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Michael Albert's Blog

Web Address: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/malbert
Bio: Michael Albert is a founder and current member of the staff of Z Magazine as well as staff of Z Magazine`s web system: ZCom (www.zmag.org). Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His po... (More)

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There Is An Alternative

By Michael Albert at Jul 23, 2005

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I was recently asked for a 1,000 word piece on parecon for a major German newspaper. I was reminded of an old joke. "would you like me to explain the meaning of life," says the jokester. While the audience ponders the offer a second, the jokester says, "would you like me to do it again." I am always excited by requests to summarize parecon for new audiences. I am always nervous about not doing it justice, even in whole books, much less tiny articles. Nonetheless, the piece follows. --- In capitalism, owners accrue profits. Managers and others who monopolize highly empowered tasks greatly influence what is produced, by what means, and with what distribution, and benefit substantially from their power. Nearly four fifths of the population, the working class, do subordinate, largely rote labor. They suffer low income, obey orders, and endure boredom. As John Lennon put it, “As soon as you're born they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.” Capitalism destroys solidarity, homogenizes variety, obliterates equity, and imposes harsh hierarchy. Capitalism is top heavy in power and opportunity and bottom heavy in pain and constraint. Indeed, Capitalism economically imposes on workers discipline beyond what any dictator ever dreamed of politically imposing. What citizen has ever had to ask permission of political commissars or dictators to go to the bathroom, yet this is a commonplace requirement for workers in many corporations. Capitalism's institutions create anti-sociality even in good people. Market competition and the corporate drive to accumulate profits imposes the most narrow individualism on even capitalism's most social citizens. In capitalism, as a famous American baseball manager quipped, “nice guys finish last.” More aggressively “garbage rises.” Witness the White House. Participatory economics, or parecon, organizes economic life differently. Parecon produces desired products but also equitable incomes, circumstances, opportunities, and responsibilities. Parecon's participants all exert a fair share of control over their own life and all shared social outcomes. Parecon produces solidarity. Even an antisocial individual in a parecon has no choice but to account for social well-being if he or she wishes to prosper. Parecon produces diversity and generates equitable distribution that remunerates each participant for how long and how hard they work as well as for harsh conditions they may suffer at work. Parecon conveys to each person a say in what is produced, how it is produced, and how outputs are allocated, all in proportion to the degree he or she is affected by those decisions. Parecon, has as its aims solidarity, diversity, equity, and self management – classlessness -- and to accomplish them parecon incorporates different institutions than capitalism. Parecon utilizes democratic councils where workers and consumers employ diverse modes of discussion, debate, and democratic determination. There are no corporate owners or managers who decide outcomes from the top down. In a parecon, each worker does a fair combination of empowering and rote labor. All participants enjoy comparably empowering circumstances. 20% of the workforce does not monopolize all the empowering tasks with 80% doing only subordinate labor. There is still expertise. There is still coordination. Decisions still get made. But no minority monopolizes empowering information, activity, and access to decision making positions. No majority is made subservient by doing only deadening labor with no decision making component. In parecon, in other words, each and every job, which means each and every person's work, while contoured to the person's needs and potentials, also always involves a mix of tasks calibrated so that each participant has average empowering conditions. There is no owning class. There is no managerial or coordinator class. In parecon workers and consumers cooperatively creatively fulfill their capacities consistently with each participant having a fair share of influence. Parecon has remuneration for effort and sacrifice, which translates to remuneration for the duration, intensity, and harshness of the work people do. Parecon rejects remuneration for power, property, or even output. Instead of gargantuan disparities of income and wealth, parecon has a just distribution of social product. Parecon also rejects markets which pit each actor against all others, destroy solidarity, impose class division, mis-price all public goods, ignore collective effects beyond direct buyers and sellers, violate ecological balance and sustainability, and have many other faults as well. In place of markets parecon utilizes a system of workers and consumers councils plus diverse communicative structures that together facilitate all participants cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs for all firms and actors in accord with true and full social costs and benefits of economic activities. In a short article I can't provide even a compelling case for an entirely different economic system. I can only briefly describe, or rather name, some of the core values and institutions. I know such brevity is vague and is hard for unfamiliar readers to translate into greater substance. But we have no room here for clarification, supporting argument, or detailed discussion. My apologies. What I hope, however, is that readers who know from their own experience that capitalist economies routinely cause us to fleece each other, deny us having a say over our own lives and/or force us to dominate the lives of others, distribute massive outputs to those who do the most pleasurable or even who do no work at all and distribute meager outputs to those who do the least pleasurable and the overwhelming volume of work, will hope that parecon is a viable and worthy alternative. I hope, in other words, that instead of quietly accepting Margaret Thatcher's passivity-inducing mantra that "there is no alternative," we will all seek something better than capitalism, and that, moved by our aspirations for a better economy we will carefully consider parecon on its merits. One place that you might begin doing that, if you don't accept that humanity is forever doomed to suffer gross inequality and hierarchy via capitalist ownership, corporations, and markets, is at http://www.parecon.org.

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question

By Kissenger, Clark at Feb 08, 2006 18:40 PM
Micahel is there a way of legally implementing paracon by offering parecon as an alternative union that would slowly replace the current economic system and corporations?

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Henryjacks, Hjacks at Oct 03, 2005 12:27 PM
(conclusion) I am certainly not advocating remaining under the despotism of globalization, but I am very seriously concerned about failing to have the humility necessary and the compassion required to attempt any radical revolution of economics. To harm many because we have failed to factor the realities of our present societal illnesses into our desires for immediate freedom may prove an oversight contrary to the good of humanity which we seek. The shackles, so evident to a few of us, might well require a more gradual removal than passionate persons would desire in order to preserve the masses from great suffering. Let our compassion for our brothers and sisters lives be greater than our passion for insistence upon swiftly securing what we believe is best for them. Ideologies, it seems to me, are better made into realities when held as objectively valid, urgent truths than dogmatically harsh, absolutist demands.

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Henryjacks, Hjacks at Oct 03, 2005 12:04 PM
(continued from hjacks last post) Even granting this assumption of humanity's natural state, the societal pathology created by lengthy years of authoritarianism's growth must be dealt with. The sadism of those with authority who enjoy wielding that authority over others and the masochism of those who subject themselves to authority as a means of symbiotic identification DO exist and will not dissipate rapidly or without a great deal of upheaval should the economic system alter toward a more humanitarian form of economic life. The chaos created and the misinterpretation of anarchistic ideas that such pathologies are bound to lead to could well bring incredible suffering. Jefferson's admonition in our nation's Declaration of Independence comes to mind. For although he asserted that powers destructive to the ends of liberty may rightly be altered or abolished by society he knew also that prudence dictates that powers long established, "should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." (to be concluded)

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Henryjacks, Hjacks at Oct 03, 2005 11:43 AM
(continued from hjacks last post) Perhaps they will, but there seems to be some evidence against this capacity. My own experience in the corporate workplace I found succinctly summarized in a poem by Charles Bukowski entitled, SPARK. The poem includes these lines: "I...resented the...hours...as a working stiff...I couldn't understand the murdering of my years yet my fellow workers gave no signs of agony, many of them even seemed satisfied, and seeing them that way drove me almost as crazy as the dull and senseless work..." That this observation of Bukowski's, which I found an apt reflection of my own experience, may be the RESULT of the powerlessness and hopelessness that concentrations of capital have brought upon the individuals in our society, rather than an argument that this apparent satisfaction with the mundane is the NATURAL state of humanity at large, I readily hold as a hopeful possibility. I will even go so far as to say that I believe (as Mr. Albert seems to hold) that human beings in a natural, healthy state do not exhibit the pathological acceptance of authority and are naturally creative, exhibiting self-directive capabilities and tendencies within a cooperative environment. (to be continued)

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Henryjacks, Hjacks at Oct 03, 2005 11:20 AM
In my reading on Participatory Economics thus far, I find myself asking many questions. Is such an economy realistic for human beings? Will humans have sufficient impetus to participate in this fashion? Do human being actually want to be free and granted authority levels as suggested in this vision of working together? Are people in general talented enough, intelligent enough and cooperative enough to pursue an economy of this kind? I do not wish to fall easily prey to a cynicism which answers these questions negatively because the possibility that they might be answered affirmatively is certainly closer to the mark I should like to see humanity strive for. Still, seeing the bull's eye and hitting it are far different things. I find myself wondering if Mr. Albert, like Mr. Marx before him, does not universally assume far too much credit upon his fellow human beings that they will, "cooperate creatively, fulfilling their capacities consistently with each participant having a fair shar of influence." (to be continued)

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Jul 28, 2005 01:55 AM
"To believe the market is democratic you must believe that millions of people each year vote to starve to death" bwong, I was responding to that statement. The US is a democracy with a mixed economy. We do NOT have millions of people starving to death. Practically no one is starving here, at least not because of poverty. Blaming world starvation on capitalism is ludicrous.

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Gammon101, Bwong at Jul 27, 2005 23:33 PM
"Those people are NOT living in the US, or any other modern free enterprise democracy." realpc "Free entreprise" is an oxymoron. All functioning markets are regulated, just a matter of how and degree. All western economies are highly regulated. The "free market" only exists in economical textbooks. Democracy again has no necessary relationship with "market economy". China resembles a text book "free market economy"(minimal taxation, minimal regulation etc) more than any Western, nominally "Capitalist" state. But China is a dictatorship. "When everyone has roughly equal capital, the economic "value" of goods will reflect a broad based consesus on the actual, subjective, value that each individual sees in it." rad20 So I take it that you agree equality is a precondition on a "democratic market". But what is commonly peddled by market idealogues is the converse of that statement: market mechanism ==> equality. The first statement is speculation. An initially "equal" market left to itself may lead to concentration of wealth, hence power. We don't know if equality will persist(i.e. whether equality represents a stable equilibrium point of the system)Since the initial condition cannot even be approximately attained in the real world empirical evidence is nil. The converse statement of market fundamentalism is blatantly false empirically(subjected to the "imperfections" of the real world)

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Tolsen1, R4d20 at Jul 27, 2005 07:01 AM
"You could have a long debate about what "democracy" is or if there even exists a "technical" definition that we should all accept. I'll pass on that thank you." I have no taste for arguing over the definition of words either. I was simply expanding on a metaphor that you used (and that I do happen to agree with). Dictionaries asides, there is a general consensus on the broad meaning of "democracy" and "democratic" and, under the right conditions, the market can be jusitifiably called "democratic" in a metaphoric sense. When everyone has roughly equal capital, the economic "value" of goods will reflect a broad based consesus on the actual, subjective, value that each individual sees in it. Furthermore, buy the action of spending money they will be exherting roughly equal amounts of influence on the economic direction of the country. As for "if it exists" ... I'm from the Zen school, where words have no instrinsic meansing, but are given meaning by agreement between parties. So, yeah, maybe YOUR democracy doesn't, but mine does - I probably attach fewer riders and preconditions to the term.

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Jul 26, 2005 18:27 PM
"To believe the market is democratic you must believe that millions of people each year vote to starve to death" Those people are NOT living in the US, or any other modern free enterprise democracy. "There is no truth to the assertion that markets inevitably lead to concentration. That depends entirely on the rules of the market in question." That makes sense to me. Why can't we improve the rules of our markets and keep free enterprise? Why should we exchange a potentially fair and basically democratic system for an impractical scheme like parecon?

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Tolsen1, R4d20 at Jul 26, 2005 08:59 AM
"There are standard economic textbooks that acknowledge that the market is not democratic" This is overly simplistic. Like many processes, the actual behavior of a market is very sensitive to the actual conditions on the ground. A market in which everyone was roughly equal in wealth would be pretty democratic because prices would, in fact, reflect the true desires of many people. This breaks down, however, as more and more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. In that regime the value of something only reflects the desires of those with market power - hence why Baldness cures for middles aged americans are more profitable than life saving medicines for the poor. The simple fact is that a market is a means of information exchange - just like a public forum - where money is the equivalent of a "voice" or a vote. When wealth is concentrated it is the equivalent of the few having more votes than the many. It's still, technically, a democracy, but not in the modern sense - more like the one of Athens where only "male full-citizens" got to vote and the majority of the population did not. However, there is no GOOD reason (but many bad ones) why markets cannot be structred to maximise their democratic aspects. There is no truth to the assertion that markets inevitably lead to concentration. That depends entirely on the rules of the market in question.

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Re: There Is An Alternative

By Yurallnuts, Realpc at Jul 26, 2005 03:16 AM
Parecon tries to quantify value in terms of effort and sacrifice, but this is not practical. Different individuals will expend different amounts of effort in performing a similar task, for one thing. Free markets quantify value automatically and democratically, taking into account both the effort of producers and the preferences of consumers. Parecon tries to rate the desirability of different tasks, so that everyone gets a balance of desirable and undesirable jobs. But this is not practical, because different individuals prefer different types of work. Some people get into the "flow" state through activities requiring intellectual concentration, others prefer social interaction, artistic expression, or physical exertion. What one person considers mindless tedium may be relaxing and meditative for another. What one person finds dry and dull may be intellectually fascinating to another. In addition, it can take years to learn to appreciate any particular form of work. Challenging jobs cannot simply be handed out without extensive education and training. Furthermore, no society wants to waste the time of its most talented members. Talented people want to spend all their time on their favorite activity.

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