More on Decentralism, Communism, and Electoralism

Carl, you don\'t say what kind of "organization" does the sort of thing you describe. But if it\'s focused on elections and getting people into office, this isn\'t the right orientation as far as I can see because it then encourages people to think in terms of electing leaders to run things, make the decisions, and do things for them. It encourages a hierarchical conception of society and organizations. I\'m not opposed to supporting a candidate in cases where it would make a real difference to people in particular areas of struggle. But i see this as purely a tactic. This is actually a difference between Wayne and myself. We have where I live a socialist who we elected to the city council, and I worked for his election, he\'s been a consistent fighter for workers and tenants, and has been a help to a housing organization I\'m a part of. But I think it\'s a mistake to organize around elections like that\'s the main route to change. Because it isn\'t.

Carl Davidson presents the sort of false choice that I run into among electorially focused left people: The way to organize and talk with ordinary people, they say, is by trying to get them to vote. But that isn\'t really trying to get them involved in something where they would have a say. And that\'s why it isn\'t really building a movement.

It\'s quite possible to do real organizing by talking to tenants, organizing them in conflicts with landlords, or talking to one\'s coworkers in organizing a workplace organization to contest the employer\'s dictatorship at work. Ultimately it is through ordinary people being active themselves that things are going to change. The expansion in the social wage via "welfare state" programs between the 30s and 60s didn\'t come about because of the nice liberals winning in elections. There was a general pattern of concessions by the capitalist elite, both directly and thru the state, that happened because of  disruptive, large-scale actions organized from below, from the general strikes, pitched battles and workplace occupations and largescale strikes and wildcat strikes of the 30s and 40s to the mass struggles in the south that broke Jim Crow and ghetto rebellions and youth rebellion in the north in the \'60s.

And people with revolutionary politics played an important role in those struggles in that era.

The problem with not discussing what to replace capitalism with is that not having within the mass movements some basic understanding of what we want to replace capitalism with is likely to play into the hands of educated elites within and outside of the movement who can then dominate in setting the post-revolutionary course, and experience shows they are likely to do so in ways that empower a minority class who play a coordinator class role. The working class can\'t liberate itself from boss classes without an understanding of what needs to change to get rid of the class system. The basic structure being proposed isn\'t complex. It\'s direct democracy in the workplaces and communities, re-integration of conceptualization and decision-making authority with the doing of the physical labor in the way jobs are designed, share in the social product based on work effort and needs, and participatory planning.

I tend to agree with Wayne that the differences among Left-anarchists in regard to participatory planning and "to each according to needs" versus "remuneration for work effort among the able bodied" can be accommodated in a single revolutionary organization.

One problem with this discussion is that the various sides get to build castles in the air and define things however they like.

But there are all sorts of practical experients, some past, some still around, some past AND still around and sustaining themselves, like the anaBaptist anarchism of the Amish. On a more modern scale, there\' the Mondragons cooperatives in Spain, alive and thriving and still growing after 50 years, or the Italian coops still thriving.

Why not take something that is, beyond a single small coop, as a starting point, rather than competing ideas of what isn\'t?

Wayne, you seem to think that under participatory planning everything gets decided at the national level. That\'s not the way it is. The idea, rather, is that people develop their own plans, and this especially means local communities and local workplaces. But they then must "adjust" their plans to others. If a factory is producing computers or shoes or anything else, shouldn\'t it take account of what people want? Within participatory planning, this occurs through a price system, among other things. Prices reflect how much people want products a group is thinking of producing. If the projected prices drop for something the factory is intending to produce, they could decide to ignore that. But they are under a certain social constraint: They must use the socially owned production facilities in an efficient way, not wastefully. If they simply ignore what people want, fewer people will want their products.

The same is true for what local communities want...any sort of public good they provide, health care, housing, etc. Many products will not be produced in their neighborhood or town. How do they arrange to obtain these?

The principle of subsidiarity is built into participatory economics. This is the principle that decisions are made at the lowest level feasible. The reason for this is because the decisions in, say, a local workplace, affect mainly the people who work there. So those decisions should be made by them. There are *some* decisions relating to that workplace that may affect people over a broader area...such as any pollutants they emit, the character of their product, and so on. But those are mainly settled through the price system in the way I suggested above. Even if housing is provided as a free good by the local community, the construction and maintenance of housing requires work and various materials. These materials are likely to come from someplace else, such as lumber, metal, pipes, wire, wallboard, etc. Use of these involves use of scarce resources, and thus a pricing system is needed so that communities and workplaces have information about the social value or relative scarcity of what they are requesting or proposing to use.

There are some questions that would need to be decided over a broader area than a local community or even a region. Things like defense, or investment in various kinds of infrastructure like highways and railways and electrical power generation or dealing with forms of air or water pollution that affect a whole region. These are the kinds of things that federations of assemblies would have to decide about, perhaps through congresses of delegates from assemblies. but the great majority of decisions would not be made that way in participatory economics.

You seem to have this image in your mind that because a plan is worked out that covers an entire economy, this means there is some decision at the national level for the whole economy. But that would be central planning, not participatory planning. There is not, or need not be, any "decision" for a whole plan. The "plan" is merely the aggregation of the myriad local plans, once they\'ve been "adjusted" to each other through the back-and-forth participatory planning process.

here is a prime example of what i see as your ultimate weakness:

"Social institutions should be as decentralized as possible, as much in human scale as possible, with only as much centralization and big institutions and buildings as absolutely necessary."

Impregnated in this comment are many things that arouse many concerns, questions and thoughts, at least for me. (Not to mention I still see you equating centralism with size and not the degree to which those affected can participate in the decision making process, which I think is an inaccurate interpretation.)

One, which is the most important and i think is an underlying feature in the rest of your commentary, is that it forgoes what is preferable. Just because something is "possible" or "easier" (in a previous post you said we should favor small planning because it\'s "easier") doesnt make it better or more efficient. Many times throughout your posts and comments you have implied that we should "always" or "only" do things on a small scale to the degree that it is "possible" and "easier." Again, just because something is possible or easier doesn\'t make it preferable. Ironically, I have seem to find in life that the right thing to do is often the hardest, while the wrong thing is often the easiest. I dont consider it a truism but pretty close to one.

We can do lots of thought experiments here on what is possible and conclude that it isn\'t preferable. The point here is that we shouldn\'t be so absolutist that we would cut off our nose just to spite our face. We shouldn\'t base our decisions on what is easy or possible but what is preferable. We should be open to a broad range of choices, methods and so on in order to achieve our goals of making a better society. If we can do that on a small scale then we should do that, if we need to do it on a larger scale than so be it. If making a better and more enjoyable and fulfilling society means utilizing different methods of democratic and participatory planning then we should be open to making those decisions.

Wayne,

I am a strong advocate for a participatory society (thus, parecon), however, until this debate, i was not aware of Albert\'s take on Obama.  Though, you certainly wouldn\'t agree with my supporting McKinney/Clemente (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18734), Obama support is just discouraging.  It\'s like watching people give an offering, hoping god or the church will grant them pie in the sky.  We all know Obama\'s top financial backing is identical to McCain\'s; why should expect different behavior?  Also, Obama has actually been just as conservative as McCain on the border and other issues, and more aggressive in his rhetoric against Latin America. 

Albert lost a lot of credibility from me with his complicity in Obamania.  The biggest chunk of the population doesn\'t vote, or hates the vote they cast; we should be going after them, shouldn\'t we? 

Generally speaking, though, i think i tend to agree with Albert on quite a bit of the debate.  I think the disagreement on how detailed parecon is seems to holds some legitimacy, but when we look at how detailed some of the visionary components of other radicals, even the the most mechanical "materialists", it seems like an exaggerated criticism of parecon that is played out by every Leftist. 

There\'s a good model for what you\'re arguing for, Wayne. It\'s the Amish, here in Pennsylvania and to some degree, in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa.

They\'re anarchists, practice mutual aid, have little to do with the state and markets, practice self-suffiency and direct democracy, and a federative relations, based on both kinship and community. They police themselves as best as they can, and use no weapons. Transgressors are \'shunned,\' a form of non-violent non-cooperation. They have community wide debates over technology, adapting to it where it doesn\'t threaten their overall values. They\'\'ll install solar panels to run electric pumps to water their cattle, for instance, but they don\'t believe in electric lights in their homes.

A big recent debate was over in-line skates. Amish children love to skate, but in-line skates were debatable because they might offer youth too much mobility, taking them beyond the oversight of community. Amish youth, however, at a certain age, are encouraged to explore the \'wild\' life among the \'English\' (Everyone else), but at a certain point, they have to decide whether to return to family and community, and its mutually-agreed rules. Most do.

The Catholics also have a term for your decentralism-- the \'subsidiarity principle.\'

My point is there\'s not much new here.