FYI, Secret's comment was just a vehicle for spam for some kind of get rich quick scheme.. Since we put in Captcha, the only spam getting through is highly sophisticated, and can pass as actual content sometimes. You know it by the weird links.

tarek : )

secret33's comment is very odd. There's some cold data (Rassmussen Reports) suggesting strongly that JRE is the most electable...perhaps some of that is because of gender bias in part of the electorate, but there's no indications that the Transport Workers union itself thinks a woman can't (or shouldn't) become president. And maybe the NYC Transport Workers union understands correctly that Edwards is by the far the most pro-labor of the top three Democratic contenders and also knows that the corporate-neoliberal Clintons blew health care reform (with an absurdly complex "market incentive" plan that could have been accurately labelled "All Power to the Big Six Insurance Companies") and then invested their political capital in freaking NAFTA ...for which by the way Bill Richardson was the legislative point man. I have yet to look at Hillary's 2007 heath care plan, the last component of which was unveiled yesterday; should be interesting. I saw all the Democratic candidates speak yesterday in Indianola, Iowa. It wasn't even close: Edwards blew the roof off the joint, making the others (and above all Obama, who was simply awful) look like distant inferiors. He referred again to the labor movement as the single greatest anti-poverty program in U.S. history and repeated his now recurrent statement that change does not come by sitting down at a table and negotiating with rapacious corporations --- or by replacing "corporate Republicans with corporate Democrats" --- but instead by fighting those corporations. Yes, there's populist rhetoric and then there's the substance of capitalist power and governance and an Edwards presidency would have to make all kinds of compromises but his rhetoric --- particuarly regarding concentration of wealth and labor rights --- is interesting and is part of why he tends not to get the media attention and campaign finance largesse that the ruling class funnels to corporate Hillary (who also knows how to give a good campaign speech) and Obama, Inc. (who apparently does not).

This is really a big time snub to support Edwards who is not from New York and do not have more experience than Clinton.

Why would they do that?

Do they think Hillary is not capable of becoming the President because she is a woman or was it because of her husband, who was instrumental in America's terrorst attack of 9-11, due to his negligence to hunt them and to defend the country during his presidency because he was busy fooling around with Monica Lewinsky?

Inquiring mind wants to know.

What is their reason for this glaring snub?

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.latimes.com

I could not register with the LA Times for some reason - if you can paste story in much appreciated sk. Shit occasionally happens with blog content for reasons that should be less than mysterious and which will soon lead me to take a psedonymn for political writing. I wish it wasn't like this but it is.

Paul, If I remember right you did a post on the Norman Finkelstein case last week or so. Not sure where it disappeared.

Here's another 'politically controversial' academic denied an position because administrators wanted to avoid 'a "bloody battle" over the appointment.' 

No, alas I do not garner singificant riches from writing about racial oppression (from a very class-based and class-informed perspective incidentally); the Ford Foundation (and the John D. and Catherine T MacArthur and Rockefeller etc.) are not especially interested in funding a researcher and writer who consistently criticizes what the democatic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King called "the triple evils that are interrelated": racism, economic expolitation (class injustice and capitalism basically), and militarism/imperialism (and yes he left out gender) - Frederic I think you are right to remind this very very confused and frankly messed-up commenter ("cryofan') that the working-class (and labor movement) is largely non-white (and non-male) and that he (I presume) deeply insults the white male working-class by assuming that it can't handle or deal couragerously and progressively with questions of race.

"cryofan,"your intellectual (not to mention your moral) failure is reaching new heights.  Anyone who actually fit your cartoon-like image of racial identity politics (certainly not me...and recall that you have repeatedly expressed the childish opinion that the mere mention of race/racism plays into overclass designs) would be automatically embracing Obama, who I have repeatedly criticized on grounds that strongly include his closeness to the white overclass (here's just one example)  By contrast, I've had some  nice things to say about white male and pro-labor John Edwards, which you ought to like given your inverted (perverted and falsely "left") identity politics.  You can't seriously think (well I suppose you could) I selected the photo because the union official in question happens to be black.  He could have been Chinese-American, Latino, white or whatever...his color was irrelevant and the point was that the NYC Transport Workers (of all colors) are backing JRE. 

This last comment of yours ("need a dash more of Identity Politics, paul") is so astonishingly stupid; it's hard to process the possibility that someone could actually be so mentally incompetent as to be capable of writing it.  

At this point you can just stop.  You've made it. You have cemented your place in --- and very possibly at the top --- of this blog's comment section  Hall of Shame....right up there with past clowns like WTGN, realpc and waltK(auplilla of Wayne State).

OK, I like how you have a picture of a black man prominently posted above this article. That's good! Images are a good way of subtly telling the white majority that economic leftism is for the racial minorities and not for the white majority. After all, if you were to pull the white majority back into the trueLeftist fold, then our overclass masters would have to pay more in wages and more in taxes. So, in order to better serve the overclass (and to reap the financial rewards of doing so, heh heh....), I suggest you edit this article to include more references to race and gender.

That way you can help alienate the largest bloc of americans from union labor--which is a major component of the true economics-oriented Left. Drive those whites away from trueLeftism by associated egalitarian leftism with race oriented Leftism, Paul.

THAT'S how ya do it! That's how ya curry favor with our rich overclass masters. And they will in turn eventually reward you with 30 pieces of silver by noticing your books and promoting them in the mass media, or by bestowing upon you a fat grant from one of the overclass-controlled nonprofit organizations like the Ford Foundation.

Ya gonna be a rich 'un someday, Paul, my man!

Frederic, I was wondering if you still were holding an affinity towards Parecon and if so, if you had seen this very good critique in the resent Historical Materialism? Enjoy Brad Parecon: Life After Capitalism, Michael Albert, London: Verso, 2003. The antiglobalisation, anticapitalist movement is frequently asked for its alternative, given the failure of the Soviet model and the alleged absence of anything else. Michael Albert's latest book off ers an answer. To critics who see the construction of visions of the future as dangerous utopianism, he correctly replies that models of a possible better world are needed to guide present action, and it therefore matters which model we subscribe to. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, three categories of well-developed models of postcapitalist economic organisation have been proposed: market socialism, in which private ownership is replaced by some form of state or co-operative ownership, but market forces are retained as the way in which the activities of the diff erent enterprises are coordinated ex post; electronic socialism, in which modern information technology is used to co-ordinate all economic activity ex ante; and participatory planning, in which market forces are replaced by the ex ante co-ordination of major interdependent investment through negotiation, but market exchange is retained for all other economic transactions. Albert rejects central planning and market socialism and does not discuss participatory planning. Instead, he proposes a model of what he calls participatory economics, ‘Parecon', which is a hybrid, a form of electronic socialism (although he does not use this term) based on a form of participation.1 Parecon is a welcome contribution to the debate over life after capitalism. It is founded on and seeks to institutionalise a set of values that most anticapitalists would broadly agree with, although not necessarily as Albert develops them – he proposes equity, selfmanagement, diversity and solidarity, whereas Alex Callinicos, for example, prefers justice, effi ciency, democracy and sustainability.2 The book is written with verve and passion. It off ers an optimistic vision of a future in which people participate individually and, to some extent, collectively in running their own lives, free from the inequalities of wealth and power that are intrinsic to capitalism. Parecon has been widely promoted and discussed and deserves to be taken seriously, not only for its strengths, but also and perhaps mainly for its weaknesses. The book starts by setting out the values Albert believes in and seeks to justify them. Th ese are then used to evaluate four institutions (private ownership, hierarchical division of labour, central planning, and markets) and four economic systems (capitalism, market socialism, centrally planned socialism, and what Albert calls ‘green bioregionalism'). All are found wanting in terms of their ability to realise the desired values or, in the case of green bioregionalism, because, as he correctly argues, its economic institutions are insuffi ciently specifi ed for a judgement to be possible. Having cleared the ground, the central institutions of the model of participatory economics are then outlined: participatory self-management; balanced job complexes; remuneration for eff ort and sacrifi ce; nested worker and consumer councils; and an iterative allocative process. Th ere then follows an attempt to convey what daily life in a participatory economy might be like in relation to working, consuming, and linking the two together 1. In order to distinguish between reference to the book under review and general reference to Albert's model, the former is highlighted in italics and the latter is not. 2. Callinicos 2003. through the allocative process. The book ends with the author's version of the principal criticisms that have been made of the model and his response to them. How does the model of participatory economics work? Th e basic units are the individual, as worker or consumer, and the council – workers' councils and consumers' councils. Each enterprise has work teams of various sorts which come together in the enterprise's workers' council. Enterprise councils are members of higher-level councils culminating in industry councils. Th rough their households consumers belong to neighbourhood councils, which, in turn, are members of higher-level councils culminating in an economy-wide council. Th e nested structure of the councils is designed to enable the handling of production and consumption externalities, collective consumption, and public goods. There is face-to-face social interaction within the diff erent levels of workers' and consumers' councils, but not between them. Within each workplace, work is organised on the basis of balanced job complexes made up of diff erent tasks. Th e tasks are combined in such proportions that the resulting job complexes of all workers are equally desirable or undesirable, equally empowering or routine. If the balance between desirable and undesirable, empowering and routine tasks diff ers between enterprises, this is compensated for by workers working partly outside their primary workplace. Since there is no diff erence between the desirable and empowering attributes of diff erent job complexes, workers are paid according to the intensity with which they work, as judged by their peers, and the hours they work. Th is is what gives them their entitlement to consumption, to be divided between individual and collective consumption. Those unable to work receive the average entitlement. At the start of the annual planning process, workers make proposals for what they would like to be involved in producing and for how long they would like to work, together with estimates of the inputs from outside the enterprise that would be required. These individual proposals are discussed and eventually combined into a limited number of alternative workplace plans for the workers' council to vote on in order to decide what it will off er to produce in the year ahead. Th e proposed annual plan is then forwarded to higher-level councils, presumably consisting of delegates from the workplace councils, which in some unspecifi ed way deal with externalities and arrive at a proposed plan for the industry as a whole. Consumers belong to neighbourhood councils, to which they submit their proposed consumption plan for the year, anonymously if they wish. Individual proposals may be queried by the council but cannot be rejected so long as they do not exceed the consumer's entitlement, with provision for inter-temporal borrowing and saving. Neighbourhood councils discuss proposals for collective neighbourhood consumption, bearing in mind that such consumption is paid for on a per capita basis out of the aggregate consumption entitlement for the neighbourhood and therefore reduces entitlements to individual consumption. An integrated consumption plan is then forwarded to higher level consumers' councils, again presumably consisting of delegates, which again in some unspecifi ed way somehow deal with externalities and more general forms of collective consumption, eventually arriving at a consumption plan for the economy as a whole. Thus, proposals for production and consumption originate from individual workers and consumers and are then developed into proposals from workers' and consumers' councils at various levels. Th ese collective proposals for production and consumption are then brought together to see if they are consistent, through a process Albert calls allocation. This is mediated by an Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB) which has three principal functions. It fi rst announces a set of indicative prices which workers and consumers use, individually and through their councils at each level, when deciding on their production and consumption proposals. When the proposals are all in, the IFB aggregates all the production and consumption proposals for the diff erent categories of goods and services – inputs into all the production processes as well as consumer goods – to see if proposed supply and demand are equal. If they are not equal for every good and service the IFB revises the set of indicative prices and the process is repeated until a consistent set of production and consumption proposals is arrived at. It is in relation to the stage of allocation that the fi rst major problem with the model of ‘Parecon' arises. Th e process outlined is a version of neoclassical Walrasian generalequilibrium analysis in which individual economic agents say what they would offer to produce and seek to consume, given a set of indicative prices announced by an auctioneer. Th e auctioneer then aggregates proposed supply and demand for each good and service and if they are not equal in each virtual market adjusts the announced price in a market-clearing direction. The process is then repeated and iterations continue until proposed supply and demand are equal in all markets – general equilibrium is achieved. Only then does economic activity begin. Th e proposed actions of all economic agents are co-ordinated ex ante so that, in principle, when they are undertaken in practice they exactly mesh together, with each agent carrying out its bid-for role in an economy wide blueprint. In ‘Parecon', the economic agents are not just individual workers and consumers, but also workers' and consumers' councils, and the auctioneer is the IFB. Decisions at each level are made on the basis of the announced prices and are then communicated electronically to the next level, right up to the IFB, which then calculates a revised set of indicative prices using a computer (indeed the IFB might be nothing but an automated central computer) and the process is repeated until proposed supply and demand are equal for each and every good and service. Th e model is a form of neoclassical electronic socialism (although Albert rejects the term socialism on the grounds that it has been historically discredited). Th ere is no reference in the book to the extensive Marxist and heterodox economics critique of neoclassical (general-equilibrium) theory, nor to the socialist calculation debate or the related Austrian school critique of the possibility of the ex ante iterative process on which electronic socialism, and ‘Parecon', are based. Th ree key issues have been identifi ed in the neoclassical literature on general equilibrium, defi ned as simultaneous equilibrium in the market for every good and service in the economy: whether such an equilibrium exists; whether, if it does, there will be a convergence towards it; and whether, if it is achieved, it will be stable. If out-of-equilibrium economic activity takes place, the conditions necessary for general equilibrium, if it exists, to be achieved through subsequent ex post adjustment are impossibly restrictive. Neoclassical economists therefore came to rely on Walrasian-type thought experiments in which ex ante adjustment occurs through iteration before economic activity takes place and therefore there is no out-of-equilibrium activity. However, in capitalist economies, there exists no institution analogous to the Walrasian auctioneer. Ironically, this role came to be fi lled by the central planning body in models of an electronic socialist economy. ‘Parecon''s Iteration Facilitation Board fulfi ls the same role. It is here that the socialist calculation debate on the possibility of the effi cient allocation of society's productive resources under socialism becomes relevant for an evaluation of ‘Parecon''s allocative mechanism. The fi rst phase of the debate took place in the 1920s and 1930s, as the Austrian school economists Mises and Hayek claimed that effi cient allocation was theoretically and/or practically impossible in a socialist economy, and neoclassical socialist economists sought to refute this claim. Mises argued that relative prices, refl ecting the relative scarcity of the diff erent inputs into the production process, were necessary in order to calculate the most effi cient method of production for each product, and that these prices could only be generated on the basis of private ownership of the means of production and real markets. Efficient socialism was therefore theoretically impossible. It was then pointed out that Mises's critique had already been dealt with by Barone's earlier socialist model, in which the central planning body collects information about all the resources and methods of production available in the economy, feeds this into a system of simultaneous equations, and calculates the optimum production plan by solving them. Hayek then responded by arguing that, although Barone's model might be theoretically possible, in practice it would be impossible to collect and process centrally all the relevant information. Lange then countered this practical impossibility argument by proposing a decentralised process which economised on the need to centralise and centrally process information. In this model, the central planning body announces a set of prices for producer goods which state-owned enterprises use, together with real market-determined wages and prices for consumer goods, to decide what to produce and what methods of production to use. By observing the movement of stocks of producer goods, the central planning body is then able to see whether too much or too little of any producer good is being produced and periodically changes the announced prices in a market-clearing direction. Adjustment towards general equilibrium occurs ex post, after economic activity has taken place. Economic calculation takes place at the level of the enterprise and the only information the centre needs to collect concerns the movement of stocks of producer goods. The first phase of the socialist calculation debate died down at the end of the 1930s, with Lange's model generally considered to have carried the day. It was not until the 1980s that the second phase of the debate started. With the failure of the Soviet model and the rise of neoliberalism, models of market socialism began to proliferate, retaining ex post adjustment but diff ering from Lange's model in that now all prices, including those of producer goods, were determined in real markets. At the same time, the development of the electronic computer enabled the emergence of neoclassical models of electronic socialism, since it now seemed feasible to envisage the transmission of all the relevant data to a central body and the calculation of the set of market-clearing prices, either directly, as in Barone's model, or through an ex ante iterative process, as in the case of ‘Parecon'. However, on the other side, the modern Austrian school's successors to Mises and Hayek also revisited the debate and renewed the attack on the possibility of socialism, whether market or electronic. Th e central claim of the modern Austrian school is that the problem of deciding on the allocation of society's productive resources really only arises in the context of change, and therefore uncertainty – in a steady state, there are no decisions to be made. Th is parallels the classical-Marxist argument that, in a socialist society, economic planning, in the sense of the ex ante co-ordination of interdependent economic decisions, would replace what Marx called the anarchy of production, the ex post co-ordination that occurs through the operation of market forces in capitalism (and also market socialism). In the absence of change, the problem of co-ordination does not arise, which is why Dobb always insisted that the co-ordination ex ante of major interdependent investment is the hallmark of socialist economic planning. However, although they agree on the centrality of change, the modern Austrian school rejects Dobb's argument for planning, on the grounds of impossibility. It claims that the relevant information cannot in principle – not just in practice – be centralised, an argument that applies with equal force to neoclassical Walrasian general equilibrium theory and therefore also to all forms of electronic socialism, including ‘Parecon'. The basis for this argument is the problem of tacit knowledge – knowledge that cannot be articulated and transmitted but can only be acquired through experience and drawn on and used through action. A distinction is drawn between explicit knowledge, which can be articulated, coded and transmitted, and tacit knowledge, which cannot. Tacit knowledge is usually characterised as ‘knowing how', as opposed to ‘knowing that'. It is based on learning by doing and since it is acquired through action, through experience, it can only be used by those who have been through the experience. Th us, each person's tacit knowledge is in some sense unique to them. Th e modern Austrian school's argument for decentralisation, based on tacit knowledge, therefore goes deeper than the earlier Austrian argument for decentralisation, which held that local knowledge of time and place is necessary for effi cient economic decision making. Since a person's experience is unique to them, it can only be drawn upon and made use of by them, as they engage in action. We make judgements, on the basis of our experience, about what we think we may be able to do, but if it is something new we can never be sure until we try to put it into action. We learn what can and cannot be done by trying to do it. Th e most that electronic socialism can expect is that the information fed into the iterative process refl ects people's best judgements of what they might be able to do, but these judgements are bound to be mistaken to a greater or lesser extent. Th e attempt to arrive at a blueprint that aggregates and meshes together in fi ne detail all production and consumption decisions before action (the activity of producing and consuming) takes place, is clearly vulnerable to the modern Austrian argument based on tacit knowledge.3 However, the methodological individualism of the Austrian school means that they have great diffi culty in accommodating the concept of tacit social, as opposed to individual, knowledge. Tacit social knowledge arises through the experience of social groups acting together and becomes embedded in the norms and routines through which decisions are made and implemented. It is this social experience which also underlies the long-established socialist argument that the effi cient operation of an enterprise requires the participation of the workforce, as they collectively know best how the labour process operates. Th is argument for participation can be generalised. Given that the activities of an enterprise have consequences for social groups outside the enterprise, not just for its workers, the best use of the enterprise's productive capacity requires that such groups are involved, along with the workers, in the decision making of the enterprise. Such a requirement could be institutionalised through a defi nition of social ownership as ‘ownership by those aff ected by the use of the assets involved, in proportion to the extent to which they are aff ected'. Unfortunately, although Albert refers in passing to social ownership, there is no discussion in Parecon of what this means. Indeed, in the chapter on ownership, the shortest in the book, he rather confusingly writes that ‘means of production are no longer owned 3. For a review of the debate, see Adaman and Devine 1996. in a participatory economy' (p. 90). This leads in to the second major problem with the model – the absence of politics or political processes. Despite a few scattered references to politics and citizens, people in ‘Parecon' appear as either workers or consumers, but not as citizens. There are no political institutions or processes through which citizens discuss the values on which they want their society to be based, the universal rights and responsibilities of citizens, the choices of social priorities that have to be made. Th e nearest we get to this are the rather vague and unspecifi ed processes and decisions of the economy-wide consumers' council. Yet such decisions involve people as workers, as well as consumers, and also of course as citizens with varying conceptions of the public good. Th e model is explicitly one aiming at self-management, not self-government. Th e distinction is important. Enterprises and neighbourhoods should be autonomous with respect to matters that are of concern only to them; they should be self-managed. However, they are part of a wider society and their place and role in that society needs to be defi ned by the society. For example, the establishment or closure, the expansion or contraction, of an enterprise will have consequences for the neighbourhoods in which it is located and in which its workers live, as it will also for other interdependent enterprises and communities. Th ese neighbourhoods and enterprises, therefore, need to be involved in decisions about investment or disinvestment, as, by extension, do other groups that will be aff ected by the decisions. Social ownership, defi ned as ownership by those aff ected by the use of the portion of society's productive assets involved, would include not only an enterprise's workers but all the groups with a legitimate interest in its activities. Decision making by the social owners at each level (enterprise, industry, locality, region, national economy, global) is what constitutes economic self-government. Even in a non-exploitative society based on equal access to resources and equal empowerment, people will belong to many diff erent groups representing the various aspects of their lives and concerns, and these groups will have diff erent perspectives and interests. If we are to avoid coercion by the state or by the operation of market forces, then such diff erences need to be dealt with through a process of negotiation. In relation to economic activity, the central problem is the changing allocation of society's productive resources in a way that best meets society's changing needs. Where major interdependent decisions are involved, such as the pattern of major investment, this can best be achieved by a process of negotiated co-ordination involving the social owners at the relevant level. Such a process enables the diff erent social owners to learn how to work together, to understand one another's legitimate concerns, and to deliberate on the course of action that best meets these concerns for everyone. It is not a process of aggregating pre-existing preferences but a deliberative democratic process with a built-in dynamic for developmental change. A process of negotiated co-ordination would give real meaning to the concept of participatory planning. However, although once again there are scattered references in Parecon to negotiation and participatory planning, they are not followed up or developed. Workers and consumers put forward proposals. Th ese are then voted on in workers' and consumers' councils at various levels. They are then communicated electronically to the IFB which links the two sides, worker and consumer, by revising the indicative prices for use in the next iteration. While there is social interaction in the form of discussion within councils, there is no social interaction, in the form of discussion and negotiation, between workers' councils and consumers' councils: ‘. . . we did not propose a model of democratic planning in which people or their elected representatives, meet face-to-face to endlessly discuss and negotiate how to coordinate all their activities' (pp. 259–60). Participatory planning, for Albert, turns out to be merely arms-length electronic interaction mediated by indicative prices. Despite some minor changes in the language, Parecon is, in fact, a restatement of the model fi rst set out by Albert and Robin Hahnel in their two books published in 1991.4 It will be clear by now that Parecon ignores the theoretical issues and problems that have been identifi ed in at least a century of discussion about the possible architecture of an economy in life after capitalism, issues and problems that have been given empirical weight by the only historical experience so far, the failure of the Soviet model of authoritarian central planning. It avoids serious discussion of how to co-ordinate investment, and also the related issues of entrepreneurial activity and innovation, both of which require real participation and social interaction if they are to be shaped in accordance with social need. It avoids the diffi cult problem of how to achieve self-government in a complex, diverse and multi-layered society, basing itself instead on the aggregation of individual preferences. In short, it is, in the end, ‘utopian' in the ‘socialism-utopian-or-scientifi c' sense, rather than in the desirable sense of the creative imagination of a possible future world based on historical experience and existing developments and possibilities. Th e principal strengths of Albert's vision are his emphasis on the centrality of participation, albeit not in the form he proposes, and his insistence that people should share equally the diff erent categories of work that are socially necessary, although, again, not necessarily through his rather restrictive balanced job complexes. A further strength is the suggestion that the proposals made by workers and consumers as to what they would like to produce and consume should be accompanied by qualitative web-based accounts of what the proposed production would involve for workers and the environment, and what the benefi ts and disadvantages of the proposed consumption would be. However, the theoretical economic framework underlying ‘Parecon' is wholly neoclassical, from the Walrasian general-equilibrium iterative process to the references to marginal revenue product and social cost and benefi t. It is therefore fatally vulnerable to the devastating critique that has been developed of this dominant apologetic paradigm by Marxist, heterodox and ecological economists. Furthermore, like neoclassical economic theory, ‘Parecon' is essentially individualistic, perhaps not surprisingly given its acknowledged anarchist provenance. Th e distinction between self-management and self-government in relation to economic activity has already been discussed. However, self-governing economic activity is but part of a self-governing society. Participatory planning based on negotiated co-ordination between the social owners can only be real in the context of participatory political democracy fi rmly rooted in a vibrant civil society. On the one hand, pluralism and diversity are most eff ectively expressed through self-governing associations in civil society which then feed into the institutions where economic, social and cultural policy is made and implemented. On the other hand, the choice between competing values and visions of the good life, and their associated societal priorities, together with decisions over the legal and regulatory framework within which civil society and economic and social institutions operate, are the subject matter of democratic politics. Th ese processes of social interaction are crucial and should not be abstracted from. 4. Albert and Hahnel 1991a and 1991b. Why has Parecon attracted the attention it has? It may be because at the level of values, expressions of general principle and aspirations there is much in it that all those who are committed to working for a better future society will share. However, when analysing the underlying structure of Parecon as a model of postcapitalist economic organisation, problems arise, not least because it is not situated in the context of the rich historical and theoretical experience of past and present discussion. Th is review started by agreeing with Albert that visions and models of a better future are important as they may infl uence present action. It has concentrated on the problems with ‘Parecon', while mentioning its strengths, because Parecon has received wide exposure and needs to be critically evaluated. What, in the end, is missing from the model is precisely what is the great strength of the antiglobalisation, anticapitalist, social-forum movement – its pluralism, multiple identities, alternative visions and priorities. Of course, the movement also needs to develop principles for thinking about global institutions and processes at a societal level in a way that enables universalism to be combined with diversity, but ‘Parecon' is of little help here. Its underlying methodological individualism directs attention away from thinking about these fundamental issues. A possible set of concepts that captures these essential aspects of social and political reality has informed this review: social ownership, defi ned as ownership by the diff erent groups aff ected by the use of the assets involved, in proportion to the extent to which they are affected; negotiated co-ordination, defi ned as a process through which social owners negotiate the production or investment plan for their enterprise or industry; and a democratic political process through which citizens deliberate on alternative values and visions, agree universal rights and responsibilities, and choose social priorities. A model based on these concepts, such as my own model of democratic planning through negotiated co-ordination, off ers the prospect of giving real meaning to the concept of participatory planning and self-government.5 Reviewed by Pat Devine Honorary Research Fellow School of Social Science University of Manchester References Adaman, Fikret and Pat Devine 1996, ‘Th e Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Socialists', Cambridge Journal of Economics, 20: 523–37. Albert, Michael and Robin Hahnel 1991a, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century, Boston: South End Press. —— 1991b, Th e Political Economy of Participatory Economics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Callinicos, Alex 2003, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, London: Polity. Devine, Pat 1988, Democracy and Economic Planning: Th e Political Economy of a Self-Governing Society, Cambridge: Polity. 5. See Devine 1988.

My educated guess is that Edwards will pick up all or most of the unions in Change to Win. The AFL may decide to pick obama or clinton to strengthen allegiances in case edwards doesn't get the primary (and because they're probably small-minded enough to want a stronger voice than SEIU with the next prez). Don't forget that SEIU was the primary engine behind the 2004 Swing State program America Coming Together and they're very strategic in they're thinking.