have sex with five-year-olds. I am not troubled by this, and it doesn't strike me as weird.

Me neither...but now you are just nitpicking.

What you urge is that the political institution dominate economic life...not just interfere in certain contexts, which I of course advocate as well.

>> Each strange choice disenfranchises people from having proper influence over an important part of their lives.

> But much of what you're calling the "economic" shouldn't be an important part of an individual's personal life. In its broad outlines, it should be an important part of public life.

Come on. It is both. Everything is both.

But each person has to and will come at it -- or else we will have no information for any judgement -- from their experience of it.

I just had a thought....

LM doesn't say political judgments should be voted by each actor in the name of ALL SOCIETY. If so, they would expect consensus or strive for it. They don't. They urge that folks have different needs and desires, different situations, and need to express their preferences based on these. The process of moving from all that to decisions that account for all the inputs, and thus benefit society per se, is AFTER folks express themselves and a process of mediating their preferences.

It must be the same for the economy.

>> This is one reason why LMists prefer a community assembly model to PE's worker and consumer councils. To quote Hawkins again: "as long as workplaces confront each other and consumption units as functionally differentiated interests, there is the real possibility that these units will seek advantage over each other, reintroducing competition, and leading eventually to regression back to capitalism with competitive markets and private accumulation." This is bookchin'a point, which I replied to in detail in the article.

> No, the view you attribute to Bookchin in your article is that economic units as such exhibit this tendency to revert to capitalist forms. What Howie and I, and I think Bookchin too, are actually saying is that separate economic units run this danger.

And it is absurd...and true, both at once.

Just as it would be absurd and true to say that the existence of lawmaking runs the risk of returning to bourgeois lawmaking or dictatorship.

If you connect economic units together with institutions that cause them to pursue narrow self interest in a dynamic that ultimately hurts everyone, or even only a large number, that's what you get, sure.

But if you tie economic units together with institutions that yield desirable cooperative results, that's what you get.

You can't just say the latter is impossible.

By the by, LM economic units are far more separate units without ties and relations and mutual interests than are production and consumption units in PE....as a matter of fact.

>> The issue is whether you have an overall institutional pattern (political or economic) that breeds competition between units or not.

> We think that yours, potentially, does.

Excellent. Good. Tell me why... This would be new content and I would very much like to avoid going over the same ground as is in this message again.

>> PE is very clear about how it does this, making such behavior exceptionally difficult, utterly contrary to the logic of the system, and, as well, very hard to turn into any real gains, and so on. But LM just says we will have the polity decide in its wisdom all the major economic decisions. Fine, now why do workers in each of these potentially fractious units bother to pay any attention to these decisions? Why do they bother to produce the amounts they are told to produce? If they don't, then the assembly needs to rethink its decision.

The same answer a central planners would and did give -- but they also noted another option was to impose a local bureauracy to force compliance.

>> And so on. More, the assemblies are deciding how much steel should be produced? How do they do that? How do they know what the plants are capable of? Why is the information they have believable? Where do they get it? And so on.

> Why are any of these issues problems for LM in particular?

Because LM says it rejects markets, rejects central planning, and rejects participatory planning. Thus, we are left with wondering how it generates any information, even skewed information, for decision making.

> Assemblies get the requisite information in the same way that consumer councils do in PE.

No. I am afraid not...not unless you have participatory planning...

> And why do workers in PE bother to pay any attention to the plan? Because they participated in formulating it, indeed their input is the very stuff of the plan.

Yes, and because their income depends on it, and because they cannot take any other approach and do better...among other reasons.

> The same is true of LM. I don't see how any of this counts as an objection to LM specifically.

I can't really help that...

>> To be honest about it, I don't actually think LM has anything resembling an economic vision... The only thing about economics that is really evident and forefront is some kind of very strong aversion to workers, perhaps even consumers, expressing their desires collectively with one another, as such, regarding the big issues of economics. That's really it...it seems to me.

> Not at all. We have a strong aversion to reducing workers to their occupational role. And we are strongly in favor of workers and consumers expressing their desires collectively with one another, as citizens, regarding the big issues of economics. What did you read that suggested otherwise?

I can read the above paragraph and it is precisely what the one before anticipates.

>> More, the statement that economic institutions can be competitive and function in a way that is antithetical to all of our values is, of course, true. But to assert that the only possible solution to that is that political institutions take up the critical defining and delimiting economic functions is to say, it seems to me, that one believes that no economic institutions could accomplish that desirable end -- eliminating the competitive clash of the units and instead tying them together into cooperation.

> Not "no economic institutions", but no separate economic entities or production units.

What are you talking about.

There are building in which work occurs. They are workplaces. What does separate mean? They are in different places, but have connections in any economy.

In a market the connection is their markets relationships...in a centrally planned economy it is that their are entwined in a plan created outside ... same for LM ... in PE their connections are their joint participation in determining economic options and results --- in all these of course goods, services, people, and lots of other stuff move between.

No separate entities or production units doesn't distinguish LM as a goal or as an achievement from any other economy...

>> Either you all are saying that you think competition between economic units is inevitable,

> Between separate economic units, those that aren't embedded in a broader communal framework.

Fine. So what this says isn't that economic units -- whether production or consumption -- need to be subordinated to a political apparatus but, rather, that they need to be embedded in a mechanism of economic allocation that is cooperative and not only prevents competititon but makes it counter productive for everyone, promoting, instead, mutually beneficial activities.

You want to say that for some reason the minute you let workers in a council impact decisions from in that council this goes down the drain. Fine, demonstrate why. And while you would need to do it in the abstract applicable to all possible allocation systems to make the case you are asserting -- I would settle for an argument regarding PE showing that even in that one system economic units would be less cooperative and the workers in them less prone to social judgements than in LM.

>> and has to be reigned in by a polity, or you admit that economic units could function cooperatively and would like to see them do so, but feel that subordinating them to political assemblies is the only way. As opposed to subordinating them to workplace assemblies, yes. Not the only way, but the preferable way.

It is like an axiom...

>> If the former, PE is an argument that you are wrong.

> Not until we try it out on a large scale. Pending demonstration to the contrary, I think Howie's got a good point. Do you really think this is not even potentially a problem for PE? What we warn against is workplaces confronting each other as functionally differentiated units in respect to broad questions of social investment.

No, I think it isn't a problem. But I also think you don't fully grok how PE works...which may be introducing a confusion on that score.

> To overcome this danger, we propose putting those economic decisions which are not specific to a particular workplace in the hands of all workers collectively, along with any non-worker neighbors, in a concrete format: local resident assemblies. You propose, in contrast, putting these very same economic decisions in the hands of all workers collectively in a concrete format: cybernetically facilitated iteration rounds.

With as a huge difference that the latter actually has institutional and informational means to operatek, on the one hand, and allocates influence to actors in proportion as they are affected, on the other.

> I recognize that you think your proposed format makes much more sense than ours. But why do you insist that we're really aiming for something entirely different?

I think I noted that I actually think most LMers probably want what PE delivers but feel, I find it almost like a fetish, that it just can't be the case, because PE has workers councils, after all.

> We both want to subordinate the same processes to the will of the same people, don't we? Isn't it the format that differs?

Yes...but central planners and market advocates say they want to do the same thing.

So it is all in the format...ultimately -- or, if you want to go back a step to the underlying aspiration, in the view of the AMOUNT of say the "same people" should have....

>> The reason we don't need a fixed layer of management in PE is because workers control their own lives in their workplaces and there are jobs that are balanced for empowerment--they aren't carrying out instructions from outside obediently without power of their own. They are doing what they have agreed is the right thing to be doing. And so are workers in LM. Do you dispute this?

Yes, I do. Because in LM each worker in a plant has a say equal to everyone else in the whole society and that is too little say...if they have that (which sometimes, when it is a local assembly in LM that makes decisions rather than all assemblies, they don't). The reason such a layer is needed for the LM or the centrally planned model is that in each of these workers are handed instructions from outside the workplace

> Aha! You mean outside the workplace .

Okay, I got tired...I mean with them not having the right level of input, or none at all, effectively.

> In that case I plead guilty: we do in fact believe that it is legitimate to make decisions about economic matters outside of the factory walls. But then so do you.

Yep...it isn't the issue.

> PE has any number of crucial economic decisions being reached outside of individual workplaces - from neighborhood consumer councils to industry council federations. And your model explicitly recognizes that larger units reach their decisions first, thus establishing the parameters within which smaller units can maneuver.

Larger consumption units plan collective consumption, not industries...

>> and in which they have collectively had no say, which they simply have to obey

There is no such thing in parecon. Unless one has no relation...

You see you have to understand that in an economy the way an actor's desires impact economic outcomes isn't like the polity, but is often in the affect their preferences have on exchange rates....

>> The U.S. electorate could be every single person, but if it instructed you about how you should operate in your household without you being able, along with the other members of your household, to have a say over your lives there beyond just voting in the polity, you would feel it as a horrible imposition from without, rightly, because your say would be being reduced drastically from what it ought to be.

> I wish you'd drop this "in your household" line. LM is no more invasive on home life than PE is.

Correct...but you aren't listening. That's the point.

You understand that to give everyone the same say in that domain makes no sense. You don't seem to get the parallel -- that to give everyone equal say in the economy also makes no sense.

> I'm nevertheless a bit taken aback by your broad claim here. Even in today's society, I cannot torture small children within my household.

This is just bad communication. I have no problem with a polity making restrictions that bind either households or workplaces, in fact. The point, now for umptyumpth time, was an analogy...what is applies in the one case -- which we both agree on -- should apply in the other as well. There are times when the large polity should have great say over individuals, other times when it should have nearly no say. We should have institutions that permit these possibilities. Same for the economy ....

> In economic life, that's what democratic planning procedures are for - to mediate and harmonize the disparate goals of all producers and consumers.

Yes, which is why they need to be heard...not in some forum where everyone is supposed to be a citizen first, but from where they are felt, about the issues at stake there...

> When the issue is, for example, how many shoes or refrigerators or bicycles to manufacture next year, we think the proper forum for conducting a democratic planning process is the full assembly of all residents in face to face deliberation.

Fine. There are probably about 300,000 products in our economy. Good luck having every assembly decide the quantities and also the distribution of all of them...with no information, no less, since you not only have no means for it, but eschew valuation.

In parecon there is a process which allows all 300,000 to be addressed, with no one even pressured much less forced to pay attention to anything that they aren't motivated to (because of where they work or what they consume), and the percolation of people's repeated expression of preferences becomes a true measure of social costs and benefits in accurate exchange rates, plus decisions about volume and distribution in which those affected have say proportionate to how affected they are.

> I fail to see why shoemakers should have more formal voting power on this question than shoe wearers.

Shoe makers should have a say proportionate to impact on them, likewise shoewearers...

Since shoes utilize other components, many others have a say as well...of course.

> This will indeed sometimes mean that the bicycle shop will be expected to produce more bicycles than its current workforce would like. Perhaps that would be an unhappy situation, but I don't think it would be either undemocratic or inordinately intrusive.

Yes, but we can do a whole whole lot better, even if LM could generate such instructions, which it couldn't as described.

> It seems to me that PE deals with similar situations in a similar way: work teams or sub-councils within one enterprise have to negotiate with their co-workers in other teams and other sub-councils in order to come up with a proposal for the full workplace council. The fact that all workers are expected to follow the plan which is eventually decided upon is hardly an indication that PE is subtly totalitarian, since all workers took part in shaping the plan to begin with. Exactly the same is true of LM.

The difference is (if we ignore matters of information flow and such) the difference between local communities having more say over there own local political decisions as compared to not only not having more say, but not even voting on them other than in national plebiscites taken, to make the analogy reasonably accurate, in workplace syndicate federations.

>> if we rule out the existence of workers councils (which is, of course, also simply ridiculous as no revolutionary project is going to occur that doesn't lead to those existing)

> Yes, but do we build the new society around them? That's the question.

No, we don't. Why does it have to be built around one thing?

We build an economy around workplace councils, consumer councils, remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning. But we build other parts of society around other institutions...including the polity.

>> When the LMer goes on to say that the problem of subordinating other dimensions of social life to oversight by polity (and in fact, it isn't oversight that LMers recommend, but complete subordination to and domination by polity) hasn't been with the idea that polity should trump every other social function, but with the fact that the actual polities other dimensions have been subordinated to have been authoritarian -- I say, no, it is both.

> I think what you're saying here is that you have a theory of what should and should not fall within the domain of "the polity."

It isn't anything so immense. It is that different parts of society have different functions which need doing, and the different ways of doing it require and benefit from different institutions. You see it when you counterpoise families (kinship, procreation, sex, etc.) to polity. I see it regarding the economy, too...

> I might be more convinced by this theory if I knew why you think "the polity" should deal with 'moral' issues but not economic ones, and why you think the two can be meaningfully distinguished.

Moral--everything is moral. The institutions for legislation, adjudication, implementation, enforcement of political cooperation and innovation are not the same as those for producing, consuming, and allocating material goods and services. There is nothing complex in this. It would be amiracle if the exact structures for doing one were the best suited structures for doing the other...which is just what LM wants us to believe.

> The force of this particular objection to LM depends entirely on accepting a fundamental cleavage between "the economy" and "the polity." We think this bifurcation is itself a legacy of capitalism.

Not at all....

I can be perfectly aware that there is a political aspect to what occurs in workplace, consumption, allocation, and that there is an economic aspect to what occurs in the polity -- and still realize that the centrally needed institutions in the two have different functions and, while needing to interface well, also have different attributes.

You know that there is a political aspect to family life and a kinship aspect to the polity, but it doesn't stop you from thinking these two shouldn't be seen as one thing which can only have one set of key institutions.

We don't replace parenting with assemblies nor assemblies with parenting....

> I can't understand why you think that libertarian municipalists, who come out of the anarchist tradition, have neglected to look carefully at the history of Soviet-style central planning. I think it is you who's not looking carefully here. The charge that LM is similar in "logic and structure" to central planning flies in the face of your own description of the constitutive features of central planning regimes.

Perhaps, I am listening, but skeptical.

> Allow me to quote you: "In centrally planned economies, there is no democratic circulation of quantitative or qualitative information. Central authorities determine what is to be known and what isn't as well as who is to know and who isn't." (Looking Forward p. 68); "planners determine economic goals [and] managers within each factory oversee the implementation of these goals. There is a division between the conceptual work performed by planners and managers . . . . and the executionary work of the working class itself which carries out the plans and orders of others."

Yes, and against the desires of LMers, who I know would be horrified to actually advocate the above, it is what I think LM's stated economic vision would become, were the constraint against workers and consumers councils persistent.

> (Socialist Visions p. 253); "central planners obstruct participation. Central planning isolates people from one another and propels elite rule." (Looking Forward p. 63) Perhaps you could point to passages in the literature on LM that suggest anything remotely like factory managers, central authorities, planners, planning bureaus, orders, a division between directors and executants, obstacles to the democratic circulation of information, or a dissociation of those with the power to determine knowledge from those deprived of knowledge. And perhaps you could explain how directly democratic citizen assemblies obstruct participation, isolate people from one another, and propel elite rule.

I have already done this...I think.

It is not that I think anyone wants these outcomes. (A lot of people who supported marxism leninist options didn't want what these made virtually inevitable.)

It is that the choice to have a polity decide economic plans, to do it with no attention to exchanges values or serious norms of remuneration, to do it without any mechanisms for information transfer, etc. -- would be utterly unstable. It could evolve back to a market oriented system, with oversight from the assemblies. It could move toward a centrally planned economy -- with another layer, the assemblies, on top of hte planning apparatus. Or, if some of the constraints on councils and such disappeared, I think it could become parecon...

So the point is, maintain the constraints, reject markets, and in my view you get either utter dysfunctionality and chaos, or you get a kind of central planning, topped by the assemblies.

>> LM does not envision an "imperial polity". Since economic processes are integrated into public life as a whole, and since all economic actors are citizens, there is nothing for the polity to "usurp".

We've been over this and over it....

>> It is quite like planners saying they aren't imperial because they are, after all, agents of the people's state....but more, they could actually add that the constitution of the workplaces gave the workers absolute power ... No matter what Soviet bureaucrats said, they were not in fact agents of the people's state, much less of a workers' state, because no such thing existed in the Soviet Union.

Correct. So rhetoric alone doesn't matter. What matters is the institutions and their implications, overwhelmingly. That's my point...

> They were wrong when they claimed such things.

Yep.

> Do you think the factual claim in my statement above is wrong? Where, in LM, are the workers who are not assembly members?

Nowhere...but does it matter. There was nowhere in the SU where there were workers who didn't have constitutional rights... so what?

The question is can your assemblies do what LM says they should -- basically deliver a plan for the economy? Will workers abide it? And so on. I have indicated why I think not and why then there would result an apparatus for the planning, overseen by the assemblies, and a lyer of management in the workplaces, to make it happen.

By the way, there is no place in what I read where there is any discussion at all about not having management, or doing so, as best I can remember.

> Where are the executants dispossessed of a conceptual role?

Inside every workplace, at least.

> Where are the coordinators who have authority over production?

In time, the emerging planning apparatus...or else the system will use markets, or participatory planning, or something else, but as described, folks would simply starve.

> Where is there any group or any subsection of society with any institutional power? Where is there any hierarchy whatsoever of some people over other people?

In all your aspirations, there isn't -- this is why I say at these levels there is a whole lot in common.

But there is no real discussion of preventing it, at least in the economy, that I saw, either. And there is the problem that what is proposed as an economic model just wouldn't be even remotely viable, so one is left trying to see where it would move toward.

I should be clearer -- we are arguing a model. In practice, I think it would obviously move toward something like parecon because I am utterly confident that should movements get near the size and scope to institute a polity like LM, there will also be movements in the economy emphasizing workers democracy, etc. etc.

> LM rejects coordinatorism just as firmly as PE does - if not more so, considering your response to Gary Sisco on the question of separating administration from policy making.

I don't know that reference....

Does this mean LM advocates balanced job complexes? I would love to hear we shared that. If not, I wonder what is the way that LM adocates to remove a coordinator class differentiation?

> It doesn't make sense to accuse us of being, in effect, too anarchist, too decentralized, too suspicious of respresentation, and of being closet central planners.

I am not accusing you of any of this...I am looking at a model and telling you what I see.

I never used anything like a phrase too anarchist, or too decentralized -- I do think you have a strange view of representation, and I think that while LMers no doubt hate central planning, the logic of the LM formulation for the economy as stated in what I have read leads to central planning unless it admits markets, participatory planning, or some other allocation scheme it is keeping under wraps for now.

>> Isn't your beef with LM really that it privileges resident assemblies over worker and consumer bodies?

>> Not regarding politics, no. I think political functions should be carried out by political institutions.

> Even if I thought it made sense to perpetuate a divide between the economic and the political, I don't see how they could possibly be disentangled in practice.

It is like a constant refrain...but it makes no sense when you get past just the surface of it.

An assembly, a key political institution for you, is not a factory or a family. That doesn't means politics has no economic or kinship aspect...

An allocation system that isn't coterminus with the political assemblies, the same structure, doesn't mean economic life and political life aren't entwined.

> Part of the intention of LM is to create a 'moral economy', a system which "ceases in fact to be economic in the usual meaning of the word" (Bookchin, "Market Economy or Moral Economy?").

Great, it doesn't succeed.

> This re-integrated understanding of economic and political action would by no means leave the latter unchanged and merely subsume the former under it: "a moral economy must become a school for creating a new kind of citizenship: economic citizenship as well as political, productive citizenship as well as participatory." We want to fundamentally reshape both the 'political' and the 'economic' realms and make both of them public affairs for all people to decide on collectively in a grassroots and participatory fashion.

> Why are you so intent on keeping these two realms of social life cleanly separated?

What is the point of the sentence?

Suppose I say to you, why do you want to keep them separate, why don't you have the assemblies produce all goods, be the place everyone picks up goods, be where people consume goods? Why do you isolate the assemblies from all these economic functions? It would be idiotic. I would be uttering nonsense to accuse you of trying to separate politics from economics because you advocate a political institution which doesn't undertake all economic functions.

Okay so in addition to workplaces and consumers units and so on, I also advocate a set of institutions for allocation. There is no point in suggesting that what is happening here is that I am trying to separate economics and politics by that. Rather I am saying that there is this task -- deciding inputs and outputs, remuneration rates, exchange rates, and so on. And I am saying that just as I think production is in many cases best accomplished not in primarily cultural institutions or households or political assemblies, but in workplaces designed with the economic attributes of work in mind -- so I think the tasks of allocation are best accomplished in most instances not via cultural institutions or households or political assemblies or even just workplaces -- but via a combination of workers and consumers councils and a set of institutions facilitating cooperative economic exchange.

> What I was trying to get at is not the groups of people who are agents in PE, since in my opinion this is not a point of divergence between PE and LM. I was pointing to the contexts in which they exercise their agency. In PE, those contexts are primarily the household and the workplace, along with neighborhood consumer councils.

Correct.

> I have no quibble with this arrangement when decisions concern what I've been calling the particulars of production or consumption, but I am not impressed with it when decisions concern the formulation of broader economic policy for whole communities.

Yes, well okay, we disagree...for all the reasons we have gone over many times, now, I am afraid.

> When "the nature of the issue at hand" is, say, setting basic priorities for local industry, agriculture, or services, PE proposes that people deliberate through the same forums and via the same media as they do when deciding on household budgets or task rotation at their workplace. I think you see this as one of PE's strong points; I consider it a weakness.

Agreed.

>>> The requirements PE places on all citizens, at the level of detail and in the specific technological format proposed, are likely to alienate many people from consistent engagement.

>> I don't know how to say this, but this is just a statement...it could be true or not, but there really isn't a reason given, I feel like there is a lot of this afoot...

> Umm... what sort of reasons are you looking for? I mentioned the level of detail, the technological format, and the temptation to let folks with a knack for massaging proposals do most of the deciding.

Well, the level of detail for consumption and production is basically folks paying attention to their economic activities with an ease that is greater than we can now focus on the few we have any say over...as best I can tell.

The technological format? You mean that folks create lists? Respond to information? Or that they do this on terminals which makes it quicker and easier than if it was done in print media?

And there is no temptation to let folks with a knack for massaging proposals do most of the deciding--nor any mechanism anyone could utilize to this end.

> But I'm happy to give you more reasons for my skepticism. To chose one example: under PE, if my personal consumption proposal deviates from the norm, I need to bring it to the neighborhood consumption council and justify it, and the council needs to reach a decision on it (as described on p. 84 of Looking Forward).

If you want to consume more than your income warrants, you must borrow to do so. But that doesn't entail going to the whole council--and instead of trying convince a bank to loan you, it is a matter of your fellow consumers.

If you enter an anonymous consumption proposal which includes, say, howitzers of gallons of arsenic, and the community says no -- you can then decide to go public and argue for it, or you can dump it.

> LM spares all of us this step, and allows neighborhood assemblies to concentrate on the broad outlines of their collective economic life.

I don't know what this means. How do people get what they consume? Why should we believe what they want will be available for them in LM? What will decide how much they get? For example, suppose an LM community decides it wants a new pool and solar observatory and library, etc. On top of all that, do the members get the same personal consumption levels as if they didn't get all that for their community? If they get less, how much less? When they decided on getting the pool, etc., did they know what the impact would be on how many steaks or books they could each get? And so on.... For that matter, if someone wants howitzers for their backyard in LM, it is okay?

> I'm also not too keen on the central role PE grants to computer terminals as a primary medium of participation (no, not out of any residual Luddism).

It is a primary means for conveying information in the planning process, that's all... People think with their minds, converse with their mouths, just like now. I honestly don't know what people mean when they say things like this...but maybe you will explain below.

> I'm not troubled by this mechanism for purposes of gathering information on individual consumption or work proposals, but PE says that broader decisions about communal economic life will also be taken via this same medium. This is where your otherwise cogent justification for the use of computer technology breaks down: "if we use computers to facilitate something akin to human interaction where otherwise there would be no interaction " (Looking Forward p. 135, emphasis in original). In LM, as far as major community-wide economic choices go, there would be real live human interaction, which you and Hahnel recognize is preferable.

The same is true in PE...except folks would have the information they need at their disposal and also have the proper amount of say in outcomes. PE doesn't eliminate face to face engagements, it adds a means for those to be informed and for the preferences that emerge from them to be expressed with the proper influence.

So, a neighborhood consumption council certainly collectively decides its collective proposal, by discussing it, etc. -- does it want a new park, a community center, whatever, in light of the gains for the community, but also the losses to personal consumption of the community members in the trade off. And to arrive at such proposals it holds meetings like what you envision for LM...but with a clear agenda, its own collective consumption -- not the administration of the whole society and every other locality, plus its own collective consumption. On the other hand, in thinking about its own collective consumption it can and will consider implications for others, etc.

> I think a more realistic scenario, under a PE system, is that many folks would gradually cede effective authority to those of their co-workers or co-consumers who prove to be good at fiddling with proposals and iterations.

Regarding personal consumption, it's effectively impossible or at least absurd, in most instances. You wouldn't get to eat if you don't input your requests. I suppose you might say to your neighbor, do it for me -- but what neighbor is going to do that, and what person would cede that? And if anyone did, for some good reason, so be it.

Regarding your own work participation, it is impossible, or again, at least absurd, as you would not get to work, and therefore wouldn't have an income--or, if allowed to have someone act in your place in choosing your work assignment, meeting with your workmates to schedule mutual tasks, etc. you took that option, so be it.

It is possible (and may be permitted) to forgo going to community or neighborhood consumption meetings, or to discussions in the workplace of proposed new organizations or technologies, sure--though we can also imagine at least the latter being a mandatory part of work . And sometimes maybe you or I would choose not to partake, other times we would. I doubt there would be any systematic dynamic. But this exists in any system....in PE folks are prepared and their circumstances empower them to participate and there are simply no impediments.

>> I can't imagine consumers letting others decide what they will consume, and I can't imagine workers not wanting to have a say in decisions about their work, and so on. That some folks will be more into dealing with the information tasks is certainly true, but not a problem...unless dealing with the information tasks conveys greater say, which it doesn't, in a parecon.

> This paragraph sounds like an implausible speculation about how PE would work in practice. The first part contradicts my experience with collective workplaces and collective households, and the second part strikes me as naive about the neutrality of information.

Well, if we use the present as an estimate of participation, no future system will have more than a tiny fraction involved...but of course in the present we don't have balanced job complexes, information dispersal, empowerment of all participants, decision input, and so on and so forth.

As to the first part, why would anyone cede control over their own consumption to someone else, and how? It isn't an option in parecon -- no one would want to, but also there is no means to do it, at least for anything other than the odd circumstance. Likewise, why would anyone cede the choice of their job and of all say in how they work each day to others? You could, I guess, but I don't see the problem since there is no motive for doing it -- and you don't get to go to the beach instead, it is part of work-time. As to not partaking of larger unit discussions, sure, sometimes folks wouldn't and some may do it more and some less, assuming it is optional. But why would one not enter one's preference between this or that investment proposal, this or that collective consumption option -- in the couple of minutes that it would require. Nothing prevents participation in all stages, and refusing to enter one's preference at a decision making stage would seem obtuse or an implicit statement that one doesn't care.

As to information, of course in many contexts information is power. That is why, for example, about LM I asked you where the massive amounts of needed information for assemblies comes from, how it is prepared, etc. There is no discussion of that regarding LM--nothing about job allocation or structure, either. In contrast, in PE -- which is only economic -- there is great clarity about the origins and distribution of information. Also, we discuss why it is that those engaged in moving or summarizing data as a part of their work, even if they were malevolent, could not, in fact, benefiit themselves in any systematic way -- other than by acts literally akin to theft (and even then it would be extremely difficult with a minuscule payoff and huge downside).

All workers have balanced job complexes...you can't benefit on that score unless you can mask your own job from accurate assessment -- which isn't possible via data handling because no one handles the information bearing on their own immediate situation's definition, and probably isn't possible anyhow, on technical grounds. The same holds for consumption -- there are no planners who can change prices of what they want down and what others want up...or anything of the sort. And so on... These issues are seriously dealt with in PE, whereas in LM it is as if they don't even arise because LM simply doesn't address many facets of what goes into economic operations.

> On the first point, the problem is not whether workers will want to have a say in decisions about their work. All of my co-workers here at the bookstore (collectively run for ten years) want to have a say in managing the store, but most of us have limited time, energy, and attention spans.

Yes, but in PE the bookstore isn't operating in a market system. Your time for decision-making in PE is part of your time allotted to economic involvement and part of your job responsibility, and in sum is much lower than now. No one is systematically more exhausted or empowered by their work circumstances than others, due to all having balanced job complexes. There are likely differentials in attention span, still -- due to things other than deadening life experience as opposed to empowering life experience -- just as there are differences in skills, dispositions, etc., but I doubt they will matter much in this realm.

> So most of us focus on particular task areas and leave major decisions or especially contentious ones to the full collective - and even there, not everyone participates equally.

What is the point? In PE mostly folks address matters directly impacting them and their mates -- we address larger matters when those impact us, and in proportion. It is a part of our overall job responsibilities... But it is LM which says the proper norm for decision making is that everyone votes on everything with equal say, not PE.

> Even in running a relatively small business, it's damned hard to get sustained participation out of the people most directly affected. Much of this, of course, is due to the capitalist context within which even a cooperative bookshop must operate; but I think part of it has to do with the nature of workplaces as such.

What about workplaces causes problems? Is it something intrinsic, or something owing to mutable structures that you have in mind?

But more, it isn't the case, in my view, that everyone needs to participate equally in everything -- an impossible and inefficient and even oppressive aspiration -- rather, people need to be able to impact the decisions that affect them proportionately as they are affected, as best we can attain that.

> To look at the same phenomenon from the consumption angle: I let my housemates decide what I will consume every single day. Since I'm pretty indifferent to the burning question of whether to get cheddar or mozzarella, I usually skip those discussions.

Which is fine... Of course you can't not fill out your consumption proposals in parecon, but it surely doesn't need to take much time. And if you want to cede collective consumption for your living unit to others in it, and they are cool with that, no problem.

> And of the twelve of us, I'm one of the most engaged on many other community issues. Here's why this is a problem: in a society run along PE lines, the same channels of information and deliberation (namely workplace and consumer meetings as well as the cybernetically facilitated iteration process) must serve for both day-to-day organizational details and for overarching economic policy making.

I am not sure what you mean. The process of doing our economic decision making involves the give and take of proposals throughout the whole economy, yes. But the process of arriving at or assessing proposals is in some cases private, in some cases a small group affair, in some cases a larger more collective affair -- in councils of various levels.

In LM, as best I can see, the local assemblies must address everything, throughout not only the economy, but also the polity. It seems to me that whatever this particular concern you raise means, it applies to LM but not parecon...so perhaps I am simply not understanding you. In LM one institution is doing essentially all decision making. In parecon a variety of economic units participate in economic decision making at various levels.

> Unless I am a real meeting hound or really enjoy sitting at the keyboard, I'm not going to pay close attention to meeting after meeting or iteration round after iteration round where issues like how many window fans my house or office gets are hammered out, especially if I have reliable and competent housemates or co-workers who do find such issues engaging.

Well, I think your reliable co-workers and officemates -- once you all have comparable life conditions, incomes, and job complexes, might have something to say about whether they want to be doing it all for you...but, if not, so be it.

> This isn't a big problem as long as I'm willing to trust my colleagues - something PE certainly encourages - and don't have strong feelings about window fans. But in PE those very same meetings/rounds also determine whether or not to build a nuke in my town.

Well, it could be a problem because in various workplaces or living areas participation in various types of decision making could be mandatory -- thus, if you don't like that, you'd have to find a workplace or living group whose approach was more congenial to you.

At to building a nuke in town, no, that would not be a meeting of your local workmates -- a town council meeting--and actually, in the case of a nuke, more likely a county or larger meeting.... And it wouldn't decide to do it or not, but to propose it or not. The decision involves many people other than only those local to the placement of it.

> And that, I think, is a problem.

Yes, I would agree that if the only place people could develop an opinion, express it, or manifest it, was privately or perhaps with their immediate local unit...or maybe with some larger unit only, it would be a problem. But that seems to me to be true of LM -- the local assemblies are the focus and seat of all power, one person one vote, majority rule on all things -- but not true of parecon.

> If the context for cheese choosing is the same as the context for deciding the overall direction of the economy, even normally active and engaged people will face, at the very least, a difficult prioritization dilemma.

But it isn't, so there is no such problem. However, in LM, while you want to say that the choice about cheeses is made personally and the choice whether to have massive investments in new solar technologies is made in assemblies, the two are interconnected and one can't make a sound choice about either of them other than having knowledge of overall valuations -- and LM doesn't even address such matters.

>> But LM tries to account for that possibility precisely by integrating large-scale economic decisions into a single public arena,

First off, there aren't any decisions only with large-scale implications. You have said LM thinks all decisions should involve all folks affected, each manifesting equal influence. That isn't achieved, even remotely, by a system which says big decisions will be handled in assemblies and the rest somewhere else.... Where else, by whom, by what means? Ultimately all decisions in fact impact everyone, even if only very very marginally.

In parecon big decisions of the sort you are talking about are in fact handled in pretty much the same domain -- the whole society organized into its councils. But the information needed exists and is provided, and the linkages to all other decisions are evident and accounted for. And, more, the rest of the economy's decisions also have sensible venues and methods -- the whole thing ultimately being arrived at as an integrated entirety, which is, in fact, precisely what it is.

Tell me, in LM what is the method that determines how much stuff I can get, what job I have, what income, how much of my income I have to allot for each thing I want -- relative costs? How is a decision about some large scale choice -- investing in solar power -- made if we don't have means to consider what we lose in other production by undertaking that option?

Peter, I do believe LMers have very similar economic aspirations to pareconers, if you will, in many ways. But LM's image of a better economy is really quite empty...when you get past adjectives.

> Maybe you should read it again. Page 117: "socially significant property - the means of production - is placed under public control";

This is a statement that dosen't distringuish LM for central planning, market socialism, etc. etc.

> page 162: "The municipality, through the assembly of citizens, would control and make the broad decisions for its shops";

Yes, I am aware of this -- it is something I find adverse not to mention essentially impossible.

How, with what information?, with what probability that the decision would fit with other decisions, that it would be enacted, etc. Not to mention the problems of proportionate say. Think of your assembly deciding the broad decisions for its shops -- how much to stock, say, how much electricity to use, etc. etc. What are the exchange rates used in the calculation? How does the assembly have any idea what people want...and how much they want it?

> page 160: "the practical realization of these policies would fall within the purview of the individual cooperative."

This again is in no way distinguishable from central planning...

> We do not believe, and nowhere do we suggest, that municipal bodies should micro-manage workplaces. Instead, we hope to achieve an integration of the wishes and capacities of various workplaces with the needs and values of the surrounding community.

A central planner could say this too -- but I notice this one isn't a quote from Biehl...and I doubt she said this...

What I think you are saying is that there is worker's control in workplaces, but it operates in context of a larger plan. Fine...Biehl doesn't say that but now you have the problem of where this larger plan comes from -- is it the polity or is it the interactive negotiations of workers and consumers. And if it is the former, how does the political structure get the needed information, determine the guiding values, and enforce the resultant instructions?

After our interaction I think parecon does what LMers probably want, and more (proper decision making influence) and answers all these questions in ways that take seriously the actual processes of economic interaction and also furthers desirable values. I think LM handwaves about most of it, leaving us with a system that would either be dysfunctional or utilize councils and an approach like parecon, whatever someone in some assembly was intoning about the huge dangers of doing so -- or, would construct the infrastructure of cental planning, but with a capping structure of the assemblies....

> We think this can be done by creating a directly democratic public space for arguing about and deciding on 'big' questions, with the fulfillment of these basic decisions entrusted to internally democratic and non-hierarchical workplaces.

You think that, apparently, but I am not sure others do.

And this "public space" we must agree, has to have the proper information and should of course apportion power over outcomes properly, and so on. I think implementing your prescription leads to parecon, not LM, for the economy.

> Your point that there's no obvious or simple line between 'big' questions of policy and matters of administration is well taken.

It is more than that. It is that big and small matters impact one another, millions of small matters either constrain or are constrained by big choices --- or, in a neighborhood, thousands, or hundreds, or dozens of small matters are constrained by or constrain larger choices... Of course, if you say anyone and any group can have anything they say they need so there is no need to choose among alternatives, all concern about allocation disappears, but so does reality.

The reason that the overall information system and valuation system has to be entwined is because the impacts are mutually determinative. It isn't just the problem of deciding what is big and what isn't that interferes with doing some in the economy and some in a separate polity....

I think if we sat down and methodically went through parecon you would agree that other than the fact that workers as workers impact large scale decisions, it does what you would like to see an economy do. That, I think, is the foundation on which LM diverges from Parecon regarding economics (which is all parecon addresses). I even think that LM's ostensible rejection of propotionate input to decisions derives from this and this only. That is, I think it is a tactical fall back position because it is clear that if one says proportionate input, one would then have to relate to workers councils and consumer councils at every level. That's verboten ofr reasons that I think are horribly confused, so since that is verbotten the principle which would lead toward it is denied (though it is then used, even if only implicitly, wherever else it is needed...)

> I don't think, however, that drawing such distinctions is impossible.

Drawing distinctions between major and minor or big and small isn't the issue...

The issue is (a) people impacting their lives proportionately as they are affected, (b) people cohering with others not in some abstract place divorced from where decisions impact but in the place where they share their interests that need expressing (so sometimes in a polity, but sometimes in a household or a church, or workplaces), (c) people making decisions in possession of relevant information and in a context that promotes solidarity, diversity, self management, and equity, rather than a framework which imposes competition, etc. etc.

> Moreover, integrating the broad parameters of communal economic life into the public management of municipal affairs will, we hope, encourage people who are consigned by capitalism to the status of workers/consumers to view themselves as citizens,

This is the type sentence that I find utterly incomprehensible.

What is wrong with being, in part, a worker, a consumer, a celebrant of some culture, a parent -- or a citizen? What is the fetishization of the last, as if it is good and the rest are bad?

If someone were to use history to say citizens are too often nationalist jingoist maniacs for us to think of citizens in some fashion according them high responsibility, you would say pishtash....that is citizens in the midst of disgusting institutions.

And you would be correct.

But being a worker or consumer or religious or cultural celebrant or parent is, similarly, not some kind of inferior distortion of our humanity and sociality by definition -- but only by virtue of the institutions that mediate these functions now.

I just don't understand how Bookchin can enunciate this type awareness as clearly as he does criticizing folks for assuming that politics is statism but not comprehend that he/you all are doing precisely the same thing when you throw up your hands at the prospect of workers qua workers having impact. It is like throwing up one's hands at the prospect of citizens having impact -- or political institutions operating in society, etc.

> and to extend their economic horizons beyond the particular interests of their workplace or household to a larger public interest, embodied in a democratic and participatory public forum, where they will be able to cooperate for the common good. That is LM's vision.

Yes, and desiring solidaritous citizens is nice...but there is no reason to forgo having solidaritous workers, parents, celebrants, etc., as well.

> I think this vision is complementary in many respects to the vision you've put forward.

Yes, the political vision is...and I could easily imagine folks advocating a parecon economy and an LM polity (though I think the latter is very incomplete, at the moment). But the LM economy is just embarassing, between us. You mention that there are no economists amongst you...don't you think there is something odd about folks claiming to have an economic vision but really knowing very little about how economies actually work, what is entailed, etc. I am not saying one has to be a professional economist to propose economic aims...but it might be wise to at least get some council, to ascertain whether what is proposed is even addressing serious economic matters -- or not...

> As I see it, there are three chief points of disagreement: the question of communism;

I think by that you mean the idea that people should be allotted what they need and should contribute what they are able to. We can discuss it, by all means. I think it is not even a desirable long long term aim, in fact....but it certainly isn't anything that is even remotely going to guide an economy we seek for the U.S. or other countries in the next fifty years.

> the institutional framework (resident assemblies or worker and consumer councils);

I have no problem with resident assemblies for political purposes -- and in fact consumer councils are resident assemblies, though I think wearing a different hat when addressing matters of consumption.

> and the implementation of participatory democracy (influence proportional to impact or equal formal power).

Yes, this is a big one, if it is really a difference.

And I think you have to add, as well, that parecon-ers feel that the functions of a particular domain being addressed with a vision have to be enunciated and achieved by the vision. I don't mean that snottily -- it is just a serious difference, I think. LM ignores key aspects of polity, but without arguing that they are either peripheral or not yet treated or anything else warranting their being effectively ignored, They just aren't dealt with, at least not seriously. And regarding the economy, LM doesn't even approach a serious assessment of what an economy needs to accomplish and doesn't even seriously ask whether its prescriptions can accomplish economic functions. It is just asserted, perhaps without even realizing what is being asserted.

> I think a continuing discussion on those points would be very worthwhile. Hope I haven't overwhelmed you with this mass of words....

Sure. But I do think getting together would be helpful...after a while this is just too slow and too impersonal.